The Statesman and other papers are reporting that 14 people are confirmed dead in West.
The Waco paper is maintaing a list.
Volunteer Fireman’s Monument, Texas State Capitol
Detailed article on the Dumas-Sunray disaster from Industrial Fire World.
Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Where do we get such men?
Sunday, April 21st, 2013Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Friday, April 19th, 2013The weather here yesterday was spectacularly crappy.
Today is beautiful. The sun is shining, the temperature is moderate – a perfect spring day.
For various reasons, including how nice a day it is (as well as some others that I don’t want to touch on just now) I thought it’d be fun to go down to the state capitol and take some photos.
So I loaded up the Honda with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction the big Nikon with the camera bag and lenses, as well as my tripod. Headed downtown to the capitol, got rockstar parking, and went inside to see a man about a racehorse before I started shooting. (Officious guard: “Sir, where are you going?” Me: “CHL holder.” OG: “Oh.”)
(For those who don’t know, the Texas capitol has a separate line for CHL holders that bypasses the metal detector.)
Anyway, get back outside, set stuff down, take out the camera…
…and the GD battery is dead. And, unlike my SD1000, I don’t have a spare Nikon battery.
Oh, well. I’m going to be down in that general area with the camera tomorrow as well, so I’ll plan on taking my photos tomorrow.
(And I stopped by Precision Camera on the way home so I could fix the “no spare Nikon battery” problem.)
(I’ve been meaning to mention this, but Precision Camera’s new store is really swell. Parking is a vast improvement over the old store, there’s much more space to move around and for them to display stuff, and the men’s room would get three stars if I was rating it for the SDC.)
This is what happens when you’re not hard enough on the Beaver.
Monday, April 15th, 2013The further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
(This isn’t an actual F-16 cockpit, but a “cockpit egress trainer”.)
(We would also have accepted “You ever been in a cockpit before?”)
Kübelwagen!
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
(I have a short list of cars that I wouldn’t want as a primary daily driver, but would love to have as a second car just to knock around in. On that list: a VW Thing. Which I know isn’t strictly the same thing as the Kübelwagen, but close enough for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to order a drone strike.)
Important reminder.
Monday, February 11th, 2013The ejection seat is not a toy.
(Top: my sister’s youngest boy. Bottom: the middle boy, who you may remember from here. Not shown: the oldest boy, Sir NotAppearingInThisSketch, who had a band thing going on and didn’t make the trip with us.)
Weasels ripped my flesh!
Sunday, February 10th, 2013
Hey, hey, LBJ.
Friday, December 28th, 2012
Lyndon Johnson’s birth certificate is on display at his presidential library. Insert your own Barack Obama joke here.
Igor, the President speaks!
Friday, December 28th, 2012He’s tanned. He’s rested. He’s ready.
He’s the newly redone animatronic LBJ from the (also recently remodeled) LBJ Presidential Library.
And if you think he looks just a little overly tan, well, you’re not the only one.
Connally.
Monday, December 10th, 2012
(I don’t remember why I had such an odd angle on this picture. Maybe I couldn’t get a better one, or I was trying to shoot around something else that was in the way.)
(Biographical information on John Connally from the Handbook of Texas Online.)
Edited to add: I like my mother’s version of this better than my own.
Hard to believe…
Saturday, December 8th, 2012….that, at one point, this man was probably the most hated person in the state of Texas.
(HouChron obit, which explains some of the background to that comment.)
Quiet, modest people.
Friday, December 7th, 2012If you ask me, “Professor, Librarian, Mentor” is a pretty darn good way to be remembered.
Also, if you served honorably in our country’s military – especially if you fought at the Battle of the Bulge, or were at Pearl Harbor, or any number of other great battles – yeah, that should be all over your tombstone.
(Dr. Mersky isn’t as famous as some of the other folks I’ve posted about, but I found this very nice conference announcement/tribute to Dr. Mersky, with an awesome picture of the gentleman in life. He sounds very much like someone I would have enjoyed knowing.)
“…with the eyes wide open”
Thursday, December 6th, 2012Something about the state cemetery that I didn’t realize until I went there; many of the monuments are, for want of a better work, architecturally interesting.
There are quite a few standard flat tombstones (especially in the section for the Confederate dead) but it seems like many people have the attitude of “This is the state cemetery; let’s make it interesting.”
I wish the focus had come out a little better on this one. I think it works, but in retrospect, it would have been better if i had taken another shot with a smaller aperture to get better depth of field.
(And call me a sentimental old fool, but I like the inscription.)
(Tom Lea Institute. The Tom Lea Collection at the University of Texas.)
Tom Landry’s hat!
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
(Tom Landry is part of that group of folks I referred to earlier; the ones who have monuments in the state cemetery, but are actually buried someplace else. Here’s his actual grave from Find a Grave.)
(I wonder if winning a national championship in any sport is enough to get you a slot at the state cemetery. Darrell Royal has his. Will Jody Conradt and Rudy Tomjanovich get one? Seems to me they’re deserving.)
(Subject line hat tip. (Ha!))
Well said, sir.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
(That second photo was taken by my mother with her camera.)
(Biographical information on J. Frank Dobie from the Handbook of Texas Online.)
(Interestingly enough, both Webb and Dobie are buried in the state cemetery, but Roy Bedichek, the third member of the group, is buried elsewhere. It isn’t unusual, as we will see, for the cemetery to have monuments for people who are buried elsewhere, but as far as I can tell there’s none for Bedichek. And for those of you outside of Austin who aren’t aware of the significance of Webb/Dobie/Bedichek, here’s a nice article on the state cemetery website that explains it all for you.)