Monday

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Some observations….

DPS
Somehow, despite paying the Texas Department of Public Safety ten bucks for them to mail me a new drivers license and additionally, waiting on-hold for thirty minutes, it looks like I still don’t have a card with an updated address. I will additionally be forced to pay another ten bucks at the local DPS office, for another new license, just so the DPS knows where to find me. Bureaucracy is awesome.

Politics
Looks like we’re continuing in our mission to promote democracy and freedom abroad by continuing to provide aide to Pakistan.

Police armed with tear gas and clubs attacked thousands of protesting lawyers in the city of Lahore today, and rounded up lawyers in other cities as the government of the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, faced the first signs of concerted resistance to the imposition of emergency rule.

I’m sure we’re all shocked and surprised. Really.

Clowns
Saturday morning we departed for a mildly epic ride up the green belt form barton springs. It was early and the chaos of children’s birthday parties and pot-smoke-clouded drum circles hadn’t reached fevered pitch quite yet. By the pool entrance, there was a clown in full make-up and costume, bag of potential balloon animals at his side, clearly hating life, smoking a cigarette. A strange picture.

DST
Every year I bitch. Every year it falls back an hour, making it dark as the arctic circle in January by the time I get off work in the afternoon.

The Ritz

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Alamo Drafthouse, the fine people who made the brilliant connection of serving beers and real food with movies instead of crap popcorn and high-fructose-corn-syrup, are moving into their new digs at the Ritz in downtown Austin this week.

The Ritz was never a ‘nice’ theatre, per se. It was never very opulent; it was kind of a working-class theatre, never very high on design. But back in the Thirties, when Sixth Street was a crazy, wild place, it was known as the ‘Western’ theatre and actual cowboys would come in, a lot of whom had never seen a movie before. They’d get freaked out, liquored up and loving it, and end up pulling out their six-shooters and shooting at the screen! The Ritz screen was riddled with holes from drunk cowboys.”

More about the history and the future of this space over on The Chronicle.

Jews With Swords

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One of my all-time favorite slingers of the written word, Micheal Chabon, privately refers to his new book Gentleman of the Road as Jews with Swords.

[It] was usually good for a laugh. I guess it’s like saying ‘pigs in space’ or something. There’s a kind of incongruity there in most people’s minds.”

In classic Dickensian tradition it’s been serialized in the New York Times.