Cheezburgers Made from Soy, and Other Myths

So, 'Pockets and I are spending the holiday in San Antonio, which for some reason has embraced the suicidal gray and chill of an Bay Area morning. Surely, this is the slow descent to hell Nancy Pelosi and her ascendant San Francisco "values" portended.

We left early Wednesday afternoon-- bracing for the rowdy, pre-tryptophan crowds--but SFO was a ghost town. The plane ride was memorable only because the mustachioed flight attendant passed out cheeseburgers he insisted were made of soy, despite the 42-point-font "beef" stamped on the wrapper. I love watching people wage losing battles: a whole bunch of perturbed maybe-vegetarians drew the mistake to his attention, but he insisted the label was a misprint. Even an appeal to his co-flight-attendant yielded a dismissive "you must be hallucinating," but he stuck to his guns.

We changed planes in Houston--Bush Intercontinental--where the picture above was taken, and my question to you, reader, is not what's up with the airport bookstore which, along with no fewer than 12 ideologically like-minded great works, put the following books on display in the window? See here, here, and here. (I like that the author of the first two lives in a "secure, undisclosed location," simultaneously paying homage to his bloodthirsty demigod and luxuriating in the paranoid fantasy that he might be some suicide bomber's prime target.)
No, my question is when did George H.W. Bush become motherfucking John Henry--chiseled abs, broad shoulders, Saddam-like stature and all? A man who's most memorable for vomiting on the Japanese Prime Minister and for evoking a Mr. Burns-esque sense of human decay has now been reimagined as some sort of frontier hero. Ninja, please.