Fort Worth Immigration Riot

There was a near-riot outside my office building yesterday when several hundred high school students decided to march up and down Main Street. They were protesting immigration reform and expressing their desire to stay in the United States and have their rights recognized by the US Government by waving Mexican flags and chanting "Mexico! Mexico", "U-S-A... let us stay!" and "What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!" Is there not a sense of irony in all of this? Trying to say you are an American by waving a Mexican flag? Chanting for freedom while exercising your freedom to assemble and pecefully protest the government?

Anyway, after a peaceful 45 minutes things inevitably got out of hand. The protesters tried to enter the hotel across the street. Some of the students thought it would be a good idea to kncok over some paper boxes. The Police tried to get the students out of the street so traffic could flow again. That's when a student pushed a bicycle cop off of her bike and all heck broke loose. Within 30 seconds about 15 bike cops and 30 squad cars were on the scene. Officers flowed into the mob, breaking it up into smaller groups. As we watched from our sixth floor conference room windows, officers grabbed students and threw them up against cars. They weren't cracking heads open but they were using quite a bit of force. The mounted police arrived and the horses did a good job of getting the rowdy crowd to settle down and start to disperse. Still, some of the more presistant students were cuffed as news helicopters circled overhead.

Within about 15 minutes the students regrouped and decided to parade around downtown in the backs of pick-up trucks. The police had a field day pulling them over and issuing tickets for expired regsitrations and driving without license plates. Who knows how many didn't have insurance.

It was a strange scene. Thursday I'm going to get my Canadian flag out and have my own march. Actually I think we're just going to go out in the street and play some road hockey. That's how Canadians get their point across best. CARRRR! Game on...

HotWater Blast in Houston

This weekend I trekked on down to Houston with soem other V-Dubbers for Hot Water Blast, what is arguably the largest watercooled VW show in the state. Over 90 cars were at the show, with plenty of heavily modified GTIs and Jettas and four New Beetles besides mine, including one that had been converted to all-wheel drive and had an APR Stage III+ kit in the engine bay. That bug is nuts. It was even more impressive now that he has fixed soem dents and paint scratches and added some other styling mods. It still a ttal sleeper hwever. Needless to say he won the award for Best New Beetle. Jason (my NB friend that I rolled down there with) and I were shut out of the top 25. That was pretty surprising since Jason has completely tricked out his NB and has almost every bolt-on performance part for the 1.8T out there under the hood. This was the first show in over two years that he didn't win an award. Oh well, it was still a fun weekend, despite the sunburn and windburn. And I'm not even goign to get into the Saturday night antics before the show on Sunday. Nope, not even going to start on jumping into a freezing pool for Venezualean Bolivars. Not at all.

Dallas Stars 3, Chicago Blackhawks 2 at AAC

It was HDR night at the Stars game, so time to trek on up to the nosebleed section to take in some NHL action. Our sets were at the front of the upper deck in section 301, right at the end of the rink. The view is great, just like the one you have when you play bubble hockey or table hockey.

It was a fantastic game with the Stars clinging to a 2-1 lead late in the 3rd period. The Hawks made a strong push after pulling their goalie with one minute left and managed to flip the puck into the net with 0.4 seconds left on the clock. Yes, they tied it up with four tenths of a second left in the game. Crazy.

Overtime was scoreless so the game proceeded to a shootout. After each goalie surrendered a pair of goals to the first three shooters from each team, the goalies turned ito brick walls and stopped what seeme dlike the next ten shooters from each side. Finally after an eterinity of misses, Brendan Morrow was able to lift a shot over the former Winnipeg Jet goalie now playing for the Blackhawks and break the deadlock. Stars win! Stars win!

In the Garage

Tonight I went over to Jason's and assembled some trophies for the car show while Jason changed the brake pads on my bug. I'm running EBC Greenstuff pads now, and they seem to have a crisper feel to them and produce much less brake dust. Big thumbs up.

We also replaced my stock diverter valve with a Forge 007 diverter valve. The new valve bumped the boost on the turbo a bit and it is holding boost better. It also has a more solid feel and sound to it when it goes into diverter mode, with a soft little pop coming from the engine compartment. That's pretty good considering VWs use recirculating valves and not blow off valves that vent the charged air to the atmosphere and emit a loud "Pssssssh!" sound.

The final mod was swapping my stock steering wheel for a beautiful contoured one from a VW Golf R32. It took forever to remove my old steering wheel. The procedure for removal simply wasn't working so we had to cut into the steerign wheel to gain access to the springs holding it to the steering column. I'll never be able to reuse the steering wheel but I can at least sell the airbag portion of it. It was worth the sacrifice, however, as the R32 wheel feels so much better. The contoured grip fits perfectly in my hand and it provides a wonderful comfort level. Feels like I'm driving a whole new bug!

Rain

It hasn't rained for an entire weekend like this here for well, probably since this time last year. It's rather nice. Of course we're going from a drought with burn bans to flash flood warnings in an instant. It does make for a nice cozy day spent curled up on the couch with your girlfriend however.

Rocky Horror GayBingo

Bingo with a twist at the Lakewood Theatre. No we were not the only straight people there but I guess when Amy and I walked in holding hands we were quickly outed. Amy came close to winning but our luck wasn't as good as the group of exotic dancers froma local gentleman's club playing a fw rows behind us that seemed to win every other game. It was fun the first time we went about two years ago and The Rocky Horror theme made it that much more enjoyable. Hopefully it will not take two more years for us to make it back and we'll convince some friends to come next time.

Landmark Tower Implosion

This morning at 7:45AM a 30-storey office tower located two blocks from my downtown Fort Worth apartment was imploded in all of 15 seconds. It was amazing.

The Fort Worth Police, who seem inept at crowd control and oblivious to people who actually live downtown, decided to expand the safety perimeter at the last minute such that my apartment was isnide the red zone. However, they didn't post any signs inside the building so that at any moment, redsidents could walk out the front door and find them selves inside the red zone, a half block behind the police lining the perimeter. Amy's MINI actualy ended up spending the morning parked inside the red zone. But anyway...

Amy and I watched the explosion from the small crowd gather at the corner of 7th and Lamar. We had a decent view of the Landmark Tower, which is surprisingly difficult to see with all fo the surrounding buildings. We couldn't hear any warning sirens or countdown from the command posts several blocks across downtown. I just heard somebody yell out "One minute!" over the din of new helicopters circling overhead and grabbed my camera into the ready position in tiem to hear the first set of staccato charges going off inide the building.

For the first several seconds during the loud staccato charges there was no visual clue of anythign going on in the building. Then a series of louder charges could be heard and the building slowly started to list to the northwest, towards the unoccupied portion of the block which had been excavated to contain the debris. As it fell I used rapid fire mode on my camera to snap pictures at a rate of five frames per second (I'm still sorthing through the photos). It was incredbible to see such a tall ediface slowly fall to the ground. The sound was not nearly as loud as one would expect after the first large charge that took out the northwest corner of the building were set off.

As the building sunk behind the Fort Worth Club, the void in the sky rapidly flled with an expanding cloud of dust and debris that raced down 7th Street towards us. Debris littered the ground as far as Taylor Street but in the last block the cloud dissaipated as it swirled around my apartment. It was still dense enough, however, that dust and the smell of cordite hung in the air in my apartment when we were allowed back in some 20 minutes after the implosion, and Amy's MINI was littered with tiny bits of insulation and wallboard that had been carried aloft from the blast site.

I have some pretty good pictures that I need to post soon.

one of the best days of the year

The NCAA basketball Tournament starts today! Mach Madness will be in full swing in a few hours.

GO ILLINI!

Breakfast

I never think of going out for breakfast. Maybe it's because I've had Cheerios for breakfast nearly every day of my life. Anyway, this mornign Amy and I got up and went to Le Peep in H-E-B. Apparently this place is very popular as it filled up shortly after we arrived with dozens of people sitting outside waiting for a table.

We were both in a pancake mood, a modd that was most definately satisfied by the offerings at Le Peep. Everything was so good and filling. A real treat.

After breakfast we drove over to Northpark to go to the new Apple Store, among other retailers, in the newly expanded portion of the mall. Maybe it's time to upgrade to an iBook G4 with a larger hard drive. Hmmm... tempting.

Dallas Derby Devils at the Arlington Skatium

Amy and I went to the Arlington Skatium for roller derby tonight. Isn't Skatium a great word? It just begs to be pronounced with the voice often heard in monster truck racing commericials. I guess that suits the roller derby quite well.

This turned out to be a huge event. We had to wait in line for a good 45 minutes to get into the Skatium. Since it was a BYOB event, there was plenty of consumption and rowdiness in the line. So much so that many of the groups in line had to send a reprsentative to the Tom Thumb next to the Skatium to restock their coolers before they got inside. Tom Thumb must have sent a single night record for the sale of Tecate in a can.

We made our way through the doors as the opening band was wrapping up and the first half of the first bout was about to begin. The action was entertaining but I wasn't as impressed with this roller derby as the Assasination City Derby. Tonight the skaters didn't seem as skilled and there was little strategy. There were a lot of illegal blocks, dirty hits and fights, but only a few examples of excellent skating on behalf of the jammers. I guess it appears to be more of a sloppy, rough and tumble league at the moment, more geared towards watching girls beat on each other than displaying agility and skilled skating ability.

The crowd was really eating it up though. It was rather rowdy and one felt like at any moment the place could be consumed by a Tecate-fueled riot. I think they just underestimated the number of people that would turn out with both their ability to sell tickets and security.

Despite the less than stellar play, a great time was had by all. Especially those who wound up with a derby girl in their lap.

UTD vs. Texas A&M

Went to see my friend Jason play roller hockey again, this time in the first round of the playoffs. It was a hard-fought game but all of the lucky bounces went the way of Texas A&M who ended up victorious. Was still fun to watch though.