The Ultimate Solution to Gridlock is Car-Free

The road crisis in north Texas has been building for years. The latest to weigh in on the looming disaster is Bill Baumbach in "The Collin County Observer":

"If nothing is done, our citizens will live in continual traffic gridlock, and our air quality will worsen. Our continued growth will stall if we do not have the necessary transportation infrastructure to sustain that growth. We simply will not be able to attract major corporations, if their employees can not get to work."

The alternatives aren't between gridlock and pouring more and more concrete. Read "LIVING CAR-FREE IN BIG D" for some better alternatives to both:

"A Sometimes Semi-Serious Slant and other Ruminations on Urban Design, Architecture, Sustainability, Ecolonomics, and the Way of the World or How I Learned to Stop Driving and Love the Walk... in my adopted home of Dallas, Texas."

It's time for some fresh thinking. It's not the Seventies anymore. Or the Nineties. Or, for that matter, the Noughts. The Noughties? The Aughts? The Noughty-Aughts? The Zeroes? The Big Zero? OK, just what are we going to call the '00s?

Twitter Reviews of 2009

My Twitter takes on the books, movies, and theatre I enjoyed in 2009. The list is short because I didn't join Twitter until August.

(There. Just 131 characters. After the jump, the reviews.)

White Christmas 2009

Christmas Day, 2009

From Flowers

A Christmas Eve snowfall graced Richardson, Texas, with its first white Christmas in ... I don't know how long. The National Weather Service claims it's the first since 1926. Could be. Merry Christmas, y'all.

To see more photos, look here.
Family portraits can be seen here.

32nd Annual Dallas Tuba Christmas

Jeff King, guest conductor of Tuba Christmas

From 2009 12 Tuba Christmas

"Neither snow nor rain not heat nor gloom of night stays these musicians from the swift completion of their appointed songs."

With apologies to the postal service, this motto just seems to go with the 32nd Annual Dallas Tuba Christmas concert. Normally held outdoors at Thanksgiving Square in downtown Dallas at noon on Christmas Eve, this year's concert was moved indoors because of inclement weather. Windy, rainy and cold outside, it was warm, dry and cozy inside the underground Dallas pedestrian tunnels where 150 musicians with tubas and euphoniums and related instruments gathered to play Christmas carols to a friendly audience in the holiday spirit. If you think 150 tubas can make a joyful noise outdoors, just wait until you hear them indoors in a small room. Joy to the world!

More photos can be seen here.

Avatar

You've seen this movie before. Evil mining company wants gold ore beneath peaceful Indian village and uses the cavalry to massacre the Indians to get it. You haven't seen this movie before. The Indians are blue. The horses have wings. The cavalry fly helicopter gunships. Avatar, equal parts Star Wars, Little Big Man, Tarzan, Apocalypse Now, breaks no new ground in subject matter, plot, and character development, ... you know, the things that make a story great. Where it does break new ground is in CGI techniques. Through the use of "performance capture" cameras, the movie gives extraterrestrial humanoids the most realistic facial expressions any movie has achieved.

Are we there yet? Can we use technology to create any illusion we want on the big screen? Probably not. When less-advanced technology was used in movies like "The Polar Express" the human characters looked creepy and zombie-like. Avatar technology is undoubtedly better, but it's no coincidence that Avatar is still science fantasy and not a historical epic. Blue aliens are not human, so failings of the CGI techniques are more easily overlooked. Only when this technique is used to bring a real historical figure to the screen, one that the audience is intimately familiar with, and does it in a completely convincing manner, will we have arrived at the future of movie making. When the movie version of the life of, say, Barack Obama is made using "performance capture" and CGI instead of starring Will Smith will we know that we have arrived. Until then, see Avatar. It's the closest thing yet.