One of the courses I took during the summer of my senior year at the University of Texas was RTF370-Introduction to Film Criticism, taught by the awesome Dr. Charles Ramirez-Berg. For my final paper I elected to write about a topic close to my heart, the Beatles. I spent many nights at the PCL (main library on campus) researching reviews and reading interviews with Richard Lester before sitting down in front of a MacSE in the college computer lab and writing:

Auteurist Style and Ideological Views
in the Beatles Films of Richard Lester

In 1998 (a mere decade later) I found the floppy disk this document was stored on, and used the built in HTML converter in Word ’98 to share my paper online, uploading it to my personal web site hosted at http://members.aol.com/seabiscuit where it lived for another decade before AOL abruptly shut down their member web page services without notice.

Recently I came across a backup of my AOL web site files that included my final paper for Dr. Ramirez-Berg. If you’re a fan of the Fab Four (or someone researching A Hard Day’s Night or Help! for your film class) you might find it worthy of your time.

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There were many suggestions, with Alison making the final choice of “Scamp” over Rascal, Gadzoo, Lucky, and severa Longhorn quarterbacks.

Scamp snoozing on the couch.

Scamp appears to be part terrier and part something else – he looks kind of beagle-ish but more than a few people have said he has a Jack Russell personality. Here’s a picture of Scamp sacked out after an evening of chasing cats and toys.

Alison cuddles with Scamp

We weren’t planning to add another pet to our family, especially a dog. That’s what I keep telling the cats, but they aren’t buying it. But this puppy was too adorable to resist and the way we found him was just too fortuitous. Plus, he looks like a twin of a stray pup that my brother and I brought home when we were kids. Yazoo turned out to be a great dog.

Our vet says he’s about 8 weeks old. He’s got a lot to learn, yet (ask the cats). His favorite toy is a red rubber chicken, or any cat toy that’s closer to where he is.

Austin was once a much calmer and less crowded place. Within the last year or so it seems that new skyscrapers downtown have sprouted like weeds and some of Austin’s most time-honored locations have had to give way to high-rise lofts and generic stores.

Close to our neighborhood and heart, the peaceful pecan-shaded trailer parks along Barton Spring Road are slowly being razed to make way for condominiums. The Frisco Shop on Burnet Road was cleared to make room for one of those giant Walgreens stores like you can find in most any city. Early 60’s homes in our own Barton Hills are being cleared to make room for hulking two story duplexes that look completely out of place.

I recently became acquainted with a British band that was big in the eighties called The Housemartins. Their song Build reminds me of how we are slowly watching the soul of Austin being taken away bit by bit as the developers clear away the things that made this city something special.

Watch The Housemartins performing Build live on UKTV in 1987: