This Crazy ‘Simpsons’ Theory Actually Makes A Lot Of Sense
My opinion is that the events in the Simpsons aren’t really happening at all – that it is only a series of still drawings shown fast enough to convey the illusion of motion. That’s my crazy idea, anyway.
The idea of the whole thing being a fantasy – I thought the same thing about Minority Report
“Look at how peaceful they all seem. But on the inside, busy busy busy. It’s actually kind of a rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true”.
Why Don’t Kids Walk to School Anymore?
In the late 1960s, nearly 50 percent of American children walked to and from school each day. In this short film produced by City Walk, experts discuss the decline of a once-common activity—and why it would still benefit children today. “Kids need to walk to school so they learn about active transportation,” says University of Utah professor Elizabeth Joy. “When you have to go two, three, or four blocks, that doesn’t mean you get in the car. You can actually walk.”
Seersucker Ride and Picnic, Lee Park, Dallas, Texas
BikeableDallas.com
Updates, news, and musings from the City of Dallas Bicycle Program
My Xootr Swift folding bike in the cool bike rack in front of the Cold Beer Company Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Proposal To Turn Abandoned London Tube Lines Into Cycle Paths
Ummm… could anything be cooler that this?
Downtown Dallas Community Roundtable Aims to Meet Demand for Walkable Urban Neighborhoods in Dallas
My Xootr Swift in the Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas
Work in the City? Use a Commuter Folding Bike!
My Xootr Swift folding bike on the bike route over Interstate 10 in New Orleans. Downtown and the Superdome are in the background.
Chuck Marohn cofounded the non-profit Strong Towns in 2009. Since then he has steadily built an audience for his message about the financial folly of car-centric planning and growth. The suburban development pattern that has prevailed since the end of World War II has resulted in what Marohn calls “the growth Ponzi scheme” — a system that isn’t viable in the long run because it cannot bring in enough revenue to cover its costs.
Dallas is the most affordable destination for 2015
I have completely fallen in love with Raymond Carver’s short stories. If I could write like anyone, I’d write like him. This is a very interesting interview – for writers, fans, and anybody else with funcioning brain cells.
The Bourbon Barrel Temptress, on a Bourbon Barrel
Beginner’s Guide to Porters & Stouts
Heavy Hitter beer flight at Luck, in Trinity Groves, Dallas, Texas
Be Suspicious of the New Harper Lee Novel
Suspicious? Maybe. But I’m still going to read it. I mean… a long lost “sequel” to To Kill A Mockingbird… written before TKAM… How is anybody not going to read that?
Why Harper Lee remained silent for so many years.
A terrible Blackberry photo of my folding Xootr Swift parked next to a Yuba cargo bike (set up to carry a whole family) outside the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Two different philosophies on urban bicycling.
Writing in my Moleskine Journal outside the Mojo Lounge, Decatur Street, French Quarter, New Orleans
The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments
Shaun is having a bad day.
The 100 Best “B Movies” of All Time
The scary thing is that I’ve seen almost all of these. Really happy that The Magic Sword is on here at #50. The article says, “I imagine I would have loved this movie if I was a child growing up in the early 1960s.” Well, I did grow up then and I did love the film.
Totally agree with #1, by the way.
Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
10 Science Fiction Illustrators You Should Know
Detail from Eyes of the Cat, by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky
Eyes of the Cat
Ranking Dallas’ Best Neighborhoods for Restaurants
I know there will be a lot of disagreement, but I’d rate my inner-ring suburb, with its wealth of ethnic choices, up there with a lot of these. We’re only missing high-end dining, which I can’t afford (who can?) anyway.
Dancing Frogs and a 5 Dollar Chicken Fajita Bowl.
The Return of the Dancing Frogs
A Guide to Lowest Greenville
Abandoned Futuro House Found in Royce City Texas
Commander’s Palace
The 25 Classic Restaurants Every New Orleanian Must Try
As best as I can remember, I think I’ve been to fourteen of these – some of them a long time ago. The next one I want to go to is Willie Mae’s Scotch House for the fried chicken and the Mac and Cheese.
Bikes locked up in front of Parkway, New Orleans, Louisiana
While I was eating, a rugged group on Bicycles, braving the rain, came up for some food.
Food Trucks, Share The Lane. Food Bikes Are Merging Into The Business
Waiting for her order.
Pizza Oven at Cane Rosso Deep Ellum Dallas, Texas
World-famous Cane Rosso pizzeria expands to gentrifying Dallas suburb
Photo Courtesy Cane Rosso and Zoli’s (click to enlarge)
I love the Deep Ellum location of Cane Rosso. Carroltton is an inner-ring suburb (like Richardson, where I live) and is in the process of using the DART rail, bike trails, and densification while re-inventing itself (like Richardson, where I live) into a more urban, up-to-date place to live, rather than the desolation of cookie-cutter homes vomited out across the cotton fields to the north. Which is a good thing.
Eating Badly: Burger King, The Saddest Chain in Fast Food
When was the last time you set foot in a Burger King? Been a while? Well, in 2015 it’s “been a while” since a lot of American consumers have visited a BK, and for good reason. After all, the average consumer is not entirely clueless. And human beings in general are calibrated in such a way that they can inherently pick up on the sort of existential malaise your typical BK is now spewing into the atmosphere.
I don’t feel any burning desire to bash Burger King – but any fast food review that criticises a restaurant because of “existential malaise” – well that’s interesting. And true.
In a successful modern city, the car must no longer be king
The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”
Two billion years ago parts of an African uranium deposit spontaneously underwent nuclear fission. The details of this remarkable phenomenon are just now becoming clear.
3D Printed Sculptures Look Alive When Spun Under A Strobe Light
Notes From the Scrum: The thing you love can kill you
As the car’s front bumper hit my rear wheel, the sound of it wasn’t but absorbed. The front wheel popped out, and the tire ripped off as the violence of energy went from car to bike and human being. I came down on a naked fork going roughly 25 miles per hour.
And so this is how it happens. This is how you die.
……
People are everywhere, and the traffic of presence is jammed in my head. Cars stopped; a deputy from the sheriff’s office arrived; a firefighter was pressing my wrist and along my vertebrae; I watched the road rash on my lower right leg, at first blush the only real injury, begin to weep. The general consensus was that I was on some nine-lives stuff, flanked by angels, lucky beyond reason. I never even heard the car before it hit me. The driver wrote her speed down on the police report as “35?”
We were all thankful and happy under the circumstances; I had been obliterated from behind at a decent clip speed and was standing up, talking. We were happy as we could be, given the fact that I could be dead.
Until the Colorado Highway Patrol showed up.
Walking toward me as I sat on the side of the road shivering under a heavy coat, one of them asked, without any precursor, if we were riding two across. If we were riding in the middle of the road.
Are Bicyclists Jerks, Or Are They Just Being Safe?
The ponds at Huffhines Park along my bike commute route. This is my old, long gone, Yokota mountain bike converted into a commuter.
9 Reasons Why You Should Never Bike To Work
Commuter Bike with Dallas skyline in the background
Why is the 1 percent suffering from this peculiar mass delusion? Well, actually, it’s not that hard to understand. Because if you’re reading this article, chances are that you are in the top 1 percent of global income. And chances are also that you really don’t feel like a tycoon.
The cutoff for the global 1 percent starts quite a bit lower than the parochial American version preferred by pundits. I’m on it. So is David Sirota. And if your personal income is higher than $32,500, so are you. The global elite to which you and I belong enjoys fantastic wealth compared to the rest of the world: We have more food, clothes, comfortable housing, electronic gadgets, health care, travel and leisure than almost every other living person, not to mention virtually every human being who has ever lived. We are also mostly privileged to live in societies that offer quite a lot in the way of public amenities, from well-policed streets and clean water, to museums and libraries, to public officials who do their jobs without requiring a hefty bribe. And I haven’t even mentioned the social safety nets our governments provide.
So why don’t we feel like Scrooge McDuck, rolling around in all of our glorious riches? Why do we feel kinda, y’know, middle class?
Because we don’t compare our personal experiences to a Tanzanian subsistence farmer who labors in the hot sun for 12 hours before repairing to his one-room abode for a meal of cornmeal porridge and cabbage. We compare ourselves to other Americans, many of whom, darn them, seem to have much more money than we do.
Es café macerado en ron, posee todas las propiedades organolépticas del ron, pero tiene grado de alcohol
How to Make Cold Brew Coffee with a French Press
Now this is a blast from the dim, dizzy, foggy past.
B-Cycle Bike Share stand, Fair Park, Dallas, Texas
Bike Friendly Oak Cliff’s New Year’s Resolutions for 2015
It has been cold here – but it hasn’t been this cold.
Design a Hedge Maze for the Hotel That Inspired The Shining
Inherent Vice Looks like it is more Thomas Pynchon than Paul Thomas Anderson. And I thing that is a good thing…..
HIT & RUN BLOG RSS In Joyless Nanny State Called America, Government Prohibits Sledding
New Levitator Lofts Styrofoam Bits *And* Moves Them Around
It was a year of mysteries. To list some of the more baffling ones:
A huge airliner simply vanished, and to this day nobody has any idea what happened to it, despite literally thousands of hours of intensive speculation on CNN.
Millions of Americans suddenly decided to make videos of themselves having ice water poured on their heads. Remember? There were rumors that this had something to do with charity, but for most of us, the connection was never clear. All we knew was that, for a while there, every time we turned on the TV, there was a local newscaster or Gwyneth Paltrow or Kermit the Frog or some random individual soaking wet and shivering. This mysterious phenomenon ended as suddenly as it started, but not before uncounted trillions of American brain cells died of frostbite.
An intruder jumped the White House fence and, inexplicably, managed to run into the White House through the unlocked front door. Most of us had assumed that anybody attempting this would instantly be converted to a bullet-ridden pile of smoking carbon by snipers, lasers, drones, ninjas, etc., but it turned out that, for some mysterious reason, the White House had effectively the same level of anti-penetration security as a Dunkin’ Donuts.
LeBron James deliberately moved to Cleveland.
Read the whole thing.
A strike against rent-seeking
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, so last year’s most encouraging development in governance might have occurred in February in a U.S. district court in Frankfort, Ky. There, a judge did something no federal judge has done since 1932. By striking down a “certificate of necessity” (CON) regulation, he struck a blow for liberty and against crony capitalism.
Our Most Popular Science Image Galleries of 2014
Watch A Pair Of Tank-Mounted Fighter Jet Engines Extinguish An Oil Fire
The John Wayne movie Hellfighters was an influence on me as a kid – along with a Popular Science article on how explosives were used to extinguish oil well fires. And now this….
The Super-Short Workout and Other Fitness Trends
33 Williamsburg Hipsters’ New Year’s Resolutions
Go to Twitter and follow @deeKizzle, just because….
Bike Friendly Oak Cliff’s New Year’s Resolutions for 2015
Have you played with Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
Heavy Hitter beer flight at Luck, in Trinity Groves, Dallas, Texas
Shane Pennington’s screen inside the Dallas City Performance Hall, with Jazz Trio.
This has always been one of my favorite movie scenes,“We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, ‘Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller. And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.”
I actually knew about all but three of these, but an interesting list anyway.
Grave of Clyde Barrow and his brother, Buck.
When I was nothing more than a sprout (or in this case, an offshoot) and lived in the Canal Zone, I was fascinated by the bananas that grew everywhere. Although everyone grew a little tired of eating them all the time, it was really cool to watch them grow and develop – and to realize that there are many types of bananas – most superior to the Cavendish that we buy in our supermarkets.
Did you know that all bananas are slightly radioactive?
I stayed up too late last night to watch most of what is one of the best movies ever made.
I’ve always found this to be one of the most frightening scenes in any movie. Starting with Lundegaard hoplessly struggling with the list of VIN numbers and then having Marge figure out that something is very wrong – you see the end of a person’s life right here. It’s awful – even if it’s somebody as reprehesible as Lundegaard. Ya, Darn tootin’.
An oh ya, this scene. I actually Googled Normandale Community College (seems like a nice enough place) after I watched it. It must be a short path from Juco to turning tricks in a snow-bound truck stop. Go Bears.
If you were to ask me (But why would you do something like that?) I would tell you I’m not a particular fan of action movies. However, looking at this list, I’ve seen all but about five of them. The others I liked (mostly) – so maybe I should try and finish it off.
If we do see all of them, or if we want more (I’ve been thinking I should write in first person plural more often) there there is always this:
I ate lunch at a splashy new dining spot at the edge of Klyde Warren, Lark on the Park, and chatted with the owner, the longtime Dallas restaurateur Shannon Wynne. When he commented, “Dallas has matured more in the last five years than in the past 25,” I asked him why this was. He guffawed in reply, “Well, it certainly can’t be the locals.” He added that the city had benefited greatly from new blood, and that they in turn had emboldened establishment Dallasites to reconsider the city’s possibilities.
While Mr. Wynne talked, I looked over his shoulder at the restaurant’s walls, which were covered with intricate chalk drawings that rotate quarterly: one by a local tattoo artist, another by a medical illustrator, a third depicting the University of Texas at Dallas’s top-ranked chess team. Meanwhile, outside, dozens of residents were tossing Frisbees, or ice skating. It occurred to me that while Dallas has always exhibited the capacity to surprise others, it had now succeeded in surprising itself.
Abby Magill, of Home By Hovercraft Klyde Warren Park Dallas, Texas
Milk Crate Bike in the reading area in Klyde Warren Park.
Bill Chance 