Friday Night Lights in Texas.

Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.

He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.

And maybe the less so sunny….

Texas has the highest proportion of people lacking health insurance of all 50 states; the third-highest poverty rate; the second-highest imprisonment rate; the highest teenage-birth rate; the lowest voter turnout; and the lowest proportion of high-school graduates. Mr Shapleigh is not surprised that these figures are so terrible: Texas spends less on each of its citizens than does any other state. Being a low-tax, low-spend state has not made Texans rich, though they are not dirt-poor either; their median income ranks 37th among the 50 states.

The question is where will we land: An Alabaman nightmare of no-education, and the bottom of every national metric, or Californian distopia of overbuilt social programs that break the state’s financial back. More from The Economist.

The Grandcamp exploded at 9:12 a.m. Exploded is probably too mild a word.

The captain and 32 of the Grandcamp‘s crew died; 10 somehow survived. More than 200 people were killed on the quay. The blast was heard 160 miles away. It shattered all the windows in Texas City and half of those in Galveston, 10 miles away.

Some debris reached an altitude of nearly 3 miles before falling back to earth. Two airplanes circling overhead were blown apart by the heavy shrapnel. A one-ton piece of the ship’s propeller shaft landed 2½ miles away. Other pieces sailed 5 miles.

More…

I am here today to stand with Texas employers and the millions of Texans they employ to resist further government intrusion into their businesses through an expansion of our state’s unemployment insurance program.”

To be clear he’s standing with us on refusing lots and lots of federal money for the unemployed. Way to put the people before your political aspirations.

For all the noise they made in the U.S. you would never guess that the Rolling Stones and The Beatles had a hard time getting air time in England during the 60’s. In fact it wasn’t until a Texan from Midland started broadcasting from an old Mine Sweeper in the English Channel that the British Invasion came home.

and…

The majority of programs were presented live from a studio in the hold. The ship’s metal bulkheads presented problems with acoustics and soundproofing that were originally solved by lining the walls with mattresses from the crew’s bunk beds, which meant none of them could sleep during the day.

Listen to the superb Teaxs Music Matters piece on Radio London or read more on Wikipedia.

To write those lyrics, which are poetry with great music, it requires real tragedy. You can’t sit in a room and do it. Even if you worked 24 hours a day with a committee of men, you couldn’t do it. As a country singer, he’s never happy. That’s not the goal of being a country singer. If you’re not miserable, you’re not going to be very good. – Kinky Freidman on Willie Nelson

After a serious string of flight delays in Denver, our one week of fall has finally arrived.

Party at the moon tower. Everyone’s invited.

Austin, Texas is the only city in the world known to still operate a system. The towers are 150 feet tall and have a fifteen foot foundation. This type of tower was manufactured in Indiana and assembled onsite. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 used lighting towers from Detroit. A single tower cast light from six carbon arc lamps, illuminating a 1500 foot (460 metres) radius circle brightly enough to read a watch. In 1993 the city of Austin dismantled the towers and restored every bolt, turnbuckle and guy wire. The 17 remaining towers were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and are therefore protected from demolition. (read more…)