Found: extrapolated video footage of Houston’s soon-to-be light-rail routes, as viewed from . . . a crop duster. Hang time for the 4 routes shown: 8 minutes and 8 seconds. Your travel time and elevation may vary.
MIA: The University Line.
How old are these renderings, anyway?
Video: Gino Martin
And now, a rare look at the Second Ward’s indigenous Ship Channel dance ceremony, performed along the gentle banks of Buffalo Bayou and celebrating the bountiful fall harvest of crushed concrete.
Video: Freneticore
THE BATS OF WEST BELLFORT KHOU-TV has tape of the newest residents of the Idlewood Park Apartments at 11675 West Bellfort, just east of Kirkwood: A colony of bats that’s been living inside the walls of at least one building. An animal removal specialist from Trutech has installed a bat valve on a portion of the building’s second story. “They come out during feeding time which is between 5:30 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. They may have been in there for weeks, possibly months, but residents didn’t tell management until earlier this week. A resident shot video of the bats leaving for the morning and showed it to management. . . . ‘We will be here every day for two weeks to monitor what’s happening and to see what occurs with this. Because of the video, we saw there were a large number of bats, so this won’t be overnight where they are going to get out and fly out,’ said [Trutech’s Derek] van Delft.” [11 News]
And now, yet another Montrose convenience-store fantasy.
Video: Sharad Patel
That gonna-be-170-ft.-high pile of trash going up across the street from Shadow Creek Ranch? Nothing a little smart landscaping can’t handle. Rice architecture grad student Lysle Oliveros’s proposal for the Blue Ridge Landfill makes for a rockin’ video. And Houston needs a mountain, anyway.
Video: Richie Gelles
Houston ship pilot Louis Vest assembled this video from more than 2000 still photos he took on a 3 1/2-hour journey on a 600-ft.-long Panamax tanker navigating the Houston Ship Channel:
The ship was only moving at 5-6 knots for the first half of the trip and up to 10 knots in the open areas away from the docks. The journey begins just below the Port of Houston turning basin at the end of the channel and continues down to Morgan’s Point at the head of Galveston Bay. We still had 32 miles to go to get out to the pilot station in the Gulf of Mexico at that point.
Vest fastened his Nikon D700 to an outside rail and set it to take a photo every 6 seconds.
What does this trip look like in the daytime? Vest made a similar video last year (high-res version).
Wedding DJ, videographer, and UH student Sammy Butts loves his dorm room at Moody Towers:
3 years down, still a few to go… reserved the room again for next year. Just love the view of Downtown/Campus/Med. Center.
“What I see on my bike rides,” writes 2-wheeled real-estate observer Lou Minatti, “is that construction has ground to a halt in Katy.” A few more louminating observations on the cycles of West Houston real estate:
The main upscale neighborhoods in the Houston metro area lie between downtown Houston and Katy, in the corridor south of I-10 and north of Westheimer/FM1093. Houston residents know what I am talking about. That narrow 30 mile x 8 mile corridor contains the trendy new “lofts” near downtown, expensive new condo towers in the Galleria area, River Oaks, Memorial, the Villages and Cinco Ranch. . . .
Me? I live north of I-10, the crappy side. It was a nice quiet place when we moved out here in 1995. It’s still an OK place, no real problems. But property values have been flat since 2000. The houses on this side of the freeway are between $100k-$150k. Here’s the thing: Long-time readers here have seen my videos and have seen the inventory and foreclosures from my bike tours. The new houses in these videos [both featured in this Swamplot post from last fall] have all been sold, and this is AFTER the shady lending was stopped. I did a video update three weeks ago [above] and didn’t post it on YouTube because there’s almost nothing on the market! In my subdivision of 900 houses there are two houses for sale and one foreclosure. That’s it.
Last year Transit Antenna, a 7-person “mobile living experiment,” camped out at Joe Nelson Icet’s Last Organic Outpost, did a little farming, and painted the giant “FARMART” mural at the top of the adjacent Comet rice mill. The group, which travels the country on a city bus converted to run on waste vegetable oil, documented its visit — which included a stint in the Art Car Parade — in a series of website posts.
And not long after the rambling group left its urban campground, Transit Antenna’s Seth Gadsden posted this half-hour documentary the group put together about goings-on at the Emile St. farm and its Fifth Ward neighborhood. An HD version is also available.
Today’s as good a day as any to highlight the work of YouTube user hcp051000, aka Senior Airman Pan, who has compiled an impressive array of videos documenting the performance of some of this city’s finer vertical conveyances.
What’s it like to ride in these Houston elevators, really? Now you can find out — and shop for your favorite — from behind the comfort of your own computer screen.
Here’s S.A. Pan’s ride in the colorful cab of a Dover elevator at the Kemah Boardwalk Inn Hotel:
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=2O53kp1Te2M 400 330]
Are you an architectural renderer struggling to bring life to yet another vast Houston shopping-center parking lot in the drawings developers have commissioned you to create? This video should bring you inspiration! Go ahead and draw in that parade — that street festival — that touching moment of parking-lot excitement. You won’t be faking anything!
Today’s baton-twirling parking-lot-parade marshal was photographed by Jason of the Around Town Houston blog — as he waited in the drive-thru at Burger King on Westheimer, just east of Highway 6, just around the corner from the West Oaks Mall.
Practice makes perfect!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn75tA2g-kI 400 330]
About one minute and 28 seconds into this video advertising a home that’s been on the market since late September of last year, we get a little . . . surprise.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVnx0vWPnE0 400 330]
Blogger and head Michael Pollack cheerleader Lou Minatti posts this street-level video report on the state of the real-estate market in Katy and West Houston, and includes the following odd claim:
I’ve never seen a stucco house in Houston before.
It’s not just a burgeoning problem that’s destroying neighborhoods and creating havoc in the real-estate market: Mortgage fraud is now also the target of over-the-top TV-show parodies. Yes, “FSI: Fraud Scheme Investigation” is . . . a training video for bored mortgage professionals — or anyone who’s suspicious (or wants to be) that he may be surrounded by unlawful real-estate hijinx.
But really, “FSI” is so much more than that. Designed for “maximum employee learning retention,” the DVD has been a runaway hit for Interthinx, a company that ordinarily provides risk mitigation and compliance tools for the financial-services industry, but occasionally breaks out of that mold to film comedy-dramas like this or its predecessor, “Desperate House Lies.”
But wait, there’s more!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfS9gffQoxY 400 330]
What’s that slow, steady thump booming from the corner of Moonlight Dr. and Braesheather in Meyerland?
Why, it’s the sound of a crudely improvised “wrecking ball” fashioned by a frustrated excavator operator, trying to smash the extremely strong foundation of the Carousel House! The foundation refused to break using more conventional techniques.
The Swamplot reader who sent in the video above, taken yesterday, calls it Robert Cohen’s revenge. Cohen designed and built the house for his family in 1964. There are more than 100 piers under that slab. The reader reports that the demolition equipment has apparently broken several times and had to be welded on site or replaced more than once. And so the shovel picks up the “ball,” drops it, then scoops it up again. Demolition is proceeding, uh . . . slowly.
