From the local classifieds:

Livestock and Poultry - Llamas For Sale. Pet quality, guard & show quality, champion stock.

I would love a pet llama, but I don't think they are easily housebroken.

When I worked the night shift this week I asked the Hispanic cleaning lady to give me the scoop on the "real" Mexican restaurants in town. Despite my nickname, I'm a gringo who isn't in the know when it comes to local Mexican-American culture. So she told me about a couple of places on the far edge of town which aren't listed in the phone book. I might try one of them tomorrow after working up an appetite hiking around the caprock.

I don't think I'll come up with anything to say about Hud, except that it was filmed near Amarillo so if y'all want a glimpse at the blighted landscape I live in everyday, take a look at it. I think I've said before that I haven't been overly impressed with Larry McMurtry's fiction, whether in its original prose form or transcribed to celluloid, but I would almost sell my soul to write non-fiction as well as he. However, our cataloguer says that Terms of Endearment is a Grade A tearjerker, so I might give McMurtry the storyteller one more shot.

Thanks goes out to Felix for being a good sport and arguing with me about the veiling of women in church, but it looks like the original message has rolled over into my archives, so if he would like to continue the debate he can append a comment to this post.

I had said a while back that, despite being at least quasi-Protestant, I find some Roman Catholic saints more attractive than I do the big names of Protestantism. I might not be alone in that, considering the admiring biographies of these saints that get produced by non-Catholics, even non-Christians. Joan of Arc has the curmudgeonly agnostic Mark Twain, the bohemian lesbian Vita Sackville-West, and wacky post-modernist filmmaker Luc Besson among her fans. The most famous account of Bernadette Soubirous was written by a Jew, as was an excellent recent biography of Teresa of Avila. But who really admires Calvin, except for Calvinists? I did hear, though, that a Catholic priest actually proposed that John Wesley be canonized!