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From the Department of Ornithology

 

Last Saturday I spotted the elusive Gull-Winged Mercedes.

This was fortuitous but not altogether surprising, as they are usually only sighted on weekends during beautiful weather.

Known nesting places are usually raked-gravel mews behind absurdly high thick hedges in the better zip codes, and they are known to winter mostly in temperature-controlled storage.

Like eagles, they do not flock, but they can be seen in the company of birds with similar plummage. Actually, their owners usually do most of the preening.

While most people will be familiar seeing them in the background of Ralph Lauren print ads, they also can occasionally be seen roosting in close vicinity of five-star restaurants, golf and yacht clubs, and the front valet lot of the Meyerson.

Dreamtime

After what has arguably with few exceptions been the dullest forty-five years of car design, finally some cars are coming around that get my blood pumping.

I nabbed this pic from the Mercedes Facebook page (figured they wouldn't mind)  ... but it doesn't near do it justice. Someone keeps pulling up in front of the restaurant in an SLS AMG just like this one, and the valets do their duty and park it as conspicuously as possible so that mere mortals can bask in its glory and walk away swearing a new purpose in life.

If car companies designed cars like this all along they wouldn't be mere bankrupt companies, they would be nation states.

Step up!

Meditations on Public Transportation

Lately because of the predominance of SNAFU and FUBAR in my life these days due to The Great Recession, I have been walking a great deal and getting into top shape, if not gaining shin splints, and occasionally I have started ... yes ... riding the bus.

Now, I love buses. I ride them to Mexico frequently. On the whole they are cheap, safe, and they get you there reasonably and with the added benefit that you can sleep along the way. What could be more marvelous?

Its just that over the past 50 years Dallas never has been much of a public transport city. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, that can walk or crawl owns a car so that they may drive instead. There simply has not been any provision for years and years and years for workable public transport. There just hasn't. No, there hasn't. No. No. No.

Well, there were the streetcars.

Used to be, you could hop a streetcar and go all over Dallas for a nickel. While we were working on the documentary about the "Pegasus" sign restoration, I saw films that some trolley-spotter made in the 1950s of Dallas streetcars. Bullet-shaped, they sailed at an appalling speed all over town. Street after street this guy had documented the course of every line. It was breathtaking. So modern.

But, streetcars were privately owned ventures then. Not a Public Good, oddly enough. I guess the government horning-in on private enterprise was a big hoary no-no and would drive them out of business and they knew better how to do it anyway.

Of course they all went out of business.

 

That's my great-grandfather standing in the doorway of the eleventh street trolley outside the Electric Park in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The streetcars in Fort Smith went out of business November 15, 1933 during the Great Depression. Of all times, can you imagine?

Fortunately there are people bringing back the streetcars in Fort Smith to boost tourism and the general well-being of a long-suffering downtown.

The good news in Dallas is that there is a groundswell in city hall to get our streetcar service back online, at least in the 214, and this I heartily support. The tracks are all still there ... its just a matter of peeling back the past 50 years of macadam and putting them to work.

 

This was Throckmorton street this afternoon. Keep scrapin' men, you're almost there!

Gaston Avenue at Gaston Yard, looking West, 6:10PM

While driving around this afternoon I was pleased to happen upon some road construction on lower Gaston which revealed the original brick pavement. I hope they cover it again with new bitulithic and leave it alone.

Of course the romantic in me really wants it all to be brick again, but the tender-footed pussy-wussy suspensions of Hummers and Beemers just can't take a brick street at 50 mph-on-a-residential ... hence McKinney Avenue, originally considered a found jewel, a lady amongst thoroughfares, was hastily stripped bare of her noble bricks and redressed in cheap tarty concrete. A fallen woman.

Brick is meant for thinking and contemplation, pedestrians walking and being neighborly while noble horses with wagons and streetcars and vehicles that putt-putt-along pass by.

My hometown was still replete with brick streets at the time I was born. Later when I was a kid in the '70s we took the highway west of Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake and great stretches of it were brick as well, but when I tried to do an internet lookup to find pictures for this article, all I could find were vague references to it by third parties who figured it was probably apocryphal, but I am here to tell you it was there.

Considering this brick was probably laid in the 1890s, imagine the traffic it saw!

What Happens When You Don't Vote Your Interests

Headline in The Dallas Morning News this morning:

CAR DEALERS FEEL LET DOWN BY GOP

Analysis: New-Vehicle Sellers Upset that Republicans they support opposed loans

Oh dear.

This, gentle reader is the Principle of Cognitive Dissonance in action.

Yes.

When you militantly advocate against your own self-interest, this is called cognitive dissonance.

I guess they voted Republican because ... they thought didn't want to pay taxes? Your guess is as good as mine.

Of course, they are getting their wish. You most certainly don't pay taxes if you have no income.

If they're "To Big To Fail", maybe they are Too Big, Period.

Back in the day, the road was humming with Locomobiles and Stutzes, Hupmobiles, Hudsons, Kaisers and Studebakers. Packards, Duesenbergs, Pierce-Arrows and on and on.

Then Henry Ford came along and said, how about just one car that costs one price and comes in one color? And the workers will work for at least this much, and work for only 40 hours a week?

Ford had a better idea, and we liked that idea alot.

Before WWII, cars that didn't sustain the public's fancy over time either went out of business or were folded into big hydra-headed companies like GM. Chevy and Oldsmobile were their own lean and hungry companies at one time.

Then Preston Tucker came along with a new car after the war, and Detroit muscled him out. They were not to high on good ol' American competition anymore.

 Parts were standardized, which was a good thing, and union members all had pools and two-story houses. Everyone was fat and happy, and not motivated to make things any different.

But Japan wasn't too interested in what Detroit thought, and so they just made a better product, and then they kept making it better, and then they kept making THAT better, and so on. They thought to see what we'd think about that idea.

We thought we liked that idea.

Chrysler sold us a 1979 bailout on the premise that they were too big to fail, and now they are back with gimme-caps in hand, as many predicted, along with GM. Ford seems to know how to manage it's money a little better, but then Henry was always a stickler for keeping good books.

See, they're going to fail one way or another. The unions can paint what ever frowny face they want, but a bailout goes straight to the bondholders and the money men, not to Flint. In a bankruptcy, the bondholders and the money men lose too, and Flint still gets screwed.

It sucks to be Flint.

Maybe they should spin off their marques and Chevy is a company and Buick is a company and Oldsmobile becomes a company again and then they are all just the right size, and if one fails, why then another rises up and takes it's place, or maybe it goes away forever, or maybe Buick becomes a division of Toyota.

But "too big to fail" is like McDonald's asking for a bailout because people are eating pizzas now, or Coca-Cola because people drink bottled water now ... they're gi-normous big too, but they compete for their market share every day.

Making exactly nothing but SUVs with mileage estimates of "N/A" when they have had the technology to be making flying hydrogen rocket cars that we've needed in order to survive The Future is exactly like the Fast Food Giants making nothing but unctous fat-oozing salty carbo product when what they should be selling is FOOD.

Just because people want it doesn't mean you give it to 'em. Do you give your kids everything they want? OK, bad example. Do you discipline your own ravenous appetites and exercise and walk five miles a day which wordlessly explains your lithe and lean hot body? OK, another bad example.

So you see now that  sometimes the government has to set a standard that people can only have so much fat in their food, etc, whether people like it or not, so that they don't become big cottage-cheese butts walking through the shopping malls like pink baby hippos ... oh ... er ... too late on that one ... never mind.

Well, on this Big Three issue, its not too late for Bush to make one more convenient screw-up and just let them fail.

What Detroit Could Do in the Last Depression ...

... I'm sure they could do again.

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

I was following live blogging today of the congressional testimony of the Big 3 automakers hoping for a bailout. Congress isn't being very receptive

Phone calls to Detroit tell me the Motor City is rattling in it's tires. If one goes, conventional wisdom says, they all go, because the supply chain of parts and services can't be sustained easily if GM goes under.

On the other hand, bailouts only postponed the inevitable for British Leyland.

You see, if they still made cars like the above, with a little flash, they would have no problems. THIS is an American Car. La véritable élégance américaine. But no one listens to me.

Dad always said that if we maintained our cars like we maintained our airplanes, they would never wear out. Look at Cuba,

they don't seem to need a new car every three years, and look how much more attractive the motorways are, decorated with wheel wells and tail fins!

It would be a huge boost to tourism.

                                                                                                Jose Goitia, AP

Street Life

Walking back from The MAC yesterday evening afforded me the pleasure of viewing McKinney Avenue the way it was designed to be viewed, slowly, and by foot.

At one point they had removed the asphalt from McKinney, south of LaTour at Oak Grove and all the way to Philip Johnson's Crescent Hotel at Pearl Street, and it made for a nice slow jaunt over the bumpidy cobbles. But, people were worried about the delicately tuned fine German suspensions on their 6000 pound SUV's when they tried to go over 40 mph, so the bricks were unceremoniously ripped up, alledgedly to brick-pave the sidewalks and preserve the 19th century character of the immediate street, but that never happened.

In the 105F heat, I walked, first from the front of the MAC ...

... to Cafe Express because I was feeling a little peckish after an hour of strenous art viewing. But, there really wasn't anything there I was in the mood for at the moment, even though the people watching is always good, since it is located next door to Bally's.

An emergency vehicle went screaming past as I left the courtyard of Cafe Express, and little wonder ... at Hall and Oak Grove there was a smashup, and someone got hurt. Now, how someone could have a wreck that big at a two lane bucolic stop like this is beyond me, but the visual evidence from the smashed SUV is clear: cherchez le cellular.

At Hall and McKinney they blocked oncoming traffic to secure the accident area, and it gave me this unique opportunity to photograph the new Dodge Charger cop cars. Very cool. This is as cool as the old 1976 Pontiacs that looked so wicked.

Note the retail-converted old gas station in the background.

Across the street is an old trolley stop that is now Primo's Restaurant. Even in this heat the patio was packed. In the 1970s McKinney Avenue could have gone either way, and it mostly went the other way. One camp was for preservation and the other was for bulldozing in favor of an international orange roofed something-or-another, or better yet, an office building.

Some of the preservation went the hippy-dippy route. Here is what appears to be for all intents and purposes an old Sears kit house that's been dolled-up with bric-a-brac, but as an antique and decorating shop it needs to get attention for commercial purposes.

Up the street a little are the last original homes left on McKinney until you get north past Fitzhugh I think. They have been restored and make great offices as well.

All of these things combine to make great street life.

Dream Machine

Another outstanding ebay offering that will be sold by the time most people see this ... mind you ... he ain't givin' it away, but this 1959 Mercury Monterey convertible it is still way more economical and WAY MORE COOL than some dinky Beemer or Bentley that anyone else could be driving.

Honestly, you spend a fortune on a car just to drive down the street and see yourself coming the other way? What could be more common?