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On Day 5 of our road trip, the Salt Lick restaurant in Driftwood, Texas, near Austin was the first stop in what would end up being a 500-mile day of delicious Texas-style cooking, long drives to West Texas and even a potential alien encounter in the dessert near Marfa.
You haven't tasted juicy meat until you've visited the Salt Lick, a rustic, ranch-style restaurant that's famous for its world-class, smoked cook brisket. It's also the place where before we started dating, Angela introduced me to Austin and also where we had our pre-wedding rehearsal luncheon. Salt Lick brisket is slow cooked with special logs over the course of 12 hours and seasoned with a secret formula sauce. During our visit we interviewed Jaime, a "pit boss" of Latino descent whose family has worked at the Salt Lick for many years. The first time I went to the Salt Lick I was with my vegetarian friend Bill and though Angela was dismayed I brought a vegetarian to the Salt Lick we were all relieved to know that they also have vegetarian platters.
Following the Salt Lick, our next stop was the quaint German-influenced town of Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg is terrific for antique lovers and people who want enjoy the charms of a small town in the Texas hill country. When you go, be sure to get there early. Just about EVERYTHING in the city shuts down at 5 p.m. on weekdays and 6 p.m. on weekends.
After several driving delays and a huge gas shortage scare we finally arrived in Marfa past dinner time at night. Marfa is a tiny town with a big reputation for its Mysterious Lights of Marfa as well as its growing arts and cinema scene. From our kids' perspective, Marfa's big draw, of course, are the Mystery Lights, a Texas version of Alaska's aurora borealis. To make things interesting I brought a professional digital camera and a tripod and took time-lapse images of the Marfa Lights from the observation deck where everyone normally sees them. (If there's too many clouds you won't see them). If you look at my un-doctored photos (see above), you will notice a red light surrounded by other brighter lights. All appear to be around the same size but what's interesting is that the white lights surrounding the red one clearly have some movement. For the record, I don't believe there's anything magical or alien-related to the lights but I do find them interesting, especially knowing that many experts and some documentaries have studied them and no one knows what to say they are.
On your way to West Texas, or really anywhere in the open roads of the state, you notice a pattern: Texas is crawling with "historical" marker signs. I'm a history guy so I appreciate things of this nature but when I've looked into some of these "historical" things I can honestly tell you that most of what
Texas will sometimes pass off as historically significant is hardly that. For example, in Texas, you will find historical state monument-type signs for just about everything from the first school house in an obscure town to the grave marker for a oil tycoon who built one thing or another. I can continue to harp on how Texans believe EVERYTHING about Texas is great (I'm married to one) but I need to have a place to sleep tonight so I will just leave you with that tidbit about driving through Texas. In short be wary of the historical state markers because in most any other state most of them would not be THAT significant.
FAMILY ROAD TRIP TIP OF THE DAY (Sponsored by Sprint Nextel)
The drive from Austin to Marfa is actually pleasant and very wide open in a way that is almost relaxing. The biggest danger you encounter is running out of gas because once you get to within 200 or so miles of remote Marfa there are few gas stations and even fewer that are open after 6 p.m.
Just like in 2006, when Angela and I first came to Marfa for the first time, we came within five or so miles of officially running out of gas. Thank God our Papimobile (aka 2010 Chevrolet Traverse) has OnStar because we needed OnStar to navigate to the last gas station open within a radius of more than 100 miles in Alpine, TX. The road lesson you can take with you to West Texas and many other remote drives of the U.S.: fuel up every half tank when driving through these types of places.


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WASHINGTON – Kris Humphries was booed even before the start of the game between his New Jersey Nets and the Washington Wizards, presumably because of his much-hyped — and short-lived marriage to reality TV star Kim Kardashian.
Once the basketball was in the air Monday night, Humphries really gave the Wizards and their fans reason to be angry, finishing with 21 points and 16 rebounds to help New Jersey erase a 21-point deficit and come all the way back to beat Washington 90-84 in the season opener for both teams.
In a duel of two top point guards, New Jersey's Deron Williams had 23 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, getting the better of Washington's John Wall, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 NBA draft.
Wall had 13 points, eight rebounds and six assists, but he only shot 3 for 13. He had the ball in his hands with Washington down only by three in the final minute, but turned it over.
Backup shooting guard Nick Young led Washington with 16 points in just 18 minutes. He missed a large part of the second half after jamming his left foot, but returned.
Andray Blatche opened a pregame speech to the Wizards' home crowd by saying, "This is your captain, Andray Blatche." He wound up with 11 points on 5-of-13 shooting and was called for a technical foul, to boot.
Apparently, Wizards fans are keeping up with the Kardashians. They greeted Humphries with loud jeers during the introductions of the starting lineups, then got on his case whenever he touched the ball. The booing reached a crescendo when Humphries was about to attempt a free throw in the first quarter, then turned to cheers when his shot clanged off the front of the rim. Fans also applauded and shouted approval when Humphries was whistled for fouls.
Humphries and Kardashian split up 72 days after their wedding. He re-signed with the Nets last week and was in the team's starting five Monday, when coach Avery Johnson decided to drop Shelden Williams.
The Wizards (who went 23-59) and Nets (24-58) were two of the six worst teams in the NBA last season, and neither made any truly significant additions. Both went 0-2 during the abbreviated, post-lockout exhibition schedule.
So perhaps it was little surprise that both went through some rather rough stretches Monday, unable to execute properly at either end of the floor.
First it was New Jersey that struggled, falling behind 26-13 in the first quarter and 38-17 in the second, after Young poured in 12 points in a span of about six minutes on 4-for-5 shooting. The Nets shot only 35 percent in the first half, including 14 percent on 3-point attempts, 2 for 14.
But New Jersey managed to start chipping away, thanks in large part to a 16-2 run, and by halftime, Washington's lead was down to 45-37.
In the second half, though, it was Washington's turn to struggle.
When Humphries hit an 18-foot jumper four minutes into the second half, the game was tied at 53. About halfway through the third quarter, Deron Williams' 3-pointer made it 58-57, the Nets' first lead of the evening.
A couple of dunks by Humphries helped New Jersey push their edge to 66-63, before Washington woke up. When Roger Mason made a 23-foot jumper about 1½ minutes into the fourth quarter, it capped an 11-0 spurt for the Wizards, giving the hosts a 74-66 lead.
But the Nets scored the next nine points, capped by Damion James' layup with about 5½ minutes remaining, and were on their way.
Notes: According to the Nets, their collection of guys named Williams make New Jersey the first team in NBA history to have four players with the same last name on a regular-season roster together: Deron, Jordan, Shawne and Shelden. ... Jordan Williams and Brook Lopez were inactive for the Nets; first-round draft pick Jan Vesely and Hamady Ndiaye were inactive for the Wizards. ... The Nets start the season with a stretch of four games in five days — and six games in eight days. "As a coach, we can't have that as an excuse," Johnson said. ... Johnson was asked about Tuesday night's game against the visiting Atlanta Hawks being his team's last home openener before the move to Brooklyn. "We're going to have a lot of situations like that this year. That game is going to be 'the last home opener' — and the next home game is going to be 'the last second home game.' It's going to go on and on," Johnson said. "It's all going to be a countdown." ... Washington's second game is at Atlanta on Wednesday.

subset: commoncrawl


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It's Saturday afternoon but traffic on 93 South is at a crawl. Finally, the cause of our misery is revealed: a minor accident on the northbound side of the highway. Our delay has been due to curiosity, every driver slowing down to take a look — me, too, of course. If Google had its way, I think, this never would have happened. Machines don't rubberneck.
The Internet giant has just announced that it has tested autonomous cars — cars without a driver — for more than 700,000 miles on city and suburban roadways. What was once a novelty seems suddenly probable. And if Google's dream comes to pass, what we'll get won't merely be some incremental improvements such as safer, speedier trips, but potentially a revolution, one almost as significant as that wrought by the invention of the automobile itself.
The technology seems wondrous but is eminently practicable. Cameras and sensors are mounted on a vehicle. Matched with detailed maps, a comprehensive driving database and a sophisticated electronic brain, the otherwise conventional automobiles navigate streets better than any human.
Google's not alone in this experiment. Others such as General Motors and Toyota are working on their own versions of autonomous cars. You won't be able to buy the cars this year but this isn't a 100-year fantasy either. Five, perhaps ten years from now will see them coming to market.
At first, they'll be just like ordinary cars, with drivers able to switch from manual to autonomous as easily as going into cruise control. As the new vehicles become more accepted by regulators and the public, however, interesting things will begin to occur. For one, manual driving will become increasingly rare, in the same way automatic transmission replaced the manual clutch. Eventually, people will be able to "drive" without being trained as drivers at all. Your 12-year-old needs to go to basketball practice? Put her in the car, and off she goes. Mom and dad as chauffeurs will be a thing of the past. At some point, in fact, one can see states prohibiting people from driving at all. The autonomous cars will simply be that much better.
Lives will be saved. More than 30,000 die on American roads each year, millions more are injured. Nearly every crash is due to some sort of human error. So too, traffic jams will largely disappear. Humans overreact to brake lights in front of them. Driverless cars won't. In cases of congestion, the cars — all of them communicating with each other — will plot out alternative routes.
With accidents rare, the need for bulky safety features will disappear. No more seatbelts or airbags. The interiors of cars will be reconfigured, looking like offices or game rooms. They'll have room for standing and walking about.
New businesses will be created; others will disappear. Mass transit will change fundamentally. Automated buses might be available on demand, or perhaps the new business model will be a cross between Uber and Zipcar. Rather than owning cars, urbanites will just call for a vehicle. One will be dispatched from some nearby location, pick them up, take them where wanted, and then go away. GEICO's gecko and Progressive's Flo will be obsolete, body shops will disappear, and we'll have no need for taxi-, bus- or designated-drivers. Massachusetts may even allow the happy hour to return!
The original car produced a mobile society, making it possible for people to live far away from where they worked. With faster, smoother commutes and time in the car now productive (rather than spent paying attention to the road), people will be even less constrained by travel concerns and distance in choosing where to make their homes. Commuters into cities won't worry about parking; their cars will drive away to some remote location until needed for the ride home. Some perhaps will become true nomads, living their lives in far more sophisticated versions of Winnebagos.
There will be losses as well. There's a romance to driving, a thrill to getting behind the wheel and seemingly being master of one's destiny. In this new world, if we want to drive automobiles ourselves, there doubtless will be off-road locations where we can try our hand. Otherwise, though, the car will be in control.
Tom Keane can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com


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Writing in the Atlantic Monthly shortly after the Civil War, Thomas Wentworth Higginson made a "plea for culture," hoping that the country would curtail its endless toil and seek out the timelessness of the humanities. By the 1890s, the mood of the country seemed to be more open to culture in general but not, certainly, what Higginson had hoped for. A professor at Columbia University, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, noticed what he called a "plague of jocularity" among his students, who he felt were for the most part unable or unwilling to take high culture seriously. The age of burlesque, running roughly from the 1830s through the 1890s, had been satisfying the public appetite for humor for so long that artists in many instances felt the need to engage in levity as well, simply to be taken seriously by the upper crust and the hoi polloi alike. In Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age, Jennifer Greenhill examines how this all came about.
Unifying the "comical and the coffinly "was the special domain of one artist in particular. Winslow Homer began his career by submitting illustrations of soldiers' lives during the Civil War to weekly magazines in New York. In her study, Greenhill reconsiders "the central importance of the 'gag' to Homer's dramatic sensibility." And she asks, "If Homer was engaged in a spiritual quest, if his art spoke to embattled Gilded Age manhood, how did it arrive at a painterly idiom that encapsulated such heady concerns?" As he moved from his illustrations of humorous caricatures of soldiers to the oil painting Playing Old Soldier, Homer developed what Greenhill calls visual deadpan. And by war's end, in the dignified Prisoners From the Front, if he "seems to expunge levity from his art, the early works are driven by an exploration of its potential to serve and inform ambitious painting."
By the late 1890s, then, the inherent dangers of resolutely standing, as Higginson and Boyesen had, for high culture had been skirted by the likes of Homer and others, who, as Greenhill, in her NEH-funded study, concludes, "understood . . . the hazards and limits of the static pose, and the inextricability of the serious and the jocular, the lighthearted and the grave. They understood that American culture was constituted in the flow and bend of those states of mind, and they produced works of art that tapped into the subtleties."


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By Robert Crawford
A man has been attacked by a crocodile at Shoalhaven Zoo on the NSW south coast.
Animal handler Trent Burton, believed to be in his mid 30s, was presenting a crocodile feeding show at the zoo about noon on Monday when the largest resident crocodile, a 3.7-metre reptile known as John, grabbed him by the hand and dragged him into the water in the enclosure.
Spectators looked on in horror as the handler broke free and got out of the water.
Paramedics treated him at the zoo and he was able to walk to the ambulance, which took him to Shoalhaven District Hospital.
He was treated for non-life threatening injuries to both hands.
Witness Marlene Orr, from Shellharbour, said it was the scariest thing she had ever seen.
"We saw the trainer taken by the crocodile," she said.
"I've seen them in the wild, lying on river banks, and have seen them at Steve Irwin's zoo, but never like this.
"It was too scary."
Albion Park resident Michelle Brady and her daughters Monique and Georgia also saw the attack.
"The trainer was feeding him meat and the crocodile took it before the designated area to be fed. The trainer tried to take it out of the crocodile's mouth and the croc just grabbed his hand and pulled him to the ground and dragged him into the water," she said.
"Then the trainer got free and got out of the water.
"He had puncture holes in his hand," she said.
Shoalhaven Zoo owner Nick Schilko said the handler had been with the zoo working with the crocodiles for more than a decade.
"Of course we are disappointed the attack happened, but thankfully it doesn't appear to be too serious," he said.
"It's an attack and that is serious, but thankfully the injuries aren't life threatening, which it certainly had the potential to be.
"He's more disappointed with himself that it happened.
"He works with him on a daily basis."
It's not the first time John, named after the former owner of the park John Stone, has latched on to the odd digit or two.
Mr Schilko has been bitten by one the zoo's star attractions.
"At this stage we don't know how serious the damage to his hands may be. He said he hasn't lost any fingers and thinks it would only require some stitches," Mr Schilko said.
He said the zoo would reassess its procedures.
"We will look at what happened and how it happened and review it," he said.
"We have procedures in place and they need to be followed.
"If the handler wants to get back involved with the big crocs, which I bet he will, I would be 100 per cent behind him," he said.
"Big John has been a resident of the park for more than 10 years and along with his female partner, Dawn, were named after the former owners of the zoo, John and Dawn Stone."
They are believed to be the southern-most pair of crocodiles to breed in an outdoor enclosure in the world.


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The Taliban have launched a violent campaign to disrupt this weekend's presidential election in Afghanistan, but in a restive eastern corner of the country they are paying villagers to surrender their voting cards.
Residents in Nangarhar province, which lies on the border with Pakistan, said local Taliban militants have been offering voters 500 Pakistani rupees - the equivalent of just over $5 - to opt out of the election.
"At first we thought the Taliban were trying to trick us and wanted to find out who had voter cards, but later we found out that they were honest and paid money," said Ahmad Shah, a youth in a village just outside the city of Jalalabad.
The Taliban did not respond to a request for comment. Saturday's election will bring the first democratic transfer of power in war-torn Afghanistan and an end to the rule of President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since the ouster of a Taliban regime in late 2001. The Taliban have branded the election a Western-backed sham.
The Independent Election Commission has said at least 10 percent of polling stations will not be able to open due to the threat of violence, the majority of them in the east where the insurgents are most active.
"When the Taliban are in control and warn people not to vote, and instead pay money for your voter card, it's not a bad thing," Haji Khan Wali, another man in the village, where the Pakistani rupee is more commonly used than the local currency, the Afghani.
"People here have to think more about finding bread to feed their families than the election. To tell you the truth, half the people here don't know anything about the election," said Khan, wearing a white turban and long beard.
Local officials said they were aware of such reports from remote areas of Nangarhar, which are under Taliban influence. Southern and eastern parts Afghanistan are dominated by Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group, which has traditionally enjoyed strong political influence.
Karzai is a Pashtun, which made him an obvious choice for many in these regions at the 2009 election, but the three frontrunners to succeed him are also Pashtun. Of them, the one with the closest links to eastern areas bordering lawless lands inside Pakistan is Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official.
Influential tribal elders say they would support any of the three candidates, but many people in remote areas of the region won't be casting a vote anyway. In Nangarhar alone, 115 polling stations will not open due to concerns about mass fraud and ballot-stuffing as well as security, the provincial election chief, Akhtar Mohammad Ajmal, told Reuters. A 10-year-old was caught with 1,200 fake voting cards in neighbouring Kunar province this week. The 2009 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud and another flawed election would undermine attempts by the United States and its allies to foster democracy ahead of the departure of foreign troops at the end of this year.


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This cream boucle pillow has a beautiful chunky weave that is both timeless and right on trend. It's the perfect sink-into-me texture that will add a modern, cozy touch to any room in your house.
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