luciaphile

You know, I wandered into this thread in my oblivious way and missed the last few posts. Perhaps at least everyone may unite in being annoyed with me for drifting off the topic, which folks are so passionate about. I thought all might enjoy this recent story from Austin.

From the Austin Chronicle:

http://www.austinchr...2-21/headlines/

"Ridgetop neighbors awoke Monday to find this old, defaced home returned to its original site at 4505 Red River, where it was built in the early 1930s. The owner had sought to demolish the home in May, but neighbors and Historic Landmark staff fought to preserve it, either by rehabilitation or relocation. An unidentified caller said it was moved to Lockhart in October but was moved back to Red River "in the dark of night" bearing spray-painted messages that suggest a disagreement over payment."

Photo by John Anderson

There have been some interesting house moves in Austin. One did quite a bit of damage to the street it left, then got as far as the river and sat sort of askew on Mopac for a few days, then lingered a few miles farther on for about a month. Another sat at the corner of 360 and 2244 for a few weeks.

luciaphile, the rules you mention apply to the entire city, and were driven mostly by uniform code changes. The Historic Districts were driven by those who think their esthetic values are better than their neighbors, and that certain parts of town should remain embedded in amber, regardless of the desires of the other property owners. The City should have zero interest in the appearance of a structure, as long as the appropriate code requirements are met. Appearance controls should be through deed restrictions, not ordinance.

Okay! Though here, those neighborhood rules vary across the city, and this is not a big deed-restriction town.

I am genuinely and neutrally curious whether you would feel this way if you lived somewhere that was actually historic in the usual sense of the word.

Anyway, the buzz about the Heights seems stronger than ever -- the interesting exception to the Houston rule. We should all have such problems?

Off this topic, Houston's geography seems to be far more egalitarian than it was in the 70s/80s. At that time, one actually heard the phrase "social address" used without irony. There was a sense you would sink out of sight if you lived in the wrong area. Now there seems to be a more evenly distributed "energy" and resurgent neighborhood pride.

I wonder if this is partly due to the flight from the public schools, or at least from HISD. For the parents of my generation -- apart from a less-than-absorbing interest in their kids -- I think there was a feeling that attending public school was a part of the civic contract. Indeed, a sense that ... if a kid couldn't make it in public school, there was something weak about him/her. Now, certain areas seem to be undergoing a revival perhaps partly because people feel no need whatsoever to be tied to the local schools.

My mother says that no child in her neighborhood attends public school, and the bus does not even go there. Most of the houses are adorned with signs for various private schools. I find this very strange. Sorry, this may be a topic you have thoroughly exhausted somewhere on the HAIF, or have long since ceased to notice.

It seems to me that constraints are placed on homeowners all the time, without anyone being grandfathered.

We are not in the floodplain, for instance, but the government's data is not terribly accurate and at some point we got a letter stating that we were suddenly in a hundred-year floodplain, by fiat. I can't pretend it really matters, as my husband is too tight to ever expand the house, but still, it amounts to a taking.

For a handful of neighborhoods in this city, ordinances have been passed which are designed to prevent the building of "superduplexes" (builders were routinely submitting plans for houses with eight game rooms, or something) and the overshadowing of smaller existing houses by newer ones, and to preserve the character of the streetscape to some degree. It's true that the implementation, for those who choose to enter the process of building a new home, seems like it could be quite maddening. And I myself find a sea of single-family houses kind of dull. But those neighborhoods are greatly outnumbered by areas which are charmless, like that where I live, where people may do mostly as they like, and the city benefits if they do. It sort of usefully channels their energy where it is most needed. The McMansion I would dislike in another context, I would more or less welcome on my street.

Windows: Big Brother has taken an unusually strong hand here about windows. There is a window in my shower, above eye level, very handy for quickly drying the room and keeping mildew down. It was drafty and not terribly private however, so almost immediately upon moving in I encouraged my kid to throw his ball against the house in that general area (see cheap husband, above) and soon enough was able to replace it with a nice double-paned frosted window. The guy who did the work said that the it violated code as someone might slip on the tile and crash through it. Another time I replaced a leaky aluminum bedroom window that always stuck -- I had to use a screwdriver as a sort of lever while pushing on it, and was the only one who mastered this, which would have been unfortunate had we needed to leave that way in an actual fire -- and decided to replace it with an easily-sliding double-paned vinyl thing, tripartite, because that looked the best. Again, a window replacer advised me that I was in violation, because a five-hundred pound person might not be able to get out of it in a fire. He did it for me sans permit anyway, but said that was why his truck was not marked with the name of his business. Ironically he had come to town to profit off of a then-city-program designed to offer rebates to homeowners in disadvantaged areas to replace old windows and thereby achieve energy savings. It was quickly discovered that in nearly all cases simple window replacements would violate city code, bigger openings would have to be cut, and few of the targeted people could afford to undertake this greater remodeling. The program was thus mainly a failure. I understand these rules were devised to prevent tragedies, but my house is so small, nearly every window and door is visible from any point. Egress is truly not a problem.

And sometime in the offing, here, the city will require new construction and remodels to conform to universal design. They trotted the idea out already, withdrew it after a hue and cry, but one sensed it was just the opening salvo.

Not to mention, two entirely new taxing jurisdictions have been created since we moved here -- and said taxes happen to be dedicated to things to which I have as great an antipathy as some people do for preservation ordinances.

ETA: I'm not insensitive to the fact that, in Houston, the rules you face in the Heights may seem particularly galling, unused as Houstonians are to a lot of regulation, and because they fly in the face of the freewheeling ethos there. That ethos doesn't seem exactly endangered, though. It seems like it just give the anointed areas a certain cachet.

Aww, samagon, blessed are the peacemakers!

http://pih.wikipedia.../wiki/Mien_Paij

Rilijin esa ting wi' dem god.

Dis artikal i' stub.

Yu ken hiiwp Wikkapedya b' adden t'et.

It kind of distills things to their essences.

Oh wait, it's back up! I'll put the link in "Anything You Want" before some handwringing wikipedia editor removes it again.

I'm glad to see that they propose sailing 3 masted schooners in Buffalo Bayou, as well. That's the kind of thing that will make this idea take off.

Maybe that was the HMS Bounty replica that was supposed to winter down here, but so strangely, and tragically, sank when the captain elected to try to go around the huge storm.

Anyway, this was a useful thread, as that "Kowloon" video has given me something else to fear and loathe, namely the idea of housing people in stacked shipping containers. I find in it the complement of an idea floated maybe fifteen years ago, before people had grown accustomed to abandoned big-box stores (and their attendant parking lots) in their midst. To stanch the purely momentary tide of bad publicity, Wal-mart (the very big, final shipping container) built a store somewhere that was expressly designed to be "re-purposed" into housing. I felt a chill when I heard that.

To offset the charge of insensitivity to those with different "lifestyles" who may be at the point in life where inhabiting a Kowloon-type cage "makes sense for them," I'll add that I regard the thought of living in an upscale pedestrian-oriented-mall-with-housing with the same contempt. It's the commercial outdoor lighting. I have to sleep in total darkness, so I think I would find it hard to live somewhere so well klieg-lit that you could read a miniature Bible at midnight. I also couldn't live in a car lot for that reason. I know -- high maintenance.

Before I'm absolved of insensitivity, though, I should admit that I used to read wikipedia in Pitcairnese sometimes ("en etom as ah unit o metuh") because I found a kind of poetry in it just to amuse myself. I think it was because of people like me that they took it down.

I agree completely, brian0123, on aging townhomes -- and will further say, I will never again live anywhere that involves condo association meetings. I would much sooner live out of a pop-up camper. I took no part, but occasionally hosted and made the coffee: a barely-tolerable hour-and-a-half spent listening to people grouse about the rats, squirrels, etc. that found their way into their homes; finally winding up with some visionary's attempt to get everyone to agree to a modest assessment to upgrade, say, the birdcrap-covered, upward-shining outdoor ball lights (that was my never-to-be-realized dream), or a motion to landscape or repair the falling down letters on the sign; which would generally fail. Our not-insignificant dues went almost entirely to a clockwork schedule of leaf-blowing.

Honesty compels me to admit we made money on that place, though.

It is easy, then, to say that a person enabled by language/logic to step outside their own culture and deconstruct its absurd barely-plausible abstractions (religion, political schemes, the 'American Dream', things that are supposed to make me happy). {sic - or was that clause ever going to have a predicate?}

Do giants have navels? Perhaps, as with most human curvature, even the slightest distortion from the norm makes the whole ugly. And so it is best to look into the giant's navel and marvel at it. Even if that is all that can be seen--and especially if that is all that there is to see.

Stop Making Sense, The Niche. Your recent posts are blowing my mind: it's like Tarski's undefinability theorem, and the barber who shaves all men, and only those, who do not shave themselves, and three chords and the truth, all rolled into one. I mean, you are really bringing it.

Add, for myself, that the settled peoples of a 21st century Texas are tethered to a bleak decidedly American existence, to their debts, to the 'American Dream', to constructed material desires mistaken for fulfillment, to an insidious slavery, to a system of banking so tied to government that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. It is as near to a sustainable form of communism as I could ever imagine being achieved in the history of human civilization. And so rather than that they work to live, they live to work. And they work. They needn't even ask why, or for whom. They work.

I have fled that, exchanged it for chaos, for unbridled capitalism (a form of which the most ardent Libertarian cannot fathom, and that they would shirk if they understood its implications), for swindlers and hustlers, for simple earthy pleasures, for excitement, for an occasional sampling of terror.

... the Texas that my father knew is long gone; ... the culture ... hemmed-in, safe, comfortable, blind, and docile.

I was born at the brink of the "Stalinization" of Texas. I think that the manifest insanity of the oil boom and the looming reality of an oil bust began to set in by about 1981 or 1982. You can hear it in ZZ Top records if you listen to them in a chronological sequence. And then, with the S&L bust, the hard money was gone and the soft money--the "American Dream" money--took hold. The people shall never again be free, not from the banks, and not from themselves. It is their desires, their greed, and a mechanism that fulfills it; that is what makes the American form of communism feasible is the peoples' implicit consent. We fought a revolution and then a civil war over something more straightforward and less ugly; but we will not do so again over what we have become. We don't even know what we are.

One of the lessons that has never been forgotten by the third world, which could never be extinguished by traditional communism, is that children are a more reliable form of social security than is any government. They will tend to one's social needs, but only if they are also responsible for one's fiscal needs. The latter begets an interest in the former.

I am only too happy to agree with your assessment of Libertarians' delusions, though I expect we would differ as to the lesson there.

The real estate in my head is limited; right now it's filled with Apsley Cherry-Garrard's "The Worst Journey in the World." (Brit obviously, but definitely not a "ninny.") That's his memoir of the Terra Nova Expedition, which includes an unsentimental but admiring portrait of Scott, though the journey referenced in the title is not the final one to the Pole but a side trip -- made in winter -- to the breeding grounds of the Emperor penguin. Perhaps you've read it.

Anyway, A.C-G is a gentleman, but there's an echo of your complaint about Americans' tameness when he uncharacteristically slings an insult at his countrymen in the final paragraph:

I thought the market could be said to have succeeded if it raised up a "people of customers .. a nation of shopkeepers," not swindlers and hustlers and chaos. Aren't we supposed to be tame? And doesn't that make possible things like polar expeditions (and young men's wander-years)?

So we're in thrall to the banks-cum-federal government. I can't hope to understand any of that, it's all beyond me, and about ZZ Top: you lost me on the flip side there...

{I mean, to listen to ZZ Top I'd have to venture back in time into my parents' attic to retrieve my brother's record collection, and while I'm up there I'll get my Barbie Corvette down, 'cuz I think I can sell that; and set up the turntable on the cinder blocks and put on ZZ Top oh look! "Earth Wind and Fire" -- and you can set up his old pyramid of Copenhagen cans -- we don't recycle yet -- "Mother, where are the speakers?" ... oh, she gave them away. Well, that was a waste of time... But we can still make out if you want. Yeah, my parents are here, but it's 1980 -- they don't care.}

... but perhaps that's the natural evolution of the market, just enough socialism admixed to insulate it from revolution. "Sustainable form of communism" sounds like hyperbole, though, the sort of thing one would say only after there was some distance between you and the real thing. I'll admit: in this light, it might be seen to be provident, the coincident waning of traditional social structures in the US, among them the family, the church. It means that, as against your garden-variety Marxist-Leninism, there's no need to undermine civil society. That's where things got so ugly, apart from the issue of all the people that couldn't be fitted into the future and so had to die.

And there's no historical imperative -- I think we can all agree we're over that; don't be a stranger, Hegel -- so this new system can be somewhat flexible, with a thin veneer of democracy -- another bad idea, though not as bad as Communism -- to lend it legitimacy.

I don't care for it, but my reasons you would judge to be aesthetic ones and reject out of hand. Apart from your professional unhappiness of late... you've said the system is stable -- maybe it's as stable and efficient as it can be, given the complexity of the modern world; and keeps the largest number of people well-fed (rather appallingly well-fed) and best promotes your favored value (which seems to be, strictly material human welfare).

Or are you prepared to admit of other values? (Yes, that's where I was going all along...)

Why should we let that stop us? Mine is chiefly a crisis of internal coherency. Drawing others in only exploits a kind of chaotic order, a formal logic with which to communicate universal senselessness.

Was that last sentence a randomly generated string of words? It's amazing how close it comes to mimicking human speech.

It strikes me that you would have no conception, or markedly less, of the ultimate meaninglessness of your place in the cosmos if not for the work of others determined to penetrate to the meaning of it.

Truly you are standing on the shoulders of giants, but content with the view of your navel.

It was fine, in college, when my roommate and I concluded that there was no need to go to class because the sun was going to die -- we really liked the sound of that (and she, coincidentally, to listen to "God Damn the Sun" a lot that semester) -- only what started as something we said to be arch, became rather endemic with us; and she in particular failed a couple classes because she never learned the date of the finals; and she hung out at Halcyon House quite a bit and startled me by announcing she had begun using "horse."

Fortunately, toward the end of the year, the campus clinic put her on Prozac and she went on to become a well-regarded geneticist, with published papers and everything.

Oddly enough, I was the one who never found any motivation again, not that I had much to begin with.

The Niche, I'm not a co-ed anymore. I'm too old for a discussion of "universal senselessness," to which you continually default, even if facetiously. There's really not much there. At least, not for those of us not versed in cutting-edge physics (which it's now impossible for a layman to be). And even the physicists have been rather spinning their wheels the past forty years.

... the climate has been changing in absolute terms since the beginning of geologic history. Sometimes it is warmer, sometimes it is cooler, sometimes Texas is under water. That is our geologic heritage, which begat our economic heritage and the climate change that you seem to abhor. Concern over it just seems so senseless in the scope of geologic time.

If ever my views should fall within the spectrum of common sense, then they would not be worth expressing.

In this matter,my conflicting sense of humanism and nihilism are in agreement. The climate is changing due to humanity's economic development. Productive capacity (and the political stability afforded by globalism) will prepare humans to adapt successfully. But then the nihilist in me says that they'll adapt or die, just like any species, that it really doesn't matter which, and that preserving the tradition of the living is absurd because there is also a tradition of dying, and of extinction. What happens happens.

We're still on this then. All right.

I am strictly backward-looking (hence conservative -- no matter how degraded things may be, there is always something I wish to see saved). I'm not able to think about the future, never have, with the single exception that, morbidly, sometimes, I think of my son as an old man dying, long after I am dead, and perhaps he is alone, and I can hardly bear it. (And would you believe, that thought first came to me looking at him in the hours after he was born -- there's nothing my neuroticism can leave untouched, but there may have been plummeting hormones involved as well.)

So, first thing this morning, I casually raised the issue -- well, after a decent interval -- with my moral and intellectual superior, whose work you would definitely categorize in your "why bother?" file if you don't already object to it on dittohead grounds (I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but what you value -- is a continually moving target to me): "So, uh ... all human endeavor's pretty meaningless in the scope of geologic time, hmm?"

Him: "Of course."

"Then why do what you do?"

Him: "Because one respects the time frame one lives in, it would be ridiculous not to."

Then hedonism is a legitimate response, though no more so than any other?

Him: "Actually less, as it's not a very good strategy."

By which he meant, as always, reproductive strategy.

Which reminds me: you thought I was referring to military threats to American dominance. Of course I wasn't. {How stupid do you think I am? No, don't answer.) Rome fell due to internal weakening, specifically, a fertility crisis: people got too lazy and decadent to procreate. My limited understanding is that the Romans, believing the Visigoths to be the best of the lot, gave them Gaul in the hope they would keep out the others; and further, that as early as the1st or second centuries (no time to look anything up, sorry) they passed laws to try to incentivize childbirth. Historians are too precious to say "Rome fell" any longer; they would say, "it 'became' Visigothic in the West, Byzantine in the East," but that's what they would mean, if they were being honest.

ETA: re the marvelous globalism, and the infinite adaptability -- not being a utopian, mr.l foresees a bill coming due that you do not; or at least an end to the easy credit afforded by fossil fuels. Right or wrong, and quite apart from the fact that you don't share my narrow interests, we can't really expect to be mutually coherent given that difference.

Nah, I don't really care about climate change. Warmer weather typically aids in building up species diversity, but it's the pattern of rainfall that is the real kicker. Some regions win and some regions lose. Whatever the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, the climate has been changing in absolute terms since the beginning of geologic history. Sometimes it is warmer, sometimes it is cooler, sometimes Texas is under water. That is our geologic heritage, which begat our economic heritage and the climate change that you seem to abhor. Concern over it just seems so senseless in the scope of geologic time. Everything is so new; what is worth preserving? Perhaps our civic architects should preserve construction sites in mid-course if every event and activity is so precious, if we are so self-important.

You're in a combative mood, pen pal. Is Dodge City not agreeing with you today? I know we're of two minds on this subject -- I've heard you expatiate on growing citrus in Siberia, was it? -- but if you think I only "seem to abhor" climate change I apologize for my own lack of clarity. Of course I regard yours as the extreme and not the common-sense view; much like someone I heard "lecture" once twenty years ago, who reassured us that there was no such thing as pollution, since it was all just a re-shuffling of chemicals in the environment. But leaving aside whether or not it is desirable: for people to deliberately, unidirectionally, and radically alter the atmosphere in a couple of centuries has to be classed as humanism run amok. It's your side that has no self-esteem problem.

Our other topic interests me more, but I'm very distracted and will have to revisit it later, sorry.

I think considering the climate change we all have to look forward to, living anywhere in will be interesting, not just America.

I'd rather not get into a discussion about the causes of the current changes in our climate, but considering the signs that show the climate scientists predictions and models foretelling our long term climate outlook are coming true, we're in for a wild ride.

You are so right, samagon. Nature is destiny and these effects will be much more profound than any of the shifts about which The Niche and I talk past one other (though these things are not unconnected: in particular, America's self-imposed loss of standing in the world and the collapse of our values down to the naked singularity of the almighty dollar, means we must sit on the sidelines of a process we might once have influenced). Only, the result will be a continuing loss of species diversity, thus a less interesting world. But yes, if I am pursued by a tornado that has a personal vendetta against me, that will be interesting.

Hasn't it been unseasonably warm lately? Here, we had not a drop of rain in November for the first time since 1897. A little cold front comes Tuesday.

Of course, some of the manifold climate models project more severe winters, as part of greater overall turbulence, I guess; but more heat trapped in the atmosphere=warmer weather really doesn't seem all that implausible.

I find your conclusion as to the motivations underlying Texas emigration to be of personal interest: "because they couldn't get along back east." Sure. That's the boiled down essence of why I've impulsively left Houston for a sometimes lawless post-Communistic third world nation, without business prospects, unable to speak the language or drink the water (which is okay, it turns out, because beer is cheap).

Well, water will rust your pipes anyway; it was the pop music that I thought might potentially be a dealbreaker.

I should add for the sake of honest and because I don't have any particular need to care:

If physical anthropology taught me one thing worth knowing, it was that my Texan ancestors sought out the 'strange', resulting in some unofficial bloodlines. (You can tell from the shape of one's teeth.) The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.

Is that a tacit concession to #1983? You are almost certain to return a less free man than when you left ...

If the blandness of your DNA bothers you ("It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me...") go ahead -- tell yourself a story about your teeth. Everybody wants a tincture -- just enough -- of the Other. Like my grandmother, who grew up in the West not all that long after it closed (and no sooner were the Indians gone (or corralled) than people began to romanticize them -- "We miss you!"). All her life she attributed her long silky jet-black hair (which turned snow white in a fever in her early twenties, so we had to take her word on this) to her "Indian blood." Everyone else was content to let her dreamily equivocate on this favorite theme, but with the natural rudeness of a child I tried to pin her down: "Was it your great-grandmother? Great-great-grandmother then? And which tribe? One of the horse cultures you admire -- Comanche maybe?"

Her answer never wavered: she was fairly certain it was the Cherokee...

Of course! The Civilized Tribe -- the upper limit to her exoticism. I only wish I could see it in my cheekbones.

Proximity was not a consideration for me, however. Proximity is simultaneously an amenity and a curse; Texans have always had to weigh town and country, one against the other, within the scope of their means and their desires and the marketplace. I shall do the same here and see what happens. I would suggest that the emigres into Texas might have been a little disgusted at the culture of a settled people, however: absent-minded, unimaginative, and tame. Perhaps they had listened to their fathers' stories about the way that the east had been a generation or two back, and perhaps they felt like they had missed out on something grand and novel.

Add, for myself, that the settled peoples of a 21st century Texas are tethered to a bleak decidedly American existence, to their debts, to the 'American Dream', to constructed material desires mistaken for fulfillment, to an insidious slavery, to a system of banking so tied to government that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. It is as near to a sustainable form of communism as I could ever imagine being achieved in the history of human civilization. And so rather than that they work to live, they live to work. And they work. They needn't even ask why, or for whom. They work....

Texas will get along just fine without me, but even the Texas that my father knew is long gone; and that Texan culture that my ancestors knew eight generations ago, it was erased by annexation, a civil war, the New Deal, WW2, and electronic media. The open range has been fenced and cross-fenced, the rivers dammed; the culture similarly hemmed-in, safe, comfortable, blind, and docile.

"Witness to the total demolition and reconstruction of their environment" is a phrase I read by chance a moment ago. It happened that the writer was referring to the Stalinization of eastern Europe. I don't say it's comparable in kind or degree; it's nothing whatever to do with it, so skip the lecture -- but the words in a different sense express how psychologically jarring I find what has happened to Texas even in my lifetime, and I wonder why others don't find it so. I'm left to conclude there is some flaw in my makeup, that I'm not very adaptable.

And i do know how very fortunate i am, and one thing I am grateful for is that I'm not a man trying to figure out a place in the modern economy. I derailed early, found a guy that I knew -- with the pure cunning of a woman -- would take care of me the rest of my life; so I didn't have to feel I was participating in something I didn't understand. I work half-time in a clerical way merely to ease his mind, in case something should happen to him -- to demonstrate "Look at me! I'm totally employable!" Yeah, right.

(For me, unlike you, too damn many people -- always a curse, never an amenity -- is a major part of it ... I mean, what was the point of all those pills and "procedures"? If we'd known that the void we created was going to be so thoroughly filled -- well, hell -- I want my dead babies back! It's so quiet here, and there's a long road winding in front of me ... Sorry -- too honest? I don't have "any particular need to care," either.)

I have fled that, exchanged it for chaos, for unbridled capitalism (a form of which the most ardent Libertarian cannot fathom, and that they would shirk if they understood its implications), for swindlers and hustlers, for simple earthy pleasures, for excitement, for an occasional sampling of terror.

If you want chaos, and "may you live in interesting times," try America in a few years -- this is 5th century Rome right here.

I know. I'll come back eventually, but only when I am content to be docile. America is a good place to be docile. It'll be a while, I think.

... and where, in time, the creature comforts will come in! They have a frightening power to take the edge off life when you've totally lost your edge: warm beverages, one after another; fancy little shelf-stable foods; footrubs, I-feel-a-draft so I'm going to go choose among five different weights of throw blankets for just the right one... Docility is not without its rewards.

I really enjoyed your friend's photos. I had not realized Portugal was so beautiful.

That fierce gargoyle sitting in a shell, holding up a tree, on the Pena palace: after some googling, i learned he is the newt who created the world, and also that you can buy an iPhone case with his image.

Interestingly, people were apparently dismayed when, around 2000, some of the color was restored on what they believed was a gray palace.

How about:

If a place were approaching perfection, we would be able to say that there is something characteristically Texan about its urban form.

Such places will be neighborly without being nosy; dignified without being presentable; have a sense of spaciousness, density notwithstanding; what else will they be? What other qualities of Texans can we interpret and express, make tangible?

strickn posed a question that was sincere, though unrelated to the back-and-forth about which city's medical services district is "better."

None of those Texas virtues, real or imagined, are or ever were perceptible to me in Houston. You need hardly look to the past for anything, and it would suggest something less than full commitment to the future, and your fearsome industry, if you did. I was just looking at Swamplot, at the Brookings Institution's "Global Metro Monitor" rankings, in which Houston compares favorably with metropolitan economies in developing countries; it makes perfect sense.

I notice that the Houston Chronicle immediately drew the same lesson from the Census results -- accelerating population growth and the "mythology of Texas" are not compatible:

http://www.chron.com...sus-1589808.php

An A&M study a few years ago put it this way: by 2030 Texas will have added another DFW, another Houston metro area, another San Antonio metro area; and with the leftovers, another Corpus Christi (or Beaumont-Port Arthur, or Temple-Killeen-Fort Hood ...).

For me, a hard-to-wade-through and never-revisited book that is yet a must-have on any shelf of Texana is John Graves' "Goodbye to a River." {I really should like it given how I feel about dams, but his tone of world-weary boredom -- earned in the war, I know -- didn't engage: tell me how you really feel about taming the Brazos! And he dwelt a little heavily on the theme of how he alone hunts "for the right reasons" -- hunt or don't hunt, with less sanctimony.}

I read it expecting a gentle rumination on nature, Texas' "Sand County Almanac," but found instead it was more a scattershot catalog of the settlement of the river, with story after story of hotheads who came to Texas and their various violent ends and blood feuds.

But I do think he is on to an aspect of our Anglo (more especially Scots-Irish) Texas character, and years of reading historical markers has confirmed me in this view: they came to Texas because they couldn't get along back east, in close proximity with others.

This is a trait that must necessarily be extinct for cities like Houston to work, and I can't pretend it's admirable, though I seem to be a throwback.

Behind everything, there is always an idea or an ideology, even if people can't express it, or it was only crudely imbibed. I think, strickn, the people of Houston have already chosen what is "characteristic" about their "urban form." It was neither organic nor ordained.

How about:

If a place were approaching perfection, we would be able to say that there is something characteristically Texan about its urban form.

Such places will be neighborly without being nosy; dignified without being presentable; have a sense of spaciousness, density notwithstanding; what else will they be? What other qualities of Texans can we interpret and express, make tangible?

Replying in "Way Off Topic."

I can remember around 1975, waiting at the bus stop behind my house with my friends one morning. We were standing on the side of Aldine Mail Rt. and the traffic was stopped for someone making a turn. My friends had their back to the traffic and I was facing it. When I looked into the front seat of the car in front of me, there was a full size lion sitting there. I must have been speechless, because when I told my friends to look the car was past them and they did not see it, and they all thought I was nuts. I still remember it like yesterday, You know they say things happen in threes, if so maybe I should be worried!

I don't doubt that you did see that, littlebunny. Such strange things are very indelible. My husband once saw a bighorn sheep clinging to the cliff above Austin's Town Lake, just above Red Bud Island, as he was going home. There was really no explanation for this.

One morning when I was small, awoke to find that a peacock had blown into our backyard during a storm. This was not all that odd, as someone a half-mile or so away kept peacocks. Still, it was out of the ordinary, and I remembered how he looked against the azaleas. Years later in some class we were asked to write a Sapphic stanza and I described that peacock, representing it as some sort of rebuke to suburban tedium. Or to bourgeois values, one or the other. It was totally fraudulent, as all my schoolwork was, and the professor ate it up, as planned.

A few months ago one of the neighborhood joggers stopped and said, "There was a peacock in your yard the other day. Did you see it?" I was disappointed to have missed it. I really do like peacocks, and once saw a pure white one that looked just like a Spanish lace fan.

I don't know what's happening to you in threes, though. That only applies to celebrity deaths, I think, and not really even then.

There used to be a guy that had a lion somewhere on Crystal Beach. Back in the 90s it chased me down the beach and latched onto my leg with it's mouth. It didn't have claws and it was just playing but it was a little scary. I remember a bunch of us having to climb up on the roof of a cabin to get away from it.

My sleepless thoughts keep recurring to the lion on the beach. I would have died of fright; unless, as was my perpetual fate on Galveston, I had just set down my beach things, stepped into the surf, and been immediately stung by a jellyfish. In which case I'd be too busy hollering to care.

The "lion on the altar" caption in the link-- inadvertently called to mind Aslan.

Not Houston-related, but once (while or after he was president, I'm not sure) Teddy Roosevelt came to Austin. A shopkeeper on Congress Avenue kept an old mountain lion in a cage out in front of his store, and it was well-known to all. The city leaders, to entertain T.R. with a "hunt," decided to release the lion on the Rob Roy ranch (it's the area you see if you drive west out of Austin on 2244, there's a bbq place and a storage facility and houses there now, and a lake.) I believe he did shoot the lion. I wouldn't want this incident to reflect badly on T.R., whom I revere -- he probably wasn't told he was hunting somebody's pet.

I read this long ago in a book setting down the recollections of the ranchers and cedar choppers who settled this part of Travis County.

Could someone explain what a Shakespeare garden is?

If you glance at the wikipedia page you'll see that Shakespeare gardens are strongly (and kitschily) associated with Lucia. They feature those plants, and only those, mentioned by Shakespeare, who took note of everything he saw in the fields around Stratford and had an encyclopedic knowledge of plant lore and superstition. I think Cleveland has a well-known one.

Shakespeare doesn't go too many lines without an herbal reference. Lots of pansies (also "Love-in-Idleness") which are a plot device in "Midsummer Night's Dream." And all the other plants mentioned by Ophelia -- daisies, rue, rosemary, fennel, columbines, violets -- and the weeds that she and Lear each made into garlands for themselves. Sad cypress, willow, crab-apples, yew, poplar. Roses, obviously, prominent in the history plays, Romeo and Juliet, and your own Twelfth Night, Subdude: "For women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour." (Fortunately, according to the same source, "love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds.")

Hopefully no knockout roses ... nor, for instance, phlox, that fixture of the English garden, since it was imported there from Texas in the 19th century.

Side note: it was a Shakespeare fan determined to introduce every one of Shakespeare's birds to North America who released five starlings in Central Park (the starling receives a single shout-out, in Henry IV). Now there are an estimated 200 million, a terrible nuisance, vector for disease, destroyer of crops. A flock of thousands of them famously brought down a jet on takeoff in 1960, killing almost everyone on board:

http://en.wikipedia....ines_Flight_375

The story of the early 19th century wildlife artist Alexander Wilson and the ivorybilled woodpecker sort of epitomizes for me our fraught relationship with wild creatures. This was the bird that he shot (in order to paint from "life") but only wounded; so he tried to make a pet of it, despite its "violent crying {like that of} of a young child," initially passing off the squalling bird off as his "baby" at the inn where he was staying. Leaving the bird captive in his room, he went to see to his horse, to find upon returning that the bird had destroyed part of the wall and the ceiling; he then tied the bird to a table and left to get it some grubs, during which time the bird nearly destroyed the table. It cut him up quite a bit during the portrait sitting and displayed "such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods .. . He lived with me nearly three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witness his death with regret."

There's a little inkling of this ambivalence in my Houston parents' relationship to their armadillo, who has gone by the same pet name these 30 years. Sometimes -- I forget why -- they have some grievance with him. My father then tries to shoot him, fecklessly -- he's no longer a good shot -- while mother wonders vaguely if the neighbors were disturbed by the sound of shots. They then usually succeed in trapping him, and my father tenderly places the cage in the shade so the critter won't overheat, then takes him to a sylvan spot one neighborhood over. The same animal he was shooting at only a few days earlier.

This process has played out many times.

And I'm thinking of it because I'm here in the vortex of the crazy.

I may have to move out of the country, shortly. I'm aware of that. (Not kidding. Actually investigating that possibility.)

Don't be so cryptic. Where did you go? Was it for love, money, or adventure? Or shale gas? At least give a hint as to climate or cuisine.

Thanks for that video. I watched it 3x. (Also, thanks, Nena E., for that Soldier's Creek link.)

There is still a train, though, right? At least, I rode it two or three years ago with a small relative. As with most things, it seemed like it had become an excuse for a gift shop -- in fact, I remember thinking they had missed a trick not running it directly through the gift shop.

{It's interesting to observe the small relative in a shop: she was a late blessing and has consequently been rather materially spoiled; and so she momentarily covets everything, or anything, or thinks she does. Most recently at the natural science museum, the "Titanic" exhibit with its obligatory tour-specific (and necessarily dreary) gift shop blocking the exit, she declared she would purchase the first thing she saw, a tiny $20 pewter model of the ship. I pointed out that we had souvenirs, the Titanic boarding passes we had been issued at the start with real passenger's names. (She perished; I lived. I was a little surprised that they hadn't separated the tickets so that children might always be handed that of a survivor. She worked it out in her mind that she wouldn't have died, though; she would have climbed up on the iceberg.) We managed to walk out without buying anything, there was a hint of a pout on her face, but it lasted two seconds, and then she visibly relaxed and looked happy to be past the gift shop. The wanting, and the freedom from wanting. Me thinking, you'll be experiencing that for years and years; and then one day you'll stop wanting things altogether, and that will be kind of alarming to interpret.}

What stays in my mind from the display of Titanic artifacts was a couple dozen ceramic gratin dishes, intact, not even a chip. There was a photo next to them of how they looked in situ: nested in perfect array, as though by hand, in the seafloor.

I concur, boarding that Hermann Park train when you were little was a pure thrill, and on the very same day that you would see the lonely gorilla in his air-conditioned house.

I'll hand it to them, the achievement of the track in less than a year is amazing. and this weekend: Mario Andretti is here. Cheap Trick! Aerosmith! (?) Helicopters everywhere. A table at La Zona Rosa, which usually hosts events like People's Community Clinic fundraisers, is $50,000. The cars look like the very coolest ones from your 40-year-old Hot Wheels set, but each one has a hundred laptops monitoring it. There's a button on the steering wheel the drivers can press on the straightaway, which makes them fly...

I still think the operative image of the track, though, will be: sitting idle, empty, giving rise to conversations like "The Future of the Astrodome," all that pavement needlessly radiating heat.

In not-unconnected news, now that Susan Combs has fallen off the GOP statewide-office ladder (and haven't they all been so patient!) I see that Hispanic George P. Bush is considering a run for comptroller, AG, or land commissioner. He has the skill set for all three, apparently! (I'm sure he does, actually.) He may well make a comforting transitional figure, the last Republican.