All posts by tim

Don’t let Prop 2 be a knee jerk

Politics

So Prop 2 is coming up. It’s widly supported and I expect it will pass. I mean how could it not? It’s phrased in such a way that voters will always vote for it. Prop 12 – New Parks for Austin, Prop 13 – Keep Pedophiles Away from Children, Prop 2 – Stop Subsidies to Luxury Retailers. Who would vote against any of those? They’re all written to appeal to the knee jerk. And I’m speaking as someone who’s generally a knee jerk. I’m constantly fighting my impulsive knee.

But sometimes we need to talk about whether our parks department has the budget to maintain a new park, and whether our plans to keep pedophiles away from children might also keep non-pedophiles from volunteering with chlidren, and whether stopping subsidies to a certain luxury retailer might actually encourage more of the Big Box developments we know and loathe.

We seem to have a lot of the same people who were against the WalMart at Northcross against the Domain subsidies as well. What are you guys looking for? What sort of shopping would make you happy? The city spent a lot of time and got a lot of input and decided that the majority of Austinites wanted the city to look like Hyde Park. Homes, mixed with apartments all withing walking distance of public transit and stores.

So IBM starts selling off parts of the domain and the city comes up with a plan to start creating a new urban neighborhood. They give these goals to the investors building the project. They provide incentives to hopefully bring in tonier clients (and thus bringing in better tax revenue). Remember we as Austinites have a real incentive to get high dollar businesses in town. Every time we drive to Sunset Valley or Beecaves to shop those tiny cities get to drive down their property taxes. And Austinites get the privilege of paying for the roads that lead there.

The city also provided incentives to build affordable housing (again something the electorate has been overwhelmingly in support of), and $1 million dollars to help get local businesses into the development.

Sometimes we have to make decisions. Do we use some of our tax dollars to ensure we don’t get more big box stores and have affordable housing? Or do we just hope and pray that developers will magically stop building the kind of shopping we hate (but go to anyway) and build the type we like?

And let’s not forget that Prop 2 was sponsored by a real estate investor (Brian Rodgers). There don’t seem to be a lot of people asking him what he’s getting out of the bargain. As a real estate investor is he planning on creating mixed-use developments like The Domain without the assistance of the city? Or is he just planning on building more suburban strip malls and big box retailers?

My Weekend of Death

Updates

On Saturday night we went to see the Rubber Rep’s “Casket of Passing Fancy”. It’s a fairly simple theatrical experience, where you are given a list of options and you are expected to choose one. These “offers” are for a personal experience. Once your offer has been chosen it is yours alone and no one else can have the same experience.

I was the second person in the audience to chose. My offer spoke to me – “Who wants to taxidermy an animal that was picked up off the road just today?”. There was something about that offer than made me think I wouldn’t get a second chance at it in my lifetime. My hand went up quickly. I was given a narrow plastic bin. It was quite heavy, and whatever was inside was wrapped in a black shroud. I was escorted to a small table lit by chandelier and blindfolded. After a few moments the blind fold came off. I was introduced to my domestic who was wearing a hunters cap and vest. We discussed her “methods” of taxidermy. “Shellackadermy” she called it. Much simpler. Our animal was a small toad. We covered it in several coats of shellac attaching it to a board. We discussed where in the house to hang it. I suggested my workshop. It was built in the sixties and has peg board. It’s screaming for taxidermied life. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince Julie to put it on the mantle.

Once we had a nice layer on the toad, I was provided with a wood burning calligraphy tool. I mentioned that perhaps we shouldn’t be using heat on a shellacked board. So my domestic thoughtfully rummaged around and found a new piece of wood for us to use as a label. I burned the name we had decided upon for the toad (Vernid) into the label, and then we shellacked the label to the mounting board. We discussed ways in which the mounting could be improved. Perhaps a montage with Matchbox cars to mimic his untimely death?

It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience, and even though I was done quickly I hung around for another 30 minutes or so to hear about the experiences of others. I cannot recommend this experience highly enough. You can see what you’ve missed on Rubber Rep’s blog. Then you should go purchase your tickets. The offers are going quickly. Don’t let someone else claim yours.

I do have to say that Julie and I had trepidations about how weird this would be. We were frightened that we would find the experience uncomfortable. But we found that for us, and pretty much everyone we talked to it was a joyful experience that was really fulfilling. And because there are so few offers, you can bet that people will be talking about their experience for years to come. Don’t miss out.

On Sunday I began reconstructing the stage in our back yard. The surface was a solid piece of decking with no holes drilled for water drainage and it was starting to give when anyone other than toddlers walked on it. I unscrewed the first piece of decking, lifted it off and was startled to find an equally startled opossum under the deck. He scurried under the next piece of decking. We repeated this dance until all the decking was removed and he had to find a new home in our neighbors yard.

As I was working on rebuilding the frame I made a gruesome discovery. Right next to the opossum’s nest was an opossum’s skull. And hipbones. I had discovered the opossum’s spine and some fur by the fence a few weeks earlier. I had been ignoring it since it was decomposed past the point of smelling, and who wants to pick up possum carcass? I did not realize that possums ate their own, but I guess that’s part of what it means to be a scavenger. Gruesome all the same. I picked up all the pieces and put them in the bag. I posted about the fact that I was having a weekend of death on the Rubber Rep’s blog and offered the skeleton and I immediately had an offer. The skeleton was picked up by a certain arts editor on behalf of someone else at around 3pm today.

Quite the weekend. I’ll try to get a picture of Vernid for those who are interested.

McCain Irrational?

Politics

No, I think he’s being completely rational. I think he believes he’s going to loose so he’s going to screw the economy to ensure that Obama is a one-termer. Think that’s impossible? Remember, we’re talking about Republicans, they’ll do anything to win.

Moscow isn’t close to Alaska

Politics

New York City is only about 300 miles farther away from Moscow than Anchorage, Alaska. And due to the way the earth spins New York is a bit closer by plane (you hop over the north pole and use the earth’s spin to make it only a slightly longer trip than flying to London).

Reading is Power

Ramblings

This Time article on Sarah Palin mentions that:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Which begs the question, why are people still trying to ban books? If 27% of people don’t read at all in a given year and most read less than 5, then they must be very, very frightened of those of us who do. We must be a very powerful, involved part of the electorate.

The Human Race

Running

Ran the Nike 10k Human Race last night. It was something like 13,000 people in Austin, competing against cities across the world. You got to pick a charity to run for. I was running for the UN Refugee Services. I had planned on running, but then I didn’t really get my act together and they were no longer taking registrations online so I sort of gave up. Then on Friday my sister emailed me and asked if I was running, and if I could perhaps pick up her registration packet. That was just enough of a kick in the pants to get my and my mother signed up to.

Which is how my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and I ended up on a bus heading downtown yesterday. We lined up in Congress avenue. For some reason I decided I was kind of slow and started in the 11 minute mile crowd (you start based on how fast you can run a mile). We ran across the starting line, headed down Congress, and then turned on second. That was the first time it hit you. Nike supplied red racing shirts and the entirety of second street was full of red. And that didn’t let up. Turning from the Bob Bullock History Museum onto MLK there was red stretching all the way up to Red River. Turning from Red River onto Dean Keaton there was red all the way to Guadalupe. It was amazing.

That said, a lot of the people were obviously not runners. A large number of people around me started walking before they even hit one mile. I really think one might want to be able to run further than a mile before signing up for a 10k. There are shorter races you can run first. It was much more of a mental game than the 5ks I’ve run. I was constantly having to dodge walkers and think about what I was doing.

That said, I think being slow at the beginning really paid of in the end. I was really able to power through the last two miles when everyone around me was fading. The fact I run in the heat and up and down hills a lot paid off too. People were really complaining about the heat and the hills. I found the hills pretty easy, and the heat was nice. The coolest race I’ve run was 89 degrees, so last night was pretty cool.

Getting the bus back after the race was a bit of an adventure. A CapMetro supervisor got us back on our bus, but it picked us up at exactly the same stop where we got dropped off. Which should never happen.

So what was my time? My dream was to make it in under an hour, and I think I did pretty well:

Time: 1:01’40”

Austin Ranking: 2959

World Ranking: 102751

$100k a year is rich

Updates

Slate is running an article right now about how deluded many pundits and politicians are about what constitutes rich. But it’s really us Americans who are deluded.

I personally think that rich should be pretty easy to define. If you’re in the top 80% of income earners in the United States my thought is you’re rich. If you’re in the top 90% you’re filthy rich. That’s just based on how I feel about percentages. I think most people would say those numbers seem fair if they don’t see what the median income is for someone in the 80% and 90% brackets.

The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)

Shocking, eh? So over $100k is rich. But that doesn’t buy a new cellphone every six months, and a lexus for your kid, and a million dollar house, so how is that rich? Amazing how our culture has managed to change wealthy into something so ridiculously unattainable. We feel poor because there’s so much great stuff to spend our money on.

Although we really need to start agreeing that we should be able to tax the hell out of people making more than 5 times the median income. It’s ridiculous that we would think that people can raise a family a 4 on $50k/year and yet howl when it’s suggested that people who make 5 times that be taxed a little more heavily.

Murder!

Recipes

A while back I received a citrus zester. It is labeled as such, but it doesn’t really work well for zesting fruit. You end up with long skinny strips. When I want zest, I want tiny shavings, not long strips. This is clearly the wrong tool for the job. So it has been sitting in my drawer.

Recently I had a lot of julienning to do, so I pulled it out. Just on a lark, to see if it would work. I took down a cucumber in less than a minute. It works great.

Everyone I talks to about their mandolin says that they’re worried they’re going to slice their hand off. Not owning one, I don’t know exactly why this is the case, but I can say that you won’t do that with one of these devices. You might shave off your knuckles, but you shouldn’t end up in the hospital.

Which leads me to last night. I was making an Asian salad which calls for julienned beets. I was really going to town, tearing down this beet into strips, when I looked up from my work. The kitchen was covered in red. It looked like I had slaughtered a pig. I couldn’t have paid Hollywood special effects wizards to come in and do a better job.

While I love this tool, I’ve decided that I have to use it in the sink when working with beets.

You know you’re from the prairie when…

Ramblings

Some neighbors across the street cut down a huge tree today. It was towering over their house. They probably shouldn’t have, but no one’s going to complain because we’re all hoping the reason they’re working so hard on the house is that they’re converting it from a rental to be for sale.

That said, without the tree you can see clear over the roof of the house, over the roof of another house and stare directly at a house another street over. Being from Dallas this is pretty trippy.