Gaddafi barely Holds Tripoli

Benghazi fell, and Tripoli can't be much farther behind. Supposedly Gaddafi still has control over the ancient capital of modern-day Libya as well as Surt, on the coast, and Sabha, a few hundred miles inland. Sabha is a staginging point for the mercernary forces that Gaddafi is using on the protesters.

It's bad in Libya. It's bad in Bahrain. What will the final picture be? How amazing is it that we get to watch in nearly real-time an entire portion of the world commence revolution?

In a country slightly larger than Alaska with just under six-and-a-half million people--largely living around the Mediterranean--it's hard to tell who controls what. The governments of their bordering countries, Tunisia and Egypt, have been overthrown; this emboldens the citizens to fight back.

I've heard anti air-craft weapons have been used on the protesters.

Yikes.

Excavated Arena

I know that this is a retention pond, well, an empty retention pond, designed to sap water away from our apartment complex and house it here until it absorbs back into the aquifer or evaporates, keeping the complex from flooding.

But one day when I was walking by I hopped the fence and took some pictures. I started to concoct false hypotheses about native games, native spectator sports, acting like an anthropologist or archaeologist.

So here is the chieftain's view of the game, the proverbial best seat in the house. Blocked by a fence in today's world, one can see what the leaderman saw, the whole arena sprawling out before their eyes.



Here a shot from a spot seen in the first look about halfway down on the right-hand side. Here you can see the opposite end that isn't blocked by trees, known as the Champion's Altar, and we also get a look from the player's entrance.



Here is a look at the player's entrance itself.



From the opposite corner, we can get a long view of the player's entrance, the chieftain's perch, and another valuable scaling shot.



Here's a look at the Champion's Altar from a corner, and a straight on look in the next shot. That was the place where the Champion would address the other players, spectators, and, most importantly, the chieftain. The acoustics would allow the Champion to be heard by the chieftain only if they were loud enough; being able to be heard is an important quality.




All in all, this site has some strangely vaginal views...

Prehistoric Garden

The third display that I'll be posting about from the Zilker Botanical Garden is their Prehistoric Garden. From a distance, I saw what looked like arrows pointing off to the left. Getting closer, the arrows seemed to keep going, but they kept going in the opposite direction that they pointed. Getting quite close, we can see that they're not arrows, but dinosaur footprints, and they're heading towards the Prehistoric Garden's entrance.



At this area of the Botanical Garden paleobotanists have convened and landscaped the zone to look and feel like a specific time period. They used plants that have changed very little in the last sixty million years. This next picture is not a plant, but helped frame the seclusion of the Prehistoric Garden.



Here is a statue of the kind of critter that you'd find within this environment at the appropriate time.



Here is an ancient type palm, but you van see how small the root structure must be since it grows out of a rock.



When I first saw this tree, I half expected Fred and Barney to come out from behind...

Japanese Tea Garden

The Zilker Botanical Garden has a pair of other displays going on year round, and this particular area, known as the Japanese Tea Garden, was in bloom, and was quietly spectacular and serene.

It was constructed by an older Japanese man, Taniguchi, who, in the late sixties, moved from Japan to Austin to be near his son. He made friends through his donations, and eventually convinced the honchos at Zilker to let him design an oasis and share some Eastern heritage with central Texas.

The first few shots are nice mood setter photos. It looks like, feels like, smells like, and sounds like anything you could imagine being called a "Japanese Tea Garden" .







This is a cool bamboo walkway. I like bamboo. I've never had to try and eradicate from property I owned, which I hear is nigh impossible...



Here I am out on a stepping stone walkway over a pond.

Zilker Botanical Garden

We ventured out to the Zilker Botanical Garden down near Zilker Park, home to the ACL Music Festival and a hard-to-follow disc golf course among other things. This is the first of three posts about our time at the sprawling garden area.

Now it is winter around here, which means that many of the beautiful plants in the Botanical Garden proper weren't blooming. This lead me to focus on some of the historical structures that have been transplanted to the Garden.

This first house is a Swedish immigrant's home. Swedes cam in startling numbers to central Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Well, startling may be an exaggeration, but the number is up just under twenty thousand, and that startled me.



This next structure is an old school house that was transplanted from today's intersection of Spicewood Springs and Mopac, a fact I include because I've driven that intersection many times. Inside you can see the three pew-like benches that would have housed homesteader kids and the like.



This is an old Swedish blacksmith building, complete with authentic tools inside and a backyard (not pictured) littered with rusted farming type machinery.



Here Corrie sits in the transplanted Butler Window. An Irishman named Butler made a fortune in Austin and built a great mansion. After his death it was turned briefly into an antique dealer's shop, and then it was dismantled and parsed out. This large window was planted here at the Garden overlooking the Rose Garden and Walk. At this time of year that view is less than spectacular.



Again we see Corrie, but here she poses in the Composting Garden Display. All around her are various containers showcasing the different methods of composting. Since we were successful composters, we were knowledgeably impressed.

'Melodrama in Manhattan

The Knicks traded away some okay players to get Carmelo Anthony and some okay players. Carmelo Anthony is a superstar in his prime and wanted to go to the Knicks--he stated that publicly--so I guess you have to make that trade.

When the Knicks lost out on the LeBron James sweepstakes they felt like they had to settle for superstar Amare Stoudamire. Amare has elevated the team not so much into contention, but definitely out of irrelevance. They should make the playoffs this year, and probably would have with just Amare. Right now they're two games over .500, but, let's not forget that that's ten to twelve games better than last year.

What the 'Melo trade does for the Knicks is gives them a powerful duo, and, more importantly for next year, makes them attractive for the saervices of a possible free agent point gaurd, the one position that, if filled with an above average talent, could push the Knicks into title contention. I believe they have their eyes on the New Orleans Hornets star Chris Paul, who could opt out of his contract and possibly sign with the Knicks. Now that team--Amare, 'Melo and Chris Paul--that team would be in the conversation and could legitmately beat the Celtics, Heat, Lakers, and Spurs.

Extra Laguna Gloria Photos

I had a few more photos from our afternoon at Laguna Gloria that I wanted to share. These aren't sculpture photographs.

Here I climbed up into a tree and out over the water get the shot.

Here is the gazebo behind a gate. This gate was a probable entrance back in the day when the water was lower, because now you get about ten feet behind where this picture was taken and you have river. I'm not sure why I like it as much as I do.

And this last picture reminded me of visiting our friends Jim and Debbie up in Rhinebeck, a hour and a half north of the City. It reminded me because of the walls/fences made out of stone that run all along the outlines of the seventeenth century property lines up there. In New York, they were erected in that time period, here, not so much. To me, this picture has both that "old fence NY" quality as well as the "south-east Asia" quality.

400th Post

CD baby! In case you're curious, that's Roman numerals...

This is my four-hundredth post, and I have to say I'm glad to have been at it for "so long", even though it doesn't really feel like almost two years.

The first two-fifty or so were from the "California Child Back East" title, about anecdotes and news and weird crap from the streets of Brooklyn and New York...even some crap that would interest me when I couldn't sleep. That was the large majority of the 2009 year.

The title then changed to its current iteration of "A California Child Deep in Texas", only because "...in the Heart of..." wouldn't fit. We'd moved from Brooklyn to Austin. 2010 was a year devoted to Texas and observations Texan.

In 2011 another move will be made, and the title will change again. I know where the move will be headed, but not necessarily to what I'll change the name.

For the record, though, caliboyinbrooklyn is coming home, soon to be just caliboy. The odyssey is ending. The odyssey is just beginning.

Having lived far away from what I consider my roots--some notion of homeland anyway--has taught me a few things. One of the last things I picked up in Brooklyn was to savor the visceral experience. That's what life is, frankly, a series of visceral experiences, and going places and doing things is the only way to make that happen. I know that now, even though it's been hard working two jobs.

Yesterday, though, on my Tuesday Afternoon, I went on a long walk to a quarry and was unceremoniously, uh, chased away by a gigantic dumptruck I thought would splatter my pedestrian ass, but that's for another post.

Thanks for sticking with me. I've been toying with a new direction for my photo contest, and have a few more photo-centric posts about some other cool local stuff.

Laguna Gloria

Clara Driscoll was the scion of the Corpus Christi Driscolls, a young woman made wealthy from the cattle and oil industries in which her father and brother were involved. She had traveled to Europe for her post graduate studies, and fell in love with the Italian-villa style of home construction. After she was married (in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral), she had some river-front land purchased in Austin, and a grand villa constructed in the style she liked. Nowadays, the villa is considered rather modest, especially for money showing itself off.

It exists today as a museum and gallery in Austin, as Clara had hoped. She purchased many Italian sculptures while travelling, and had them on display here. Currently there are a few modern and post-modern sculptures on the grounds sharing space, as well as some contemporary paintings inside the villa.

Because Clara was so afraid of fire destroying her Italian dream house, she had the entire thing made out of concrete in 1916. One claim to fame for Clara Driscoll is that she saved the Alamo.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many states were not in the business of saving historic places for posterity; some didn't have the financial resources, others didn't have the historical verification. Clara, though, with both grandfathers fighting at the Battle of San Jacinto--a major battle in the Texas' independence war--was brought up a proud Texan and knowledgable of Texas history. She purchased the Alalmo--the surrounding land and the dilapidated building, and held on until the state was ready to purchase it back, and preserve it as a landmark.

Not everything at Laguna Gloria is made of concrete. Here is a cool gazebo. It plays prominently in the many weddings that are held on the grounds annually; another stream of revenue for the site.

There are a few hand-crafted wooden benches placed around the grounds, some, like the following one, are placed so those seated can look out over the water. Overgrowth has blocked most of the view today. Also, the damming of the Colorado River to make Lake Austin caused about a third of Clara's property to be swallowed up by water, so the shoreline might have been farther from this spot anyway.

On the grounds there are plenty of palmettos, and I was even inspired to call a series of pictures "Winter in Thailand". This picture is pretty neat, I think, because you can see a physical manifestation of the wind, as in the ground having been swept by the palmetto frond.
Here is one of the many sculptures on the Laguna Gloria grounds. I was thinking of having a post devoted just to the sculptures, and I might still do it, but the thought of waiting for all nineteen or so pictures to load is enough to give me severe agita. This gal lives in the rose garden.

"Winter in Thailand" Series

These pictures were taken on the Laguna Gloria grounds, a villa and museum space on the Lake Austin section of the Colorado River. From Laguna Gloria one could see Mount Bonnel.

The proximity to the river and general humidity year round make this wooded/forrested area what it is, and what it is, because of similar conditions (it never gets cold over there, though), is very similar to the jungles of South-East Asia.

That's prompted me to call this collection "Winter in Thailand".

The palmettos stand in nicely for the tropical palms they have overseas, and I love the ivy climbing the tree.

1000th Picture

I've taken the thousandth picture with our new camera that was obtained right before a trip last September.

The milestone came and went without me noticing for a day.


Picture turned out pretty cool, I think. Backyard at the Dwyce house.

Tough World in a Cage

While watching an obnoxious travel-show host on a PBS program, I heard an older Teutonic lady who runs an African animal refugee camp (her place in Zambia was being visited by the obnoxious lady) say that while chimpanzees are now easier to get for bushmeat (deforestation in Zambia), baby chimps aren't shot; they're worth far more money in sales to Saudi Arabia. A passing comment from an older and wizened lady that got no attention on this particular show made me say "What? What did she say?"

I wanted to do a little research online; curiosity got the best of me. I'm not a hacker or anything, and I didn't spend all night chasing dust clouds, but:

This, this, and this are three separate ads on a Saudi site called ExPatAds that use the same two photos and twice use the same broken English to describe their baby chimp for sale.

Wow, I thought. Then I found an ad coming from Doha, a city in Qatar, that had baby chimps, lemurs, genets, and kinkajous for sale, all bread for quality.

That's in Arabic lands, right? That doesn't happen in America, right? Pretty soon I found this ad: (cut and paste)

Male and female Baby Chimpanzee.Healthy & registered with papers. Born and bred in captivity,tame and friendly. Gets along with other pets. Will sell only to experienced hand. Will ship at buyer's expense. Drop a note for inquiries at (silvia11@blumail.org)

This ad said it was for a Los Angeles location and provided the following phone number: 201-473-4473, which, as it happens, is for Seacaucus, in Jersey. Hmm...

After that I tried to find out some of the legalities of owning primates as pets in the United States. This site, Pet Monkey Info, gives probably the best breakdown of how to go about finding a primate for sale, how to care for it, and what states have what restrictions. Because the US is in line with the provisions of CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species), it is illegal to import any endangered specie into the States. If you purchase a monkey outside of the country, because of the CDC, you will not be allowed to bring it into the country.

Other than that, the federal government has left the question of exotic pets up to the states. In Alabama? No regulation. California? Banned. Nevada? No regulation. Louisiana? Surprisingly banned. Their state motto is "A Sportsman Paradise", where Sportsman means "hunter". Florida has the most specific, and labyrinthine, set of regulations on exotic pets of any state in the country, mainly due to the gold rush of cocaine cash in the 80s.

So, if you live in a state that has little or no regulation, and you can locate a breeding and selling organization, you can legally purchase for your home entertainment a baby chimp, or a squirrel monkey (very popular), or a lemur, or any number of weird things. Personally, I'd say be wary of chimps. They're thugs at heart (kinda like us).

Apparently, it's all good. And if your baby chimp gets sick, you can contact these folks.

Interesting Sight In Wilco

"Wilco" is a contraction of "Wiliamson County", the county just to the north of Austin and Austin's Travis County. Round Rock is in Wilco. I hear cops are bad in Wilco, similiar to stories I've heard about Roseville cops in Citrus Heights or the border areas.

Also, I think this interesting sight may be just inside the border in Travis Co.

I call my morning job a "morning" job because I, well, work in the morning, but the time that I leave for the job isn't day-break dark-and-light outside; it's nighttime. The job takes place in the morning, but I leave at night.

Since moving into our new apartment last Septmber, I've had the welcomed change of a different driving route. I noticed this "interesting sight" on that first drive:



Oh man, hovering, trying to steal cattle, maybe...Every day I go to work, this guy pops up out of the darkness at precisely the same moment. Playing with my camera's ISO numbers (the abiliy to let in more light when it's dark) yielded a little more of the outline:



While you know what it is when you see it everyday, it is remarkable how much it looks like a UFO everyday. At least a flying saucer stereotype. Here it is in the dayime, just to ruin the spell. While I may see it everyday at night, I see it everyday in daylight as well.

Photo Contest Winner(s)

We have a weena, and I don't mean this "You're trying to seduce me, aren't you Mrs. Robinson" shot from Rotterdam.



I didn't expect an answer so soon, in fact, with the small amount of readers I have, I figured it could take a while. But give a couple of enterprising fellas a prize incentive?

There are two winners. One texted me in the first two hours after I'd posted the picture. I wasn't able to get online and call the contest over, so another person commented on the post the correct answer, and since I wasn't able to call it over, I'm accepting both.

It didn't take twenty-four hours. Makes me proud...my blood investigative team.

Here they are with me:



My brother Dan commented on the post, and my other, Norm, with the long hair, texted me. I'll be sending two frames less than a mile apart.

I'll find another picture soon.

Corrie's Birthday Celebration

We awoke on February 4th to a what was being called a "snow cover", but what really amounted to a slight layer of sleet. It got me out of work for the morning, so it was nice enough.



Corrie enjoyed a pair of gifts I gave her for a while; I'll get more on them later.

She had put together this cool outfit jst for tonight:



We had dinner plans at a local Italian eatery with some of her family, and our friend Sam from San Luis was also visiting, so he happily joined. Dinner was plentiful and good; many leftovers for everybody.

Here's some shots of the Birthday Girl with her fam and Sam:





After dinner we shed the older generation and went to a club/bar that Corrie researched and wanted to check out; an Austin establishment dating back to 1957 called the Continental Club. The initial band that was playing was loud and great. They rocked hard for Austin, which currently tends towards that emo-punk/folksy Frankenstein monster that's popular with the hipsters. Each of the two guitarists took a solo in the full song we saw, and they were both good. Their name, I believe, is "Chris Gates and Gatesville".

The second band, The Mother Truckers, wasn't exactly for us. We held up in the back and tried to have a conversation, which, as hard as it was to hear, was made easy by cool scenery like this:



We left soon after and made it back to the bar where Corrie's cousin Rachel works, but not before Corrie tried to take some cool pictures of the capital at night:



All in all, blurry pictures notwithstanding, it was a great night.

Photo Contest

A framed 5x7 of the following picture will be sent--free of charge--to the first person who can tell me where it was taken. I'm aware that not too many people, in the greater scheme of things, actually read this site, so if, as a reader, you may know someone else who could tell you where it was taken, you might just win a framed picture.

There is no deadline. Let me know via comment, email, facebook note, text message, voicemail, or an old-fashioned postcard...



The actual picture is sharp and clear; the subject matter harkens back to a time when people's idea of the Judeo-Christian god was of a wrathful and vengeful deity.

Super Bowl Notes

A week and a day has passed since thw Man from Chico beat the Dirtbag Rapist in the Super Bowl in Arizona...

That's a silly and unfair comparison, since both teams had outstanding defenses all year.

There was a time when I rather liked the Pittsburgh Steelers. Back when the Packers had a young gun-slinger named Favre and they beat the 'Niners regularly, I became a fan.

When Aaron Rodgers, the current quarterback for the Pack, took the team on a tear down the stretch of the regular season I was telling people to watch them. They're going to be tough, and that this season was all about the ascension of Aaron Rodgers, the Man from Chico.

When they beat the crap out of Mike Vick and Philly, I claimed that the Super Bowl was going to be Rodgers and the Pack over Brady and the Pats; Rodgers needed to have a legitimate opponent in order to truly ascend.

When it was all said and done, it was Roethlisberger and the Steelers, which counts almost the same.

Corrie and I watched the Super Bowl with our friend Sam, who's visiting, and some of his people out at a Nintendo developer's house. There were tiny bets made on many things...first posession, first score, the over/under on the amount of time in seconds that Christina Aguilera would hold on the word "brave"...even the over/under on the age of Big Ben's next victim, which is in poor taste at best.

One thing I've noticed, having heard a variety of morning radio shows at my morning job, and spoken with many fans of American football, is that most people have no trouble voicing their dislike of Ben Roethlisberger and his alleged sexual assault. Nowhere on television do you ever hear that; those guys spend billions on football, and bad press could hurt their return. I had been nervous that other media outlets and even the random guy in the bar might all just ignore it, forget about it, sweep it under the rug...not so.

How many Super Bowl Championships did Brett Favre bring to Green Bay? The same number as Aaron Rodgers.

Mubarak Resigns

Hosni Mubarak is now the former president of Egypt. He handed over control of the country to the military leaders on the evening of February 11th. Celebrations throughout Cairo were roaring and people were already talking glowingly about "the events of 2/11".

The eighteen days of protest now has its climax. The writing, though, was spelled out in large Arabic letters on most walls in Egypt. The military leaders got together just a few days ago and had a summit meeting. Noticeably absent and uninvited was Mubarak. Didn't I mention earlier that a despotic leader, to hold onto power, must leave the military institution rather independent and intact, but that in turn makes them vulnerable to precisely that institution? Those military leaders issued a statement they called "Communiqué 1" in which they put down on paper their intention to support the true will of the people of Egypt. Usually plans with the number "1" in their name coming from the military are used for start-overs.

Mubarak is gone.

Something interesting to put this in perspective: consider 2/11 a nice bookend to 9/11. On September 11th, 2001, the Arab world looked like the wild west, like no one could be in power without being a thug, like democracy was nothing but a word dissolving in the sandy chaos. On February 11th, 2011, a revolution was enacted by the will of the people--without firing a single bullet--out in the apparently less chaotic sands.

Turmoil in the Arab World

A preview of current events going on in the Middle East was the mostly peaceful take over in Lebanon in 2005. One thing about that "revolution" was that Hezbolla's influence wasn't eroded, so it won't ever be seen as major as what's happening here in early 2011.

In Tunis, an ancient land--home to Hannibal and Carthage, the mix was just right. Young people protested, they were mowed down by machine guns held by the army, but the next week the army disobeyed orders to shoot. Within an hour the presidential palace was taken, with President Ben Ali and his wife fleeing for their lives.

Emboldened by this, this exercise of "People's Power", other Arab nations are stirring, with the new epicenter being the Egyptian centers of government and culture, Cairo and Alexandria.

That mix that I wrote about earlier, the mix that has the potential to reshape the Arabic world more that GWB, is: 1) a very large percentage of the population being between 18 and 35 years old (ie, young); 2) high unemployment; 3) an ever widening gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else; and 4) massive government corruption.

That mix is present in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinian territory, all of whom are watching with great unease how the events are unfolding in Egypt, the country with the world's largest Arabic population. King Abdulla in Jordan has already dissolved his government and pledged to hold elections very soon.

Hosni Mubarak, the 80+ year old "President" of Egypt has announced he won't run for reelection come September, but his motives are clear. He's hoping that his announcement will soothe the angry masses, that they then will settle down and things will return to business as normal, and come September, nobody will remember some crap that happened in January and February. He's pretty much completely out of touch with his country.

Mubarak, like any dictatorial leader, has spent the last thirty years eroding all of the country's civil institutions. This ensures that a healthy opposition doesn't form. The only institution that any dictator has to let pretty much control themselves, just so it can stay dynamic, is the military. That is the case in Egypt. The one obvious and glaring issue with that is that any dictatorial leader will be vulnerable only to the military.

The next few weeks will show us how Mubarak's regime might fare in the long run, since the young protesters aren't buying the "won't run again" line.

Another worry for these countries, once the governments have been disposed of, is then how does one actually run a country? A country that had this problem figured out by the time they needed it was Eritrea. (I'd been pronouncing it "e-RIT-tre-uh" ever since I met some guys from there, but I heard that it's actually "air-uh-TREE-uh".)

After the end of WWII, and the ouster of Italy from Eritrea by the British, Ethiopia and its king Hailie Salassie convinced the UN that Ethiopia and Eritrea should be in a Federation, an arrangement Eritrea agreed to, but soon came to regret. For thirty years they fought Ethiopian domination, with no help from anyone from the international community. They were called the greatest guerilla army in the world, and eventually took back the capital Asmara, a city that Mussolini had built up in the modern/fascist architectural fashion as Piccola Roma, Little Rome. By then the Eritrean fighters had spent nearly three decades running underground schools, hospitals, courts, even convalescent homes.

Eritrea had the necessary infrastructure in place when they finally became the power.

Let's hope that what replaces Ben Ali in Tunis and possibly Mubarak in Egypt isn't as bad.

Happy Birthday Corrie

Today is Corrie's big birthday, where she finally joins me in the fourth decade of life: she's now three-oh, 30. She's excited to be out of her twenties, and now both of us can be "old" together.

It's still not that old at all.



Happy birthday, baby! I love you.

Elisabet Ney

Born in 1833 in Westphalia, one of the Germanic kingdoms to unite in the 1870s under Bismark, was one Elisbeth Ney. Her father worked stone engravings for grave stones and similar fare. The Ney family was a famous German family, with a proud tradition dating to the Marshal Michel Ney, a great general of the seventeenth century. Famous and important as the Ney name was, it compelled Elisabeth to keep it even when she got married in 1863, strange at the time.

I had never heard of Elisbet Ney, or even Elisabeth Ney, until Corrie found a gallery and small museum sitting in a quiet neighborhood here in Autin.



Elisbeth Ney was allowed to watch her father work, and eventually picked up the craft, and before long she discovered in herself the skills of a prodigy sculptor. She wanted fame and fortune, to study in Berlin under the Prussian master, and to meet all of the "world's great men" that would undoubtedly be in Berlin.

Her parents were not so keen on that, since it was the 1850s and all, and we're talking about a girl, an entity that had no place in many of nineteenth century Europe's highest echelons of art or power or intellectual life.

Their bishop in Munster, upon seeing the young girl's talent, convinced her to try first at the sculpting academy in the nearby kingdom of Bavaria's most important city, Munich.

She agreed, and eventually became a friend and confidant of King Ludwig II, the young king who spent much money on his castles, Neuschwanstein being the most famous now a days. There she finally got to hob-knob with the Bavarian elite.

Eventaully she was admitted to the grand sculpting academy in Berlin that she'd always wanted to attend, all the while becoming the first woman to do so. At first the skeptical art critics (men) thought that her admittance was a gimmic, or a result of some amorous instigation on her part, but she soon enough rose to the top of her class, even with the added pressure.

Elisabeth met the famous philosophers and "great men" she'd hoped, and one important German feminist, who's own name change, from Rachel to Rahel, prompted Elisabeth to become Elisabet. In Heidelberg she met Edmund Montgomery, a Scottish physician, and the two, both rebellious iconoclasts, fell in love and married.

In her time in Europe she sculpted Otto von Bismarck, King Ludvig II, Schopenhauer, even Jacob Grimm.

Elisabet and Edmund emigrated to the US, at the behest of fiends in Georgia. They lived for a time in Georgia, then moved and eventually settled in Texas, on a plot in Hempstead. Needing to be around "important people", they purchased a plot of land in Texas' capital, Austin, but only after being commissioned to sculpt two important Texans, Stephen Austin and Sam Houston, for the 1893 World's Fair. They needed that commission money.

In her time in Texas, Elisbet was successful in creating the Texas Commision of the Arts, helping to found the University of Texas' Art department, and the Texas Fine Arts Association. Through her connections in the state house, Elisbet befriended the legislature, and even had every state representative over to her house for a dinner party. Even in Texas, she was surrounded by "important people".

Elisabet was a trail blazer in Texas for equal rights for women in the arts as well, but that could almost be said about her in general throughout her lifetime.

In the museum here in Austin photography wasn't allowed. I didn't know this until I had already taken a few pictures. So, here is King Ludwig II from Bavaria, before he was, um, disposed of by his, uh, trusted circle of lawmakers.



I'm not sure who this guy is, but it looks cool, and is visible in old pictures from Germany on the walls.



Here is a gallery of busts. Present, starting on the left is Jacob Grimm, who, along with his brother Wilhelm, are best remembered for their colletion of colloquial tales that are the basis of our modern "fairy tales"; next is German philospher Arthur Schopenhauer, who stressed that surrounding the populace with beautiful things will lead to a happy populace; then in the back we have Wholer and Liebig, two German chemists; and the front, on the left we have Garibaldi, famous Italian uniter and merchant; and on the right is Chancellor Bismarck.



Elisabet Ney, like Mary Wollstonecroft, was an early champion and inspiration for women everywhere.