Most Popular
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Barack Obama and Me
It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator
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Mescaline on the Mexican Border
Texas is the only state in the country where peyote is sold legally. Really.
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A Prison Cover-up During Hurricane Rita
For days after the storm, inmates in Beaumont lived without A/C, electricity or hot meals. Press releases kept saying everything inside was fine. Guards and prisoners agree — that was nothing but B.S.
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Little Bitty Burger Barn
"It's okay to be little bitty in the big city" is an apt slogan for this new burger joint, where sliders rule
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Ghost Town CFS: Carriage House Cafe
Step back in time — to a spooky old carriage barn with a monster chicken-fried steak
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Barack Obama and Me (251)
It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator
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Save Lobo: A Siberian Husky Mix is Sentenced to Die (28)
Why? Because he's big and intimidating and because one family complained about him over and over again
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A Prison Cover-up During Hurricane Rita (15)
For days after the storm, inmates in Beaumont lived without A/C, electricity or hot meals. Press releases kept saying everything inside was fine. Guards and prisoners agree — that was nothing but B.S.
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Are You Hot Enough for Citizen Lounge? (7)
All This Useless Beauty
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Rotten to the Corps: A Question of Justice at Texas A&M (140)
Thanks to A& M and a district attorney, two cadets escape punishment for beating in a student's face
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"CSI: The Experience"
Exhibit inspired by CBS series puts you behind the evidence
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Lisa Landolt and Jo Barrett
Two law-school-grads-turned-chick-lit-authors show us amore might be the death of us yet
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Michael Winslow
The man with ten thousand noises comes to Houston
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Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Parade
Watch downtown turn into cowpoke heaven
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Free First Sundays: Family Flicks
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston hosts four kid-friendly films
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Over the Weekend: Fotos, Dogs and Sausage. And Hannah Montana Too.
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Friday Night: Wilco at Verizon Wireless Theater
05:04PM 03/10/08 -
Spring Training Doesn’t Count, Except for When It Does
04:29PM 03/10/08 -
Sausage Fest: Bangers and Mash at Red Lion Pub
11:40AM 03/08/08
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Grilling Sacred Cows
Though far from PC, Big Daddy's comedy is too likable to be hated
By Dylan Otto Krider
Published: November 8, 2001What's a disaffected blue-collar white guy supposed to do for a laugh in a world full of gay, handicapped and ethnocentric comedians? Come on down to Jeff Wayne's right-of-center one-man comedy show, Big Daddy's Barbeque.
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Big Daddy roasts social activists.
Where:
Details:
Subject(s): Big Daddy's Barbeque
"I never say conservative or liberal… because that's very divisive with people," says Wayne, whose mother was a Republican and father was a Democrat. Big Daddy's views "certainly aren't PC, let's put it that way."
Big Daddy is unapologetic about his hamburgers, for one thing, and he lampoons California as the kind of place that will outlaw cigarettes but create marijuana smoking sections in restaurants. At the height of the PC movement the show was subtitled "It's O.K. to Be a White Male," but now that it's almost politically incorrect to be politically correct, the show has been subtitled "It's All My Fault" to keep with the times. Big Daddy now jokes that Osama bin Laden should have turned himself in because he "could have pulled the O.J. jury and gotten off." He says Bush didn't send Jesse Jackson to Afghanistan because "we don't hate them that much."
The director of the show is Ted Lange, the actor made famous by his portrayal of bartender Isaac Washington on The Love Boat. Though that association has provided the show with some protection from offended critics, Wayne says Lange's skin color had nothing to do with his selection. "He was the best man for the job," Wayne says.
Big Daddy is too likable to be hated. Time and again reviewers have noted that black people -- particularly women -- laugh the loudest at Wayne's routines. Big Daddy is not so much threatening as revealing of a new American reality. White people are slowly losing their majority status to become but the largest in a nation of minorities. Perhaps it's inevitable that they would turn into what conservatives hate most: yet another vocal ethnic group touting their cultural identity.
