This bleary-eyed, storm-clean-up a.m., a Friend of Unfair Park does us the most solid of solids and sends along our first story of the day: this New York Times profile of Bob Phillips, better known as the Texas Country Reporter -- a fixture of our childhood, natch, dating back to his days as the 4 Country Reporter in '72.
The Bryan Adams and SMU grad, who has some 33 videos available on YouTube, has parlayed his interest in his home state into a franchise, turns out, "with guidebooks, cookbooks, T-shirts and an annual October festival in Waxahachie, near Dallas, where more than 50,000 fans come to meet subjects from the shows. Mr. Phillips also has a tour company, Texas Country Tours, and a resort, Escondida, in Medina in the hill country." A nice read for a deserving gentleman, and it drew our attention to an YouTube-award-winning piece with more than 2 million views, which is after the jump. For those with electricity. --Robert Wilonsky