Claudette Ravages Texas Coast Like Mean-Hearted Woman in Blues Song

weet mercy! Texans are still rebuilding their shattered lives after last week's "just plain cold" brutalizing of the Galveston Bay area by heartless hurricane Claudette.

Like an insufferable tropical cocktease, that hurricane moved in and out of the Gulf of Mexico with threatening promise until attacking the Texas coastline with unrelenting moxy. Damages were estimated easily into five-digits, possibly six with the option for seven, and over 30,000 Texans were left without power. Electric power, not power in the Marx-Engels sense.

It was a double-decker sadness sandwich for residents of the Texas coast, who found their homes and livelihood torn up like the love of a good-lovin' bluesman. Ol' Claudette, she knocked over houses and blew down powerlines with a blow from those puckered-up metaphorical lips of hers and left all Texans lower than low. Some residents were desperate for electricity and shelter again, and even though Gov. Rick Perry promised disaster relief and the American Red Cross offered help to those hit hardest by the storm, it was little consolation after being so brutally used and abused by a hard-hearted bitch with a max wind speed of 85 mph.

"I lived in that wreck that used to be my house all my life," said 10-year-old Bob Phelps, a part-time investment banker and pretend Indian. "Claudette rolls in here like a storm and leaves everything all busted up. A lot like a storm, very much so, really. And all this debris, it's just like the inside of my little ol' heart."

Some grief-stricken residents, like cat fancier Elvin Harper, hoped Claudette would follow earlier predictions of losing intensity before reaching the coast.

"I had friends who said she was just a pretty coastal wind, but I knew better," said Harper, searching through cat debris to salvage what he could. "That hurricane was no good, and she messed Texas up good. It just ain't right, I'm telling you the truth."

Used to being turned inside out by tough-lovin' women, local blues players were among the first to recover from the storm. Though electricity was still out in the town, renowned blues legend Galveston Larry had words none-too-kind for the Category-1 storm in an all-acoustic set at Victoria tavern Benny's.

"That Claudette, she's a tough-lovin' woman," Larry advised, seeking a harmonica affirmation from fellow musician "Luckless" Gary Woodland. "She done rolled in over me, all up and down me—you hear what I'm sayin', Gary? And she flattened my trailer like thousand-pound anvil. Just like in Bugs Bunny cartoon or something."

Despite the poor simile, most residents suffering the aftermath of the tropical storm could identify with Larry's feelings.

"It's just sad, wrenches your insides all up," said steel worker and aspiring dancer Clara Gumption. "You can run into good weather systems every day of your life, it only takes one bad one to ruin it for everybody. But I don't hold no grudges. My main concern is getting on with everything, not cursing Claudette to Hades. She'll get what's coming to her some day, she's going to stroll into the wrong town and get herself messed up like she done to Texas."

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Last installment we ended with the great video game crash of 1982, which treated the world to visions of programmers heading west across the dust bowl in Calistoga wagons, embarrassing holes worn through their one-dollar pants. Entire landfills had to be created to accommodate the vast influx of unplayed games and unused gaming consoles manufactured in the early 80's. The town of E.T., Maine, was founded around a massive landfill that Atari created to hide the shame of the millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges produced before the company realized that not even stamping the name of a hit movie on the cartridge could save one of the shittiest games ever produced.

From this smoking hole in the ground Nintendo would emerge with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Hujitsu Homanama had formed the company to sell his sexy playing cards in 1889, naming it "Nintendo," a Japanese word meaning "eat the children." Over time the company would evolve into other areas of gaming, scoring hits in the early 80's with arcade hits Donkey Kong and Stick Dick in Hole for Blow. But total world domination would have to wait until 1985, when the company's first home console grabbed the world by its balls and mopped the floor with it, like some kind of weird ball-handled mop.

The driving force behind the success of the NES was its megahit pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. Offering gamers a glimpse of what happened to those bickering, deranged Italians after they finally climbed out of the sewer at the end of the original Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. delighted children the world over with its colorful, drug-induced imagery and perhaps the most cruelly addictive theme song of any video game ever. Years later, respected American composer George Crumb would be shamed in the international community when he realized he had inadvertently written the Super Mario Bros. theme into one of the movements of his grand fifth symphony. Regardless, anyone who had grown up with a NES controller fused to their mitts and that maddening little song in their ear was quick to forgive.

And the hits kept coming for Nintendo, thanks in part to the system's forward-looking peripherals. The NES light gun and Duck Hunt made the fun of unprovoked attacks on animals possible without the horrors of spending time outdoors. And thanks to the Robotic Operating Buddy peripheral and the game Gyromite, millions of kids developed critical thinking skills trying to figure out why in the hell Nintendo had put out a complicated robot controller that only worked with one lousy game.

Nintendo even branched out into 3-D games with the inimitable Rad Racer in 1987, a driving simulation title that perfectly captured the powerful nausea someone would experience trying to drive a race car while wearing red and blue glasses.

Though certainly a milestone in the racing game genre, Rad Racer was hardly the first, or the radest. Most rader. The first arcade racing game was actually 1979's Chicken Run, a bizarre title unrelated to the later claymation movie. The game revolved around how many chickens a player could run over with a Datsun in three minutes, based on one of the game creator's DUI convictions from college. Though undeniably fun, Chicken Run would soon be pushed to the back pages of history by 1982's legendary Pole Position. Pole Position remains to this day the most accurate driving simulation ever created, marveling gamers with its realistic physics, and is still the program that the Army uses to train its formula-one drivers.

Pole Position was followed by Sega's Outrun in 1986. In Outrun, the gamer took on the role of a red convertible piloted by a couple of Californian genetic freaks capable of surviving repeated rollover wrecks that would have decapitated a Samoan. A hit cartoon of the game had to be pulled from the air in 1987 because parents' groups thought it was giving young children the message that rollover fatalities are fun.

And thus we're backwardly introduced to Nintendo's only real competition, if you could call it that, in the era of 8-bit home gaming, an American company called Sega. Sega was started by a Korean War veteran named David Rosen as a front company called Service Games, which Rosen used to sell chintzy Japanese pinball machines to American families as a magnetic homeopathic therapy for kids with cancer. Rosen claimed the machines would cure a variety of fatal illnesses, as well as play a fun little song if your wellness score topped 100,000. Later he shortened the name to Sega because he was a very lazy and uncreative man.

Sega scored early hits with the frog abuse fantasy Frogger and the Dr. Seuss-inspired Zaxxon, which grew enough hair on Sega's balls that they thought competing with Nintendo sounded like a good idea. Thusly in 1986 came the release of the Sega Master System, which was actually Sega's fifth console, but the first that didn't have the added functionality and electrocution risk of a built-in juicer.

The only problem was that Sega forgot to make a Super Mario Bros. for its own system, opting instead to put out a whole line of crap. Later, the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo, Atari's Jaguar and 3DO would all attempt to compete with the NES and lose, because they all sucked a giant dong. The Sega Master system was relegated to "little bitch" role, having to settle for finding a home in households that somehow couldn't find a NES or weren't sure how to buy one.

Sega would later turn the tables on Nintendo with their 16-bit Genesis console, which outsold the Super Nintendo due to confusion about what a hedgehog was, and the surprisingly large number of dumb kids who didn't want to have to choose between "soup or Nintendo." Nintendo would have the last laugh, however, with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, an extremely crappy portable gaming system and technological leap backward which would go on to become the best-selling gaming machine ever. Since the Game Boy was cobbled together inexpensively from components of Russian consumer electronics leftover from the early 1950's, Nintendo's profit margins were enormous and executives spent the entire decade of the 1990's laughing.

Later, even more shit would happen. Stay tuned.

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Boris love in movie Lethal Weapons when cop persons is saying "I am too old for this shit!" when him is supposed to do dangerous thing. Chief says for Crocket and Tubbs to go on adventure to stop karate guys from making money, and thing will have lots of yelling and fast cars, but Tubbs is too old for this shit. Him wants to stay home with footballs and house size of airport. But they do go on adventures anyway because Crocket lives in shitholes and does not want to go home. Which is good for movie because Tubbs Staying Home movie not so exciting.

This part so good is now Boris new saying. Whenever there is thing Boris doesn't not want to do, is time to say "Boris is too old for this shit." Like other day, Louis wants help to move fridge, to get back where Boris hides housekeys for safe keepings. Nope, sorry, Boris is too old for this shit. But then Louis has saying that Louis is too old to buy pizza for dinner, and so him does win battle of who person is too old to do things. Boris moves fridge and does have pizzas for dinner.

On other day cop person asks what Boris is doing with fishing pole in swimming pool, and Boris does not feel like explaining fishing so does tell cop person Boris is too old for this shit. Cop person does not like this thing and says him is too old not to give Boris wedgie, so Boris must explain how Snoopy fishing pole is for catching new dog, because Similar to Skippy did runs away during loud part of Lethal Weapons.

Cop person doesn't not like this, Boris thinks is because him wants special dancing dog for himself. So he does tell Boris is assjack who will never catch dog with such little fishing pole. Is okay, as Louis say opinion is like Eskimo.

Starting to think no persons does love this Lethal Weapons saying so much as Boris. So instead Boris does think to go visit old persons home, where all persons is too old for this shit and can relate to funny saying.

So Boris does go to tell old persons what to say, and is very good time. Boris explains about Boris is too old for this shit, and old persons does like to talk about such things. Old persons is too old for all things, and love to tell Boris about this. And old persons is right age to drive electric wheelchair and give Boris ride, so fun. Life in electric wheelchair is like very slow race with no finish. And old persons does love to watch TVs with Boris, though when Boris does put on Lethal Weapons show old persons are too old for this shit. Too bad but still fun to watch show about stopwatch and thing with crocodile hunter.

Old persons home is fun place with good pudding. But after few days Louis does come to take Boris away because Boris is not old enough for this shit.

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