Archive for February, 2009

Urban Issues and Metro:

Kevin at Fort Worthology notes that bike lanes are coming to the Near Southside. and asks whether the cultural district needs a neighborhood association.

Log Cabin Village Blog says that one of their cats is missing and asks for help.

David at The Ranch Blog discusses the trials and travails of creatives looking for work in a “down” economy  Steve Smith at West and Clear delves into a similar topic: advice for being out of work. He also points to new legislation being considered to make it possible for micro-breweries to sell brews for off-site consumption

Personal Blogs:

Kevin at 5ksandcabernets writes an open letter to White hair cut establishments, and figures out that  at times the runner in him needs more salt — quickly and from a Chik-fil-A packet.

Pete at Cowtown Chronicles admits that he had until recently 10 email addresses which forwarded automatically to each other in a “Kafkaesque” way.  Then he admits that after consolidating his email to one account, he has started using a gaggle of new apps to simplify — the list and descriptions made my eyes cross. Go Pete — but I don’t know if this is really simplification.

Inkognegro posts Man vs. Backyard in which he describes a his gladiator battle with a backyard having “growth so high it would hide even the largest toddler.”

D’Jane talks about Random Acts of Kindness and some women she met on twitter.

And Matthew J. Stevens scores some Stars tickets

Arts and Letters

At the Extra Credit Blog, discussion focuses on the admissions process at Trimble Tech, which is the only FWISD high school which is currently meeding some federal standards.

Eleiva talks about Molas from the San Blas Islands, a traditional femine art reaching all over the world.

Richie Escovedo introduces the Dallas Edition  of 100 cities Twestival, a charity event to raise money for clean drinking water in the Third World, which and occurs on the 12th of this month.

Blogging about their professions:

Dave Kozlowski serves up some lovely rural Texas photos on his blog, including a dust storm and a grain silo.

If you’re searching for information about tonight’s or any other tornado alerts, try National Weather Service Online, which shows a color coded radar map (in general red is bad.) Tonight, the bad weather has already moved through Fort Worth and is on its way, as it generally does go, out through Dallas and towards east-north-east.

“You have to walk the jackal before work,” I tell myself as I sign up for a substitute teaching job this morning. “He feels very offended when his comforts are ignored, and he might damage the house.”

Here he is, under my desk, the loyal hound.

“The Jackal” is my dog. I don’t know who started calling him that. The basenji, of which he is one, is an African breed, which we got involved with years ago because my husband wanted a dog that didn’t bark. They have erect ears and a pointed muzzle and a high curling tail, and resemble the Egyptian God the Dead, Anubis.

But except for a rather haughty attitude, I wouldn’t say my jackal is much like Anubis. He asks relatively little — two walks a day, some dog food, and a dog bed to lie on under my desk. When I walk him, he doesn’t pull on the leash. If I don’t walk him, he doesn’t necessarily do anything — though depending on his mood, he may leave a sign of his non-appreciation somewhere in the house for me to find when I get back from work–but usually he just stares at me with gold eyes of reproach and wonder, as if to ask, “how could you fail to perform a task so simple and so important?” His dogly brain seems honestly confused. “Don’t you love me?” he seems to wonder.

Recently I realized it’s easier just to walk him than try to get away with not doing so. The time I save by skulking out of this task isn’t worth the burden of those yellow eyes asking mutely, “Don’t you love me? I love you! Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

Yes, I love you, jackal-dog.

Rabbits aren't just cute, they also produce fertilizer!

Yesterday my mother and I drove out towards the ranchette of a friend of hers, a guy who has 400 rabbits. The purpose of this journey was to gather rabbit manure and prepare for a super-abundant garden this spring. 

My mother was the one who came up with this idea, and though I was quite interested in preparing the garden, my real interest in the jaunt was getting a chance to talk to her, and tell her of my many problems with children who don’t do their schoolwork.  Somehow, we never got to that topic. I suppose I’m just as glad.

We stopped at a 7-Eleven to get gas in Benbrook, and I got a package of Hostess cakes. Thus fortified we set off for the countryside.

I admit I do remember from childhood a monster tomato plant grow where the rabbit cage had stood, but I hadn’t thought rabbit manure was such a big deal. Little did I know. A study of the situation in my favorite “library,” the World Wide Web, revealed a chart that shows that rabbit manure has three times as much nitrogen as steer manure, and almost three times as much phosphoric acid. At $3 a bag, it wasn’t cheap, but my mother was paying, so I didn’t complain. (Three dollars a bag is the bag-your-own price, if you want it pre-bagged, it’s $6.)

We also had the opportunity to admire the 400 bunnies. They are raised by Mom’s friend’s wife and are available for sale. Many varieties were evident, in particular, I think, rex and mini-rex. As a bonus we were allowed to hold a baby rabbit. 

The Texas smallholding under the Texas sky.

Loading up the back of Mom’s SUV, we had 6 bags of manure, and I looked out on the smallholding. Rural Texas is like much of rural America, with metal buildings, and metal fences, and fat healthy animals. There’s still something lonely about it, and I’m almost always reminded, when I drive out of town, of the solitary path of the pioneers. 

Us townies, on the other hand, make a jaunt to the outskirts, coffee in a paper cup, pick up some agricultural products, and get back to the cozy confines of our city homes. We may feel a little wistful, we may wish for some stronger connection with the land, but we know that our survival is our highest priority and we’re covering that by living as we do.

Survival on the farm is a little more dicey and may involve such gigs as selling show rabbits and their manure. If your garden needs a boost or you need a bunny, you might try inquiring at staff@ridgleawest.com about getting one or the other or both.

Next week, I’ll be building my garden boxes and laying in the rabbit manure, and over the summer, we’ll see if it proves up to its reputation. Meanwhile, I can still feel the soft fur of that gray mini-rex, and I wish I could own some livestock of my own.

By the time we got to the midway, we had seen animals, clothes, food, and a horse show, and so I figured the kids were ready for the ultimate, the final word in Country Fair, the Midway.

You walk up over electric cables and past cotton candy booths and  look at the brightly painted but rickety-seeming portable rides, and marvel that they got them here and got them running. Although you’ve seen how it’s done, with the rides compacted and tied down on small trucks out on the freeway, travelling hundreds of miles from parking lot to parking lot, you still wonder at the undertaking. The carnies do all this, men with slicked back hair and women who wear too much makeup, ticket takers, mechanics and barkers, here for your amusement and your money, with whirling wheels and blinking lights, the Vegas side of the Stock Show.

The mini roller coaster introduces a good component of thrill for the under ten set.

We walk through the midway, and my daughter chooses a mini roller coaster with cars in the shape of a Chinese dragon. How many tickets? Four. How much are the tickets? A dollar each, if you buy 20, you get four free. That should allow them to go on three rides each, so I wince and pony up the money and she gets on. She smiles. Next my son rides a mini-semi truck around a short track with a big grin, my daughter rides a contraption where you lie down in a special cage and it spins you around a bit, my son and I get on the bumper cars and then to sum up they ride the mini-helicopters. The $20 is gone. The merry-go-round’s callipe shrills and whisles “Somewhere over the rainbow.”  

On the way out, we walk past the game-of-skill stalls where the barkers sit, waiting for customers who are not, at 3 in the afternoon, here yet. One guy gets out in the walkway and dances and sings. He’s full of exuberance even though he has a pot belly. Such total confidence in front of an empty stall is remarkable, but then, he was chosen for this job becuase of his personality.  And the empty stalls, I know, will fill tonight, with teenaged guys trying to impress the girls.

Some say the stalls are where the real money is made. I have to wonder if they can’t make money at four dollars a ride for a mini roller coaster what is this country coming too, but I have no info, and no statistics, and so I have to go on anecdote and observation: the fact that this midway is here means it is profitable. 

As we walk away, a man in a stall is counting out money, holding handfulls of bills.  “I can’t believe I rode a rollercoaster!” my daughter says. “And I rode bumper cars!” my son replies. “That was so fun!” they agree.  “How long until they’re going to have the Stock Show again?”

Point taken. I catch the eye of the carny counting the money, I nod. Fair enough, I think. Fair exchange. We did it and we’re glad. In every life, there’s room for a few moments in the Midway. For some, the carnies, there’s time for a life there.

Children face to face with an Angus Beef cow.

We visited the Fort Worth Stock show this week, where 6 large barns hold cattle of every description, huge red Herefords, white Charolais, brindle Longhorns, and more than any other type the  Black Angus, a bovine renowned for its eating quality. We walked past one huge steer, I believe it must have weighed 1500 pounds, though only about a year old, which was being blow dried in preparation for a date in the show ring. 

“They’re not going to eat this cow,” my daughter told me.

I looked at the young woman who was handling the steer. She was heavyset as was her animal, wearing a western shirt and cowboy hat. “He’s going to be sold at auction and then eaten?” I asked.

She nodded without a hitch. My daughter drew back in alarm.

“You like hamburger, don’t you?” I pointed out. We went on to the snack bar and she ordered a foot-long sausage on a stick, didn’t ask about it again.

As we walked about the cattle mangers, where steer after huge steer was tied, it suddenly struck me that these were the lucky ones, perhaps, they were cared for and appreciated before being slaughtered. And they are not typical. The typical beef steer is rasied in a herd and interacts very little with humans. There’s something a little strange, I admit, about eating an animal that is rasied like a pet. Perhaps there is something decadent in it — some animals are over-cared for while others reside on factory farms, a strange kind of welfare inequality which mimics the income inequality of humans throughout the world.

But the Stock Show is a land of radical divisions anyway, of city and country, performer and audience, judge and the judged. It is “us humans” writ large, somehow, in every minute detail, a purely human construct. From the barns to the trailers to the stocksmen sitting in folding chairs in an empty manger with the family, listening to Country Western music on a portable cassette player, enjoying themselves for a moment amid all the work and disappointment of life, the stock show does tell us who we are. Sometimes that’s not easy to admit, but here, in the old country way, no one’s covering it up. Yes, we raised these cattle, and we eat them. I guess out on the farm, where this show has its basis, things are clean, simple and honest that way.

In these days of national food chains and brands owned by Kraft and General Mills, it’s good to discover local products. We were really tickled the other day to discover that there’s a pasta company in Fort Worth, Our Best Macaroni, which has been making semolina flour into macaroni products for 100 years.  The company was founded by Italian immigrant Giovanni Battista Laneri and is now headed up by his great-grandson, Carl L. Laneri, Jr. 

When we saw the pasta in simple, soft plastic bags, we had our doubts. There are some food snobs in this family, who believe all decent pasta comes in cardboard boxes from Italy

Local macaroni comes in a simple package, but the quality is high.

Special disdain has been directed at any pasta made in the midwest or lacking an Italian surname. When we first bought the O.B., of course, we hadn’t been on the web and so we didn’t realize  the company really had an Italian connection.

The package we tried, an 8 oz. bag of “Texas Sized Shells,” was quickly cooked up by one of the kids who needed something to put leftover tomato sauce on. It was then tried on my husband, who is the one who doubted the most and who has the highest standards. Much to our surprise,  he had to admit that O.B. pasta really is good — at least as good as Barilla from Italy. The best part? If you buy it, you’re buying local. 

After this experience, we immediately went down and stocked up on O.B. Macaroni.  Visit their website for interesting family and company history and a list of the pastas they produce, which includes a large array of the classic Italian shapes, not just the elbow mac they use in West Texas.

O.B. Pasta is reportedly available at most local supermarkets, including the new City Market and Walmart.

It’s interesting how this site has evolved since I began it. One thing I’ve been covering that I didn’t anticipate is social media, which for my purposes is adults like me going on FaceBook and a micro-blogging website called Twitter. I probably spend about an hour on Twitter a day, and the networking has been phenominal. Other Fort Worth bloggers who are there include 5KsandCabernets, @FortWorthology, and @WestandClear, and there’s several complete profiles of other Fort Worth “tweeps” at the Fort Worth Faces thread.

I was taken aback the other day as I read my twitter stream and someone posted about the number of “useless or meaningless tweets” the twitterverse contains. Immediately I wrote to the poster and suggested that “there are no completely useless tweets, they are useful to the person who wrote them and in almost every case, a few others as well. “

I asked if he shouldn’t consider revising his following list, since one man’s trash is another man’s teasure. And perhaps he’d find more meaning in the tweets of different tweeps. 

“I’m very happy with my following list,” he shot back. 

“Well,” I thought, “Maybe I am one of the meaningless tweets he wrote about?” Should I argue? Reason? I decided to just stop following him and take my own advice.

This event reminded me of the multitudinous nature of human correspondence, human thought, speech, existence. The guy was right in one way. There is far more out there than I can read, and much of it I don’t understand (especially the tweeps I follow who write half their posts in Portugese.)

Nevertheless, the idea of calling any tweets “useless” is going too far for me. True, there’s nothing wrong with consuming books, records, or twitter threads selectively. But one of my favorite songs when I was younger (okay, it still is) was “everyone is beautiful” by Ray Stevens. Even in the twitterverse, we need to show some modicum of respect for others’ right to tweet, the right to be different and to disagree.  Just because someone says something you do not find interesting does not mean it’s fundamentally meaningless. 

The day after unfollowing the guy who talked of useless and meaningless tweets I wrote this essay. And after that, I had to re-folllow him. Because I had to admit, even his grousing tweet complaining about the banality of other people’s lives had quite a bit of value for one person, and that was me.

Urban Issues and Metro:

FortWorthology wants to tell you about an exciting historic restoration project at the Log Cabin Village and the Ugliest Building in Fort Worth. From the Bauhaus to our house — yeah, it’s ugly.

Pete Wann at Cowtown Chronicles poses the issue of  sustainability, asks if anyone else is concerned. Yes, Pete, I think about it all the time, and I think you should include a poll on your post so we can take a vote on this. If you do, I’ll put it on twitter.

Fort Worth Citizens Against Neighborhood Drilling Ordinances invites all those concerned about local gas drilling to consider joining the Texas Oil & Gas Accountability Project.

Fort Worth Vision’s Political Sense has some thoughts on what the Economic Stimulus Package could mean. 

Fort Worth Hole in the Wall reports that a fire has closed Cafe Piola for an undermined amount of time.

Personal Blogs:

At 5Kandcabernets marathoner Kevin talks about what a difference a year makes — 2 whole  miles faster an hour since Feb. 2008. Should he try for the Boston? Maybe not, but he has to admit he’s gotten stronger. 

DJane at Blogging Mama is waiting for a replacement of her free pair of Joe’s Jeans that’s she’s getting in return for writing a review. The first pair she ordered was 5 sizes too big. DJane is a petite girl but she had no idea how petite. Sweet deal for her either way and her readers can get a 50% off coupon. 

Inkognegro says he is still here, and will post soon, honest. We’ll check back next week and see what’s up. 

As I watch my two daughters working through their private university educations, I’m struck by how much they are just like me when I was their age, back when I honestly didn’t realize the magnitude and magnanimity of the gift I was receiving.

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One day I was complaining to one of my professors of the priice of the fees for my public U education. What are you talking about?” he responded. “This is the greatest bargain you’ll ever see!”

Of course, at the time, I hadn’t made a careful cost-benefit analysis of going to college. Like a lot of young people, including some who were written up way back in the time of Aristotle, I was a little bit lazy, self absorbed, and spent and awful lot of time worrying about stuff that was actually going to take care of itself. 

That day the professor pointed out to me that I wasn’t actually working my way through school, that the taxpayers were doing it most of it for me. And at private schools, it’s only a little different, it’s the parents and the school endowment which are picking up the slack.

Back when I was a student, I used to feel as if any second my entire existence was going to flare out. It would have been better, I think, had I realized that in fact my parents, who sent money, the taxpayers, who paid to keep the public university open and even my professors, who tended to take some limited concern of my wellbeing, were investing in me particularly. I was not in fact doing this college degree solely under my own steam.

Today, looking back, I realize that for some reason, my society—my peeps–decided to put a lot of resources into my future back then when my future was just a matter of speculation. That realized, I’d like to tell my daughters and their fellow college students a couple of key points:

1. College students are special. Not everybody  can complete a four year degree. Don’t act like it’s not something to be grateful for, to be in a school, even if it’s not Harvard.   
2. If you’re in college, someone is investing in you. They want something for the future. They want an educated you. 
3. The reason they want an educated you is for our family, our country, and our world. You will have the opportunity to give back when you’re older, and not just by paying off your student loans, though we expect that as well. When you pariticpate in our society, whether by being a doctor or a teacher, a parent or a volunteer, and you do your duty, you will be making the world a better place. The expectation that you’re going to do this is why we send you to that ivory tower on this hill with the wide green lawns and big lecture halls.  
4. If you’re a college student, you’ve received a double gift. First, from the universe, in terms of ability to study. Second, from your countrymen, the actual resources to be educated. It’s up to you to decide what to do with your gifts.
5. At the UT, the fight song is “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You.” I want to say that that is true not just in Austin – the eyes of America are on all our college students. We have sacrificed so that you can study today. Don’t take it lightly. This is your job and our patrimony, our joint heritage, your college degree. We’re doing this for you and for America. So be grateful, and don’t mess it up.