So ... where's the keg?

From Lopez!:

George Lopez was in El Paso to campaign for Obama. This is a quote from one of UTEP's best and brightest:

"This was fun and more entertaining than Hillary's rally, but I'm not going for either one of them right now," said Jacob Torres, 20, a sophomore education major. "Some of the stuff they're promising is kind of hard to accomplish."

=l

Honestly, a fire was probably just a matter of time

I know it will never — and probably shouldn't — happen, but if newspapers gave their reporters some sort of prize for best quote of the week, Zahria Torres would've been the winner.

This is from a story about a fire and some unruly customers at one of the restaurants of legendary El Paso chain, Chico's Tacos:

"We understand the sacrifice they had to make leaving possibly a double order of Chico's Tacos with extra cheese behind, but when an emergency response agency asks you to evacuate, including firefighters and police officers, it's usually because it's an emergency," said Lt. Mario Hernandez, the spokesman for the Fire Department. "So hopefully they'll realize this morning that they overreacted a little bit."

When you're interviewing someone, every now and then you get this moment where there's a part of your brain screaming, "This quote is GOLD!" And if you're from El Paso, this quote is even better (you can tell that cop knows what he's talking about ... oh, he knows).

The whole story is pretty funny actually, and for you lazy mugs out there it's also short, so go read the whole thing before it's lost to archiving.

Photo lifted from Interstellarlass' Flickr site

It's pink and it's oval

Man, I'm tired of writing obits — I thought I was done with that! Seriously, it's a habit that needs to be broken.

So, to shake that off I give you today's best message line from the junk folder:

"Turn your garden tool into a POWER DRILL!"

He got a bigger boat

Like a lot of people, I was sad to hear Roy Scheider died yesterday after fighting multiple myeloma — a type of blood cancer — for the past three years. His death was kind of a surprise to me, because I hadn't heard anything about him being sick and I had no idea he was 75.

I'm pretty sure he still could've kicked my ass.

Thanks, of course, to Jaws, Scheider was one of my favorite actors, even if he wouldn't have come immediately to mind if anyone had asked. But looking at his filmography I realized that he was not only an actor I was always glad to see on-screen, he was also in a lot of movies I really, really enjoy.

Jaws might've been where I first saw Scheider, but I also thought he was great in the underappreciated 2010. And I tend to hate all those '70s-era "I'm-a-performer-and-I'm-gonna-make-it!" movies, but I'll give All That Jazz a break due to Scheider's intense turn as a Broadway choreographer. He was in a ton of other movies, some good (The French Connection, Marathon Man) and some not as good (Dracula II, anyone?), but he never just phoned it in.

Just recently me and Lopez were watching Law & Order: CI and up popped Scheider and holy crap was he creepy! Seriously, he freaked us out, and he did it with this small, quietly menacing bit of acting on what is now basically a cable cop show. It made us appreciate him as an actor all over again.

I'd guess that one of the cable movie channels is going to have some sort of Scheider retrospective, which means poor Lopez is going to have to sit through yet another viewing of Jaws, and probably 2010, too. If we're lucky, someone will dig out Blue Thunder.

Photo nabbed from The Shark Is Still Working