The Texas Wildflower Report will keep you posted on what appears to be a spectacular Texas Wildflower season.  Wildflower Sightings is another excellent source for information about Texas Wildflowers where you can find and report sightings and learn to identify a wide variety of our native species.

A total lunar eclipse will be visible all across Texas early Saturday morning.  NASA has prepared a chart that most folks will likely find incomprehensible.  For the really technically inclined EclipseWise provides additional information.  For the rest of us, the Lunar Eclipse will begin around 4 am and be at its maximum at around 7 am just as the sun rises.  This is supposed to create a spectacular effect.

SF Gate reports on illegal slot machine casinos that are easily found in Texas.

Casino gambling with cash payoffs is illegal in Texas. But on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in February, you could not tell it by the scene inside a former tire shop near this Rio Grande Valley border town: a few dozen men and women gambling on 75 slot machines in windowless rooms.

Among the cattle ranches and wind-battered palm trees on U.S. Highway 83, the setting was lowbrow — free chips and soft drinks were the only amenities — but the payouts, in one of the poorest sections of Texas, were substantial, up to $4,000 per play.

After sliding their money into the machines, gamblers who scored jackpots raised their hand, yelled “Ticket!” and waited for a worker carrying a thick wad of bills to convert the points they had won to cash.

Despite laws saying otherwise, casinos thrive throughout the state, an underground billion-dollar industry that operates in a murky realm and engages in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game with the authorities.

Photo from valleycentral.com.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Sen. Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay), the chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, is attempting to end the renewable energy program he championed a decade ago, when the Texas wind power industry was just getting started. Wind power now accounts for almost 13,000 megawatts and at times supplies as much as one-quarter of the power being delivered to Texas electric power grid.

“Mission accomplished. We set out to incentivize and get wind started in Texas, and we far surpassed that goal,” Fraser said. “There’s no state that’s come close to what we’ve done.”

With the support of the state’s Public Utility Commission, Fraser wants to freeze the state’s Renewable Energy Credit program, ending a requirement that power retailers buy credits from wind and solar farms to meet state renewable standards. Also, the $7 billion-and-counting Competitive Renewable Energy Zone project, which has constructed 3,600 miles of transmission lines to bring wind power to Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Austin, would officially end.

The bill is expected to go before Fraser’s committee on Tuesday, before being moved to the Senate for a vote. Already, renewable energy companies and environmental advocates are starting to lobby to let the program run through 2025, arguing that ending it with so little warning endangers an industry that has created more than 100,000 jobs statewide.

Why are we killing off a program that has been remarkably successful in providing clean renewable energy to Texas?  It couldn’t have anything to do with the oil and gas industry’s influence over the Tea Party dominated Legislature, could it?

Red will be on vacation for the next week, so posting on the site may be sporadic at best.  Red needs to rusticate every now and then and get back to his country roots.  Life in the big city can wear on a man.

Rep. Jason Villalba (TP-Dallas) has introduced House Bill 2918 which creates a Class B Misdemeanor offense for private citizens who record, video or photograph police within 25 feet of the officers.  If you are armed, you would not be able to record or photograph within 100 feet of an officer.  The bill also creates a defense for a person working for a radio or television station that holds a license issued by the Federal Communications Commission, as well as certain newspaper and magazine reporters

From the Annals of the Revolution –  In 1836, after the disastrous defeat of Texian forces at the Alamo, the newly commissioned Texan General Sam Houston began a retreat across the coastal plan in an effort to buy time to train his makeshift army. Houston had been chosen on March 6 to be the commander-in-chief of the revolutionary army by the delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Houston immediately departed for Gonzales to join the main force of the revolutionary army.  The Texan Army, such as it was, consisted of about 400 poorly dressed and ill-equipped men. Almost none of them had military experience, some had no weapons and little in the way of provisions.

Houston quickly learned that forces under Col. William B. Travis and volunteers led by Jim Bowie were under siege by the main force of the Mexican Army at the Alamo in San Antonio.  Historians debate whether Houston ever considered attempting to relieve the siege, but it was too late because the Alamo had already fallen when he took command. Scouts reported that Santa Anna’s division was heading east toward Gonzales. Houston had little choice but to retreat and hope for that a situation might present itself where he could press a strategic advantage. The retreat started what became known as the Runaway Scrape in which Anglo settlers followed Houston’s Army across Texas ostensibly seeking refuge in Louisiana.

Responding quickly to Texas AG Ken Paxton’s request for emergency relief, the Texas Supreme Court put a halt to any further same-sex marriages in Texas.  CNN reports that Paxton will seek to have the one marriage license issued rescinded after Sarah Goodfriend and Suzanne Bryant were married on the steps of the Travis County Courthouse today.

Hours later, however, the Texas Supreme Court blocked other gay couples from obtaining marriage licenses after a legal challenge by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The state high court ruling did not invalidate the marriage of the two women in Austin, but Paxton said his office will seek to void their marriage license “due to the erroneous judicial order.”

Paxton is relying primarily on cases that have been pending before the Texas Supreme Court for several years involving the question of whether a same-sex couple that was legally married in another state can obtain a divorce in Texas.  The Texas AG intervened in those cases to claim that a district court did not have jurisdiction to grant a divorce because Texas law does not recognize same-sex marriage.  Paxton claims that Probate Court Judge Guy Herman abused his discretion in deciding an issue that is pending before the Supreme Court.  This seems to be a novel argument as the Supreme Court has not ruled and therefore, there is no clear ruling that Hermann failed to follow.  Rather, Hermann found the Texas prohibition on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional – something the Texas Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on.

Chapel of Love by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector.   Performed by the Dixie Cups.

Have a thoughtful and reflective Ash Wednesday and consider giving up something for Lent.  Red has done this for several years now and while it may or may not have helped, I work under the theory that it cannot hurt.

Or if you are in Ashbourne, England you can participate in the Royal Shrovetide Football Match which may be the strangest “soccer” match on the planet.