Barton Springs Municipal Pool, Austin

One of the fun curiosities in Austin, Texas, is the Barton Springs Municipal Pool. As the name suggests, the pool is filled by spring water that keep the temperature around 68 degrees. People swim in it year round and the pool covers three acres of Zilker Park, just south of the city.

Pool with a little bit of downtown showing

My son getting in

The pool is a natural swimming hole that's been enhanced with sidewalks on one side and a dam at each end to keep the water levels up (the deepest part is 18 feet).

An idyllic setting

Using the diving board

Used the diving board

Another view of town

The far end of the pool is dammed and has Barton Creek flowing towards it. The creek water is diverted underneath the sidewalk so it can make it to the other end without washing away the swimmers.

Far end of the pool

Barton Creek

The downstream end of the pool has a runoff gate with a spillway beyond.

Keeping the water from getting too high

Continuing Barton Creek

View down the creek

Three separate springs fill the pool, each named after one of William Barton's daughters. The Eliza spring is the most visible.

Eliza Spring

Just outside the pool is a sculpture commemorating "Philosophers' Rock," a spot where three friends would meet to discuss pretty much anything. Naturalist Roy Bedichek, folklorist J. Frank Dobie, and historian Walter Prescott Webb are the three men depicted in the sculpture.

Sculpture and plaques

Close up

It's a fun place to visit with a minimal fee from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Visitors can come as early as 5 a.m., with the early hours being free.

Game Review: Unlock! Heroic Adventures plus Scheherazade's Last Tale

Unlock! Heroic Adventures published by Space Cowboys

We've played other Unlock! games (the Star Wars set and Night of the Boogeyman and a bunch of others) and have had mixed experiences. The Heroic Adventures set is highly rated so we decided to give it a go.

Unlock! games are escape room-type games that use a custom deck of cards and an app to solve a bunch of puzzles in an hour. The puzzles are thematically tied together to roughly follow a narrative (like an escape room). The app provides a timer, clues, some interactions (entering codes or solving puzzles on the app), and thematic music. 

The first adventure is Insert Coin. The players are a kid whose cell phone has run low on power and decides to play Grandpa's old arcade game in the attic. The game absorbs the kid and we had to play through several levels of video games that were clearly based on classics like Donkey Kong and Tetris. The game uses the app for some Augmented Reality challenges where cards have additional information on them when viewed through the camera on the apps device (we must have given the app permission to use the camera a while ago). The ending was especially fun and funny. We finished in time (just barely) and had one or two dings against us for using hints and bad guesses on puzzles. Still, we scored four stars, so not bad at all.

The second adventure is Sherlock Holmes - The Scarlet Thread of Murder. Players are assisting Holmes as he investigates a murder. Some of the cards were resources in the app, letting us look up information the way Holmes used reference books. Then we had to sift through evidence, identify some suspects, and solve some puzzles. A few puzzles were more than cryptic to us, including the last puzzle, unfortunately. We ran over time as well but still managed to score three stars. Not the most fun experience in spite of some clever use of the app.

The final game was In Pursuit of the White Rabbit, based on Alice in Wonderland. The puzzles share the whimsical and occasionally non-sensical narrative of Lewis Carroll's book. Players help the author find an ending for the crazy story he is crafting. We were a little intimidated by the timer starting at ninety minutes but the extra time was extra-entertaining, not extra-excruciating. We had fun solving the puzzles with some great "aha!" moments. We did take a few hints and the final puzzle was a little tricky to solve mechanically. Being familiar with classic story helps. This was much more enjoyable than the Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Overall, we had a good experience with this set on Unlock! games.

We also got a used copy of Scheherazade's Last Tale, one of the adventures in the Exotic Adventures set (they used to sell all the adventures individually). Scheherazade is the heroine of 1001 Nights, a source for Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, among other tales. Players help Scheherazade as she gets down to the last tale and wants to escape the Vizier because she is really in love with the Sultan. Puzzles include working with a magic carpet to travel around the city and rubbing the magic lamp to get the Genie's help. Some moments were cryptic, but only a few. Some puzzles show up early but take a while to get solved which was a bit frustrating. The final puzzle wound up being a brute force solution for us because there were no good hints about the answer in the materials. Twenty-two minutes of penalties! I'm surprised we still scored three stars.

Recommended for escape-room-at-home fans.

Movie Reviews: A Bit of the Ultra-Violence, Twice Over

The movie version of A Clockwork Orange is famous for pushing the limits in depicting violence and sex on the movie screen. Somehow, movies I recently watched put me in mind of the Stanley Kubrick's infamous opus...

Red Sparrow (2018) directed by Francis Lawrence 

Jennifer Lawrence (no relation to the director) plays a Russian ballerina whose leg is broken on stage by a co-worker who wants his girlfriend to have the lead. After her leg is mostly healed, she finds out the accident wasn't an accident and gives some ultra-violent payback to the couple. All of the sudden she is in a desperate situation and goes off to "Sparrow School" where she is taught to be a seductive, manipulative, and deadly agent. Her first assignment is to shack up with a CIA agent (Joel Edgerton) who has a contact in the Russian intelligence community. The Russians want to find out who their betrayer is. If she can earn the American's trust, she can find out and her comrades can take care of the betrayer.

The movie doesn't stint on the violence--we see the broken leg pointing the wrong way, we see the surgery, we see a tortured cadaver, we see a long and gruesome torture scene, and more. Clearly these were meant to be shocking and revolting but they cross the line into bad taste for me. The movie doesn't stint on the sex either--we see Jennifer Lawrence in various states of undress and in sexual situations with several characters, often just for the sake of her character manipulating someone else. It's a more explicit version of the sex content in the tv series The Americans, so also in bad taste for me.

I wish I had those two hours back and had watched a different movie. The plot is sort of clever but one of the twists I found too unbelievable so that ruined the story for me. Maybe if the characters had been more likable or sympathetic that might have made up for the flaws. It's just a lot of bad people treating each other terribly. Nothing to see here, move along...

Straw Dogs (1971) directed by Sam Peckinpah

Dustin Hoffman is a nebbishy American mathematician, David Sumner, who moves to a small English village, the hometown of his wife Amy (Susan George). The locals remember Amy, especially some of the young men who run the gamut from cordial to flirty to sexually aggressive. David and Amy have a house that needs some work. The local boys are on the job but are very slow and enjoy peeking in the windows (especially the bathroom window) at Amy. The situation escalates. Amy complains to her husband who doesn't like, want, or have any skill at confrontation. Through a plot contrivance, the house becomes besieged and David finally mans up in fighting off the besiegers.

Director Sam Peckinpah is famous for his violent westerns (like The Wild Bunch) and this movie is indeed set in a western English town. As with most non-violent people, when David takes up violence to defend his home, he goes overboard. Peckinpah clearly thinks David finally becomes a man by the end of the movie, though his ideal of manhood is stereotypical and superficial.

Even more problematic in the film is an extended rape scene of Amy by two locals. The way the scene is filmed, Amy objects to but appears to enjoy the first rapist; the second rapist is completely unpleasant. That's a problem, because there is no justification for depicting rape in any positive light, least of all as positive for the victim.

So Straw Dogs is another movie that makes me wish I had those two hours back.

Why bother writing reviews of these films? Hopefully I can spare you, dear reader, from wasting four hours of your time.

TV Review: Dark Season 1 (2017)

Dark Season 1 (2017) created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese

In the small German town of Winden, two children go missing. They were out wandering in the forest but no fairy tale creature took them. The body of a young boy turns up but he is neither of the two missing children. The investigation and the tension in the town bring up a lot of old memories, especially from 33 years ago when some children also disappeared under unclear circumstances. That story is blended with the contemporary story, so viewers see the characters in 2019 and 1986, when many of the characters are children or teenagers. The plot is painstaking and heartbreaking and very mysterious.

The plot is very intricate, dealing with multiple generations of the same character and interwoven storylines (you know, how real life is more complicated than usually shown). The filmmakers do a fine job keeping the time periods apart, though I had a little trouble remembering which kid from 1986 was (would be?) which adult in 2019. Early on, some characters start traveling between times which is not as hard on the viewers (on the other hand, the characters have a hard time dealing with the displacement). The time travel is always both interesting and perilous for me. I'm a bit of a stickler for logical coherence. This plot is satisfyingly coherent, though it does require viewers to pay a lot of attention. I like that in a show. Trying to resolve free choice and determinism is a challenge for both characters and viewers.

The tone is fairly dark (as the title might suggest). The children-in-peril element is too much for my wife but not me. Some injuries, both physical and moral, are rough to watch. The pervading sense of doom puts into question whether the story will have a happy ending or not, which generates a lot more suspense and investment. I found myself wondering how things would work out, if indeed they would. The show has a cliffhanger ending, so I guess I'm glad I waited a while before starting it.

The show is currently (August 2021) only streaming on Netflix, with two more seasons already made. I am sure to watch them.

Austin Capitol Area

The Texas Capitol is the third building to serve as home to state politicians and civil servants. The first structure was built in 1853 but by 1881 the people wanted to build a new one. The old one was burnt down and the offices of government moved to temporary quarters across the street. The new building was completed in 1888. The building was touched up and expanded in the 1990s, building an extension underneath and toward the north. The Sunset Red granite is striking and distinctive. The four-block grounds on which it is situated is home to plenty of trees and memorials.

Texas Capitol from the edge of Capitol Square

South entrance

By the south entrance is an old drinking fountain that is no longer in use, except as a light post.

Drinking fountain

Inside the south entrance is a foyer with statues of Stephen F. Austin (who is known as "The Father of Texas") and Sam Houston (who fought for Texas independence and was the first president of the Republic of Texas).

Stephen Austin

Sam Houston

The Rotunda features portraits of the governors of Texas, with the most recent at the bottom. Once a new one is elected, all the pictures have to move up one! There's still plenty of space at the top.

Rotunda with tour guide

A bust of the first female governor, Miriam Ferguson, is on display. She served two non-consecutive terms (1925-1927 and 1933-1935). Her husband had been governor from 1915-1917, so she quipped on the campaign trail that she was a "two for the price of one" deal. Ferguson was also the second woman to serve as governor of any U.S. state, though Nellie Tayloe Ross won her election in Wyoming on the same day and was sworn in two weeks earlier than Ferguson, so she is the first female governor by a small margin. 

Miriam Feguson

The dome reaches up 218 feet. The tour guide said that the Statue of Liberty could fit inside the rotunda! The star at the top is eight feet across.

Dome

Our tour took us to the Senate Chamber. Thirty-one senators come to work with the House of Representatives to craft legislation. The upper galley is open to anyone who wants to see the proceedings.

Senate Chamber

The desks are the original desks from the 1800s, though they have been modified. The ink wells now hold microphones for the senators and a phone is installed on the left leg of the desk. Senators choose their own seats, with senior senators getting first choice. So the parties are mixed on the floor. The guide said that they still vote by hand. One finger is a "yes" vote; two fingers is a "no" vote; three fingers is a "present but not voting" gesture.

Desk

The back of the room has two large paintings by Henry Arthur McArdle (1836-1908). I took a picture of Dawn at the Alamo.

Dawn at the Alamo

Across the hall is the House of Representatives Chamber. It's the largest room in the Capitol. 150 representatives work here. We were unable to go in because the room was temporarily closed (maybe because of the flight of the Texas Democrats in July 2021 when we visited?).

Temporarily closed or out of order?

Our tour took us to the new extension where we could view the dome from the outside. On top of the dome is the Goddess of Liberty. The original statue was weather-worn and thus replaced in the 1990s by helicopter! The original statue is in the Bullock Texas State History Museum just north of the Capitol.

Dome with Goddess of Liberty on top

Picture of the restoration

The grounds of the Texas Capitol have several statues and memorials scattered through the twenty-two acres that make up Capitol Square. The weather was beastly hot, so we only saw a few things. The Volunteer Firemen Memorial was striking to me.

Volunteer Firemen memorial

Close-up of the fireman statue

Terry's Texas Rangers monument is nearby. 

Terry's Texas Rangers statue

On the periphery of the square is The Price of Liberty, a recent statue dedicated to those who have died in service since September 11, 2001.

The Price of Liberty

We also stopped in at the Capitol Visitors Center which has some displays about Texas history. I couldn't resist taking a picture of the food of Texas!

Whattaburger, cookbook, and Blue Bell ice cream

The Capitol is recreated in Legos!

Lego Capitol building

A model of the rotunda and dome shows how it was put together.

Rotunda model

The wrought iron grille below was originally in the Capitol's South Foyer and protected an original copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Texas Secretary of State Jane McCallum found the document in 1927 and the display was commissioned. When the 1990s restoration happened at the Capitol, the original 1880s appearance required the removal of the grille.

Texas Independence!

Upstairs, a walk-through display showed what life was like for the first settlers coming to Texas. People were drawn to the Republic of Texas by land offers. Simple houses were built and the fledgling country grew.

Log cabin decorations/useful tools

A good variety of period costume are also on display.

I'd rather wear the right outfit

More outfits

We saw the outside of the Texas Library and Archives. The seals on the outside of the building represent the six countries that have ruled over the land. First, Spain held the territory, then France, then Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, then the Confederate States, then the United States. That's the order of the seals, obviously Texas was part of the United States before joining the Confederacy.

Back of the Library and Archives

Nearby is the Catholic Saint Mary Cathedral. We were sick the weekend we visited, otherwise we'd have gone to Mass there. It's quite impressive from the outside. 

Saint Mary Cathedral

The back of the cathedral