Lone Star State Stories: Falling Down the Armadillo Hole!
Interesting tales from the Lone Star State!
Armadillos, beer, and music … now, that’s very Texan!
“Lone Star State Stories” (okay, it’s a mouthful!) has as its prime directive to be a series of blog posts that basically start by me falling down the digital “rabbit hole.”
We all know what’s like to fall down the Internet “rabbit hole” while at your laptop, desktop or smartphone. It can be a time-consuming (and time-wasting) maze of the wacky and wonderful.
Alice Meet the Armadillo Hole
Okay, one of the things about falling down any “rabbit hole” is embracing the tangents, secret side doors, and back alleys that drop you deeper into the labyrinth.
Which brings me to my first (of many!) points … does anyone remember that the phrase “going down the rabbit hole” comes from the 1865 classic “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll?
Indeed, the opening chapter to that mesmerizing work is title “Down the Rabbit-Hole”, and sure enough, Alice does follow the White Rabbit into his burrow and begins her journey to the unique and unsettling Wonderland.
Interestingly, Kathryn Schulz pointed out in The New Yorker in 2015, that the “down the rabbit hole” meaning has evolved over the years to take on a more negative sort of “time wasting” meaning vs. the discovery of something wonderfully weird.
Texas Migrants: You, Me and Even Armadillos
Of course, “Lone Star State Stories” are going to be about tales from Texas and, while we do have rabbits, they just aren’t that Texan.
But, you know what is 100 percent Texas?
Armadillos!
(Please, save those cards and letters pointing out to me that armadillos are “actually” native to South America — because unless you speak the Karankawan or a similar Native American language of a Texas-based tribe, then your clan isn’t originally from Texas, either! And, heck, DNA sequencing studies have shown that most of the Native American populations actually crossed to North America from Asia on an ice age-era land bridge from Asia … so we are all immigrants to the Lone Star State.)
And if you live long enough in Texas, you will find yourself in a conversation with a neighbor that goes like, “hey, how can I get those darn armadillos to stop digging holes in my lawn?”
Which is a very roundabout way of saying … we aren’t going to fall down the rabbit hole here, but dive headfirst into the armadillo hole.
Now onto the very first chapter of “Lone Star State Stories”
