Las Vegas musing

Got a little down time in the Las Vegas airport. As a matter of fact, it seems I spend quite a bit of time here. Las Vegas as most of you know is the conference capital of the universe. Thank god the airport WiFi is free. This time I stayed in Caesar’s a triumph of comfort and terrible taste—yes that is saying something for Las Vegas, but I didn’t come here to slag Caesar. Going to Vegas and complaining about the decor is kinda like going to Hawaii and saying it was nice, but we didn’t like all that water.
And as I say, Caesar’s is a comfortable hotel. It’s got great pools, restaurants, and enthusiastic gamblers but still all those faux Roman statues and rebuilt ruins under a carefully painted Michelangelo sky are an assault upon reason. The Renaissance and ancient Rome are all mashed up here and I always wonder what the gorillas might think.
You know those Planet of the Apes gorillas who come after we’ve blown the place up. They’ll make their way from the New York Subway and the Statue of Liberty and stumble across Paris, the Eiffel Tower, and Caesars. They’ll see the David, and the Chanel store, and the Charioteer of Delphi all better again and what in the hell are they supposed to think? Do you think they know we got irony? Come to think of it, do we?
When it comes to the architectural and decorative excesses of Las Vegas, I’m overwhelmed. My internal irony machine has to run too hard and it kind of breaks down. Is this fun? funny? appalling? Then I tell myself to just shut up and go to to the pool. There’s a special on margaritas at the Venus pool. Just dive in.

Mamet’s Race

A little post-Thanksgiving trip to New York and we caught David Mamet’s new play Race. We liked it, though it’s not quite as snappy as Mamet can be at his best. It’s certainly as complicated as Mamet can be. A tight story told with four actors in a law office played by James Spader, David Allen Grier, Kelly Washington, and Richard Thomas. The story is really a debate among three lawyers (Spader, Grier, Washington) about how to play the case of their rich guy client Thomas accused of the rape of a young black woman.

Is he guilty? Not guilty? As you might expect, the usual lawyer rationale is at work. Who cares? Our job, should we choose to take it is to defend our client. But, as you also might surmise, there’s a lot more going on here as the two black lawyers, Grier and Washington, start circling each other regarding the attitude of each toward their client, and Spader seems at first to concentrate on the case. And yet, for all his efforts at getting above the emotional issues and staying above the fray, Spader’s character is vulnerable to the distorting mirror of race in American society.

New York is a great town setting for Race — both for the play and the audience. In New York there are people of every color and every class jostling on the street and interacting in a variety of relationships — not to mention language.

Don’t touch my junk

John Tyner has become the latest folk hero telling a TSA agent, “if you touch my junk I will have you arrested.” He made his own tedious video and sabotaged his own flight — paid for one can not help but add by his father-in-law. Tyner, it seems was in a sweat about the naked scanner because of possible radiation danger and he was also real sure he didn’t want anyone touching his genitals. And in his own quiet, no doubt premeditated way, Tyner has inspired a call for revolt against the TSA’s enhanced search techniques.

Blessedly it didn’t happen. As it turns out, most people who buy an airplane ticket really want to get where they’re going so they play ball with the TSA.

I have a hard time getting too worked up about the naked scanner. It’s not like it goes straight to my Facebook page. It’s not like anyone is really that interested in looking at all my junk and frankly I suspect this bothers people the more junk they got.

I also have a hard time getting too worked up about security. We just got back from a jaunt to the UAE — one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East and my junk was certainly touched quite a bit by forbidding, black gowned women. This being a few weeks after a bomb left Dubai disguised as a printer cartridge security was very very tight.

However, in general, security was also efficient and reasonably low key, and friendly.

So far, in all my travels all over the world, the TSA is distinguished for its idiocy. Every airport seems to have its pompous self-important buffoon who will repeatedly yell the instructions of the day at people who more than likely have heard it many times before and can probably figure it out for themselves.

Every frequent traveler has a favorite story about an encounter with the TSA. My personal favorite comes from the Oakland airport where a TSA agent held up the line berating a young woman for the size of her shampoo tube. Being from Oakland and all, she gave as good as she got — and so at least it was entertaining.

No wonder all this rage has bubbled up against the TSA, and it feels like the kind too long bottled up.

Granted, all this protest smells like a replay of Joe the Plumber. Tyner video tapes himself, he’s got his snappy line all prepared, and he posts a blog. Then, right on cue and on time for Thanksgiving comes the groundswell of outrage. “Don’t touch my junk” has become the battle cry of protesters demanding that people opt out of the naked scanner and also refuse the “enhanced” pat down.

Oh please. Along with sane people everywhere, I’m delighted nothing came of the rude, insensitive plan to destroy the holiday for thousands of people for yet another demonstration against “the guvment.”

On the other hand, it’s a swell time to look at the TSA from top to bottom and see if the procedures can’t be made more efficient — and the personnel more pleasant. Just because a protest has been started by a bunch of publicity seeking goofballs who hope to disrupt travel without themselves buying a plane ticket, doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.

It’s time for a new look at the News

 

Soon to become mysterious artifacts

The atmosphere at IBC (the International Broadcasting Conference) and NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) was very strange this year. It was as if the TV industry, which has been competing against the web for viewers and advertising dollars suddenly realized they were really really in trouble after close to a decade of denial. On the one hand, perhaps it’s understandable. No one, not even or perhaps especially, clueless TV executives, want to admit the party’s over. I know the feeling, I’ve seen technical magazines crumble behind me as I worked for them. (I don’t believe there is a cause and effect.)

The situation is also acute in mainstream journalism — in all media. There was a panel at IBC that discussed the issue of journalism headed by London-based Business journalist Kate Bulkley who noted that the passing of journalism is a threat to democracy. We’ve seen journalists pay a high price in Russia where they’ve been shot down in the street and in war zones where the immunity of journalists (and aid workers, and other non-combatants) has disappeared. And yet when one falls, another steps forward. Free speech, as it turns out is a fragile gift and there are some, thank god, still willing to fight for it.

In the U.S. and Europe, the situation is slightly different. Sometimes it seems as if there’s a bit too much free speech and one panelist at IBC commented that perhaps the situation isn’t so much that the jobs of journalists are disappearing but the situation is rather one of consolidation — there are too many journalists — and not enough good ones. It’s been noted that there are situations where the pod of journalists covering a conflict outnumbers the combatants and every TV news watcher has seen the monstrous army of boorish photographers, writers, and newscasters materialize around anyone unfortunate enough to be deemed newsworthy.

Even the geeky tech industry has seen mushrooming numbers of people calling themselves press. In the past, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have accommodated hundreds of giddy game playing journalists. It’s unlikely that all the people at these huge events were getting paid for their time and work. And in fact, the huge game companies have tired of spending millions of dollars on the uncertain production of the drone class of journalist. There are fewer huge press events and the press invitations are getting harder to come by. 

Yes, journalists working in traditional occupations at newspapers or in broadcast news are competing against people willing to work for free or practically free but all people aspiring to the mantle of journalist are threatened by the variety of choices available to news consumers and here is where we get to the real danger and the real opportunity. British newscaster/media commentator Raymond Snoddy noted that the problem wasn’t really a matter of distribution,  TV or print versus internet, or high wages for Priests versus low wages for enthusiasts, it’s rather a matter of audiences being able to find exactly the kind of information they want any time they want. He called it unfettered democracy and noted that it has resulted in the moronic ranting of opinionists like Glenn Beck in the U.S. and reporters in India who break away from reporting on a political race to report that a woman has turned into a snake and has terrified a village (a story related by Vir Sanghvi of the Hindustan Times). You might not go broke giving people what they want, but you certainly aren’t doing them any favor either.

But whoa, let’s back up a bit. “Unfettered democracy?” Snoddy seems to have a point but his position is incredibly condescending. What in the world is the alternative? Just how much fettering do we need and who is going to do the fettering? Isn’t that what’s happening in Russia? The old guard journalists seem wistful for a day when there were only a few channels available to those hungry for information – three TV channels, two newspapers, and the radio. Does anyone really believe that as nice a man Walter Cronkite apparently was, that he was actually delivering “the truth,” even if he was America’s most trusted journalist during the Vietnam War?

There is a way out of this though. Unfortunately, it probably isn’t going to significantly improve the bargaining position of competent day to day journalists. The rise of new voices via new channels like Twitter and Facebook is enabling people to be better informed. Yes, there are people who are searching out and sharing the stories that support their points of view – even the crazy points of view. But our salvation (and I don’t think that is too strong a word) is that there are people who do want to be better informed and so they’ll search for different points of views and stories. And those who don’t want to be better informed? Those who settle for the information they’re fed on their news network of choice? Who cares? The stupid will always be with us.

The decimation of technical journalism and the fall of the fan boys is not an isolated incident – it’s an example of the upheaval going on in throughout journalism. There is a massive process of weeding going on and those who have no talent and no industry are fading away and they will be replaced by those who can develop a story and tell it. The New York Times is finding itself, the Huffington Post is rising, Glenn Beck is eclipsing Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly if you haven’t noticed. So, yeah, he’s a jerk but he’s made the other two jerks irrelevant.

I heard a man say on the radio: “It all works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out yet, well then this isn’t the end. “ I wish I remembered who it was who said that, but he was right.

You can’t blow away New Orleans

Katrina Memorial by the Convention Center: the stone says: Honoring the people and remembering the events that occurred August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina

The first time I went to New Orleans it was part of a road trip I took with my college friends. We piled in a car and drove to New Orleans from Dallas. This is pretty much a rite of passage for Dallas kids and as these things go ours was a pretty tame affair. We were college girls from a small Catholic school where my uncle was the Dean of something. The driver on this wild weekend trip, Mary Jo, had been my friend since high school and her father once dated my mother — an apparently happy, if brief, relationship because neither party shows any inclination of shutting up about it. All in all, our idea of a wild New Orleans weekend involved a beer or two and a chance to stare self consciously at boys.

We were driving up to see my roommate Sara Anne.

The drive was magnificent and mysterious to us Dallas girls. After our own bleak plains we were amazed to find ourselves in endless woods punctuated by tiny tree shaded towns that sometimes seemed to consist of nothing more than a few roadside buildings including a bar, a grocery store, and a couple of old fashioned gas pumps.

Once we got to New Orleans we stayed with Sara Anne in Metarie and she obligingly took us into the Quarter for lunch and a little shopping. This wasn’t even close to the wild weekend we’d planned with trepidation but Sara Anne also took us to Lake Ponchatraine for soft shelled crabs (What a revelation! They didn’t have a lot of soft shelled crabs in Dallas in those days), Canal Street for Oysters, on the street car to see the great houses in the Garden District, and I do believe we managed to get to Tipitina’s for some fabulous music and great food — but that may be my imagination. I do know that we had a few beers and stared self-consciously at boys — quite a bit as a matter of fact. We drove all over the area and all over New Orleans and everywhere there was something wonderful to see and something even better to eat. I can’t say that I really came to understand New Orleans on that trip — I am a slow learner.

I got the opportunity to start figuring it out anew when a bunch of friends saddled up for a another road trip to the New Orleans Jazz Fest. This time I surely did get it. We beat our feet in the Mississippi mud. We ate crawfish morning noon and night — most memorably in the dark at the side of the Natchez river boat listening to Pharoah Sanders wail away on the boat. We watched the barges on the river as the music floated by on one of those impossibly beautiful moonlit nights you get in the south and we dream about out here in the west.

Since then we made the pilgrimage to Jazz Fest and New Orleans repeatedly and one night was preserved for Dooky Chase’s restaurant, another for Tipitina’s and the Maple Leaf. New Orleans was becoming “my” town.

Once I moved to California, I didn’t get to New Orleans nearly as often as I liked. Before Hurricane Katrina though, New Orleans was a major stop on the high tech conference circuit so I usually got a trip every now and again. Then, of course, came Katrina, really another 9/11 for the U.S. This time the attack came from nature and in the aftermath of that disaster, many Americans were left feeling disappointed in themselves, ourselves — we weren’t able to come together and help each other as we always believed we would. Instead, everything came apart inexorably on the television.

I went to New Orleans this year in connection with one of my favorite conferences, Siggraph (short for special interest group, graphics). It’s a gathering for people who work in the fields affected by computer graphics including glamorous fields like movie making and game development, but also the sciences where computer graphics are used to visualize oil fields beneath the sea and scientists put together new molecules as if they’re snapping together Tinker Toys. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of work going on all around the Gulf Coast to find oil and get a better handle on weather patterns. In fact, in spite of all the emphasis on games and movie special effects, much of the real ground breaking work in graphics happens on the scientific side and the entertainment industry puts new breakthroughs to work where we all can see it. And, it is at Siggraph where everyone in the field of computer graphics hunkers down and shows each other what they’ve been working on all year. It’s where graduate students make a name for themselves with a new breakthroughs for creating computer graphics and the big media companies give back by presenting their discoveries and tircks of the trade to eager students.

Siggraph has been held in New Orleans twice before, both times before the storm, and both times the conferences were like no other trade show on earth. We partied through the night and we trudged through astounding heat in the morning and all the bright colors and fanciful architecture of New Orleans made moving from the real world into the imagined world a smooth transition.

In that sense, this year wasn’t all that different. There were fewer sponsored parties and less people showed up. There’s not enough money to go around right now. But, anyone who can’t find a good time or run smack dab into magic in New Orleans probably shouldn’t have gone there in the first place. And, if you, like most tourists, just hung around the French Quarter and the Garden District, New Orleans seems to be just about the same, but it’s not the same. Whole neighborhoods are now fields of weeds with the occasional re-built house looking lonely and forlorn. The neighborhoods we’d passed through on those rides with Sara Anne and all those other road trips from Texas are just not there. It’s a supremely disorienting experience.

Some neighborhoods have come back stronger than ever — as evident on this map: the blue areas are 80-100% rebuilt, but the yellow and green areas need more work. Source:
http://www.gnocdc.org/RecoveryByNeighborhood/Figure1.html

All of which finally brings me to the point of all this nostalgic rambling. This year Siggraph was different in another significant way. This year people came to an annual trade show with a determination to bring something back to a city that showed them such a good time in the past. Spontaneous projects bubbled up. Turbosquid, a company that sells 3D models to content creators in the game industry and for movies and television sponsored a house for habitat for humanity. Their team built a house in the 9th Ward.

Walt Disney Animation Studios, Nvidia, and Autodesk helped make over the computer room of the Algiers Technical Academy with new computers, software. Volunteers came and painted, cleaned, and set up hardware and software. Nvidia sponsored a pub crawl through the French Quarter. Proceeds and matching funds went to the Algiers Technical Academy.

ACM Siggraph also supported the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp which offers classes in the music business and music making. An album of New Orleans Music is available here $9.99 and proceeds go to the camp. http://www.siggraph.org/s2009/community/outreach/index.php#louis.

The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) offers arts training to New Orleans school kids with classes in culinary arts, dance, media arts, music, theater arts, visual arts, and creative writing. Siggraph invited 50 students from the school to meet professionals in the Siggraph community for one on one mentoring.

Siggraph also supported the Tipitina’s Foundation’s Instruments a Comin’ project to provide new musical instruments to New Orleans schools.

Finally, a project close to my heart is the Make It Right House sponsored by the ACM Siggraph Graphics Pioneers — a group of people who have been active in computer graphics development for more than 20 years. This group has been formed out of a desire to give back and they offer scholarships and mentoring programs. The Make It Right Group http://www.makeitrightnola.org/index.php?isDirect2=true was founded by Brad Pitt, William McDonough + Partners, Cherokee Gives Back FoundationGraft, and works with neighborhood groups to help rebuild the 9th Ward where the destruction was the worst and the rebuilding is taking the longest. The emphasis is on building sustainable houses that are practical for the Louisiana ecosystem. They’re economical to build and to cool, they’re on stilts, they use solar energy, and they’re attractive. To donate to the Siggraph Pioneers’ Make It Right house go to: http://tiny.cc/GraphicsHouse. You can show support and monitor the progress of the house at the Facebook group for the Pioneers MIR house.

This last visit to New Orleans made me realize that we’re really not as helpless as the television makes us feel. Just because there was nothing we could do to stop the storm or help people immediately, there’s nothing stopping us from doing more now and to keep doing more. People in New Orleans said over and over again, thanks for coming, we know you haven’t forgotten. I was proud when a waiter at Emeril’s told me the people of Texas have been wonderful and he put his hand down on the table and just started listing what groups in Houston and Austin were doing for the town and especially for the musicians of New Orleans. I realized that Americans still really do come together and help people. You just can’t believe everything you see on the television.

And, so hey, by the way, we ought to have another of these little talks about Galveston, Texas.

 

The dawn of a new age

Las Vegas is probably the last place you’d expect to see the start of a revolution so maybe it’s been going on all along. You tell me. Here’s what happened: during several cab rides, the conversations between the driver and the dispatcher were remarkably cordial — I mean remarkably.

They called each other sir and ma’am and they said please and thank you. Dispatchers. Cabbies. What is the world coming to?

It’s even a little bit of a disappointment for one who has rather enjoyed listening to the screaming matches between drivers and dispatchers from time to time. But there are compensations. For instance, there was one muted exchange after a driver finally admitted to the dispatcher that he wasn’t going to be able to pick up a fare on time — even though the appointment had been made the day before. The sirs and the ma’ms flew back and forth spit out between clenched teeth, escalating through cadence, tone, and aspiration. Sir, you have had this appointment on your book since yesterday. Yes, Ma’am but I can’t get there in time, that’s why I’m telling you now. These words are nothing on the page, but through the deft use of fraught silence and well placed emphasis they were daggers hurled across the air waves. Finally, the dispatcher unleashed her ultimate weapon — the one that must never be abused, the boss. Sir, please call Mr. Frangipani at your earliest convenience. The meek rejoinder, yes, Ma’am.

Cab rides have changed, and in the end it can’t possibly be a bad thing. In fact, it’s part of a larger thing. At some recent point in time, management manuals were updated to include the basic rules of behavior we were supposed to learn in childhood but lost on the playground, the basketball court, the convenience store, through haste and efficiency, and language differences. What didn’t drift away in thoughtless daily exchange, was beaten out of us by the TV shows, movies, and games that promised to show us reality but actually created their own.

But maybe the tide is being turned. If Las Vegas cab drivers can change, cab drivers,  those stressed out souls who must deal with the late night drunks, despair in the morning, madly euphoric tourists, and  people just trying to get to work on time. Well then,  change is definitely possible.

Politeness and kindness might not end wars or violence, but the effort to control one’s temper and maintain civility can certainly delay the festivities. When one is forbidden the easy expletive and rude gesture, carefully chosen words have to be used and in the end actual information is likely to be communicated and points of view exchanged.

There is a great temptation to attribute all this to a new administration and maybe that is an influence. If we see our leaders carefully choosing words and avoiding inflammatory rhetoric, the least we can do is say hello to the grocery store checker. Maybe the change has come as part of a general movement away from the quick draw and snappy rejoinder to more complex interactions because there’s a general recognition that hard problems require hard work. After all you don’t change the culture of cab drivers over night.

It certainly seems to me that people in general are being more polite and helpful to one another, and that too doesn’t happen over night or with one election. In fact, let’s hope it is something deeper that lasts a little longer than an election cycle or two. There’s so much more work to be done and getting to a destination in peace is just one little step.

Day of the dead

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one does a pretty good job of saying, well yeah sure it’s Barcelona and all but dammit, I am working.

Isn’t this a miserable looking bunch of folks?

Reporting for the tech pubs is just a brutal job these days. Websites with a daily quota have replaced daily, weekly, and montly printed publications. Most of the people I talk to are expected to file at least three or four stories a day, every single day.

I listen to reporters talking to editors and sometimes it’s just painful. The editors frequently have absolutely no technical understanding of what the reporters are writing about and the reporters are so burned out they’re just trying to get through the process of delivering one story and move on to the next.

And the worst part? The very worst part? People are getting laid off, and the salaries are insulting.

Technorati Tags: journalism, tech writing,

Unasked for movie review: A History of Violence

Sure, movie reviews are becoming the most useless commodity on the web. Everyone is a critic and few are worth relying on including me. But, a blog is a swell place to keep track of the movies I’ve seen and thoughts I’ve had about them, so I will offer up reviews of movies as I see them. It’ll do me good to keep my hand in, after all.
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History of Violence (2005)
Dir: David Cronenberg, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Cronenberg film and as yet another sign of aging, I found it a relief that there was none of the spectacular gore of The Fly or the creepy perversion of Dead Ringers, and none of the overwrought pretension of Naked Lunch but there was the ghost of all that. Cronenberg used to be my favorite director but I found myself signing up for this one with a sense of duty and dread — I’m just getting too old to have the bejeezus scared out of me. But no, as the title suggests this movie isn’t going for that. Cronenberg is going for something bigger in this story of a small town dad, Viggo Mortensen, who faces down, and spectacularly dispatches two evil psycho-killers and reveals himself to be something more than he appears. It’s a neat three act piece. The idyllic small town life is defined and explored and changed forever for the characters by the entrance of evil and violence. In part 2, violence attracts violence. Big city hoods from Philadelphia led by Ed Harris come looking for our cleft-chinned hero and tell Mortenson’s wife Maria Bello and anyone else who asks that Mortensen is really someone else, an accomplished killer from Philly. Harris asks Bello, don’t you wonder why he’s so good at killing people? She does and so do we,  and in the third act the story is told and all the loose ends are cleaned up and it’s messy — it is still a Cronenberg film after all. It is an updated film noire with echoes of The Killers and Out of the Past. But for Cronenberg, evil is always something that lives inside. In the past for Cronenberg, evil could come crashing out in various disgusting ways as it has in Rabid, Videodrome, and The Fly. In The History of Violence, evil twists inside a man who wants to be a good father and husband and a small town good guy. There is something eerie about the characters and the setting, which is probably the result of Croneneberg’s affection for the strange and the work put into the screen play by the writer Josh Olsen who wrote the original graphic novel. In the end, Cronenberg rejects the crazy torture and horror the graphic novel apparently went in for  (according to the Wikipedia account of the movie making http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Violence). Instead,  the movie comes a little closer to a more typical modern thriller with maybe a more than the usual bloodshed.

The movie’s three different acts never really seem to be of a whole,
the movie doesn’t overcome some bad dialog and ill-advised side-trips
in the story telling. But luckily, it’s a fun ride that doesn’t do any
lasting damage along the way. And, there is that little something extra that makes it worth the time. That title, that contemplation of evil — can evil really be overcome or is it always there, always inside and always ready to come crashing out? In real life evil and violence is not manifest as some creepy inner organ with a life of its own or a monster with a fly’s head — but people die, sometimes lots of people die, because of evil.  Cronenberg, gets closer to making this point in The History of Violence.
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I’m off to stock up on more Cronenberg films. Maybe my early love was a post-adolescent affair for the thrills but I’d like to see more of this (slightly) more restrained story telling from the man. That’s certainly one advantage of being out of the movie reviewing game — there’s always catching up to do.

Out where the buses don’t go

Plano is out there–Unless you live in Plano or grew up there, I suppose. But, having grown up in Dallas, I don’t believe I have ever heard the town of Plano mentioned without the prefix “out in” added to the front as in “They’re living out in Plano” or maybe even, “Oh my god, that’s way the hell out in Plano.” I won’t even mention Plano’s sister city Frisco, because I didn’t know it existed until a company put me up in a hotel there last year but when it did, I discovered a whole new world.

This year I happen to be staying in Plano around Christmas and it has even changed over the past year. There is acre after acre of shopping center all with the same shops: a Gap, an Ann Taylor, a Chicos. Some are doomed, the Linens & Things are gradually sprouting “going out of business” banners. There are Circuit Cities that don’t seem long for this world, but Best Buy looks strong out here in God’s country. Some are new, we ran across an Amish Furniture store, an Urban Furniture store (hello?) and a whole hell of a lot of upscale wine stores.

A lot of the new areas out here are  attractive — upscale mini-towns with condos and main streets with movie theaters, and restaurants with outdoor cafes. There are cute little stores full of stuff no one really wants like little branding irons to personalize your steaks. But the question is why? Why does the city need to crawl its way out here into the prairie? Why keep building places that require cars in order to survive. This is out where the buses don’t go. It’s where the toll road goes.

There seems to be general agreement that it’s nice to live in a place where you can walk to get coffee and shop, where neighbors are close by. Urban centers are being rebuilt to capitalize on this new found appreciation of town as opposed to country. And, false towns are being built in the country.

During this cold and scary Christmas of 2008, looking out my hotel room over empty fields on one side, and teeming concrete on the other, it feels like the infrastructure is getting a little thin out here. Can all this be sustained through the new year?

Eventually, Plano won’t be out there anymore. It will be Dallas. In the meantime it really feels like the ends of the earth and the end of the latest boom.

The car bidness

who are you friends … really. The car manufacturers are finding out that the Republicans are not their friends just their accomplices we guess. The Republican legislators are the most vocal opponents to the idea of bailing out the car manufacturers. These guys are not exactly exemplars of bravery are they? When the car manufacturers balked on seat belts, safer cars, emissions, energy efficient cars, you name it, the Republicans were right there with them joining in a harmonious sing along about the economy and the expense of making cleaner/safer/fuel efficient/whathaveyou cars. But now, the automobile makers have ended up staring down bankruptcy as a result of their unimaginative stay the course attitude towards design and development and who is standing up for them? Democrats who can’t see how throwing 2 million people out of work can be a good idea. Or perhaps it should be stated more clearly, they’re uncomfortable throwing 2 million voters out of work.

An electric car design from Zap. Don’t count on seeing anything like this baby from American car manufacturers any time soon.

Granted surveys show the majority of Americans are inclined to let the American automakers boil in their own motor oil and that’s what has the Republicans spooked. The point is don’t go counting on your friends they might not be there when you need them especially if there’s money and votes involved.