...With this great link comes news that city bike planner Abigail is leaving her post to work for VIA. They'll be looking for a replacement if you know anyone with a city planning/bicycle advocacy background.
The link mentioned in this letter is this following video. The unintentional comedy is high. Stratospheric.
#2 Little Opie Cunningham
(sin permiso)
In came this letter with details about the behind the scenes of the new Ron Howard film in LA.
(author's name withheld to protect the innocent)
(excerpted)
...We're working on the new Ron Howard film, Angels and Demons. They couldn't get permission to shoot at the Vatican so they built a 60% scale model in the parking lot of Hollywood Park....It is a pretty impressive set - and the dolls, well, they're the dolls 2.0. We bought 30 tables, put wheels on them, and then staple the dolls to the tables and roll them wherever they need to go.
Evidently the public indifference to the first DaVinci Code movie wasn't convincing enough. A high budget sequel is on the way to right the ship.
Also, more about the Vatican later in regards to Mount Graham and the celestial search for space aliens to convert, not that there's anything wrong with that.
But Bernie Mac Is Fine
Home loan institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are on life support and writer Dr. Michael Hudson tells us why we're all screwed.
It's a long, long article that I can't even get through but there are some thought provoking morsels in there to ruminate on. He does come with some credentials, so his opinion can't be immediately dismissed.
In other words, more material to be filed under "Impending Doom".
An excerpt...
All this is as American as apple pie. Altruistic political talk aside, the reason why the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors have lobbied so hard for Fannie and Freddie is that their financial function has been to make housing increasingly unaffordable. They have inflated asset prices with credit that has indebted homeowners to a degree unprecedented in history. This is why the real estate bubble has burst, after all. Yet Congress now acts as if the only way to resolve the debt problem is to create yet more debt, to inflate real estate prices all the more by arranging yet more credit to bid up the prices that home buyers must pay. The plan is thus to pretend that the Bubble Economy’s financial unreality may be made real by Finance Socialism.
Tentacle Outreach
Saturday night Austin's Octopus Project and our own Hyperbubble played at Sam's.
The writing on the window was a nice touch, and made me try to remember if this was standard procedure at Sam's...
...from earlier in the Octopus Project set when the projector was still on. The crowd kept chanting to turn off the house lights, which created a nice dilemma. The projector and the house lights were on the same circuit so to dim the house, the projector had to go as well. It seems like an odd choice of electrical wiring, and what a great way to begin talking about the show...wiring issues.
The show was actually quite good. I got too late to see Hyperbubble but saw the majority of OP. They are a band that is clearly at the top of their game. Everyone interchanges instruments. Toto seems to be the powerhouse in the band, belting on the drums with sincere fury, then next jumping around playing bass, and then at moments there's no drums and he's on another guitar adding layers of noise.
Instrumental bands can get tiresome but Octopus Project never ceases to captivate.
Mount Graham, A Telescope and... Unconverted Space Aliens
(sin permiso)
A personal story by Jeffrey St. Clair about the University of Arizona building a telescope on top of Mount Graham, the Apaches' failed fight to protect their protected land...and the Vatican looking for space aliens to convert?
(Excerpt)
"The priest said if they spotted aliens in those scopes, it would be their mission to convert them," Vittorio said, speaking of Father George V. Coyne, the head Vatican astronomer. "But they are the aliens here and they're too fucking self-righteous realize it."
Here's a taste of Father Coyne's cosmic eschatology: "The Church would be obliged to address the question of whether extraterrestrials might be brought into the fold and baptized. One would want to put some questions to him, such as: have you ever experienced something similar to Adam and Eve, in other words, original sin? Do you people also know a Jesus who has redeemed you?" And this spaced-out priest has the nerve to denounce the Apache religion as primitive?
Art Stalk
Friday night began with a quick stop by Galleria Ortiz in Olmos Park for Fotograma, with the work of Martin Rodriguez and Guillermina Zabala.
Saturday brought us over to Second Saturday at 1906 S. Flores. In the space behind Salon Mijangos (which was closed for the night) a performance was getting set up.
Behind the left screen was live music; the blue screen showed a video; the white screen began with some sort of religious type of ceremony.
Across the street at Gallista was a series of similarly styled paintings. The numbers 1492 on the side give extra meanings to the race car.
And then back across the street (again) to Fl!ght Gallery where a variety of smaller scaled works were being sold.
At the One 9 Zero Six, Anastacia Uriegas showed a collection of fotos of people's beds, detailing a variety of approaches to life.
Outside, from Austin, the group Custodian rapped/performed.
They were hard working and stuck to the custodian theme, even though they weren't dressed as custodians...
And lastly, showing off skills.
And so goes another week on the streets of San Antonio. As always, to be continued...
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