Mayor Leffingwell accurately geeks out on Austin as "Green Lantern" of cities

Over at Newsarama, Austin's own Mayor Lee Leffingwell, the guy I actually voted for in our most recent mayoral election, compared Austin to superhero Green Lantern.  And he did it with surprising accuracy fit for a comic geek.

Click here for Newsarama's take.

And our local NBC affiliate

"Austin is the Green Lantern," said Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell. "We are a city without fear. We are a city that can create anything we can visualize, through sheer force of will. We are a city with a special charge to shine a light into the darkness and lead the way to a new and better day."

one way to beat I-35 traffic

I now expect to see t-shirts reading "Keep Austin Oan".*

"Lawyers-are-Pigs Guy, you have been determined to possess great will..."

*in the wake of crushing suburbanization and a massive jump in transplants to Austin who were surprised by the laissez faire attitude of our fair city when it comes to letting folks be folks, Austin adopted a "Keep Austin Weird" slogan to encourage and support the creative and technological arts. the slogan has since been endlessly co-opted.

Austin Books and Comics to be Crushed by Godzilla!

IDW has launched a new Godzilla series, and as an incentive to retailers, if the shop ordered a whole lotta copies of Godzilla #1, they could get copies with an image of the store getting destroyed by the rampaging toes of the King of Monsters.

I already had plans to read this series and am quietly very excited about getting a copy of this comic.  I find the idea of Godzilla rampaging his way down Lamar toward The Triangle, and into campus, then southward toward the Capitol...  appealing. 

when will the staff of ABC learn to live in balance with nature?

And I think Brandon at ABC would have wanted to go exactly this way, by the way.

Awesome News! The World is Ending! Everybody PARTY!!!

So, we were driving back from grabbing lunch at Curra's here in Austin, and at the intersection of Congress and Oltorf, three trucks were parked in a lot, all with the same graphic.

I could only get one of the trucks with my cell phone.

the most oddly depressing strip center in Austin gets a little added spice

In case you can't read the graphic:

Guarantee is a very strong word...  I'm just saying.

As if that wasn't wacky enough, Andrew - a guy I am 6 degrees away from being a relation (uh, Jamie's brother's wife's brother.  Yes, that sounds right)  also posted images on Facebook of himself next to exactly the same truck in Virginia.  He says there were five at his location.  So, people, let me know if you're spotting this fleet of people declaring the Earth will end before the Green Lantern movie gets released.

As Jason said "well, there's been somebody predicting the end times are about to happen since time began".  But I'm not exactly sure what the hook is here other than some mash-up of Mayan snake-god calendaring getting mixed up with Poltergeist-2/ tent revival/ end-times fun.  And, look, if its a financial scam, three months isn't really much time to maximize your profit.

On the one hand, if the world were ending...  Just imagine how kooky the next three months would really get.  I tell you what, I wouldn't feel very incentivized to show up at work or fill out my tax return.

Snow Day in Austin (a short photo gallery)

Austin sits in kind of a funny place geographically, geologically and meteorologically.  Not that weird.  I've been to the Bay Area, and you people have different weather by neighborhood.  But the weather here changes fairly drastically during the mid-point of winter.  Last weekend, we were wearing shorts and running around town, then it became very, very cold, dropping into the high 10's, and now its lovely and sunny again and I'm wearing a t-shirt.

My understanding is that we get southerly fronts from the gulf, and we also get northers - the arctic air originating from around Alaska that pummels the western and middle states- coming through, so you kind of need to stay on your toes. So, you just keep your eye on the forecast a lot more in this part of Texas than folks do in, say, Arizona.

So when it does snow, we tend to take lots of pictures.  For Canadians, us getting snow is sort of like if you woke up and your yard was inexplicable covered in cactus that just disappeared after a day or two.  We get ice here, and sometimes snow will fall, but will not accumulate at all.  The ice storms are crazy and mean, and you generally don't want to go out in them.  This time, we actually got both ice and snow, I was told.  which made driving in town really dangerous.

Anyway, I woke Friday to about .9 inches of snowfall (thus losing my place on the office betting board where I'd guessed we'd get 1.0 - 1.5").

Babar the Happy Element found himself under a blanket of snow

League HQ held up well under the winter weather

The dogs were really excited to be out in the snow, so we took a walk

Scout was pleased to be out on patrol.  She must have detected a menace somewhere at the time of this photo.

If you know my street, you know this is not how it usually looks.

and here's one by a random Austin citizen that I saw making the rounds on Facebook.

Along Lady Bird Lake, Austin is lovely on an average day. Here, it looks kind of surreal:

Austin on the rocks

I'm Headed for Waco, also (Some) Lawyers are Pigs!

I'm headed out for Waco yet again tomorrow.  No, I will not go to your old local haunts, JimD.  Its another night at Ninfa's for me!

I'd feel worse about the fact that I'm not going to do a real post, but I interrupted my hiatus to talk about Wonder Woman on TV and the Comics Code thing.  See:  news breaks, we're on the scene!

This evening I was driving south on Lamar in Austin, and at the intersection of Barton Springs and Lamar, I saw this:

It was a gentleman of middling years in a pig costume standing at the intersection and cheerfully waving. 

And then he turned and I saw his sign:

I was in traffic.  I risked my life to bring you this image.

  

Can't read the sign?  Well, let me help you out.

"Some" Lawyers are Pigs!

Apparently the pig costume is nothing new.  Austin gadfly John Kelso wrote a column on the Lawyer-hating pig-guy way back in November.  I'd just not had the chance to see him.

Kelso never did learn what was going on, exactly, and it sounds like the world may never know.  I just like the idea of dressing up as a pig to make an abstract point.  Especially when you dress up as one of the two things you're comparing and suggesting you like neither.  That's owning it, man. 

But, I wonder if the pig suit is getting attention as pigs can be terribly cute animals.

I am waiting for the high pitched "eeeeee!" sound Jamie will make when she sees this pig.

See, that's just adorable.

I actually think grown up pigs are cute, too.  And delicious

Anyway, I knew I was in luck when I went to Google "Lawyers are Pigs" and "Lawyers are Pigs Austin" came up as an option.  I salute this fellow, even if the lawyers I know are mostly okay.

why I am not allowed to have a pig of my own