Skip to main content

Views of Houston

One of the many entrances into the Downtown Tunnel system -- this one is at the center of Tranquility Park and leads to the theater district parking garages. You can literally enter the Houston underground system on one side of downtown and through a series of tunnels and skybridges walk for miles... with shops, restaurants and other retailers through-out. The tunnels open at 6:00 A.M. and generally close at 6:30 P.M. -- their primary use is for downtown workers to be able traverse from building to building without having to deal with Houston weather.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More On Energy: Supply, Demand and the Not-so-free Market

Speculators in the market have, rightly, been targeted for thier use of the Enron-loophole to basically compete (unfairly) in a market that is mixed between highly-regulated (see integrated oil companies) and unregulated players (see commodity brokers). This imbalance of power has led to the free flow of capital to a market from sources that a decade ago largely abandoned investment in oil companies -- in favor of the speculative bubble of the dotcom boom. That lack of capital infusion -- and the capital-intensive nature of the oil & gas business -- led to the mega-mergers of 1999 - 2001. Bear in mind that even with all that merger activity among the multi-nationals, their true competition is with national oil companies -- basically branches of their nation-state governments: Pemex (Mexico), Petrobras (Brazil), Pedevesas (Venezuala), Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Cinoco (China) ... you get the picture. On the one end, you have national oil companies -- either in OPEC or non-aligned ...

Looking back...

It being "the thing to do" on New Years Eve, here are some of the things that came to my mind about the last decade: Houston & the Weather Tropical Storm Allison flooded Houston causing more than $5.5 B in damage and 41 deaths -- as usual, the story was overlooked by the national media because a) it was happening in Houston and b) they were manically covering the Timothy McVeigh execution countdown.  Were it not for 9/11, Allison would have been the largest disaster of 2001. Hurricane Katrina devasted the central Gulf Coast, flooding New Orleans with water and Houston with evacuees.  While the nation watched the Bush Administration fail in its duties, Mayor Bill White and the people of Houston stepped into the void -- providing shelter and a path forward for countless "new" Houstonians. Hurricane Rita taught us that our own hurricane plans were inadequate. Hurricane Gustav taught us how quickly a major storm could develop. Hurricane Ike showed how re...

Promise? What Promise?

from the NYT " The Caucus " blog... "A gaggle of sign-waving protestors milled around outside The Beverly Hilton, the sprawling hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. They must have caught the president’s eye when he arrived at the hotel from an earlier stop in Las Vegas because he relayed one of their messages to the crowd. 'One of them said, “Obama keep your promise,’ the president said. 'I thought that’s fair. I don’t know which promise he was talking about.' The people in the audience – who paid $30,400 per couple to attend – laughed as they ate a dinner of roasted tenderloin, grilled organic chicken and sun choke rosemary mashed potatoes." Feel free to take this image and put it on your blog -- or even on a poster or t-shirt. Just do me the favor of linking back here and/or putting a link to your blog (or a picture of the graphic in action) in the comments. Thanks!