Driving Over The Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridges Looking For Fort Worth's Three Bridges Over Nothing

Today, looking for a photo of my dad, and a video of Spencer Jack, had me coming across the photo you see here, and the video you can watch below.

In the photo we are looking north across a Tacoma Narrows waterfront deck, near the Steamers seafood restaurant, south of the Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridges.

The closest bridge is the newest bridge. The new Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridge was built this century in less than four years.

Built over water.

Built after the voters in the seven or eight counties most affected by the need for a new bridge approved a bond measure to finance the construction of the bridge.

What a concept.

Fort Worth is currently building Three Bridges Over Nothing. No water in sight. The Fort Worth Three Bridges Over Nothing are scheduled to take four years to build. And the public has never been allowed to vote on this particular public works project.

With those Three Fort Worth Bridges Over Nothing taking so long to build, longer than the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge, longer than the Golden Gate Bridge, we can certainly reasonably expect that those Three Fort Worth Bridges Over Nothing are going to be spectacular.

At some point in time, in July of 2008, I drove across the old and the new Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridges, using my antique camcorder to record the drive.

In the video you get a cloudy look at Tacoma, population much smaller than Fort Worth. But with a road system well designed to handle the traffic it needs to handle. In the video I make mention of The Mountain being out and clearly visible. However, The Mountain does not appear in my inferior quality video.

If I remember right I also made a video of Tacoma's Theo Foss Waterway and its surrounding museums. Theo Foss is a development of the sort the Trinity River Vision wants to be, but likely never will be, due to that boondoggle problem from which it suffers.

Below is the video of a drive over the Tacoma Narrows Bridges, along with my pithy commentary....

Happy Birthday To My Dear Ol' Dad

Today being my dad's birthday I found myself looking for a photo of my dad for happy birthday illustrative purposes.

Eventually I found the photo you see here, of All My Dad's Family.

Sounds like a soap opera.

If you are wondering what birthday number today is for my dad, well, my dad was not quite 15 when World War II came to an end after a couple big booms.

So, you will need some minimalist historical knowledge and slight math ability to calculate how old my dad is today.

Back to my dad's soap opera.

Currently, the cast of All My Dad's Family is almost the same as you see above, with a couple major changes, with the biggest change, I suppose, being the addition of Spencer Jack to the cast.

That is Spencer Jack's dad, my favorite nephew Jason, standing in front of me. I am holding my favorite nephew, Jeremy. Next to Jason, in front of my dad, is my favorite nephew, Joey. Next to Joey, in front of my mom, is my favorite nephew, Christopher.

Next to me, is my little brother, Jake, who is Spencer Jack's grandpa. At the far left of that row is my favorite brother-in-law, Jack.

Spencer Jack is not named after my favorite brother-in-law, he is named after my favorite dad, Jack. And Spencer Tracy. I think.

Next to Jack is my favorite sister, Jackie. Jack and Jackie are Christopher and Jeremy's parental units.

Another big change to the cast of All My Dad's Family has been Spencer Jack's grandma, my favorite ex-sister-in-law, Cindy, being replaced by my new favorite sister-in-law, Spencer Jack's step-grandma, Jill.

Spencer Jack's grandma, Cindy, returns every once in awhile for guest appearances with All My Dad's Family, such as the guest appearance you can see in the video below, which took place in August of 2008. Cindy is expected to make a guest appearance with All My Dad's Family late next month, in Arizona.

Back when the above photo of All My Dad's Family was taken, the entire show took place in Western Washington. In 2014 All My Dad's Family also has locations in Arizona and Texas.

Below you can watch a very low quality video I took with my now antique camcorder, over six years ago, at Bay View State Park, documenting the first time Spencer Jack met me and my mom and dad, also known as Spencer Jack's great grandparental units. I already mentioned you will see Spencer Jack's grandma Cindy in this video. You will also see Spencer Jack's mom, Jenny. And others.

Happy Birthday Dad!!!

No J.D. Granger Clone Executively Directed Singapore's Successful Marina South Vision

No. What you see here is not an artist's rendering of what the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle's Granger Bay Sands Resort might look like when, or if, it is completed decades from now.

What you are looking at is not a sad little pond in Fort Worth, Texas. The body of water you see here is Marina Bay in Singapore.

That would make what you are looking at the Marina Bay Sands, a Singapore resort complex which includes a hotel, convention and exhibition centers, theaters, concert venues, stores and restaurants.

Plus a casino is in the mix, due to Singapore deciding earlier this century to get into the casino business.

After an extensive search Singapore gave the job to project engineers from the Las Vegas Sands to develop the Marina Bay site, in what is known as the new business district of Marina South.

For our purposes we will refer to this as Singapore's Marina South Vision.

No Singapore politician's son was hired to be the executive director of the Singapore Marina South Vision.

Singapore is one of the least corrupt nations in the world.

On May 27,  2006 Las Vegas Sands learned they had won the job to develop Marina Bay. Construction began soon thereafter, in early 2007.

Marina Bay Sands opened way less than four years later, on April 27, 2010.

Another interesting fact.

Marina Bay Sands is currently the world's most expensive building, costing $4.7 billion in U.S. dollars.

I guess you get what you pay for. Literally.

Which leads me to wonder how can Fort Worth's relatively puny undertaking known as the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle be slated to cost around $1 billion? Is that high cost due to the slow motion, un-funded, poorly planned, incompetently directed method of project construction?

All that Fort Worth, and those in the rest of America who Fort Worth expects to help pay for their boondoggle, get for that billion bucks, is a short flood diversion channel, a little lake, three plain bridges over the flood diversion channel. Plus the removal of levees which have kept the downtown Fort Worth zone flood free for well over a half century.

Also, how can the small multi-purpose arena, which Fort Worth voters recently voted to help fund by charging $1 to rent a livestock stall, cost almost half a billion dollars? Look at what Singapore wrought  for $4.7 billion, compared with Fort Worth's puny half billion dollar arena.

Marina Bay Sands has a well done website which gives one a real good idea of what $4.7 billion buys in Singapore. Screencap of that website below....

Go to the Marina Bay Sands website and you will see what that is atop those three hotel towers.

Oh, why make you look for it, I'll just go find a photo of Singapore's version of a Rockin' the River Happy Hour Float venue....

The Marina Bay Skypark, atop the Marina Bay Hotel, featuring the world's highest and longest infinity pool, along with other amenities, like restaurants, with a view.

I wonder how many things there are in Singapore which make other towns, far and wide, green with envy....?

In Italy Mr. & Mrs.Galtex Found A Possible Parking Lot Turned Into Turin's Piazza Castello

Fort Worth globetrotters, Mr. and Mrs. Galtex, are currently in Italy, today in the Mediterranean port city of Genoa, a few days ago in Turin, also known as Torino.

While in Turin, Mr. Galtex used Facebook to ask me the trick question you read above the picture.

I had to ponder Mr. Gatlex's trick question a few minutes and then answered with...

Fort Worth has changed a lot since you kids have been out of town, but I am almost certain Fort Worth's teeny little plaza has not grown to big city size, so I'm gonna guess the above is Turin's Piazza....

Fort Worth calls its teeny little  plaza Sundance Square Plaza. Apparently Turin calls its big city plaza Turin Piazza Castello. Does Castello mean square in Italian? Making the name of the Turin plaza, Turin Plaza Square?

Or did the Turinians have the common sense to realize redundantly naming their plaza Turin Plaza Square was a bit ridiculous?

Or maybe Turin  confused its multitude of tourists, for decades, by referring to the Turin downtown as Turin Plaza, where there was no plaza, but plenty of parking lots, which many of the Turin tourists assumed must be the Turin Plaza. And then did Turin decide to turn one of their big parking lots into an actual plaza and then name it Turin Plaza Square?

I suspect that is not how Turin's plaza came to be.

The Italian reports from Mr.and Mrs. Galtex have been causing me some serious Italian food cravings.

One of which is a craving for Pecorino Spaghetti. I have acquired all the ingredients for this version of spaghetti, except for the Pecorino.

Mr. Galtex has let me know it is difficult to replicate the made in Italy version. Mr. Galtex has tried to do so, on some of those rare occasions when he and the Mrs. are stateside, and failed.

However, I have the advantage of having never enjoyed the real thing, so I'll likely be happy with however mine turns out.

And really, how can you go wrong with noodles, butter, pepper and really sharp cheese?

From Anonymous I Learned I Am Too Ignorant To Navigate A Texas Railroad Commission Website Map

On Sunday I blogged about wondering what was up with one of my Chesapeake Energy neighbors, due to its gas pad site being missing some of its usual signage.

I took a picture of a piece of the Chesapeake signage which was laying on the ground.

Someone named Anonymous then took the "Rutherford 1H" name off that grounded Chesapeake sign to, apparently, glean production information about this particular gas site.

Basically the Anonymous comment left me more befuddled than before...

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Wondering What's Up With One Of My Chesapeake Energy Neighbors": 

If you are able to navigate a GIS map, the Texas Railroad Commission has a much friendlier version available for your perusal.  It shows that the well (known as the Rutherford 1H) is in production for gas and, as of the last production record from July of this year, produced about 10,000 mcf of gas that month. Based on today's NYMEX Futures price for January delivery. That's about $37,310 for the month of July. I assume the lack of data from July to December is normal lag time from reporting to posting by the RRC. But I could be wrong. 

I went to the Texas Railroad Commission website to which Anonymous directed me to to see if I could alleviate any of my befuddlement about the well known as Rutherford 1H.

Below you are looking at a screencap of the Texas Railroad Commission website to which Anonymous directed me.

I entered "Rutherford 1H" into the search window to come with a no information found message. No matter what I clicked on I could not find specific info about any specific gas pad site's production records.

What I guess I have learned from this is not only am I not able to navigate a GIS map, as Anonymous suggested I do. I do not even know what a GIS map is.

Ignorance really is not all the bliss it is cracked up to be......

Anonymous Has Me Boosting The Color Of Fort Worth's Infamous Hillbilly Mudpit

A week or so ago I blogged about the fact that nowhere in the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle's 28 page 2014 Fall Update did I see mention made of what J.D. Granger has previously referred to as one of the crown jewel stars of The Boondoggle, that being the pond known as the Cowtown Wakepark, designed by The Boondoggle to be the world's premiere urban wakeboarding lake, leading Fort Worth to once again be at the forefront of the world in offering its citizens one of those precious amenities everyone in the world is clamoring for.

Someone with a name about as common as Jones, that being Anonymous, made an amusing comment about the Cowtown Park being missing from The Boondoggle's Update....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "28 Pages Of Boondoggle Propaganda With No Mention Of The Trinity River Vision's Shining Cowtown Wakepark Star": 

Local hero Brian Luenser needs to photograph Granger's hillbilly mud pit and show us its true beauty. I don't know of anyone who can boost the color intensity of photos like ol' Bri'.

I borrowed the term local hero from the December issue of Fort Worth Magazine and I got hillbilly mud pit from Durango Texas at Blogspot.

I have no memory of referring to the wakeboard pond as a hillbilly mud pit, but I am sure I did, I just don't remember when or where. Though I suspect, via entering the term 'mud pit' into the blog's search window, I could quickly find it.

The reference to Brian Luenser, to those outside the Fort Worth information distortion bubble, is to a guy who takes photos of the downtown Fort Worth area, including the Trinity River. Some think these photos to be works of beautiful art. Others think these photos are works of distorted propaganda, hence the remark made by Anonymous about the Luenser tendency to boost color intensity.

When I was first exposed to the Brian Luenser School of Chamber of Commerce Photography I was reminded of those photos one often sees of Seattle from the perspective of looking south from north of the Space Needle, photos in which Mount Rainier is made to look much larger than it does in reality. I have wondered, more than once, if this has ever annoyed any Seattle tourists, of which there are many, when the clouds lift and they see The Mountain way in the distance.

I have wondered if the Brian Luenser photos have ever annoyed any of Fort Worth's tourists, of which there are few, when they see the Trinity River, expecting to see what they saw in the Luenser photo's, and instead see a littered ditch without free flowing water.

I decided to see if I could do what Anonymous suggests, and see if I can apply the Brian Luenser type of photo color boosting to put lipstick on that messy pig known as the Cowtown Wakepark.

The un-boosted photo below is from a blogging from way back in 2012 titled Trying To Wakeboard Today At Cowtown Wakepark. That photo is pretty much a documentary look at what this poorly kept eyesore actually looks like. Litter and junk laying about. Green astro-turf atop a beached floating dock.

Applying a saturated boost to the above photo turns the astro-turf into an otherworldly shade of green. The pile of debris in the foreground now looks like some sort of carcass, ready for a BBQ pit. The water is almost an inviting shade of greenish blue. The grass looks so green one might think one was looking at Ireland.

Even if the Cowtown Wakeboard pond looked as good as the boosted version above, I still would not want to get in that water.....

Slowly Making My Way Through A Dense North Texas Fog To A Steaming Hot Tub

Last night in the middle of the night, as in at 3 in the morning, my phone went off with its incoming text message type noise.

After the phone woke me up I woke it up to find the message which woke me up was from AccuWeather, alerting me to the fact that a heavy fog would be blanketing North Texas by morning.

Why did I need to know this in the middle of the night? I must find out how to shut AccuWeather up. It's more annoying than Pete Delkus in Weather Drama Queen Mode.

By the time the sun arrived this morning following by me opening that which blocks the incoming sun from coming in my windows, it was obvious, without any sort of AccuWeather alert, that a heavy fog had descended upon the land.

I don't recollect seeing a pea soup thick fog of this level at my current location previously. This is like a thick fog rolling in from Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. There is no ocean within hundreds of miles of my current location.

The foggy view in the above photo is from the vantage point of this morning's foggy hot tub soak. Normally in this view, without fog, you could see the redrock colored walls of Albertsons. This morning all you see is a wall of fog.

I do not know if it is safe to drive anywhere, what with this almost zero visibility thing happening. I suspect by the time I'm feeling like rolling any sort of wheels the fog will have lifted sufficiently to make it safe to do so.

A Chilly Bike Ride Admiring A Fort Worth Monument Before Egg Foo Yunging

In the hot tub this morning I was basking under the glow of a clear blue sky, nary a cloud in sight.

A short time after exiting the hot tub clouds arrived to erase that clear blue sky.

A noonday bike ride was on my schedule today. I was hoping the predicted high in the 60s would arrive in time for a well warmed bout of wheel rolling.

Instead of 60s I rolled in the low 50s. With the rolling wind chill I found myself getting a little cold on the fast downhill slopes. At one point my bike helmet, well, baseball cap, almost blew off.

The most pleasant part of the bike ride, other than having it over, was the stop where my handlebar horns pointed at the Molly the Longhorn horns on the big round monument which greets travelers to Fort Worth as they come into town from the east on Interstate 30.

I think I will  warm myself up now by making a nice hot stir fry, over rice, with egg foo yung.

Wondering What's Up With One Of My Chesapeake Energy Neighbors

Today, on this first Sunday of the last month of 2014, I decided to take a walk to visit my neighborhood Chesapeake installations.

On Wednesday I walked by one of my neighborhood Chesapeake Energy Barnett Shale natural gas extracting operations, that being the one across the street from Albertsons and the I-820 freeway.

At that point in time I noticed that much of the signage, such permit info, had gone missing.

I thought not much about the missing Chesapeake signage until the next day, when  I was reading this week's Fort Worth Weekly cover article, titled Shale Math: Half Full or Half Empty which mentioned among many other shale sham related mentions, the fact that former Fort Worth Golden Child, Chesapeake Energy has pretty much been run out of town, with the "divorce' being so nasty that the city of Fort Worth and other local entities, such as the D/FW airport, are suing Chesapeake Energy.

Fort Worth suing Chesapeake is such an irony. Back when the Chesapeake-Fort Worth marriage was still in its honeymoon phase Chesapeake could pretty much get away with anything it wanted to do to Fort Worth, partnered, as it was, with Fort Worth's then mayor, Mike Moncrief.

Has Chesapeake abandoned my neighborhood Albertsons installation? I found that which you see below near the base of the sign above.

I have no idea what the above means, of it in any way relates to the Boca Raton, 6699 Albertsons gas pad site.

After getting a closer look at the neighborhood's Albertsons gas pad site I decided I needed to check if my other neighborhood Chesapeake gas pad site was also missing its signage.

Nope, all the signage is still intact  on my other Chesapeake neighbor. This gas pad site is actually closer to  my abode than the Albertsons one. But, I usually do not walk by the Chesapeake gas pad site you see above, due to the fact it is a location that is missing something that is missing a lot in Fort Worth.

A sidewalk.

On My Way Today To Walk With The Village Creek Indian Ghosts I Had An Encounter With A Machine Gun Toting Santa

On this first Saturday of the last month of 2014, on my way to go bike riding with the Indian Ghosts who haunt Arlington's Village Creek Natural Historical Area, I stopped at Sam's Club to squirt some gas into the tank of my mechanized bike conveying device.

In the midst of squirting the gas I looked across the street to find myself startled by Santa Claus brandishing what looked to me to be a machine gun.

I am guessing this is an "Only in Texas" type thing.

Where even saintly Santa is an open carry advocate, jolly while waving a weapon at people passing by.

Santa is doing his gun slinging from the roof of a business located on Eastchase Parkway, across the street from the Eastchase Super Walmart in far East Fort Worth, near where Fort Worth becomes Arlington.

As you can see above, the business Santa is guarding is a Fort Worth Gun store. Santa is aiming towards those driving west on the entry lane to Interstate 30. I would imagine there has been a motorist, or two, startled at seeing this type behavior from Santa Claus.

I had no incidents with gun toting Indian Ghost aficionados in the Village Creek zone today. A lot of people were out enjoying the perfect weather.

About half the homes I saw in the Interlochen neighborhood appeared to be ready with their Christmas displays. A couple homes were lit up in the midday sun, with one of those sporting a lot of glowing purple lights glowing bright, causing me to think this house must be blindingly bright at night.

It has been several years since I braved the Interlochen Christmas traffic jam. I have no inclination to see those bright lights this year.

I will be experiencing Christmas in the Fort Worth Stockyards, though, on the evening of December 15.

I hope the Fort Worth Stockyards Santa is armed with a more era appropriate firearm, something like a Colt 45, or a Winchester rifle....