Informative, but no. Before the park was refurbished with a new central fountain, those walls, and those granite plaques, that spot had almost nothing on it except a few large bronze medallions set in the concrete at ground level at the entrance. You walked over the plaque I was originally thinking of.

That's the right spot, though. Interesting to see what's there now.

Wow - it HAS been a long time since I walked that park. Now that I think about it, it's probably been around 20 years. I shouldn't be surprised things have changed that much.

But if the "a" was carried over from the original bronze to the new granite (I'll take your word for it; I can't make out anything), then I guess my original point still stands.

Last time I was there, at Tranquility Park in downtown Houston, across from the old federal building/current federal courts at 515 Rusk, there was a giant plaque at the entrance to the park quoting those first words from the moon.

The quote included the missing "a".

Somebody thought highly enough of the theory that the article belonged in the sentence that they cast it in bronze, decades ago, soon after the landing.

It's been a while since I've been in that park. Is there anybody who works nearby who can verify that the plaque, complete with the "a", is still there? It used to be at the corner entrance on the Rusk side of the park.

You attribute to the GP more benign motives than I do. I've seen too many people say too many times "You wouldn't be fat if you'd just push away from the table!"

(Fucking DeBakey actually said that in a TV interview many, many years ago. I'll never forget it.)

It's simply not true. The human body is too complex to take such a simplistic view. It's easy to find case after case where person A takes in fewer calories, eats better quality food, and exercises more than person B. Yet person A is fat and B is stick-thin. The fact is, we nearly all take in more calories than needed to maintain weight. Whether we get fat or not does not depend on the number of calories anywhere near as much as it depends on how efficiently our particular body chooses to store them as fat. That's a completely different discussion from any I've ever seen started with a cite of the law of conservation of energy. People who start off with cites like that generally don't have the foggiest clue about what makes people fat.

...to use constitutional amendments to attack other constitutional amendments...amounts to mass insanity

Agreed. I wonder how slippery the slope will turn out to be.

The Heller decision made it clear that gun ownership is an individual right. But when the laws change and all gun owners are forced to get a license, will it be fair game to demand that all journalists go through a background check and get a government stamp of approval before they are allowed to make a living by arranging words on a screen?

If exercising your rights is reason enough to be "outed" like this, how about an interactive map showing the homes of everyone who writes for the paper, holds a management position, or sits on the board? Fair's fair, right?

The law of conservation of energy?

You're an idiot. The human body isn't a simple machine where an easily accountable amount of energy going in will produce a given amount of work.

Most people can do the simple experiment of eating exactly the same thing this month as they did last month with the same amount of activity. Make one change - this month divide that daily food intake into 8 equal parts and have 8 small meals at even intervals throughout the day. Same energy in, same energy out, and you WILL lose weight.

In my own case, I was forced to experiment radically. I was diagnosed with diabetes. What tipped me off to go to the doctor was that I had lost 50 to 60 pounds even tough I was cramming my face with all the carbs I could lay my hands on.

After the diagnosis, I went after the disease with a vengance. I consumed fewer calories, ate only high quality foods, and exercised daily till I was ready to drop. I took my prescribed meds. And I kept meticulous records showing my wonderful drop in blood sugar, substantial decrease in daily calorie intake, and substantial increase in physical activity. I showed up at the next appointment, 3 months later, with a ream of charts and graphs to show that I had done everything I was supposed to do.

My A1c number dropped from 12.9 to 6.1. I was in control of my diabetes.

One problem - despite the fact that I took in fewer calories, did more work, and maintained extensive records to back that up, one of the medicines prescribed had weight gain as a side effect.

I had radically reduced my caloric intake, radically improved the quality of food I ate, radically increased the amount of exercise I did and I still GAINED 40 pounds.

Anyone who makes simple references to the law of conservation of energy in this context is a person completely incompetent to speak to the subject. Please, AC, STFU until you have half a clue what you're talking about.

The same is true of France. In fact, I think they were the first to adopt that policy; it's been several years.

During the dotcom bubble, I was at the top end of the age range (35-ish) that was fashionable and working for a US TLA as a general-purpose sysadmin greybeard in an all-Unix shop. I networked more than most and corresponded with lots of folks both in govt and the private sector. I don't know why I did it because I loved my work and wasn't looking for anything new but I did like to keep up and keep in touch with lots of folks. Also, it didn't hurt and sometimes greatly amused me that the part of my email address just to the left of the ".gov" tended to get my emails read.

During those years I turned down a number of job offers. I don't remember specifically; some were informal "let's talk" and others were "I'll pay you $X to come work for us". But I distinctly remember several offers that would have as much as quadrupled my pay (which would have put me at double the going rate since, as a fed, I was already being paid only about half what the average private sector employee in my position received.)

I never bit. Of those companies, none survive today. All of them wanted me to trade my 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half for overtime for positions where I essentially worked 24 hours a day, perhaps 12 at the office and the rest of the time wearing a pager. None offered more than a couple of holidays. None offered sick or vacation time that was more than a farce. The pay, though, would have been great if I was willing to step into the hamster wheel and start running.

So maybe I'm a doddering old fool. Maybe I was unambitious. All I know is that now I'm retired. My retirement check covers my expenses plus a little...and that's after deductions for all taxes, decent health insurance, very good life insurance, and fairly good long-term care insurance. It's not lounging on a yacht with supermodels but I'm not afraid of being three paychecks from living in my car, either.

Folks who spit on public-sector employees simply don't understand. I often wonder if it's worth the (usually wasted) effort I sometime put towards trying to help them see things from a broader perspective.

I'm Texan, too, and I (and perhaps you, too) know that the fusion culture you describe already exists in some places along the border. It's not a bad thing. If Texas secedes and such attitudes hold sway, Texas could be an even better place than the one I already love.

Y'know, I'd go to a store that offered all the stuff in the checkout area of my local Fry's (plus their magazine rack) with some regularity. That's a pretty attractive product mix.

But if they've got the "Let's make everybody feel like a suspected shoplifter" jerks at the exit door, then the whole idea is a non-starter. :-)

Seriously, though, the GP is in Houston. There are plenty of neighborhoods around here where stores like he describes are found and doing well. It's partly cultural and partly the fact that Houston has (essentially) no zoning.

... the ones the city council is going to listen to, not someone who can't even find a place to host his business, so they get to influence the zoning that controls where you're allowed to open your business.

I really don't understand your post since where I live, there is no zoning. What was your point and does it have anything to do with trying to find a way to help a guy morph his DVD business into something that can remain profitable?

The people who are still around after 20 years ... are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.

What gets me is how quick they can flip. I was a wizard, though not a coder, more of a crypto specialist with a TLA who did lots of other stuff on the side.

We went through a management re-shuffle from top to bottom that just about killed morale in the entire organization. In my case, no other function could borrow me for a project without a writ from on high. In the past, IT could lend me to another division to help them over a hump and build up favors that helped *everyone* the next time a new project came along and workload negotiations were happening. No longer. I got all my "interesting" work taken away. This was the stuff I did all day, every day, for years. I was re-directed to my core duties (which were fine...if boring) *only*. Literally, the last time I was lent from my division to another, the person who asked to borrow me had to take the request all the way up to the office of a presidential appointee to get me for two weeks (and I worked in one of the few TLAs where there are almost no political appointees except at the very top.)

It took me less than 5 years to flip from wizard to burnout.

They wanted to reduce staff and one day, out of the blue, offered me a few bucks and a reduced pension to retire early. I was out the door so fast, I feared the vacuum behind me would suck all the furniture out into the hallway.

A few months later, I got invited back for a Christmas party. Management had been lying (of course) and they had not reduced staff. They had replaced me with 2 contractors. My old work partner described them as "#1 sits around and plays with his smartphone all day. #2 has a brain; in 10 years, we'll be able to get half the work out of him we used to get from you. Neither of them will ever have a clue where all the bodies are buried like you did." He then proceeded to tell me he was getting out within 6 months.

Mod parent up; "...hire wizards and ...shift... burnouts into doing something they ... enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game" is the best advice I've seen yet in all the replies to this article.

I recently spent a couple of days in Raton, NM. It's quite small but they have a thing there called the Whittington Center. It's a gigantic place to shoot, museum, store, and library on all things having to do with shooting. (How it got there is a fascinating political story that I'll leave for another day.) I'm retired and I love to shoot but it was that library that drew me in. I spent hours and hours there, finding new gems and old, every time I scanned a different shelf. I would literally consider moving to Raton just to have easy access to that specialty library...if it weren't for the fact that I spent enough time there to discover that Raton is an armpit of a place.

In the large metro area where I currently live there are a couple of niche stores that are doing at least OK. I can think of two stores that sell just vinyl records. I can think of one that rents rare DVDs, has an extensive anime section, even has some old stock on tape that never made it to disc, and sells a small selection of high-value, carefully-selected hardware to equip your home theatre. They have employees who seem to know *everything* and can make a dozen recommendations based on scanty evidence. I've brought three discs to the front counter and said "I've seen these. I liked them. What else would I like?" Within three minutes, an employee will have sprinted me around the store and put a dozen other titles in my hands (guaranteed I haven't even heard of half of them) and I can pick at random from that pile with no fear of disappointment.

I'm definitely willing to pay for that kind of service. It's just too bad I retired and I'm too far away from them to use them now. (In fact, I've been away for so long that I don't know if 2 of the 3 examples I just gave are still in business and I don't want the potential heartbreak of looking them up online to see if they still are.)

That brings me to my last point - location. Most DVD stores that were successful back in the day did so by being where there were the most people. Everybody was renting DVDs so you just had to be located where the most people were to be found. There were even DVD stores that did rentals inside major shopping malls.

Times have changed. Joe Average is no longer your customer. If the store in question is in a place with good traffic flow but no *specialty* traffic flow, then they're screwed, doubly so since not only is the customer base falling but the location rents are probably higher *because* of the good traffic flow.

The first idea that pops into my head is that specialty equipment stores that sell guns, weightlifting equipment, cosmetics, whatever, etc., tend to have a shelf somewhere with a couple of "how-to" discs to buy. The selection is always lousy and the discs are for purchase only. I wish someone would come up with a way to put a smaller, lower-tech version of a Red Box in every speciality store in the country. Said kiosk (or just a shelf of DVDs with bar-coded labels that somehow communicate with whatever vertical app the store is using to sell all their other stuff) would rent out "how-to" and specialty DVDs to those people who are interested in the goods sold by that particular store.

Wherever there's a successful brick-and-mortar store, there's the potential to sell and rent DVDs with highly-specialized content to the customers of those stores.

Why not abandon the "DVD store" concept? Bring the stock to the customers instead of making the customers come to the stock. I know one gun store that tried this with books and it failed but only because it took up too much room. On a per-square-foot basis, keeping a book store inside a gun store is stupid; there's so much more profit in just adding more display space for high-dollar-markup guns. With DVDs, though, we're literally talking less than two square feet of floor space for a tall, rotating rack.

Just an idea. I hate to see the OP's friend go out of business without at least an idea or two on the table.

See? Now that's putting a little thought into it. :-)

...even though I've got points because this comment is just too out-of-touch to let go without a response.

The Texas secession will go nowhere, of course. However, you've missed a couple of things.

First, the kinds of Texans who actually want to secede wouldn't bother with a wall on the border. They'd set up a 1000-yard-wide no-man's land, pepper it with automated machine gun towers and kill anything that moved. That would be a start on the whole "hold off the violent Mexican gangs" thing.

Second, even more Texans than the sort mentioned in the previous paragraph legally carry concealed weapons and wouldn't hesitate to return fire. The brazen, large-scale Mexican gangs activities seen inside Mexico just wouldn't fly in Texas. There are too many ranchers with too many 7.62s and .50s, and too many LEOs and judges who would simply give them a pat on the back and some reward money for every cartel member they downed.

Finally, the U.S. would never let Texas secede specifically *because* of national defense issues. Remember, the PANTEX plant is in Texas. Texans are the people who make nukes for the USA. A successfully seceeded Texas would instantly become a nuclear-bomb equipped nation. Now, delivery systems would be a problem but I'm sure they could figure out a way.

God, these secession petitions are stupid but if you want to insult Texas, work a little harder, OK?

Odd you should mention geese. There are actually U.S. Army bases that use geese as alarms, placing them between fence lines surrounding the base. They make a lot of noise when unauthorized people are in their space.

As for geese attacks, I'd tend to discount that. Yes, they will do that. I've been attacked several times; I used to be a photographer and would often shoot wedding portraits at a lake with geese. I've seen several brides and grooms attacked without much damage as long as they moved fast enough to prevent the goose from latching onto clothing. They got some good stories to tell, though. I've been forced to kick a couple but that seemed to make them think twice and they appeared none the worse for wear.