A teenage boy in Texas has claimed to have shot and killed a Chupacabra, the infamous “goat sucker” of Cryptozoology. I like how although they claim to have the Chupacabra dead in their backyard, there is still only this grainy, blurry photo. If you claim you have a Chupacabra you really have to get in there with the HD camera, and snap some high res photos and video.

“It just walked across and started shaking, slowly moving across,” Pope said. “No hair on it at all, the back legs were shriveled up, and I honestly think it was a chupacabra.”

Pope said he ran to his parents’ room to wake up his dad to come see what he had discovered.

“I thought, ‘I’m dreaming or this kid is crazy, but probably a little bit of both,’” Pope’s father Will said.

Will said when he came outside with his son, he was amazed by the creature. The animal was about 200 feet away when Pope fired three shots before the animal stopped moving.

Link

“I’ll say right off the bat that I’m a conservative – I believe in hard work and I believe our border needs to be secure,” says Debbie Loop, whose 15-acre citrus farm is on both sides of the fence. “But when they signed this fence into law, nobody stopped to think Texas isn’t Arizona or California. Our border does not run dirt to dirt. Any idiot could have told them that. My grandchildren now live on the wrong side. Who is going to protect them? Who protects me when I’m in my orchards after dusk? I just want to work hard and earn a living. But they’ve changed this place forever.”

Link -via Metafilter

"At the Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, we have found evidence of an early human occupation… 2,500 years older than Clovis," said Dr. Waters. "This makes the Friedkin site the oldest credible archaeological site in Texas and North America. The site is important to the debate about the timing of the colonization of the Americas and the origins of Clovis."

The newly discovered tools are small and made of chert, and the researchers suggest that they were designed for a mobile toolkit — something that could be easily packed up and moved to a new location. These tools are recognizably different from Clovis tools although they do share some similarities, including the use of biface and bladelet technology.

Link (Photo: Michael R. Waters)

At the Clubhouse in Dallas, a manager who declined to give his name told the Daily News that he is expecting increased traffic and is willing to hire additional women who come in – but doesn’t have a blank check for new employees.

NY Daily News has more: Link

Austin’s legendary "Cathedral of Junk" is closing its doors after city officials demanded that the 33-foot folk art tower be modified to meet safety requirements. The structure is made of discarded items such as TVs and furniture and was so popular it was listed in Roadside America. So much for the slogan "Keep Austin Weird."

The owner, Vince Hannemann, has decided that altering the 60-ton structure to bring it into compliance with demands made by Austin city officials has altered the unique character of the piece and further modifications will destroy it completely.

Mr. Hannemann commented that the changes he has made in pursuit of city approval have already the rendered the structure a “Junkhenge.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Doctor Zom.

To avoid getting delayed behind noisy schoolkids waiting in line to pass through new metal detectors at the state Capitol, lobbyists are signing up for concealed handgun permits exempting them from the security checkpoints. [...]

The only people exempted are lawmakers, properly identified state employees or Texans who carry a pistol with a concealed handgun license — or just the license itself, which allows them to bypass the security lines for an express lane reserved for “CHL: Holders.”

“Every lobbyist in Texas is going to become a card-carrying member or a gun-carrying member,” lobbyist and former state lawmaker Pat Haggerty said. “We’re going to have more damn guns in here than we know what to do with.

“And there are some lobbyists I don’t know whether I’d trust — or trust myself if they’re around,” added Haggerty, a Republican who represented El Paso for 20 years. “It would certainly be a good way to do away with the competition.”

There’s method to this madness, folks: metal detectors are there to detect guns being furtively smuggled into the State Capitol building. You can openly carry concealed firearms if you take an all-day training class for certification to do so.

Link

The US Civil War will always be one of the most studied parts of US History. But it hasn’t been the only civil war in the US. Cracked takes a look at five more wars that can really only be called ridiculous.

From the war between Michigan and Ohio over the city of Toledo (no one was killed but prisoners were taken) to a war over the Red River Bridge between Texas and Oklahoma (which all but stopped transit between the two states), these wars are relatively overlooked, and completely ludicrous.

Back on the Oklahoma side, Governor Murray decided the situation wasn’t anywhere near stupid enough yet, so he increased the dick move quotient in the skirmish by 75 percent and ordered the Oklahoma National Guard to block and demolish the road north of the private toll bridge, rendering the area impassable.

Then, he expanded his martial law order to both sides of the Red River bridge. And that was how Oklahoma National Guardsman wound up occupying land in Texas.

Link – via metafilter

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

The Salt Palace in Grand Saline, Texas is the only building in the U.S. made entirely of rock salt. The town, founded in 1845, sits on top of a 16,000-foot-deep salt deposit that is still mined by Morton.  The deposit is expected to last 20,000 years.

This is actually the third Salt Palace built in Grand Saline. The first building was torn down, and the second building melted. But the current Salt Palace, built in 1993, has an overhanging roof to protect it from the elements.

Visitors to the Salt Palace will learrn about salt mining and the history of Grand Saline, including a display about the town’s most famous son, Wiley Post, who in 1931 became the first person to circle the globe in an airplane.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

To battle chronic power outages and electrical fluctuations, the city is coming up with an unusual solution: a Texas-sized battery backup!

The hoped-for remedy is a battery, a Texas-size battery, which could eventually end up playing an important role in wider use of green power generation such as solar and wind. The U.S. $25 million system, which is now charging and is set to be dedicated April 8, will be the largest use of this energy storage technology in the United States.

The four-megawatt sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery system consists of 80 modules, 8,000 pounds (3,600 kilograms) each, constructed by the Japanese firm NGK-Locke. They were shipped to Long Beach, California, in December and transported to Texas aboard 24 trucks.

The cost of the battery system includes $10 million just to construct the building in which it will be housed and the new substation it requires.

Link

But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Without paddling, "there were no consequences for kids," said Steve Wright, who runs a construction business and is Temple’s school board president.

Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically, Wright said, even though only one student in the school system has been paddled.

"The discipline problem is much better than it’s been in years," Wright said, something he attributed to the new punishment and to other discipline programs schools are trying. Residents of the city’s comfortable homes, most of which sport neighborly, worn chairs out front, praise the change.

Michael Bimbaum of The Washington Post has the story: Link (Photo: Tom Fox/Dallas Morning News)

Previously on Neatorama: Spanking Children Makes Them More Aggressive

The Dallas Police Department said it was embarrassed by what it calls a mistake by rookie Officer Gary Bromley after he stopped Ernestina Mondragon for making an illegal U-turn.

In addition for being cited for the U-turn violation, Mondragon received another ticket for being a "non-English speaking driver."

Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle issued an apology:

"We don’t have abilities to determine proficiency in any language, and we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place," Kunkle said. "I apologize to the Spanish-speaking Hispanic community."

After a review of the records, Kunkle said about a half-dozen officers had issued a total of 38 similar citations. He said police would recommend to the courts that any pending cases be dismissed.

Link

“Everyone was handing it off to everybody else,” Schule said.

He was surprised at the amount of work it took to get the military to pick up its lost missile launcher.

Schule initially was nervous when he found the weapon. But as the hours passed, he did what most guys would do — marvel at the mind-blowing awesomeness of finding a missile launcher. He posted photos on Facebook and called his buddies, saying: “Guess what I found?”

Schule called the military police at Fort Sam. But their jurisdiction doesn’t extend off the post. Schule’s information was passed along to an Army criminal investigator, who visited Schule on Wednesday morning — about 19 hours after he started making phone calls.

Three hours later, an Army ordinance disposal team retrieved the weapon. There is still no word on how it got to Schule’s yard. Link -via Queuebot

Two types of the endangered species call south Texas their home, the Gulf Coast jaguarundi and the Sinaloan jaguarundi. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they are larger than a domestic cat and have small ears, long, narrow bodies with short legs and flattened heads and tails. They generally look more like an otter or a weasel than a cat. They make their homes, according to the lawsuit, in the “dense thorny mesquite, cacti and cat claw thickets of southern Texas.”

One commenter said the jaguarundi looks like a cross between a cat and a mossy tree. Link -via Digg

(image credit: blueskull611)

Howard Witt of Chicago Tribue has the story:

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you’re African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That’s because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled highway connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking and call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state’s asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

Link

(Photo: Howard Witt/Chicago Tribune)

The project results in one crime bust in the six week it has been on, but it was a biggie: "virtual deputies" spotted three suspects trying to smuggle 540 pound of marijuana across the border. According to Wired:

The exact location of the cameras is not disclosed, but according to a press release about the project, "a significant number of Texas landowners" requested that the cameras be placed on their property.

More than 21,000 people from several states, including as far away as Ohio, have signed up to be virtual deputies so far. BlueServo claims its web site has received more than 5 million hits, resulting in about 1,000 e-mail reports of suspicious activity. The average camera watcher spends about eight minutes on the site examining video.

What do virtual deputies get in return for their efforts?

Aside from the satisfaction of knowing they’ve done their part to combat crime, they get the opportunity to become targeted consumers.

Link | Here’s the webcam: BlueServo – via Attuworld

The rural North Texas town of Ferris — about 20 miles south of Dallas — has approved a policy that allows authorities to shoot “wild” roaming dogs.

Ferris City Manager David Chavez said the Ellis County town approved the policy because it was becoming a dumping ground for unwanted pets. People drive out to the country to release pets they no longer want, but the starving animals breed, form packs and wind up scavenging for food, he said.

Ferris Police Chief Frank Mooney said the city would shoot only “potentially violent dogs,” and only as a last resort — after attempts to humanely capture the animal had failed.

Link – via Muttskis

(The photo is from the iconic January 1973 cover of National Lampoon humor magazine, and yes, it’s not neat but isn’t it remarkable?)