Local newspaper fails to verify AP story

The Sweetwater Reporter failed to verify a recent Associated Press article about an incident that was purported to have taken place on Interstate 20 near the town of Sweetwater.

The article, published by the newspaper around January 16, reported that an army soldier, on leave, stopped at a wreck and saved a man's life by performing a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen. The event has been found to be untrue.

The newspaper ran the story without verification from the Texas Department of Public Safety, The Texas Department of Transportation, the Sweetwater Fire Department, the Sweetwater Police Department or the Rolling Plains Memorial Hospital, all first responding entities that serve Sweetwater and Nolan County.

Two emails sent to Sweetwater Reporter publisher Rick Nunez on Friday January 18 were unanswered at the time of this publication. A letter to the editor the following week was also unanswered.

The trouble with the landman...

Here is a recent Eleventh Court of Appeals opinion that gives a little too much insight to the way mineral rights deals happen:

Kerwin Stephens; Thunderbird Oil & Gas, LLC; Thunderbird Resources, LLC; Thunderbird Land Services, LLC; Stephens & Myers, LLP; and Chester Carroll v. Three Finger Black Shale Partnership; Trek Resources, Inc.; Tiburon Land & Cattle, L.P.; L.W. Hunt Resources, LLC; and Richard Raughton Appeal from 32nd District Court of Fisher County
 
Here's an easier version to read:

Kerwin Stephens; Thunderbird Oil & Gas, LLC; Thunderbird Resources, LLC; Thunderbird Land Services, LLC; Stephens & Myers, LLP; and Chester Carroll v. Three Finger Black Shale Partnership; Trek Resources, Inc.; Tiburon Land & Cattle, L.P.; L.W. Hunt Resources, LLC; and Richard Raughton Appeal from 32nd District Court of Fisher County

A variety show

- Tillage radish -

Something new in the field

When temperatures drop around here, a conflagration of winter weeds takes the place of the summer crops. I thought this was what I was seeing as I made my daily tour around cotton and haygrazer fields.

Last week I noticed that the green was not random, that it had a uniformity. Then I noticed large roots on the plants, roots that can be seen as one drives by.

A little finagling on the internet led me to an article about cover crops, after I searched crop rotation. These new dudes are tillage radishes. They say they're good to eat, but it seems they're planted for erosion control, not a cash crop.


Whatever happened to Bobby Templin 

In 1974, Templin made the front page of the Rotan Advance as a newly hired lab tech at the Rotan hospital. He and his wife, Rhonda (Schlegel), were a newly married couple from Shamrock.

On April 11, 1976, Rhonda died in their home by electrocution, when a radio fell into the bathtub in which she was immersed.

Bobby was later convicted of murdering her, in 1981, where he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. That conviction was overturned, but he was convicted again, in 1986, and, again, sentenced to 99 years.

There are many articles and books written on the topic, but it's hard to figure out what happened as the years went by and the flash of the story wore off. It looks like he may have won an appeal in 1994 and been released, that he may live in Mesquite, and that he was alive as recently as March 2018.


Tess of d'Urbervilles

I hear people talking about ancestry testing and I wonder if they've never read the story of Tess and her dire dramas brought about by finding out who she was be related to. Also, I don't talk to many of my relatives who are living, and I'm fairly aware of my family history. Why would I want to know any more?

This thinking gave way to an imaginative conversation between two people, and one trying to convince the other that God is real. One could say, "But you believe in results given to you by people you've never met, in a lab that you've never been to," then the other could say, "But I've seen a lab." This conversation could wind on infinitely, I guess, just like any other philosophical query. "If you were on a railroad track and could pull a switch that would save one person on one track or ten people on another track, what would  you do?". "Oh, I'd save the ten people!". "But what if five of the ten were murderers?", and so on.


Links

Here are some links I came across this week:
The Forage Radish: Bane of Tillers Everywhere
Search for Justice, written by Rhonda Schlegel's father, Norbert
West Texas: A Portrait of its People and Their Raw and Wondrous Land, which has an excerpt of the Templin murder
A Science News article on genetic testing
Cliff Notes for Tess of the d'Urbervilles