[UA] Austin, Texas. Was: A place to start my UA campaign

[Steve Mains]

A few quick bits of weirdness from Austin, TX, for José's sake.

Hermetic already mentioned Leslie Cochran, Austin's most infamous homeless
cross-dressing would-be politician.

A couple-a links:
http://austintexas420.tripod.com/leslie-cochran/pictures.html
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-03-14/pols_atlarge.html

Both links feature, er, illuminating pictures.

I say Leslie is the "most infamous" because there's another one--Jennifer
Gale.  Well, maybe.  When I first met her, I assumed she was a transvestite,
but the last time had me wondering.  It seems the local papers aren't too
certain either.  But both of them ran in the last mayoral election.  As for
the homeless bit, the address listed in her contact information I found via
Google is, if memory serves, that of a church which will sometimes let the
homeless in for some shelter.  She's actually very nice, and not nearly as
crazy as I'd expect a homeless perennial candidate for mayor/city
council/etc. to be.  She encouraged me to become a trucker.  A page with
tons of Gale links (most dealing with the election) and a picture can be
found here:  http://www.austinmayor.com/e2003/other/gale/index.html

Duelling avatars of the Mystic Hermaphrodite?  Perhaps they're urbanomancers
as well, spending all their time in the streets and vainly hoping to attain
political power.

My second point of weirdness would have to be the local cable access
channels.  As I have no idea whether or not cable access extends outside of
America, a brief description is in order.  Basically, they're TV channels
broadcast on local cable that will show pretty much anything provided the
show's producer has taken a workshop course provided by Austin Access and
has paid an annual fee.  The shows range from the genuinely good (my
personal favorite, The Show With No Name), to the craziest whackjobbery in
the world.  Gurus and potheads and conspiracy theorists and plenty of people
just screwing around flood the access channels.  You can watch a program
claiming what truly misunderstood and wonderful people slave owners were and
follow it up with a shot of Alex Jones, who is very worried about the
Freemasons and the Illuminati.  Maybe after that, you'll be lucky enough to
catch a snippet of a show (the name of which escapes me) that features a
wooden puppet manipulated by sticks that will answer any question you have.
"Oh great master, what is the sound of one hand clapping?"  "The same sound
that emanates from your bedroom every night!"

Some of the shows could very easily be Occult Undergrounders at least
partially in the know, but a bit too far-gone to get their conspiracy-fueled
ideas across.

It's bedtime, and so I'll wrap this up with one last thing.  Probably the
second-most ubiquitous bumper stickers around town, behind "Keep Austin
Weird," are stickers for a local record store, Waterloo Records.  Once upon
a time, I imagine, someone cut up one of these stickers, or a few of them,
and rearranged the letters--the "d" in "Records" can become a "p," and the
"W" in "Waterloo" an "M," etc.--to spell something else.  Somehow, this
phenomenon caught on, and now everyone's doing it.

Perhaps some of them, taking advantage of this, are conveying secret
messages.  Others might be attempting to instill subliminal ideas in the
public consciousness.  My brain's too tired to think of anything else, but
here are a few examples from the web:

https://webspace.utexas.edu/majorce/bumper.html (the "so it goes" sticker in
the bottom pic)
http://www.aprendizdetodo.com/austin/?item=20030318 ("secret word"--oooooh;
there are also a few other local bumper stickers that I've never seen
rearranged, though I do remember seeing an "Austin Chronicle" bumper sticker
that, predictably, got switched to "Chronic")
http://aprendizdetodo.com/austin/ (this one has the same stickers as the
last, plus a few instances of Austin's odd graphitti; my favorite is the
one--not on this site, though--that says "todos somos ninjas")

If I'm not beaten to the punch, I can probably provide some helpful
Austin-oriented links tomorrow, when I'm not so dead-tired.

-Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: Jose Porfirio <heinrichkornelius at yahoo.com>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 2:32 AM
Subject: [UA] Austin, Texas. Was: A place to start my UA campaign


>
> > Or, if your players aren't IN NOMINE fans, you might use Austin,
> > Texas. Huge pagan/New Age community, great university (Univ. of Texas
> > has one of the largest rare book collections in the world), much
> > Texan weirdness.
>
>
> It had to be you, Ken! Thank you ONCE MORE! Austin is the city where the
> movie Slacker takes place, isn't it? OK, that's my choice! It's also the
> home town of Steve Jackson Games, and I owe a lot to that company for
> all the wonderful GURPS supplements, and, of course, Pyramid and (wink,
> wink) the Suppressed Transmission.
>
> So, having decided that, where can I get information on Austin and the
> University of Texas, and all the real world weirdness going around
> Austin?
>
> Thanks for you all, so far
>
> Cheers,
>
> Zé
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> UA mailing list
> UA at lists.uchicago.edu
> http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua
>


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