Good news, everyone! UT Law has a new dean!

Posted on May 12, 2012 by wellsdc

The announcement just came down on Wednesday: the University of Texas School of Law has chosen a new dean:

Ward Farnsworth, associate dean for academic affairs at Boston University School of Law, has been named dean of the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Farnsworth’s appointment, effective June 1, fills the position currently held by Interim Dean Stefanie Lindquist.

“As a teacher, a scholar, and a leader, Ward Farnsworth is just what UT Law needs,” said President Bill Powers. “I’m confident he’ll not only continue the tradition of first-class legal education and service to society at the University of Texas, but take the Law School to even greater heights.”

I wish Dean Farnsworth the best of luck in the wacky madhouse that is UT Law School. The building is very confusing, but people are generally happy to give directions. I presume that you will not have any specifically professorial duties in your role as dean, but I hope you don’t mind if I at least think of you as Professor Farnsworth.

Yup, this whole post was a setup for a Futurama joke. What else did you expect from me?

Photo sources: UTLaw Magazine and Wikipedia [Fair use].

Austin shelter animals need your help this Saturday!!!

Posted on May 11, 2012 by wellsdc

Tomorrow, Austin Animal Center is hosting its first annual Pet Extravaganza at the new shelter site in east Austin:

Austin Animal Center will host a first annual Pet Extravaganza event from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 12, 2012. The Center is located in Central East Austin at 7201 Levander Loop at Highway 183 and Airport Boulevard.

The event will be a fun filled day for pet owners and their families and will include a wide range of local vendors providing information on dog training, agility demonstrations, various pet resources, children’s entertainment including Josesito the Clown and his balloon animals, music, food vendors, and much more.

The event is free and open to the public. For those without a pet this event will be a great opportunity to take a walk through the animal shelter and meet a new life-long friend.

“This event will provide information and educate the community on responsible pet ownership,” said Kimberly Hart, Animal Services Office Outreach and Education coordinator. “Also we’d like to invite all members of the community to visit us at our new location and see what the shelter is doing to create a more humane community for all pets in the city.”

For more information check www.austinanimalcenter.org or call 3-1-1 or visit www.facebook.com/austinanimalservices for daily animal updates. The Austin Animal Center is open daily 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

I’ll be there with Friends of Austin Animal Center, so come see us!

The shelter is packed right now because of an unusually high number of animals coming in. Actually, they’re over capacity, which puts the city’s no kill goal at risk:

For the past few months, City of Austin Animal Services has experienced an unseasonal influx of animal intakes at the City shelter, maxing out capacity at both of its locations.

As of May 2, approximately 885 animals were either in shelters or foster homes, representing approximately 30 percent more than shelter capacity.

Compared to the same time last year, the shelter has taken in 150 more kittens and 200 more dogs. Animal Services operates the main Animal Center at 7201 Levander Loop and the overflow Town Lake Animal Center at 1156 W. Cesar Chavez St.

Traditionally, springtime brings in more kittens to the City shelter, but this year the Animal Center has taken in over a hundred more kittens than last year, with more than 600 of those being too young to thrive on their own. As of today, May 2, the Austin Animal Center has about 200 cats available for adoption.

Austin remains the largest no kill city in the country, but we need everyone’s support to stay that way. So head down to the shelter tomorrow, or today, or Sunday (you get the idea). Maybe your best friend is waiting for you there.

If you can’t be bothered to vote, I can’t be bothered to care about your opinions

Posted on May 10, 2012 by wellsdc

City elections are Saturday. Here’s a story about why you should give a shit.

Seven years ago, a tiny percentage of Austin’s voting population voted to ban smoking in bars located within the city limits. Leading up to the election, bar owners split over the proposed ban, and some warned of dire consequences if it did pass. By the end of May 7, 2005, around 5% of the city’s registered voters had weighed in on the question, approving the ban 52% to 48%.

As I recall, there was wailing, gnashing of teeth, and cries that this would destroy the downtown scene once and for all, as people deprived of their right to smoke would simply go elsewhere. I spent an afternoon at Crown and Anchor Pub about a week after the election listening to someone make these dire predictions, only to learn that he hadn’t voted. I had two responses to the people warning of the sky falling, one of which holds true today.

First, this is Austin, Texas, the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Where else are people going to go? San Marcos, where the bars closed at midnight? Round Rock, where the, uh…..well, nothing interesting ever happens in Round Rock. Are smokers going to skip the bars and clubs and just listen to a Bob Schneider CD while chain-smoking in the living room? I seriously doubted it at the time, and the fact that downtown Austin has sprouted multiple high-rises since 2005 seems to support my position that downtown Austin would be just fine.

Second, roughly five percent of the voting population actually voted in that election. I don’t know what percentage of the voting population subsequently whined about the outcome, but I know it was large. If you opposed the ban, yet didn’t vote, shut up. Just shut your pitiful fucking mouth. The ordinance passed by 2,420 votes, according to one crazy libertarian blogger. That’s more than the capacity of Antone’s, sure, but that certainly represents but a fraction of Austin’s smoking population circa 2005.

For my part, I’m glad the ordinance passed. I think people ought to be able to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. Smoking bans tread close to the edge of what “hurts” people, in terms of secondhand smoke, but note that the ban didn’t exactly lift the floodgates of nanny-stateism all over the city. Continue reading →

Living in a Blue Law Bubble

Posted on April 8, 2012 by wellsdc

We went to Easter lunch today at my aunt & uncle’s house. As we were preparing for a drive to the land of my birth to commemorate the fact that we used to celebrate Easter, it occurred to us that we should bring something. It is, after all, customary to contribute something when you are a guest in someone’s home. After consulting with other family members, it became clear that we should keep it simple and just bring wine. Everyone likes the person who brings wine. It requires no effort, and who doesn’t like wine? (I don’t drink, but even I appreciate a visually-appealing wine bottle.)

Being the lazy fellow that I am, I waited until this morning to buy a bottle of wine. The big grocery store, H.E.B., was completely closed. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that. We went to the nearby Walgreens, grabbed a bottle of white (my aunt and uncle like white wine), and headed to the register. It was 10:30 a.m.

“Um, I don’t think I can sell this to you right now,” said the clearly sympathetic clerk.

Yes, in the secular bubble that is Austin, Texas, I had completely forgotten that Texas blue laws prohibit the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays. The sale of distilled spirits of any kind is prohibited entirely in Texas on Sundays.

Because, as we all know, Texans like small government, and what better way to limit government’s pernicious influence over us than to allow it to dictate when we can and cannot buy booze? At least we know that no one will buy a box of wine, get drunk, and accidentally……do something that we, as a people, have a right to prevent people from doing when drunk on a Sunday morning. I’m sorry, I can’t even think of a sarcastic example of what this law might legitimately prohibit. It’s just that stupid.

The only reason these laws exist is to enforce some sort of religious standard that hasn’t existed in many communities for decades, if ever. Yet many of these laws apply statewide. Some Texas counties are “dry,” which often just means that you can’t buy alcohol unless you buy a “membership” to a restaurant. I’m not sure where that membership fee goes, although it would not surprise me if some part of it ended up in the county’s coffers. So the church-going folk get to pretend their community adheres to their own antiquated notion of morality, and the county (possibly) pockets a little extra change. Winners all around, right?

Except that it makes us all look like assholes.

Photo credit: ‘Unidentified white wine in glass’ by Basheer Tome (originally posted to Flickr as White Wine) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

At this point, let’s call it an invasion

Posted on March 27, 2012 by wellsdc

You are not welcome in my home

Seriously, what are these giant mosquito-looking bugs??? They are everywhere, not just in Austin, but apparently all over Texas. I can’t walk through my front door without a few coming in with me. They have turned my entire backyard into a breeding ground–if insects had their own pornography, my backyard is their Van Nuys.

A Google search for “giant mosquitoes in Austin” turned up nothing. I’m not even sure what to call them, since “giant mosquito-things” gets old after a while. According to Wikipedia, they might be crane flies, part of a very large family of insects that shares a suborder with mosquitoes.

If there is an equivalent sexual position for humans, I do not know what it is.

They are also quite fearless. Or just very stupid. As I sit at my desk trying to work, at least one lands on me every 20-30 minutes or so. I assume all the recent rain has brought them out in droves. I also know that they eat mosquito larvae. Or mosquitoes. Or something that we would prefer be eaten. In the winter absence of the bats, I welcome that. Just please, stay out of my house. And stop landing on my nose when I’m trying to go to sleep.

I like the idea, but where do I park?

Posted on March 19, 2012 by wellsdc

Several Austin City Council members want to let businesses lease parking spaces along Congress Avenue to use for sidewalk cafe space.

Austin City Council Members Chris Riley and Sheryl Cole, looking to invigorate the Congress Avenue street scene à la New York and San Francisco, say some businesses should be allowed to set up shop in city parking spaces.

Under a proposal from the pair, businesses along busy streets such as Congress Avenue would be able to lease spots from the city and use them for sidewalk cafes or retail activity. The proposal would essentially expand the city’s practice of allowing businesses to lease sidewalk space for cafes. Riley said the goal is to create more vibrant, interesting places for pedestrians and bicyclists.

I see a future in which downtown Austin is a bicycle and pedestrian utopia, and anyone wishing to frolic through its glory will have to park on the far side of Lady Bird Lake. If that day comes, you had better believe I am investing in my own pedicab.

Photo credit: 02.DCPedicab.400F.NW.WDC.12May2011 by ElvertBarnes, on Flickr.

“Consumerism on steroids”

Posted on March 18, 2012 by wellsdc

Via Addie Broyles at the Austin American Statesman, here’s an interesting take on South by Southwest Interactive:

For your Sunday reading, a baffling letter to the editor in @statesman about SXSW interactive fest: “I can’t think of anything more diametrically opposed to the arts than the high-tech industry, which cannily creates addictions to countless gadgets that further detach its users from actual experience and emotion.”

(h/t Don Cruse)

I will be the first to admit that South by Southwest Interactive is a smorgasbord of first-world problems and self-important navel-gazing, but I would hardly say that it bears no relevance to “the arts” per se. Some huge percentage of all internet technology is now devoted to transmitting music and movies around, and much of the conference seems devoted to finding newer and shinier ways to do that.

People do make good connections and do quite a bit of business at SXSWi. Much of the purpose of the conference, after all, is to connect people in ways that will make them money. Having never been to a Star Trek convention, I have no idea if any business networking goes on or if any actual products get rolled out there. Maybe haters are just gonna hate.

Even if the vast bulk of what goes on at SXSWi is generally useless fluff, the same can be said for nearly every gathering of people in history. After all, it’s only five days. The Constitutional Convention needed four weeks, to use a wholly-inappropriate analogy.

Cue Sturgeon’s Law, paraphrased as “ninety percent of everything is crap.”

SXSW Diary, Final Entry

Posted on March 17, 2012 by wellsdc

It’s over. The hipsters will return to their respective coasts, and the music scene will recede to its usual level of cultural dominance. Many Austin businesses have more money in their coffers, and many Austinites probably have raging hangovers right about now. Starting tomorrow, if you want to see ironic handlebar mustaches, you’re going to have to look harder.

This has been a great opportunity for me, not only in that I got to meet amazing people and learn quite a bit, but forcing myself to write about it every day has helped jump start my creativity again.

That said, I’m tired of writing about music. I will simply recap my last day of South by Southwest 2012 by telling you who I wanted to see buy didn’t, and who I saw.

We wanted to see Nada Surf at Waterloo Records, but didn’t quite make it. “High/Low” was a recurring soundtrack to my senior year of college in 1996-97, and I’ve never seen them live. It was a time in my life when lyrics like this seemed quite deep:

Take a look at what’s been done
The killing wound is the thousandth cut
A dead turtle on the beach puts my happiness out of reach

Everyone probably remembers “Popular,” but the entire album is solid. You should check it out.

I had hoped to see Shiny Toy Guns at Auditorium Shores, but again, fatigue and an overwhelming sense of just wanting to chill out kept us home. I had learned that all of their songs I know were sung by their previous lead singer, Sisely Treasure, who left the band last year. I bet it was still a great show, I just would not have been as familiar with the material. (I tried to find a good concert video of “When Did This Storm Begin,” but the sound was terrible on everything I could find on YouTube.

We did make it to the Cult at 8:00 at Auditorium Shores. As you may know, they were big in the late ’80s, particularly with their song “She Sells Sanctuary.” That song has always stood out to me as being one of the most iconic rock songs to almost completely lack any specific hooks (unless you count Ian Astbury wailing “Hey yeah heh heh-eh-eh” over and over again.)

I won’t belabor the point that I suck as a music writer, so I’ll just say it was a great show. As my imaginary Shakespearean friend might say: Off with our socks did they fucking rock.

I even took a cell phone video of “She Sells Sanctuary” that turned out pretty well (see attached).

I thus conclude this chronicle of SXSW 2012. See many of you next year.

SXSW Diary, Day Eight

Posted on March 16, 2012 by wellsdc

My assessments of the music at South by Southwest this year have been unremittingly critical, and I figured out why. For various reasons, we have been looking for specific events with bands we know well. This is great, but the spirit of SXSW has always been discovery: wandering around downtown, or any number of other parts of Austin, to just see who’s playing. I have on occasion made some great discoveries. This year, though, we are keeping it relatively simple. I hereby commit, in front of whomever might be reading this, that next year I will take in some unknown bands and then say at least a few nice things about them.

Back to tonight: After an attempt to hear the Cult play the Waterloo Records parking lot (you really can’t hear them from across Lamar while a band is playing on the Whole Foods patio, although it creates a fascinatingly jarring stereo effect), we made our way back to Auditorium Shores for Counting Crows.

Let me first say that “August & Everything After” was my theme music for part of the mid-90’s, and Adam Duritz is one of my heroes among singers. I had high hopes for the show, and those hopes were fully realized when they played “Rain King.” Unfortunately, that was the last pre-encore song of a roughly 90-minute set. There are two terms I’m trying to remember, but Google isn’t helping:

When singers who have been performing for a long time start to forget their own lyrics during concerts; and
When bands with long careers end up having to mostly play songs from two or more decades ago at their concerts.

I saw R.E.M. play a show in Houston in 1995, and while they put on a phenomenal show, they clearly could not remember the lyrics to several of their most famous songs. No one really knows all the words to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” except hopefully the people who wrote it. When Billy Joel played in Houston around the same time, it was clear no one cared what he had released recently. We just wanted “Piano Man.”

Tonight, it felt as though we waited politely through about an hour of new material for them to play “Mr. Jones.” The musicians were incredible, but Adam Duritz was not displaying the energy that always made them such a great band. He mentioned that he had been partying all week (and that’s partly what SXSW is for), so perhaps he was just dragging a bit. Still, I sensed that they are tired of playing their old stuff. Okay, enough negativity. Here’s the song that had me so excited:

SXSW Diary, Day Seven

Posted on March 15, 2012 by wellsdc

[Cue the grumpy old man rant…]

Today was a less-than-satisfying attempt to venture into the music side of South by Southwest. The plan, hatched several days ago, was to catch the Shins’ free show at Auditorium Shores at 8:00, then head to the gutted remains of Spaghetti Warehouse at 10:00 to see Girl Talk.

A note on Girl Talk and the overall trend of making people jump through hoops in order to get to see shows. Maybe offering vague hints of a show’s location (or even very existence) is an effective way to generate buzz and get some people to wander downtown Austin and/or the internet doing whatever it takes to get to the show, but that ain’t me. Maybe I’m just grumpy and old, but I prefer to look up a show’s date and time, purchase a ticket if necessary, and go to an entrance of some sort in order to enter a venue and watch a show. That’s how most of the world works, but SXSW sometimes does it different.

But I’ll get back to that.

The worst view of the Shins has the best sound

This was the best picture I could get of the Shins from the spot where we could actually hear them, alas.

As for the Shins, they’re a pretty good band. I get them confused with the Strokes for two reasons: (1) their names are both “The ***” names beginning with “S” and (2) I am out of touch with music. The main observation I can make about the show is that the stage, set up against the backdrop of Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin, reminded me of the Austin City Limits studio stage, except that this backdrop was real. We wandered the park in search of a good spot to both see and hear the show, eventually concluding that there was no available spot where we could do both. The best sound, in my opinion, was actually on the walkway of the 1st Street bridge, where we couldn’t see anything.

Anyway, the Girl Talk show was part of a Nike/VEVO event promoting a new doodad that Nike rolled out this week. Getting on the RSVP list involved tweeting something to VEVO and getting a password to a website. They never got back to me with the password, but then someone tweeted the password and it showed up on Facebook. The line to get into the former Spaghetti Warehouse was long–not as long as some lines I’ve seen, but pretty damn long. A volunteer told us that the venue only holds 500 people, that there were 100 VIP’s that would get in no matter what, and that over 7,000 people had RSVP’d. Another volunteer told us that if we did not receive an e-mail in response to our RSVP with the subject line “Awesomeness,” then we were not on the list.

Guess who didn’t get such an e-mail?

Seriously, it would have been easier to get into a Where’s Fluffy? show, and they’re not even a real band.

At any rate, I didn’t really want to support Nike anyway, because of reasons.

That left us wandering downtown Austin with no wristbands and no particular idea of what else was going on, and then my phone battery died because I left the camera feature running for too long. Nothing seemed to be going on outdoors, so we went home.

I remember Thursday night of last year’s SXSW being much more active, in terms of people being out and music going on in accessible places. Last year, the Thursday of SXSW week was St. Patrick’s Day, which I’m sure had much to do with the activity. This year, it just seemed like nearly everything was behind one barrier to access or another, except for Auditorium Shores. Again, though, maybe I’m just getting older and grumpier.

Photo credit: Yeah, I took that first picture, but I don’t really want to admit it; Where’s Fulffy? by mr-tee on redbubble.

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