Huevos Rancheros

Callipygian: A lonely but useful word

2011-12-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

How many words can you think of that have no synonyms, where there is literally no other, single word to describe a concept? I learned a new one this morning: "Callipygian," which means "having well-shaped buttocks," according to Dictionary.com. The Thesaurus entry on the word, by contrast, yields no results. A related form of the word, as evidenced in the accompanying photo, is "callipygous."

There are perhaps slang synonyms - "bootylicious," comes to mind - though a web search came up with surprisingly few others. But "callipygian," with its etymological referent to Aphrodite, lacks the same misogynist air while capturing the same concept.

Excellent word.

Facing middle age, or, procrastination on a rainy December day

2011-12-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

On a rainy December day I enjoyed thinking back to our trip to Galveston this summer.

Not to mention our trip right after session to Mexico City:

Not so nice here at the moment. We need the rain, but the gray weather's a bummer.

Austin Water’s bond rating may look better if Water Treatment Plant 4 delayed

2011-09-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

In the wake of a breathtakingly high estimate from city staff on the cost to shut down construction of Water Treatment Plant 4 (WTP4), the temptation for city council to just build the project out as planned may be overwhelming. Some have even claimed that the city’s bond rating might go down if the project isn’t completed immediately. But city staff estimates throughout this process have been notoriously unreliable and always directed towards getting a “yes” vote to build out the plant.

A more realistic review of the utility’s finances reveals a strong argument for delaying WTP4 as perhaps the only fiscally prudent decision. Weather patterns and individual conservation have combined to reduce water use so much that the plant simply can’t be paid for without massive, politically unsustainable rate hikes that punish the poor and those who conserve most.

But first, a little context. Austin Water’s bond rating (AA-) is already lower than the city’s general revenue bonds because their income flow long-term appears not to match their increased spending and debt load. Truth be told, I suspect any ratings agency that looked too closely at the Austin Water Utility’s future water sales projections in their bond prospectus might consider downgrading the debt further if the plant goes forward.

The entirely predictable effects of a half-billion in new debt are starting to kick in: Before the City Council’s vote last year to begin construction of WTP4, the water utility told the council and the public that water rates for the average residential customer would go up 34 percent over six years if the project went through. The SOS Alliance hired me to separately analyze rate projections and in a report (pdf) titled “The Perfect Storm,” I projected rates would rise 74% over six years (including last year’s rate hike).

After construction of WTP4 was underway, the city quietly admitted that predictions of much-higher residential rates were accurate, and then some. In the current proposed budget, not only will the city raise residential rates by 66% in the next five years, city staff wants to tack on immediately an Orwellian-named $6 per meter monthly “sustainability fee.”

I say “Orwellian” because the fee really pays for an unsustainable business model that depends on the city selling far more water over the next decade than appears remotely likely. The “sustainability” fee is both front-loaded and heavily regressive; including it results in immediate rate hikes of 26% for the "average" residential customer and 66% for those using the least amount of water, according to city estimates. Residents using the most water would see only a 7% increase. That’s a dramatic shift from the focus in recent years on “conservation pricing,“ which raised prices most on the most profligate water users.

Which brings us to the issue of the credibility of city estimates. If I could tell last year that rates must rise that much to pay for all this debt (as could, by the way, any kid with an A or B in 9^th grade algebra), why couldn’t Austin Water? City staff projections have erred consistently and dramatically throughout the long debate over WTP4, but were always biased in one direction: favoring the plant’s immediate construction. So I don’t know what the cost of mothballing WTP4 would be, but the $138 million figure seems incredible and unlikely considering city estimates that just 15% of the work is done.

The far bigger problem is that the city has told bondholders that their water sales – especially peak use in the hottest days, which is all even proponents say the plant is needed for – are on a steadily rising trend that will generate enough revenue to pay for the bonds. In reality, though, conservation measures have reduced per-capita consumption. So, for example, even on the hottest day this summer Austin’s peak use hasn’t topped 221 million gallons (Aug. 28), while in its bond prospectus, the city estimated to purchasers of its debt that peak use would reach 254 mgd in 2011, a number we’ve virtually no chance of hitting.

Indeed, somewhat confusingly, in that same prospectus, sworn truthful as of November 1, 2010, the city told bondholders that FY 2010’s “projected” peak day was 249 mgd. In fact, the fiscal year had already ended by that time and the peak day (of a quite rainy year) was just 193 mgd (Aug. 29). Similar, the actual total annual water pumpage in FY 2010 was 21.6% below what was told to those purchasing the city’s debt. Especially considering about 8% of that was leakage that never actually reached the customers (or their meters), the city is simply not selling the quantities of water bondholders were told would be necessary to pay off the debt. Notably, the bond prospectus estimates fail entirely to take into account the effects of higher rates and recently adopted conservation goals to reduce per capita consumption to 140 gallons per capita per day by 2020.

The confluence of all these factors leaves the utility one, predictable option and we’re now seeing it: Raise rates even higher, and preferably (from the standpoint of selling the most water) in a way that deemphasizes conservation and encourages more water sales. That’s not in the city’s long-term best interest. Given low levels in the Highland Lakes it may not even be physically possible to sell as much water as the city has projected in representations to bondholders. This plant won’t produce more water, it only treats water we already have. Conservation remains our most effective approach to drought conditions, and should be reinforced, not undermined, by pricing decisions.

Even if it cost millions to mothball WTP4, launching such a high-dollar project without sufficient demand to justify the expense was just a bad management decision. If they chose to pause construction because the plant’s not needed, the City of Austin would be no more likely punished by the bond raters than was the Intel Corporation after they stopped construction of a large new building mid-stream just two blocks from Austin’s city hall. The company did so because their changing economic situation couldn’t support it and they were flexible enough to recognize it and make a decision in their long-term fiscal best interest.

The question is whether a majority on the Austin City Council will do the same, injecting some fiscal sanity into management of the water utility? Or will Austin just raise rates ad infinitum to secure promised revenues to bondholders from increased water sales that it’s obvious won’t be forthcoming? Will the city council protect ratepayers before this self-inflicted debt bubble bursts or just soak them afterward and pretend they had no choice? When you find yourself trapped in a hole, the saying goes, the first thing to do is stop digging.

The author is a consultant for the Save Our Springs Alliance hired to analyze Austin Water Utility finances and their effects on residential water rates, though this article was not pre-vetted by SOS or any other group.

Trannsforming Tragedy

2011-07-31T08:33:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share with readers a remarkable story that provides a happy coda to a dark, sad episode in Grits' personal family history: Readers may recall that two years ago (on Tuesday, to be exact) my 12-year old niece, Maggie Lee Henson, died after a tragic church bus accident and three anguished weeks lingering in an intensive care unit in Mississippi. Rather than rush to the state capitol to push for a new criminal statute named after their daughter, my brother and his wife instead designated Maggie's birthday, October 29, "Maggie Lee for Good" day, challenging those who knew and loved her and others whose lives she touched to perform one good deed on that day in her memory. Thousands responded, from small gestures to grand ones. In the Shreveport Times this week, her mother Jinny, shared stories of how the Maggie-Lee-for-Good movement became an unexpected blessing for their family during from the first 24 months after Maggie's death. On her blog this morning, Jinny (who is a Christian comedian by trade) linked to the Shreveport Times story and added these sobering thoughts:

While I would give anything to have her back, and hear that that feeling subsides little as the years go by, I know that we will always be a table with three legs. As time goes by, you learn to put the heavy stuff on one corner and just where to place the chairs in case things topple, but these gymnastics only serve to remind you of what you lost.

Then again, at least I have a three-legged table while some people have no table at all. I am vastly aware of what I have left. August 2nd marks the one year anniversary of 6 Shreveport teenagers drowned while swimming, one mother losing three children on the same day. That is a pain I cannot fathom.

As we begin our third year of life without Maggie Lee, I have to be thankful for God’s sustaining grace, a loving family and the most unshakable friends in the world.

I was already thinking about Maggie and my brother's family a lot these last few weeks, so I wanted to both share the Shreveport Times story with y'all and publicly express my admiration for Jinny, John, and their son Jack. They each have weathered this terrible storm with remarkable courage and dignity, transforming grief into literally a constructive force. I couldn't be more proud of them for it.

Austin water rate hikes foreseeable, foreseen

2011-05-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a letter I sent to local Austin city beat reporters about rising water bills, decrying the city's efforts to downplay and/or mislead the public about massive rate hikes required to pay for Water Treatment Plant 4:

Perchance you received, as I did, an email from the SOS Alliance mentioning Bill Spelman's calculations of future Austin water rate hikes. It read, in relevant part:

Last summer the Austin Water Utility projected a five-year total increase in residential water rates of 30 percent. ... Recently the Water Utility released its initial budget figures. Councilmember Bill Spelman has analyzed the data - and calculated a projected 5-year water rate increase for residential customers of 66%. Go to http://www.billspelman.org/2011/05/spelman-analyzes-projected-5-year-water-bill-increases/ and click on the "spreadsheets here" link and look at the "monthly bill" chart.

That is an eye-popping sixty-six percent rate increase - and more than double the Water Utility's projection from just last year. And it follows seven years of annual rate increases. (If you just count last year's increase, the six year increase thru 2016 is projected at 74 percent.)

In that context, please recall that last year's SOS Alliance report on this very topic (attached, titled "The Perfect Storm") predicted - wait for it - a 74% residential water rate increase over six years from publicly available data ! I remind you of this to ensure that, if and when you report on the subject, you make it clear to your readers and/or viewers that these rate hikes were not a surprise. Don't, in your coverage, allow the Mayor, Greg Meszaros, Daryl Slusher, etc., to greet Spelman's calculations in your stories with quotes saying "We couldn't have known." They could, and they did. But they wanted to keep this fact out of the public debate until WTP4 bonds were issued, construction began and it was too late to do anything about it.

Spelman's calculations differ from mine mainly in that they cover the years 2011-2016, whereas my report estimated them for 2010 - 2015, and he's including sewer rates whereas I focused solely on water. (City staff shifted some of the increases from water to sewer in response to criticisms in the report.) But both analyses document the same, inexorable trend - water bills headed upward on a dramatically steeper curve than city staff and WTP4 backers were last year willing to admit, with most of the increase (far more than the city lets on) attributable to WTP4.

The calculations are not rocket science. Staff knew exactly what it would take to repay the city's huge new debt burden. The bond prospectus for new Water Treatment Plant 4 debt simply lied about growth in water use to make the numbers work, but in real-world budgeting such phony, politicized projections carry no weight. The future rate hikes Spelman and I documented were an inevitable and foreseeable outcome at the time they took that vote.

Though I'm no longer employed by SOS, having been retained only for that one research project, this still offends me. I've been around this town a long time and I don't mind losing a fair fight. But I certainly do mind losing because public officials don't tell the truth, or worse, as in this case, actively attempt to discredit truth-tellers.

This episode also speaks to the fact that Austinites were poorly served by local media in this affair. Anyone who investigated city claims about water rates last year would have easily documented these misrepresentations, as did my report, from available public records. But local media just took pols' word on rate hikes and adopted a "quote both sides" approach that equated falsehoods with facts. City staff based their public calculations on higher use levels even as the city was adopting per capita conservation goals that would on their face leave AWU short of revenue needed to pay for WTP4 debt (and demonstrate that we don't even need the thing). The situation would have been obvious if any reporter had independently examined the subject instead of simply quoting officials without verifying what they said.

That failure, of course, is now water under the bridge (or from the perspective of ratepayers, over the dam). But with a regressive new fee proposed which would assign the cost of AWU's misrepresentations disproportionately to the poor, you now have a chance to really dig into this and not just accept whatever falsehood is handed you in some official's formal statement. Rapidly increasing water rates and the new, regressive fee are a real burden on the public, and an honest discussion of that burden should have been part of the WTP4 debate. It's not too late. Good reporting on this issue still matters...a lot. Perhaps we'll eventually see some.

Drawing conclusions about illusions and the failure to perceive them

2011-04-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, based partly in an ongoing interest in the brain science behind eyewitness errors, partly on being immensely impressed with the related artwork by Salvador Dali I saw in Berlin and Spain last year (e.g., at left), and partly thanks to the need to generate ever-new drawing projects for my 4-1/2 year old granddaughter, I've been teaching myself to draw rudimentary optical illusions (sometimes while sitting in lengthy committee hearings at the Legislature waiting for a bill to come up). In furtherance of that effort I purchased a slim book by a fellow named Robert Ausborne titled "How to understand, enjoy and draw optical illusions," which was a good starting point for a ham-handed beginner.

One thing I've learned through this process is that, for whatever reason, I cannot see certain types (but not all types) of color-based illusions, in particular so-called "afterimage" illusions, which is when you see the negative or complementary color, i.e., the color across from it on the color wheel, after staring at an initial image then looking at a neutral color. (See examples here and here.) I understand them. I can even create afterimage illusions others can see (it's easy on Photoshop following Ausborne's instructions: With the image in an active layer, perform the following commands: Image > Adjustments> Invert). But as I wrote to the author, "I have discovered that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot see after image illusions … EVER … having now looked at dozens of examples, and comparing notes with my wife (who does see them). I’m not color-blind and my eyes react to illusions based on shading tricks, but I don’t ever get an afterimage." He graciously replied:

The question you ask is a good one.   While I am not a scientist, but as a long suffering, pestering enthusiast I can offer up anecdotal evidence.

The most obvious demographic quirk I've noticed about illusions is age. The young quickly realize almost all illusions with no trouble at all. They seem to walk into them guileless. The older a witness is the harder it becomes. You don't see that many optical illusion shows in Florida.

As for After-image illusions. My own research has turned up several factors which affect the ability to "see" them; such as heredity, eye color, color blindness, and a host of other vision problems, including bad lighting.   I have never found a definitive answer and suspect that nobody really knows. Perhaps you were born with an extra supply of photo chemicals, and just don't run dry that easily. Perhaps your eyes have an Indianapolis 500 Pit Crew and the photoreceptors are replenishing too quickly. Perhaps your eyes are making tiny movements which are undetectable, thus making it difficult to expose a single patch of neurons to the illusion. Perhaps you are an alien plant, and have just inadvertently given humans a sure fire test to discover and weed out your kind.

As an artist who draws illusions for a living I can tell you that it is possible to oversaturate oneself with an illusion. Most illusions do not stop working while I draw them, and with some illusions it can be like trying to paint a leaf while it's falling; as things tend to wander out from under my eyeballs.   But with some illusions I can become burnt out; I just can’t see them easily anymore. I run the risk of ruining the illusion, making it too obvious by far in order to stimulate my own burnt out senses. The reason for this phenomenon may be that we are human; we learn. The brain adapts. Just as the brain can make your nose invisible to both eyes, it can make an illusion invisible, once it figures out you don't really need to "see" it.   Perhaps you are just more adaptable than the rest of us.

I appreciate the author's response, and he's probably right nobody knows. I'm still curious about it, though.

I've been interested in how we see color ever since learning with fascination and borderline envy about synesthesia and how differently synesthetes see and interact with colors (which are often associated with numbers, music, or other mathemtaically based facets of life). Then, in researching eyewitness identification in a criminal-justice context, I became acutely aware of just how little of the world around us our eyes actually see and how much is filled in by our memory. That's why eyewitness accounts are extremely reliable when people previously knew the person they're identifying, but exceptionally unreliable when trying to identify someone they'd never seen before. Writing in the June 30, 2008 New Yorker on an unrelated topic (itching, to be precise), Dr. Atul Gawande described the nuts and bolts of vision mechanics that explain why that's the case:

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor - a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty percent do; eighty percent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals.

So memory is filling in most of the image you see when you "see" something, which is why eyewitness errors are much more likely when identifying strangers. As for the optical illusion: No wonder most people see afterimages if our memory is generating 80-90% of our visual perception. Your brain is busy filling in all the gaps in the image you're looking at, and when it's taken away it can't immediately shut down that extraordinarily complicated function. Who knows why I'm an exception, but there always is one. I'd still like to know.

Texas road system being constructed on credit cards

2011-01-31T04:13:00.000-08:00

This story really pissed me off, in part I suppose because I haven't paid close attention to road funding issues for the last decade:

Texas soon will be shelling out more per year to pay back money it borrowed for road construction than it spends from its quickly vanishing pile of cash to build new highways.

Legislative leaders characterize the state's transportation funding as a crisis. Most Texans, they say, are unaware of its severity and must be educated before the state can find new ways to finance new roads.

The gasoline tax pays for road maintenance and construction but has not increased in 20 years. Gas tax revenue peaked in 2008 and likely will decline as vehicles become more fuel-efficient.

"It's not a crisis until everybody agrees that it's a crisis. Right now, people who don't understand it are saying, 'You're crying wolf,'" said House Transportation Committee Chairman Joe Pickett, D-El Paso. "Yes, it's a crisis."

Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, agrees.

"The gravity of the situation is that in the absence of further action by the Legislature this session, we will literally be out of money for new construction in 2012 in the fastest-growing state in the country and in one of the largest states in the country," he said. "We need to begin to have a discussion about it."

The whole story is worth a read. That makes me mad because state government - especially Texas - supposedly pays as it goes, as opposed to the federal government which has run up a $1.5 Trillion annual deficit. We're not supposed to be borrowing for our entire damn road budget! The feds do that. "Oh, let's have a couple of wars and put it all on the credit cards." But state government at a fundamental level shouldn't be operating that way. Apparently the bonds we're currently operating from were issued in 2007 and we'll completely run out of road money by next year. Genius. (/sarcasm)

It sort of reminds me of the spate of county "road districts" we saw for a while during the go-go '80s S&L fiasco, where developers owning empty land would move several employees onto it in trailers, have their employees "vote" to declare a "road district," then issue county-backed bonds to pay for essentially private road construction, making roads a) much more expensive than they should be and b) designed in service to suburban developers instead of overall public need. Some of these, like the one built at the behest of former Governor John Connally and former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes southwest of Austin, were paid for essentially with junk bonds back when credit was cheap and easy.

Road districts, though, were at most only ever a small fraction of county road building. By contrast, state government is using debt to finance our road system entirely, in many cases proposing to pay for them by building or designating toll roads. TXDoT now mostly doesn't pay to build roads, a majority of its budget will soon, and for the foreseeable future, go to pay bondholders. What a friggin' mess. I honestly don't see how the Lege can get a budget that pays for everything it needs to without raising some taxes somewhere. If Texas just stopped building roads in 2012 because the Lege didn't allocate enough money, I'll bet that 101 member majority presently enjoyed by the GOP would evaporate as quickly as it appeared.

This is one of those issues that voters really want government to get right. They don't like "tax and spend," but "borrow and spend" has even greater drawbacks, and on roads, "stop spending" is not a viable option..

The hedge maze I've always wanted

2010-11-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

I've always wanted a hedge maze. I've teased my wife that it should be the next thing she adds to her already extensive garden, to the point that it's become a years-long running joke. Then we visited Park Laberint D'Horta in Barcelona, pictured below in a photo taken by either Kathy or me.

Just a dream come true. I absolutely loved it. The maze was deceptively large and somewhat difficult, though trial and error would eventually let anyone out without too much trouble. Leaving after you'd found the center was actually more difficult than reaching the middle in the first place. Here's another view:

And another:

When you reached the center there was a small circular area surrounded by tall shrubbery with multiple exits, along with this grotto:

Remarkably, though it's difficult to tell from the photos we came back with, the rest of the park was perhaps more impressive, even, than the portion with the Labyrinth. The place was filled with intimate little grottos like this one brilliantly designed to encourage private moments even when the gardens are filled with a large crowd (as it was for part of the time we were there).

And here:

And here:

And here:

The place was a former estate from some royally endowed late 18th century fiefdom, from whence period the hedge maze and gardens date. I should add that they were only barely keeping the place up to the level it deserved, doing minimal upkeep and watering but perhaps not in the most efficient, effective or professional manner. Having visited Kew Gardens outside of London earlier in the trip, which admittedly may be an unfair comparison, the differences in the levels of upkeep weren't even close, and there were portions of the garden that would have been even more spectacular if they'd been kept in top-notch shape.

That's nitpicking, though. If I lived in Barcelona I'd go to Laberint d'Horta all the time. It'd be a great place to take kids and let them run around, and a spectacular place for picnicking. On the day we went they required no fee, so the whole visit cost us the sum total of subway fare to get there and the cost of a few snacks picked up at a local market for the occasion.

Wish I were there right now.

Local property tax hikes getting a little extreme

2010-10-31T06:47:00.000-07:00

Man alive, local property taxes in Austin are rising fast.

This year's tax bill just came in and the property taxes imposed overall for our 1,000-ish square foot house in central east Austin went up 16.3% over last year - most of it from the City (19.46%), the County (21.56%), and Austin ISD (13.75%).

On the back of the bill is a "tax history" from prior years. Before this recent hike, our tax bill went up 12.38% last year and 12.28% the year before, for a cumulative total of a 46.75% over the last three years. Couple that with rapidly rising water rates and planned electric rate hikes for the first time since the '90s, and local government - particularly the city and county - is pretty significantly jacking up the base cost of living in this town.

I don't mind paying for government services, but a 46.75% increase over three years during the worst economic crunch since the Great Depression seems like a little much.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

2010-09-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the presence of my granddaughter, this morning at my house we're celebrating "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," with lots of "Aaaarghs" and "Ahoys" and "Yo ho hos." So in honor of the occasion here's the greatest pirate song ever written, and a really cool, old version of it at that:

Cool Graff

2010-09-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd post a few examples of cool graffiti we've seen here and there while on vacation. Here's a massive spaceman several stories tall in the Turkish quarter in Berlin:

And here's another cool bit of graff covering a metal door of a quite industrial building in Berlin:

This fun graff can only be seen from the highest point atop Parc Guell in Barcelona, which means only an intrepid few who hike to the top of the mountain ever see it:

The park below the precipice from which this photo was taken contains several buildings and structures designed by the (astonishing, half-crazed) Antoni Gaudi, which is what most people are there to see.

Barcelona has the largest quantity of high-quality street art of any city I've ever visited. There are multiple books available for purchase featuring literally thousands of photos on the subject and there are full-blown graff murals throughout the narrow, winding streets and on every underpass I've seen. Last night (regrettably we didn't have the camera with us) we ran across about 8-9 excellent murals, all apparently done illegally (you can tell the commissioned stuff because the topic relates to the businesses) painted on the metal doors shop-owners pull down over their entrances when they close up at night. Without question, I've seen art in high-class museums on this trip that I didn't enjoy so much.

Loving Berlin

2010-09-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

One goes to London to see and learn about things that are old - the history, the architecture, religion, etc.. In Berlin, it's alll about the new: New architecture, art, fashion, attitudes. An aura of individualism, youth and cutting edge ideas imbues the city like exotic spices infuse food from the vibrant Turkish quarter of this extraordinarily international town.

Western developers for years had been eyeing the no-man's land between East and West Germany before the wall fell and and today near what used to be "Checkpoint Charlie" you'll huge, impressive, glass and steel monuments to western capitalism with no trace of the old divisions beyonnd a few out-of-the-way memorials and a bizarre tourist-trap set-up where people get their pictures taken near a mock-up of the old sign, "You Are Now Leaving the American Sector."

This town is full of museums, restaurants, monuments and other touristy spots, but one is most impressed, perhaps, by the city itself - the cosmopolitan crowds, the cutting-edge architecture, and the huge areas of green space everywhere. It's flat as a skillet and perfect for bicycle riding - particularly compared to hilly Austin where biking is great for bulking up your calves but not really a viable way for average people to get around when the weather's hot. While we've been here (in late August and early September) the high temperatures have been in the 60s - a little cold for Kathy but right in my wheelhouse.

Word War II and the Cold War left a scar on this town's psyche which in many ways still defines the city, if only by what its denizens are AGAINST (which typically defines people much more than what they are FOR.) There's a disdain for conformity and a celebration of diversity and individualism that's striking and rather extreme, even coming from the United States which of course fancies itself the global bastion of individualism. On that score, though, Berlin's got us beat by a country mile. I think it's because the last 20 years in the city have been defined by a reaction against East German/Stasi authoritarism. The folks who brought down the Berlin Wall - and most especially their children, who have never lived under dictatorship - have embraced the "Never Again" slogan, which European Jewry adopted after World War II when establishing Israel, and are building a new Germany here whose values and approach to living is antithetical to Nazi and Communist totalitarian rule. That's an impression from a visitor, not a learned historical analysis, but it's difficult to otherwise explain the vibrant dynamism we've witnessed in every corner of the city we've visited..

I really like this town. Kathy suggested I might like to come and live here for a while, and (as usual) she's probably right.

Weather gloating

2010-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

We picked the right time of year to get out of Austin. When Kathy and I arrived in London this morning it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and it probably never got over 72 all day. This evening when I got online, I noticed yesterday's high in Austin was a whopping 104 degrees. Though it rained in London today, I was so thrilled at the 50 degree drop in temperature I could care less. In Germany, where we're going next to visit one of Kathy's close friends, we were told to bring sweaters and other warm clothes.

London is an amazing city. Like New York, Paris, or Istanbul, there's more to see and do here than you can reasonably attempt in just a few days. When we got here today I took a nap for a couple of hours to combat the jet lag, then we spent the afternoon visiting the city's oldest functioning church, St. Bartholomew's, the Museum of London (focusing on the history of the city), and then stopped off at St. Paul's Cathedral, where we were treated to an organ-accompanied choir. We had dinner at a Lebanese restaurant that far outclassed the Middle Eastern food we can get in Austin, sad to say, which of course is one of the reasons you come to a cosmopolitan city like London. Tomorrow we should both be over our jet lag and able to get a full day of touring in.

Easy peach cobbler recipe

2010-08-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

We've been eating lots of peach cobbler lately with fresh peaches from the tree in our front yard. After experimenting with several, here's the recipe I like best both for the final product and ease of preparation. In addition commenters over at Grits gave me lots more ideas of things to do with peaches.

Meeting Mojave

2010-07-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

Our good deed for the day yesterday involved an old, skinny hound named "Mojave" who showed up at our house (probably visiting the small pond in the front yard, which is the only close-by source of water), looking like he was starving to death. He was a sweet, gentle dog and had a collar and tags, so we tried to contact the owner, whose name and phone number were listed.

When I called a young woman's voice responded on the answering machine - the right person, thank heavens - so I left a message. We pulled out one of our own dog's metal crates and kept him in the house for the day, feeding and giving him short walks every little while. (I feared putting a strange dog with my three might start a fight, and the animal wasn't in any shape for a scrap.) The owner's name was quite unusual and in addition to calling the number on the tag, I even was able to find her on Facebook and send her a message that way.

For most of the day, though, we heard nothing. By late afternoon we were beginning to wonder what we'd gotten ourselves into (we need a fourth dog like a hole in the head and I was loathe to take an adult animal to the pound for execution), but eventually the relieved owner called and agreed to come get Mojave when she got off work at a restaurant that evening.

I figured this doe-eyed bag of skin-and-bones had been fending for himself on the street for weeks, but no. It turned out Mojave was well cared for, but 13 years old and cancerous, explaining the appearance that he was starving. The dog was not yet decrepit, though, by any means. The owner had recently moved from an apartment into a house with a yard maybe 15 blocks from us, and she said this was the fourth time in several weeks the dog had inexplicably gotten out, this time, she said, in a blink of a eye while her back was turned. She thinks he's actually jumping the chain link fence, which is pretty good for a cancer patient!

I probably overfed him, wrongly thinking he was starving, giving him about four cups of food split up in small portions over the course of the day. He also drank water like it was going out of style, perhaps a function of the cancer.

When his owner finally arrived at about 10 pm after her work shift, Mojave couldn't have been more excited to see her - not just his tail but his whole, skinny body was wagging. She was on a bike, and put a muzzle/leash apparatus on the dog to which he was clearly accustomed before taking him away. I imagine the jog home was a welcome, joyful relief for Mojave. He'd not only missed his owner, but he'd been cooped up in a cage most of the day when he's clearly a runner and a jumper.

Fruit trees loving the extra rain

2010-07-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

All the rain we've received this year has led to an unexpected fruit boon in my household: A peach tree in our front yard and a fig tree in the back have been filled the last couple of weeks with ripe, delicious fruit.

The figs are perhaps the best I've ever eaten, fat, ripe, and full of juice. The peaches are less spectacular and some have been victimized by bugs or squirrels (who take a ripe peach, eat one bite, then throw it on the ground - bastards).

The peach tree in particular is going on ten years old and we've never before had a peach crop that generated edible fruit, partly because of the ongoing squirrel problem, but mostly because the tree never produced much. But this year's rain has the thing loaded with peaches to the point that I'm afraid one limb is about to break from the weight. We've been cutting them up to remove the bug-spoiled parts and using the peaches for fruit salads, smoothies, etc.

Strangely, squirrels have been apparently carrying peaches across our rooftop and into our backyard, where we've found a number of them which immediately become dog toys. One dog (Domino) likes to chew them until getting to the pit, which he then cracks down on like a bone. Another one (Indeaux) will throw them up in the air like a ball and presses me to use them to play "catch" (his favorite trick is for me to throw one up high and he can catch it out of the air).

There's also a pear tree in the front yard that's a little younger, but we're still not getting edible fruit from it. My wife thinks if we get one more round of rain the tree might fully fruit out.

We're really loving all the extra rain since the drought has finally broken, but the fruit trees have got to be the nicest surprise from all the extra water.

All Purpose Casserole Recipe

2010-04-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Another recipe for Mikel and whoever else might be interested: Here's an all-purpose casserole that's a staple around the Henson household: comfort food that's relatively quick and easy to make, even after a long day's work.

Ingredients

Base: Rice or spaghetti. (Instant rice is okay, but long cooking brown rice or,even better, red himalayan rice makes for a tastier, more substantive casserole. If you're using spaghetti, break dry spaghetti in halves before boiling with little olive oil in the water.)
Meat: One pound or less of ground hamburger works well. You can also use leftovers, including, for example, scraps from a roasted chicken, holiday turkey etc..
Veggies. Stir fry your own if you have fresh you need to use (broccoli is good), or add a bag of frozen mixed veggies (household favorite is green peas; with rice, but not spaghetti, corn works well, but really any bag of mixed frozen veggies will do).
Chicken or Beef Broth (2 cups or more, as necessary): You can use water if you're broke and need to skimp - it will still taste good - but broth gives a richer flavor.
Flour - just a small amount, a half cup or less, to create a gravy
Grated cheesse
Spray-on Pam or butter/oil to grease a 13x9 casserole dish

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cook 1-1/2 -2 cups of rice per the directions, or boil spaghetti (broken in half) with a dollop of olive oil in the water.

If using ground beef or some other meat like sausage that requires cooking, salt and pepper and cook it in a frying pan with a little olive oil and butter. If using fresh vegetables, add them to the meat when it's nearly finished cooking and mix thoroughly, sauteing both together.

When meat (or meat/vegetable mixture) in frying pan appears adequately cooked, take 1/4 - 1/2 cup of flour and sprinkle moderately over all of it. Take spoon and mix it all together so the flour sticks to filling, then pour in chicken broth, stirring constantly. Start with two cups (and don't worry if you run out of broth and need to use water). Stir constantly until the whole concoction begins to boil and simmer. If it thickens to a nice, gravy like texture, great, turn the heat off and you're done with this step. If it's too thick, add more broth or water. If it's too liquidy, put a little more flour in a separate small bowl, mix it with broth or water in a slurry, and add a little at a time, stirring all the while, until the gravy reaches the desired thickness. At that point, turn off the heat.

Spray your casserole dish with Pam or use butter or oil to grease the bottom and sides.

Lay the rice or spaghetti on the bottom of the casserole dish. If you're using frozen vegetables, open the uncooked package and spread the contents over the base. Then pour in the whole contents of the frying pan, meat, veggies, gravy, and all. Mix together thoroughly in the casserole dish so the gravy gets over everything.

Spread grated cheese over the top to taste. I use pre-grated cheddar from the grocery store which is relatively inexpensive and perfectly adequate for most everyday purposes.

Place the casserole dish, uncovered, in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. (It doesn't have to stay in there long because everything has already been cooked once.)

When you remove the casserole, let it sit for ten minutes before serving. If you don't it will fall apart, but if you give it 10 minutes to set up it comes out in nice, neat squares - particularly the version with rice. Feeds 4-6 or makes enough for a family meal with leftovers.

This is a favorite household dish. A family tradition with holiday turkey after both Thanksgiving and Christmas is to make a turkey tetrazzini that's essentially this recipe with spaghetti, leftover turkey frozen peas and a gravy made separately. But the great thing about this is it's a technique more than a recipe, so you can adapt it to basically whatever you have around the house.

Shaky NCAA bracket picks barely holding up

2010-03-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

As we enter the Sweet 16 in the college hoops tournament, my bracket still looks pretty good. Three of the four teams I picked for the Final Four are still alive, where I have Baylor beating Syracuse for the title in what's only a bit of a homer pick. I didn't think Duke or Kentucky would hold up as well as they have, though - both look stronger than I anticipated - and I've been surprised at how, besides Baylor, the Big 12 teams seemed to all crumble. (I had Texas as a first-round loss, but was surprised Texas A&M didn't get through to the Sweet 16.

Anyway, since they're still alive I'll stand by my pre-tournament pick: Baylor over Syracuse in the national championship game. Somebody's got to win the thing; it may as well be the Bears.

Sic 'em.

UPDATE: Thanks to the Bears' collapse in the final five minutes of their game with Duke in the quarterfinals (the "Elite Eight"), not one of my picks made it into the Final Four this year. The lesson from this: Don't come to me for your sports betting tips.

Cedar Waxwings

2010-03-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

For the past week or so we've had a flock of several hundred Cedar Waxwings in and around our neighborhood. Both yesterday and this morning I had a pleasant time sitting on my back deck watching them swoop in a huge mass from tree to tree, hovering briefly almost like a hummingbird to peck at their food and then lighting momentarily on seemingly every available branch and twig. They tend to all arrive and leave together in a furious, fluttering whirlwind of activity.

They're quite pretty, colorful birds when they sit still long enough to observe them closely. These are probably the final weeks we'll see them before they head northward to summer in the midwest and Canada. They're really quite lovely, colorful birds and the sight of them swooping in a chaotic mass from tree to tree is really neat to watch.

UPDATE: I should also mention that hundreds of birds leave massive amounts of bird poop, which I've been dutifully cleaning off of Ty's treehouse deck every few days. There are pros and cons to this whole nature thing.

Dessert staples: Banana bread and brownies

2010-03-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

In part for the benefit of my goddaughter Mikel, who God help her never quite learned to cook while she was living with us as a teen, I'm going to begin putting on this blog some of my staple household family recipes. Lets start with sweets, since she would. ;) Here are two recipes I've used a long time and that Mikel grew up on.

The first is a simple banana bread recipe my mother scrawled onto an index card when I first go my own apartment at college.

Shirley Henson’s Banana Bread Recipe

1 stick of butter
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 mashed ripe bananas
1¼ cup flour
¾ tsp soda
½ tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar until light. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in mashed banana.

In another bowl, mix together flour, soda and salt. Add to banana mixture. Mix well. Pour into greased loaf pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Let cool for 45 minutes before serving.

Add a half cup or so of chopped nuts if you like. Her instructions envision using a hand mixer, but in my large stand-up mixer I do it in one bowl.

I usually double this recipe and make two loaves because inevitably at our house the first loaf gets eaten within 24 hours and it keeps well wrapped lightly in plastic or foil for several days.

Another standard recipe in the Henson household is a brownie recipe I got from a cooking magazine, probably Cook's Illustrated, at some point in the mid-'90s. I've long ago lost the original text of the magazine article, but have made the recipe many dozens of times from memory. They're incredibly quick, easy and delicious. Here's the gist:

Chocolate Brownies

One stick of butter
8 oz semi-sweet baking chocolate
1-1/4 cups of sugar
3 eggs
1 cup of flour
1/4 cup of cocoa

Put butter in small bowl. Break up chocoloate on top. Microwave for 2 minutes on high. In bowl, beat together sugar and eggs. Add in butter/chocolate mixture. Mix in flour and cocoa until texture and color are consistent. Bake in preheated oven at 350 degrees for 38-40 minutes.

This was adjusted slightly from the original recipe, as I recall, which substituted a small amount of unsweentened chocolate for a portion of the semi-sweet. In my experience, this made the already-rich brownies just a little too bitter and intense for children's tastes, but if you want to try it, use 7 oz of semisweet and one oz of unsweetened chocolate instead of 8 oz semisweet.

Watch the angels cry

2010-01-16T06:06:00.000-08:00

I love to sing and frequently will get snippets of song lyrics stuck in my head, often for days at a time. Over the past few days, this line has been repeating itself from a favorite John Prine tune: "My car is stuck in Washington and I cannot find out why. Come sit beside me on the swing and watch the angels cry."

The tune is catchy and that line cracks me up every time. But it was a difficult concept to explain to the three-year old grandbaby, who piped in from the other room upon hearing me sing this to myself while making supper last night, "Why are the angels crying, Grandpa?" She came into the kitchen looking genuinely troubled.

Why indeed? I didn't quite know what to say. I told her they couldn't find their car.

"But they'll find it, right?" she insisted. I assured her the angels would likely find their missing car very soon. "That's good," she said with a relieved expression. "I don't want angels to cry."

Me either.

Meeting Mommy's Boyfriend: A 3-year old's first trip to the Texas state fair

2009-10-12T09:16:00.001-07:00

This weekend we took Mikel and Ty to the state fair in Dallas, and it was great to see a three year old get to experience that for the first time. Of course, spending so much time on the little kids' midway meant the adults didn't get to see the exhibits we might have chosen, but the little one had loads of fun.

On the drive to Dallas I kept telling Ty she would get to meet "Mommy's boyfriend," ribbing her mom to say she had a long-time crush on "Big Tex," the giant statute at the entrance to the Midway at Fair Park (pictured above). Since all over the fair Big Tex is used as an icon, this elicited cries of "that's mommy's boyfriend" every time she'd see an image of him. Mommy was tickled but a little mortified, which was of course the desired effect - I thought it was hilarious.

Of all the things she saw - from the carnival barker with no legs to a diver take an 80 foot plunge into a 10 foot pool of water (definitely a don't try this at home moment), what Ty loved most were the Midway rides she took with her Mom. It was all ridiculously cute. I've got a lot of fun memories from the state fair when I was a kid and I hope Ty will too when she's old enough to remember what will probably become annual pilgrimages, just like we did with her mom when she was still a youngster living at home.

3 Fun Outings in Austin, and a Baby's First Poem

2009-09-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

I had three fun outings last weekend with the grandbaby, Ty, now almost 3, who was with me when her daycare was closed on Friday and then quite a bit over the weekend.

On Friday, she and I went to Zilker Park and Ty enjoyed the wonderful converted fire truck that they've transformed into a platform for slides and monkey bars. She also loved the huge statutes of seals, which are usually fountains, though she was disappointed that (thanks to Stage 2 drought restrictions) they had the water turned off. And as always, we spent a loooooong time on the swingset, where she would happily be swung as high as you can push her for as long as you're willing.

Quite a few other kids were there, maybe 9-10 or so, all supervised by Moms; I was the only man there with a child. One youngster turned out to be from our neighborhood; her mother recognized Ty from playing at a neighborhood park up the street.

After an hour or so on the playground, we got a (much anticipated) snow cone at the snack stand and purchased tickets to ride on the kiddie train, which Ty adored. She wanted to sit at the very front (in my lap) and waved to everyone remotely nearby as the train meandered through the park. (Later, recounting the story to Kathy, she told her she'd waved to her "friend with the guitar" as we rode along, by which she referred to a long-haired fellow who was playing the guitar by the tracks who waved back to her, smiling as we passed.)

Ty was thrilled when the train went through the tunnel at the very end of the trek, holding her breath and squeezing my neck as we went through, then announcing excitedly when we came out the other side, "It's not scary, I wasn't scared!" Throughout the rest of the weekend she kept bringing up that tunnel, which apparently made an impression on her.

After her Mom took Ty for the afternoon, she came back to spend the night with us, and the next morning after breakfast I took her to hear children's books read on the second floor of Book People's downtown Austin store. This was her first time there and the outing was a big hit.

The reader had chosen books about magic - one about a witch who turns her dog different colors, another about a little girl who uses a magic wand to create a menagerie of friends while alone in her room. Afterward, they passed out paper, crayons, and supplied tape and ribbon to create a "magic wand."

This was a clever trick. First the kids colored whatever they wanted all over the paper. Then you'd roll it up corner to corner, taping it together in the middle so that the coloring shows somewhat randomly on the outside. Then they twisted together one ed and tied on red and white ribbon, which gave the "wand" a pointy feel and a sense of magic as the far end whipped through the air. This cheap, homemade toy was the source of big fun for two solid days after the event.

Just as fun for Ty was running around underneath the bleachers that constitute Book People's little kiddie amphitheatre. She thought that was pretty cool.

On Sunday we had Ty while her Mom went to church (she's just a little too fidgety to sit through a worship service), so Kathy and I took her over to Rosewood Park hoping for a swim. Unfortunately, the main pool was closed (again, presumably because of drought), but surprisingly their lovely kiddie area had all nine fountains going full blast (they're designed for kids to splash and play, not as decoration). On what turned out to be a scalding hot day, that was the perfect way to cool off.

I'm glad Austin has some fun, cool places to take young kids.

A final baby story: Ty recited her first poem on Sunday, at one month shy of three years, I kid you not! :) It's from the wonderful "Book of Hours" - a book of translated Mexican poetry I frequently read to her by the painter Alfredo Castañeda. The one she honed in on (though she knows shreds of many of his other poems) is about Little Red Riding Hood. The short poem is illustrated by Castañeda with his wife's face in a red hood, with a menacing wolf's eyes and ears vaguely but recognizably imaged in her cape behind her. I can't make Blogger properly indent the last two lines, but the poem reads:

Is your fear like mine, friend wolf?
Mine is growing beneath my clothes
beneath my hair
beneath the color of my name

She recited it without prodding upon seeing the accompanying picture, which has always fascinated her (we've read these poems together over and over). I think it was that picture and her love of the Red Riding Hood story that made her latch on to these words, though admittedly they sound a little odd coming out of the mouth of a toddler. Perhaps somebody read her the story at daycare, but Ty has no books with the Red Riding Hood story in it and I've only ever told it to her subsequent to questions about this poem. Still, she knows the tale inside and out and it's a remarkably frequent reference for her.

I'm going to get a Red Riding Hood book next time we're at Book People for storytime, but I suspect Ty will always associate the story in some way with that picture and her first poem.

Remembering Maggie Lee

2009-08-09T07:31:00.000-07:00

What a sad and terrible week it's been. Here's a good account of the extraordinary, jam-packed funeral service in Shreveport for my lovely, departed niece Maggie Lee Henson, and a number of other substantive stories about her and the bus crash that took her life from the Associated Baptist Press:

An astonishing 951 people watched a live webcast of the standing-room only service at First Baptist Shreveport. Maggie was buried in Tyler not far from my mother's grave at Rose Hill cemetery; I'm thankful she's at peace and am now pulling for my brother's family as they struggle to deal with their loss and regain some sense of normalcy. My nephew Jack (10) restarts school this week, so I'm hopeful getting back into that routine will be good for everybody. This whole episode must have seemed like an out of body experience - it would be absolutely annihilating to lose a 12-year old daughter as bright, happy and wonderful as Maggie Lee.

One amazing aspect of this event was the online outpouring of support my brother's family received, evidenced on this page set up for her on the website CaringBridge. John and Jinny's updates and the many thousands of guest book entries are as inspiring as they are heartbreaking.

Thanks to all the friends and readers who've expressed their sympathy and support in this difficult time. I definitely appreciate it.

A family tragedy

2009-07-13T08:54:00.001-07:00

Say a prayer, please, or give a good thought for my niece, Maggie Lee Henson, who yesterday was in a terrible church bus accident in Mississippi and has been airlifted to Jackson with severe injuries. (See initial coverage.) My brother John is an assistant pastor at the Shreveport church whose bus rolled three times after a tire blew out while taking a youth group to Atlanta, killing one and injuring 27. At this time, Maggie is still not out of the woods and remains in critical condition.

If anyone needed a reminder that everything about your life can change in a heartbeat, here it is. Just devastating. Keep Maggie, John, and his family in your thoughts and prayers, as well as the family of the deceased and the other bus crash victims. They face a rough road in front of them.

UPDATE (July 14): As of this morning, Maggie Lee remains in a coma with a severe brain stem injury. She has nearly died several times and is fighting for her life. Thanks to everyone who's expressed their sympathy and good wishes. They are appreciated.

MORE: See AP coverage of a prayer vigil held for Maggie today in Shreveport.

AND MORE: (July 14, 3:30 p.m., via Caring Bridge): "Latest update on Maggie Lee....Tubes have been inserted to inflate her lungs. The tubes that were put on Sunday were temporary and have been removed. Maggie Lee is getting good air return from this procedure. Medicine has been turned down to ease her out of medically induced coma. Her heart is stable. We are still watching cranial pressure. It is creeping up to 30. Please pray for swelling to subside."

Graffiti as Art in Austin

2009-03-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

Fueling the neverending debate over whether graffiti is art or merely vandalism, the UT-Austin art school purchased an outdoor piece by graff writer Shepard Fairey who created the Obama "Hope" poster. The Statesman notes that "Although his Obama poster now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Fairey currently faces multiple vandalism charges in Boston for pasting his work on public and private property."

In addition, some of Fairey's work will be included in a special short-term exhibition at Gallery Lombardi in Austin this weekend. Then on April 4, also in Austin, Spider House Cafe will feature work by a long list of local graffiti artists, sponsored by the Art Seen Alliance.

For the latest in Austin graffiti news, stay tuned to atxgraffiti.com; they'll keep you in the loop.

Oscar Wilde in Austin

2009-02-22T16:05:00.001-08:00

Last night Kathy and I attended the first performance we've seen at Austin's Long Center for the Performing Arts - a rendition of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" put on by the UT Department of Theater and the Austin Shakespeare group, and for my money (@$32 per head) I thought it was an excellent performance.

The play was performed in the round and there wasn't a single bad seat in the house. I won't try to parse the details of the performance, but here's an excellent review that gives a good sense of the event.

The costumes and set were visually gorgeous, particularly the women's dresses which displayed the long trains and high Victorian-era style one might have seen when the play first debuted in London in the 1890s. Some of the "bonnets" worn by the actresses - particularly a hat worn by the woman playing Mrs. Marchmont - were so elaborate and outlandish they almost made me laugh as hard as the dialogue.

I'd not seen this play performed before and it's been 20 years since I read it, so after seeing this performance (which shortened the script to cater to the shorter attention spans of modern audiences), I'm now anxious to go back and read the full text again as it made me laugh out loud nearly from start to finish.

The actors motion, to a person, was incredibly fluid and graceful, and the lilting British accents they adopted gave Wilde's prose an impact they couldn't have achieved in the local dialect. Good choice, IMO, to make it a period piece instead of trying to modernize the setting or script.

One of the actresses in a Q&A after the event said their vocal coach had told them to emphasize the adverbs in Wilde's script instead of the nouns, because it emphasized that what the speaker thought was important was their own opinion, not the actual subject of the conversation. I don't think I'd have noticed that particular affectation if she hadn't mentioned it, but, it's absolutely true that that aspect of their delivery made the humorous lines all the funnier.

The UT MFA grad students who performed the five main roles did an admirable, professional-level job to the point where I can honestly say I wouldn't have expected a higher caliber performance if I'd seen it in New York. Everybody involved deserves a lot of credit.

They'll only be performing the play for one more weekend, so anyone interested should make their plans accordingly.

A serious art museum in Austin? Blanton's permanent collection improving with Latin American additions

2009-02-15T04:36:00.000-08:00

Kathy and I went to UT-Austin's Blanton Museum of Art yesterday afternoon, and they've improved their collection a lot since I'd been there last.

A commissioned work covering the walls and stairs at the main entrance - tiles resembling stacked water in rolling waves of blue - really improved the visitors' first impression. And at the top of the stairs leading to the main galleries, they've installed a gorgeous African piece made of metal strips from Nigerian liquor bottles sewn together with copper wire to look (from a distance) like a woven blanket with tribal patterns. Very cool, and a step forward from the European dominated pieces that formed the base of their initial collection.

They're developing a significant Latin American base for their permanent collection - a decision which, as a lover of Mexican art, I can only applaud. Among the new pieces acquired since I last visited was a small painting by David Siquieros, the Mexican painter who once tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. I didn't know previously that Siquieros was a mentor of Jackson Pollock. You could see from the painting they'd chosen how Pollock's "controlled accidents" may have evolved in part from Siquieros' stylings, though I'm not sure I'd have otherwise made the connection.

An acquisition fund left to the museum by writer James Michener has been used to purchase a number of excellent new pieces from Latin America and elsewhere, including the piece pictured above by Jerry Bywaters, a former Dallas Morning News art critic and co-founder of the Dallas Nine, a group of artists who became known when they (unsuccessfully) tried to get permission to decorate the interior of the Hall of State on the state fair grounds during Texas' centennial celebrations.

I think that's exactly the direction they should take the museum's collection, fulfilling a niche that to my knowledge nobody else has taken. I'm not aware of a serious, permanent collection of Latin American art on US soil, certainly not in Texas, and there's a lot of wonderful historical and artistic ground to cover. Let somebody else do ancient Greece and the European masters.

That said, the European art in the Blanton is certainly impressive, just not in any way unique. I've got a fascination with religious history so I especially appreciate the Christian art from the 15th and 16th century they've compiled, which includes some beautiful pieces. A series of drawings featured in a collection of art from the era of Pope Clement included sketches for larger murals and elaborate drawings of action scenes commissioned for an international Jubilee in 1600. The most vivid of these (and there were several) depicted attacks on soldiers by wild lions. They were beautiful to look at, but quite classical not particularly interesting, as art exhibits go. If you visit big museums with any frequency, you've seen much like it before.

When the Blanton first opened, I was particularly unimpressed with their collection. But by my third visit yesterday, their team of curators had bolstered that initial batch of art with numerous quality additions, giving me hope that, before long, Austin may actually have a serious, quality museum with exhibitions rivaling those in Houston and Fort Worth.

As an aside, by comparison to the ever-improving Blanton, the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum across the street, by all accounts, remains a complete mess - if they didn't have an IMAX theater, I can't imagine why anyone would go there.

That's a source of embarrassment to me because I care a lot about Texas history and think there's much of significance besides nostalgia and schlock for them to present, but that would require more serious and creative curation. Perhaps as the Blanton's collection improves, with a serious museum across the street the Texas History Museum will ultimately be shamed into presenting a more serious collection.

Burn, baby, burn: Flaming timepiece incinerates last year's regrets

2009-01-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon Kathy and I went downtown to walk around Town Lake and see the preparations for Austin's First Night celebrations, and I couldn't help but remark here about the astonishing New Year's art project the city of Austin financed for the event.

The city gave artsts a grant to construct an ornate, two-story working wooden clock - a project that took them three months - then for the new year, they invited the public to write on the clock anything they'd like to symbolically get rid of and burned it publicly last night!

I'm pleased and proud to live in a city that spent my tax dollars that way, and clearly from the response we saw to this magnificent piece of art, the public enjoyed it, too. Here's the Statesman's coverage, a Youtube video of the clock once it was fully constructed and here's a clip of them burning it last night - awesome stuff.

Congrats, and thanks, to everyone involved with the project.

The old precinct sports a new election day look

2008-11-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

To avoid the lines, Kathy and I showed up about ten minutes before 7 a.m. at Austin's Precinct 126 to find about 12-15 people waiting ahead of us. After a moment of initial confusion (my ID was checked a total of three times, and there was an oddly large amount of redundant paperwork required, for whatever reason), we were able to quickly complete the task, and now it's just a matter of hoping the electronic voting machies record the darn thing accurately. ;)

In any event, predictions of a high turnout appear to be on target. Over the years, East Austin has experienced such low turnout rates that most political consultants, based purely on a (correct) cost-benefit analysis, advised against spending money on East Austin GOTV efforts since, more often than not, nobody voted anyway even if the campaign spent money there.

This spring, though, around 2,000 people voted in my precinct alone in the Democratic primary, then more than 600 of them came back that night to caucus at the precinct convention. By comparison, at the last Democratic precinct convention I attended before that, my wife and I made seven total participants. (I've lived in this neighborhood since 1990. Our precinct is historically black and at one time a serious crime center, but is now a rapidly gentrifying mixed neighborhood a mile due east of the capitol.)

Another interesting change, for good or ill: For years, our precinct (which was precinct 128 until the 2003 redistricting) was staffed on election day with the same, long-time cadre of septuagenarian or octogenarian black women, all wearing their Sunday finest. A couple of them would remember me as a frequent voter, always asking if my wife was coming in, exchanging guesses about turnout totals, etc..

But 2008 saw a generational shift Precinct 126's election workers, who today were mostly energetic young people, a couple of whom sheepishly admitted they were doing this for the first time as they fumbled through the seemingly over-complex paper work required to verify IDs. One of the new election workers was an old friend who Kathy and I've known for 20 years, so I'm happy to report this personnel transition didn't alter that sense of communal familiarity I think I'm somehow looking for when casting a ballot on election day. And there's little question there's a lot more excitement in the air - even at 7 a.m. - than there is for most elections.

Dinosaurs in Zilker botanical gardens good fun for kids

2008-09-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

Kathy and I took our two-year old grandbaby to the "Dinoland" exhibit at the Zilker Botanical Gardens - featuring life-sized replicas of various dinosaurs set au natural - and the baby particularly enjoyed herself, though the long walk wore her down by the end and made everyone a little cranky.

We happened to go to the event on opening day, and though the botanical garden is a large place - around 30 acres - the crowd at 2 pm on Saturday was still rather oppressive, I must admit, though it made no difference to the baby.

Having visited the zoo recently, I think, primed her for the experience, and Ty issued oohs and aahs at nearly every stop. I particularly liked one depicting two long-beaked dinosaurs in a gigantic nest situated up in a tree, but Ty was most impressed with the traditional, large lizard creatures like the one featured above.

The animals were most notable for their impressive scale, but they didn't quite look real, more like oversized toy dinosaurs. Another minor complaint - while we know nothing about what color dinosaurs were, a little more diversity in the educated guesses exhibitors made would have been welcome. Like birds, to whom they're related, dinosaurs were likely multi-colored and more showy than depicted in this exhibit, which portrayed most of them as gray, brown, or some other neutral hue.

The level of supporting information provided was aimed at an audience of kids, for sure, not adults who might, say, frequent natural history museums. But for its audience it was quite well done. There was also quite a bit of kid oriented programming in addition to the nature walk, but it was a hot day and the baby was ready to bed down by the time we finished. Not only was this a good experience for kids, it gives a lot of Austinites who might not have been there before a chance to see Austin's impressive botanical garden that plays second fiddle on most weekends to Zilker Park and Barton Springs across the road.

UPDATE (Oct. 19): See a story on the exhibit from the Austin Statesman.

Baby Ty and the Rhinos

2008-08-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

Among the many animals at the San Antonio Zoo that were new to her, my granddaughter saw a rhinoceros for the first time recently and the beast made quite an impression on the 23-month old. Even now, weeks later, if you mention the zoo she'll break in to a babbling description of either the rhino or the monkeys (who got into a fairly energetic and vicious fight while we watched, much to her amazement).

In any event, upon returning home she was so obsessed with rhinos that we got online looking for toddler-appropriate rhino references and quickly found "The Rhino Song," a brilliant little ditty with an accompanying cartoon that she now asks for virtually every time she sees the computer. This is clearly quite popular among toddlers and the adults who cater to them but I just ran across it. Be forewarned: It's addictive:

Depth Perception

2008-08-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

I've always thought optical illusions are a pretty cool thing, but while it's one thing to manufacture them in drawings, it's another entirely, it seems to me, to enshrine them in sculpture. Here's a piece outside the McNay Museum in San Antonio that appears to have a great deal of depth when viewed from the vantage point of the museum:

Here's the view from the opposite side:

However, here's a side view that shows to what extent the depth you see from the front and back is mostly illusory:

I thought that was a pretty neat piece: the eye projects a lot more depth and complexity to the sculpture depending on your perspective. Here's another remarkable sculpture from the McNay - this one, if I'm not mistaken, from the late Austin sculptor Charles Umlauf set in the museum's fabulous courtyard:

If Green Bay can buy the Packers, why can't Austin purchase the Statesman?

2008-08-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

When Green Bay, Wisconsin's beloved historic professional football team was about to be sold and moved to another locale, the local community decided they'd rather buy the team than see it auctioned off to the highest bidder. It was a smart move that's benefited the town tremendously, both economically and in terms of prestige and public satisfaction.

So upon hearing news this week that the Austin-American Statesman will be put up for sale, my first reaction, posted as a comment on The Good Life blog, was that:

I think the City of Austin should purchase it and put it in trust with professioal management the way Green Bay, Wisconsin did with their football team. Nobody else who can afford to buy it will do anything but slash it to pieces.

To me, daily newspapers are a national treasure as important to sustaining democracy and public life as water and air are to keeping us all upright and breathing. Certainly blogging would not exist as it does today if bloggers didn't have daily journalists' work to build upon. So-called "citizen journalism" is a good thing, but some projects only get done if you have a pro on the job. Despite the rise of disparate additional media that cut into ad revenues and shrunk the newshole drastically, the Statesman remains the central information source for the largest number of engaged citizens and opinion leaders in Central Texas and a critical spearpoint for public conversation .

I'd personally support a bond issue to purchase the paper and establish an independent trust with its own, dedicated board to manage the project. Public ownership would give the paper many options for distribution and synergy that are closed to a private entity. And a charter for the paper could be crafted that dedicated it to reporting in the public service, bucking the trend of treating news items as entertainment and giving the public better coverage all the way around. If the paper is sold, odds are both staff and the newshole will be further slashed and diminish overall reportage.

The main reason newspapers like the Statesman are losing money is people are accessing their content for free online. So by providing taxpayer support for journalism, purchasing the paper would overcome the "free rider problem" created for papers by web technology.

Besides convincing taxpayers it's a worthy investment, the hardest part of such a deal might be structuring the entity so it's editorially independent - boardmembers couldn't be appointed by the City Council, for example, and remain credibly separate from the city power structure. I don't have a clear idea how that might work, but I'll bet it could be done. The Green Bay City Council, after all, doesn't interfere with the Packers game plans or hiring decisions, and I'll bet there's a way a newspaper could be similarly distanced from outside interference.

Who knows how much Cox News wants for the Statesman or whether it might be possible for the city to purchase the paper? In any event it seems worth considering whether public ownership might be a viable option.

RELATED: See also "Who will buy the Statesman?" from Jeff Beckham, and the Lone Star Times has identified a prospective buyer.

Food notes: An Irish blue cheese adds zing to a salad, Italian ricotta dreams, and perhaps the best steak dinner I've ever had

2008-08-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

A few disparate food notes:

First, on the home cooking front, I made a spectacular salad two nights ago using fresh spinach greens, a splash of seed-heavy trail mix with raisins and dried cranberries, a spectacular (if expensive) blue cheese from Ireland made from sheep's milk called "Crozier Blue" (see their website for a lot more detail about this cheese and its makers).

The Crozier Blue cheese really made the salad special, though it'd better given the dear price - a whopping $30 per pound at the Central Market, though I just bought a smidgen (at $3 worth), enough to liven up a couple of 2-3 person salads. It would be wrong to call the flavor "mild," though it's not as pungent as some blue cheeses (or as I imagine it might become if allowed to sit and ripen a bit). Indeed, arguably the slightly less brash initial reception the Crozier Blue engenders with the palette creates space for enjoying more fully its rich and complex textures. A good find. I can't afford much of it but it's a good choice for a style of cheese that frequently I pass by as too overwhelming.

Speaking of cheese, I was interested to see an article in a recent issue of Saveur about traditional methods of making ricotta cheese used by shepherds in rural Italy - nearly a dying art form now practiced by septuagenarians whose kids for the most part haven't picked up the family shepherd biz. Turns out Ricotta cheese (ricotta means re-cooked, said the article), is produced from the whey or liquid byproduct from making pecorino cheese, a more expensive and exportable commodity. That whey is used for all sorts of different products by industrial manufacturers, but for shepherds in the mountains its main purpose in the past was to generate a wonderful fresh ricotta that still dominates the region's recipes.

Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention the ridiculously fabulous (and equally expensive steakhouse Kathy picked for her birthday dinner last night - a place called Three Forks at Lavaca and Cesar Chavez catty corner from City Hall.

The meat was as fabulous as any I've been served, clearly of the highest possible quality. My filet mignon came as a three-inch high tower of melt in your mouth tenderloin goodness, perfectly cooked medium rare, while Kathy ordered a rib-eye twice the size of my cut of meet which she entirely devoured. Kathy was so happy with hers she essentially giggled all through the meal.

The side dishes are the same for everyone, so all you pick are the entree', drinks and appetizers, though given the size of the main dish portions there's really no need for the latter. The bread that came before the meal, too, was clearly made on-site and really quite special. With entree's at $35-50, this is a place for special occasions only on our budget, for sure - Kathy just wanted a "good steak" for her birthday so we got her one. It may not be P.C. to say so given the global economics of beef production, but that might have been the best meal I've had in 2008.

Religion and Science meet for coffee

2008-05-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

Religion and Science meet for coffee over at Real Live Preacher, and part of the discussion included this wonderful observation:

Dark matter makes up about 96% of all that is, which is a little sobering, considering we make a lot of broad statements about reality for creatures that can only perceive about 4% of it.

They say perception is reality, and this data puts a metric on it: The reality we perceive, at best, captures about 4% of what's there.

Read the whole piece, which was as delightful as it was insightful - a rumination on science and "trust," in which RLP concludes wisely that "trusting people is its own kind of spiritual exercise."

Never been horse that can't be rode, never been a cowboy can't be throwed

2008-02-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a Superbowl game, huh?

When Kathy asked who won, I told her that light prevailed over darkness and the Evil Empire had fallen. I think she was a little non-plussed at the hyperbole. Still, I was glad to see New England go down.

Who gets to write the first draft of history?

2008-01-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

How the "first draft of history" gets written has changed a lot in my adult lifetime.

It used to be said when I was a lad that journalism was the "first draft of history," and that conceit helped draw me into writing for The Daily Texan in college. There I learned, in fact, that the press release was the first draft of history, but even that has changed. After a while the "first draft" began to show up on blogs, and today, more often than not, it comes in a blog comment.

I'm not sure whether I think that's good or bad, but I think it's true.

It's also been said that winners write the history, but to a large extent, that has changed, too. If there's one thing you can say for the blogosphere, it's that it's definitely given losers a voice!

Note to Wall Street Journal: It's not "historic" when you predict wrong

2008-01-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

Here's an example, to me, of the utter failure of the modern media: They've become so reliant on polling and so confident in their own predictions, they now believe it "historic" when THEY are wrong! What hubris! From Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal:

Judging by the pre-vote polls and prediction markets, the Democratic primary in New Hampshire created one of the most surprising upsets in U.S. political history.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was favored in the final pre-election poll of all 12 pollsters who surveyed voters since his surprise victory in Iowa, and was the unanimous favorite among television pundits. The only real question to be resolved appeared to be the size of Mr. Obama's majority.

His loss to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was equally embarrassing for prediction markets, such as the WSJ Political Market. Election-eve trading had suggested that Sen. Obama had a 92% chance to win in New Hampshire, while Sen. Clinton rated only a 7% chance.

Against this background, it is no exaggeration to term the result truly historic. Not that there haven't been more dramatic upsets or come-from-behind wins that carried more significance -- this was just an early primary, albeit a pivotal one. But in terms of unpredictability, or at least the failure of everyone to predict it, it may have no modern match.

The fact that he and his egghead buddies were wrong in their predictions doesn't make this primary result any more "historic" than it would otherwise have been. (It is, after all, the presidential campaign, so in some sense calling it "historic" is definitionally redundant.)

Managing expectations has officially become more important than reality. We've reached a stage when many in the media believe their own pre-election assumptions are actually more important, apparently, than the actual voters themselves. Otherwise, when the voters disagree with the media's and the pollsters' predictions, why is it such a big deal?

That's definitely a bias in media coverage, but it's not a bias toward left or right, it's an expression of narcissism and group think. Results, not expectations, are what matter, but you wouldn't know it from reading most political coverage.

A Random Assortment of Movie Reviews

2008-01-08T09:41:00.000-08:00

Lately Kathy and I have been on a movie-going spree, seeing five movies since Christmas Day. They were:

Charlie Wilson's War
The acting and script were so good in this movie it was almost possible to forget the frequently glaring historical inaccuracies. Among my beefs, when you say the covert ops received matching funds from the Saudis, how hard would it have been to have added, "from the Bin Laden family"! Another: Texas Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson was a buffoon and a tool, not the compassionate, forward thinking Congressman portrayed in the movie by Tom Hanks.

The movie (as well as, I understand, the eponymous book) downplayed the fairly predictable consequences of climbing into bed with fundamentalist jihadists (a decision which arguably led directly to the creation of Al Qaeda and ultimately 9/11), and it gave Wilson way too much credit. After all, the Reagan administration itself was simultaneously selling arms to fundamentalists in neighboring Iran - do we really think arms sales to Afghanistan weren't part of a broader Reagan administration policy against the Soviets? Was it really this one Democratic Congressman who wanted those weapons? That's certainly not how I remember it.

No Country for Old Men
An iconic drug war tale set in an imaginary Terrell county in southwest Texas, No Country for Old Men also was a tremendously well-acted movie, plus its fictional subject it didn't suffer from comparisons with history that plague Charlie Wilson's War. On the other hand, the movie was also tremendously violent, perhaps unnecessarily so, coupling the already grotesque routine violence associated with the drug war with the actions of a true psychopath whose murders weren't always business related.

The movie opens portraying the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad out in the middle of the desert, both buyers and suppliers gunned down, when a hunter stumbles upon the scene and leaves with the money, launching a blood-drenched chase by a hit man hired by the drug purveyors to get the money back.

Two overarching message from the movie: First, the border region has always been a violent, semi-lawless place, where rational minds struggle to impose reason on the occasionally inhuman actions of its worst inhabitants. In a brilliant scene near the end, a beleaguered and overwhelmed Tommy Lee Jones learns from a relative how his great uncle, a Sheriff, like Jones' character, died in the line of service in 1909, gunned down in a hail of bullets at his home by seven armed riders. The message: Never think what you're seeing is new, it's how humans have always behaved. And it overwhelmed your predecessors, too.

The other theme that arose was how far away law enforcement was from comprehending the scope of the problem from any given incident. Jones' character spent most of his time in a diner reading the newspaper, as though he might find a clue to the murder there! He never really got close to understanding the characters and organized crime infrastructure that confronted him, perhaps typified in his conversation with the El Paso County Sheriff, who blamed the rise in murders as stemming from a degenerate culture that tolerated disrespectful teenagers with purple hair. Jones' character nodded sagely, but of course, none of the killing in the movie - neither the capitalist driven drug cartels nor the psychopathic hit man with a strict if twisted moral code - had a darn thing to do with the high Terrell County body count. As if to drive home the point, Jones at one point found himself knocking at a door where the killer was hiding on the other side, but by the time he entered his foe had vanished. Their paths never crossed, everyone went on about their business, and life goes on, for some of the characters, anyway.

Though it was quite a different movie, the ending reminded me of the denouement of Traffic, with its nonconclusory and anticlamictic result. Nothing will change, the film seems to tell us, this is just how things are, how they always have been.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
This movie had me laughing out loud throughout, which is about the best thing I can say about a comedy. From the opening scene when it's made clear the director would stoop to any level for a laugh ("Where's Cox?," a young man with a clipboard yells while muscling through a crowd, "I need Cox!"), the movie was a joyous musical and historical romp. John C. Reilly created a bigger than life character whose goofy ego and legitimate musical skills (he's got a great tenor voice) rose above the anything goes humor to create a flawed but memorable and lovable persona.

The movie is 100% satire, so to my mind that lets them off the hook for most pedantic complaints, but Kathy perhaps rightly thought that, at times, the movie was too directly satirical of Walk the Line, the recent Johnny Cash biopic, paralleling Cash's story, if indirectly at most of the major plot points. To me, Johnny Cash is bigger than any movie, either this one or his biopic, and not satirization can harm his legacy. But it's certainly true that just drawing story lines from one or two other iconic rock and roll figures into the mix might have made a couple of the jabs seem less mean-spiritedly directed at the Man in Black. That said, the movie overall was smart and funny, well worth the cost of admission and probably better viewed on the big screen.

The Golden Compass
I've not read the books this movie was based on, which I've been told contain an anti-Christian bent. But I couldn't detect such theological undertones from this movie any more than I could see any pro-Christian overtones in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Hollywood apparently must pound those theological elements out of our cultural products before they're deemed safe for viewing by the public.

In any event, the movie itself was visually stunning, the script smartly written, and the plot compelling. The story takes place in a universe parallel to ours, but astonishingly different, where people's souls (their "daemons") take animal form, follow them around, and communicate. A variety of other differences take a great deal of the movie to flesh out so that the plot becomes understandable, but by about 1/3 of the way through they'd sufficiently established their fantasy lexicon to die into a fairly complex plot line.

The acting in this movie wasn't as good as in the others reviewed so far, but let me tell you: Nicole Kidman can play the hell out of the part of an ice princess! And the talking armored "Ice Bears" were terrific animated characters, perhaps the most impressive part of a truly visually stunning movie.

One complaint: The movie's close left many plot threads hanging, nearly insisting that moviegoers return for an inevitable sequel. I understand the financial reasons for doing that, but artistically it just left the movie with a quite abrupt ending, leaving feeling of incompletion in its wake. OTOH, it left you entwined enough with the plot to anticipate the sequel, which I guess was the goal.

National Treasure II
I actually saw this movie way back on Christmas Day with my brother's family, including my niece and nephew, and for a pure comic romp it has a little something for everyone. Like a bizarre, Americanized Da Vinci Code, National Treasure has envisioned a spectacular alternative vision of US history dominated by secret societies and cabals that still secretly haunt the modern political landscape. Nicholas Cage plays a cartoon-character version of Indiana Jones with admirable enthusiasm, and the ensemble cast around him came together with more cohesion, I thought, than in the first rendition. The movie was a fun diversion, and left a pretty wide age range in our party (9-60+) more or less equally satisfied.

That's the most frequent batch of big-screen movie going in which Kathy and I have indulged in quite some time. With the writers strike spurring TV's nightly, hellish descent into reality and game show pablum, there are probably a few more big-screen titles out there I could still go see.

What movies have you seen lately that you'd recommend?

The Way of the Fallen is Hard

2008-01-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

These lyrics, for whatever reason, have been rattling in my head all day:

Down in Corpus Christi
Always around midnight
You'll find the devil limping along 'cause his shoes are too tight.

His hair's up in pig tails
His whiskers are in braids
He's talking 'bout the promises he said God forgot He made.

The way of the fallen is hard.

-Ray Wylie Hubbard, Brewed in Texas, Vol 2

Truer words were never spoken. Like God, in whose image we're created (or vice versa), we despise no one more than those with whom we're disillusioned, those whom we once put on a pedestal who for whatever reason fall off and no longer seem worthy of the imaginary shrine built to them in our mind's eye. Whether it's a friend who betrayed us or prideful Lucifer, God's Shining Star ... when we're profoundly disappointed, it's easy, isn't it, to succumb to our pain, to demonize our betrayer (and who's more demonized than Lucifer?). But the object of our scorn has a story to tell too, even if he's doomed to tell it sitting by the railroad tracks in Corpus Christi wearing tight shoes.

The way of the fallen is hard.

Fort Worth museum exhibit boasts earliest Christian art

2007-12-28T12:23:00.000-08:00

Before Christmas Kathy and I visited this exhibit on early Christian art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth - described here by the San Antonio Express News - "Picturing the Bible." It was a neat experience I'd highly recommend if you get the chance; the exhibit continues through March 30, 2008.

Nearly all truly ancient Christian art - even after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the Fourth Century - has been destroyed as a result of later "Iconoclastic" movements bent on destroying images that portrayed the Divine or even humans since they were created in God's image. Countless ancient works were lost to these awful movements, whose motivations mirror those of radical Islamists today who object to portrayals of Muhammad.

We'd gotten to see some of the early Christian art that escaped the Iconoclasts when we were in Turkey, buried in underground temples and chapels carved from caves out of canyons in Cappadocia that to this day one must hike in to see. Many of these drawings in what today is central Turkey (and what in ancient times was "Galatia," as in Paul's epistle to the Galations) were done by monks loyal to St. Gregory, the earliest Christian monastic, who led his followers into the wilderness in central Asia Minor to contemplate God in true, remote isolation. (Some of these images were preserved because they'd become covered with smoke over time, and are only now being restored, often revealing brilliant color preserved by the ash, virtually untouched in more than a millenium.

In Fort Worth, though I got to see even older specimens, the most ancient from the catacombs around Rome excavated around the turn of the 19th Century. The paintings on these catacombs dated, at the earliest, from around 200 A.D., and constitute the oldest extant Christian art, nearly one hundred years older (and much more classically Grecian in style) than anything I'd seen before.

Discovered in the 19th Century outside of Rome, the Vatican commissioned what are known as the Wilpert Watercolors, named after Josef Wilpert (1857-1944), a photographer who took more than 600 photos of the ancient tombs and Christian paintings and sculpture inside, in many cases documenting art that was untouched since the graves were closed. The photos were in black and white, but we're incredibly lucky (since much of the art didn't survive excavation) that Vatican scholars had the foresight to commission artist Carlo Tabanelli to take the same photos into the catacombs and paint over them in watercolor to document the exact colors in the original tombs. The result is a 600 page book that must be out of print (I can't find it available online, but we copied the title from the exhibit), called Roma Sotteranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane.

By far the most common themes from the catacomb art were the Good Shepherd and his flock, Adam and Eve (see the finely detailed ring in the first image above), Noah's Ark and Family, and the story of Jonah and the "great fish," which the ancients saw as directly foreshadowing Christ's resurrection (Jonah three days in the fish; Christ three days in the tomb). Interestingly, unlike today when we think of Jonah in the belly of the whale, ancient Christians believed Jonah had been swallowed by a Keto (at left), or a Grecian sea monster straight out of the Homer and the Odyssey. This early mixing of pagan Greek and Christian symbology was especially striking in light of how our conception of the story of Jonah has changed thanks to modern science and sea exploration.

The Kimbell has hosted some great exhibitions of religious art in recent years, including an exhibit Kathy and I saw in 2003 featuring mediaeval "illuminated manuscripts," and another in 2005 featuring Islamic art (which of course we also saw plenty of in Turkey). I was glad to get to see these excellent pieces, from which I learned quite a bit. Topping the visit off with a walk in the Botanical Gardens (a beautiful, Depression era WPA project) and dinner at the always excellent Realta restaurant downtown, I found the two-day sojourn to Fort Worth last week an enjoyable jaunt, well worth the trek.

There is officially no hope for us as a nation

2007-12-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

Graffiti of the philanthropic class

2007-12-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Like taggers, rich folks like to see their names plastered on walls. It's just that they can afford to pay for the privilege, reports the New York Times. That's an interesting way to think about it - philanthropic naming rights as a formalized twist on invited graffiti, compensating the wall owner rather than the artist.

Writer Charles Isherwood wonders "what became of those wealthy philanthropists who used to support arts organizations and other not-for-profit and charitable institutions without requiring that their names be slapped somewhere — anywhere, it sometimes seems — on a building"? Answer: They have mostly succumbed to the narcissistic pleasures of uptown tagging.

The first time I've ever wished I lived in South Carolina

2007-10-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

So I could vote for Stephen Colbert.

How can employers reduce worker stress?

2007-09-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Stressed out employees are less productive, tend to have higher turnover than happy employees, and make more mistakes on the job. What can employers do about it? Here's an idea from Australia I bet most workers would support, via Science Daily:

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, found that 54 percent of the emergency room staff in summer and 65 percent in winter suffered moderate to extreme anxiety. However, this fell to 8 percent, regardless of the season, once staff received 15-minute aromatherapy massages while listening to music.
The study involved 86 nurses during two 12-week alternative therapy sessions provided over the course of one year. Sixteen massages were carried out over a two-day work period each week, with the names of staff working those days put into an envelope and selected at random.

"Introducing stress reduction strategies in the workplace could be a valuable tool for employers who are keen to tackle anxiety levels in high pressure roles and increase job satisfaction," study leader, Marie Cooke, of Griffith University in Brisbane, said in a statement.

"But what is clear from this study, is that providing aromatherapy massage had an immediate and dramatic effect on staff who traditionally suffer high anxiety levels because of the nature of their work.

At my last job I watched an insane level of stress make life unbearable for everyone there. Something like this would not only have benefited those who got the occasional treat, but would have helped repair an environment where employees felt alienated and unappreciated. That makes me wonder if there were any subsidiary effects for those who weren't chosen to receive a massage in the weekly drawings (only 16 of the 86 nurses would receive a massage in any given week)? I'd imagine that not only getting an occasional massage might help, just the idea of having an employer who gives a crap about your mental health might also bring stressed employees some comfort.

'Taps' may be the easiest difficult song in the world

2007-09-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

I played a little trumpet back in the day ... not well, but maybe well enough to do this with some practice:

While a federal law requires a flag detail for every veteran's funeral service, buglers are optional. With too few military buglers available, some veterans' cemeteries, including Houston's, are turning to recorded or a digital version of taps played over a loud speaker.

Kirby's group helps provide buglers at funerals for U.S. veterans and active duty service members. Every fallen vet and service member, he said, deserves the honor of a live bugler, not a recorded song or a digital bugles.

"We feel every veteran should have a 21-gun salute and a live bugler," said Kirby, a disabled Navy veteran.

But of the group's more than 170 members, only about 40 are able to play taps. The rest are either taking lessons from volunteers or are awaiting the resources to buy instruments they can play.

Kirby learned taps in only four months, but he said it's still a difficult song to perform.

"At a funeral there are no redos," Kirby said. "It's the emotional side of it and getting through the actual song, the tradition of what taps means."

I'll bet that last bit is right about getting through the emotional side being the hardest part.

Taps in one sense is an easy song to play, in another sense a difficult one because of its musical purity. When you play Taps on a trumpet instead of a bugle, you simply don't push down any keys. One changes notes entirely by adjusting your embrochure, or how you purse your lips and how much air you blow through the instrument.

Bugles can only play a given set of notes in a single harmonic series by making your embrochure smaller for higher notes and slightly more open for lower ones. A trumpeter can use valves to switch to a different harmonic series.

In other words, when you hold down the valves on a trumpet to create a different note, you're not creating a single different note but shifting the instrument's tubing length to access an entirely different harmonic series, which itself can be adjusted higher or lower by changing one's embrochure and the velocity of air pushed through the horn.

So on the one hand, Taps is "easy," because it's simple. It explores the notes in a single harmonic series. You don't need to know how to use the valves on a trumpet, read music, or really understand anything about musical theory at all - the song basically uses the only notes the instrument (a bugle) can play.

On the other hand, its simplicity also makes Taps difficult because it's entirely about the purity of the notes, their tone, the performer's smoothness of transition - all of these are highlighted more because so much else has been stripped away, leaving pure harmonics and the musician's skill as the only featured elements.

I imagine Taps is most difficult, though, because of the pressure - the emotionalism of the moment and the fact that screwing it up in the middle of such a significant ceremony is really NOT an option. You'd really want to practice long and hard before showing up to perform, but I'll bet it's a rewarding thing to do.

How did they know?

2007-08-08T06:45:00.000-07:00

In a conversation with a doctor friend over a meal the other day, she marveled at the specificity with which marketers and list brokers were able to target a person's individual interests.

She'd received a catalog she hadn't ordered, junk mail, IOW, but said on her way to throw it away she realized she was actually interested in some of the things they were selling. She was both a little embarrassed that her interests were so transparent, and a little creeped out by it.

I mentioned that I'd experienced the same thing many times. I'll receive an email from someone I've never heard of asking, "Do you want to have sex tonight?" And I always wonder, "How did they know?"

Shouldn't Austin respect Lady Bird Johnson's wishes about renaming Town Lake?

2007-07-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Burnt Orange Report and most Austin Democrats appear to support renaming Town Lake after the late Lady Bird Johnson, who by any measure was an icon who deserves recognition. As I wrote in the comments at BOR, though:

This would be great and the honor well deserved except for one thing: As I understand it the deceased opposed the idea for this eponymous honor for many years, including fairly recently if memory serves; this has been proposed several times.. I think they should honor Lady Bird's wishes and leave it "Town Lake" unless it turns out she specifically changed her mind and somebody can document it (allegedly whispering it into Will Wynn's ear on hear deathbed, e.g., doesn't count). Otherwise to me it feels a little creepy and opportunistic to use her name in a fashion with which she disapproved.

I really don't like that, at sort of a gut level. Maybe it's because I've lost quite a few beloved family members over the years, so I feel pretty strongly you should respect the deceased wishes to the greatest extent possible if you want to truly honor their memory. I wish they'd do what she wanted, not just whatever the two-bit wannabes on the Austin city council feel like doing.

Gâteau au yaourt

2007-07-21T08:43:00.001-07:00

Kathy has just harvested a bunch of beautiful, ripe fresh figs from one of the two fig trees in our backyard, and I'm going to use them to make a "gâteau au yaourt," which "is a traditional French home-baker-friendly cake that is really easy to make," according to the wonderful culinary blog we discovered this morning, She Who Eats. I'll let you know how it comes out.

The Missus and Willie and Me

2007-06-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

There are two themes common to most all of the homemade CDs Kathy creates downloading music off of I-tunes. One is that almost all of them start with a song from Willie Nelson. (The one I'm listening to on the computer right now begins with "Shotgun Willie.") The other, perhaps more troubling commonality is they all contain songs about women leaving, cheating on or killing their husbands or boyfriends.

I'm not too concerned. In my house we tend to listen to both kinds of music: Country AND Western. So admittedly these are common themes.

However, they ARE the common themes. Hmmmmm. More on this as it develops.

Alone

2007-06-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Alone
Nobody here
The one person who wants to be with me cannot
And I've driven everyone else away

Alone
No job, no career, only words
No shared goals, no workers' camaraderie
The writer's task is solitary

Alone
I've never accomplished anything
But alone is how I accomplish everything
So my achievements feel pyrrhic

Alone
I wish I found more comfort in God
I wish I were closer to my family
I wish I knew better how to have friends

Alone
The world is still a grand place, full of possibilities
People are kind, fear is surmountable, hope is justified
I don't believe that God is dead though he seems lost to the world

Alone
My muscles contract and my back wrenches
My mind seizes on itself, devoured by fear and self-doubt
I cannot comfort myself, I can only be comforted, but I am

Alone

The New Mexican Tortilla Wars

2007-06-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Cargill and other grain speculators, the price of tortillas in Mexico increased 738% since the advent of NAFTA, according to this insightful article tranlsated from La Jornada on the political economy of the new Mexican tortilla wars.

The Way He Ballz

2007-05-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

You honestly can't make this stuff up: Via Pink Dome, meet Texas new Assistant Parliamentarian, Ron Wilson. He's the speaker sitting behind the desk at the beginning of the video.

Meanwhile, Pink Dome has its own legislative best/worst contest going, and since for some reason I couldn't leave this comment on the site, I'll include my suggestions here:

BDM - Royce West, no doubt, followed by the Lite Guv
BDF- Slim pickin's, but Hernandez or Van de Putte
WDM- Tie btwn Dunnam and Haggerty
WDF- Mowery, by a country mile
CIA- I love Jessica Farrar, but yes, it's her scarves
WH- Dan Patrick, with honorable mentions to Dunnam and Haggerty
LILF/F- With respect to Lois Kolkhorst, who is one of my faves, this must go to the angelic Veronica Gonzales
LILF/M- No opinion, except to say that whoever nominated Steve Ogden is one sick f%#k

Drinking with bloggers

2007-04-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

Shaine Mata posted a nice picture from a beer and burgers outing at Mother Egan's last night. From left to right are Kevin Kennedy who writes about blogs for Texas Weekly, me, Vince Leibowitz from Capitol Annex, and the fellow who does McBlogger, who by his own designs shall remain nameless.

Shaine is a South Texas blogger who's working for House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Chairman Aaron Peña's legislative staff this session. He told me he's only gotten to go home twice to visit his family since session began, and that he supports dark horse Bill Richardson for president because "I'm dark, too." Shaine said he thought it was time Latinos began promoting their own leaders for statewide and national office and Bill Richardson is the only Latino in the field. The photo was taken from a cameraphone. Shaine has more pics.

I've known no war, and if I ever do I won't know for sure

2007-04-18T08:13:00.001-07:00

Can you even imagine living in a state of constant war? The Virginia Tech massacre shocked the nation, and yet that kind of thing happens in Iraq weekly, maybe daily. Mind boggling.

2007-04-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

YouTubin': Some days you miss Stevie:

This Week on Easter Island

2007-04-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

I made this over at Witty Comics. Click on the image to view a larger version, and Happy Easter.

Primates lived in Texas 42 million years ago when Laredo was on the coast

2007-04-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

Forty two million years ago, the area that today is quite-inland Laredo was a coastal lagoon, and researchers have discovered evidence primates occupied the area ("Researchers study evidence of ancient primates in Laredo area," Waco Herald Tribune, April 2). See an artist's depiction of one of the animals at left. According to news reports:

Lamar University Professor Jim Westgate and two colleagues announced the discovery of three new genera and four new species of primates based on their examination of material removed from Lake Casa Blanca International State Park near Laredo and the Mexican border.

Westgate said the Laredo area was a coastal lagoon during the stage of geologic history known as the Eocene Epoch, which was when primates were becoming extinct on much of the continent.

"It was kind of the last gasp for the primates in North America," said Westgate, a professor of earth and space sciences.

The researchers presented their findings last week at a conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia.

Westgate and others are still studying the 15 tons of material excavated from the park's fossil deposits between 1983 and 1996. Researchers recovered 1,800 mammal teeth, including 50 from primates.

Dana Cope, a co-author of the study and associate professor of anthropology at College of Charleston in South Carolina, compared the teeth with other primate teeth from the same era. He said the newly discovered teeth, which measure about 4 millimeters, were not from known primates.

"This is a very important locality," Cope said. "Not much is known about Eocene mammals outside the Rocky Mountains."

The Beaumont Enterprise linked to these additional web resources on the topic:

Lake Casa Blanca International State Park near Laredo
The Eocene Epoch link 1
The Eocene Epoch link 2
The Eocene Epoch link 3
Tarsier link 1
Tarsier link 2
Tarsier link 3
Galago/Bush Baby link 1
Galago/Bush Baby link 2

If I'd kicked Muhammed Ali's ass I'd brag about it, too!

2007-03-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Meet Alberto "Tex" Henderson, who broke Muhammed Ali's jaw in the second round in 1972 in a San Antonio exhibition match while the champ was banned from boxing.

He said the referee counted to 16 - one to eight, and then went back and started from one.
"I said, 'Get your (rear end) up, boy. You ain't hurt,' " Henderson said he told Ali.

My expectations of the general public continue to decline, until I look in the mirror

2007-03-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

If you don't believe that voters elect the candidates they deserve, consider that these have a market. Via MariaMaria.

In the interest of full disclosure, growing up in Tyler I had a Confederate battle flag hanging over my bed until I left home to go to college at 18. The last time I was home it was still hanging in my father's garage. As I (half) joked with Maria in the comments, I've got relatives for whom these would probably make a good gag gift. What can I say? In the big picture, like a lot of multi-generation Texan families, a lot of my family came to Texas fleeing union occupation after the Civil War.

That was true of everybody I knew growing up. The road from the Deep South into Texas literally led directly through Tyler and Smith County, and once they got to East Texas' Piney Woods, many of them traveled no farther. One of my best friends in junior high and high school, Waterson Calhoun, was John C. Calhoun's great-great grandson, if I remember correctly. (Wat's father was county judge in Smith county for many years, and I should add that his mother is a gracious, joyful and lovely woman.)

That said, while I don't condone the use of Confederate symbology, neither do I automatically associate its use today in the South with racial hatred. (Whether it's smart or useful or necessary or unproductively provocative are all different questions than racist intent.) Many people are too quick to judge complicated historical situations and cultural associations.

There was a time I would have thought this was funny. If I'm 100% honest, part of me, I guess, still does:

The Great Texas Archive War

2007-03-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

Did you know about the Great Texas Archive War? Coyote Mercury gave some wonderful history I didn't know, even though I'd passed by that statue on Congress Avenue a thousand times. I especially like CM's headline, "That ain't no open records request!" Excellent blogging from Texas Independence Day.

Perry: Bush administration empowers 'environmental extremists'

2007-02-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

In his State of the State address, Governor Perry said there are "environmental extremists" in the Bush Administration's Environmental Protection Agency. If the Bush folks are extremists, I wonder what that would make actual environmentalists?

Marquez vs. Barrera

2007-02-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm a boxing fan, especially of the smaller divisions where speed and skill matter more than the thunderous power of what have become truly massive heavyweights.

Mexico, of course, is the Mecca of smaller boxers - that nation's mean streets have produced some of the toughest small men you'll ever see step into a ring. So I was interested in this piece highlighting two brothers from Mexico City, Juan Manuel and Rafael Marquez, two small men who have fought their way into the limelight of the sport called the "sweet science."

The older of the two, Juan Manuel will fight Mexican legend Marco Antonio Barrera for the super featherweight crown in March. Marquez and Barrera share a high-profile common opponent, Fillipino Manny Pacquiao, who knocked out Barrera but whom Marquez fought to a grueling draw. Here's how Sports Illustrated described Marquez in that fight:

Juan Manuel stepped into the spotlight when he fought the Philippines' Manny Pacquiao, considered the best featherweight in the world. After being knocked down three times in the first round, Juan Manuel battled back to earn a draw -- and, perhaps more important, universal respect in the division. "Each time I got knocked down I thought of my family and how important this fight was to them," says Juan Manuel. "I couldn't quit; it's just not in me."

The fight with Barrera ought to be an outright war. I'll certainly be watching.

While most of the big money boxing matches still happen in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, more and more quality fights are being held in Texas now, frequently featuring Mexican boxers working their way up the ladder toward the bigger venues. (Marquez last fought in the Rio Grande Valley at Dodge Arena in November.) Kathy won't go with me to the fights, but maybe I need to find some buddies to go with because we're getting a lot more chances to see high quality fighters here in Texas than we did just a few years ago.

UPDATE: This turned out to be a high quality fight. Marquez won on both the scorecards and in my own estimation, though I certainly agree a flash knockdown by Barrera in the 7th round should have been called as such, and that round otherwise so heavily favored Marquez that could flip a closely scored bout. But it was a classic Mexican boxing war, the kind of closely matched slugfest that's good for the sport. For Marquez this opens up many options, not the least of which is a superfight with Manny Pacquiao. For Barrera, this fight might be a career ender unless he wants a rematch with Marquez. Like the HBO announcers who called the fight, I wouldn't mind seeing that.

You Tubing: Johnny Cash's prison blues

2007-01-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Who doesn't love this song?

My favorite line: "I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car. They're probably drinking coffee, and smokin' big cigars. Oh I know I had it comin'. I know I can't be free. But those people keep on movin', and that's what tortures me."

Johnny Cash never went to prison himself, but early in his career he realized that prison was a brilliant metaphor for a set of human experiences in a raw, extreme form that are universal, that all of us endure at one time or another. Commenters at YouTube compared Cash's near-glamorization of prisoners and their crimes to modern "thug life" attitudes routinely expressed by rappers. There are songs where that is justified - for example, Cocaine Blues:

But I wonder myself what Cash would have thought about modern thug life musicians? I don't think he'd hold as harsh an opinion as many of their critics. But I think in most of Cash's music about prisons there are a couple of differences with modern thug-life musicians, not the least of which is Cash's sympathy for the prisoners and his focus on remorse ("I know I had it coming") and often Christian redemption. For example, see God's Gonna Cut You Down:

Crime should not be glamorized, just as the crime-reduction value of punishment should not be oversold. But crime and criminals must be humanized - made understandable to the broader public in human terms - in order for the public to consider evidence-based anti-crime proposals instead of fear-generated ones. Art can remind the public that these folks are all somebody's son or daughter, somebody's sibling, cousin, nephew or niece. And that nobody is ever as good as their best act or, just as importantly, as bad as their worst one.

That's what Cash tried to teach through his prison-related art. Now that he is gone, who will pick up that mantle?

Guts

2007-01-16T13:49:00.000-08:00

Via Tom Kirkendall at Houston's Clear Thinkers.

Tom called it the play of the year, and I'd have to agree. As he described it, "During a key part of the 4th quarter in the state 5A D-1 championship game between Southlake Carroll and Austin Westlake, Southlake Carroll QB Riley Dodge barks out the signals, vomits immediately before taking the snap, then throws a perfect TD pass to put Southlake ahead for good in the game, and then is helped off the field by a couple of his teammates as he vomits again on his way to the sideline." See for yourself:

How intense is that?

What did you learn in school today?

2007-01-15T08:31:00.000-08:00

This Pete Seeger tune could have been written today instead of 40 years ago:

Surfing further around YouTube I also found this fine rendition by a much older Seeger of "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." I'd heard it before but somehow, at the present moment in history - with the Iraq war degenerating and parts of Louisiana still devastated after Katrina - it takes on a bit of a different sense, doesn't it? Check it out:

Matisse: Artist as Sculptor

2007-01-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

Kathy and I want to go see this Matisse exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art featuring his sculpture.

In search of bathroom graffiti

2007-01-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

After writing a couple of recent posts on Grits about punishing graffiti artists, I enjoyed this provocative mini-documentary filmed in Austin in the mid-'90s on bathroom graffiti, found via Dirty Third Streets, which also has up a great set of pics of Austin graffiti worth a second look.

Featherlite drainage pipe break update: Sewage now bubbling up into shower

2006-12-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

I suppose can't 100% for sure say it's because of the freshly busted drainage pipe from the Featherlite tract, but a moment ago the bathroom sink in my office began bubbling up with foul water and inexplicably burbling noisily, then spewing small amounts of brown water with little chunks up into the sink basin.

I don't really understand how all the drainage and sewer pipes are hooked up in this neighborhood, and I suppose it could be my own home's plumbing acting up, but it seems like some coincidence that this would start up now, just after a major drainage pipe was broken 30 feet from my house.

Oh, BTW, I got a photo of the flooded area at the end of 14th street. By the time I got batteries for the camera, the water had receded quite a bit, seeping into the ground at the end of 14th street. But you can still tell this is creating a big problem for my neighbors.

Literally I must end this post because sewage is backing up into the shower and Kathy needs me to help deal with it. Meanwhile the water's burbling noisily in my bathroom sink off my office even as I write these lines - I'm afraid to look in there yet to see what needs cleaning up.

Personally, I don't believe this is a coincidence. Here's a picture of the end of 14th street. It was much worse earlier today; this was taken after quite a bit of the water had already receded:

If a tree falls in East Austin and it causes the streets to flood, will anybody hear it?

2006-12-29T13:48:00.000-08:00

According to an exasperated and apologetic City of Austin public works official who was just out here by my house, the new owners of the Featherlite tract shouldn't have taken down a huge Cottonwood tree near our property, and they should have known that before they started tearing everything up.

It turns out this was no unreasonable request by environmentalists, though for aesthetic reasons my wife had requested the tree be saved. The previous landowner actually told us they'd adjsted their plans to accomodate it. Then he sold the property and the new landowner started mowing down everything in sight.

Now we discover what City officials already knew - the tree's roots were wrapped inextricably around the drainage pipe that takes in all the water flowing downhill from the whole neighborhood at the end of E. 14th street, which dead ends into the Featherlite tract.

Now, after just a moderate rain, the end of 14th is flooded and backed up into my neighbor's yard. (The damn batteries are out in my camera or I'd have gotten pics.) The drainage pipe is broken, said the frustrated city worker, at this point probably filled in with dirt.

Dellionaire Tom Meredith recently sold the portion of the property between 14th and 16th streets to a partnership between Momark Development (Terry Mitchell) and Benchmark Development (Dave Mahn). They're developing 64 condos on the southern section of the lot where it narrows along Boggy Creek next to the train tracks.

Apparently Momark and Benchmark didn't know about, or care about, any agreement to preserve the tree, the trunk of which is currently laying about 100 feet behind my house beside its giant, upended root system. From a distance, two X's marking it for destruction resemble a smiley face.

More and more I think there will be big drainage problems with the Featherlite, as I've feared from day one. IMO, anyone buying residential property on the southern end of that tract should probably be required to purchase federal flood insurance. The whole neighborhood's drainage used to dissipate into the Featherlite tract or flow down into Boggy Creek. Turn much of it into impervious cover and that seems like a near-certain recipe for flooding.

I'll write more about this subject later as things develop.

Cerdos

2006-12-20T06:46:00.000-08:00

The weather's crappy in Austin and I really don't like the holiday season - mostly I just hunker down and get through it. But this picture from Veracruz cracked me up. I wish I was there now instead of here. Via Catemaco Noticias.

In case you were wondering, cerdos is spanish for "politicans."

Abuelita's Christmas Carol

2006-12-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

I'm still excited that a theater troupe took over the old Jehovah's Witnesses building in my neighborhood at Cedar Ave. and 12th, and notice they've got a holiday play coming up Dec. 14-23 that I plan to attend, "Abuelita's Christmas Carol." (As I've mentioned previously, you gotta support them if someone is going to launch a theater company three blocks from your house and start with Ionesco.)

It's also good to see the rest of play! Theatre's season filling out. They're having auditions there tonight for another show next spring, I Am Not Tartuffe, billed as a "French-bashing American rock opera" - I'll go see the play when they perform it, but probably pass on stopping in tonight to give a reading.

A Rat Done Bit My Sister Nell, and Whitey's on the Moon

2006-12-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

So the United States has a long-time twelve-figure deficit, expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, escalating violence by drug cartels at our southern border, millions of kids have no healthcare, our schools suck, their dropouts fill the prisons, New Orleans isn't fixed yet, but the United States is going to spend the money to build a permanent station on the moon?

Does anybody else remember the Gil Scott Heron song referenced in the title? That's been running through my head ever since I first heard this ridiculous news.

Like John Timmer, I wonder what if they built the thing and nobody showed up?

Featherlite construction started

2006-12-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

I missed a recent neighborhood meeting to get more details, but they've started tearing up the Featherlite tract behind my house in East Austin this week, making way for new streets, hopefully better drainage (the area floods after a big rain) and several dozen detached condo units with shared parking. This is the view from my back deck of the recently dug up field. I walk my dogs back in that area pretty regularly, so it's a bit of a downer they're digging it all up, but since I've lived here the field's been a dump for garbage, animal carcasses, and once even a murder victim, so I don't have a major beef. Sometimes change is good.

The southernmost area of the property cannot be developed because of drainage concerns, last I heard - I'm surprised that's not true of the part they're developing now along Boggy Creek. Sometimes after it rains big sinkholes show up out of nowhere, up to 3-4 feet deep. That can't be too good for a slab foundation. The section from 14th street to 16th will become condos according to the last information I received, while the northernmost section of the tract will be some type of commercial and lots of parking.

The $64,000 question (actually a lot bigger one than that for Dellionaire landowner Tom Meredith) is whether they can find commercial tenants who want to build next to what will soon become a commuter rail station, where the train tracks cross Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Certainly the site appears more likely to develop after voters last year approved the commuter rail line that will stop right besides Meredith's property. (A cynic might note here that former Dell President Lee Walker chairs Capital Metro, the agency that proposed putting the rail stop there, but I'm sure it's just a coincidence, don't you think?) Several potential anchor tenants like H.E.B. and KLRU originally balked at building on the northern commercial end of the property.

I'm sure those who went to the neighborhood meeting got more detail -I'll try to find out a little more about what's going on and blog it soon. But I thought it was significant that after all this time - nearly two years after they originally announced they would start - construction has finally begun on the largest remaining piece of empty real estatein central east Austin.

UPDATE: A commenter who attended the meeting points to a website put up by the developer about the project, which has been labeled "Chestnut Commons."

Texas vino options expanding: Dry Comal Creek Winery makes nice Central Texas options

2006-11-26T17:43:00.000-08:00

Driving north from Boerne to New Braunfels on HWY 46, looking forward to an evening of German food and music but still with a little time to kill, Kathy and I stopped into a small Texas winery - the Dry Comal Creek winery - toward the end of the day just before closing time. We didn't intend to go there, but I was glad we did. We'd passed a non-descript sign that just said "Winery," heading onto a gravel road, and followed it down through the cow pastures until we spotted the telltale grape vines indicating we'd found the spot.

It was serendipitous we wound up there. Kathy and I had been in San Antonio earlier in the day at their monthly, last-Saturday Houston Street crafts festival. At a booth for the Poteet winery, I happened to pick up a brochure from the Texas Department of Agriculture identifying 95 separate Texas wineries primarily clusterd in four regions - in West Texas around Lubbock, in Northeast Texas from Grapevine north toward Wichita Falls, in Central Texas in the southern Hill Country (where we were), and in Southeast Texas from Bryan down to Orange near the Louisiana border. (They've actually got a great version of that brochure online, complete with links to the wineries' websites, where available. Here's another website specifically featuring Hill-Country area wineries.) When we saw the "Winery" sign we pulled out that brochure, identified which one it probably was, and decided to turn the car around.

Kathy and I chatted for quite a bit with elderly proprietor Franklin D. Houser, who started the winery in 1998. He grows Black Spanish grapes and another specialty varietal on site for blending, but like many Texas wineries buy much of their "juice" for traditional brands like Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and others from California. He said some Texas wine purists were disdainful of wines that weren't made of 100% Texas grapes, but that California had "more juice than they knew what to do with" and it was of high, consistent quality.

Houser said that importation of California grape juice was the Texas wine movement's dirty little secret, but that he saw nothing wrong with it. He just wanted to make the best wine possible, he said, whatever it took to do it. He suggested that Texas wineries claiming they didn't buy juice from brokers were probably fibbing - when a Texas heat wave kills your crop, you don't have a lot of choice if you want to stay in business. Houser said much of the skill involved in creating a good wine began after the grapes were harvested, anyway, and that since business was booming - he sold all the wine he could make - he tended to ignore his purist critics and focus on making good wine.

Astonishingly, Mr. Houser said that 90% of his wine sales were made at the winery site itself, which has a nice patio where folks can sit and taste the wares. However there are a number of Austin and other central Texas sites where you can purchase their wines. He said they sold wines to HEB stores, but only the ones that actually had their own in-house wine stewards.

When you start to sample them, there are some surprisingly good Texas wines out there. One of my favorites comes out of Lubbock: Llano Estacado Winery's "Signature Red," a nice blend that stacks up nicely alongside any red wine in its cost range, and many more expensive ones. But among Dry Comal Creek's nice array of blends and varietals, I think I found a new favorite Texas white to go with Llano's Signature Red: the Dry Comal Creek Vineyard's "Bone Dry" French Colombard, described in their brochure as "fruity, crisp, clean, smooth. Balanced on a razor's edge, incredibly delicious." That's a pretty accurate description - I thought this wine was really nice - as good a white wine as I've had for twice the money (the wines ran about $14 per bottle).

Dry Comal Creek also makes a nice Sauvignon Blanc that includes hints of citrus fruit, cherries, mango and kiwi. Even more interesting - the Fume Blanc, he said, was essentially the same wind aged for six months in Ameican oak casks. You could really taste the difference between that six months' aging and the effects of the oak on the wine's flavor. I liked them both, especially the Fume Blanc, but Kathy didn't prefer them as much as the "Bone Dry" and "Demi-Sweet" French Colombard.

We didn't try their red wines - Kathy prefers white so we focused on those. But Dry Comal Creek also offers some red wines including blends using "Black Spanish" grapes, described as "a long-neglected native grape expressed in a dry dark red, smooth, rich mellow style with character aroma and flavor not found in any other red wine."

The winery was a nice diversion on our day trip this weekend - we left the place with three bottles of the wines we most preferred, one of which we're about to have with dinner, and a couple of new wines to add to the list of regular buys. Next time you're near New Braunfels, stop in and visit them to taste their wares if you have a spare hour (or sit down on the patio and enjoy a bottle or two if you've got longer than that).

Autodidact

2006-11-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

It's true, I am an autodidact: Several items in this quiz I knew because I learned them outside of school. Truth is I didn't pay much attention in high school at all - a little more in college, though I never finished. Wonder what questions I missed? I found this quiz via Cigars, Donuts and Coffee.

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

UPDATE: Kathy got 97% right. She's obviously the brains in the family.

It's Always Christmastime for Visa

2006-11-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

The payments that we're making are the gift that keeps on taking, and leave us buried deeper every year.

- Austin Lounge Lizards

Just in time for the holidays Consumers Union has released a song and video by a bunch of talented Austinites aimed at convincing Congress to pass laws against usury. The Austin Lounge Lizards wrote and performed the catchy tune, "It's always Christmastime for Visa," and Austin's own Animation Farm did the graphics. My wife Kathy runs online promotions for Consumers Union and thought this song and video would be a good hook to help promote federal credit reform legislation that needs support. More than 25,000 people have already taken action, and you should to - go here to see the video and tell Congress you support restrictions on usurious credit card rates.

Jensen vs. DallasBlog: Should Thanksgiving be replaced with 'day of atonement'

2006-11-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

Left-wing UT-Austin Prof. Robert Jensen called on Alternet for making Thanksgiving a national day of atonement, and on DallasBlog this was received as a big joke.

I'm not a tremendous fan of Jensen's; I agree with him sometimes, but I often think he take extremist vews just for show. On the other hand he tends to expand the terms of debate and usually doesn't hurt anything, and there's that whole First Amendment thing, after all, so I don't usually let it bother me.

What I don't like, though, is when provocations offer reactionaries opportunities for backlash that they use to slam a wide variety of folks who don't agree at all with Jensen or others on the extreme left. Just as important, I also think we should be respectful of history, should view it as a teacher, not a club with which to pound our enemies. That's probably why impulse overcame wisdom and I responded to DallasBlog in the comments (somewhat) defending Jensen. Here's what I said:

Read the excellent and profoundly disturbing history "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" for a sad description of what we should atone for on Thanksgiving.

Indeed, one can view the Pilgrims as America's first illegal immigrants. Uninvited and unwanted, they entered in opposition to the residents' wishes and under the authority of no native law.

One thing I'll say for Jensen, I think most of us need more atonement, actually. One of the things I liked about Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March was that he billed it as a day of atonement, of introspection for black men, and that focus resonated and was embraced by a lot of folks, with positive results.

Pride goest before a fall, whether it's black pride, gay pride or perhaps especially, as with Thanksgiving, nationalist pride. We live in a great nation built on 400 years of slavery, genocidal extermination of its former residents, not to mention imperial military conquests that seized half the mainland territory from Mexico by force, plus a bloody Civil War that only ended after Gen. Sherman brought the phrase "total war" (read: routinizing mass war crimes against civilians) into the modern vocabulary.

We have much to be thankful for as a nation. But if our thanks aren't tinted with humility for the suffering, pain and loss which enabled our presently dominant position [in the world], such celebrations risk indulging in hubris, encouraging an unjustifiedly unexamined, rank nationalism that ill serves us, IMO.

So I don't know about a fast - I like my stuffing and pumpkin pie - but I like that somebody's reminding the public that Thanksgiving celebrates a history with very complex meanings, not just simplistic, nationalist ones. Best,

I don't agree with Jensen we need to "replace" Thanksgiving. I think it's fine to give thanks. I think giving real, earnest thanks implies the humility that Jensen wishes were more commonly expressed during the holidays. If we are truly thankful, it's because we know that we do not deserve grace but have been offered it anyway. It's because no one can repay those old debts, those sins cannot be erased, but they can be forgiven.

You can't wag your finger and lecture people into bevaving more humbly. All you can do, I think, especially for a teacher, is demonstrate such behavior yourself and hope your example inspires others.

UPDATE: More from Robbie at Urban Grounds.

Polemicist online in html

2006-11-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

This is flattering ... and a little scary. ;)

The student group UT-Watch has now posted nearly all the issues online from a short-lived (1989-'92) alternative student magazine founded by me and Tom Philpott, Jr. at UT-Austin called Polemicist. The student-written zine focused entirely on investigative reporting (by some very green student-reporters cutting their chops, I should add) about the University of Texas and its environs.

We began publishing just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but for some reason the epigraph on the masthead from Karl Marx, "A journal must have polemic, if it is to struggle," wasn't always taken in the ironic sense it was intended. The real source of the magazine's name wasn't Karl Marx, though, it was actually a George Bernard Shaw quote that I'm sure Tom remembers but I've long since forgotten.

Polemicist was a free handout in central Austin paid for 100% from advertising that maxxed out at around 15,000 circulation. However, it was published before the Internet era, so that means the UT-Watch folks (I think primarily Austin Van Zandt) had to re-type those suckers to get them into html.

Thanks Austin and UT-Watch, that's an amazing compliment that you'd think these old stories were important enough to archive online, even though part of me is a little scared to look and see what in the world I might have written as a student 16-17 years ago - and about whom. God help me ... indeed, God help us all.

UPDATE: Funny to read my collegiate writing again. Among opinions I've backed off of, somewhat, in my more moderate middle age: Against school spirit, a three tiered attack against jingoism in the young.

That means there are 155 impostors out there ...

2006-11-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

Lots of people ask if I'm related to Jim Henson, or Drew Henson the football player (no to both) and there's a Scott Henson, it turns out, who's one of the designers of X-box games (not him, either, to my knowledge). But I thought this was an interesting bit of trivia:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
156
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Carts before horses: K-State whips UT

2006-11-13T06:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, maybe I jinxed the Horns' football team speculating too soon about a possible national championship bid. No sooner had I authored that blog post than the Longhorns lost their star quarterback to injury and a tough road game to Kansas State, taking them out of national title contention.

Kathy and I went to see the movie Borat Saturday night, and when I came home during the third quarter I was surprised to find Texas and K-State tied 21-21. I was then stunned to watch the Wildcats score three times in what seemed like the next five minutes - Boom, Boom, Boom!

With Colt McCoy at the helm, the Longhorns might still have pulled it out, but the situation was too much to throw a true-freshman backup into with no preparation. I'm amazed the final score (45-42) was so close.

So no national title shot for the Horns this year. Damn it - I spoke WAAAY too soon.

I'll still be shocked if Texas doesn't win the Big XII and earn a spot in a BCS bowl game. And with all this young talent, if they can keep their stars from turning pro early, next year's team should be awesome.

UT's botched scheduling may cost Longhorns national title shot

2006-11-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

I've watched all the top college football teams except Michigan play at least once, and I'm convinced the Texas Longhorns probably have the best one loss team in college football. Quarterback Colt McCoy is loads better than he was in Texas' loss to Ohio State, and a rematch of that game with a more veteran QB would make for a great storyline. I think Texas would win.

But as this writer points out, Louisville's loss probably won't be enough to get Texas into the national championship game because Florda ranks slightly higher than us in the BCS computer polls.

Who is responsible? I think it's whoever at the UT Athletic Department decided to schedule the University of North Texas and Sam Houston State to play one of America's hottest football properties this year.

There's a lot of football left to be played, and Florida (or UT, for that matter) may not win out. But Texas is already stuck with teams like Baylor and Rice weighing down the annual strength-of-schedule meter. Why do the Longhorns schedule Division II patsies in football that harm the team in the computer rankings?

Texas does the same thing in baseball and basketball, too, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the year a tournament decides everything. In football, style points count, as does every week's opponent.

In that light, scheduling two Division II schools in a year when Texas has a real chance to repeat for a national title was a disservice to the players and team who worked so hard to earn it.

Sunk in Lucre's Sordid Charms

2006-11-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

I thought the old pictures on this site are just wonderful.

For instance, check out these playing cards:

City council approves red light camera scam

2006-11-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and that goes double for the system of cameras the City of Austin voted today to install to give tickets to red light runners.

Vendors will pay for the cameras to be installed, then take a percentage of the profits. So do you think those vendors (or the city, which anticipates a big revenue windfall) have any interest in actually reducing red light running? Not a chance - the more red lights are run, the more money they make. In other cities municipalities actually lowered the length of yellow light times in order to increase revenue.

Most studies on the subject not paid for by vendors find that the number of injury accidents stays about the same when red light cameras are installed, or sometimes increase. The state of Virginia banned municipal red light camera use because a statewide study showed they were sending more ambulances to auto accidents, not less, after the cameras were installed. Other states have followed suit.

People don't run red lights on purpose, they tend to do it by accident, and cameras won't help that.

Councilmember Mike Martinez, in particular, came off simultaneously arrogant and ignorant on the subject, declaring criticisms of the camera scheme by the ACLU central Texas chapter "not substantive," but refusing to debate the topic. Not only was he being an asshole, he was flat out wrong: ACLU presented the council with a plethora of legitimate studies and other documentation, while councilmembers (according to results from an ACLU open records request) received all their data from industry lobbyists. City staff hadn't even bothered to contact more neutral sources.

Martinez should be ashamed of himself. IMO he bared his ass and came off as though he didn't care what the facts were - he just wants the extra income. What invertebrate cowardice! If the city needs more money, show some balls and raise taxes - don't try to mulct citizens through the back door.

City Council claims that this is about "safety" are an obvious canard. The Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M says there would be a greater benefit in accident reduction - they estimate 40%, according to testimony at the hearing - simply by increasing yellow light times by one second. Another proven method is to add a visible counter to traffic signals at high-risk intersections that counts down the moments until the light changes - most red light running happens because drivers are guessing when the light will change, and the counter takes out all the guesswork, dramatically reducing accidents.

But the city isn't looking at increasing yellow light times. Why? Because it would decrease camera revenue.

This is nothing but a scam. More later on some of the legal aspects, but for now if you're interested check out past coverage of this issue from Grits for Breakfast when the matter was before the Texas Legislature.

UPDATE: See Statesman coverage and comments from the public.

Colt McCoy quickly growing into quarterback role

2006-10-29T05:39:00.000-08:00

This Houston Chronicle article gets it right. Red-shirt freshman Colt McCoy looked GREAT in UT's comeback win against a jacked up Texas Tech football team in Lubbock last night. At 21 to zip in the first quarter things didn't look so hot. But according the Houston Chronicle:

When things were coming undone in those chaotic early moments, the coach pulled the quarterback aside.
"Come here," Mack Brown told Colt McCoy. "Listen, they've got to know that you think you can win this game. They're going to be looking in your eyes."

And when Texas started its comeback, I'll be damned if you sure couldn't see it in his eyes. The game reminded me a lot of watching Major Applewhite come into his own against Oklahoma. This kid Colt McCoy, who looks like he's about 15, had never taken a snap in a college game before the start of the season. But Texas had plenty of big offensive guns to make a comeback, and when he settled down he did a great job distributing the ball to all of his different weapons. Bien hecho! Very nicely done.

It's a shame Texas scheduled Ohio State so early before McCoy gained a little seasoning. If he played OSU the way he played Tech last night, it would have been a really different game.

That said, Tech exposed Texas' inability to get to the quarterback with four pass rushers, or often even five or six. I don't know what about Tech's blocking scheme baffled the 'Horns, but it didn't look like the same group - they were often just stifled at the line. Maybe Tech's O-line is just that good. Giving Tech's hotshot pass-crazed offense time to run their routes explains the Raiders jumping out to such a big early lead, plus Tech's own QB had an amazing night.

If Texas is lucky to have enough teams ahead of them in the BCS lose and backs into a title shot, they'll have to put more pressure on the passer to beat any of the likely contenders.

Yes, America does

2006-10-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

Spin It asks if America owes the Dixie Chicks an apology? I say "Hell, yes!"

The documentary about the Chicks, titled Shut Up and Sing, opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles. (Why the hell not Austin, BTW? Fans here would have lined up for tickets around the block!) Ironically NBC won't run ads for the movie. I don't know if that makes them bigger cowards or jerks - but it amounts to a ton of free publicity and a complete affirmation of the movie's, and Spin It's, point: America owes the Dixie Chicks an apology.

Ionesco staged five blocks from home

2006-10-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

A new local Austin theater has turned the old Jehovah's Witnesses church building a few blocks from my home into a 96-seat playhouse! The Play Theatre Group has teamed up with local theater compnay the Coda Project, and also renting the facility out. They began their fall season with three Eugene Ionesco shorts. Nice!!

The theater's at 12th and Cedar Avenue, about a mile from the highway, due east from the capitol building. For the past 16 years I've lived just a few blocks away in the neighborhood right behind it.

I have to say, the transformation from church to theater is a big improvement as far as I'm concerned. We've already got lots of churches in the neighborhood, and I don't think the loss will cause the religiosity quotient to fall much.

The same couple of Jehovah's Witness ladies came by my house every year handing out literature, and they were always quite friendly. But let's face it. Would I rather have the building occupied by people who once a year send out door knockers to interrupt me while I'm watching football on the weekends to give me religious literature I don't want, or people staging Ionesco? Really there's no competition.

Last weekend I went with my friend Tracey to see the Sunday matinee while Kathy was out of town, but we could only stay for two of the three short plays. I should have written this up right after we saw them so I'd do a better job reviewing the performances; I've forgotten too many details.

The theater itself was cozy, well-designed and audience friendly, not a bad seat in the house. I thought they did a nice job with the performance space, though actors inexplicably used a trailer out back as a changing room - the church building is big enough that it seems like there should be enough space to change inside, but perhaps renovations aren't complete.

If you've never seen or read any of Ionesco's plays, you simply must attend this production to expose yourself to his wonderful absurdist humor. His genius and theatrical legacy are nothing short of a world treasure - a gift from a twisted mind that transformed modern humor as we know it, for the better, and the sillier.

That said, Coda's production was merely adequate - honestly not as finely performed as I might have hoped, but certainly good enough to make for an enjoyable Sunday afternoon. I laughed and enjoyed myself, but perhaps might have wished a bit more from the actors (the staging was sparse, so the acting is everything). None of them particularly wowed me, but neither did I find any of their performances disappointing or poor. It was their first weekend so maybe I should cut them a little slack. I'll probably even go back again to see the third play we missed. The show was well worth the $15 admission, but if you go on Thursday night it's pay what you can.

If you like theater and you like to laugh, I'd encourage you to check out the scene for yourself - the plays are funny and you'll get a chance to visit Austin's newest theater space.

So long, Jehovah's Witnesses ... Play Theatre Group, welcome to the neighborhood

Mexico blogs

2006-10-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent list of English language Mexico blogs compiled at Catemaco News. LOTS of good stuff here.

Decline in Mexican textile jobs changes face of maquiladoras

2006-10-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

"NAFTA no longer provides Mexican textiles and apparel much benefit," said the Dallas federal reserve bank last month in this interesting essay.

Competition with China for the US textile market has slashed jobs in Mexico's maquiladora industry, reports the fed, but growth in other sectors partially compensates for the difference.

Competititon with China and other US trade agreements besides NAFTA deflated post-NAFTA growth in Mexican textile jobs, says the fed. Other economic sectors, though, have replaced many of those jobs, dramatically changing the face of the maquiladora industry in the last few years:

The strongest sector has been chemicals, up 67.8 percent since January 2003, followed by services at 45.1 percent, electronics at 25.4 percent, machinery at 21 percent, furniture at 17 percent and transportation at 14.9 percent. By contrast, textiles and apparel declined 15.6 percent over the same time span.

The maquiladora sectors’ varying fortunes have geographic implications. The industry is growing in Mexican border cities that cater to mainstream U.S. manufacturers. Since January 2003, for example, maquiladora employment is up 40.9 percent in Reynosa and 25.8 percent in Ciudad Juárez. Elsewhere, border cities’ maquiladora industries have been held back by various impediments, such as infrastructure difficiencies. Matamoros’ job gains were 2.8 percent. Employment fell by 30.8 percent in Piedras Negras and 13.6 percent in Ciudad Acuña.

Those are large job growth figures for Reynosa and Juarez on either end of the Texas-Mexico border, with maquiladora jobs declining in the central section along the Rio Grande.

I learned when Kathy and I were in Mexico this summer that many maquiladora workers arrive at the border and only work in the plants there long enough to earn enough money to pay coyotes to help them cross the river. So illegal immigration has fueled low-labor costs on the border, meaning the success of the maquiladora plants can simultaneously be blamed, in part, for the failure to control immigration at the border.

On Grits for Breakfast not long ago, I quoted a spokesman for the Texas Border Coalition arguing that "the border region can no longer compete with the Pacific Rim on cheap labor, its historic competitive advantage. The border's emerging advantage compared to Asia, he said, lies in "logistics," i.e., the ability to transform the area into a transportation hub."

These employment figures seem to dispute that. Cheap labor might not benefit Mexico's textile industry as much as it once did, but the Dallas feds' stats tell me the maquiladoras will still thrive on cheap Mexican labor, and on America's failed immigration policies, for a quite a while to come.

Has neoliberalism failed Mexico?

2006-10-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Economist Brad DeLong asks if neoliberalism has failed Mexico. (UPDATE: Marginal Revolution offered additional thoughts.) My view, half-assed neoliberalism has failed Mexico.

Having traveled in Mexico quite a bit before and after NAFTA, I can tell you NAFTA has definitely succeeded in creating a more prosperous middle class there, especially in the larger cities, and this in turn has actually boosted US exports to Mexico, where trade used to be mostly the other direction.

However, other NAFTA policies weren't such a great benefit, in part because they were incomplete and skewed toward American interests. For example:

Separate rules for maquiladoras left them unregulated and a source of significant labor exploitation that contributes to border instability.

US agriculture subsidies, particularly billions subsidizing corn and soy, have virtually depopulated hundreds of Mexican farming communities, forcing millions of young men either to move to the United States to find work, or for farmers to shift to marijuana or other illicit crops to survive.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, NAFTA liberalized markets for (some) goods while failing to liberalize labor markets, which was a recipe for disaster. Markets don't respect national boundaries, so it behooves nations to create multinational structures to control them - that's especially true for the labor market.

So DeLong's incorrect, in my view, to abandon his faith in markets as a (partial) soution to Mexico's woes, though I'd argue that to be effective, neoliberal policies must be coupled with direct economic and infrastructure development assistance - essentially an industrial policy aimed at bolstering emerging industries the way we've done with high tech in the United States. That'd be better spent money than any fence. In the end, though, IMO the ultimate answers may rely on greater reliance on market solutions, or rather, solutions that respect market forces instead of ignoring the most important of them.

True Wife Confessions

2006-10-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

For any married man, this dialogue is enlightening, and a little scary.

'The people need good men': Why do we blog?

2006-10-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

"The people need good men," said Homer, smiling.

In a chapter of her debut novel, Getting Mother's Body, devoted to a monologue by preacher Roosevelt Beede, Pulitzer-winning dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks offered the best summation I think I've ever read on the struggle between participating in public, political life while maintaining one's spiritual grounding.

Roosevelt's take: Most people can't do it.

He ponders the difficulties internally as he listens to his younger cousin Homer, a wealthier, more educated man with political aspirations, driving west on I-10 during the early '60s. Set in West Texas, the novel tells the story of the family traveling to Arizona to dig up "treasure" supposedly buried with one of their kin, and Roosevelt for a time finds himself riding with Homer in his convertible during their adventure.

This particular quote from Roosevelt Beede in Parks' wonderful book has been ringing in my head, now, for a couple of months:

"The people need good men," Homer says smiling at me. And I know then that he will make a good politician, not a preacher, cause he ain't been called, but a politician, one who ain't been called but, through the force of his own personality, calls others to him. That's largely the difference. A man of God is called by God. A man of the people calls the people. Some men are called by God to lead the people. But that's rare. A man of the people thinks the people are calling him but it's just his own voice, overly loud, shouting his own name and hearing it echo back to him through the open mouths of the people, mouths open in awe and wonder watching a man shout his own name loud. A man of God has his mouth shut until God opens it, forces it open sometimes. And sometimes forces it closed.

Politicians are an easy target, and it'd be simple to focus that quote's venom on the array of stuffed shirts and fools (not exclusive categories) running for Governor, for example, and use Parks' lens to parse their motives.

But as near-daily public writers, I think bloggers dance the same line every time our fingers strike a keyboard, especially those of us blogging on political or policy topics: Is what I'm doing for me, for my own ego gratification, or is it for some higher purpose? If the latter, is that higher purpose the pursuit of truth, and if not, will the truth be compromised? Every blogger answers such questions, consciously or not, each time they sit down to write. (Parks, BTW, advocates standing while writing - "dancing," actually. She says every writer should try it once before they die.)

That said, neither can others answer those questions for the blogger - not the most sympathetic fan nor the harshest critic. One's motives are one's own and frequently more complicated, even, than the writer understands.

For people who generate as much prose as I do on Grits, writing is essentially a compulsion, if we are to be honest. Though it's not an original sentiment, I tell young folks who ask me how to write professionally that they shouldn't if they have any choice. A wise person would never undertake the task unless the compulsion to write is simply so great they cannot not write - that's the only reason to endure the negative aspects of the hazard-filled, isolating life choice that is truth-telling in print.

Parks' prose challenges us to go further, to ask, what is that compulsion's source, and is it healthy and good for everyone or indulgent and narcissistic? Is it self-promoting, or morally and spiritually grounded? A meaningless dalliance or a calling?

As "grassroots media," blogs almost by definition style themselves as the "voice of the people." But don't even, perhaps especially, the most popular bloggers risk that the people's affirmation is really "just his own voice, overly loud, shouting his own name and hearing it echo back to him through the open mouths of the people, mouths open in awe and wonder watching a man shout his own name loud"?

Some days, that's true for all of us. But I'd like to think that, on our best days, bloggers are doing something more important and better than that - providing a reflection on the world instead of a reflection, merely, of our own self-involvement.

Down on the end of the long tail where Grits for Breakfast, Huevos Rancheros and most other blogs reside, certainly there's room for many motives - to co-opt a phrase from Mao: Let a thousand flowers bloom. In one sense there are no bad reasons for blogging, but I often feel there are many unexamined ones, sometimes my own included.

Helping immigrant kids go to college

2006-10-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

See this 2-minute video about an educational forum held by the Texas Criminal Justice Coaltion's University Leadership Initative in Austin explaining to parents and high school graduates how, in Texas, children of undocumented immigrants could attend college and qualify for in-state tuition. I know most of the kids working with the University Leadership Initiative, and I'm really proud of the work they're doing.

Saints Alive! And Dead: Rafael Guizar Valencia

2006-10-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

I grew up Protestant in the Deep South, Southern Baptist, specifically, so the world of Catholic sainthood always held for me an exotic allure. As a child, I thought of saints as figures from the distant past, mysterious, alien icons that made the Catholic church seem odd and formal compared to the country-fried religion of my youth.

So I was interested when we were in Veracruz to learn one of Mexico's own will soon join the ranks of the Catholic blessed. Everywhere in the state, it seemed, Kathy and I saw images of Rafael Guizar Valencia, the former bishop about to be elevated to sainthood on Sunday. Guizar will be canonized for his work as the sometimes-exiled Bishop of Veracruz in the face of anti-Catholic persecution after the Mexican Revolution.

Huge banners featuring his image adorned the cathedral in downtown Xalapa when we were there in August, and local travel agencies were booking package trips to Rome for the occasion.

Our Spanish wasn't good enough when we were in Mexico to understand everything we saw and heard about the good bishop, so I learned more from recent news coverage than we were able to discern when we were there. Here are a few excerpts about Guizar's life from a recent article in Catholic Online ("Mexican becomes first Catholic bishop born in Americas to be named saint," Oct. 11):

In an Oct. 15 papal ceremony at the Vatican, Blessed Rafael Guizar Valencia is scheduled to become the first bishop born in the Americas to be declared a saint.
As a priest during the anti-clerical era that marked the start of the 20th century in his native Mexico, he often disguised himself as a junk dealer to bring the sacraments to both sides fighting the Mexican Revolution which started in 1910.
After the revolution when anti-clerical measures were adopted by the new government, he lived in exile in Cuba, Colombia, Guatemala and the southern United States to escape persecution. He was ordained bishop of Veracruz in absentia in 1919 while living in Havana. ...
"He lived from 1878 to 1938, and actually survived the Mexican government's persecution of Catholicism – but only barely," Anderson said in a statement.
"One anecdote about him says he returned from a mission with bullet holes in his hat and clothing," said Anderson. ...
Father Maciel has cited his great uncle, who was the brother of Father Maciel's grandmother, as an inspiration for his own priestly vocation.
Writing about Blessed Rafael, Father Maciel, now 86, told of a time when his great uncle took him for a walk in Mexico City.
"He carried an accordion, which he played very well. I had no idea what he was going to use it for. We arrived at a well-trafficked spot. He took out his accordion and began playing popular songs. People gathered around him in a circle. When the number was substantial, he put aside his accordion and began preaching (about) Christ," said Father Maciel.
Blessed Rafael was born to a wealthy family in Cotija de la Paz in the Mexican state of Michoacan April 16, 1878. In 1894 he entered the seminary of the Diocese of Zamora and was ordained a priest for the diocese in 1901.
When the Mexican Revolution started, the Catholic Church was a target of rebel forces because it was considered one of the privileged institutions that dominated society under Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. The then-Father Guizar became a target because of his defense of the church.
After the successful revolution, the new government ordered Father Guizar shot on sight and in 1915 he fled the country, entering the United States. He then moved to Guatemala, Colombia and Cuba.
Blessed Rafael returned to Mexico in 1920 as bishop of Veracruz and in 1923 joined the local Knights of Columbus council.
As church persecution continued, he founded a clandestine seminary.
"A bishop can do without a miter, a crosier and even a cathedral, but never without a seminary, because the future of his diocese depends on the seminary," he said.
Persecution of the church forced Blessed Rafael to flee Mexico again in 1927. He returned in 1929, after the church reached an accord with the government.
He became known as "the bishop of the poor" and died of natural causes June 6, 1938. Pope John Paul II beatified him Jan. 29, 1995.

More people might aspire to sainthood if you didn't have to be dead to enjoy the honor ... I'm just sayin'. ;)

UPDATE: Here's coverage of Guizar's canonization from the SA Express News and the Dallas News. More from a Veracruz-based expat blogger.

Bevo is dead

2006-10-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

Long live Bevo.

UT's longest-living rendition of its mascot, Bevo XIII, has passed away. I guess the excitement of beating OU with a freshman quarterback was too much for him.

My father was president of UT's Silver Spurs, the student group that cares for the mascot, when he was in college, so Bevo has always been a big icon in my family.

My own personal favorite Bevo memory: I vividly recall sitting in the end zone of an OU game when I was a child, probably in the late '70s - not great seats, but right next to where the Spurs were maintaining the steer. A Sooner fan crept up and threw crimson paint on Bevo right in front of where my family was seated. The Silver Spurs in response beat the living crap out of the man until police ran from their posts to intervene. By the time they got there the Spurs had really worked the guy over, and the cops dragged the poor Okie away, bleeding and cursing.

You don't mess with Bevo.

Hook 'em.

Agua de Horchata ... in Austin!

2006-10-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

Kathy just got back with a batch of breakfast tacos from El Chilito on Manor Road, and in addition to the tacos she brought us each home an agua de horchata, a rice-based drink we had frequently in Mexico that I described in this Huevos Rancheros post. Here's a recipe I found for the drink online.

El Chilito's version was a little sweeter and heavier on the vanilla than the agua de horchata we had in Mexico, but tasty, still.

It's really cool to me that so many dishes from the Mexican interior are becoming available now in Texas - one of the many benefits, IMO, to the current immigration boom.

Dixie Chicks movie out soon

2006-10-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've been a Dixie Chicks fan since they were a local Austin band and Natalie Maines was still in high school up in Lubbock. For my tastes, I liked their album Home more than their most recent offering, Taking the Long Way - Home really let the girls' instrumental lights shine, and I thought Natalie Maines vocals were given greater range in the album's arrangements and song selection. But even their average performances stand out, to me, as among the best in country music.

The Chicks have a documentary coming out soon called Shut Up and Sing! that focuses on the controversy surrounding Maines' criticisms of President Bush. See the trailer here. They also recently performed and were interviewed on Bill Maher's Amazon Fishbowl; go here to watch that video.

I'm a little tired of that particular controversy, but I'll probably go see the movie. I'd listen to the Chicks sing the phone book. Plus I'm not a huge fan of Dubya nor the Iraq war myself. To me, the boycott of the Chicks by country music radio stations and death threats from irate fans was real low point for free speech in America - the Chicks really got an up-close-and-personal view of this nation's dark, nativist underbelly. But their celebrity also caused the incident to get overblown beyond its real importance - while their victimization got them a Rolling Stone cover and likely boosted album sales, Muslims targeted for sneak and peek searches under the Patriot Act, for example, or abuses at Guantanamo had a lot harder time getting on the national radar screen.

From a musical perspective, I'd like to see the Chicks go back to Maines' father Lloyd, himself a Texas music legend, to produce their next album. That collaboration on Home, for my money, really generated something special and fun.

The Hoffbrau

2006-10-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent local blog piece on Austin's Hoffbrau restaurant. I sent it to my father, who fondly and frequently recalls courting my mother on dates at the Hoffbrau in the early '60s. Neither he nor I ever knew the chain was unaffiliated.

Writer Kramer Wetzel nails what's special about the place: Doing one thing and doing it well.

Come home to the armadillo ... in Veracruz

2006-10-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article about a professional boxer I've seen on HBO before, Cruz Carbajal, who it turns out lives and trains in Veracruz, Mexico. That'll get me to take an extra interest next time I see him. The article's lede describes the prize fighter's odd training and diet regimen:

Former WBO bantamweight champion Cruz Carbajal (26-13, 22 KO’s) chases armadillos to help keep fit when he’s back home in Veracruz, Mexico. “It’s great exercise, I go out with a net and a flashlight, I catch them and bring them home,” said Carbajal from his training camp now located in San Diego, California. Unfortunately for the armadillos, Carbajal also claims that they’re good eatin’. “It’s good for you. I also hunt rabbits and do a lot of fishing. In fact most of my diet consists of different kinds of fish, shrimp and an occasional armadillo,” says Carbajal. It’s all part of Carbajal’s Spartan lifestyle that currently keeps him at a walking around weight of about 125 pounds.

He'd better not eat any American armadillos while he's training in San Diego - a lot of them have rabies in the US, I understand.

Poverty explains Carbajal's many losses, says the writer. "Carbajal is one of many fighters who made a habit of taking fights on short notice, in opponents’ backyards, and even when he’s not at his healthiest. Carbajal, like the rest of us, needs to make money and the cash was usually too good to resist when called in as a late minute, replacement fighter. 'Those losses came early in my career. I was fighting for the money. It made sense to take the better purses during those times,' he explained."

Maybe so, but he's a big-leaguer now. Even if he's still chasing armadillos for exercise.