Category Archives: Keep Austin Weird

Things I do or feel like talking about around town.

Cold cold cold

Austin temperature on January 8th, 2010 (morning). Don't panic, it's Celsius.

We are expecting the coldest weekend in Austin in over a decade. I know that to some of my readers from Sweden, Alaska, the South Pole or Jupiter this is nothing. Well I don’t care. It’s notable enough for me to post. I had to take out my huge crazy winter coat that I never wear and I’m saving for the next Ice Age… so I can walk 25 meters from the parking garage to the office building.

As a favor to reader Eli Seidner, who practically got on his knees and begged me to do it, I left a bucket of water outside. Turns out that if you get water down below certain as of now undetermined temperature, it turns into ice. Ice! Hard to believe.

Beer and cheese tasting

Austin food blogger and friend Jodi Bart organized a beer and cheese tasting together with Amy Cartwright of local beer company Independence Brewing Co. and John and Kendall Antonelli of upcoming Antonelli’s Cheese early in the morning last Saturday (1 PM).

Fortunately, beer is one of my favorite things, and cheese is somewhere high up in the list as well;  so I could not miss it. Read more if you dare…

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E. A. S. T. 2009 – reminder

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Don’t forget that this coming Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd is your last chance to go to the East Austin Studio Tour, in my humble opinion one of the city’s best yearly events and best kept secrets (people just don’t know about it!). Over 150 art studios open their doors for you to visit, all of them located in the eastern part of the city. I bet you didn’t know there were so many!

The exhibitions cover just about any kind of plastic art you can think off: pottery, sculptutre, photography, painting, metal works, etc. going from “even I can do that” to “that should be in a museum”.

Expect a complete report from  The MKX® soon.

Global Warming and Me

Three signs of how bad it actually is:

1. Lake Travis

I was in Lake Travis last week. The lake is emptier that I’ve ever seen it before. And the low water level means little water flow, which translates directly to a dirtier than usual lake. We need some rain badly. More pictures including girls in bikinis upon request.

Windy Point

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Eeyore’s 46th Birthday + Where’s Waldo

Update 4/28: Now on The Austinist.

Update 4/27: The Daily Texan has posted an article with video. Try finding Jamie S.,  Carrie S., Marcos K., Jaramillo, or Tim H. in it. If you see them, post the time in the comments!

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Eeyore's 46th birthday

Yesterday was Eeyore’s 46th Birthday (previously covered in The MKX®), celebrated every year in Austin, TX. To spice things up, but mostly to give me something to post about in this blog, I joined the people of flash mob austin to take part in their latest prank: The World’s Largest Live Where’s Waldo Search Party.

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Most of the Waldo's lookalikes. Don't bother finding the real Waldo, he's not in the picture.

It’s easy: you dress like the notorious M.I.A. cartoon character and blend in with the wholesome crowd of Austin original hippies, little boys, and topless women. The real Waldo is walking around as well (it’s actually a guy dressed like him, but you get the point) and whoever finds him gets a prize.

More photos and a video after the break.
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Matzo Ballers

The Matzoh Ballers
Matzoh Ballers Kickball team: Daniel, Josh, Ryan, Jason, Shauna, Marian, Jen, Brian, David, David, David, Ashley, Marcos.

The very appropriately named team “Matzo Ballers” participated in the Austin Sports and Social Kickball CO-ED league last Saturday. The 30-team league was divided in a first round of groups followed by the playoffs.

This ad-hoc team was formed with members of YAD. I joined in spite of not having played kickball since elementary school, where we call it fut-beis (pronounced foot-base), I decided to join in. Given that most teams in the league play together year-round and we were randomly thrown together, we didn’t have very high hopes.

But we surpassed our expectations by winning the first game. And the second one. And the third one.

At this point we had been out in the field for five hours on a sunny Saturday morning. This made us be both surprised and thrilled of winning yet sick of being all the way out in a park by the airport in the middle of nowhere. Read more for the rest of the story.

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Like the good ol’times

Diego and Joe were in town last weekend. Diego came to play at the UT MBA soccer tournament (4 games in 2 days). Joe came to exert his bad influence on me. For those not in the know, Joe and I were on the same ulpan program in Kibbutz Yehiam in 1995. Diego then joined us in early 1996 for the legendary Machon Le’Madrichei Chul in the City of Gold herself, Jerusalem. We all look exactly the same we did back then except we changed our haircuts.

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