mkultra25

Production credit used for many of the films written/produced/directed by the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). The greatest British filmmakers who ever lived. 

19 hours ago, Purpledevil said:

Well see, the latter is what most younger people my son's age tend to call it, and is also the name you see on the sign in the median as you travel down Cavalcade, "Brooke Smith". My son has a friend that lives on Walton and needed a ride home a few months back. When I asked where he lived, he responded "**** Walton". I said "oh, you live over in Montie Beach" which caused an absolute dumbfounded look to creep across his face. He'd never heard the neighborhood referred to as such, and he's in his early 20's. I thought that I shown just how out of touch I was, but apparently it's all on him. Thanks for that, mkultra. Makes me feel just a little less old. 

Yeah, I suspect the younger people have had "Brooke Smith" permanently imprinted as a direct result of seeing those median signs innumerable times while traveling back and forth to the D&T Drive Inn on Enid. 

8 hours ago, Purpledevil said:

It's an oldtimers thing, much like me and my generation still calling Independence Heights "Studewood", or the neighborhood around Cavalcade and North Freeway "Monte Beach". That's just what I grew up knowing the places as, and still use them to this day.

The civic club still refers to it as Montie Beach:

http://www.montiebeach.org/

as does the wretched hive of perpetual suspicion and petty disagreement that is Nextdoor, although they prefer the variant "Montie Beach/Brooke Smith". 

This was a preliminary rendering for an auditorium and administration building by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson's New York Office. It is also reproduced on pp. 23-24 of Stephen Fox's monograph "The General Plan of the William M. Rice Institute and Its Architectural Development", a PDF of which can be downloaded here:

https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/35961/generalplanofwil00foxs.pdf?sequence=1

It is undated in Fox's monograph, but 1909 is a reasonable guess. There is a hand-colored General Plan drawn by William Ward Watkin dated March 16, 1910 in which an auditorium is clearly shown as a separate building from the administration building, so it's not too big of a jump to infer that the preliminary rendering pictured above predated the March 1910 plan. There are plenty of other elements in the initial plan that never reached fruition, such as the Persian Gardens. 

Watkin's March 1910 Plan drawing can be viewed/downloaded here:

https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/75071

Do y'all not use ad blockers on your phones? They've been available for Android for a long time, and have been available for iOS for about six months now (1Blocker is one of the more popular iOS ones).  

I do whitelist a handful of sites, but given that malware-infected ads have increasingly become a non-trivial risk, my usual reaction to sites like Forbes that nag you to turn off your ad blocker before allowing you to view any content is to simply stop visiting those sites. 

57 minutes ago, Telephoneroad said:

There is a great Book titled "Telephone Road, Texas" available only on the web. It is a good book about some of the old history of Telephone Road. 

Pretty sure it's been mentioned here before, but it certainly bears repeating for those who may have missed it. Anyone interested in Houston history should check it out.

Telephone Road, Texas

On 3/9/2016 at 4:16 PM, cspwal said:

You can click "unread content" at both the top and the bottom, and you can select the "condensed view" and it acts the same as before

On 3/9/2016 at 4:38 PM, skwatra said:

I just tried "unread content" again, I hadn't tried the condensed button before i found the custom stream option. That works as well. I also saw that you can edit your stream settings with the unread option as well. overall this is very customizable and i'm sure 99% of users can find something they like as much, if not better than what was available before.

This approach seems to work pretty well. There are some differences between the old "new content" view and the default settings for the new "unread content" view, but a combination of the condensed view and tweaking the stream settings to adjust what's displayed narrows most of the differences considerably. 

6 hours ago, skwatra said:

I personally am not a fan of the "All Activity" option, since it shows each topic activity, likes, pretty much any activity. Way too much content when I just want to see the newest topics that have been responded to (the old "view new content"). I did find a solution I like, under "My Activity streams" you can create a custom stream. I did so with topics only then when I went to it I changed the view (top right icon options) to condensed view. This gets me closest to the old view new content and I'm sure I will like it better over time.

This has been the topic of a lot of discussion on another forum I'm on since they underwent the same software upgrade. I strongly preferred the "view new content" view there as well, but since it's gone and doesn't look like it's coming back any time soon, I've reverted to manually browsing each forum to locate topics containing new content. 

The pictures of the boat brought a literal tear to my eye. It is a carbon copy of the one at NW, and these eyes really appreciated seeing it once again, after all these years. What a spectacular and sensational job you are doing with the historical documentation of the southside. 

I heartily second those sentiments - these are great photos. Funny how the boat that loomed so large in memory looks a lot smaller in the photos, but when you're four years old, pretty much everything seems gargantuan.

http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/heights/business/article/Mural-to-be-part-of-Heights-mixed-use-project-6870298.php#photo-9407543

A large mural by @wileyart, @ackzilla, and @annaveewins has already been painted on the Yale-facing side of the building - can't find a single pic of the entire width, but here are a couple of Instagram posts of the left and right sections:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCMD7FKkKvL/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCWVW0Ol3OK/

It appears that the owner owes quite a few people money:

http://www.houstonpress.com/restaurants/59-diner-owner-owes-more-than-200-000-to-employees-for-unpaid-wages-8209611

Am I just that deep in the hood, or what? In this neighborhood, we just put them out on the curb and watch them find a new home in all of 15 minutes.

People do that around here as well, but how quickly something disappears depends on the perceived salvage value. I've occasionally seen old TVs sit for a week or more with no takers, but when I had to replace my water heater, the old one was gone in less than half an hour after we dropped it curbside. No doubt the next stop was C&D Scrap Metal after reclaiming the copper. 

I'll poke as much fun as anyone at all the people who suddenly start dressing like Porter Waggoner during March

Most of whom without a clue as to who he was, I'd wager. 

Of course, Porter wasn't always permanently sporting a Nudie suit - on some of his best records, he looks downright normal:

That looks huge compared to their current campus. They've gotta be either bursting at the seams now or expecting significant growth in the future. Or both. 

The 4c is awesome.

 

If I ever have the funds to afford a fun weekend car in the 75-100k range, this will be it, real manual or not.

Likewise. Even with a healthy amount of options, the 4C would come out at well under 75K, closer to the mid-60s (at least the coupe - the spyder's a bit more).

I think the only other manufacturer making a comparable pure driver's sports car in a similar price range right now is Lotus. The Fiat Abarth always gets referred to as being a "baby Ferrari", but the 4C is much closer to being the real deal. 

There were more guys taking pics of the "booth babe" at that display than there were taking pics of the Lambo. 

I was happy to see an Alfa Romeo display, and got a close-up view of both the 4C and the Giulia Quadrifoglio. They really need to offer a manual transmission in the 4C. 

I wish Houston would get more concept cars, but I've gotten resigned to the fact that we'll always be in the second tier of the car-show circuit - if you're not NY, LA, or Detroit, you can pretty much forget about most concept cars making an appearance, at least while they're still relatively new. 

The new Lincoln Continental is quite attractive, and Lincoln seems intent on cultivating a new generation of customers, as they were offering $75 to anyone who signed up to test drive one at a dealer. 

I'm impressed at their aim, although I wonder if they're just being stolen. When the signs first debuted, half of the letters were gone within a week.

Though the letters stolen can be arranged to spell "RAD", I can assure you it is no such thing to be stolen.

Amateurs. They could've left the letters in place but rearranged them, instead of stealing them. I look forward to a small army of drunken, juvenile anagram fans doing their part to ensure that passersby are welcomed to "DAY RASH DRY".

I'm telling all this to underscore how openly racist HPD was, from top to bottom, and I'm saying it's completely believable for me that in 1967, a white HPD cop would make up the excuse of a black student throwing a watermelon. These were cops who would talk openly of the small untraceable pistol they carried around with them to "throw down" next to the body of somebody they'd shot if the guy didn't have a gun. They did it so they could claim they shot him in self defense, and it happened fairly often, and you won't be surprised to know that most of the time the victim was black.

They got away with it for many years, and you won't be surprised to know that it took the police shooting of an unarmed white teenager to bring an end to that shameful practice. A cop shot the boy after a wild car chase, and used a "throw down" gun that -- it was learned later -- had been confiscated from a robbery suspect the year before, and was supposed to be locked up in the police station property room downtown. The boy's parents raised hell with police and the DA, the media got involved, and the truth finally came out several years later. Several officers were fired and one was brought up on charges. I've always believed that if that boy had been black, it would have been forgotten.

Incidentally, this story was made into an excellent movie for TV in 1981, with an all-star cast. The Killing of Randy Webster. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082615

And here's the original NY Times review of that movie. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...750C0A967948260

I had never seen this movie before, despite having lived here when Randy Webster was killed and remembering the subsequent fallout when the facts were later exposed. So I was pleased to run across it being aired very late last night on the "Decades" subchannel (20.3). I suspect it would be pretty eye-opening viewing for anyone too young to recall how HPD used to operate with relative impunity forty years ago. It's noteworthy that the concept of a "throw-down" was apparently still uncommon enough then among the general public that it has to be explained in the movie. 

Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Houston history, and fortunately the full-length movie is also on YouTube (the picture quality was better on the Decades airing, but it was also cropped to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio, whereas the YouTube video is the correct full-frame 4:3):

Cool.  I wonder if they will accept a water bill as proof of residency?

I just own rental property in the city limits but I am no longer an actual resident.

You are probably out of luck. They will accept a utility bill as proof of residency, but the name and address on it has to match the name and address on your driver's license or photo ID:

http://www.houstontx.gov/solidwaste/depositories.html

I wound up paying my yard guy $20 to haul off my last CRT when it died after 15 years of use, but it was a 36" set that weighed almost 200 lbs. There was no way it was going to fit in my car, and moving it anywhere was a two-person job. 

Where did you see a Feb start? I had only seen references to EOY. They did recently do some utility pole work that removed an old structure close to the bridge. I live very close and will be considerably impacted by the closure.

This piece from the Chron was written at the end of September, and says "within the next six months":

http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/heights/news/article/Yale-Street-bridge-awaits-destruction-6540318.php

Traffic is already bad during rush hour on Yale near I-10 in both directions, so I imagine it's really going to suck once the construction starts and Yale isn't an option for through traffic for the duration of the project. 

I haven't seen any signage posted yet indicating an imminent closure, so I'd say it's safe to assume that it will still be open on Thursday. IIRC, they were going to start the rebuilding project sometime in February. 

The Menil Foundation and Menil Properties own a substantial number of houses (and land) in and around the vicinity of the Menil Collection facility - HCAD shows 119 separate properties owned by one or the other of those entities. You can usually identify the houses easily as they're almost always painted in that distinctive shade of "Menil Grey". 

They're not exclusively rented to artists, but as long as I can remember there's been a waiting list for prospective tenants - people that live in one of their houses tend to really like the property, the neighborhood, and the landlord, so the turnover isn't very high. 

^^^ the VC&A boutique in the galleria is located inside of neiman marcus.  the ROD locale is their first free-standing boutique...

Has that always been the case? I could've sworn they used to have a separate storefront in the mall. Perhaps it was relocated inside Neiman's at some point?

 

welcome to houston VC&A!

well done crockpotandgravel...

 

They're not exactly newcomers to the city - they've had a boutique in the Galleria for some years now.