The impact of this drink has grown by leaps and bounds since it started in a little town in Texas. Dr. Pepper can now be found in most vending machines in Japan. I always describe it as a mix of root beer and Coca Cola.
This tasty combination of cookie and caramel may not have been invented in Texas, but the world owes the Mars Chocolate North America factory in Waco for its continued production. Roughly 50-75% of Snickers in the world come from Texas.
There are two events occurring this weekend. One that you might like and one that I would really, really, really really want to go to.
“Now, should we go see the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders…”
“Ha! Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.”
“Yes… or…”
“No. Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.”
“But Michael, I want…”
“NO. DALLAS. COWBOY. CHEERLEADERS!”
This one goes further back in time than you may think — to the 1960s. Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow were working in Houston and offered the first clinical trials for women looking to augment their breast size. Soon it expanded to cancer patients, and then to Baywatch.
You’d think Mexican food would have incorporated these two items centuries ago (even without refrigeration), but, hard to believe, there was a time when Tex-Mex didn’t exist.
Texas Instruments, based in Dallas, is responsible for making a TI-83 calculator practically standard in high school math classes across the country. Before that, they invented the first handheld calculator in 1967… makes you wonder why people at NASA still used slide rules.
From its humble beginnings catering to the hipsters of Austin, Whole Foods has now expanded enough to be purchased by Amazon. You still may not be able to find WF in Asia, but locations have opened in Canada and the UK… at even more outrageous prices.
Nowadays we associate Ruby with red so much that we think of it as just a description of a color, but no…Ruby is the Texan who accidentally discovered the red grapefruit in 1920.
Texas, and Austin in particular, are no strangers to the American film scene, with classics like Dazed and Confused and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We’ve even had some small rom-coms like Hope Floats shot in small towns. Nevertheless, Texas clearly had an early impact on Quentin Tarantino’s movies: Death Proof was shot entirely in a bar on South Congress in Austin, and Kill Bill has its share of Texas landscapes. Tarantino may be from Tennessee, but his movies reside in the Lone Star State.