The 21st Annual City Of Wink Texas Roy Orbison Festival

You are looking at my windshield, last June, heading towards Wink, across the flatlands of West Texas, with my windshield getting slapped with Roy Orbison memorabilia.

For you non-music history aficionados out there, Wink was the hometown of rock and roll legend Roy Orbison, he of "Pretty Woman" fame.

This year the City of Wink Texas presents the 21st Annual Roy Orbison Festival.

I know no details of this year's Roy Orbison Festival, except for the fact that it is taking place June 18. And that music and a car show is involved. Last year the festival was a 2 day affair.

The only lodging available, in Wink, is at The Queen's Palace. Unfortunately, all rooms are already booked. The nearest other lodging is in Kermit, about 7 miles northeast of Wink.

I believe term limit rules prohibit the Queen of Wink from being named Pretty Woman in the Roy Orbison Pretty Woman contest. But, I am not certain of this.

Meanwhile, the 4th of July will soon be here. For purely non-altruistic reasons I made a webpage this morning of my Texas Top 10 Fourth of July Events.

I did not put the Wink Fireworks Show on the list. It was a close call.

Protesting Injustice In Pecos & Fort Worth Texas

Last night the Queen of Wink blogged about school kids in Pecos, Texas refusing to go to school in protest over the firing of the school's Athletic Director, last name Hensen. I do not know if Hensen has a first name. The Queen did not mention it.

Apparently the Kermit ISD School Board in the notorious town of Kermit, Texas, booted their Superintendent, last name Lujan. Again, I don't know if Lujan has a first name. The Queen did not mention it.

The Lujan guy somehow landed a new Superintendent job a short distance away, in Pecos, where he continued his bad boy ways with the ouster of the well liked Athletic Director.

Which led to Pecos kids refusing to return to school.

That is quite a display of gumption on the part of those West Texas Pecos kids. Very impressive.

The Queen of Wink makes a very good point. As in there are issues here in Fort Worth and its surrounding areas that it would seem would cause citizens to rise up in protest.

Case in point. Chesapeake Energy and its lapdog, the City of Fort Worth, continues its unwarranted, outrageous, uncivilized, indecent, fascist, corrupt, unfair persecution of Steve Doeung.

On March 4 Steve Doeung is back in court, fighting Chesapeake Energy's abuse of eminent domain, in their attempt to install a non-odorized natural gas pipeline under Steve Doeung's home.

Now, I am thinking here with my Pacific Northwest mindset, where protesting is a way of life. You may have seen some of that going on at the Vancouver Olympics. If what is being done to Steve Doeung were happening in the Pacific Northwest, and trust me on this, nothing like this would happen up there, but if it did, you would see large numbers of people protesting the trampling of one American's Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness by corporate and government thuggery.

I'm thinking a very large group needs to be causing a ruckus in downtown Fort Worth on March 4. Anyone agree?

The Blue Sky Of Texas & More Lunacy Courtesy Of The Twin Peaks of Texas, Wink

You're looking at my very blue view, in a picture taken earlier this morning.

The current forecast is for 3 days in a row getting into the 60 degree zone, starting tomorrow. I'm thinking 60 will feel HOT after this Arctic deep freeze we've been suffering from here in North Texas.

I am computer bound til later this afternoon. I don't like it when that happens.

I've decided the Wink/Kermit area is the Twin Peaks of Texas. An awful lot of lunacy seems to happen in those parts, way out of proportion to the population, like it's got 18 loonies per 100 people where the national norm is 1.2 loonies per 100 and the Texas norm is 3.4 loonies per 100.

A couple days ago I blogged about the Wink Sinkholes. In that blogging I wondered where the water came from that made lakes out of the sinkholes, it being in the desert of West Texas.

Well, that simple question turned all sorts of weird, started by Garth the Texan, with an ill-considered comment that seemed to suggest the sinkhole water came from the Cenozoic Pecos Alluvium Aquifer.

Somehow that simple comment had others chiming in, including the Queen of Wink, whom Garth thought was being mean to him, which led him to be mean to the Queen, which then led to someone saying really mean things to the Queen and this morning has Elsie suggesting that King Durango has a nice ring to it.

It's all very perplexing.

Listen To The Kermit Texas Doctor Who Got Nurse Anne Mitchell Fired & Brought To Trial & See If You Want Him Operating On You

Yesterday I blogged about a bizarre story coming out of Kermit, Texas that has become the latest Texas embarrassment, if not in Texas, in the rest of America and the world.

A nurse, Anne Mitchell, was arrested, indicted and today, if events proceeded as scheduled, brought to trial, in Kermit, for reporting what she believed to be the dangerous medical practices of the man you see in the picture, Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr.

The picture is taken from a YouTube video in which the doctor is on some Christian TV Network going on about some medical condition I've never heard of, for which he offers a cure.

The blogging about this latest Texas bizarreness has generated a lot of comments, many from people who have had personal experience with the Kermit hospital at the center of this scandal.

Then one from my favorite commenters, the ubiquitous Anonymous, said...

Of course, it wouldn't be the perfect Texas story unless this quack doctor and placebo huckster peddled his wares under the veneer of professionalism on a Christian cable network, during a program addressing a condition whose very existence is in doubt by most of the medical community, right?

Oh wait, it is the perfect Texas story!

Now, watch the below YouTube video and tell me how fast you'd run out of the operating room if you saw this was your doctor? Also make note of how he refers to "mainstream doctors" which indicates Arafiles recognizes he is out of the mainstream, which a Kermit nurse also recognized and realized something needed to be done. And so she did it. And now faces a 10 year prison term. For doing the right thing. Again. Any of you reading this ready to be operated on by this guy? Want him treating your kid?

UPDATE: Read the Texas Medical Board document regarding 2007 malpractice charges against Kermit Dr. Arafiles.

Monday Morning Raining Texas Blues With The Scrabble Queen Hot In Kauai & Gar The Texan's Psychiatric Woes

That is my Monday morning 9am view this dark winter day in Texas. Rain is predicted to fall all day long. Snow is predicted to arrive, again, on Thursday.

This is the coldest, wettest winter in all the years of my exile in Texas. Meanwhile up north, in my previous place of residence, they are experiencing the warmest winter in recorded history.

The Pacific Northwest winter heat wave may wreak havoc with next week's Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, the Scrabble Queen of Washington is temporarily the Scrabble Queen of Hawaii and is tormenting me with reports of it being too HOT to sit outside. Too HOT in Kauai. Where it rarely gets into the 90s, where it is usually a nice balmy 80 something. And the Scrabble Queen is too HOT.

I can not remember the last time I was too HOT.

And then I have Gar the Texan lamenting that his life full of woe got its start at the now nationally notorious Kermit Hospital. Reading Gar the Texan's blog this morning I learned he's spent decades in psychiatric therapy trying get Kermit out of his head.

I actually watched the entire first half of Super Bowl XLIV yesterday, without getting bored. I think it had something to do with the HD quality of the video rendering watching more watchable. The Who halftime show was good, too. But, I grew bored at some point in the 3rd quarter and ended my active Super Bowl viewing for the year.

Lame commercials this year, for the most part. The Simpsons Coke one was amusing, though. And a few others. My blogging about the Super Bowl, right before it started, turned out to be a bit bizarre, with convoluted errors and an ironic use of the word "who."

In about 3 hours I will start going stir crazy. Maybe the rain will let up before crazy sets in.

Kermit Texas Nurse Faces 10 Prison Years For Reporting Doctor's Malpractice

There is a whole lotta crazy that goes on in Texas. I've mentioned before that the zone I live in takes on Orwellian aspects at times, what with all the double-speak from various Texas state agencies that are supposed to be protecting the people and the environment.

But it's not just my zone of Texas. A whole lotta crazy comes out of this little town in far West Texas, called Kermit.

Gar the Texan is from Kermit. That's one example. Sheriff Robert L. Roberts Jr., that's him in the picture, is another example of crazy coming out of Kermit.

There is this medical thing called the Hippocratic Oath, that's an oath medical type people take in which they pledge, among other things, to do no harm to patients.

Well, the Hippocratic Oath has been turned upside down in Kermit. A doctor in Kermit, Rolando G. Arafiles Jr., was doing bad things, like doing a skin graft, that failed, in an emergency room where he did not have surgical privileges. Another time Arafiles sutured a rubber tip to a patient's finger, an unorthodox procedure which was deemed inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

A nurse, Anne Mitchell, had seen enough of what she believed to be Arafiles' bad medicine. She and a fellow nurse, Vickilyn Galle, sent a letter detailing the bad medicine they had witnessed, to state regulators.

That letter set in motion a bizarre chain of events that now has the good nurse indicted, facing 10 years in prison, for being true to the Hippocratic Oath. Nurse Mitchell is set to stand trial in state court on Monday for "misuse of official information." Whatever that is, it is a 3rd-degree felony in Texas.

The state prosecutor claims he will show that Nurse Mitchell had a history of making inflammatory statements about Dr. Arafiles, intending to damage his reputation, when she reported him to the Texas Medical Board, last April.

Nurse Mitchell, on the other hand, she being a voice of sanity in the troubled town of Kermit, said she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw was a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures.

Charges were dropped against co-letter writer, Nurse Galle.

When the medical board told Dr. Arafiles about the anonymous complaint, he complained to a friend that he was being harassed by a pair of nurses. Arafiles' friend happened to be Winkler County Sheriff, Robert L. Roberts Jr., who credits Arafiles with saving his life, after a heart attack.

Sheriff Roberts showed his appreciation of the bad doctor's good work, in his case, by obtaining a search warrant to seize the 2 nurses' work computers, where he found the evidence of their crime. That being the whistle blowing letter their consciences told them to write, which they felt they were free to do, living, as they do, or so they thought, in the land of the free.

No one had told the nurses they were not living in the land of the free, they were living in Orwellian Texas. It's a totally different country from the rest of America.

Obviously, this has been an extremely twisted nightmare that has been visited upon these nurses. State and national nurses associations have raised over $40,000 for the defense. Legal experts, operating outside of the Malice in Blunderland zone, say Nurse Mitchell would seem to be protected by Texas whistle-blower laws.

The nurses' lawyers have filled a civil suit in federal court charging the county, hospital, sheriff, doctor and prosecutor with vindictive prosecution and denial of the nurses' First Amendment free speech rights.

Nurse Mitchell's co-conspirator, Nurse Galle, said, "We're just in disbelief that you could be arrested for doing something you had been told your whole career was an obligation."

Nurse Galle, it's not just you and Nurse Mitchell who are shaking their heads in disbelief, heads are shaking in disbelief all over America and the world, over the latest scary stuff to come out of Texas, that common sense would seem to dictate would, should never happen.

But, somehow does.

UPDATE: Video of Dr. Arafiles. Watch it and ask yourself if you want him operating on you.

UPDATE: Read the Texas Medical Board document regarding 2007 malpractice charges against Kermit Dr. Arafiles.