Happy 2012

CDK Company is a dance troupe based in The Netherlands (website), and they recently released an extremely energetic dance video to Gotye’s ubiquitous “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The scale of the production is striking, as are the Wes Anderson aesthetics. But the real eye-grabber is the choreography, a sharp, baroque contrast to the plink-plink-plink simplicity of the song.

I don’t even know if I like it! The dance moves are so rapid-fire, so herky-jerky, that it’s hard for my eye to settle (which was their intention). But the physical talent and technical precision involved are undeniable. Plus they’re Dutch! So I watched it twice just the same.

I’ll Miss the Brontosaurus Bridge, Though

Ya know they filmed “Office Space” here.

As plans solidify for the all-but-inevitable expansion of I-35 through central Austin, KUT has shared a truly impressive deep dive into TxDOT’s plans. Since the write-up is well over 5,000 words, I thought I’d do a write-up of the write-up and summarize the good, bad, and ugly. TLDR: It’s about 20% good, 60% bad, and 20% ugly.

Let’s start with their physics-defying intention to add four more lanes, which—it is almost universally understood1—will leave traffic worse than it started. Add to that the decade of construction, and it’s hard to argue the widening provides any benefit (though of course many will argue it just the same; meet me in the comments).

Besides this lovingly-wrapped gift to traffic, noise, and pollution, the expansion will do what expansions always do, and push out more than 100 homes and businesses—most of them low-income—in the name of “progress.” (Go have dinner at Stars Café and buy a rock at Nature’s Treasures while you can.) 

That’s the incredibly, intolerably bad news. TxDOT will get its way, and a few years later we’ll collectively forget the construction misery, and a few years after that you’ll start hearing the same drumbeat all over again. So it goes.

But this shit sandwich is not without its pickles. TxDOT might be singing the same old song about I-35, but previous verses have been arguably even worse: over time the highway expanded not only out but up, turning the metaphorical wall between east and west Austin into a physical one.

There’s a city over there, I promise.

This project will rectify that generational mistake by lowering the main lanes of I-35 below ground level most of the way between the river and Airport Boulevard—farewell, upper decks.  Even better, the design allows for so-called “caps” that hide the monstrosity in a tunnel, providing the opportunity for parkland or even buildings on top.2 The upshot will be Austin’s own version of Boston’s Big Dig, which was both an infamously nasty boondoggle and an indescribable improvement to downtown Boston. That dual outcome is also plausible for Austin.

Still Red Sox fans, though.

I’m so excited about this aspect that I’m in danger of sounding like I support the project. I don’t! There’s a widely-circulated proposal to execute our own Big Dig without expanding I-35, and I whole-heartedly support that. If this is what we get instead, then I’ll accept the cognitive dissonance and enjoy the improvements while I rue the drawbacks.

That’s my short summary of what’s being planned. The true nerds can keep reading for a few highlights and lowlights I noticed when I went through the KUT article. (Or, ya know, just go read it.)

The wackiest change worth mentioning: just north of the river, the northbound frontage road will jump *over* the depressed highway, and both frontage roads will run side-by-side on the west side of the highway. Check out the orange lines here:

North is left here. That’s Holly Street to the right.

One strange side effect of this decision is that, if you’re driving south and you wanna exit for downtown, you’ll bypass it, take a left exit, and do a crazy u-turn and crossover maneuver. 

And yes, in depicting the highway with this few cars, TxDOT thinks we’re idiots.

By the time you get to the heart of downtown, the highway will be below ground level—and, if Austin foots the bill, covered by green space. It’ll look something like this (again they’re showing a fanciful number of vehicles on the road).  

To reiterate, this proposal is a lot worse than it could be—those ground-level frontage roads comprise eight or more traffic lanes, practically a highway on its own. But I won’t pretend it’s not a lot better than what we have now.

Near the UT campus, the rogue frontage roads will hop over to the east side of the highway. Everything in orange below is hidden by park land, or could be. You know UT is licking its chops at the possibilities here (Does Bevo have chops?), but say a prayer for the drivers stuck in the 22 lanes of traffic underground. Yes, traffic tunnels are generally safe; no, they’re not a fun place to wait during rush hour.

North of campus, the frontage roads go their separate ways again and the whole project gets a lot more conventional, in ways both good (upper decks permanently demolished, hooray) and bad (most of the doomed homes and businesses are in this stretch). There’s one more Big Dig opportunity from 38th street to Airport Blvd, where the main lanes are again below ground level.3 By the time you get to Capitol Plaza, it’ll be the same surface-level I-35 we have now, but (somehow) even wider. 

Unsurprisingly, there’s much more to say—the most obvious thing I haven’t mentioned is the continued expansion of I-35 north and south of downtown, road projects which are much more typical and have practically nothing to get excited about. (Hilariously, the southern component of the project includes an upper deck, the same fucking thing they’re making such a fanfare of removing in central Austin. TxDOT is like the Doozers in real life.)

I dunno how to conclude this long post, besides encouraging you to avoid downtown Austin for a decade or more, and suggesting you take your as-yet-unborn grandchildren to see the completed thing when it’s done. There’s literally no way this doesn’t experience delays and cost overruns and generate more traffic than we started with. Cause that’s how these things always go. 

Cortney

Photo by the inimitable Steve Rogers

When you live in Europe, you often wake up to the news. I’ll never forget Kiki startling me awake one morning with “Will Smith slapped Chris Rock!” Of course, sometimes the news is bad—occasionally very bad. So it was to wake up to texts from Brad and Lampe telling me Cortney DeAngelo had suddenly, shockingly passed away in her sleep.

When I told my friend Rahel that an Austin improv friend had died, she asked “Were you two close?” I started to type three different responses:

First I wrote: “Yeah, she was one of the best techs in the Austin improv community.”

Cortney was one of the three so-called “tech ninjas” (along with Lindsey McGowen and Cindy Page) who formed a tight mutual bond while producing professional-quality work around the Austin theater scene for little-to-no pay. Like so many improvisers who’ve experienced the ninjas’ work, I’ve become dogmatic about how good tech can elevate a show: “You’re going to love this show and you won’t even know why!”

Cortney’s comic timing onstage was good, but her comic timing on lights was phenomenal. With nothing more than a few sliders she could make or break a show (usually make it, unless she was doing her usual brand of mischief).1

Lindsey, tech ninja #2, is actually in Amsterdam right now for the IMPRO Amsterdam festival. In a weird coincidence, on Sunday night—perhaps right around the time of Cortney’s death—I made a social-media post to highlight Lindsey and Emil running the boards, saying: “The technical improviser Avengers have assembled.” Cortney would have been an easy, first-ballot addition to those Avengers.

Then I wrote: “Yeah, we were in a troupe together for years.”

The passion for good tech extended to Cortney being a part of ¡ZARZAMORA!, my long-time troupe with several other old-timer improvisers that hopped around to various festivals.2 Cortney accompanied us on many of those, and was never less than an official full-time member.

I keep coming back to the promo picture that ¡ZARZAMORA! took for one of our formats. It’s admittedly hard to look past certain other elements of the picture, but there in the background is Cortney in her green wig, just as I imagine her: a sassy goddess. (In this show format, she *literally* played God.)

But finally, I wrote: “Yeah, she adopted my cats when I moved to Amsterdam.”

Cortney wore her heart on her sleeve, where it radiated in every direction like her trademark perfume (man did she love that perfume). Imagine my luck when I needed to find a new home for my two cats, Suitcase and Sabado, and Cortney and her husband Jonathan agreed to take them.

(That’s an oversimplification; they’d actually only agreed to take Suitcase, with Sabado coming along to Amsterdam; and then with less than a week until the big move, when it became apparent that Sabado was in too fragile a state to move, they agreed to take them both.)

(And that’s STILL an oversimplification; they only agreed to foster the cats until I came back for them; but they got along so well that we mutually agreed the cats would stay there.)

This of course promoted Cortney to our inner circle of friends, with a Facebook chat called “Cats!” where she would keep Kiki and I posted on how damn happy she and Jonathan and Suitcase and Sabado were in their little apartment.

Sadly, Suitcase and Sabado both preceded Cortney in untimely deaths—I fucking hate this being the *third* tribute I’ve written in as many years for that single household. Our hearts go out to Jonathan; they’d just moved into a new house, and Cortney’s last message in the “Cats!” group was “I can’t wait for y’all to come visit!” There’s just nothing to say about something so awful.

Cortney’s final Facebook post was so eerily perfect that, when I checked her page after hearing the news, I thought it was a memorial from somebody else. She’d just finished coordinating this year’s FronteraFest, one of Austin’s longest-running theater festivals. Again, the picture captures her perfectly: photogenic, exhausted, and happy about a job well done. And such a goddamn pro that her body told her fatal condition to just hang on a second while she finished flying and landing a whole festival. 

This week we’ll head back to the IMPRO Amsterdam festival, because the show must go on, as Cortney would be the first and last to tell you. She should still be here, taking a break on the couch with Suitcase and Sabado before jumping into her next creative endeavor. My best tribute to her is to be pissed off that she’s not.

God save the Queen.


Maybe I Should Get That Timeshare

Today’s the five-year anniversary of one of my most secretly amazing nights, and I figure that’s a good enough excuse to end the secret. I think I’ve told this story to fewer than twenty people, which for me is a VERY low number.

So I’d come into possession of a “gift certificate” offering two free nights in a decent Vegas hotel in exchange for sitting through a timeshare sales pitch. Timeshares are a scam, but the free hotel stay felt like scamming the scammers. I booked it in February 2019 and invited my friend Yichao to make the drive from LA and spend a guys’ weekend together. 

Yichao picked me up at the airport and we made the most of Vegas for 48 hours (the correct duration for any Vegas trip; no more, no less). We wandered the Strip, went to Drag Brunch, got confused by slot machines, and ate an alarming number of calories. (Did you know there’s a $100 all-you-can-eat buffet? Now you do.) Oh yes, and I dutifully sat through the two-hour timeshare sales pitch and repeatedly told the guy that I was not his target market before finally being released.

This is actually from a different Vegas trip, but I’ll use any excuse to share the greatest selfie ever taken.

On our second and final night, we walked across the highway to the Rio Casino to see Penn & Teller (great show). As we filed out of the theater, I suggested to Yichao that we dodge the crowd vying for taxis and Ubers by having one last round of blackjack before we headed back to the hotel.

A nice call on my part; I went on a hot streak, turning my $200 or so into almost $500 in less than an hour. As is common, our blackjack table had an optional side bet: for $5 you can bet whether any of the three cards in play—your two cards or the dealer’s up-card—would be a 7. If one of them is a 7, you win $10; two out of three, it’s $100; three out of three, it’s $1,000.

You shouldn’t need long with a calculator and a deck of cards to realize this side bet is for absolute suckers (even more so than gambling in the first place). But I think of gambling as entertainment, not investment, so I tossed a $5 chip into the side bet circle as the mood struck me, just for the tiny dopamine hit. 

You see where this story is going, so I’ll tell it as abruptly as it happened: shortly after midnight, I placed a fateful side bet. I was dealt a 7. And then the dealer got another 7. And then I got a third 7.

Yichao and I leapt to our feet, yelling and high-fiving and generally causing a scene. Moments later, though, I realized something was wrong; the pit boss was interrogating the dealer in a serious tone, and the third player at the table was waving us back to the table. Maybe I hadn’t won after all?

Nope. In all the excitement, I hadn’t noticed something: it wasn’t just three 7s. It was 7s of the same suit. Which meant I’d won the jackpot. Which stood just north of $32,000. 

Should I say something profound here? My life is so stupidly privileged that it beggars belief. I didn’t deserve this lucky hand more than any other idiot at the tables.

As you’d expect, there’s some paperwork involved in winning jackpots. We sat buzzing for an hour or more at the table, sharing the story with passers-by and sipping free drinks (generously tipped) while casino management scoured the video footage for any shenanigans and had me complete a tax form (W2-G, if you’re curious). Yichao said he was just as happy as if he’d won himself; I’m sure I’d feel the same way if it were reversed.

Look how happy!!

At last, the floor manager decided the necessary boxes had been checked and instructed the dealer to pay me out. An interesting ritual: he counted out the full jackpot in chips from his tray, then immediately separated $7,000 of it into a separate tray for tax purposes, which the pit boss whisked off to the back room for the accountants to play with.1 The remaining $25,137 was pushed in a big pile over to me, just like in the movies.

Apart from the millions of little butterfly-effect coincidences that conspired to enable this win, there’s one incredibly large sliding door: I hadn’t been placing side bets on every hand. There’s an extremely plausible multiverse where I *don’t* drop a $5 chip in the circle, the exact same cards are dealt, and I watch my jackpot float by unclaimed. 

The point here is NOT to obsessively place sucker side bets! The point is that I got very, very lucky.

Even after everything was settled, we still hadn’t actually played the blackjack hand! I foolishly said “hit me” (Always split 7s against a dealer 7!) and busted out. I left the dealer with a generous tip, scooped the pile of chips into my wool hat, and nervously walked the 20 steps from the table to the cage. It was another half-hour wait for them to tick more boxes and print me up a certified check2, during which I called Kiki with the news. Finally they handed it over, and just like that I had a flimsy piece of paper making me $25,137 richer.

Money is weird if you think about it.

Well past 2am, we taxied back to the hotel. I said good night to Yichao, telling him not to worry about paying for his end of the Penn & Teller tickets or anything else he owed me. Though I’d already warned myself against extravagant spending, I did splurge on a first-class ticket back to Austin—Spirit Airlines just didn’t seem right.3 At the airport the next morning, I made video calls to immediate family to share the news, and checked approximately ten times per hour to be sure the check was still okay.

The Aftermath

Back in Austin I deposited the money with my credit union. The exchange with the bank teller was funny; neither of us wanted to be the first to comment on how big a check it was. I soon made a category in my Quicken app called “Holy Crap,” which proved to be genuinely helpful. 

About 25% of the winnings went to pay the remaining balance on my FEMA loan for my 2016 house flood. Another 10% paid for fun stuff: tickets to see Hamilton when I met Kiki in New York the following month, my flight to Amsterdam a couple of months later, and some toys for around the house. (And yes, I made multiple charity donations.)

A month or two later, all of the rest went towards my Chevy Volt, which belatedly offered me some close contact with my winnings. I figured out that Chevy Volt prices were $1,000 cheaper up in Dallas than in tech-happy Austin—well worth the road trip. Since my credit union didn’t have a branch in Dallas, literally the only way for me to have money on hand was to withdraw it in cash. So I did, and for 24 hours I got to spend some quality time with my winnings before handing it off to a Dallas Chevy dealer.

Cat for scale.

So that’s my casino story, which (now that the money’s gone) I don’t mind sharing publicly. It wasn’t life-changing on the scale of winning the lottery—if I’d only gotten two 7s instead of three, I’d be writing you on the same MacBook from the same Amsterdam couch.

But man, am I glad I placed that side bet.

Why I Love Maestro

As I started telling local improv buddies that I was bringing my favorite show format back to Amsterdam (Saturday March 9th! Tickets €12!), I heard from more than one friend—two, actually—that they felt anxious about it. That seemed like a good reason to jot down my thoughts about Maestro, and why it’s nothing to fear.

If you have no idea what Maestro even is, here’s a summary…

Maestro is a competitive improv format where 12 improvisers perform short-form improv scenes in small groups. The audience gives each scene a score, 1 through 5; at intermission, the lowest-scoring players are knocked out; and at the end of the night, the last person standing is crowned Maestro and awarded the coveted Canadian Five-Dollar Bill.1

To admit my obvious bias, I’ve been playing Maestro for a long, long time. It’s been a weekly show at the Hideout Theatre in Austin since 1999, which I’d bet money2 is the longest such streak in the world. That means it’s been a regular part of my life since I began taking improv classes in 2001. I grew up on this stuff.

Given that history, I wasn’t surprised to hear about the anxiety! There are a few reasons people shy away from this kind of show:

  1. Improv shouldn’t be competitive. The entire basis of the art form is supporting each other, not trying to win.”
  2. I’m not competitive. I just want to play a scene, not worry about how to impress the audience and get a high score.”
  3. “I don’t like ‘format’ shows. Too many rules to follow! Can’t we just play improv?”

All extremely valid concerns. Here’s my shortest response, which I’ve been telling players backstage for 20 years:

Maestro is not a competition.
It’s a show about a competition.

Think of Maestro like pro wrestling (without the costumes and violence). You might make a show of wanting a high score for your scene, only to immediately help your so-called “opponents” get a high score by giving side support to their scene.

And before you go buying face paint, even the pro-wrestling analogy is a bit too far. Your job is to play short-form improv scenes and let the show take care of itself. Everyone gets at least two scenes before we start eliminating. And when you do get cut, great! Take a big bow, then join the audience and watch the rest of the show while the remaining players play for the win. The competitive format is what makes Maestro great. As I always tell players before the show: “You’re not going to win! Just go have fun.”

And one last thing: if you genuinely don’t care about winning, the audience will eat that shit up. (They’re just as likely to boot somebody who’s itching to “win” rather than improvise.) One year at the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, I was asked to play a Maestro that didn’t even *start* until 11pm. I did *not* want to play well; I wanted to get to the festival afterparty. So I took the stage not giving a single, solitary fuck about the Canadian $5 bill. I was only there to be silly and weird and mischievous and get the audience to vote me off the stage as quickly as possible.

Yeah, you can guess what happened.

Photo taken some time after 1 AM. Never did get to that afterparty.

How to Make a Coffee-Table Book in Only Three Years

Though it all feels like one big project, visiting and photographing 300 courthouses could hardly be more different than making a coffee-table book about them. The former is mostly a test of endurance and road trip route-planning. The latter is a hugely complicated creative and logistical endeavor. Sure it’s possible to order a simple photo book from Shutterstock, but this idea felt like it needed to be done properly or not at all.

After settling with Kiki in Amsterdam at the end of 2020, I waffled on whether—more importantly, how—I should begin. One of my first actions was to mock up the cover, which started as an iPad sketch and changed surprisingly little over time.

Lord knows why I thought the book would be portrait-oriented, though.

The book’s title gave me my next assignment: make the ridiculously subjective judgment of which 90 courthouses are the prettiest, and which ten are ugliest. I had over 300 courthouses to choose from1 and zero architectural expertise to draw from. But the concept was tongue-in-cheek enough that I felt comfortable making gut decisions (and hey, if you disagree, make your own book). Some interesting trivia that emerged at this point: Texas has a surprising number of twin and triplet courthouses—even one set of quadruplets!

After some weeks I finally narrowed down my winners and losers into a nice organized spreadsheet. But I hadn’t even started making the damn book. It only took a few minutes poking around Adobe InDesign to realize that using it was going to drain my enthusiasm. Instead, I opened a blank document in Keynote—yes, Apple’s PowerPoint app—and started building a mockup, one page per slide, dragging around images and text boxes.

I even added little shadow-boxes on opposite pages to help distinguish left and right.

The fundamental questions began almost immediately. Would I be ranking the courthouses, and if not, how else would I organize them—alphabetically, geographically, etc? I made a hundred book-design decisions you would expect—fonts, color scheme2—plus a thousand that you wouldn’t, like how to format the index. My rationale for most of these is lost to time: why did I start the book with the East Texas chapter? Why did I put Travis County Courthouse next to Navarro County Courthouse? I don’t know, but I probably had a reason!

It was slow going, with weeks of inaction punctuated by short bursts of productivity. That’s how big projects go with me. After about a year, I had an “alpha” version of my mockup ready for review. This felt like a huge accomplishment, but it was still a simple thing—only a few of my photos even had captions! For all that work, it wasn’t much more ambitious than the aforementioned Shutterstock picture book. My reviewers gave great and candid feedback, which in summary said: This isn’t finished! Give us more! 

So I doubled down, researching and writing captions for every page, typing the phrase “County Courthouse” so often that I made a keyboard shortcut for it (“cch”). My productivity slowed to a glacial pace, but never quite stopped. I got through a second round of friend reviews and kept plugging away. There were obvious to-dos like the back cover design, plus weird little side projects like creating the maps and the numbered arrows pointing to all 100 courthouses.

Kinda hypnotic, isn’t it?

There were still miles to go before I slept. But one happy hour in spring 2023, energized by my second beer, I decided in a flash that the book would be on sale by my birthday, June 30th. 

Deadlines are motivating. I made design decisions on which I’d been hedging and checked and re-checked and re-re-checked every word and detail in the book. Amazing how many times you can glance at a typo without noticing it.

Meanwhile I made final edits to the photos themselves—that’s over 100 separate Photoshop jobs, and I’m not especially good at Photoshop. There are wizards out there who coulda made my pictures twice as pretty in half the time, but this felt like a “me” part of the project. I’d noticed that many of my photos were cropped a bit too closely—note to aspiring photographers: stand back!! But soon before going to print, I got a huge assist from our new robot overlords: Photoshop released an AI-driven “generative fill” feature that can expand an image beyond its original borders. While chuckleheads online were using it to stretch the Mona Lisa and whatnot, I was giving almost a dozen of my photos some breathing room. With any luck, you’ll have no idea which ones they are.

Page 94: Everything to the left of the dotted line was invented by Photoshop. Crazy times we live in.

All that done, I hired a designer called Jennie on upwork.com who recreated my Keynote mockup in InDesign with incredible speed. Jennie and I went through five rounds of feedback as I refined it (see above about the damn typos). Example feedback: “Page 57: would you narrow the text box slightly so the word ‘is’ jumps to the final line?”

As Jennie and I finalized the design, I educated myself on self-publishing with IngramSpark, the most popular self-publishing platform. There were a dozen more hurdles too boring to get into, but the upshot was my trip to Texas in July, where I picked up a box full of copies of my very own book.

The precious!!

As we speak, my book is available on Amazon in paperback and hardcover editions. There’s sadly only one Amazon-free way to buy it, at BookPeople in downtown Austin. Full transparency: if you’re kind enough to order a copy, I’ll earn almost *one US dollar* from the sale! (You might’ve heard about the slim profit margins in the publishing industry. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll never make a profit on this.)

This blogpost is part of my very small promotional effort for the book. I sent a review copy to the Austin American-Statesman, and I’ll do some promotion to my 11,000+ followers on Ugly Texases, where there’s some obvious crossover appeal. Who knows? Maybe it’ll get noticed, picked up by a publisher, and become a bona fide hit.

But that’s all gravy. My first and only goal with this project has been a copy of the book for myself and whichever friends and family care to have one. Any time I want (which is often) I can pick it up off my bookshelf, flip through it, and say out loud: “I made this.”

Spotted in the wild by Jason Hoppenworth.

How to Visit 254 County Courthouses

My other hobby is improv.

On a 2014 drive from Austin to Denver for an improv festival, David Lampe and I entertained ourselves with a little app I had that listed every historic marker in the cities we drove through. I’d skim through the list as we approached each little town, and if something really piqued our interest, we made a quick stop. 

The frequent highlight of these (often the only highlight) were the courthouses, one per county, which gave our long road trip a nice tempo. This bit of entertainment caused us to zig-zag our route and spot as many courthouses as possible, and—starting with Hartley County Courthouse (Channing TX, built 1906)—photograph them. 

Hartley County Courthouse, Channing TX

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” our caffeinated conversation inevitably went, “if someone visited every county courthouse in Texas?” Fun might not be the word some would use. Texas has 254 county courthouses1 spread over an area bigger than France, most of it empty space punctuated by cattle herds and Dollar General stores. But, over the following six and a half years, that’s exactly what I did.

At first, I took pictures of courthouses as I happened to pass them by. On every visit to mom’s place in Nashville, I varied my route to hit new ones. Before long I was making dedicated day trips, stopping for as little as 30 seconds to snap a single photo before driving on. Many times, I found myself racing the sunset to get a courthouse photo before it was too dark. In the more remote corners of Texas—and friends, there are a whole lot of those—these were effectively now-or-never opportunities.

My bingo map of Texas slowly filled over the years. I had no particular endpoint in mind for the project until 2020, when I made the big decision to move to Europe at the end of the year. This put me on deadline with over 80 courthouses to go! But thanks to a little thing called COVID, I found myself with a lot of free weekends. So I tackled them a dozen or so at a time in long looping day trips. The project reached its nail-biting climax in December 2020: one day after quitting my job, one week before flying to Amsterdam, I visited the last few dozen in a single epic four-day journey that methodically criss-crossed the Panhandle like I was mowing the lawn.

But—you are surely asking, your voice raised—Kevin, why?? It’s not too complicated: I love road trips, I love old buildings, and—despite its long, undeniable list of flaws—I love the state of Texas. Taking a single picture of the courthouse in each of our counties, accruing unknown thousands of miles, was a decent way to scratch all of those itches at once. Even if only for a few minutes, I passed through almost every corner of this enormous state, visiting places I’d never seen before and never will again.

Dozens of times over the years, people shared the thought: “You should make a book!” My initial response was simple: There are already Texas-county-courthouse books! At least four of them, in fact. You’ve probably noticed Texas has its fair share of super-fans. I’m neither the only person to have completed this stunt, nor to have published the results.

But the peer pressure wore me down, and I started to riff on the idea. I knew for a fact that not all of my pictures were print-worthy, so any book would need to comprise a subset. “I dunno,” I mused one day, “maybe I’ll make a book called The 90 Prettiest Courthouses in Texas and the 10 Ugliest.” Like so many off-the-cuff jokes in my life2, it stuck.

To Be Continued. Buy my book on Amazon!

What is BRT and Why Is It Sometimes Good?

I was reminded recently how much easier it is to remember facts and arguments if you explain them to someone else after reading them yourself.1 So, when I read a Streetsblog article about transportation nerdery recently, I decided to summarize its argument—partly for the half-dozen people who end up reading this, but mostly for myself.

Today’s nerdy topic is BRT, which my computer wants to autocorrect to “Be right there!” but actually stands for Bus Rapid Transit. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first I’m going to back up—way, way up.

The point of any kind of transit, whether it’s a bus or subway or giant MAGA pickup truck, is to move people from one place to another. Since we operate within the laws of physics, we can’t fit everybody’s personal vehicle onto the roads at once without making highways infinitely wide (and yes, they’ve been trying that in Texas). The only way, and I mean the ONLY way to efficiently move city-sized numbers of people around is with some kind of mass transit. 

Pictured: 1,000 words.

Once you’ve gotten over that mental hump (and some people never will), the practical question is which kind of transit—to use the terminology, which “transit mode”—is best for a particular situation. As seen above, even a boring smoggy city bus is orders of magnitude more efficient than individual cars. Then you’ve got commuter rail, light rail, subways, and even weirder methods. To decide which one to use, how much it’s going to cost should be at or near the top of your list of considerations.

I see you lunging for the Comment button, because every time I talk about the cost of mass transit, there’s an automatic response: “Mass transit isn’t supposed to make money, Kevin! It’s a public good! Down with capitalism!” I agree with all of that. But it still costs money, and in our underfunded country, it’s extremely important to be smart about spending limited public funds.2 Subways are cool, but also hyper-expensive, and you can probably imagine how a subway might bankrupt a city if it didn’t have a LOT of daily users to help pay for it. In a less extreme example, an under-used commuter train can cost so much to run that it passively drains money from the rest of the city’s transit system, no matter how popular it is. (This is sadly the case with Austin’s Red Line, but that’s a topic for another day.)

There’s a name for this math problem: “transit-supportive density.” You need a certain number of people living and working per square mile for it to make sense to run any kind of transit through that area.3 And the more expensive the transit, the more people you need to support it. Check this table:

Transit modeCost per milePop. density
(people per acre)
Bus<$1M10+
Light rail$150-$350M28+
Subway$300M-$2B47+

Those estimates vary *widely* but you get the idea. A plain-vanilla bus line costs very little to build (buses + stops) and doesn’t need much population density to be financially viable. Light rail costs much more to build and operate; a subway, even more than that. This is, in a nutshell, why a city like Austin can never have a NYC-style subway system—it just isn’t built for it.

Finally, I’m getting to the subject! Somewhere in between normal buses (cheap) and light rails (expensive) you’ve got something called “bus rapid transit,” or BRT for short. The definition of BRT is a bit flexible, but boils down to a bus line that’s been built for speed and efficiency. Most often this includes some or all of the following:

  • A dedicated bus-only lane for at least part of the route
  • “Signal priority,” ie. traffic lights that let buses go before cars
  • Higher frequency (10–15 minutes) so you don’t need to check a schedule to use it
  • Self-payment terminals so you can just tap your card or phone to pay the fare

On top of this, the bus itself might be sexier—extended lengths with multiple entry points; “level boarding” so wheelchair users can roll on; Wi-Fi networks; and so on.

And sometimes it’s green!

It’s all very cool stuff! And even if your BRT includes everything from the wish list above, it’s still way cheaper than installing the complicated infrastructure (rails, power lines) you need for light rail. That means the “transit-supportive density” for BRT is way lower. Since most American cities have very low population density compared to the Amsterdams or Copenhagens of the world, that means BRT can be an attractive option. 

So the point of the Streetsblog article is that BRT is, or should be, a very useful Goldilocks option—“BRT often can cost 20 percent of a light-rail system but can capture 80 to 85 percent of light rail riders.” That’s a sweet deal that brings a lot of mass-transit benefits to cities or areas that otherwise wouldn’t qualify for them, financially or logistically. If it’s “real” BRT—meaning most of the checklist items above, instead of just one or two—then it’s a viable alternative for a lot of applications. 

Explainer done! Back to your regularly-scheduled whatever-this-blog-is.

Still No Idea What a “Fourth” or “Fifth” Is

I know proposing marriage isn’t a creativity contest, no matter how much YouTube culture has tried to convince us otherwise. But special girls need special treatment, and when I decided to ask Kiki to marry me, I couldn’t help but put some pressure on myself. I had the ring in hand—pink tourmaline, gold band—but a month or more after deciding to do it, I was still mulling how to actually do it.

Then one night we rewatched “Yesterday,” a movie about a guy who realises he’s the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles (goofy premise, I know). Ed Sheeran plays himself in a supporting role, and the end of the movie features one of his ballads, “One Life.” Here it is:

You’ll note the competent musicianship and on-key singing.

As we watched, it hit me: this is it. This song is how I’ll propose. That was a half-burst of inspiration, but how exactly would I sing it? In a karaoke bar? With a hired musician playing backup? Then the other half-burst arrived: I’d play the guitar myself! How romantic!

An important caveat: I have never, ever played the guitar.

Continue reading Still No Idea What a “Fourth” or “Fifth” Is

Sábado Gigante

One of Kevin’s cats

In late 2015 I was living contentedly at my house in Austin with my housemate Robby and two pets, a dog named Lola and a cat we just called Cat. Then one day, my friend Cat Drago made a plea on social media: her father could no longer care for his cat, and he (the cat, not the dad) needed a new home in short order. 

Like my existing fur-babies he was an indoor-outdoor cat, a key selling point in that I wouldn’t be adding a litter box to my operation. Without thinking about it much further—hey, two cats isn’t much different than one—I volunteered. Cat gushed her thanks and a couple of weeks later arranged to bring over the new resident. She’d never actually mentioned his name at any point, but her last text before arriving said: “by the way his name is Cat.”

Yes, thanks to my friend Cat, I now owned two cats named Cat. I don’t even need to think of a joke here.

Cat 2, as we called him, settled in nicely. He was a HUGE boy, 15 or 20 pounds, whom I would pick up and bounce in my arms while chanting “Big! Fat! Cat!  Big! Fat! Cat!” His size was most evident when he affectionately rested his full body weight on my chest. It was much like a heart attack accompanied by a comforting purr. 

He had an adorably broken meow and a habit of sleeping on his back, legs splayed, which I dutifully shared on Instagram with the hashtag #deadcat. 

Robby and I had no issue with the “Cat 1” and “Cat 2” names. Bachelors are low-effort like that. Our friend Billy eventually decided Cat 1 should be named Suitcase, and then at a party awhile later, one of my Latino friends declared of Cat 2: “His name is Sábado. Because he’s Gigante.” (Link, if you don’t get the reference.)

He was an impressive mouser, able to move his giant body with superhero speed when one of the rats around the chicken coop came within range. (He once brought a rat he’d caught into the house. Not cool!) He got along well with the chickens—one time, two chicks imprinted on him and followed him around the yard.

“…Dad?”

For most of 2020 I was plotting my big move to Amsterdam. It was always part of the plan for Sabado to join me on the flight, with our friends Cortney & Jonathan fostering Suitcase for a few months. I bought the travel carrier and collected the right paperwork, but fate had other plans: Sabado abruptly lost a bunch of weight and was diagnosed with liver disease. Desperate for him to eat, I bought every kind of cat treat they sold at HEB, working out what ones he’d still stomach. Something he loved was cooked chicken breast, which Kiki would have delivered constantly from a nearby restaurant, surely a memorably strange order for them. As you’d expect, this made him permanently spoiled. 

It made no sense to move a sick cat across an ocean, and so on impossibly short notice—I think it was a week or less—Cortney & Jonathan agreed to foster a second, very ill, cat. Fortunately for everyone involved, the foster parents *loved* their new charges, and when we gently floated the idea of keeping the cats permanently in Texas, their first response was relief at not giving them up.

Sabado kept on trucking for another THREE YEARS—ironically it was Suitcase who crossed the rainbow bridge first. His faulty liver finally and suddenly gave up the ghost, and on Wednesday morning Kiki and I woke up to the sad news that he was in kitty heaven. Eleven years is too short a life for any cat (my preference would be infinity years) but he lived his best life in three different households, and I was lucky that one of the three was mine.

#deadcat is dead. Long live #deadcat.