editor

What happens when you crash a 1959 car into a 2009 car? The 2009 car wins.

In reviewing what I've written above, I can see that I've offended some people and may have crossed a line I don't yet see. I've sent e-mails to the moderators asking them what they think of it and what action should be taken. I will abide by their decision.

He means that the long-time bullies who thought they could get away with anything are learning that they have to play by the same rules as everyone else. I'm not saying that RedScare is a bully. I always just thought of him as a very strong-minded person who was committed to what he believed. I guess I was mistaken. For which part?

This from the man who stated over and over on HAIF that he didn't care what people thought of what he wrote back when the negative rating system was in place. I guess he can dish it out, but can't take it. Sorry I didn't realize your skin was so thin that when someone challenges your bullying you turn opossum.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive. I'm just tired of the "can't do" attitude that pervades, and I don't mind calling people out on it. Most Texans of today are standing on the shoulders of giants. They puff out their chests and talk about how proud they are to be Texans, but what exactly have they contributed to Texas?

Which one of them doesn't care about animals?

So... do you have anything to actually contribute to this thread, or are you just going to be a sarcastic jerk? Were you able to tell who introduced the rider? Is that the right term?

I think the lesson that citykid is learning here is that the age of dreamers and doers in Houston is over. There will never again be a massively audacious project like the Astrodome or Johnson Space Center, or Chase Tower again in Houston because anyone with a vision or an idea will be shouted down by the "not my tax dollars" and "show me a study" and "I don't want no outsiders in here" crowd. The age of big Texans with big plans is over. Now Houston is being run by armchair cowboys who drive around in SUVs criticizing other people who actually want to make the city better. They are happy to let Houston slide toward backwater status long as they have a cold beer and memories of their high school football days. What's good enough for them should be good enough for everyone else, because they are the example of the perfect human form in mind and body, and are superior to all. Citykid, I think you no longer have to wonder why talented people move out of Houston. King of the Hill has been cancelled. But the do-nothing "yup" alley loafers live on in Houston.

BARC Announces Facilities Improvement Plans The City of Houston's Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care today announced plans for a proposed $3.3 million renovation of its current facility. "We are committed to progress at BARC and these plans, coupled with changes we are making in how the facility operates, will help make a positive difference," said Elena Marks, Director of Health and Environmental Policy in the office of Mayor Bill White, who is helping direct the reorganization of BARC. The existing BARC facility, at 3200 Carr in the Fifth Ward, includes two kennel buildings completed in 1990 (North) and 2004 (South). The property also includes an administration building and a warehouse. The proposed renovation plan calls for: (1) replacing the kennels in the North building with a new facility similar to the South building, with 200 appropriately sized cages; (2) adding a new modular facility for cat housing and renovating the first floor of the North building to include cat "condos"; (3) renovating and enlarging the surgery area in the North building to enable a higher volume of spay/neuter services (up to 50/day); and (4) improving public access by adding a new public parking area. Some $3.3 million has been secured in the City's CIP (Capital Improvements Plan) to fund the work. The new modular facility for cats will be in place within 30 days, and the construction of the remaining improvements is expected to be under way in June 2010. To see preliminary drawings of the proposed renovations, go to http://www.houstontx.gov/barc/renovation.pdf. BARC also plans to construct a new facility, to be named the Ann Young Animal Center, including an adoption program, a veterinary clinic and a dog park in Gragg Park, 2999 South Wayside at Wheeler. This facility will be made possible in large part by the generous bequest left to BARC by Ann Slemons Young, who died in 2007. Her dream was for BARC to have a state-of-the-art adoption facility to enhance the ability to find homes for the 25,000+ dogs and cats brought to BARC each year. The preliminary plans call for a 30,000-square-foot building and the dog park on a 5.5 acre tract across the road from the Houston Parks and Recreation Department offices. More details about this proposal will be announced at a later date.

I was just in Seattle recently, and surprised by the mindshare that Alaska Airlines has in that market. Alaska has its own security lines at SEA for regular shuttle customers as well as first class and frequent flyers. When I was booking my hotel and giving my flight information to the clerk to hold the room for late check-in (red eye flight), he assumed it was an Alaska Airlines flight. When I told the shopgirl at Nordstrom to run my check card as credit not debit so I'd get (American) miles, she said, "I've never seen a blue Alaska card before." I don't remember Continental in Houston or United in Chicago or even Northwest in the Twin Cities having such top-of-mind recall. I'm not sure where it comes from because there wasn't all that much Alaska Airlines advertising around that I noticed.

But that's where you run into the flocks of NIMBYs. Or at it's core: "What's in it for me?"

Find a way to encourage restaurants and mom-and-pop retail shops to locate near the stations. Use the rail line to turn that corridor into a shopping and entertainment district. Maybe pick a theme for it. Little Guadalajara, or maybe something easier for Gringo tourists to spell.

Actually, the ozone layer is getting better. In fact, the ozone layer is getting much better much faster than scientists predicted, which means the scientists don't really understand how it works. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/26may_ozone.htm?list832167 http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM6MD7H07F_index_0.html (I think that's the first time I've linked to a .int domain)

The writer lives in Houston, not London. You see, large media companies have these things called "reporters" that sometimes go places. Sometimes they even live and work in other cities so they can know what things are like from an insider's point of view and correspond that information. They're called "correspondents." When there's a bunch of them together they can sometimes form a "bureau." it's all very technical. Or you could just have read the very first line underneath the headline.

Oh. My. Goodness. <embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/716758716" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="videoId=42889665001&playerId=716758716&viewerSecureGatewayURL=https://console.brightcove.com/services/amfgateway&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http://admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=false&" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="486" height="412" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed>

Good historical note there. I read about this in a few books about the elder Daley. Before Hollywood was what it is today, Chicago was America's second-biggest movie making city, after New York. But Richard J. Daley hated celebrities and the idea of fame, and so it made it incredibly hard for films to be made in Chicago. Virtually none were made during his 21 years running the city. The movie companies moved to California, and the rest is history. When his successors came into office, they actively courted Hollywood studios and it's the reason so many movies have been made in Chicago since -- from The Blues Brothers and Ferris Beuler's Day Off to Home Alone and National Lampoon's Vacation to the last two Batman films, and hundreds more. I read an article in the paper when I first moved to Chicago about the long-term economic impact of all those 1980's movies that were filmed in the city. The value at the time they were shot was in the mere tens of millions, but when quantified as long-term publicity the figure was close to a billion dollars in economic impact. Today the old movie studio buildings in the South Loop are mostly converted into lofts and restaurants now. Most people who live in them don't even realize that they're living in a building where the modern entertainment industry was born. So, in short -- It's not possible to fully quantify the economic impact of the entertainment industry on a city based on the money given and received in the short term. It's like planting a tree. It may cost you 50 bucks up front, but if tended to properly it will yield thousands of dollars worth of fruit over its lifetime.

Doesn't sound all that different than how the average Houstonian lives. Wake up in air conditioned house. Get in car in air conditioned garage. Drive air conditioned car to parking garage. Work in air conditioned building. Return to air conditioned car. Return to air conditioned garage and home. Rinse. Repeat. Wipe hands on pants. Let us know when you get those answers. Wait... you are going to find out, aren't you? Or are you just making rhetorical statements? I see you've never paid a Houston summer air conditioning bill. So, because Houston excels at just one specific type of pollution, it's not polluted?

It wasn't closed that long for the last demolition. Maybe they're worried about debris on the tracks or maybe they have to take down the overhead wires or something.

This just in:

I'd assume that people coming into the United States via this proposed light rail line would be screened at the border by ICE. The people you're worried about are walking or swimming over, not paying for a ticket on a train.

Maybe Houston shouldn't try to be an American entertainment hub. Maybe it should try to be a Central and South American entertainment hub. Make it attractive for the Mexican, Brazillian, Argentinian, and other entertainment companies to have offices and production facilities in Houston. To someone watching TV in a village in Chile, Houston might be close enough to Hollywood to add a little glamor.

Well put. If you ask the average Houstonian if he would like to see $100 million spent on widening the Southwest Freeway, or $100 million given in tax breaks to Hollywood, I bet 90%+ would pick the freeway.

Not work. Money. Match the tax breaks and incentives that Vancouver offers and you'll have Hollywood racing down I-10 to set up shop in Houston. The production studios will do the work for us. Hollywood would find it easier in terms of visas and customs and immigration a lot of other hassles to head down I-10 to Houston instead of up I-5 to Vancouver. Houston wouldn't even have to beat Vancouver's offer -- just match it. The savings in time and money and hassle from doing it in the same country would be incentive enough to switch to Texas. A teleport is a large facility with the ability to beam TV and radio signals to satellites. Back in the 70's and 80's these were very rare and massively expensive. It used to be that if you had a TV station in say... Houston... that you wanted to put on a satellite full-time, you'd lease a dedicated line from AT&T between your station and the nearest teleport in say... Tulsa. When your signal got to Tulsa it would go up to an east coast satellite and a west coast satellite, and from there down to the entire continent. For decades it was the best way to distribute a signal nationally. With changes in technology, teleports are not as necessary as they used to be since you can uplink pretty good quality video from a transmitter in a mini van these days. Changes in technology also made it cheaper for individual companies to build their own teleports, rather than rely on an outside service. For example, DirecTV has at least two to constantly feed its satellites. But some companies still rely on the teleports because they're super high quality, super reliable, secure, and it's sometimes easier and cheaper to outsource something like that. I saw a national cable channel install a new transmitter a couple of years ago, and they're still using a massive six meter wide dish because of the low power required (probably around eight watts) and high quality. Houston has three teleports, but they're somewhat different than what we're talking about here. The Houston ones are designed for oil and gas exploration and marine support services, not broadcasting. I've heard people mention this, but I don't know it personally. My understanding is that it's just a master control facility. I would guess that the programs come in from the 20 or so regional Fox Sports cable channels to the Woodlands facility (likely by VYVX) and the computers in The Woodlands insert the commercials and squirt the signals up to the satellite for distribution. The Woodlands (or really anywhere in eastern Texas) is a good location for this because you can hit both the eastern and western satellites. In case you aren't aware, you need two satellites to cover CONUS (the continental United States). Or in the case of Fox Sports, they're probably just sending the east regional feeds to an eastern satellite and the west regional to a western satellite. By doing all of the networks in one location, it helps reduce costs. Computers are cheap. People are expensive. You can have 10 people in the Woodlands do the work of 200 people across a dozen cities. I don't know why The Woodlands was chosen specifically. It would be equally easy to set up in Dallas or Kansas City or Chicago or Minneapolis or any centrally located city. Heck, if I was going to do it I would put it in Tulsa since that's where most of the TV fiber in America goes through anyway. What you're seeing is the legacy of Randy Michaels. He's the person people love to hate for turning tiny CitiCasters into Jacor into the beast that became Clear Channel and ate radio as we knew it. He did a lot of things that people hate him for in terms of radio. But the man was an absolute visionary. He wasn't (and still isn't) afraid to spend money on computer hardware if it will solve a wetware (human) problem. He saw the possibilities of using technology to consolidate redundancies 20 years before anyone else did. I worked for his company when I was in Cincinnati. I didn't understand what he was doing then. I understand it now. I think he'll get his own chapter in the business textbooks of the future. Today, Randy is trying to work the same trick he did with radio with the newspaper industry. I suspect he has some new tricks up his sleeves, though. His biggest problem will be the unions. I've heard people on HAIF mention hip hop music out of Dallas, but I've never heard of it anywhere else. NY, Atlanta, LA. Occasionally Detroit. Never Dallas. But then, I don't listen to hip hop music so I'm hardly an expert in these sorts of things (my current musical fix: http://www.kdfc.com )

Wait... we're exporting terrorists to Mexico now?