Thursday, March 24, 2011

Richardson Idol: Week One

A new season of Richardson Idol premiered last night from Mohawk Elementary School, hosted by the JJ Pearce HOA. This season there are thirteen fresh contestants vying for the grand prize, a seat on the Richardson City Council. As the format requires, it is up to the audience (and by audience, I mean me) to eliminate one contestant each week until we have a council.

But before we hear who will be eliminated this week, let's first hand out superlatives ... after the jump.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Mazel Tov: An Eruv Comes to Plano

How many people in Plano even know what an eruv is? How many people in Dallas know what one is, even though Dallasites have been living with two eruvin, maybe even living inside one themselves, for years?

After the jump, the curious new incident of the dog in the night-time.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

First Impressions of the Candidates

The May 14 Richardson City Council election has 14 candidates for 7 seats. That's a lot of candidates to learn about. So, let's get started. Here are my first impressions of the candidates. I know that first impressions are often wrong. But they can be hard to shake, so it's best that the candidates be aware of the crazy ideas about them that are out there. Let's just say this is a public service to help candidates shape their campaign message to overcome false impressions. That's it -- a public service.

After the jump, let's get busy with first impressions.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Checking Off The Great Wall From Our Bucket List

This spring break, Ellen and I visited John in China and in the process made some significant progress on reducing the length of our personal bucket lists.

After the jump, our itinerary and links to photos.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

OTBR: A Narrow Track in Italy

Latitude: 42.4598 N
Longitude: 12.2907 E

A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.

After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".