luciaphile

It would be nice had they not so belatedly commemorated him, then promptly pulled down the memorial, so that his own private foundation had to step in and replace it some years later.

But then, of actors large or small...

The preservation of good ideas is all that matters. And luciaphile, who will never see Chicago, for whom Chicago is only an idea, remembers him.

A. Montgomery Ward, mail order merchant, waged a twenty-year fight for open space on Chicago's lakefront and created Grant Park:

http://fotp.org/publ...front-protector

When it was done, he told the Chicago Tribune:

Unlike Ozymandias, referenced in another thread, he had no "cold sneer of contempt," but perhaps he might have had. The bust was a copy, I suppose, of one that stood or stands in front of the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Alas, I looked for it the other day -- it had become a sort of shrine in my cult of Montgomery Ward, WWMWD? -- and couldn't find it.

Why do you people not READ stuff before you respond!? This is extremely frustrating.

You're looking at figures for the City of Los Angeles or the County of Los Angeles, which are political entities whose boundaries do not conform at all with the machinations of a city as an economic entity, much less a transit authority whose service area extends beyond them.

The Census attempts to cope with these issues by defining MSAs wherein commuting patterns between outlying counties and core counties indicate a decidedly one-sided flow. However, these entities are delineated by County. As a result, western MSAs have a tendency for being ridiculously large in terms of square mileage and for not conforming very well with commuting patterns that decidedly change within the same county. For instance, both San Bernadino County, CA and Riverside County, CA adjoin Los Angeles County and include portions of the Los Angeles urbanized area as defined by the Census (see below) and also include public transit connections to Los Angeles, but those counties extend all the way to Arizona and Nevada, three hours distant. We obviously shouldn't be factoring in the density of Death Valley. Each of these counties also include mountain ranges and national parks, and these should no sooner be factored into density than should Lake Houston or the Addicks Reservoir.

This is why I am using Urbanized Area. The official definition from the U.S. Census Bureau is as follows:

The use of a UA allows for a more direct comparison of geographies wherein public transit has even the potential to be relevant.

That definition of Urbanized Area is something only a bureaucrat could love. I did read it! I did try. I have grasped that it is the Census Bureau's attempt to grapple with the fact that, while few people live in truly rural areas, a great many people live in small towns. I don't see that this definition was meant to furnish a contrast between the nation's big cities.

And I'm not sure what, exactly, the LA UA is, nor the Houston UA.

In the spirit of capturing reality, though: would you exclude the Santa Monica NRA from density calculations even though only 38% of it is public land?

Similarly, would you exclude Houston's little bit of parkland? What about land under easement with the Katy Prairie conservancy? What about neighborhoods like the one where I grew up, that gesture, in a degraded way, at being parks, houses set in a "parklike" setting, with their low density -- since they are as much a quaint historical oddity as an actual park, and function as green space?

Thinking of parks that no one wants reminds me of my hero, Montgomery Ward, but I'll take my tribute to "Anything You Want."

... Developed nations with liberalized trade policies instigate fewer wars with other developed nations...

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.

Freeways and cars are money better spent...

Take the Tata Nano as an example of what could be. It costs about $3,000 and gets 56 mpg (per U.S. measurement standards)... It would only cost $189 million to purchase a Tata Nano for each and every one of the 62,951 people that commutes using public transportation anywhere in the ten-county metropolitan area according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Tata Nano is the best federal program that won't ever be.

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:

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.

And no, road work doesn't need to be part of the transit equation actually. While METRO buses run on streets, the voter approved sales tax towards METRO goes towards operating buses, not building roads. Can you give me an example of another city where a public transportation system is responsible for building roads?

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?

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.

I suspect it will be easier for you to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Target than for me to do the same with Walmart, as I leave my bubble increasingly infrequently, and since I am an equal-opportunity big-box hater, your quixotic dislike of Target threatens my 5th Law of Thermodynamics.

"Fire-baked" is part of the copyrighted name of the product. I cited the entire product name because Red Baron also has a frozen cheese pizza with what they describe as an "Original" crust, and the sauce and type of cheese is different too. I regard the "Original" style as a grossly inferior product and have a difficult time finding it except at Fiesta and Wal-Mart.

I was only kidding -- but careful: "fire-baked" sounds like it could be a gateway drug to artisan pizza drizzled with truffle oil.

Pornography is a pretty good replacement for spiritual script, though. And the activity that accompanies it is at least a little like a daily prayer.

I'm not sure God likes these ostentatious acts of piety: Genesis 38:8-10. And now that I know this...

As for preservationism, I am not against it. I've probably spent more money and devoted more time to actively rescuing cool old buildings than 99% of the members of this forum...

... I think you should ease up on the daily devotionals. It's a wanton waste of peservationist DNA, which is in short supply.

moo. Silly argument is silly, cause I'm sure somewhere along in the middle we can all play with our hotwheels and train sets in the same room, at the same time.

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!

Wal-Mart is where the people are. The people are weird, genuinely weird. This is different from Target shoppers, who are also weird but try to pose as not weird. Or hipsters, who were perfectly and normally weird to begin with but try to brand themselves as a different flavor of weird.

I find it kind of endearing, actually. Wal-Mart is where America lets its beer gut hang out.

Replied in my home thread.

Wal-Mart is where the people are. The people are weird, genuinely weird. This is different from Target shoppers, who are also weird but try to pose as not weird. Or hipsters, who were perfectly and normally weird to begin with but try to brand themselves as a different flavor of weird.

I find it kind of endearing, actually. Wal-Mart is where America lets its beer gut hang out.

They -- you -- or those you choose, facetiously or not, to champion -- are hardly weird; they are the norm. A beer gut is the least of it. More like whole oceans of soda pop made flesh.

The tedious running current on the Heights Walmart thread is the charge of elitism against those who dislike the sight of a Walmart. Would I be the first to actually plead guilty to that charge? -- though since I am no member of any elite, "otherness" better describes it. I haven't placed a force field around Walmart. I go there half a dozen times a year for some random thing, usually unsuccessfully, spending in toto perhaps $50; and when I do it is borne home that I don't belong there. It was a more useful store to me about fifteen years ago, when there was much greater variety to its inventory, all piled up pell-mell, five-and-dime style. Now it mostly resembles - horrors! - a Target, and has reached a critical tipping point of "decorative" crap and the like.

Walmart. I think of a matriarchal phalanx, barbarically tattooed, that collectively weighs about a hundred stone, moving en masse, basket piled high, through any small town or many an urban Walmart: an older woman, maybe not much older than me, or even my age, a bit rough-looking; her grown daughters, who, though huge, have taken some care with their hair and makeup -- probably more than me; a couple kids, and, sort of poignantly, a little girl who, though by no means waifish, yet retains what were once thought of as ordinary bodily proportions. If they were paper dolls, their clothes -- kids and grownups -- would be more or less interchangeable.

I have never elicited a smile from them. Their brief glance is either suspicious or dully closed. I have held the eyes of a grey fox for longer.

You who find them endearing will doubtless note that they are busy being Real, albeit paradoxically sedentary, People, while I am an uppity bookish Velveteen zombie who is inconsequential to them. And of course that's true (I confess I've never purchased a Big Gulp, or a lottery ticket); and since one of them is three of me, I am trebly negligible.

I am usually successful with all sorts of people, though. Not from empathy - that wasn't given to me - but because I don't know how to be other than open, I like to be liked, and too I compulsively find people fascinating (how did you get into that line of work? how did you meet your husband? and then what?). With old people, obviously, I am gold; and also with Mexican construction workers, teenagers, the men who collect the trash, recent Chinese immigrant ladies, etc....

But with the women of Walmart I strike out, which due to the sheer volume of them, and the fact that they are successfully replacing themselves, leaves me the freak, not them. I have heard it suggested that these are formerly rural people not quite adapted, even several generations on, to an urban lifestyle. I don't know about that, but if so I would probably find them interesting though I readily concede they'd have nothing to gain from me. Having been wrongly assigned to be a city girl, I love talking to country people, who are usually happy to talk, and haven't lost the knack of it (me: what's poke sallet exactly, and where can I find it? and you made head cheese how? and so you would just cover the milk with a damp cloth to keep it cool?).

I understand that Walmart, now that it's in the food business, is, like McDonald's before it, probably the most effective means of feeding people ever devised. That it is the exact opposite of a Soviet-era breadline. And it's where the diapers are distributed. It just happens that its expansion is incidental with two things: a stratification of American society that I find disturbing, maybe selfishly, because it has marginalized me and mine -- maybe, in an interpretation less damning, because I can't see where it is leading for all of us; and secondly -- and on this I will hold firm despite your much-vaunted indifference to the subject, The Niche, because it tracks exactly with my life, being mostly an observer I have watched it unfold: the ascendance of a coarse materialism, embraced by right and left, which is now all that Americans, qua Americans, have in common with one another. Human nature being what it is, apt to get causes and effects all muddled, for non-rigorous reasons I find it hard to regard the rise of Walmart as a force for unmitigated good. Cheap goods, yes. I suppose. Even that mystifies me. I don't regard most of their goods as a bargain at half the price. ("Fire-baked?" What are you -- some sort of foodie?)

If a Walmart were coming to my neighborhood, I wouldn't feel called to fight it -- at most, I would sign a petition asking them to plant some shade trees in more than 9 square feet of dirt so that the parking lot wasn't so anvil-like -- but I would have no reason to welcome it, as I don't particularly need it, I don't like the way it looks, and I associate it with things that dismay me, beyond mere questions of "taste."

Walmart is only one strand. There are a host of other things -- like Disney World; like the parallel monstrous appetite for both pornography and a personal Jesus; like people of both genders sobbing all the time on TV; like how men seem emasculated except for the two hours a day they tune in to Rush Limbaugh and let him push their buttons; like the strange national obsession with education and with health insurance, and the conviction of all that these are legitimate concerns of the President of the United States -- that give me the same feeling of being, essentially, Left Behind in my own country.

luciaphile, left behind, who'd have seen that coming?

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.

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

... A troubadour from faraway lands, an exotic stranger with a scooter, a temporary and anonymous fling whom daddy would never meet, it was easy to understand the appeal. Middling non-Semitic merchant that I am, too secular and cerebral to merit the attraction of peasant stock and too ordinary for a princess (whom the peasant stock uniformly mistakes themselves to be), I could never elicit such a response...

I was remiss, in my insomnia post -- vis à vis the roommate: you're overthinking. It was not the swarthiness, it was the scooter: a standing invitation to fun. See "Roman Holiday" -- all the would-be princesses (of all ethnicities) have! It doesn't have to be a vintage Vespa. The prize is within your grasp!

my interpretation of "luciaphile" indicates the poster is Ricky Ricardo, so not a she.

IHB2, I find a little gender ambiguity is desirable on the internet!

If I were recalling TV, it would be samanthaphile or maryrichardsphile. Not Jeanniephile: I was always relieved to see her put back in the bottle. She created so much havoc for the Major, and it all seemed so unnecessary.

But I'm not:

http://www.penguincl...732_1_0,00.html

You are onto something with the gender-bending, though. Lucia is the creation - and partial alter ego -of the epicene E.F. Benson:

I just wanted to post his picture because I think he had an arresting, beautiful face. He lived at Lamb House, Rye, Tilling, UK, which had been Henry James's house. Pretty - I'll post that too:

For a time Lucia lived in that house as well, in the fictional town of Tilling:

“That was her real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others. But how her schemes for the good of Tilling bored him!”

It was bombed in the Blitz, but looks to have been all restored.

Lucia's fans are called luciaphiles. As there are few of us, luciaphile is convenient because no one ever picks it. At least, I thought so until I saw that someone posts on Television Without Pity as luciaphile. I've never posted anything there, but I stop by to see when Timothy Olyphant is returning to the screen and suchlike.

Which could mean anything, gender-wise ...

my interpretation of "luciaphile" indicates the poster is Ricky Ricardo, so not a she.

Sigh. Back to "Anything at All." I wish I could post in the regular thread with the other kids.

To my mind, the fatalism was incidental to those figures' appeal or perhaps mistaken for another quality. I tend to think of the girl mind through archetypes present in medieval fairy tales. Morrison was a wizard of the old school. Think about it. He was an individualist whose powers were nurtured by his own personal achievements and proprietary knowledge; he had potions of all variety (and let us not forget that the word potion derives from the word potent); although capable of influencing mainstream politics, he was too far outside the mainstream to be a figurehead. To the extent that the peasantry are aware of a wizard, they fear him but stand in awe; their establishment disapproves, they think. Now make that wizard a younger man with vitality and means. See what happens.

Sadly, he got his potions all mixed up.

May we please substitute the word shaman for wizard? In any and all connections, forever?

I have not thought about Jim Morrison in a very long time, not since I swiftly moved on to Steve McQueen. Frailty, thy name is "girl mind." I would like to think there is a valid reason girls are attracted to "dangerous"-seeming boys; they perceive in them strength of will or competence for dealing with certain situations: so prowess, sexual and otherwise. It causes them to overlook - no, that's understating it - be genuinely hurtful to, sometimes - guys with other qualities, the ones they'll appreciate later.

Consider this a public apology, Guy from Calculus - It took a lot of nerve to risk getting shot down in class like that, which you were, and you were never anything but nice to me, and funny; and Guy from That Computer Class Where We Learned to Program in Fortran (?!) and The Teacher Took Off Mid-Year and They Didn't Replace Him, But Had the Smart Kid Take Over: what I did to you I cannot think of without crippling shame; and Guy Who Invited Me to Hike Across the Grand Canyon - only to find I brought along another boy, so, so sorry, And Strake-Jesuit Letter-Writing Guy, I wish I had gone to Miller Theatre to watch Shakespeare with you, but I was awfully young (remember, we met when you hit me with your Volvo while I was riding my banana seat bike? Come to think, you were kind of dangerous.) Still, I shouldn't have laughed at your sweet letter that compared me to 7-Up.

Your only fault was that you were not James Dean or Jim Morrison or Lord Byron, ad nauseum, or even just That Monosyllabic Guy from Biology with the Bedroom Eyes.

I'm mostly keying from the variety of humanism espoused by Kurt Vonnegut and as an expressed worldview that's most likely to get me laid. Nihilism just doesn't do that for me. And besides, nihilism implies fatalism ...

Chicks dig fatalists. I'm thinking of the life-sized poster of Jim Morrison (dead fatalist: better still) in leather pants in my girlhood bedroom, but the vampire vogue still bears it out.

I haven't read much modern fiction and no Vonnegut at all (thus satisfying my newly-formulated law - it's uncanny - one day on Swamplot you railed against my naive faith in home ownership, and it was the very day we had decided to pay off our mortgage!) and watched bewildered and a little nonplussed as my fast-reading son brought his books home from the library one after another. I regret that I was too lazy/slow to read them too; it would perhaps have been a neutral subject he and I could have talked about, which we could have used. Well, anyway, I suppose I remember one Vonnegut story, the one about the ballerina and the athlete (?) who had to be killed because they jeopardized the project of egalitarianism, because they were not interchangeable with others within an acceptable measure of tolerance...

I feel like I've said that "individual actors are impotent, interchangeable within a measure of tolerance" at some point in the past. Is that a direct quote of mine, or did you arrive at it independently?

Let me try to help you remember, without actually looking for it:

It was during the Bag Ban Unpleasantness (by the way, yes, I saw the other day that report that bag bans drive business to non-bag-ban places, but we don't care who gets the business, right?). You and another poster had double-teamed me most un-gallantly. I was my usual sweet self, but you were so rude the moderator had to take you outside. So you may have been in a good mood that day? I think you were eating something from the Taco Bell dollar menu at the time. Does that help?

... which doesn't allow for me to be pissed off enough at stupid people and smart assholes.

..but we are all of us stupid at moments. Why so harsh? Especially if 'nothing human is alien to you,' you cuddly humanist.

Luciaphile, I reject romanticism in favor of humanism. That's my MO. Granted, it's a lot easier to say that than to contribute to the administration of my preferences. I never claimed to be an effective advocate of my beliefs, some kind of social engineer. I shall only state them and hope that others might prevail upon my reasoning to win small humanistic victories, even if I should never know of them.

Replied in Anything You Want, lest I try the moderator's patience.

Luciaphile, I reject romanticism in favor of humanism. That's my MO. Granted, it's a lot easier to say that than to contribute to the administration of my preferences. I never claimed to be an effective advocate of my beliefs, some kind of social engineer. I shall only state them and hope that others might prevail upon my reasoning to win small humanistic victories, even if I should never know of them.

I am surprised to hear you so describe yourself. I would have said you had cast yourself in the mold of a latter-day Bazarov, complete with his not-very-active nihilism; he was mainly at pains to convey that he was comfortable living in the world just as he found it, and sneered at the reformist impulse as at tradition and aestheticism. Of course, Turgenev, a member of the generation Bazarov disdains, kills him off "tragically;" which ironically makes him seem a sort of Romantic figure after all. But you seem to have a happy ending in view, as you are pleased with the status quo, and I accept that you are utterly sincere in your certainty that individual actors are impotent, interchangeable "within a measure of tolerance" (I can't help but feel you've left yourself a little out there).

"Humanist" perhaps threw me off because the early humanists were unhappy with what they saw as a degraded present and immediate past, looking back to the distant Roman, and somewhat later, Greek, secular past; which couldn't be more at odds with your anti-preservationist bent. However, I'll assume you mean by that mutable term something like, you are interested primarily, or only, in human material welfare, best produced by markets operating efficiently.

If so, why should you feel that humanism needs you to set small victories in motion? -- it more than prevails, it is everywhere triumphant (which is to say nothing about human misery one way or the other).

If you've got any philosophical leg to stand on, it is the notion grounded in Romanticism that local tradition should be upheld for its own sake and enforced by government intervention and at the point of a sword... And the worst of it is that traditions at any scale are understood superficially by those speaking in the role of the third-person and typically invented by those speaking in the first-person, just as Hitler invented the Aryan race.

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.

Niche tends to argue from the macro perspective, discounting any of the individual micros that make up the whole as expendable, as though "the Houston economy" had any meaning beyond the collection of the 10s of 1000s of individual economic actors from 1 person operations to the biggest chemical plants.

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.

Otherwise you find yourself in a situation where localities, neighborhoods, and special interests can dictate terms to a larger entity, holding even well-conceived projects hostage. And that's ridiculous, too, because the best interests of the few (i.e. restaurateurs) are often poorly aligned with the best interests of the many (i.e. travelers). Not always, but often enough. Allowing special interests that latitude or codifying veto rights into statute would be absurd.

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.

When may we expect Peak Eggs? And when will Peak Omelette-Cliches be?

Re accidental likenesses: people sometimes see a Rice owl in the corners of the UT tower. There is another building in Austin that has been likened to a nose hair trimmer, or toenail clippers. (Perhaps when this was becoming painfully obvious, the builder added a clock that you would need a scope to read.)

It would be hard not to suggest a Dutch windmill instead of an oil derrick unless you made it quite slender. Everybody's a critic.

Thank you, Subdude, for posting that Longaberger basket picture. I sent it to my mother, who discovered that she had its exact twin in her closet.