S2L77: Srinigar, Kashmir Valley

Srinigar, Kashmir
March 12, 1977

Staying on the houseboat Babar -- living in luxury, lounge room, dining room, bedrooms with private baths, roof deck, servants. Evening boat ride on Dal Lake!

The next afternoon a three and a half hour shikara boat ride to the Mughal gardens.

Trip to Gulmarg. Horse ride up to snow fields.

Source: Personal travel notes.

From 1977 03 02 India

The Vale of Kashmir is sometimes called Heaven on Earth for its natural beauty. Kashmir has lakes and snow-capped mountains, making it a prime vacation spot and a welcome break after my travels through the hot, dusty plains of northern India. We stayed on luxurious houseboats on Dal Lake.

More after the jump.

Mother (2009)

IMDB

Mother (2009): Korean murder mystery. Mother desperately seeks to clear her mentally challenged son. Tense, tragic, heart-breaking. B-

Review: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Amazon

From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta."

Thus the mystery begins for Toru Okada, an easy-going young man in Tokyo who recently quit his unfulfilling job without knowing exactly what he was going to do next. On the phone is a mysterious woman with a sexy voice. Before long, Okada is in search of his lost cat, then his missing wife, then explanations for all the odd characters and implausible coincidences that complicate his simple life.

After the jump, my review.

The Turin Horse (2011)

IMDB

The Turin Horse (2011): Farmer, daughter and Nietzsche's horse in a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, a la Bergman. Dry as a dust storm. C-

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

DFW Airport has been serving north Texas since 1974, yet still has no direct mass transit connections serving it. DART brags that from its Belt Line Station on the Orange Line, it's just a "short, 4-mile ride over to Terminal A via a DART bus."

To be fair, this might be the last year I can badmouth DART's lack of light rail service to DFW Airport. DART says it's "hard at work building a state-of-the-art light rail facility at Terminal A. The DART Light Rail service will arrive at its permanent, Terminal A station in 2014."

That's still just the Orange Line. Which is fine if you're coming from downtown Dallas. But what if you're coming from, say, Richardson? You'll be waiting a while longer than 2014. After the jump, the dismal outlook.

First Day of Summer in the Steger Garden (2013)

From Flowers

Who Needs the NSA to Erode Privacy?

Ernestine: What's that Mr. Veedle? Privileged information?... that's so cute. You're dealing with the phone company, Mr. Veedle. We are not bound by city, state, or federal regulations. We are omnipotent.

Source: Lily Tomlin as Ernestine.

A lot of people are apoplectic over the NSA's surveillance program that captures metadata from phone calls (which numbers are calling which numbers). In the past, courts have ruled that persons have no expectation of privacy about this data, which seems to be a surprise to many. Look folks, this isn't news.

After the jump, privacy from the days of Ernestine to Twitter.

Indie Game (2012)

IMDB

Indie Game (2012): Nerds hope to get rich writing video games. Maybe if you're into Super Meat Boy or Fez. Even then, play, don't watch. D+

Who Is Encroaching on Nature Now?

In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.

Source: Henry David Thoreau.

"My dream of a greater Spring Creek Nature Area may be over. My dream of a greater Richardson isn't." That's what I wrote back in April, 2011, when I saw bulldozers and construction cranes encroaching on the biggest, best chunk of natural area left in Richardson. Blue Cross plunked down a huge office building to the south. The City of Richardson accommodated it by cutting a wide gash through the forest for the Routh Creek Parkway. That big empty lot north of Renner Rd was rezoned for development (and now, two years later, major development is finally underway). The Spring Creek Nature Area was getting sliced up and hemmed in on all sides. Didn't anyone see what Richardson was losing?

In that blog post from two years ago, I conceded that my dream of preserving wildness was just another quixotic dream of mine. Sigh. But I challenged the city to think long and carefully before they allowed more development of the land surrounding the Spring Creek Nature Area. It has to be done right, I said, in a way that organically transitions between nature and neighborhood, in a way that enhances both park and commerce.

After the jump, so who's encroaching on Spring Creek Nature Area now?

Richardson: Suburb or City?

Off and on for a long time, I've blogged about what I call my quixotic dream to rip up Central Expressway through Richardson and replace it with a people-scaled grand boulevard or central park. I call it quixotic because I know it will never come true. Dallas and Plano and Allen and McKinney would never, ever, allow it. So, my calls to tear out Central in Richardson are mainly aimed at provoking thought. I'm playing devil's advocate in an attempt to get people not to reflexively think that adding lanes is the solution to all traffic problems. And when they do add lanes anyway, I want to get them to do it in a way that's least disruptive to the street networks and community the freeway passes through.

Last week, Rodger Jones, editorial writer of The Dallas Morning News, wrote about my quixotic dream on the News' transportation blog. He paired my attention to Central Expressway in Richardson with the attention that is being given to tearing out IH-345 in downtown Dallas. Patrick Kennedy, the CarFreeInBigD guy behind the calls for the IH-345 tear-out, ripped Rodger Jones but left me alone (I think -- Kennedy rambles a lot).

I'm going to overlook most of what Kennedy said because he focused on IH-345, but I do want to respond to one thing he said about suburban freeways. After the jump.