Sidewinders, Tinhorns, Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers from the Periphery of the Blogosphere

Hopalong Cassidy

We got TV in Seattle in 1948, although my first recollection is watching Hopalong Cassidy in the early 50's on a 4 inch screen.  I quickly learned that I didn't want to be a sidewinder, tin horn, a yellow-bellied sapsucker or lily-livered, although those terms were never defined in cowboy vernacular.  Sheep farmers were hated too because they grazed the land differently from cattlemen.

The TV signal in the early 50's was never clear.  As a kid I learned you could stop the screen from rolling by hitting the top of the box with a closed fist.  The fine tuning dial would sometimes alleviate snow and other squiggly lines from the screen.

By the time I was 11 or 12 I knew how to take all of the tubes out of the television, put them in a bag and ride my bike to the nearest U-Test-Em machine at the grocery store.  You could find your tubes number on the front of the machine, insert the prongs just right and the machine would tell you if the tube was "weak" or "needs to be replaced."

Old TV Set

Television sets are much more reliable now, but unfortunately tin horns, sidewinders and yes, yellow-bellied sapsuckers abound and this blog tries to keep up with them.  Cowboy justice would have been swift and brutal to sapsuckers like Ernie and Erin Hernandez, Gilbert Hinojosa, Able Limas, Cata Presas-Garcia, Aurora de la Garza, Herminia Becerra, Jim Solis, Ray Marchan, Tony Martinez and Juliet Garcia.

While we wait for the distressed Carnival Cruise ship to reach shore with 4,000  guests on their last cruise, let's revisit a few of the sapsuckers, tin horns and sidewinders who float on the outer edges of the blogosphere:

1. Sapsucker Carlos Quintanilla:  No one has sucked more sap from BISD than Quintanilla.  He

can smell BISD's $500,000,000 budget from the back yard of his Dallas home on S. Dwight St.  Carlos is not a smart con artist as his RICO conviction attests, but he chooses his cons more carefully now.  He plays the con-friendly environment of the Brownsville Independent School District like an old, familiar fiddle.  His blog, carebrownsville, was closed some time ago, but he still ventures the occasional inarticulate comment on local blogs when his name is mentioned.  Below is a recent comment he made to the Mean Mister Brownsville blog:

2. 
   AnonymousFebruary 12, 2013 at 9:45 PM

   Jim Barton
   
   You continue to misinform your few readers. FYI I was not in Brownsville and have not been in Brownsville for some time. But let me tell you next time I am in Brownsville I will personally call you, then you can post in your blog that I was in Brownsville.
   
   I am wasting these few minutes of my time just to show how much a bulls hitter you are.
   
   Carlos Quintanilla

   Quintanilla took some hits for his phrase "bulls hitter," but I think we all know what he was trying to say.

   
   

   

   Patrick Lehmann

   2.  Sapsucker Patrick Lehmann:  In cowboy days, old Hopalong would have emptied his six-shooter into Lehmann's hide then blown the smoke away from the barrel.  It's not just that Lehmann sells cheapass Chinese motorcycles for $1999 to unsuspecting Brownsville residents that (last time I checked) can be purchased online for $600, it's also the parts only, labor not included "warranty" that adds insult to injury.  

   Pat's recent wallet stuffer was a proposal to BISD to monitor their trash, collecting a commission on the "savings."  The fancy name for Lehmann's trash anaylsis company is LCA Management Consulting Solutions, located at exactly the same address as his motorcycle showroom.  One MMB commenter saw through the scam:

   "Pat Lehmann was voted down before the board to receive a consulting contract with the district. . . . . . . . . . He wanted a 50/50 split with the district for every dollar he would save for the district in their trash collection fee's. The way this works, is that he would go around and eliminate one dumpster at each high school and a few at the middle schools and he would get half of the savings. At $1,000 dollars for each dumpster about ten dumpsters, that is a 10,000 savings for the district per month, 5,000 for pat! The district pays 1.3 million a year for trash collection. The maintenance dept is responsible for the trash collection contract with the city and they have no idea what is going on with the dumpsters. That same department has the biggest budget in the entire district and they are totally inept!"

   
   

   

   Duardo Paz-Martinez

   3. Tinhorn Duardo Paz-Martinez:  A very creative, but intermittent blogger, Duardo may have been accused in the old westerns of riding sidesaddle given his apparently fragile psyche.  

   Introduced to the local blogosphere by longtime blogging fixture Jerry Mchale, Paz-Martinez maintained a tri-columned blog, The Paz Files, which opined on national news, advertised novels penned by Patrick Alcatraz, but seemed to have a primary focus of a melancholy look at Brownsville as observed from near Austin.  It was not the first time an Austinite dissected  matters of local interest from Travis County as Erasmo Castro pulled and continues to pull Brownsville Cheezmeh strings from north, central Texas.  

   After Paz-Martinez tired of The Paz Files, he resurfaced as Sam Losoya on a blog with one central purpose:  to denigrate Harlingen blogger Tony Chapa, referred to by Losoya(Paz-Martinez) as Tony "The Turd" Chapa.  A consistent charge leveled by Paz-Martinez against Chapa was that he wrote fake comments for his blog, a charge that Paz has also recently made against MMB. 

    Duardo's kryptonite may have come in the form of Brownsville's resident nerd, Tad Hasse.  Hasse claims to have verbally "kicked Duardo's ass so many times that, anatomically, his posterior may not even exist."  Hasse also claims to have "chased Duardo's sorry ass out of Brownsville."  

   In any event, Duardo may have landed on his proverbial feet.  Someone reported that he found gainful employment managing a trailer park near Kyle, TX.  The rigors of maintaining a neatly trimmed hedge, separating the singlewides from the doublewides and eradicating crystal meth may explain the bloggus interuptus as much as anything.  

   While it's doubtful even in the old west that tinhorns would be strung up just for being tinhorns, they never got star billing.

   
   

   4. Sidewinder "Rey Guevara-Vazquez," the Grammar Nazi:  When I was 6 or 7 I had a bad habit of adding the phrase "so can I" whenever someone said they could do something.  Finally, an adult took me aside and explained that I wasn't helping myself my coming off as a know-it-all.  Similarly, my son's girlfriend has an 8 year old daughter who finishes everyone else's sentence with "I know."  

   Evidently, no one has ever pulled aside  "Rey Guevara-Vazquez," the Grammar Nazi and told him that correcting every blog commenter's grammar is poor form.  I learned years ago that criticism was a subtle way of elevating the critic over the one being criticized.  

   Criticizing corruption, ineptitude, malfeasance of officeholders is not the same as constant correction over trivial issues of grammar.  Mark Twain, a notoriously bad speller once said:  "I have nothing but contempt for a man who can spell a word only one way."  Twain would not have liked Guevara-Vazquez, nor would Hopalong Cassidy, who likely would have issued the order:  "String him up!"