I wrote last week about the return of Howard Stern to the Austin airwaves. Today, I stumbled on this story in the Daily Texan. I was kind of surprised that I didn’t see it on one of the other Texas blogs, but I guess it wasn’t much of a story. Perhaps the local morning DJs are feeling the pressure with Stern’s return? Or they’re just plain stupid.
Austin seems to be a favorite test market for companies, mostly food and beverage operations. For a while there, it seemed like I was offered free samples from a different energy drink company every week and there’s always those cigarette people trolling the bars for new lung cancer victims.
Now, it looks like Wendy’s has decided to test locations without dining rooms and we’ve got one. It’s on the northbound frontage road of I-35 between 6th and 7th. I noticed it a few weeks ago while taking The Boy to school. I guess it’s a reasonable idea to intersperse locations with dining rooms with those that don’t, but I don’t think it’d be wise to switch over entirely. You can have a smaller staff and it probably saves on air conditioning costs by virtue of the smaller space. Since people don’t generally stay and spend more money at a fast food restaurant anyway, it doesn’t make much sense to offer an atmosphere that would encourage them to hang around, a strategy that works well at coffee places.
McDonald’s seems to have the opposite strategy. They’re adding things like wireless access (provided by local company Wayport), a move which seems odd to me since no one really wants to hang out a McDonald’s except kids under 12. It might work well at the locations with playgrounds, but otherwise it’s a waste of time and effort.
Thundercloud Subs has had that drive-thru location on S. Lamar for quite some time. I wonder how its revenues compare with other locations.
If you or your friend are victims of side effects from cancer drugs, please, visit http://sideeffectsofxarelto.org/current-xarelto-lawsuits/.
Ever since missing Tony Bourdain’s book signings at Bookpeople , I’ve been somewhat obsessive about checking their event calendar. I’ve made it to a few book signings lately and The Wife and I tag-teamed David Sedaris’s appearance this evening.
She went early to get a line number as it was projected that the turnout would be very big. It was. By the time I got there, several hundred people were already in the store and they had closed off the second floor so that the only option was to hear him over the speaker system. The family was next door at Whole Foods, so I went over there to get something for dinner. We ran into all kinds of people that we know. The Wife ran into Baldo and his parents before I arrived. We then ran into Jason & Angela and an old co-worker of Michele’s who also attends some of the same yoga classes as The Wife. The reading started at 7 and I didn’t get my book signed until 10:30. I read the first 5 or 6 stories. I laughed out loud once. He plugged the same book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, that he plugged at the signing that Scott attended earlier this week. Sedaris apparently has a colossal dislike for cell phones and cameras, so I was unable to take my traditional book signing cell phone camera shot for the moblog. He makes up for his hatred of cell phones with a love for smokers, however, as he let anyone with a pack of cigarettes cut in front of the rest of the line. He’s hoping that the favorable treatment of smokers will spread. Fat chance.
For those locals who missed him last night, I just saw that Bruce Sterling will be on TechTV’s The Screen Savers tonight. He flew to San Francisco early this morning after doing the book signing here last night. It airs locally on channel 239 at 6pm, 11pm and again tomorrow morning at 7am.
I went to Bruce Sterling’s reading for The Zenith Angle last night at Bookpeople. I haven’t been to very many book signings, but it was a modest turnout, definitely smaller than the Neal Stephenson signing last October. Sterling is in the middle of his largest book tour ever and seemed relieved to be back on his home turf for a day. He even commented that he decided to wear some old sandals as opposed to socks and shoes, something he wouldn’t normally do at a signing in another city.
He started off talking about his annual SXSW party which has apparently grown to such a proportion that he’s vexed as to whether or not to continue the tradition. He’s convinced that cell phones and text messaging were a contributing factor to the size of the party this year. He used the story of the party to tie into a brief commentary on on globalization and then also related it to his new book. I managed to read the preface while waiting and he read the first chapter aloud. I found his reading style a little odd. His delivery was enthusiastic and endearingly geeky. There were certain passages where he clearly looked up and paused briefly, expecting laughter from the audience.
While I’ve read many of his articles in various magazines, the only book I’ve read is his collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, which I didn’t particularly care for. So far, the new one seems like it’ll be a fast read. It’s set in the recent past with the first chapter occurring on 9/11 and looks like it’ll be part thriller and part commentary on recent events. He mentioned during that signing that he’s currently working on a book set fifty years into the future.
I’ve seen news reports in both the Statesman and News8 in the past week about the intersection of Third and San Antonio. (I’d link to the Statesman article by Ben Wear last Monday, but they only make the last 7 days available online. If you have an Austin Public Library card and have gotten an online PIN from them, you can access the last several years through the APL site.)
My legion of loyal readers will recall that I recently ranted about this intersection. I’d like to see the statistics for the number of accidents at that intersection since converting San Antonio to two-way. Someone’s going to be seriously injured at that intersection if the city doesn’t figure something out soon.
Yet another embarassing incident in Austin has made national news. Coming on the heels of the Ozomatli arrests and the Jason Patric arrest (whose charges, I might add, were quietly dropped recently), we have a boat capsized by a group of people who were apparently a little too enthusiastic about viewing naked sunbathers at Austin’s infamous Hippie Hollow.
I heard about the barge capsizing on News8 last night and they mentioned that it occurred near Hippie Hollow, but I didn’t put two and two together until CNN spelled it out for me. When I first moved here in 1989 for college, I was dragged to Hippie Hollow by a misguided friend. He was certain that we were going to be treated to a bevy of naked bathing beauties. Reality set in before we even got halfway down the path to the shore when we passed a middle-aged man who hadn’t yet covered himself.
Let me go ahead and spell it out for any new Austinites or tourists: Hippie Hollow is mainly populated by fortyish or older white men, probably over-the-hill hippies who feel the need to maintain their ideals, but haven’t maintained their bodies. If you’re looking for a cheap thrill, I suggest the Internet (at least until Ashcroft and his cronies take that away from us).
P.S. How slow of a news day must it be for CNN.com to list this as one of their top stories?
No Pants Day is this Friday. Be sure to check out the No Pants Day song penned by my former co-worker, Stinky Del Negro. What are the odds I can get work to participate?
