Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
2025-07-12 15:38:35
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
2025-07-10 12:52:10
As for LGM.... There is a certain atmosphere there, a way of acting, just as there is here and at every blog I have ever visited for any length of time. You pick up on what opinions are acceptable and which ones will induce a pile on and yes, also the topics where people within the community will rip into each other.
And which opinions are which have changed over time. Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to say that things are soon to come down to an actual shooting civil war. People are applauded for saying that they are leaving the country to avoid the war.
Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
2025-07-08 16:23:11
Richards and Willie Nelson seem to have inherited the mantle of the Betty White jokes. "Shouldn't someone be worrying about the kind of world our kids will leave for Keith and Willie?"
2025-07-08 16:19:11
From back when HP made quality stuff, not just crappy printers.
Sometime while I was in graduate school (Texas, 1976-78) I went to one of HP's sales pitches for their engineering calculators. At one point the salesman asked if there were any petroleum engineering students in the crowd and got several hands up. "You, my friends, will someday soon be walking along a catwalk and drop your calculator, watch it bounce twice, go over the edge, and fall 20 feet to the ground. What will you have if that's a Texas Instruments calculator? Pieces." Then he wound up and throw the HP calculator hard enough to bounce it off the back wall. "With an HP, you'll just yell down and ask your buddy to pick up your calculator."
2025-07-08 16:03:30
I just saw a video clip from Ringo's 85th birthday party. He's four years older than Keith Richards, but looks 20 years younger :^)
2025-07-07 20:35:16
My question for Schumer is my now-standard question for anyone advocating for a two-state solution: precisely where to you think the second state will be? And who is going to evict the current owners?
2025-07-07 12:50:59
A personal hero, on a few levels.
A friend once remarked that the only measure of a drummer's contribution to music was their technical virtuosity. "Yeah?" I asked him. "How many more great songs might have been produced if Ginger Baker were as good at keeping a band full of huge egos together as Ringo was?"
2025-07-06 20:19:32
and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I've mentioned that I have wound up as the extended families' archivist, and have thousands of pages of stuff that has been dumped on me over the years. One of my uncles spent years after he retired building a blog site where he posted content about the tiny town in Iowa where he was born and (for a while) raised.
One of the first things on my list of stuff to get safely tucked away in digital form when I decided to be serious about it was that blog content. Quite a bit of what I learned pulling everything out of Obsidian Wings was useful for pulling his stuff out of Blogger. Multiple copies are stored away now.
2025-07-06 19:56:21
I've tried searching the blog many times for all possible variations of "alien space bat". No joy.
From back at the time when it looked like the hosting service was going to drop Typepad, and the Typepad export-content function was broken, and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I still have a flat text file with everything up to that point. Thumbing through on the word alien (case independent), there are numerous mentions of space aliens. Someone flat out states that Moe Lane is a space alien. Someone follows that with, "No, I meant intelligent space aliens." There seems to be agreement that Alien vs Predator is the definitive example of film franchises that have gone on too long. Nothing in a context suggesting alien space bats.
Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
As for LGM.... There is a certain atmosphere there, a way of acting, just as there is here and at every blog I have ever visited for any length of time. You pick up on what opinions are acceptable and which ones will induce a pile on and yes, also the topics where people within the community will rip into each other.
And which opinions are which have changed over time. Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to say that things are soon to come down to an actual shooting civil war. People are applauded for saying that they are leaving the country to avoid the war.
Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
Richards and Willie Nelson seem to have inherited the mantle of the Betty White jokes. "Shouldn't someone be worrying about the kind of world our kids will leave for Keith and Willie?"
From back when HP made quality stuff, not just crappy printers.
Sometime while I was in graduate school (Texas, 1976-78) I went to one of HP's sales pitches for their engineering calculators. At one point the salesman asked if there were any petroleum engineering students in the crowd and got several hands up. "You, my friends, will someday soon be walking along a catwalk and drop your calculator, watch it bounce twice, go over the edge, and fall 20 feet to the ground. What will you have if that's a Texas Instruments calculator? Pieces." Then he wound up and throw the HP calculator hard enough to bounce it off the back wall. "With an HP, you'll just yell down and ask your buddy to pick up your calculator."
I just saw a video clip from Ringo's 85th birthday party. He's four years older than Keith Richards, but looks 20 years younger :^)
My question for Schumer is my now-standard question for anyone advocating for a two-state solution: precisely where to you think the second state will be? And who is going to evict the current owners?
A personal hero, on a few levels.
A friend once remarked that the only measure of a drummer's contribution to music was their technical virtuosity. "Yeah?" I asked him. "How many more great songs might have been produced if Ginger Baker were as good at keeping a band full of huge egos together as Ringo was?"
and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I've mentioned that I have wound up as the extended families' archivist, and have thousands of pages of stuff that has been dumped on me over the years. One of my uncles spent years after he retired building a blog site where he posted content about the tiny town in Iowa where he was born and (for a while) raised.
One of the first things on my list of stuff to get safely tucked away in digital form when I decided to be serious about it was that blog content. Quite a bit of what I learned pulling everything out of Obsidian Wings was useful for pulling his stuff out of Blogger. Multiple copies are stored away now.
I've tried searching the blog many times for all possible variations of "alien space bat". No joy.
From back at the time when it looked like the hosting service was going to drop Typepad, and the Typepad export-content function was broken, and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I still have a flat text file with everything up to that point. Thumbing through on the word alien (case independent), there are numerous mentions of space aliens. Someone flat out states that Moe Lane is a space alien. Someone follows that with, "No, I meant intelligent space aliens." There seems to be agreement that Alien vs Predator is the definitive example of film franchises that have gone on too long. Nothing in a context suggesting alien space bats.