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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

texas chainsaw massacre fragrance photo illustration“Which movie would you want to smell like?” sounds like a prompt for a profile on a dating app for cinephiles. But let’s consider the question. I’d pick Top Gun over, say, Pretty Woman. A James Bond film seems like a safe bet for me—Casino Royale, perhaps, with its seductive smell of money, martinis, and Mayfair. Home Alone might smell of pine, cinnamon-apple potpourri and freshly baked sugar cookies, which would be nice this time of year. Pride and Prejudice might have notes of hyacinth mixed with the earthy aroma of rural England and the incense of a roaring hearth. That sounds promising but there were also a lot of horses involved in English country life during the Regency era.What about The Texas Chain Saw…

The post ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Has, Somehow, Inspired a Fragrance. I Tried It. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Desalination Plants in CorpusThe dark hump of a bottlenose dolphin’s back cuts through the surface of the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, appearing briefly alongside a docked, Hong Kong–registered bulk-cargo vessel. This industrial canal is an unlikely haven for wildlife, but dolphins are attracted by its cool waters and abundant mullet and appear so regularly that local captains take tour boats to see them.From the observation tower under the downtown Harbor Bridge, a pedestrian can also spy the bend in the channel, a mile and a half away, where the city is placing pipes to feed its planned Inner Harbor desalination plant. Water will be sucked into the facility and stripped of its salt and other minerals by reverse osmosis. The clean water will be routed into the city’s…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Balmorhea Trip GuideWhen Balmorhea pool threw a party for its grand opening over two days in June 1936, celebrants took part in all kinds of activities. A poster from the event breathlessly lists them: a bathing-girl revue, swimming competitions, something called fancy diving, a free barbecue lunch, a baseball game, speedboat races on nearby Lake Balmorhea, and not one but two big dances.That sounds like a lot of action. Honestly, I prefer my visits to Balmorhea—both the vast, gin-clear pool (which famously ranks among the world’s largest spring-fed pools) and the West Texas town you pass through to get there—on the sleepier side, which is why I like to go in winter. The state park packs people in on sultry summer days, but, like cold-blooded mosquitoes, all…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

made in texas: brand new noise photoThe motto was always “Build it, don’t buy it.” Richard Upchurch heard his dad say this constantly growing up. So when his beloved sixties-era Sony transistor radio broke, a young Upchurch didn’t purchase a new one; instead, he cracked it open and tinkered until it worked again. Decades later, the fifty-year-old Upchurch still has that radio—and it’s still functional. He’s now a professional tinkerer, the Geppetto behind Brand New Noise, a Dallas-based line of wooden musical instrument–toys—or toy-instruments, depending on the customer. He recently sold one of his pieces to a synthesizer enthusiast who planned to use it on a record. But on his way out, the customer added, “My daughter’s gonna love this thing.” She’s nine.Upchurch’s flagship product, Loopy Lou, is essentially a small recording…

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working life shredder photoWorking Life is a monthly column in which Texans talk about their jobs. Thomas Polinard, who is 42, is general manager of Shredco, a company that destroys and recycles documents in San Antonio.I would have preferred to be an astronaut, but shredding is the family business. Even in elementary school, I helped my dad with Shredco. After I graduated high school he kept asking me to work at the company, which he had been running for more than forty years. Eventually I took over. The majority of our customers are lawyers, doctors, and accountants. Insurance companies too. Dentists are fun because a lot of times they’ve got X-rays mixed in with the paper. You’ve got to take those out if you want to be right with the…

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weekends bbq food photoMonte Neil was in fifth grade when his father, Glenn, opened WeekEnds BBQ in 2007 in Plainview, 45 minutes north of Lubbock. “When we started it, we didn’t know the first thing in the world about barbecue,” Neil said. “It was just something to do on the weekends,” he added, hence the name. His father is now semiretired, and Neil runs the joint, which moved to the other side of town in February. He added a unique smoker to the new pit room and tweaked the recipes. Now he has a barbecue gem on his hands.After his college days at Texas A&M University, “I didn’t want to move back to West Texas,” Neil said. He took a sales job in Houston after graduation and thought…

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When I arrive at his Dripping Springs ranch, Theo Rossi informs me that Willie Nelson has died. He’s referring to a goat he and his family named after the beloved Texas icon and who suffered from an unhealthy urethra. Thankfully, Rossi’s four other goats are fine, including Willie’s sister, Bette Davis. An auburn buck named Biggie eyes us suspiciously as he approaches the fence line, while Smalls, his counterpart, lazes near a dirt pit that the 49-year-old actor tells me was once a pond. Rain has been scarce, and Rossi would rather not water a hole. Within eyeshot, Peanut Butter and Jelly, two Great Pyrenees that joined the fold after two of the family’s dozen chickens got plucked off by foxes, stand upon a hill in…

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The Incarnate Word College Football PipelineTexas and SMU are still more than a week away from their first playoff games. The University of the Incarnate Word has been there, done that.This year, the not-so-little private Catholic university in San Antonio won the Southland Conference for the fourth time in the past seven seasons and also earned its fourth trip to the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoffs, with a best-ever number-six seed in the 24-team bracket. The Cardinals enjoyed a first-round bye before beating eleventh-seeded Villanova in a second-round matchup last weekend; on Saturday they’ll be in Brookings, South Dakota, to face two-time defending national champion and number-three-seed South Dakota State in the quarterfinals. Not too shabby for a school that didn’t even have a football team until 2008 and only…

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By the middle of September, Kenzie Kingston has already shown half a dozen new students around her TikTok-famous campus. The senior and student ambassador at Walnut Grove High School, in Prosper, about 35 miles north of downtown Dallas, is used to hearing them react with a single word: wow. From the outside, Walnut Grove, which opened in 2023, is a block-long wall of two-story beige brick, broken in the middle by the building’s neoclassical-style entrance. Inside is a soaring atrium that contains the school’s open-concept library, furnished with blond-wood bookcases and sleek navy-and-gray armchairs.Walking down one sunlight-flooded hallway after another, Kingston opens the door to robotics and manufacturing labs, a vast commercial kitchen for culinary education, and the broadcast studio where a student-produced newscast is filmed.…

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Beyonce and SaguaroBeyoncé! Is there anything she can’t do? The answer has long been rumored, at least ’round these parts, to be “absolutely not.” However, as of Wednesday morning, we have a compelling counterargument. Should you find yourself on Jeopardy! and get the question “Houston pop icon Beyoncé Knowles can do anything—except correctly identify that this famous breed of cactus doesn’t actually grow in her native Texas,” click in quick with “What is saguaro,” and you’ll be in control of the board. Bey made this tacit admission in a promo she cut for NFL Christmas Gameday Live on Netflix, a football doubleheader that marks the streaming giant’s first entrance into America’s most beloved sporting pastime. To effectively set the tone that these two games aren’t just regular-degular NFL…

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