The 21 Absolute Worst Things in The World
Actual poster from the mid-50’s issued by Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare and anti communist witch hunt in Washington.
What I learned this week, April 20, 2012
Monthly Archives: April 2012
A Bird in the Hand
Taken at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival
The Shuttle, then and now
NASA Photo
Today I walked down to the break area at work to get some ice and I saw a small clot of folks gathered around the television, holding their coffee and watching the screen. I glanced to see what had their attention and saw footage of the Space Shuttle Discovery strapped to the top of a Boeing 747 on its way to Dulles airport and the Smithsonian.
That scene brought back a long-ago memory for me.
It was… maybe 1980 or so. I was working for a salt company in Hutchinson, Kansas. We had bought a small solar salt company in Utah. The production method was to pump saline water from the lake into a series of crystallization ponds and let the sun evaporate the water over the summer, leaving a layer of salt on the bottom of the shallow ponds. This would be picked up by a loader, screened and packed into bags, and then shipped out for animal feed or de-icing.
The company offices and warehouse were in Ogden, but the production ponds were located on the Great Salt Lake in a very isolated location – a little ways around the tip of Promontory Pont.
There are several large, successful evaporation operations on the lake… this was not one of those. It was a small company that made some salt from a few acres of ponds. It was called the Lake Crystal Salt company and its location on the remote arm of the lake (sealed off, more or less, from the rest of the lake by a railroad causeway) gave it access to some concentrated brine, and it did produce a lot of salt in its tiny ponds.
It’s long out of business, but looking at google maps, the ponds are still there (I’ll remember the shape of those ponds ‘til the day I die).
At any rate, part of my job was to fly up to Utah at the end of the summer to do an inventory of the salt that had been produced in the evaporation ponds during the warm season. We had designed and built a core drilling machine out of a gasoline powered post hole digger and would don rubber boots and walk around the ponds in a grid pattern, drilling holes down through the salt to the hardpan beneath. I would reach down the hole with a tape measure and determine the depth of the salt. I still have small scars on my hands from where the rough salt crystals and harsh concentrated brine would scrape at my skin. I would then take all these measurements and use them to calculate how many thousands of tons of salt we would have for sale after it was harversted (harvested… it was surprisingly like farming).
It was a two – man job, so I would hire a laborer in Ogden and the two of us would drive out every morning to the site. It was a long drive through some very desolate country. A handful of workers lived in a dormitory out there, only coming back on weekends – but I didn’t want a part of that, so I stayed in a hotel.
It was quite a drive and to have time to get any work done we would leave Ogden well before dawn. From Ogden north to Brigham City and then west, out across the mountains and desert until we could curve south down the length of the Promontory Point peninsula. The sun would rise behind us and light the beautiful, rugged, isolated mountains in a golden fire.
One morning, as we were driving, not another car or soul in sight for miles, I spotted, way up ahead, something odd. It was an aircraft of some type. It looked like a biplane, though something was off. Distances are hard to judge in the desert, but it looked a long way away. That would mean it was huge. It was flying very low, however, so I wasn’t sure about that. As I watched, it flew behind a large mesa and I lost sight of it.
“What was that? Did you see that?” I asked my worker.
“I think I saw something, but I don’t know what it was,” he said.
We drove on, scouring the sky until we reached the opposite end of the mesa. Suddenly a huge, ungainly aircraft lumbered out from behind the rock and crossed the highway directly in front of us. It was no more than a hundred yards off the ground and no more than two hundred in front of us. I slammed the brakes and skidded to a stop on the shoulder. My worker and I tumbled out of the car and stood in the desert, our mouths hanging open as the plane slowly curved around us. We were gobsmacked. It looked so close we could reach out and touch it.
It was the Space Shuttle attached to the top of a 747. Keep in mind this was 1980 and the shuttle wouldn’t make its first powered flight for another year. My memory is a little hazy but I think we saw the Colombia on its way to Florida for its first launch. We had seen pictures of the shuttle and its transportation 747, but on the tiny television screens of the day. To see the thing live, so close, coursing through the crystal clear high desert air at dawn, unexpected in the middle of nowhere, was an astounding sight.
It flew past us and then disappeared behind another mountain. We climbed back in the car, drove on out to the evaporation ponds and put in a full day of work.
That night I watched the Salt Lake City news on my hotel television and they covered the landing of the shuttle at a nearby air base. They said that they had flown the shuttle past the Morton Thiokol plant out in the Utah desert mountains where they were building the solid rocket boosters to give the workers a view of what they were working on. On my next drive out to the ponds I looked closely and could pick out burned spots on the mountains where the engines had been tested.
I saw the Colombia once more, over Dallas, one morning twenty three years later. It was a nice day and we had the front door open to get some fresh air in the house and I was shaken by a loud boom from the sky. We rushed out to see the smoke trails in the heavens.The Colombia was breaking up over the metroplex to die and fall in a million pieces on in the East Texas Piney Woods.
Meat Pie!
As I was puttering around the house Saturday, trying to shake off the ache of a sleepless night, I thought about getting some cereal or something in my gullet – but I realized there would be food trucks at the Ciclovia de Dallas and that I would want to eat there. That made for some hungry driving around, but I was rewarded as I cycled across the closed-off Houston Street Viaduct by the appearance of a gourmet food truck that I had never tried before.
It was the Three Lions truck and this one boasted English Food. A while back I tried the excellent Three Men and a Taco truck and it was good. The problem is that the folks behind this truck were British ex-pats and driving another Taco truck around North Texas didn’t fit in with their souls. So the gaudy Taco wrap came off and the truck became Three Lions.
Most of the Ciclovia festivities were over before I arrived. When I rode my bike up to the truck they were working on the menu sign, crossing off the Sausage Roll. Looking at what was left, I decided on the Meat Pie (The Carolina BBQ Pork Mini Burger looked good, but didn’t sound very English to me). While I was waiting for my food a guy came up to grab a napkin and told me, “Oh man, those sausage rolls are great… Oh crap! They are out of them!” He looked at me like a poor relative as they handed me my meat pie.
I moved to the condiment section and chose the bottle of Sriracha (anything good is better with Sriracha on it). A Hispanic family was standing there eating the last of the sausage rolls and the man pointed to the Sriracha and in broken English said, “That stuff is good… spicy!” I agreed and gave it another squirt.
I carried my pie back to where my bike leaned up against the concrete bridge rail. I sat there eating, listening to the live music, and watching the bikes of the Ciclovia de Dallas roll by. It was good, though I was so hungry I can’t really give a fair review.
Some day, though, I’m going to try that sausage roll.
Three Lions Food Truck Home Page
Three Lions food truck at the Ciclovia de Dallas
Texas in our hearts, England in our blood.
A meat pie, Sriracha sauce, a diet Coke, a bike, and a concrete bridge
Ciclovia Dallas
The crowd at Ciclovia Dallas on the Houston Street Viaduct with the Dallas downtown skyline
Saturday, April 14, was a day I had marked my calendar quite some time ago. It was the day of the first Ciclovia de Dallas, and that looked really cool to me. I had never heard of a Ciclovia before. It means bike path, or in this case, the temporarily closing of a road to automobiles so that it can be taken over by cyclists and pedestrians.
The good folks at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff had organized this event and the City of Dallas had closed off the Houston Street Viaduct to cars. The viaduct is a long bridge that reaches out of the skyscrapers of downtown over to Oak Cliff across the vast Trinity River Bottoms. Over the decades I’ve lived in Dallas I have driven across the Houston Street Viaduct many times and I knew it would be a dramatic place to hang out and ride a bike because of the view of downtown and the long drop down into the river.
My intention was to get up early and get to see the whole thing, but I had a rough Friday the Thirteenth the day before and I was so upset I didn’t get to sleep until about five in the morning. So I slept in and it took quite a bit of willpower to drag my aching and worn out body from the bed and into the day. My mind kept racing and coming up with a million reasons not to drive down there and ride my stupid crappy bicycle over an old bridge.
But I persevered, took my bike apart (reminding me why I want to save enough money for a folder) and shoved it into the trunk. Then I drove downtown and proceeded to get caught in several massive traffic jams and lost and lost. I was hungry, frustrated, and sleep-deprived and couldn’t find a parking spot or make the right turns. I fought my way through downtown at least four times, crossing over the Trinity, then making a mistake and ending up on a crowded Interstate going the wrong way. Twice, I went by so closely I could see the folks on bicycles riding back and forth, but couldn’t find a place to stop (or at least couldn’t spot one before I drove by it). I was getting very close to packing it in and going home, but I thought I’d take one more drive across the river.
Finally, after wasting an hour driving around, I gave up and turned down an obscure side street in Oak Cliff, deciding I’d park there, assemble my bike (reminding myself why I want to save enough money for a bike that folds) and ride around looking for the bridge on my bike. After heading off I realized that the entrance to the bridge on the Oak Cliff side was only fifty feet on down the road.
I was late and a lot of the Ciclovia festivities were past, but there was still a nice crowd there and it was a lot of fun. I rode back and forth over the bridge enjoying the views of downtown and the Trinity river bottoms and looking at all the interesting people.
Music at Ciclovia Dallas
Unicyle riders - I was too slow to get a photo of them riding.
Bicycle Polo on the bridge
Bicycle Polo player
It was so much fun I didn’t pay much attention to getting photographs – I missed the bicycle powered smoothie maker. Didn’t get photos of the unicycle riders on their single wheels. There were food trucks on hand so I was able to get something to eat and I felt a lot better after that.
While I was eating I noticed a guy along the bridge sitting there with a manual typewriter. I’ve wanted a manual letter-hammerer for years and I asked him what he was up to .
His name is Thomas Cantu and he types up little chapbooks on that manual typewriter. I bought one (A Mexican American’s Guide to Your Parent’s Homeland) and chatted with him for a minute. Thomas writes about the Mexican-American experience and how drug violence is destroying Mexico. He says the typewriter is nice because people come up to ask about it and it’s an easy introduction. I told him I’ve always wanted one to put a roll of paper into – he recognized that was how Kerouac wrote.
Thomas Cantu and his typewriter.
So I rode one more lap of the bridge and then went back to my car, took my bike apart, and loaded it into the trunk (getting grease all over and reminding myself about how nice it would be to have a folding bicycle). It was a lot of fun, I hope the event was enough of a success for the city to take the ball and run with it. It would be a great annual thing – to close off the bridge and allow one day of slow riding and walking.
A Ciclovia… what a great idea.
Sunday Snippet – Swallow the Worm
It was in a third floor hotel corridor in Teacup, Mississippi that Kevin Buck met the love of his life. Hurricane Camille had torn open the belly of the Gulf Coast like a giant wind and water driven scythe and flooded what she didn’t wreck. The work and repair crews assembled, coming from all across the center of the continent and careening down in convoys of trucks – blue collar men piling up overtime and setting the world back to right… like they always did.
Kevin needed the money and used some of his last unspoiled connections to hook up with the power crew. His job was to set up a mobile laboratory and test the various oils brought to him by the workers trying to restore burned out or flooded transformers. He’d check for PCBs and then analyze the oil for water content or other contaminants. He could give the workers a pretty good educated guess at what was wrong with the machinery based on the properties of the oil that wrapped and cooled its core.
At the end of each day Kevin would hand write the days lab results in big block letters on thick opaque sheets of paper. He’d clip these to a heavy cylinder and lower that into a bulky machine hooked into a phone line. The cylinder would spin and a little arm would slowly trace its way down the paper – transmitting a crude image back to headquarters over the line. The other workers would sometimes come in and shoot the bull – amazed as they watched the thing spin and move. Every now and then Kevin would have to re-print and re-send a page or two if he hadn’t written large or clear enough the first time.
Kevin had a bachelors in math and a PhD in physics, but tried to conceal his education – especially on the road with the work crews. He liked being with them – liked their simple views, their lack of concern for the future… but especially, he liked the way they drank.
At the end of each day they would gather in the air conditioned interior corridor of the hotel (they rented an entire floor of the small Red Roof Inn) and would share coolers of beer and bottles of stronger stuff.
The women would show up too. Kevin didn’t really understand where they came from or why they were there… divorced women from Teacup or down the road, bored younger girls looking for a way out of town… maybe some professional women willing to ply a little trade on credit. Kevin didn’t pay much attention to them but appreciated the way they livened up the party – gave an edge, a primeval competition to the boasting and drinking.
Then one night… it was very late and Kevin was very drunk… he leaned back, sitting against the plaster wall, feeling the thin cheap carpet through his jeans, and noticed a slim young girl with short ragged dark hair, wearing a white halter top and a tight pair of jeans with the top button undone.
As Kevin watched her she snatched a bottle of Mezcal from a giant man hulking above her. The man was shirtless and covered with a thick layer of dark wiry hair but he was still wearing a bright yellow hard hat. Kevin knew the brand of Mezcal – it was cheap and nasty stuff – illegal in the US but readily available for almost nothing from the legions of workers that swarmed across the border whenever disaster struck.
The girl spun the cap off, stuck the bottle into her mouth and tipped her head straight back. The liquid level was maybe a quarter down and the air bubbled up to the top, making a delicious solvent noise. Kevin watched with his mouth slightly open as the girl held motionless – she must have stuck her tongue in the end of the bottle and plugged it because nothing was running out. The corridor lamps were dim but everyone could see the silvery worm sinking down through the clear liquid. The worm swam back and forth as if it was still alive before it finally tumbled out of sight down the glass neck past the girl’s lips.
She made a gulping sound and a convulsive twitch. Kevin saw a fresh healthy bubble pulse back up through the Mezcal, settling against the flat bottom of the inverted bottle. The girl quickly grabbed the bottle and pulled it from her mouth, flipping it right side up with a wide smile. The worm was gone. The clot of workers standing in a semi-circle erupted into applause… they had never seen anything like that.
“This is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with,” Kevin said to himself as she took a little bow there outside the hotel room.
Got Pupusa?
It was Thursday and time for the second of the Patio Sessions down at Sammons Park in front of the Winspear Opera House. Last week I took a lot of photographs (here, here, and here) and didn’t feel like doing that again. Viewing life through a viewfinder is not the best way to see things.
I did take my camera, just in case, but I loaded my Kindle, Moleskine, and selected a vacuum filler Parker “51” with a fine nib and Parker Quink black ink (my best note-taking combination – the “51” has an amazingly smooth fine nib, perfect for the Moleskine) and decided ahead of time I’d get something to eat from a food truck, commandeer a table, and relax – read and write a little.
I left work and caught the DART train downtown from the station near my office. The weather was cloudy and windy, but overall not too bad for Texas. I was happy when I saw they had a food truck that, not only had I never eaten at before – but it was also one I had wanted to check out. I was glad I at least brought my camera… have to get photos of food trucks.
It was Dos Paisano’s – a fairly new truck that promised Salvadorian fare. I’m a big fan because it is food that is similar to what I ate in High School in Nicaragua (I love banana-wrapped tamals)… plus pupusas.
Jacob Metcalf opened with a mellow acoustic set. The sound system is such that the music can be heard clearly from anywhere under the massive Winspear sunscreen so I went ahead and bought a pupusa plate and a bottle of water and settled down on a table, listening to the music and reading, just as I had planned. The food was very good. Now I need to track that truck down and try their plantains, yucca, and tamals.
The second musical act was The O’s – a neo-country duo singing upbeat folksy music using a banjo, a slide guitar, a foot pounded bass drum, and a bit of a goofy-corny sense of humor. I enjoyed them a lot though they had to deal with the pealing church bells, just like last week.
The crowd was quite a bit bigger than last week and the concert was sort of impaired by a large group of little kids that kept running around the reflecting pool, yelling and splashing. I know I shouldn’t complain – my kids were as big a pain as anyone’s – but I know how it works. To a parent there is nothing as attractive as their own children and nothing as amusing as their antics. You could see the proud mothers and fathers smiling broadly at the edges of the reflecting pool, out for an evening with their blankets, plastic wine glasses, and massive strollers. What is tough to do is to constantly remind yourself that not everybody thinks the way you do – as a matter of fact, nobody else thinks your kids are cute. You’re the only ones.
The Patio Sessions are not too long, at seven thirty everything was over. I gathered up my stuff and caught the train back home.
I have been working through this huge ebook of noir short stories, The Best American Noir of the Century. I kept reading on the train, coursing through a fascinating bit of fiction by Harlan Ellison called Mefisto in Onyx. Even with Ellison’s occasional overwrought chunk of prose here and there it’s a crackerjack story and sucked me in enough to have me look up and realize I had gone a stop too far. I had to get off the train and wait for another southbound to get me back to where my car was. I don’t like waiting around on a dark train station platform that I’m not familiar with… but there was some illumination from a streetlight and at least I was able to finish the harrowing story.
And it was very good.
The Dos Paisano's Salvadorian/Mexican fusion food truck. Look for it in your neighborhood.
Got Pupusa?
Ordering food from the Dos Paisano's Truck.
My pupusa order with a lot of red and (spicy) green sauce.
Also in the photo is my Kindle and its custom made case.
The top half of the Dos Paisano's Menu.
The bottom half of the menu. I'm going to have to go back.
I like that this song mentions Tietze Park – a Dallas sort of place. My bus drove by there on the way to work for years. I would look for its signature bent over tree (I think it’s a “kneeling” bois d’ arc )every day. It was voted the best place to break up in the city. There’s even a song about it by the band Elkhart- video performed at the Belmont, of course.
The amazing view of Downtown Dallas from the Belmont.
What I learned this week, April 13, 2012
We all have read and heard enough bad advice to fill the oceans to overflowing. This, on the other hand, may be the best advice I have ever heard… ever.
I really, really, wish someone had told me this when I was sixteen. Ten thousand hours.
The other day, I went down to the Dallas Arts District to watch the first Patio Sessions
Here’s a Vimeo of a bit of the performance….
You can see me take a picture at 5:35 or so.
My favorite Internet radio station is Radio Paradise. They play a wide variety of music, all of it good. Every now and then, something comes on that makes me sit up and listen – then find out who and what it was. This was one of those times.
This has (as of when I’m writing this) over one hundred fifty million hits. I suppose you have already seen it. On the odd chance that you haven’t – here it is anyway. It deserves the hits.
This is sort of long, but watch the whole thing, it’s worth it. Nine-year-old’s cardboard arcade launches college fund
Monster Heads in Little Wooden Boxes
The night before we went down to the Deep Ellum Festival of the Arts, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos, I pulled a little wad of bills out of a hiding spot and carefully counted. This was what was left of my stash of savings that I had scraped together and held aside for non-essential purchases. I was glad when I found out I had enough to buy another sculpture from an artist that haunts the Deep Ellum Festival, David Pound of twentyheads.com.
He makes little monster heads in wooden boxes out of sculpey polymer clay and found objects. I’m a big fan. He always brings a big inventory to Dallas and it’s hard to choose only one.
I found his booth right after we arrived and I gave everything a once over, then left to think about my decision. We walked down to the other side of the festival and as we were coming back I could see a huge Texas violent spring thunderstorm rising up on the west side of the gleaming towers of downtown. I knew that time was suddenly short so I walked quickly back down to David’s booth to make up my mind.
They all look so cool. Some have backgrounds I especially like, some have more interesting found objects (I particularly liked one with a roadkill rat’s desiccated hand sticking up from his head – I asked about preservation and David said, “A couple days in the sun and it’s like jerky”) and others have facial expressions I like.
I narrowed it down to two – then picked one named “Burrow.” I liked his earth tones, electronic parts, and snarky expression.
Burrow
Now “Burrow” sits on a shelf next to his buddy that I bought last year, “Persuasion.”
Persuation
Last year, for mother’s day, I had David Pound make a pair of earrings for Candy. For the commission, I sent him a photo of our dog, Rusty, and he made her earrings to match.
Earrings I had David Pound make for Candy for Mother's Day last year.
They do look like Rusty
Customers at the Deep Ellum Art Festival looking over David Pound's inventory of little monster heads in boxes.
It's hard to pick only one.
David Pound working on a creation.
Art, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos
Every year, in the spring, Dallas is host to the three day Deep Ellum Art Festival. We try to go every year. I like to refer to it as the Deep Ellum Festival of the Arts, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos.
I wasn’t able to get down there on Friday or Saturday, but managed to carve out a couple hours around noon on Sunday. The sky started to spit on the ride down and the clouds off to the west were looking ominous, so I had to scurry through the throng a little faster than usual.
There were a lot of artists there – more than usual. I was a little disappointed, though. Usually the Deep Ellum Festival of the Arts, Music, Food, and Bad Tattoos has a healthy selection of oddball, interesting, and edgy art for sale – but it seems to have been taken over by the usual selection of folks that haunt springtime festivals all across the heartland. There is one sculptor that I look for and he was there with his usual flair (tomorrow’s entry) but otherwise, there wasn’t much to catch my eye for sale.
Now, as far as the folks walking around, that was another story. That was fun.
The festival stretches in a double line of canvas booths lining Main Street for about a mile. It is now growing down a handful of side streets too.
One nice thing about an arts festival is the chance to meet and talk to the artists themselves.
A wide variety of stuff is for sale.
There is a lot of food at the ends - Por Ejemplo - the King of Candy Apples
At each end of the main drag were large stages. This guy was drawing a band - though they had already finished.
Plenty of hipster doofuses to keep things lively.
This woman was waving a turkey leg out of her food trailer. When someone came up to buy one, she said, "Let me get you a fresh one hon, this is my demo model, I've been waving it out this window for hours."
A guy eating a turkey leg being stalked by a woman in a "Reality is a Prison" shirt.
Smaller musical stages were set up out on the end of the side streets.
An artist and his creation.
I really liked these little sculptures... but you'd have to by all of them to get the same effect.
Bill Chance 