No Rockets in all star Weekend

“Houston – gets shit done.” Nobody wants a refinery, everybody wants gasoline.

And having lived in Houston and Dallas, yes, Houston is much more cosmopolitan, despite what Dallas thinks of itself. I do admire Dallas’ mass transit, though and it does retail better.

Houston is more open, diverse and generally harmonious than most cities its size, almost anywhere. Other places are quite self-congratulatory about that sort of thing, but Houston actually practices it.

The city has a “blue collar” rep, but honestly, I think we’re getting a bad rap for still, you know, having an industrial base. There’s plenty of white collar jobs, and the largest medical complex in the world, and good paying blue collar jobs too. This is a problem?

Of course, the climate is painful for most of the year, and there are effectively no tourist attractions, and no architecturally interesting place for visitors to congregate and spend money and that hurts perception. It’s a better place to live than visit.

Here’s a tourist attraction idea: cover the Astrodome and parking lot in solar panels (to run the AC) and make it a farmer’s market/specialty art/stuff market like Pike Place in Seattle or Granville Island in Vancouver. It’s still a cool space, there’s ample parking except for a few Sundays and rodeo, and it becomes a hip sort of focal point with a sort of bazaar set up on the “field” and permanent shops, restaurants and studios set up in the seats and concourses.