Wow, Color Me "Blown Away" -- Norah Jones -- "Origin" Is Grapevine, TX

My wife noticed this.

Go over to wikipedia and look up Norah Jones. Born in NYC but she considers her "home" to be Grapevine, TX. Wow.

That's where we live. She went to the same middle schools/high schools our granddaughters and/or their friends attend and/or will attend.

In addition, she attended UNT, Denton, TX, just north of us where the middle granddaughter often goes to practice Olympic soccer development.

See Texas Monthly:

I was born in New York, but growing up in Grapevine, vacationing in Big Bend, and two-stepping at the local steakhouse turned me into a Texan soon enough.

This explains her country songs, which I never understood until now.

Norah Jones -- and we're living in her neighborhood. Blows me away. Who wudda thought?

She was my favorite singer in the years 2002 - 2004. A long story. For another time.

More from Texas Monthly:

My earliest memory of Grapevine is going two-stepping at the local steakhouse when I was about four, not long after my mom and I moved to Texas from New York.

We’d go every Sunday. One week, a woman came with her three sons, who were all about my age and had on cowboy hats and cowboy boots. I was so happy because they wanted to dance. The band was playing good ol’ country music, and we danced all night. I really got into music later.

I have great memories of playing alto saxophone in the Grapevine High School marching band—because football was such a big deal, marching band was a huge deal. We went to band camp about a month before school started, and we had to start practice at six in the morning because by noon we’d be dying of heatstroke. We’d be at these competitions with polyester uniforms on and we would drop like flies. I remember our section leader telling us, “If you pass out, pass out on the side, otherwise you’ll get trampled.” There was a protocol for passing out! [Nothing has changed; it is still the same.]

After going to Grapevine High School my freshman year, I transferred to Booker T. Washington, the arts magnet school in Dallas. There was no marching band there because there was no football team, but I could take classes like jazz ensemble. After high school I went to the University of North Texas to study jazz, and I didn’t listen to anything but jazz. It wasn’t until I moved to New York the summer after my second year and I got homesick for country music that I realized how deep it was in my bones.

In junior high I didn’t think it was cool to like country music, but truth is, I love it. I love all aspects of it—the music, the lyrics—but what comes through in my music is the drawl. Sometimes my accent gets kind of twangy and my piano playing gets more country than I ever thought it could be—there are all these little grace notes in my playing that I associate with country.

After my first record came out and I started playing a lot of shows, I was really into Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, and I found myself trying to play like his sister, Bobbie Nelson, who was on that record. In fact, it was partly because of Willie that I began to realize what being Texan was all about. In high school, I remember thinking, “Since Willie’s from Texas, it must be cool to be from Texas.”

Lonestar, Norah Jones

Global Warming To Roil Power Markets Next Week -- Bloomberg -- March 2, 2019

Updates

Later, 10:45 p.m. CT: see first comment. Quite interesting. See also "Focus on Fracking."  

Original Post

 

When I started the blog eleven years ago I had no plans of following natural gas. I was only going to follow the Bakken and only going to follow crude oil. That did not last long. The natural gas story has become incredibly interesting.

Two tags: natural gas fill rate; and, natural gas fill rate 2018 - 2019. The EIA graphics are amazing.

One source linked at the sidebar at the right has provided an incredible amount of particularly good information. 

Had this been a winter like that of 2014, the natural gas story would have been even more interesting. I had pretty much given up on the story.

But it looks like things are just starting to get interesting. From Bloomberg via twitter, link here:

I think this was previously posted but I see the EIA has tweeted it again.

Canadian Auto Sales Slip For Eleventh Straight Month -- Canadians Want Trucks -- March 2, 2019

Talk about cognitive dissonance. The country that doesn't want pipelines to move fossil fuel and the country that is so concerned about global warning prefers diesel- and gas-guzzling trucks to fuel-efficient sedans. Who wudda thought?

Link at Auto Economics. Data points:

• Canadian auto sales dropped for the eleventh straight month in February, 2019
• auto sales fell 3.7 percent from a year earlier
• truck sales rose 1.2 percent
• passenger car sales fell a whopping 16 percent
• heavy goods vehicles? represented nearly 75% of all sales in the month

What do analysts blame? "Significant snow and weather" events. I can't make this stuff up. Remember, this was not a single month of declining auto sales but the eleventh straight month. Hard to believe that "significant snow and weather" was the reason for the "eleventh straight month."

Whatever.

Future Of Wi-Fi -- The WSJ -- March 2, 2019

Of all the non-energy stories I've blogged about over the past eleven years, this one is one of my favorite. Years ago when visiting the local Apple store -- out in California -- I mentioned to the young millennial (though no one knew what a "millennial" was back then) that "some day wi-fi would be everywhere and it would be free everywhere." He disagreed saying that no one would ever leave that much money on the table by not charging for wi-fi.

Fast forward ten years: wi-fi is everywhere and for the most part wi-fi is completely free.

I was unaware that a war was brewing but it goes back to what that millennial said many years ago: "no one would leave that much money on the table."

And that seems to be the case. The telecommunications folks are eager to see wi-fi disappear so that they can charge you and me extravagant fees for 5G.

From The WSJ this weekend: cellphone carriers envision world without wi-fi. Verizon calls Wi-Fi "rubbish," but providers say it is cheaper and "getting smarter."

Cellphone companies can’t quit Wi-Fi just yet, though not for lack of trying. Cheap and unburdened by regulations governing mobile-phone service, Wi-Fi networks have grown from a coffee-shop perk to near ubiquity. There will be more than 549 million global public and cable company-run hot spots by 2022, contributing to a technology that accounts for more than half of all internet traffic, according to equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc.

At the same time, telecom executives say fifth-generation cellular technology could drive more data and revenue onto their networks. One of 5G’s top selling points is its ability to more cheaply link swarms of machines to cellphone networks.

Ronan Dunne, head of Verizon Communications Inc.’s new consumer-focused unit, says many customers should be able to get rid of Wi-Fi at home once 5G is rolled out and new technologies spread its signal throughout homes.

Look at this:

“I think the jury’s still out,” Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s chief executive, said in an interview. “There’s certainly a lot of downstream discussion about it.” Hot spots are so common, he added, that it makes sense to buy a device like a Wi-Fi-only computer tablet that isn’t likely to travel where a signal can’t be found.

In fact, Apple does exactly that, offering tablets and iPods that are wi-fi only and they've done that for years.

Great, great article. Worth archiving.

The California Drought Is Washed Away -- March 2, 2019

The California drought washed away. From the Pasadena Star-News. Worth archiving. The graphics are incredible.

An atmospheric river that formed over the Pacific Ocean in early 2017, sending storm after storm after storm toward the West Coast, officially ended the drought. 

The winter of 2017-18, however, was unusually dry, and drought conditions spread back over California throughout 2018. They weren’t as severe as they’d been in 2016 — this time, none of the state entered that “exceptional” drought category.

Once again, 2019 has been rainier than average thanks to back-to-back storms throughout January and February. The Drought Monitor shows that as of Feb. 19, less than 4 percent of the state is in drought. The 29 percent of the state that’s still abnormally dry includes most of Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties and parts of Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

And it's still raining. 

It Never Rains In Southern California, Albert Hammond