11 posts tagged “htown”
My mom sent this to me the other day. It's Fox News Houston story about a man who's invented an engine powered by (gasp) WATER! It was added to YouTube a year ago, and it's been added a few times since then. Naturally, it took even longer to circulate amongst the old folks who still e-mail each other WindowsMedia attachments (yeah, my mom emailed me a WMV file).
Now of course, this story is just silly. It's not a hoax exactly, but we are not getting water powered cars anytime soon. Sure, getting power from water through electrolysis is perfectly feasible, just not terribly efficient. Wikipedia explains why:
Where designs that claim to be water fuelled engines have been made public, they often involve obtaining hydrogen from water by electrolysis. The usual scheme is to use electricity (from a battery) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen — then to burn the hydrogen in a more or less conventional engine — then use some of the power of that engine to recharge the battery and thus electrolyse more water. The end result would once again be water because that is what you get when you burn hydrogen in air. In effect, you'd have a perpetual motion machine.
In practice, none of the processes involved are 100% efficient. This means that some electricity is wasted in the electrolysis stage, some heat is wasted in burning the hydrogen in the engine and some of the power of the engine is lost in generating electricity. This means that the amount of power available for recharging the battery is considerably less than the amount of electricity needed for continued electrolysis — and the engine rapidly comes to a halt when the battery runs out of charge.
When the hydrogen is burned, the heat it creates can be converted into work by a conventional piston engine (car engine), but the efficiency of such engines is limited by the second law of thermodynamics and is likely to be of the order 30%. Because a conventional electric motor does not use heat, it can theoretically have an efficiency close to 100% and 80% efficient motors are commonplace.
The best part of the e-mail came from the guy who forwarded the video to my mom:
Subject: Fwd: Fw: Water as fuel??
THIS IS INCREDIBLE. ONLY ON FOX....MAKES YOU WONDER WHAT ELSE THE MEDIA IGNORES... EB
A revolutionary invention!..Let's pray for it to be available soon.
Why isn't the media talking about this incredible discovery.
Only on Fox, indeed. Our local affiliate, too. I'm Houston Proud, for sure. Also, I'm going to pray that people one day figure out Fox is also the media. When you turn on your television, THAT IS THE MEDIA. Fox is a multinational, billion-dollar corporation. They own freaking MySpace. They're trying to buy DowJones. Fox is the media.
Sheesh.
Instead, you're reading this. Last night, I saw Yo La Tengo for the first time in 6 1/2 years. That's how long it had been since their last time in Houston (and you know I don't go anywhere else). I wrote a review of YLT's 2000 show for Space City Rock. Six years ago I was underwhelmed. Last night, my favorite band in the world reminded why they've been my fave since 1993. The show was nicely balanced between lengthy psych-rock jams and brief, softly sung pop gems. They played quite a few songs from I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, while mostly avoiding the two preceding albums (Summer Sun, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out). They did draw heavily from older records, opening with "Double Dare" from 1993's Painful, and adding "Autumn Sweater" and "We're An American Band" from I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. They even played two from 1990's Facebook.
The only crappy thing about last nights show were a few fans near the front of the stage who kept yelling during the quiet songs and acting like jerks. According to BDM, there was one fan who was yelling all night and giving the "thumbs down" signal every time the band launched into a soft-rock number. Another dude, who was standing near us actually managed to provoke Jordan into telling him to shut up. Now, you know that guy was being an ass.
Anyway, I took some photos, and they're available on my Flickr page. Unfortunately, my best photo was one I took of Times New Viking, the lackluster amateur openers.
Speaking of photos, I thought this was worth mentioning again. Last.fm
allows you to tag your Flickr photos with a unique, show-specific event
tag they give you. Then, Last.fm will automatically pull your photos
and display them on a custom page generated just for that show. The
Last.fm page for last night's Yo La Tengo show is here,
and if you scroll down you'll notice photos from the show (taken by me
and others) have already been retrieved. You can see the photos on
Flickr here. The implications of this feature are breathtaking,
if you ask me. Every show has its own page, and all the photos are in
one place. Each show page also has its own message board. For real,
Last.fm might be the most useful social networking site there is.
Unless Jordan knows something she's not telling me.
 clipped from www.houstonist.com
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Police are still investigating a fatal shooting aboard a Metro bus yesterday 
Show us your favorite sunset picture.
Submitted by B. Mag.
I'm not sure this is my favorite. Far from it, but it's a recent one I shot with my camera phone near our house. This being a camera shot, it's not very high quality, but it compensates with tone and mood. This is the sky over a small elementary school in Houston's famous Montrose neighborhood near downtown.
Yesterday on the HandsUp Board, someone mentioned the old Firehouse 3, located just northwest of Downtown off Houston street.That place really was an old fire station, which was in distressed condition and no longer used by the Fire Dept. The owner converted the space into an art space and makeshift music venue. I saw more than a few shows there, including Groceries, Swarm of Angels, and Danny Mee's first band Gross National Product. That may NOT be Danny's real first band, but I'm pretty sure that's how I met Danny. Anyway, the place close a few years ago, and there hasn't been a show there in quite a while.
Anyway, the pictures below were taken during my first visit to the Firehouse. I believe it was an art opening for Heath Flagtvedt, who had, I think, returned from Georgia specially for the event. Anyway, Groceries and Woozyhelmet played and there was beer, and the whole evening was a lot of fun. These pictures are terrible, but since there's some interest in remembering the old Firehouse #3, I figured I post them anyway. If nothing else, there are a couple decent photos of Toto dressed in rumpled finery.
This photo set comes from the Electric Eel Shock / Groceries / Woozyhelmet show on March 9, 2003. Electric Eel Shock (EES) have played Houston four or five times, but this show at the Rhythm Room was my favorite because hardly anyone was there. I think maybe 35 or 40 people made it out. Every show after this one was completely packed because people found out EES are insanely talented hard rock gods who should never, ever be missed.
By the way, I really miss the Rhythm Room. I
saw a goodly number of shows there, and I think sound-wise, their room
was probably the best small club in Houston. They had a nice open dance
floor with cavernous booths on either side, and a bar at the back. It
was basically a honkey tonk built for boot-scootin' & two stepping.
But it had two things you won't find at Walter's or The Proletariat.
First class sound equipment and a huge room. Even Rudyard's, which has
superior sound, is cramped by comparison. Name just about any show
other than maybe Low, and I woulda rather seen it at RR.
Went to Rudz last night to check out The Jonx / Golden Axe / 500 Megatons of Boogie. I hadn't seen the Jonx in a while, but I must say this: that band has passed a threshold. They aren't just some pals of mine playing in a local band anymore. They are ridiculous good. I want them to be famous. I want kids in Chi-town and Madrid to be buying Jonx on vinyl. I want to see Jonx play on Conan. As I said on the board this morning, no one in H-town is doing it better right now.
Sadly, my attempts to take photos of the Jonx (at the height of their powers!) were a miserable failure. My meager photog skills don't yet cut it in low light, so the Jonx look like ghost ninjas.
Fortunately there's some Jonx video available on YouTube. This footage is also from Rudz. It's a show they played nearly a year ago. Now, they're about 100 times better than this video might indicate. Until some of last night's video gets posted, you'll have to use your imagination.
Fortunately, I did get some photos of the post-show hangout on the Rudz patio.
But the photos don't really capture everyone who came out last night. It might be that some name dropping is in order.
- adr
- anna
- ben
- carrie
- dan (the bother)
- emily
- freed
- jay
- joey t
- jordan
- lauren
- lance
- lee
- liz
- megan
- michelle
- miles
- shaggy
- steph!!!
I should see most of these people at Shoe's party tonight. And I think Jordan's coming, too.
On July 26, 2003, Matt Brownlee's ambitious local music fest, Down with the Scene, went down as perhaps the most amazingly fun show I can remember seeing in Houston. For one day, Walter's, Mary Jane's (RIP), and Silky's (also RIP), played host to the best of Houston music, with some killer Austin / San Antonio / Dallas bands thrown in.
The lineup, so far as can be gleaned from this photo, was as follows:
Walter's
Chasmatic (now known as Bright Men of Learning)
Baboon
DJ Scuba Gooding Jr.
Knife in the Water
Groceries (now Bring Back the Guns)
The Skullening
Mary Jane's
Modulator
The Truth
Woozyhelmet
Lights out on Sound
Jana Hunter
Octopus Project
Silky's
The Jonx
Act of God
Defend the Ghetto
Benway
Swarm of Angels
Fatal Flyin' Guilloteens
The reason for this post, aside from the shameless wallowing in nostalgia, is that I have a ton of pics from the event I'd like to share. Below are just a few choice selections. The entire set is available on Flickr.
I sure didn't. But I was looking for a specific photo (entirely unrelated to fortz) and I came across hundreds and hundreds of photos I had completely forgotten. Most of them were from three or four summers ago (2002? 2003?) when I had just met a lot of people who would become my best pals. These photos were before Flickr, and were taken at the very dawn of Friendster. So, with no real place to put them, they've just been kinda hanging out on my hard drive.
Well, no more.
Since I got a Pro account earlier this month, I've got unlimited storage capacity on my Flickr account. So I am going to start uploading these so you can look at them and see what you remember from our wanton, drunken summers. This Vox site works particularly well with Flickr (I can just drag and drop photos from Flickr right into the post). That being the case, I'm going to post these here instead of LiveJournal. But you'll still get a notice on LiveJournal and you can look at them on Flickr, too. As for this particular set, I can't remember who actually took them. I don't think it was me. It might have been Jordan. Are these already online somewhere? I'm not sure.
Anyway, enjoy.
