How Government Wrecked the Gas Can

Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Bicycle Lanes on the Jefferson Viaduct from Oak Cliff into downtown, Dallas.

Why car drivers just lost my support for city streets

I have been somewhat skeptical of this whole car and vehicle lane investment the city has been building for the last 200 years …. They’ve built them in front of my home and my neighbors’ homes. My first thought, naturally, was of the inconvenience and safety issues — cars drive so fast! What if they hit my house? Or my neighbor? Or, me? But I also understand the desire of cars to have priority. They are so large, so loud and so dangerous, after all.

However, an incident that keeps occurring every day has tipped the scales. As I was making my way home, I was stuck at a standstill trying to cross the street. “What was the reason for this?” I wondered. As I got closer, the answer was evident: Hundreds of cars were riding down the street to gloat. (As they do every day now!)

For the Love of Kettle
Looking at the art

The Weird and Wicked World of the Singing Cowboy
by Clay Stinnett

13 REASONS WHY ORIGINAL ART IN THE HOME IS AS IMPORTANT AS A BED

Having original art in the home is vital to your well being. Art is a key piece of furniture for many reasons and yet it is sometimes put on the back burner in comparison to other home objects. This list is dedicated to the understanding of importance of art from perspectives of interior design, well being, social atmosphere, creating a mood in the home, and more. One quote that stands out about the importance of original art is the following, “You would never put fake books on your bookshelf, so why would you put fake art on your walls?”

Tethered to an Upside Down Giant
by Richard Ross

I am always amazed when I am in an expensive house and the shelves and walls are filled with stuff purchased from some “home store” – unoriginal crap made by some poor semislave laborer in some far-off tropical country. I want to scream, “Buy real things! Buy local art! Put something that means something to you on your walls and shelves!” It’s like they want to conform to some unwritten rule – “you will buy crap from the appointed crap stores and you will display it as a flag to other idiots that you know and follow the unwritten rules.”

Persuation, from Twenty Heads

I remember when Aw Shucks opened. I was living a block away at the time. There was a nice little family-owned Mexican restaurant in the building and I was a little disappointed when it closed… until Aw Shucks opened – it was really good. And it’s still there, 35 years later.

From the same series… The Inwood Lounge. I remeber when it opened – it was so cool. This was before Netflix and there was nothing better than going to a film at the Inwood – going early and meeting in The Lounge for a Martini beforehand. That was the 1980’s… and that was a long time ago. But The Lounge is still the same… maybe it is out of date, but maybe out of date sometimes works.

The Inwood Theatre is a baby boomer, celebrating its 70th birthday in May, but few things are more iconically ’80s in Dallas than The Inwood Lounge. Instantly, you may picture the wall of thick, squared glass and violet runner lights, like something you’d see in the club Sarah Connors visits in Terminator, or the crystal-clear, ice-sheened martinis.
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“It’s definitely a victim of its time,” Clardy says, describing the lounge space. “Between the glass tile, the wall, the little fountain running through it — it looks like the ’80s had one too many cocktails and vomited all over the place.”

I did not know he had passed away. It’s sad, I love his work.

He does have a posthumous book of short stories coming out next year. I wrote about the title story here – A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day Thirteen – The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden. You can read the story online from the New Yorker here – The Largesse Of the Sea Maiden

Ohh Crap

After the demise last summer of its bookstore, BookEnds, now the site of the madhouse that is the Office of Vital Statistics on the first floor of its downtown branch, the Dallas Public Library turned to moving its surplus stock with biannual clearance sales. The summer sale is set for Aug. 12 and 13 at the J. Erik Jonsson central branch, the library announced today.

About 40,000 books (print and audio), CDs, and DVDs will be on sale at exceptionally low prices, which, as far as we’re concerned, makes this the social event of late summer in Dallas.

I enjoy short films and have been pleasantly surprised at how many are available for free on youtube. Here’s one I like: