The Cowtown Chronicles

My sister-in-Law is gettin’ hitched this weekend, my father-in-law and his wife are visiting from St. Croix, it’s been a hectic but fun week so far.

More content when I’ve recovered fully.

I’ve spent the last 6 hours experiencing the coolness that is Ricki Derek. First at Central Market, then at Scat Jazz Lounge.

Now that I’ve been back to Scat a few times since the first time, I can definitively say that it’s too cool for me. It’s too cool, in fact, for anyone except Ricki, as far as I can tell. It’s nice of him to let the rest of us poor schlubs come and hang out with him.

Seriously — if you like jazz and well made cocktails, and you haven’t been there, you’re dumb. Go. Now.

Ever since the USGBC introduced the LEED standard for green building, there have been naysayers and skeptics.

First it was the builders and real estate developers who said that people didn’t care about all that “green” BS, they just wanted the least expensive building they could get. (Or, conversely, the most building they could get for the least amount of money.)

More recently there have been catcalls from the traditionalist movement that green buildings are ugly and therefore inherently unsustainable because they’re “unlovable.” (I wonder how you quantify lovability?)

Now that “green” has become mainstream, the loudest complaints about LEED are coming from people who say that it doesn’t go far enough, or that it’s just a marketing tool or system for racking up points based on the unconsidered application of “gizmo green” technology.

I’m more bothered by the latter groups than the former. While it’s good that there be healthy debate and I’m all for criticism of LEED on the basis that it is too easy to game or that its standards are too vague, I wonder if this kind of scorched-Earth dismissal of LEED isn’t more harmful to the sustainability movement than its intended target.

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Dogfish Head Brewery, self-proclaimed home of “off-centered stuff for off-centered people” are hosting a vertical tasting at the Fort Worth (I double-checked this time) Flying Saucer on March 31st.

The tasting will be hosted by Claus Hagelman, Dogfish Head’s national sales director. (No, craft brewing rock-star Sam Calagione will not be there. Sorry to disappoint.)

Hagelman will conduct a vertical tasting, comparing current editions with vintage samples of four Dogfish Head beers. More specifically, they’ll be featuring some of Dogfish’s rarer brews — Fort, Immort Ale, 120 Minute IPA, and Burton Baton.

I’m not a big fan of the WAY over-hopped beers they produce, but Dogfish always makes quality beers. I enjoy most of their seasonal brews, and the really off-the-wall stuff like Midas Touch.

UFO Club members pay $35, regular schmoes will have to cough up $40.

Fort Worth State Representative Mark Veasey filed a bill this session that would require Texas State Agencies to create all of their documents in an open, freely-available file format standard.

Fortunately for Microsoft, they’ve already succeeded at creating FUD about the bill, even though it’s only been in committee for a little while.

Here’s the skinny on what the bill does, and more importantly does NOT, require:

The bill requires that all documents created by a State agency (court, legislature, department, office, etc.) to be made available in an XML-based OPEN file format based on a recognized industry standard, and available without any intellectual property restrictions on the underlying file format.

What does that mean? Does it mean we’ll all have to switch to OpenOffice if we want to read government documents on our computers? Does it mean that the lady down at the DPS will have to learn Linux and OpenOffice? No.

To really understand the thrust of the bill, you have to understand a bit about how “standards” in the computing world work. Bear with me for a minute, I’m about to get technical…

Essentially there are two kinds of standards: widely recognized and adopted standards created by standards bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), referred to in our world as “industry standards,” and de-facto standards which are created because “everyone” uses a particular application or file format, like Microsoft Word. The two are related, but they are most definitely NOT the same.

Industry standards are the foundation upon which Information Technologies are built. Ultimately all de-facto standards are based at some point on an industry standard. A good example of this is Wi-Fi. The correct name for Wi-Fi is IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, depending on what kind of device is in your computer. Obviously the general public doesn’t want to have to know anything about the IEEE standards that Wi-Fi is based on, so the group charged with promoting its use came up with the nonsensical name “Wi-Fi,” which doesn’t have anything to do with the technology except that it is wireless. The ethernet cable you have plugged in to your desktop computer works because of IEEE 802.3 (which is older than me, by the way), and your bluetooth headset works thanks to IEEE 802.15. The CSS that generates the page you’re reading right now is thanks to IETF RFC 2318. (Yes, I COULD go on all day.) While there are competing technologies for wireless data transfer among computers, Wi-Fi is both the Industry Standard AND the de-facto standard by which we all interconnect.

The point: It doesn’t matter what company manufactures what you have, so long as they adhere to the defined and open industry standard. Usually these standards are free for anyone to use, or at the very least available for a minimal fee with no restrictions on how they can be used, and no royalty or licensing fees.

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The Star-Telegram writes a slobbering love note to coal. (BTW, There’s no such thing as “clean” coal. There’s just not. It’s like being “a little” pregnant — you get environmental catastrophe with all of it, the only difference is on which end you get it.)

“Smokey” Joe Barton is #4 on the list of house members in terms of coal contributions to his campaign — $122,050 worth. (I wonder who gave the $50?)

I mean, duh! It’s because they dress all slutty and stuff. If they would only dress more modestly, they’d be “…individuals worthy of deep-seated respect and honor from men.”

Or at least that’s what Deliverance Bible Church’s pastor opined in Wednesday’s TCU Daily Skiff.

Here’s the interesting bit — Pastor Weatherford preaches for/at a church that not only accepts, but RELISHES being so-called “outcasts,” (which, based on the pictures on their website, means the tattooed/pierced/all-black-clothed/mullet/mohawk/punk/hot-rod crowd, not ACTUAL outcasts like orphans/immigrants/the poor/lepers/AIDS patients/non-white people). I’m sure he’s experienced his fair share of being judged based on his appearance by his peers in the evangelical community, yet he has no qualms about doing the exact same thing to 54% of his fellow students at TCU.

My favorite part is where he pulls the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” trick and blames his own issues with lust and “impure” thoughts on the women (or rather the bodies of the women) he’s lusting about and objectifying. Then he brings it full-circle and blames the fact that he even needs to school us on this topic on the women’s liberation movement; the go-to bogey-uhhh-”person” for evangelicals caught in a vexing moral quandary about women.

Is this really the school of thought in mainstream churches, or is Weatherford’s column just a particularly egregious example of the tortured logic evangelicals will go to to justify their continued attempts to subjugate women?

Note: I linked to the TCU Chapter of the Tri-Delta sorority for illustration purposes only — I am in no way implying that these young women are dressed or behave in a “slutty” manner. I merely wanted to give an example of how the typical female student at TCU dresses, which I thought was nicely illustrated on that page. Maybe the average female TCU student doesn’t bend over quite so much when they’re in a group photo, but I think you get the point.

When the five of us got together to consolidate our blogging efforts under the West and Clear banner, we always intended to use our platform as a way of creating discussions among and between the people of Fort Worth about Fort Worth. Until now that discussion has been a bit one-sided, due to the nature of blogs and how conversations are started through them. Today we’re pleased to announce a new forum for discussion generation: EightOneSeven.com.

EightOneSeven.com is YOUR portal — it’s a place where you can create the conversation instead of just reacting to our content. Think we missed something? Write it up and get feedback! Start the discussion with your friends and neighbors today.

The best part is that if you already have a login for commenting on West and Clear, then you also have one on EightOneSeven.com. The same username and password will work for both.

We’re always working to put out a better product for you, and we’re excited about the potential in EightOneSeven.com. We can’t wait to see you there!

You obviously came here for a reason — some of you subscribe to my feed, some of you searched Google for “what goes with pizza” (the answer is beer, BTW), some are looking for pictures of the “prettiest dog“, and then there are those loyal few who just come directly to the site and read whatever’s on my mind for the day.

Here’s what’s on my mind today — What do YOU want me to write about? What’s on your mind?

You may have seen my post last Friday about the best places to get some nature in FW. Well, I took my own advice Saturday morning and headed out to Tandy Hills Natural Area to go for a hike and some fresh air.

While we were there, we ran into Don Young and Jenny Conn from the Friends of Tandy Hills, and they introduced me to the crew led by Michelle Villafranca, of the city’s Urban Forestry department. (I met Michelle last year when Jenna volunteered to help our neighborhood tree program get free trees from the city for planting in the easement along the street.)

Michelle described the work they were doing, which is that they’re going through the Natural Area and clearing out invasive and non-native tree species so that the grasses can recover and native plants can have a chance to gain some strength.

Too many of the trees you see when you go out there are invasive species — often something used as an ornamental plant in landscaping that’s escaped and started to reproduce like crazy in our wild areas.

The difference between the last time I was there and how some areas look now is amazing! It may not be immediately obvious, but imagine this area being choked with small trees, all competing for scarce light and also choking out native species. Now there’s room for the grass to grow again!

Hundreds or thousands of years ago, this kind of mechanized labor wouldn’t have been necessary. Lightning strikes and droughts would have burned out small trees before they had a chance to establish themselves, and the grasses that make up the prairie would recover more quickly, keeping things in balance. Since we immediately put out any fires today, even in wilderness areas, those natural processes don’t take place, and areas like this become forever changed. Thanks to Don and his passion, we’re finally starting to see the order of things set right.