COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW THEY COVERED UP THE GARAGE DOOR MECHANISM IN THE EXERCISE AND TAXIDERMY ROOM 
“When you look at the other listing photos there is one that shows the ‘trophy’ room. This room has a two level ceiling, and you will notice a hogs head and a fish on the wall. The overhead door backs into the space that is above the lower ceiling section.” [Bill, commenting on Spring Home Listing Photo of the Day: Easy Access]
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COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE FATE OF THE NEON SIGN AT HUSTON’S DRUGS “The Soda fountain stays. I want to fully restore it to working condition, along with reupholstering the stools, and getting the chrome redone to make it all shine again. The sign out front is a different story. I would very much like to keep the old ‘Huston’s Drugs’ sign but the original owners’ family still owns it and unfortunately might be keeping it.” [Chris, commenting on Artist Renovating, Moving Into Washington Ave.’s Old Huston’s Drugs]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HIDING OUT ON THE TOP FLOOR OF A 4-STORY TOWNHOUSE “I’d hate to be the parents of the kid in bedroom #3, having to run up stairs to check on him. Do you have any idea how much mischief a teenager in a place like that could get in? I once had a bedroom like that as a kid, and it was awesome.” [Roy, commenting on Some Happy Guerilla Architectural Disagreement in Montrose, Ya’ll]
RIVER OAKS DISTRICT TO SEE ACTION, ADVENTURE 
The last we heard the River Oaks District was providing “move out concierges” to help Westcreek Apartment residents get off the property west of Highland Village where the upscale mixed-use cluster is going; now it appears that something’s moving in, the Houston Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff reports: Florida-based iPic has signed a lease to build a 560-seat octoplex. It might not end up looking like the rendering shown here, but it will be called “Escape,” reports Sarnoff, and it will allow moviegoers to pick — get it? — among escalators, self-serve ticket kiosks, beers on tap, recliners, and pillows and blankets. [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Oliver McMillan
COMMENT OF THE DAY: INSPIRED BY DESTRUCTION “What a charming house, perfectly sized for the lot. I like the painterly exterior colors, terra-cotta and celadon with the touch of yellow in the tiles. Someone had a very clever eye. I avoid shelter magazines, as they only foster envy and discontent in me. It’s surprising how much inspiration there is to be found just in the soon-to-be-demolished houses on Swamplot.” [luciaphile, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: The Marshall Plan]
FUNDING THE POST OAK BRT 
Metro board chair Gilbert Garcia throws in his $.02 on Uptown Houston’s proposed Post Oak bus rapid transit system that Swamplot reported last month: “There are transit needs everywhere. We know all about them. But Metro’s resources are finite,” Garcia tells the Houston Chronicle‘s Dug Begley. “‘If we can solve the transit needs in this region without stretching Metro resources, like this does, that is great.'” The project is expected to cost $177.5 million, Begley reports, though TIRZ-powered Uptown Houston will pay up to $92 million of that. “The rest would come from $24 million in state transportation funds, and a $45 million grant from the Houston-Galveston Area Council, using federal money the region received,” Begley reports. And the buses could start running as soon as 2017. Uptown Houston’s president John Breeding adds, ‘”We’re the guys who put arches across the street. . . . We’re the guys who put giant granite balls from China at the entrances.'” [Houston Chronicle ($); previously on Swamplot] Image: Uptown Management District
COMMENT OF THE DAY: RECREATING GREAT MOMENTS IN BIG BOX HISTORY “Ironically the glass facade is strikingly similar to a designed, but never built Great Indoors store prototype that was slated to open in 2004. The prototype coincided with the merger of Sears with Kmart when all new concept development (and gross profit) for Sears ceased. Pity.” [Hdtex, commenting on Great New Indoors Replacing The Old Great Indoors]
WHERE WILL THE RAMEN BE? 
You can order ramen at dozens of places in Houston, but The Modular food truck’s Joshua Martinez’s Goro & Gun, declares Houston Press‘s Katharine Shilcutt, is going to be the first dedicated to the squiggly noodle: Doubling as a bar, Goro & Gun is set to open in about a month somewhere Downtown; CultureMap’s Tyler Rudick hazards a guess that 306 Main St. will be the new spot, but Martinez calls that story’s reporting “very inaccurate.” So where, then? Martinez and his fellow gaijin Brad Moore and Ryan Rouse aren’t ready to say, but Shilcutt does slip in a few clues: “The downtown restaurant which will house Goro & Gun hasn’t been home to anything successful in years. Its last resident was a sandwich shop, which closed almost as quickly as it opened.” And it’ll be in a “shotgun-style space.” [CultureMap; Eating Our Words] Photo: First We Feast
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PLANS FOR HOUSTON “Houston didn’t develop organically. The original street grid was planned, the Heights was planned, Montrose and River Oaks and the Villages and Cinco Ranch, etc., all planned. At least 90% of the people who wax poetic about Houston’s ‘vibrancy’ and ‘free spirit’ probably live in a place that was very carefully planned. Our freeway system was the result of planning, and our organic twisty-turny roads were straightened out. Everything within 5 miles of Rice University was aggressively planned, and people love it. Property values in Houston are high in places that were planned, low in places that weren’t, which tells you what the market wants: Planning.” [Mike, commenting on ‘The Galleria Is My Idea of Hell’ and Other Houston Stories]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: TATTERS TALE “. . . I rather like greater Houston’s add-it-as-you-need it layout. I mean, I definitely see the distinct advantages that other cities have in their planning, so I’m not knocking them, but I think Houston has advantages, too. I couldn’t ever put my finger on why until reading this article, but I like that Houston doesn’t seem like some piece of created artifice, regulated in such a way as to preserve it in a frame. A “mediation between private homes and the impersonal corporate world†feels like some sort of sop. Like, if the city looks like something I see on TV, then everything must be fine here. No place is perfect, and no one should be lulled into thinking it is. Some more beauty would be nice (I can remember when this town had a lot more trees, for example), but our citizens are so disparate that I’m not even sure we can all agree on what ‘beauty’ is. We’re not homogenous, which gives us some great advantages, but it makes our public spaces kind of bland, even while the private ones are eye-popping. The city (including its many suburbs) wears its elbow pads on the outside of its jacket, showing off the tatters. It keeps the valuables on the inside, in hidden pockets. That won’t change for a long, long time.” [Sihaya, commenting on ‘The Galleria Is My Idea of Hell’ and Other Houston Stories]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: REAL ESTATE PHOTOS THAT ARE OUT OF THIS WORLD “I honestly love the house; it’s a very well-done renovation. But please, agents, quit with the HDR photos! I don’t know what looks stranger, the outdoor patio where the first floor appears to be in flames, or the close-encounters-of-the-third-kind turquoise glow outside every window.” [Dave102, commenting on Beaming with Built-Ins in Lakeside Estates]
CENTERPOINT SAYS NO BIKE TRAILS WITHOUT ‘ADDITIONAL LIABILITY PROTECTION’ 
Houston lawmakers Sarah Davis and Jim Murphy have each introduced a bill to the state legislature that would have more bike trails built here along CenterPoint-owned utility rights-of-way, but the energy provider’s response seems to StateImpact reporter Dave Fehling a little overprotective: “a CenterPoint media liaison said it would permit trails ‘if — and only if — the Texas Legislature provides additional liability protection to CenterPoint from people entering its rights of way.'” Fehling adds: “What has resulted, though, are bills that would give what lawyers say is almost blanket immunity to CenterPoint Energy should someone get hurt on company property while using it for recreation, even if CenterPoint was ‘grossly negligent.’†[StateImpact; previously on Swamplot] Photo: StateImpact
COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE AGAINST EXTREMISM IS NO VICE “Although I agree some of Ayn Rand concepts are a tad to the extreme, it is a necessary tool to combat the concepts on the opposite side which are even more extreme such as Carl Marx and the Occupy Movement. These days you cannot persuade people to your side by simply being centrist and laying out facts and figures, you HAVE to have a certain level of Theatrics and Overly Dramatized Dramatizations.” [commonsense, commenting on Comment of the Day: A Rand Retort]
IT’S NOT LIKE WE’RE DOING ANYTHING ELSE WITH THE ASTRODOME 
One of Houstonia magazine’s writers, John Nova Lomax, says that Houston, not Austin, ought to be the state capital; “Austin lacks gravitas,” he writes in a Texas Monthly essay this week, laying out his case and making a modest proposal to deal with one of each city’s landmark eyesores: “Slap a statue of Willie Nelson in the Goddess of Liberty’s place atop the granite dome and repurpose it as the Texas Pantheon. Fill it with statues, plaques, and exhibits dedicated to all those exalted icons who were truly Texas cool, and presto: a world-class tourist attraction,” he writes: “As for Houston, well, let’s not forget that it has long been home to a certain Eighth Wonder of the World, now just sitting there running to ruin. The Astrodome’s merits as a seat of government are limitless. It has rail service and ample parking and seating. It has skyboxes in which lobbyists, high above the scrum, could go about their deals. The old ‘exploding’ scoreboard could be reactivated, and we could make state politics a spectator sport. . . . Whenever a legislator started getting a little too grandiose up on the dais, an appointed sinecure (Nolan Ryan?) could power up that bawling, smoking-nosed bull that once thrilled baseball fans. C-SPAN ratings would be off the charts.” [Texas Monthly; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Russell Hancock
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A RAND RETORT “I’m well aware of the resurgent appeal of Ayn Rand, after she had become mainly a stage passed through by the young, shallowly encountering her for the first time. Now her stock seems to be rising even as people have happily embraced statism. I don’t discount the lingering uncertainty about the direction we’ve gone, but I am sorry to see the fanatical Ayn Rand resuscitated as an alternative. Approaches may differ, but her hatred of tradition and, as Chambers noted, her materialism — her approving view of ‘naked self-interest’ — really mirrored that of Marx. The conservative movement was right to drum her out fifty years ago. For myself, I feel intuitively that anyone who wrote as badly as she does, can’t have a mind worth attending to. I’m afraid that is my prejudice, and I can’t defend it, but I’ll never depart from it. More signally, the doctrine of ‘aesthetic selfishness’ is dangerous more for its reach than its fancifully ‘logical’ foundations, whose weakness — nonexistence — others have convincingly demonstrated, although I grant you, that her ‘thought,’ once you get beyond the bright shiny part about individual freedom, is so ugly, eugenics and all, that it has not always brought out the best rigor in its opponents. Owing to my own particular concerns, the legacy of hers I dislike most is the idea that Industrial Man has such capacity to alter nature that he stands outside of nature; that we’ve come to the end of nature. Others have written much worse than she, perhaps, but even if one generously considers her only mediocre, it is disquieting that she has become the Bible for so many. . . . ” [luciaphile, commenting on Could Glenn Beck Bring Independence to Texas?]