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luciaphile

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Everything posted by luciaphile

  1. I'm sorry, The Niche, when you're taking it on the chin in that other thread for coming to the defense of the possibly-fake Asian landlord guy with the not-yet-finely-tuned sense of how, when, and, crucially, whether to invoke race -- but I'm going to drop the "envelope of politeness" (your locution) and slip into something more comfortable: I detest your farfetched (Dallas voluntarily elects to shutter one of the busiest airports in the world?!) vision, and the attitude toward rural Texas implicit in it, and all in the service of making Austin grow and grow. Why would we want to do that? Reading it made me unhappy in a wish-I-was-never-born kind of way, which only happens a few times a month. But I wouldn't like to be accused of negativity for not proffering something else instead. (Trying hard to think of my own vision, when actually I'm really super-excited about leaving things the way they are.) Got it. Let's make the spaceport they're planning at Boca Chica, the one on the inholding in the refuge, a super-airport serving a reunified Texas and Mexico and ... the galaxy! Our ideas are about on par -- in fact, mine is a step or two closer to fruition.
  2. I'm afraid that was a yuletide loss leader, Samagon. Well, my hands are clean. I neither drive a Lexus nor need a waffle iron. I already have one. It was a wedding present to my parents in 1961. There's a picture of the gifts laid out on card tables covered with a white damask tablecloth, so the bride's mother's friends could come by and admire them -- a quaintly aspirational middle-class custom, obsolete, because, all evidence to the contrary, we no longer care about stuff. It turns out a good waffle. I recently scrubbed the irons and reseasoned them in the oven, though, and I think that was a mistake: it actually worked better with 50 years' worth of crud. I admit, my fellow travelers haters Wal-mart disdainers disappoint me with their fixation on the least distinguished aspect of the situation. Guys, ya gotta represent!
  3. Except when they are not: http://www.nytimes.c...wanted=all&_r=0 One need not read it all the way through to know they must have been driven mad with hunger. Same thing with the fracas over the $2 waffle irons: http://www.huffingto..._n_1113293.html Give a man a cheap teflon waffle iron, and teach him to beat egg whites to stiff peaks, then gently fold them in with the other ingredients -- he'll never be hungry again. This looks bad: http://edition.cnn.c...ents/index.html ... but again, the virtuous poor were made "desperate" by retailers and their tricks, according to the psychologist. And I think in 2012 we can all agree to define the Four Freedoms upward to include freedom from: wanting the latest game console and not having it.
  4. I just remembered it wasn't a Weingarten's at all - it was a Lewis & Coker. My memory has never been sharp. Sorry, carry on.
  5. Re post #40: harsh. I worked at Weingarten's for a little while when the store was really on its last legs. For a place that was struggling, it did seem to do as much as possible to discourage commerce. The particular women I worked with liked to tell me about their lives. They seemed to have entered on a career as checkers after their "titty dancing" days were over (that was how they repeatedly styled it in conversation, I would have been happy with "exotic dancers.") I was unused to being on my feet all day as they were and once fainted dead away. They were very kind to me. All you obsessively grocery-shopping guys would not have liked Weingarten's -- it was pretty much the opposite of Walmart. Mind, I've long since mastered the art of offering sweet, smiling, and where necessary obsequious 'customer service,' but in retrospect I find Weingarten's disinterest in it hugely appealing.
  6. Oh, I can answer that! It's elitism, yes, I've acceded to that elsewhere; and also this: "I wouldn't particularly like to shop there, and doing so will cost more than shopping at HEB." {It's our greedy, sharp, smallminded recall for prices, for tiny little sums, that makes women so successful on "The Price is Right."} But it's a serious charge -- though made with so little provocation nowadays, and so frequently -- that of being a hater. I would like to learn the trick -- comes natural to so many, if they are to be believed, if it is not "part of their carefully constructed image" -- of loving an amorphous group of people unknown to me, and the corporation (yes, "people too," I know) that is said to serve them so well. Your damnable bridge has brought to mind the story that famously begins-- On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below...and closes: But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.Perhaps if I pretend to subscribe to that, I'll start to feel the love, for you, for the babies, for Bill Simon, for the weekenders, for seven billion souls. Why, I think my heart just 'grew three sizes.'
  7. Thank you for not posting a video. I used to love Ma and Pa Kettle movies, but I'm pretty sure it's one of those things where I would not now understand why I found them so funny. At least the Little Rascals hold up. I think. The Apple Dumpling Gang does not, sadly.
  8. But however Machiavellian it may be, you have to appreciate his unusual gift of insight - to have noticed that people tend to shop on payday (!), and to recognize that this is a completely new phenomenon, and to posit that Walmart is thus all that stands between these folks and the abyss. One may as well profit from alleviating misery as anything else, and get credit for it. And the more women who pick up formula at Walmart the better, because they forgo the natural birth control associated with breastfeeding: more hungry mouths, more government transfers!
  9. Was that Walmart CEO hired for his excellent fearmongering skills? It totally worked. The thought of all those babies eating cat food toward the end of the month is alarming, especially when it would be so easy for their non-breastfeeding mothers to sign up for WIC: http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/ Wikipedia: Currently, WIC serves 53 percent of all infants born in the United States. Bit if not enough people are finding it, perhaps Wal-mart with its greater reach should administer the program - as it is probably receiving a good percentage of those WIC and SNAP dollars anyway.
  10. I'm that possibly rare specimen, a repeat Houston tourist. When I am there I am regularly taken to Astros games, once in a while to a Rockets game, Rice baseball game; Bayou Bend for the azalea trail and the decorative arts, the art museum (especially for traveling Tut/Pompeii, and that tunnel), and the natural history museum (especially for anything terra-cotta warrior/Titanic, and the minerals and the malacology). I go to the zoo every two or three years. I feel sure I've been to the planetarium more recently than any of you. I saw some smashed-up cars in the Menil one time. I used to walk around the Arboretum until all the privet began to oppress me. I have toured the Heritage Society homes downtown. I have actually attended the quilt show. I've seen the Houston Ballet dance "The Nutcracker" at least five times. I've been dragged to the Alley Theatre ("You're not even dressed yet?!") I've watched the rodeo and been to the fat stock show much more often than I really deserved to. I'm pretty sure I've eaten lunch next to a shark tank in a downtown "aquarium." Yes, I have trod the Discovery Green. I also go to the dentist. When I saw those renderings, I felt that coldness Harry Potter experienced when the Dementor attacked him. Pretty much drained of all hope, as if there were no light in all the universe, and the possibility of happiness closed off forever. (When I looked away, it was fine.) Dead-zone surface parking lots are pregnant with possibility by comparison. And, oh yes, The Niche, I have even attended a flower show at the fuddy-duddy garden center you don't like in Hermann Park!
  11. My eyes passed over that incorrectly the first time, to my great confusion, for some reason substituting "industrialized" for "developed" and missing the liberalized trade policies. If only we could have a post-industrial do-over of the 20th century with those liberal trade policies in place. Not entirely sure all would be smooth sailing between China and Japan, even so. Has the post-industrial period been long enough to have that predictive value? Have we reached the end of history? I always read the last page of a book first, so I'm glad to have witnessed it. I suppose damage to the planet -- or I'll phrase it as a loss of "information" to avoid connoting Romanticism in any way -- is "necessary" to some (particularly economists?), and the horrors of the recent past do furnish a convenient misdirection in discussions of how the world might best modernize, and what's at stake. Moot, since it will not be up to us, unless we think of some way to influence the process; and we are not torpedoed, from doing so, at home.
  12. That sounds lovely, if only everyone drove Tata Nanos. As things stand, it seems like asking the poor to accept a very dangerous mission in the service of social engineering. According to P.J. O'Rourke, the Tatas don't do too well versus cows, or other Tatas or even perhaps bicycles, on the Grand Trunk Road (my apologies for the dorky website): http://casnocha.com/...ourke_on_i.html I myself recklessly drive a Nissan Versa. (A wrecked rental-fleet Nissan Versa from Carmax! it is definitely not for "Car and Driver"-types, but I love it, and it's not really all that little. It gets about 40 mpg.) Momentarily moving off to the siding of the train thread -- I don't think it will be Tata Nano Month in Texas any time soon. In India, yes, every month: In 2005, Indian vehicles released 219 million tons of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. By 2035, that number is projected to increase to 1,467 million tons, due largely to the expanding middle-class and the expected rise of low-cost cars, according to the Asian Development Bank.If only I could convert things into percentages (Barbie: "Math is hard!") I think that would sound like a lot! But I guess it would just reinforce Americans' irrelevance to something that is irrelevant to you, The Niche. The above was from an outdated 2008 USA Today article linked to here: http://www.nationalr...greg-pollowitz# Sorry the figures aren't current, but what you had written about the Tata Nano had a slight post-Buckley National Review tang to it, so that's where I went looking.
  13. in my town, I don't think our transit system has to fund roads, but it is responsible for some portion of sidewalk construction, I guess on the assumption that pedestrians could only ever be en route to a bus stop. Here, the intractable point of contention is the "paratransit" door-to-door van service it must offer various groups, which apparently accounts for 20% of its operating budget. Is this not an issue in Houston because of your much bigger scale?
  14. Are not many luxuries - that is to say, other people's priorities -- "foisted upon one by government?" RandomIy: I choose to live without medical care but I see that it's something that other well people very much enjoy, and government spending on "health care" reflects that. Some people enjoy the luxury of bass fishing in a reservoir, and God knows the state of Texas facilitates it. For myself I would enjoy having the bottomland back. When the little guy went to kindergarten, I wished he could come home at noon. But the schoolday went to three, and I understood that this was long-since instituted as an aid to working women, and a school district would be thought backwards if it did not offer full-day kindergarten; still, in this relatively affluent area, it was a luxury, and not one that I sought. Rail fails for most of you on a number of counts, I realize, but this zero-sum argument eludes me.
  15. I agree. Our Tonka trucks are ready to go to work. (Lifting little front-end loader up and down.) And being children, so inherently pragmatic, we aren't waiting for some government entity to reform itself first, or for funding to be secured. It seemed entirely worthwhile to risk people's displeasure and slip out of bed on weekdays pre-dawn (no clock - just those amazing circadian rhythms!) and move through a cold, dark house to turn on the TV -- and bleary-eyed watch "Speed Racer" with your face about a foot from the screen because you couldn't turn the volume up. But then, years later, those Thomas videos, skillfully deployed, earned you another blessed 39 minutes of sleep, and the fact that they were narrated by your second-favorite Beat-le and then by George Carlin gives them a slight edge. Team Trains!
  16. Among Jonathan Franzen's recently collected essays in "Farther Away" (the title story refers to the remote island of Masafuera to which he retreats to scatter David Foster Wallace's ashes) the best is called "The Chinese Puffin," after a golf club cover his Portland-dwelling brother has given him. He is not an avid golfer and at first doesn't even realize it is a golf club cover, but becomes attached to it nonetheless. His brother invites him to Oregon to play golf, and Franzen describes self-consciously (well, everything he does is done self-consciously) squeezing past the working-class riders on the Portland Metro (Tri-Met?) with his golf clubs in tow. This is a shameless plug for Jonathan Franzen, whose nonfiction (not the novels!) I adore; and when he arrives in China the piece becomes very funny, and if you chance to be interested in the welfare of birds very, very sad. It first appeared in the New Yorker, which used to be easy to link to, but now it has a seemingly impregnable paywall. Sorry. As you were, back to trains.
  17. Just cleaning out my Walmart file: Maybe Walmart needs a private police force to deal with its own damn loss-prevention: http://usnews.nbcnew...-daughters?lite It's 2 AM, Do You Know Where Your Toddler Is? Walmart! http://www.statesman...en-2295603.html Someone brought a gun to a crowbar fight -- the excellent lighting of the Walmart parking lot giving them an immediate advantage: http://www.statesman...ng-2438491.html Woman stops to render aid, but just runs into all-night Walmart first: http://www.statesman...ogs_the_blotter The art is Proudly Made in the USA, like Daddy's pickup: http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all Alice Walton, NIMBY-ist -- she doesn't like those airboats running up and down the Brazos. Spooks the horses: http://www.arktimes....-than-air-boats
  18. Sigh. Back to "Anything at All." I wish I could post in the regular thread with the other kids.
  19. Replied in Anything You Want, lest I try the moderator's patience.
  20. I think It is important to distinguish between Romanticism as an artistic movement, rather lovely, and as the precursor of a political movement, rotten from the very beginning. It doesn't make sense to pass moral judgment on the former, even if some very nasty characters listened to Beethoven and thought they heard departed giants striding the earth. I have never grasped or wanted to grasp why Hitler looked to northern India for the origin of his Teutonic tribe. One should always be on guard when somebody exalts the volk. Same with Tolstoy and his feeling for the Russian peasantry, by all accounts the most depraved people that ever lived, known mainly for their proficiency in wife-beating and anti-semitism. They didn't survive modernity, though. An interesting book on the subject of invented history, by the way, is "The Myth of Scotland," by Hugh Trevor-Roeper. Caveat: he really loathed Scots - I'm not sure why. But I don't think that rural Texans resisted the Trans-Texas Corridor out of a romantic impulse in remembrance of their lost folkways. That said: I don't find "local traditions" ersatz at all. Despite our ever-increasing homogenization, regional differences persist in Texas (or so it seems to a city-dweller). East Texas, in particular, remains distinct, and not well-known to the rest of the state. It's true it has lost its "gracious Southern" air. Central Texas retains a residual German tidiness. West Texas has always seemed to me to have the easiest melding of Anglo and Mexican. If I find in a central Texas cemetery plot, among headstones invoking Gott, a grave outlined with rocks or shells, I think: East Texas. People's names: in West Texas women are much more likely to be named some feminization of their daddy's name: Danna, Glenna, Steva. Or ending in -dora or -lee, but rarely a Southern double name. The barns, even the various types of joints of wooden buildings are indicative of the provenance of their builders. A wonderful UT professor and German Texan named Terry Jordan wrote several books on this subject. Not "of concern" or interest, by fiat, The Niche, I know, I got it.
  21. I was actually hoping The Niche would go all macro on me, but he obstinately stuck to small ball instead. I have now been convinced that from the point of view of the government in whose gift is a four-lane road with a divided median and a Bucee's, or whatever -- it makes no difference who gets the Bucee's and whether that road goes through one town or the other. I'm not sure I would have necessarily thought it did and it is not precisely what I was wondering about, but it is good to have empirical proof of it nonetheless. I assume it was also his backhanded way of telling me my question made no sense. And also of the Law of Conservation of The Niche and luciaphile, that whatever he regards with sanguine approval, I will probably consider a disaster. Still, his posts are engaging, if not directly engaging, and I am now invested enough in the pretend scenario to hope that the Bucee's will cause the tax-o-meter in the pretend town to spin backward and that the people there will be rewarded with tax rebates in the form of beaver nuggets, and that they wil share their bounty with the other town, the one that was spared not awarded the Bucee's.
  22. No doubt you could construct a truth table to establish the validity of what you've said here, and I'm no logician and couldn't hope to dispute it; but I'm confused about the composition of the "many" -- travelers -- whose interests are held captive. Why privilege travelers over other "manys"? Such as the set of property owners: is it not in the collective best interests of that many, so defined, for governments to struggle to exercise their power of eminent domain? It may be obvious that my concern for the many is provisional. It goes to the core of my few convictions that what is worth preserving is generally not in the hands of the many.
  23. When may we expect Peak Eggs? And when will Peak Omelette-Cliches be?
  24. I was thinking how we used to be styled Houston Lee to distinguish us from Baytown Lee and San Antonio Lee and all the other Lees; and that it was an interesting locution given Sam Houston's and Robert E. Lee's differing allegiances during the war. I was searching for more about their relationship when I found this, from the Washington and Lee website: http://leearchive.wl.../rister/10.html I had not realized Lee was still stuck in Texas, feeling his career stagnate there, at the time of secession. He was stationed at Mason, which he described as a "desert of dullness." (I wonder if he ever checked out the bat cave on the little James River.) He was very conflicted, when he was recalled to Washington, convinced his future lay with Virginia, though the dissolution of the Union was what he had feared most. Evidently when he got to San Antonio, in his federal officer's uniform, the secession-mad Texans gave him a hard time and demanded he take a stand right then and there, which, according to the above, he considered a "great impropriety." Nevertheless he changed into civilian garb to appease them. I had not heard this story. He had been reading the Life of Washington that year and had written to his wife: “I will not permit myself to believe,” he declared, “till all ground for hope is gone, that the work of his noble deeds will be destroyed, and that his precious advice and virtuous example will soon be forgotten by his countrymen.” There can have been fewer military men more reluctant, initially anyway, about the wisdom of their cause. They can lose the battle flag - surely they already have, I don't care about that - but I am embarrassed the school district took the strange half-measure of removing the "Robert E". from the name of my benighted school. I would just as soon they had stuck with "Yes! Academy."
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