E-gads

Just when you think your job is going great and you're really making a difference, connecting with people in a way that's important to them, you send an email containing penis pictures to a state-administrated historians listserv.

So there I was, minding my own business when I got an email--from a reliable historian source--about a cemetery preservation seminar that I thought would be of interest to my regional constituents. So I forwarded it on to this listserv for historians across the state that I'm on through my job. The email contained everything one needed to register for the workshop: the press release, the registration form, contact information, and as they say in Louisiana--a lagniappe. Yes, just a little something extra for the viewers at home.

Imagine my surprise when, as I worked diligently one night to prepare for a board meeting the next day, I received an email from a lifelong friend of my parents, in her 80s, who was not, unfortunately, writing to tell me what a good job I was doing. No, this lovely woman that I have known since a child, informed me that she had opened up the attachments on the email I had just sent, only to discover that zipped up in the innocuous "press release" file were three casual snapshots of penis.

I pretty much died right there. Actually, no. I thought this woman was out of her mind and that she'd been hacked. But it was I who was the amateur! She was right. I had, by not carefully policing the attachments from the original email, sent porn to my entire board. To many of my board members' bosses. It was great! What a coup! Blurgh. That's when I had a panic attack and started raving about losing my job and such. I made phone calls and wrote desperate emails apologizing for this obscene gaffe.

But it was all for naught. Despite my horror at having done this, everyone else seemed to find it hilarious. Possibly this is because I have not established myself as a pervert or a corruption artist in the Texas historians world. Maybe they were just so amused that a friend of my parents' had been the one to call me out, as if I were an unruly school child, but the whole event passed without much ado. My parents certainly found it hilarious, and Matt, too, after he stopped egging me on in my "I'm going to get fired!" tirade.

In the end, I did send a "revised" email to the historians' listserv, letting them know that an "inadvertent spam file" had been attached to the previous email about the cemetery seminar and should be deleted. I hope they thought it was a virus and never opened it (clearly, not everyone opens zip files).

Still though, I'm without words for the person who originated the email in the first place. Knowing him as I do, I am quite certain of two things: 1) There is no way he intentionally included them in that email, and 2) They are undoubtedly from his personal collection. I couldn't think what I could say to him, so Chrissy and Sonnie encouraged me to say it inappropriately with my very own someecard.

View my masterpiece here (mostly because I can't figure out how to save the image elsewhere--sorry.)

Four Days at the State Fair and No Pat Boone in Sight

I will spare you the discussion of why this blog has died. You're tired of it. I'm tired of it. Now let's discuss fried foods.

This year's state fair vendor food competition winner was....heart-starting paddles on stand-by, please....chicken fried bacon. Now, I did not taste any of this frightful friedness myself (the line every day was pure madness), but the picture of it in the State Fair map made it look like chicken fried steak, but kind of in a ravioli-shaped way. Hmm. I can see why it knocked out the competition though. All of the other finalists, despite the contents of their batter-dipped inside, basically looked like hushpuppies. So there's a coup right there.

In other news, did you know I attended the State Fair? I did. For four days, although attended is not quite the right word. I staffed a booth and ate a lot of free ice cream and spent $16 of my dollars (or in State Fair currency: 32 coupons) on corn dogs. Before you judge me, realize that is only 4 corn dogs at a rate of $4 per nitrate-cicle. I feel a little sick thinking about it, so I guess it's okay to go ahead and judge me.

I have always loved the State Fair though and despite my utter exhaustion at the end of the day with not even enough energy to watch tv in my hotel room (I'm not kidding), I had a great time and made a few key purchases of inventions I could not live without, per my State Fair-going custom.

This is not to say that nothing has changed over the years. The butter sculpture, once simply a very handsome cow, is now the stuff of legend. This year's sculpture in a refrigerated corner of the Fine Arts pavilion, featured King Tut's sarcophagus, hieroglyphic walls, and one of those Egyptian dog/soul animals meditating over Tut. It was truly a great showing for fats.

Another thing that has changed is the 7-10 Dallas Police Department Gang Units which patrol the grounds like so many sentinels looking for secret handshakes, groups in gang colors (though I saw many a family all dressed in the same color for easy-finding purposes), and the excessive use of airbrush on t-shirts. Okay, I added the last one, but really, who needs to wear the Dallas skyline in airbrush? D-town 4eva.

Speaking of D-town 4eva, that is about how much time I spent stuck in traffic thanks to gaggles of TX-OU fans streaming to and from the fair grounds: 92,000 of them (thanks to the new additions to the Cotton Bowl), some of whom found it necessary to be drunk at my hotel breakfast at 6:30 a.m. on game day. Thank you!

Most hilarious part of the fair: the hundreds (maybe thousands) of TX-OU football fans who paid to get into the fair, braved the traffic of game day, and the hordes of folks who just wanted a football victory and a little chicken fried bacon, to watch the game on the Jumbotron, in the sun while standing.

Hey, not that great of a blog, but I'm just getting back into it, so ease up, Tiger.