Highway6

I never set boundaries. Look, i don't see why it's so unreasonable to consider that the farther away a tourist attraction is away from the nearest mass of people, transportation services, accommodations, etc, the more likely it is that visitor counts are going to suffer both from locals and out-of-towners. You though, are bringing in drive views, smells, and non-POIs as your counter. Like I said.. I'm staying the heck away from your fruit salad.

JSC and SCH may barely be within the Houston city limits of your "town", but SJM certainly isn't.. your boundaries are arbitrary. Why stop there.. the "state" encompasses Big Bend ... so visitors to Texas, staying in Houston, should have no problem visiting Big Bend, i guess. Your fruit classification system is disturbing. Tourist attraction: a place of interest where tourists visit, typically for its inherent or exhibited cultural value, historical significance, natural or built beauty, or amusement opportunities. In this case.. SCH, SJM, MFAH, Zoo.. they're all fruit. The only difference between your apples and oranges is the distance from the population center of your "town".... which happens to be the exact difference I'm trying to highlight as one reason for crappy visitor counts. But HCAD... That's offering up Haggis or something. Note to self: If Niche ever offers to make you a Fruit Salad, just walk away.

You're being very obstinate, amigo. Please find an article showing how poorly rated the Houston Zoo should be .. otherwise you really aren't contributing here. My wife wanted a Zoo pass for her last birthday.. we've been 4-5x since last summer.. I think it's great.

A ) HCAD is halfway between the 2 loops, 8 miles outside of town.. relative to the 3 "tourist attractions" previously mentioned, I would easily consider it centrally located so as a data point, it could only help. B ) I'm glad I'm not one of your out of town guests if HCAD is where you take them for a good time. Should I consider my local Fiesta and BoA as data points in this discussion as well ?

I know.. i specifically said that. My point in including them was to show that due to a central location, our generic zoo and museum gets significantly more visitors that our "tourist attractions" That being said.. I was pleasantly surprised by our Zoo and museum visitation numbers...I was expecting one of the most popular museums in the most popular tourist city in the US to average way more than 2x the visitors of our MFAH...

Well.. like I said, as far upstream as possible. I think if it had been located anywhere inside 610 it would be drawing significantly more visitors and locals. I'm not saying the joint experience isnt fine and dandy.. but most visitors must not agree considering for every 3.5 people visiting the SJ monument, only 1 is also visiting Battleship Texas. 70k a yr just seems really pathetic.

I couldn't decide which thread to put this in.. so I'll just link to it here... but I pulled the visitor counts for various Houston and other tourist attractions to build the case for why SCH should have considered opening a satellite facility for the Shuttle in our Museum District.

The "No Shuttle For You" thread made me curious about how many visitors some of our top tourist attractions get. Space Center Houston gets 750,000 a yr according to their Bring the Shuttle home literature. San Jacinto Monument gets 250,000 a yr according to their Wiki page. Battleship Texas gets a meager 70,000 a yr according to this Chron article discussing the merits of moving it to Galveston. Houston Zoo - 1 million per year. Houston Natural Science Museum - 2 million per year. Houston Museum of Fine Arts - 2.5 million per year. Some other tourist attractions by comparison - Eiffel Tower, the most visited paid monument in the world had over 6.5 million visitors in 2006. Empire State Building - 3.8 million per yr St. Louis Arch - 1 million per yr. 6th Floor museum in Dallas - 2 million per year. San Diego Zoo - 3 million per year NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art - 5 million USS Intrepid Museum - NYC - 900,000 per year. I've bolded the items I think are the most telling. First off.. most every big city has a zoo and a museum or 2.. so while most aren't really special (aren't "tourist attractions" and the reason to come to a city) and I would include ours in that description,( We don't have the Guggenheim ) but I still thinks ours hold their own and perform very admirably. St Louis, the 18th largest MSA, and hardly a tourist mecca, with their biggest tourist attraction beats ours. Dallas, with perhaps their biggest tourist attraction, trounces us. Why.. because both of them are centrally located. Our HMNS and HMFA, good museums, but just museums, trounce our 3 biggest "tourist attractions" combined because they are centrally located. Our tourist attractions suffer from geography. SJ monument.. obviously we can't do anything about. Battleship Texas - Why is a WWII battleship associated with the Texas Independence in the first place? How many more hundreds of thousands of visitors per year would it have been getting had they taken it as far up stream as possible to base it - DT or East End off Navigation. As for SCH - since they are the welcome center for JSC, they can't move. But there's no reason they couldn't open a satellite museum. Even had SCH been awarded the Shuttle and that doubled their yearly visitors - that would put them at 1.5 million per yr. That is still 25% less than our HMNS. I would think a satellite museum staring the Shuttle in the middle of Herman Park would have instantly become Houston's top visitor's attraction getting 2-3 million per year. SCH's failure to think outside the box cost them a golden opportunity.

Completely forgot about the ol' BaggyShuttleDerrick.... And that would have been a more serious bid entry than that cr@phole of a sketchup hangar addition.

I'll take any chance I can get to bash a Dem administration, but after reading this article by a NASA employee, I'm willing to concede that even if politics were also in play here, City of Houston, our reps in Congress, and esp. Space Center Houston didn't do their job and are *probably* more at fault here... they made it really easy to punish us if politics were at play. http://blogs.chron.c...tics_for_a.html The part that really hit home for me was the Strike 3 paragraph on what a piss poor job Space Center Houston does now at displaying what its got. While I haven't been in close to 10 years, my recollection of Space Center Houston was a poorly implemented children's museum that you had to drive 25 miles outside of town to get to. Not impressed. Even had we been awarded the shuttle, I would have been extremely disappointed to have to drive out to Space Center Houston to see it. In my mind, a winning solution would have been to put the space shuttle up on a pedestal, figuratively speaking, in it's own satellite facility.. not as part of SCH.. with this sleek, glass, modern facility and its one exhibit in the most visible and accessible location they could afford... Herman Park or something. Sure, it would have been pricey..but it beats no shuttle at all. I understand that NASA is down there in Clear Lake and so is the vast majority of the NASA community, but NASA isn't in Houston from a population access standpoint. I'm not sure a win for the NASA community would have equaled a win for Houston. It ticks me off that those in charge of our bid didn't realize that when you're competing against all these other cities without ties to NASA, that they are going to go all out from the tourism standpoint.. and that you are competing against that. SCH and the City thought way too small. I do believe Houston should have started with several hundred points in the "ties to NASA and sentimentality" section... but from a tourism perspective, We went into the competition with the precedent of glorified hangars, 25 miles away from the population center. We went into the competition with an uninspired sketchup rendering of an uninspired hangar addition tacked onto the side of SCH. We went into the competition apparently without the realization that for every other city without ties to NASA, this was in part an architecture competition. Is it any wonder we lost ? VS. this in the heart of Manhattan

Ok.. Not happening. Very sad indeed, so rooting for the Grizzlies. Shane Battier's house on HAR - http://search.har.co...HAR74931484.htm

10' wide potholed lanes with several S curves... That's not bad, that's funtasticly awesome. Of course.. I rented NFS: HotPursuit this weekend.. so all the roads/freeways were fun this morning. Yeee-haw !

They're all on the bandwagon now. SJL, Al and Gene, plus congressmen from 4 other states. http://blogs.chron.c...s_file_leg.html

Sen Shumer, D NY - "When people from Paris, Beijing, Tokyo and Amsterdam start saying they want to go to Houston, maybe then they'll get a shuttle,""I'd say to Texas, don't mess with New York." http://www.nydailyne...mer_says_f.html

I must have missed all the letters to NASA that SLJ, Al Green, Gene Green and mayor Parker wrote outside of and prior to the official "Bring the Shuttle to Houston" contingent.

For weekday visitors.. The Chase observation deck is free.

http://blogs.chron.c...s_challeng.html Disappointed Texans in Congress are threatening legislative action to block NASA's planned transfer of a retired shuttle orbiter from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to a riverside museum in New York City. The 16 lawmakers, led by Reps. Ted Poe, R-Humble, and Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, want NASA to award a retired shuttle to Houston's Johnson Space Center. The lawmakers — 15 Republicans joined by Houston Democrat Gene Green — issued their threat in a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden. "If there is no rational explanation based on definable factors for the choice of the Intrepid museum in New York City, and that the transfer of the Enterprise to that location will cost significantly more than a transfer to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, we will do everything in our power in Congress, including legislation to prevent funding of the transfer, to stop this wasteful decision," the lawmakers warned.

What a delightful thread.

Even if this law treats texting as serious as drunk driving, people will still put others at risk because texting is just 1 of many many technological distractions available now while driving, with more coming out every year. This law may be useful as a tool for punishment, but I just can't see it having any meaningful effect in reducing distracted driving fatalities. I do understand texting while driving is dangerous.. but your statement above, like this law, attempt to isolate texting ( an i assume smart phone use in general ).. and compared to all the other technological distractions that have been made available while driving the past 5 years, it seems like it's the equivalent of trying to curb gun deaths by only banning 9mm rounds. I'm guessing onstar, or my entertainment console/radio will allow me to text within a few years. And even if its voice activated, it's one more non-driving activity that will spring up to distract me while I'm driving in rush hour or 80 on the west loop. EDIT: Will this law prevent all smart phone use while driving or only texting? *facetious alert* I sure hope I can still play angry birds while in traffic. :/

Since I don't get over there that often, I look forward to Frank's booth at the Sicillian or Italian Festival every year... Italian sausage poboy.. its like culinary Christmas.

Roger that.. 10-4

I've been to Edinburgh. I stayed a couple months at the University of Sterling in the mid 90s. Locals there were b*tching about the quality of construction and paper walls even then. You can't compare construction methods across decades or centuries. If the Scottish are building with stone today.. it's a 1/2" stone veneer, just like us.

Is this a mocking face? agreeing face? confused face? constipated face ?

I'm saying going after texters is too little too late.. the floodgates are open. If any lawmaker was seriously concerned about distractions while driving, Onstar, built-in tvs, and turning the radios into laptops never would have been allowed. I'm not advocating for this to have happened.. i'm just using this to highlight the ginormous pointlessness of this texting law.

Meanwhile.. I can now press a button on my new Chevy's mirror and get facebook status updates while asking my built in GPS console to find the nearest pizza joint while shuffling through my playlists and mp3 folders until i find the perfect driving song..... while my Xbox is on pause on the video console waiting for the next light. If they wanna make laws fighting driver distractions, they should stop being pansies with the low hanging fruit. What the hell will this law accomplish when consumers demand and manufactures provide.. turning our cars into one big distracting communication/entertainment module on wheels?