A Wichita Falls Walk Around Sikes Lake With Picasso & Andy Warhol

I was not long in Wichita Falls before I began noticing horses of many colors at locations all over town.

I soon learned this was a citywide public art project called The Mane Event.

The Mane Event has a website where one can find a map of the location of all the horses of many colors.

I soon also learned that the horses were Mustangs and that the Mustang is the mascot of Midwestern State University, a school a short distance from my abode.

Today I traveled that short distance from my abode to walk around Sikes Lake at Midwestern State University.

During that walk around Sikes Lake one comes to the Mane Event Mustangs you see here. A mama Mustang and her baby.

This Mane Mustang is very close to the Wichita Falls Museum of Art. So, it is fitting that this particular Mane Mustang is covered with famous works of art by famous painters.

Including Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo Da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gaugin, Johannes Vermeer, Michelangelo and Grant Wood.

Take a virtual tour around this Mane Mustang and see how many of the famous painters and their works of art you can identify. I would hazard to guess most will be able to identify the works of Grant Wood,  Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso and maybe Vincent Van Gogh.

Recommending Durango Jones On Facebook Is Abusive

Now, this is puzzling.

Last night I made a comment on a Brook Bailey Facebook post.

My comment included the link to my blogging about Sick City.

Brook Bailey then tried to send that Sick City link to another Facebooker, telling the Facebooker that "I think you'd enjoy reading Durango Jones blog."

Facebook then told Brook Bailey that her attempt to share the Sick City link was deemed abusive or that it was otherwise disallowed.

Brook Bailey was then advised that to keep from getting blocked again she needed to make sure she read and understood Facebook's Community Standards.

Facebook has community standards?

Downtown Fort Worth May Get A New Store For Christmas

I saw that which you see here this morning on the front page, online, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and found what which I saw to be amusing.

Amusing for a couple reasons.

Toy store headed to Sundance Square? With an illustrative photo of the former parking lot re-purposed as Sundance Square Plaza.

Have the goofballs who run downtown Fort Worth decided to drop "Plaza" from the name of the re-purposed parking lot?

It was after several years of exposure to Fort Worth that I finally learned that Sundance Square was the name given to a multi-block downtown Fort Worth revitalization scheme. Why would such a name be chosen for such a scheme with no one realizing it was confusing to call something Sundance Square, where there was no square?

Last week I blogged about the frenzy of new construction in downtown Seattle, with 65 major buildings under construction.

While in Sick City, Fort Worth, it is big news that a toy store is headed to Sundance Square by Christmas.....

Happy Singing The Washington Blues

I saw that which you see here this morning in the Seattle Times and found it to be interesting.

Apparently the county I grew up in and lived in prior to moving to Texas is among the bluest counties in Washington, with there being nine such Washington counties, which was where the voters voted in sufficient numbers to put Washington in the win column for Obama, twice, legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage, prior to the Supreme Court making that the law of the land.

I suspect spending the majority of my existence on the planet in one of the liberal progressive parts of America may explain why I found myself appalled by much of what I saw in Texas upon arrival.

Eventually I got acclimated to Texas, sort of, and not as appalled as I was upon first exposure.

Though, having said that, I really never did quit being appalled by much of what I saw in the town I eventually came to call Sick City, that being the more backward part of the D/FW Metroplex, that being the FW part of D/FW.

Washington is split in two by the Cascade Mountains. The west side of the mountains is the more liberal, progressive, democrat part of the state. The east side of the mountains is more like Texas, in both topography and politically, with Eastern Washington being much redder that Western Washington. Eastern Washington is not as prosperous as Western Washington. Nor as well educated. Another similarity to Texas.

There does seem to be some correlation between how well educated a person is and their political leanings. Like college dropout, Rush Limbaugh, who flunked every class he took during his short time in college, yet became the cult leader of the right wing nut jobs.....

Tuesday Morning Thunder Booming In Wichita Falls

What you are looking at here is the view stormy view south from one of my kitchen windows on this post 4th of July first Tuesday of the month.

When I went into slumber mode last night, after fireworking, I did not know that a major storm was on the morning menu.

Lightning has been striking with thunder booming for hours now, along with periodic downpours.

And wind.

Even though the sun has been in town for over an hour the outer world is still quite dark.

Looking at my local weather information source I see the booming is scheduled to abate in a couple hours, followed by more thunderstorms in the noon time frame.

I suspect I will not be climbing to the summit of Mount Wichita today....

Wichita Falls 4th Of July Parade With Uncle Sam

I have long opined that Texas towns do parades much better than my old home zone of Washington's Skagit Valley.

Fort Worth's Stock Show Parade is excellent. Granbury's 4th of July Parade is also excellent. So is Arlington's 4th of July Parade. And the Ennis Polka Festival Parade is another good one.

Texas towns are able to get their high schools to participate, with marching bands and cheerleaders. And the football team.

Today I attended the Wichita Falls 4th of July Parade. It was different than any other Texas town's parade I have attended. No marching bands, no local school participation.

Yet, the Wichita Falls 4th of July Parade, while short, was highly entertaining and amusing, with more kid participation than I have seen in other Texas parades. Such as the young Uncle Sam you see above.

And the shirtless kid cops you see below.

I have never seen so much candy thrown to so many kids as what I witnessed today. And it wasn't little measly pieces of candy. I saw Tootsie Rolls getting thrown. I have never seen Tootsie Rolls getting thrown to eager kids at a parade, til today. The kids came prepared, like it was Halloween, with bags to stick their candy haul in.

The kid floats were human powered, for the most part, with what appeared to be moms and dads doing the horse work.

There was plenty of adult participation in the Wichita Falls 4th of July Parade, such as what you see below.

The above "float" appeared to be a bunch of bums sitting at a picnic table which had been installed on some sort of motorized device. The 4th of July connection was not accessible to my feeble imagination.

What with it being the 4th of July one would think the American flag would be prominently displayed.

Above the Texas Lone Star flag blocks one from seeing the flag we later pledged allegiance to at the Kell House 4th of July Ceremony.

The Wichita Falls 4th of July Parade had a lot of motorbikes, such as you see above, and dozens of old cars, some of the Model T type vintage. Several of the old cars had rumble seats. Multiple parade watchers within my hearing distance seemed fascinated by the rumble seats. This had me wondering why these type seats were named rumble.

Sheppard Air Force Base was well represented.

The patriotic little girl you see on the right clapped the entire time the military personnel marched by.

The Wichita Falls 4th of July Parade ends at Kell House where a 4th of July Celebration Party takes place. You can watch video of a little of that celebrating below the below picture of the aforementioned Kell House.

At Kell House all the Air Force personnel who marched in the parade stood at attention. You can see some of them above, behind the cowboy on his mule, holding the flags of the various nations who have Air Force personnel being trained at Sheppard Air Force Base.

The video below gives you a little dose of a Wichita Falls 4th of July, at Kell House....

Trinity River E. Coli Levels Too High Near Imaginary Island

Why would any sane city have regularly scheduled events in water which requires regular testing to determine if the water is safe enough to get wet in?

The fact that Fort Worth has regularly scheduled floating beer parties in the Trinity River is just one among many reasons why I came to refer to this town as Sick City, after years of observing this Sick City up close.

And why do the people of Fort Worth go along with the ridiculous Panther Island labeling? There is no island. There never will be an island, not by any rational definition of that which constitutes an island.

Mislabeling is a Fort Worth forte. Sundance Square comes to mind. Where for decades the few tourists who toured downtown Fort Worth found themselves perplexed by signs pointing to Sundance Square, where there was no square.

If the City of Fort Worth is so determined to have a water venue for its people to float in that the town is willing to use a polluted river to do so, how about a civic effort to make an actual clean water venue for such events?

For instance, the pond which America's Biggest Boondoggle dug for the defunct Cowtown Wakepark. Could not such a pond be built with a filtering system keeping the water fit for humans to float in?

And is it not an indicator that Fort Worth is sadly lacking in outdoor activity opportunities if so many of the Sick City's citizens eagerly go floating with feces?

And another thing with this testing of the Trinity. Does it not seem logical that the level of e. coli ebbs up and down? As in a plume of extra polluted water flows on by, then a few minutes later a test sample gets taken, followed a few minutes later by another plume of extra polluted water?

Why would anyone in their right mind trust that the Trinity River is ever safe and free of pathogens?

The Curious Case Of Elsie Hotpepper's Oregon Rock Stalker

A couple years ago lifelong Texan, Elsie Hotpepper, ventured to the west coast state of Oregon.

I do not know if this trip to the west coast was Elsie's first visit to 21st century America, or just the latest of many trips to one of the non-Texas, modern, regions of America.

What I do know is Elsie Hotpepper checked into a Portland hotel. And in her room she saw a big piece of artwork hanging on a wall.

A day or two or three later Elsie Hotpepper ventured to the Pacific Ocean, to the fabled Oregon Coast.

Eventually Elsie came to the town known as Cannon Beach.

At Cannon Beach Elsie Hotpepper saw that which had inspired the piece of artwork she found hanging on her hotel room wall.

Haystack Rock.

Sort of an iconic symbol of the Oregon coast.

And then that Oregon rock began to stalk Elsie Hotpepper.

Haystack Rock followed Elsie to Portland International on her flight out, with a large piece of Haystack Rock artwork hanging overhead as Elsie made her way through security.

On her way back to Texas, Elsie way laid  to visit a friend in Colorado. Entering that friend's Colorado abode Elsie Hotpepper was startled to see a big picture of Haystack Rock hanging on her friend's wall.

I can't remember all the details, but when Elsie Hotpepper finally made her way back to the D/FW zone she soon found herself stalked by multiple iterations of Haystack Rock. If I remember right, one Haystack Rock iteration was in Elsie's mom's bathroom.

And now, today, I suddenly realized Elsie Hotpepper's stalking rock is stalking me.

Regularly.

My computer cycles various background images, to which I pay little attention. Today nothing was blocking the view on my secondary screen, with me realizing I was looking at Elsie Hotpepper's stalking rock.

That is a screen cap of such above.

And now, just as I typed "screen  cap of such above" Elsie Hotpepper's stalker rock cycled in to view again....

Wichita Falls Walk Around Lucy Park With Fellow Communists

With the temperature a relatively chilly 88, with a strong wind blowing, on this first Saturday of July, which is also the first day of the 4th of July weekend, I decided to haul myself north, to Lucy Park, for some shady communing with nature.

A lot of Wichita Fallers appeared to choose Lucy Park today as there go to location for communing with nature. Among the communists were disk golfers, volley ballers, swimmers, joggers, geese feeders, walkers, bikers, picnickers and campers at the kid's camp.

The past couple days I have been in recovery mode, recovering from a slight concussion acquired via three separate incidents of banging my fragile noggin into something hard, like an open cabinet door.

Yesterday was spent in painful headache mode.

You can sort of tell via the pitiful selfie photo that I am in more pain than usual. Forelocks cover the scabbed over gash on my upper forehead.

Behind me, in the selfie, is my favorite location in Lucy Park. That being the swinging suspension bridge over the scenic Wichita River.

It is time to take my pain medication now and consume lunch. Tomato soup which I made this morning, along with some other nutritious stuff which should help alleviate my misery....

No Billionaire Helps Fort Worth's Homeless

This blogging is the latest in our popular series of bloggings about news we read in west coast online news sources, usually the Seattle Times, which we would not expect to be reading in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about similar type news in the Fort Worth area.

The Seattle area has a lot of billionaires, with Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen, being a civic minded, philanthropic sort of billionaire.

Paul Allen has done all sorts of good things for Seattle and Washington, while never sticking his name on his various good deeds.

In other words, in Seattle, you won't find the Paul Allen Seahawk Stadium, Paul Allen EMP, Paul Allen Cinerama, well you get the drift.

Meanwhile in Fort Worth you will find the Bass name slapped on all sorts of things, like performance halls and cowgirl museums.

I am not aware of the billionaire Bass family doing what one might characterize as "good works" of the help the homeless sort.

Fort Worth has a homeless people district a short distance to the east of its downtown. The Fort Worth homeless district is primarily on Lancaster Avenue. Driving through this area is disturbing.

Near as I can tell the Fort Worth city government does little to help alleviate the homeless problem, no matter how outrageous the cause of such might be. If anything, from what I have seen, and been told, the Fort Worth city government exacerbates the homeless people problem.

Such as when the city and its mayor, Betsy Price, blithely looked away when a Dallas developer hit hundreds of Fort Worth residents with 30 day eviction notices. Likely an illegal action, which would have been dealt with appropriately in non-corrupted, modern, democratic towns in America.

But, in Fort Worth, such evictions are just business as usual.

Landlords, as in apartment complex owners, know that there is no governing entity looking out for tenant's rights. Owners know they can break the law, ignore Texas property code, violate TCEQ regulations, with impunity, creating, basically, a lawless environment where a property owner can wreak havoc with a tenant's life, with the tenant having no recourse.

As we recently mentioned we blogged about this in Betsy Price's Tarnished Golden Rule of Pseudo Compassionate Service and Fort Worth Shrugs Its Shoulders While Hundreds Of Citizens Are Given 30 Day Eviction Notices and Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price Has No Comment About 30 Day Evictions Of 100s In Her Town.

A tenant in a Fort Worth apartment may find they are the victim of criminal violations by a landlord. That tenant may try to fight the wrongdoing, only to find themselves being served with an eviction notice. Thinking a court will recognize the law and the property owner's criminal violation of the law, the tenant soon discovers that the justice system, in Fort Worth and Tarrant County, is in cahoots with the property owners.

How many of Fort Worth's homeless people are victims of the Tarrant County Kangaroo Court, run by an elected justice of the peace? A right wing tea bagger type, supporter of Ted Cruz. With no formal legal training. And an ex-cop.

Does all that not sound like a recipe for multiple miscarriages of justice?

A tenant can appear before this corrupt Kangaroo Court, armed with evidence of the property owner's wrongdoing. The justice of the peace, acting like a make believe judge, won't even look at the presented evidence, then rules in favor of the property owner, then informs the victim, I mean, tenant, that they can appeal this ruling by posting a couple thousand dollar bond with the court, and then ones case can be heard in front of a jury, and one can hope, a real judge.

That Fort Worth and Tarrant County have such a corrupt judicial entity ruling on something as serious as evictions could, it would seem, explain why Fort Worth's homeless problem is as bad as it is.

Methinks some sort of external investigation of Fort Worth needs to take place.

FBI? I have no idea.

What I do know, from the sad tales I have been told, there is a judicial authority in Tarrant County who should not be in the position of making any sort of legal ruling about anything.