Yes, that is a real road sign.
And where does River Styx Road go to? If you guessed “River Styx“, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.
We would also accept “the River Styx Bridge” as a correct answer.
Archive for the ‘Roads’ Category
As seen on the road…
Sunday, July 14th, 2013The Bridges of Cuyahoga County.
Sunday, July 14th, 2013Well, just one bridge, really.
I keep thinking of these as “Egyptian”, but they’re not, really: they’re Art Deco.
These are a couple of the pylons, known as the “Guardians of Traffic”, at the ends of the Hope Memorial Bridge in downtown Cleveland. (AKA the “Lorain-Carnegie Bridge”.) We drove across this bridge several times, since it is the best route to the Westside Market. (“The bridge connects Lorain Avenue on Cleveland’s west side and Carnegie Avenue on the east side, terminating just short of Progressive Field.” Heh. My mother observed that everywhere we went in Cleveland, it seemed like we had to drive past Progressive Field. By the end of the trip, she was rather tired of it. In comparison, I think we drove past Browns Stadium twice, and Quicken Loans Arena once.)
The “Hope” in “Hope Memorial” is William Henry Hope, Bob Hope’s father. Mr. Hope was a stonemason who worked on the pylons when the bridge was built.
A reliable source tells me:
When the Cavs were in the playoffs, the city put Cavs sweatbands on the foreheads of the two closest to the Q, where the Cavs play.
There’s really no good place to park near the bridge and the pylons, so these photos were taken either with the iPhone camera or compact cameras, by myself and my mother, out of or through the windows of a moving rental car, while trying not to obstruct traffic. If I get a chance to go back and the weather is nice, I plan to get some better pictures with the big camera.
TMQ Watch: February 5, 2013.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…
When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013Random notes: December 26, 2012.
Wednesday, December 26th, 2012The NYT was running a little behind yesterday, and didn’t post their Charles Durning obit until later in the day. (Also, thanks to Lawrence and Guffaw for their comments yesterday.)
Likewise, the A/V Club is operating on holiday time: they did publish a nice obit for Jack Klugman, but have not gotten around to Charles Durning yet. (Edited to add: the A/V Club’s obit for Durning is up now.)
19 people were killed when one of the buses crashed. 16 of them were teenagers. This is one of those bits of Austin history that I was previously unaware of; I commend the Statesman story (and the sidebar about how horrible the highway bridge was) to your attention.
There goes Toyko.
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012Paging Andrew! Andrew to the white courtesy phone, please!
Random observation.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2012At least 90% of the time (if not more), when someone tells me “you shouldn’t burn bridges”, that person has just finished pouring gasoline all over the structure in question, and is now standing in the middle of the bridge flicking their Zippo.
Making the news personal.
Tuesday, May 1st, 2012I wouldn’t ordinarily make note of the five guys arrested for conspiring to blow up a bridge in Ohio. Terrorist plots are a dime a dozen these days, and it seems that many of them turn out to be a bunch of losers who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery without help from undercover FBI agents.
But I’ve noted before that I have family in the Cleveland area. Some of them live in Sagamore Hills, and I’ve driven over the Ohio 82 bridge many times while visiting them.
Here’s what that bridge looks like in Google Maps satellite view:
And here’s your Google Image Search results for the Ohio 82 bridge. It is a nice looking bridge, I have to admit.
Random notes: April 30, 2012.
Monday, April 30th, 2012The “Three Cups of Tea” lawsuit (previously noted in this space) has been tossed.
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Those poor people.
Random notes: April 18, 2012.
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012Invasive species are good eating.
Frankly, yeah, I can see eating tiger shrimp. The Asian Carp…well, it makes me think of the old joke about how to prepare carp. (Nail it to a board, prop it in front of a fire until one side turns black, turn the board over and wait until the other side turns black, then throw the fish away and eat the board.) I’m not a big chili fan, but nutria bourguignon could be interesting. And as for feral hogs, let me just say two words: feral bacon.
This one goes out to Andrew: how to replace a bridge in a weekend, instead of months.
Oh, look! Greg “Three Cups of Tea” Mortenson is being sued for fraud!
Would it shock you to learn that one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs was also involved in the James Frey lawsuit?
More random crap.
Monday, November 28th, 2011First of all, a couple more obits: Lana Peters. You might know her better as “Svetlana Stalina”, Josef Stalin’s daughter.
I missed this over the weekend (I’ve been distracted, working on my final project for school) but Tom Wicker, noted NYT journalist, passed away on Friday.
Speaking of municipal budget cuts, Lourdes Garcia, one of Robert “Ratso” Rizzo’s employees, has lost her job with the city of Bell.
She was making $422, 000 a year until last year, when her salary was cut to $165,000.
We haven’t had a “Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark” update recently. How are things going?
The producers also say that they’re not planning on mounting touring companies, but instead want to concentrate on making the Broadway production successful. And this decision has nothing to do with Julie Taymor’s lawsuit. Nothing at all.
Bruce Boudreau out as coach of the Washington Capitals.
Up until about five years ago, I drove Loop 360 every day. I still have to drive it from time to time, so I was quite interested in the Statesman‘s coverage of plans to improve traffic flow. The biggest change involves implementing “Michigan left turns”: instead of left turn arrows at the lights, drivers will have to turn right, go down to a median cut, and do a U-turn.
I had plans: if I was ever diagnosed with a terminal illness, I’d go out late one night and blow up all the pointless traffic lights on Loop 360. The “Michigan left” plan doesn’t go quite that far, but I think it is a good step, if properly implemented. However, the plan doesn’t address the other major problem I used to see: traffic backs up horribly at the Loop 360/Mopac (Loop 1) intersection. That area badly needs a massive intersection redesign.
Public service announcement.
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011The Texas Department of Transportation is closing the ramp from northbound 183 to southbound Loop 1 this coming weekend. The closure is supposed to start at 9 PM Friday, and run until 5 AM Monday.
TXDOT does have a pretty good reason for the closure; they’re repairing a section of the highway damaged in a horrible tanker truck accident/explosion last fall.
Lonesome Roads.
Monday, July 18th, 2011The Texas Department of Transportation has been building a couple of additional “flyover” connections down south of town; specifically, at the intersection of Loop 1 (also known locally as “MoPac”) and U.S. Highway 290.
Unfortunately, TXDOT contracted with Wiser Construction, a company based in Nevada. (The Statesman says Wiser is based in Las Vegas, but all the business addresses I found for them are in Moapa, which is about 55 miles away according to Google Maps.)
Why is that unfortunate? Because Wiser Construction declared bankruptcy last week and walked off the job, leaving the flyovers uncompleted. (A search of the two Las Vegas newspapers turned up nothing about this bankruptcy.)
Edited to add 7/19: Here’s a link to another Statesman story. If you look at both that story, and the blog post I linked to yesterday, neither one currently contains any mention of bankruptcy. (The Statesman blog post appears to have been revised sometime after my original post.)
However, this story from KUVE still refers to the contractor’s bankruptcy.
Links to make Lawrence happy.
Monday, May 23rd, 2011Because I live for his happiness.
- The 75 MPH speed limit bill has passed both houses and is headed to the Governor’s desk for his signature. (Previously, and not 100% related.)
- Dennis Kucinich is losing his district due to redistricting, and is considering making a run for a seat in Washington State. This is not at all a transparent attempt to justify linking to this post. Not at all. We have standards here.
- Kelly Clarkson will be performing live at the new Microsoft store in the Houston Galleria on June 25th. This actually doesn’t have a damn thing to do with anything Lawrence cares about, except possibly the phrases “epic failure” and “you’re doing it wrong”.
Yet another public service announcement.
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011Once again, our friends at TXDOT are closing I-35 at Ben White this weekend.
Fortunately, we’ve already picked our SDC venue, and it is almost as far away from that mess as we could get.