Favorites
Rev. 2001-03-29, 2003-07-27, 2006-04-11, 2007-08-03,
2008-07-27, -10-03
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| It may seem a bit ironic to start a list of favorite
places in Dallas with pictures from the Water Garden in
Ft. Worth, but that is Dallas' loss. Dallas has a
downtown garden park by the same architect, Phillip
Johnson, but it is second rate for a number of reasons,
while the FW park is a perfect example. |
The Water Park has six parts, two of which are shown. and
described below. Those not shown include what I call the
mountain, the desert, the flower garden, and the greenway.
All are linked by concrete ridges running around the park. |
|
 |
| This is the Canyon which as a rushing stream entering
at the top. The bottom is reached by a series of steps
coming down from the left, which are tricky to walk
because the water is moving sideways under them. At the
bottom, because of the rushing water, the sounds of the
city are absent. |
The Quiet Place is a wet walls submerged area with a
shallow pool in the center and these trees growing around
the edge reached by stairs between wet walls with a quiet
rush of water at the corners. |
| The Ft. Worth Water Garden is located at the west end
of downtown, limited parking is usually
available weekdays right next to the park. [2004-09-06 Tragically,
6 people have died in the Water Garden. Two died several years ago
when one of the very tall moonlight standards fell on them. Four
died earlier this year in the pool shown above left. The tragedy
is that both were caused by human disregard for design. The tower
fell because it was made of Corten self rusting steel which is
decorative but must be kept reasonably dry. Someone decided the
bolts at the bottom were not a feature and filled in around them with
dirt and plants that were watered regularly until the column broke
through. When the four people drowned, the pool did not look like
it does in the photo, with the water arching into shallow water, but was
full to the top. So instead of 2.5 feet the water was about 8 feet
deep. One person fell in, another tried to save her and was pulled
down to the drain, guys jumped in and were held in. Trained rescuers almost
suffered the same fate due to strong suction in the drain on the bottom.
It turns out that the sensor that was supposed to keep the level down
had never been replaced after failure, the original instructions were
lost somewhere, the experienced people had retired or lost their jobs in
the economy and the current operator had had no training.][After being
closed for some time, the park reopened more than a year ago.
Visitors are greeted by warning signs at each entrance. While,
fortunately from my view, the threatened guard rail around the lower pit
and hand rail on the steps down was not installed, the upper rim is
blockaded and a guard grid installed below a raised water level in the
pit - so now the water falls a much smaller distance, the water can't
get as deep if fill failure occurs, an adult can climb out of the pit
while standing on the grid and the suction is far below.
2008-10-03] |
The Mustangs, Las Colinas
| This sculpture is located in the center of 3 office
buildings just off 114 between Texas Stadium and the
North Entrance to DFW Airport. |
They represent a small family group of mustang horses
running down to and crossing a creek.
http://www.mustangsoflascolinas.com/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustangs_at_Las_Colinas
http://image38.webshots.com/39/3/4/1/274930401UHUYMC_ph.jpg |
| What takes the sculpture beyond the ordinary is
threefold. First, the huge horses have character and are
alive in their running, but are placed where people can
get at them. Second, the "creek" is wholly
abstract, but it evolves out of the concrete and brick
structure of the square and the horses make it alive for
a moment. Third, there are small fountains at the feet of
the horses in the water, that make the spray of the feet
hitting the water. |
Dallas has a downtown sculpture, near the convention
center, of longhorn cattle coming down a hill to a creek
with a several cowboys guiding their way. The main reason
for the sculpture is to prevent a hotel from being built
on the site. It supposedly honors the cowboy in Texas
history, but until it was built, Dallas had ignored and
buried any connection with the West and cattle, leaving
that to Ft. Worth, a far more proper symbol being the
flying red horse of an oil company overhead. The
sculpture is oversized, but has little energy and the
creek is simply real, with a falls and plants growing
beside it. While claiming to be the longest bronze sculpture in the
world, from the nose of the front steer to the tail of the last, it was
supposed to be bigger, but the additional cattle exited from a lack of
funds.
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/190295/
http://www.ultimateventures.com/gallery/tr19pioneer_lg.jpg |
"This, milord, is my family's ax. We have
owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes
it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new
handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the
ornamentation ... but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old ax of
my family? And because it has changed gently over time,
it is still a pretty good ax, y'know. Pretty good. Will
you tell me if this is a fake, too?" Dwarf king
explaining traditional symbols to Vimes, p282-3, The Fifth
Elephant, Terry Pratchett.
[Old joke - "My family owns George Washington's axe. Of course we had to
put a new head on it a couple of times, and replace the handle 5 or 6 times when
it broke." But Pratchett makes tradition real with the story.]
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny.
Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make
progress." p. 268, The Truth, Terry Pratchett
"I . . . got to be really sorry . . . ?"
OH YES. IT IS SUCH A SIMPLE WORD. BUT HERE . . . IT HAS MEANING. IT HAS .
. . SUBSTANCE.
"Yah, I know." Mr. Tulip looked up, his eyes red-rimmed, his face puffy.
"I reckon . . . to be that sorry, you got to take a ---ing good run at it."
YES.
"So . . . how long have I got?"
Death looked up at the strange stars.
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD.
"Yeah . . . well, maybe that'll ---ing do it. Maybe there won't be no more
world to go back to by then."
I BELIEVE IT DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT. I UNDERSTAND REINCARNATIONS CAN TAKE PLACE
ANYWHEN ...
"You sayin' . . . I could be alive before I was born?"
YES.
"Maybe I can find me and kill myself." said Mr. Tulip, staring at the sand.
p. 246, The Truth, Terry Prachett [In his books, DEATH is
personified, always speaks in capitals, and has a granddaughter, Susan.]
"The jockeys were thrown up like confetti
and landed in their saddles, and their spindly long-legged
transportation skittered its way out onto the track." Rat
Race by Dick Francis.
"I love you. But I lust after and covet so
much more than your body. I wanted to possess the power of your
eyes, the way they see form and beauty that isn't even there yet
and draw it up out of nothing into the solid world. I wanted to
own the honor of your heart.... I wanted your courage and
serenity. I wanted, I suppose, your soul, and that was too much
to want." Miles Vorkosigan apologizing to the widow Ekaterin
after telling everyone but her that he wanted her for his Lady. A
Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold.
I can hardly claim uniqueness here, since these
authors are quite popular and have a bunch of books, but maybe
you haven't run into them and could be interested.
S.M.Sterling
|
What I like |
S.M.Sterling has written a "Ship Who ...
" book with McCaffery and a related book on his own,
but the books that I really like are the Island In The Sea of Time
trilogy, which take the Island of Nantucket and the Coast
Guard sail training ship permanently to 1250 BC and explores
their adaptation and encounters with people of that time. The
solutions and kinds of people presented are interesting. Then he came back
with a Dies the Fire trilogy that inverts the speculation in Island -
where they mostly worry about will happen to the future because of the
changes they are making - and posits a total instant change to the entire Earth when the
Island leaves - all electricity and high temp chemistry - guns & engines
- no longer work.
Planes plunge to earth and cars crash and millions die from lack of food and
disease. The survivors go back to swords and feudal type clans and
enclaves. The first book starts with the triggering events and follows
a gal with one group who believe in Wicca and a guy with another group who
become horse cavalry as they work toward each other in Oregon and Idaho and a
really nasty feudal former professor who has taken over Portland. The second book
develops the conflicts between the various surviving groups and adds personality
conflicts. The third book adds a new factor with survivors escaping from England
and adding to the mix, coming to final violent but optimistic conclusion.
2006-04-11, A third series has begun with children of the two leaders
walking east to see what has happened to the rest of the country. 2007-08-03
|
|
Where to start |
Start with Island in the Sea of Time unless you have a strong dislike of
stories that tinker with the past, in this case so distant there is less hassle
than proposing the South won the Civil War or Hitler won WWII. Dies the Fire is a modern, "what
if ..." disaster story taken to some logical consequences. Mild warning:
two main characters in Island are lesbians (PG) and the heroine in
Dies is a Wicca (witch) where mystical things are believed, but actual magic
does not happen. |
|
What else |
In school we learned anachronism is something in fiction like glasses on a
Roman. Both anachronistic references I enjoyed finding in Dies the Fire
are literary and due to the delay in writing them. The Event occurs in mid May
1998. One book, Seymour's The Forgotten Arts & Crafts, used to cope with
primitive conditions was only published as a single volume in 2000 being two
books before then. And reference is made to Harry Potter's Sorting Hat as
a way of making choices, but the first Potter book was just barely out in
England summer of '98 and it would hardly be a common reference on the U.S. west
coast |
Dick Francis
What I like
|
These mystery books have a pattern of a male protagonist somehow involved
with
horse racing who is
dragged into an adventure that involves only a moderate
amount of violence but usually some desperate effort to
escape a risk to life or deal with the limits. Each book is different
enough to not be predictable. Most books involve a mildly
offbeat love/sex relationship. Quote |
Where to start
|
It is interesting to watch Francis develop as a
writer by reading his early books compared to his later
ones, but I think his later book The Edge set on a train
across Canada is a great place to start, milder than
some, but well written and set in the horse world that
Francis started in. Shattered is the
2000 book and is set in a glassblowers studio. My Review |
What else
|
Francis has usually come out with a new book in late summer, but
Shattered is the last. [Well, he said it was the last, after his wife
died, but has come out with another going back to his original detective
character. 2007-08-03] |
Anne McAffrey
| What I like |
Anne has written a huge number of books covering
several different groups of characters and settings and
the books usually involve very little violence and good
adventures against circumstance with romance rather than overt sex. One amazing point is
that she has written different books in the same series
with different authors. Sterling and
Moon have since become authors I like on their own.
Not all the series are of equal quality and some are youth books
although these are pretty good reads. The Pern series has a couple
of dozen entries ranging from short stories to extensive novels. [Her son has started writing
the Pern books and maintaining quality. 2008-07-27]. |
| Where to start |
Dragon Riders of Pern or The
Ship Who Sang. |
| What Else |
Acorna series (6 plus 3 new ones about her
children) involves a two legged individual raised by humans with a
healing unicorn horn who later finds she is part of a remote species and
then is an outsider at home because of her human raising. Power
Line series involves workers on an mega-corporation's power system;
I didn't finish the first book I found. Freedom series involves
forced colonization of prisoners of an alien space race who are
protected by another species and carry out a rebellion. |
Lois McMaster
Bujold
| What I like |
Miles Vorkosigan, "star" of a long series of books that begin with
his unique parents meeting before he was born and following him to the
birth of his own first children. Good sense of humor and taste
through all the books. |
| Where to start |
Memory drops you into the middle of
the series without being too confusing. Depending on your
mood you can go backward in the series for more youthful
adventures or forward for more mature books, but
eventually either should read Shards of Honor which
includes the meeting of his parents. I like all the
stories for different reasons - a good sense of humor,
human relationships and doubts in Miles and his fellows,
and a lot of nice strong women (including his mother, who
ends a civil war while going to rescue his artificial
womb.) http://www.dendarii.com/
Quote above. |
Terry Pratchett
| What I like |
The offbeat humor and the offbeat characters.
Diskworld is a totally fictional place that strongly
resembles Britain and other parts of the Earth, while
being populated with werewolves, witches, zombies, real dwarfs, nasty
elves and put upon
policemen. DEATH is portrayed in most of the later stories
(speaking in CAPITALS) and his daughter has a couple of
her own. The stories are mostly very funny satire of
government, universities, fantasy writing, and life.
There are actually several thru lines - a group of
stories about twitchy witches, the group about DEATH and his family, a
group that mostly deals with the Watch guards, a group
focused on religion and a group that deals mostly with
the wizards (and Wizzard) of Unseen University of magic, although people met in one
group are likely to show up in another. The more recent books seem
more focused and telling more of a satirical story rather than being
scattershot setups for jokes or satire. http://www.lspace.org/about-terry/index.html
Quotes above 1, 2,
3 |
| Where to start |
Guards, Guards is a very beginning of Ankmorpork's Night Watch.. Thief of Time jumps in with both feet. |
Charlaine Harris
| What I like |
I recently discovered her Sookie Stackhouse series - in her
titles the word Dead* appears (like 'Dead Until Dark') I read
the first and last in the series and then went back to read them in order
which is neater. If you are upset by werewolves and vampires and
violence and a good dose of sex in modern northern Louisiana (Katrina messes
up the business prospects of the vampires), you can skip this
suggestion. Sookie is a telepath, the only one she knows, in a
world where vampires have "come out of the coffin" since the development
of artificial blood by the Japanese. She gets deeply involved with the
vampire world, taking several as lovers and solving crimes, meanwhile
discovering Weres (werewolves, weretigers, werepanthers) and Fairies
that haven't come out yet, while living the life of a Wal-Mart shopping
barmaid - her boss turning out to be just a were - he can choose what he
wants to be. Found in fantasy & science fiction if shelved
separately from fiction. *except "Dead over Heels" which is in another
series.** 2008-06-24 |
| Where to start |
Dead Until Dark is the first and I think reading
them without having to guess at relationships mentioned in later books
would be best. [Having now read them all, yes, it is better to read them
in order 2008-07-08] |
| What Else |
Ms. Harris has 3 additional mystery series with women leads: Lily
Bard, Angela Teagarden, and Harper Connelly. Each series has its
own sexual tension. Harper was struck by lighting as a teenager
and can locate bodies and see their moment of death. She and her
step brother, raised in rotten conditions, travel around doing that, to
the skepticism of police - Grave appears in the title. Angela
lives in a small town in Georgia and gets involved in crimes, much like
Miss Marple, except she gets attacked and has sex, and doesn't just talk
about her quirky neighbors, but interacts with them. Lily Bard
chose to come to Shakespeare (which is in each title), a small town in
southern Arkansas, in part because of her last name, after a horrendous
rape and torture where she killed the torture boss and endured huge
publicity. She is into muscle building and karate. She
recognizes and becomes involved with an ex-policeman whose affair with a
fellow cops wife ended on TV when the husband shot his wife in front of
him. She has to cope with hidden killers and personal threats as
well as good-old-boy attitudes and unwanted male presumption. All of
these have enough of a through line that finding the first book is a
better idea. 2008-07-27 |
| |
Patricia Briggs
has written a number of books, but a series I recently
enjoyed and when my is liking as she reads it, features a
Charlaine Harris like character, Mercedes "Mercy"
Thompson who like Sookie is a lone oddity caught between supernatural
forces, in this case a "walker" who can transform to a coyote on her own
wish who was fostered by a werewolf clan in Montana led by the national
Alpha werewolf and now lives in eastern Washington state making her
living as a auto mechanic in a shop sold to her by a "goblin" which is
not really true, while living next door to the local Alpha were whom she
is beginning to love while her teen crush, who is hundreds of years old,
also shows up. It is a time of change and the fae have come out,
the werewolves are thinking of it and the vampires don't want to and
dissident members of each will kill to have their way. Done with a light
touch with interpersonal relationships complicated by variant species
and small town activities of ordinary kinds infested with these odd
people and their unique conflicts. Mild sex. Moon Called, Blood
Bound, Iron Kissed available together in Preying for Mercy from the
Science Fiction Book Club. 2008-11-13 |
Other Books I Like
These are several additional books I have liked,
hoping you might look at them and enjoy. Most are in libraries.
David Gerrold, Trouble with Tribbles, the whole book as an
e-book
http://www.benbellabooks.com/gerrold/Tribbles.pdf great story of writing for
TV and about writing and editing in general. Bought it a long time ago and
reread it when I found it on the internet. 2008-07-08
Harry Potter by J.K.Rowling If you don't know
about Harry, you must have been asleep for several years. If you
haven't read the books, you have missed a bunch of fun,
especially the first three. I find the fourth a bit thick both in
pages and fun quotient. Start with Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone, the first one.
Elizabeth Moon has written over a dozen books,
three with Anne McCaffrey where I met her. I went looking for
other books by her. I have enjoyed four books,
Once a Hero
to Against the Odds that feature the encounters of
several young women as they progress in the military and
government of their space traveling society. I see there are
three books listed before these four in a way that suggests they
are in the same series and six other books in another series. http://www.sff.net/people/Elizabeth.Moon/
Eric Flint's book 1632 is a neat book
that takes a chunk of West Virginia and moves it to the middle of
the 30 Years War, where the fire power of American blue collar
workers and American attitudes make a change in history. Nice (with
a few satiric touches) exploration of effects of horrors of that
war. 2003-07 There is a second book, 1633, the Baltic War which is good, if a bit more
didactic (lecturing). There is to be a series, the next being 1634, . [2004-09] Well, unfortunately,
1634 turned out to be about
Galileo and my wife got about 25 pages into it and quit and I got about 10 pages
before I quit. Much of the offhand humor and personalities of 1632 were missing
and it quickly became apparent that all the new people being introduced were
going to have a story line away from what was left behind in 1633. 1633
and 1634 have coauthors.
The Forgotten Arts & Crafts by John
Seymour
is a combined volume (2000/2001 England/U.S.A.) of two books published in the
80's which discusses in detail exactly the title topic. Besides
ordinary crafts like chair making, we find horse collar making and the skills
nobody mentions like growing the long straight willow pieces used for making
baskets and traps, and coppicing and pollarding which are growing wood for canes
and fences on stumps of hardwood trees. Not much on glass which was not an
craft but an industry from this book's point of view. 2006-04-11
Edwin Tunis has several related books
including Frontier Living, Colonial Living, and Colonial Craftsmen which were
first published in the 60's and 70's and reissued in 2000. All the books
have good basic descriptions and excellent drawings by Tunis. The Living books
attempt to make the topic of historical crafts more lively by abandoning the
infinitely complete catalog of variations at all locations and times for a
narrative of changing place with time: 30 years in New England, 40 years in the
South Atlantic Coast. The Craftsmen book repeats material from the other
two and adds more detail. While other crafts seem accurate to me compared
against other sources, the coverage of glass has some serious flaws.
Craftsmen says glass is cooked at 12,000F which may be a typo, but while
Craftsmen has an accurate description of spinning out the disk for crown glass,
in the earlier Colonial Living he says the bubble is spun flat until the "front
and back surfaces met and stuck together" which would guarantee bubbles and a
real mess. Craftsmen unfortunately follows the correct description of
crown glass with one of "broad" glass I have never seen before that has glass
being flattened on a heated iron table in a fan shape - the bubble being cut
lengthwise. Cylinder glass, which is commonly described elsewhere, he says
is done the same way by implication when every other description has it
flattened in a kiln. 2006-04-11 [I have since learned that there are two
distinct types of cylinder blown glass, one developed in the early 19th century
after these books cover and an earlier type from centuries before where the
cylinder was cut while hot with shears and flattened as described, which was
much more distorted than the favored and succeeding crown glass. 2007-08-03]
1491 is a factual book
[by Charles C. Mann, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2005] about the latest (2005) data
about the history of tribes and kingdoms in North and South America before
Columbus - millions of people, large settlement, and lots of modification of the
environment. Much of what has been reported in text books - small groups,
lots of bison, heavy forest - was due to diseases killing off huge numbers of
natives between 1492 and 1620 and the easy defeat of Inca and Aztec by small
European forces was due more to loss of 80-90% of population in the years before
Pizzaro and Cortez arrived.
Perhaps the most remarkable story to me is the detailed history of the
translator to the Pilgrims, who ended up living with them. Mann relates the
story, along with one set in Peru, even though it occurred long after 1492
because it is well documented and shows the effects on the native culture.
Tisquantum called Squanto in most textbooks, learned English because he was
kidnapped in 1614 by a co-captain of John Smith of Jamestown fame and sold in
Spain as a slave. He escaped to England and was a kind of household
curiosity for about five years and then got back to America, but hundreds of
miles north of home. Trying several times, walking and by boat, he finally
got back to where he had lived - only to find it devastated. Fishermen had
been trading with the Indians (the term Mann uses as explained in an appendix)
since about 1480, in 1501 captured natives in Maine had a sword and rings made
in Venice, and Champlain had come over with plans to set up colonies in 1606,
only to find Cape Cod and Maine so crowded there was no space for a
colony. Verrazzano, 1523, found the coastline densely populated. When
Tisquantum came back in 1619, there were almost no villages with living people
within 40 miles of the shore for 250 miles after 3 years of disease and the
village he had been living in Patuxet was gone. Pilgrims set up shop on
the site the following fall. 2008-10-03
