East Dallas Hail Storm

We had an awful hailstorm yesterday evening in our east Dallas neighborhood.  Broke out five windows in our house.  I saw countless broken windshields driving around (luckily I was out buying comics when it hit so our car was alright).  Our neighborhood looked like a war zone.  Click here for a news story with video.

Implosion of Texas Stadium

Texas Stadium's last sunset (taken yesterday).

And the implosion this morning:











you can watch a video of it here: http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978165918

Allegiances on LOST

One of the few shows I watch on television is Lost. I made this diagram to help me sort through what group was against what group in what year. There are potential spoilers if you are not caught up on the current season. Let me know if there is anyone I need to add.

Work News

So this week Corgan Associates (the firm that I work for) received two important pieces of news. The first was that we were awarded the new Parkland Hospital campus. While it won’t affect me personally, it was a huge boon for my firm. More details here:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/042209dnmetparklandarchitect.f960f23a.html

The second is cooler on a personal level. I am in charge of our firm’s model shop and this week we received a laser cutter, which is basically a large printer but instead of printing ink; it cuts wood, paper, or plastic with a laser. So in practicing with it today I made a fantasti-car:

Anti-Federal Rhetoric

While I applaud Perry’s recent denouncement of Washington’s attempt to enact changes in state legislation with the bail out money, it still pains me to watch him try and give a speech. The man holding the highest office in our state, championing for our state’s competence in governance, comes off completely incompetent. He should take pointers from Daniel Hannan, a British statesman who recently told off the prime minister. Take a look at the eloquence of an English thrashing:

Bail Back In

I heard the finest (as well as sardonic) commentary on our country’s current turmoil on the radio yesterday. So I thought I would pass it along (you can also go listen to it read by the author by clicking here).

After the Bailout by Andrei Codrescu

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home
you won't be bailed in or out again
you're safe in Second Life

New Architecture in Beijing

(image by Pen9)

Here is a link to an informative website put together by the NY times. It provides some good graphics that explain 5 new architecture projects that Beijing has recently built (2 of which are for the Olympics). Make sure to click on the “New Beijing Architecture” tab on the left and then click on any one of the buildings.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/20080804_OLYMPICS_GRAPHIC.html

The airport looks nicely done and the rest are if nothing else interesting. There defiantly seems to be a focus on simple forms with complex skins.

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For the design firm Herzog and De Meuron this focus on the wrapping of the building happens to be their strength. They have experimented as of late with weird forms but it is still the unique material choices and patterns that set them apart. I have been watching them for awhile it is nice to see them not only so successful but going back to their roots. Some more of their projects:

Winery in California

Signal Box in Basel (photo by numstead)

De Young Museum in San Fransico (image by me)

Snow

It snowed last night! In the eighties on Sunday and below freezing last night: a prime example of Global warming…I mean Texas weather.

In other news, the Texas primaries are today, so the only acceptable excuses for you not voting would be:
-you don’t live in Texas
-you don’t have a clue about anyone who is running (acceptable might be a misclassification)
-you are extremely busy with work and don’t know where your voter’s registration card is…

Destroying the IRS

I have a question for all the hardcore Ron Paulers out there. NPR has been providing a lot of coverage on Huckabee since his recent up rise in popularity. They were specifically addressing his plan to completely dismantle income tax by increasing sales tax to 23%. Basically taxing what we buy instead of what we make. This sounds appealing to someone like me who does spend a lot, even though I know there has to be a catch somewhere in there. Anyway, it sounded to me a lot like something Ron Paul would do, and I am wondering how RP might look at this specific plan raised by Huckabee (would he agree with him, would he do something completely different, would he call Huckabee a moron and challenge him to a duel to the death using nothing but sporks)?