AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST VISITS EXOTIC FOREIGN COUNTRY, REPORTS BACK ON STRANGE COMINGS AND GOINGS TO HIS ASTONISHED READERS. “Texas is like Australia with the handbrake off,” Tim Blair writes in the UK Spectator. Needless to say, read the whole thing; this is just a tasty sample:

There is no individual income tax and no corporate income tax, which explains the state’s rapid economic and population growth. A recent downturn has sparked some concern, however. Apparently Texas will only create another 150,000 jobs during 2015 – about the same number as Australia, from a population only a few million larger. In a good year, that number of jobs is easily generated by a single Texan city.

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Well, here’s one reason to head for Austin. I’m staying at the sprawling compound of mysterious internet identity David Burge, among America’s most perceptive and hilarious online commentators. A routine is quickly established. By night, the Burges take me around Austin’s finest and lowest establishments (often they’re the same). By day Dave runs whatever business he’s involved in – stolen human organs, for all I know – while Mrs Burge and I check out the sights. I buy a pair of shoes at a store that also sells pistols, rifles and semi-autos, drop by Torchy’s for a Trailer Park Taco (experienced hands know to order them ‘extra trashy’) and then we wheel the Burge family’s train-sized Ford F150 through a car wash. Remarkably, the car wash is beneath a scale replica of the University of Texas tower – a structure notorious for gunman Charles Whitman’s 1966 killing spree, which reduced the university’s need for graduation diplomas by 14.

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As a general rule, the shabbier a barbeque joint, the more delicious will be its various briskets, ribs and sausages. Texas isn’t big on regulation, but many of its best barbeque sites must be in breach of a building law or two. Some seem so aged and fragile that they’re defying the law of gravity.

Analysis: mostly true.