Arsenic and Old Lace

Mesquite Community Theatre

Arsenic and Old Lace at MCT: Classic farce still works 70 years later. Laugh out loud at the same show your grandparents did. "Charge!!!"

Unsafe Routes to School

For the last several months, signs have been up all around the Yale Elementary neighborhood advertising street and sidewalk improvements being made as part of a Safe Routes to School program to enable and encourage children to walk and bike to school. Good intention.

I thought the city would be repairing sidewalks and perhaps installing curb-free sidewalk ramps at intersections. That some intersections that already had curb-free ramps were also being torn up was puzzling, but I thought that maybe they were adding those little round bumps to warn you of the approaching intersection. Still, why would they be tearing up the intersection for ten to fifteen feet? Dunno, but that turned out to be the least of the problems.

Houston Richardson, we have a problem. Someone from the city needs to come out quickly and look at the work being done (Mark Solomon, I'm looking at you). Someone needs to stop this before more work is done that will need to be redone. The program advertised as Safe Routes to School is taking already safe routes and turning them into accidents waiting to happen.

After the jump, one example of Unsafe Routes to School.

120th Caltech Commencement

From 2014 06 13 Caltech Commencement

In his introductory remarks at the 120th annual commencement for the California Institute of Technology, David L. Lee, Chair of the Board of Trustees, told guests some of the things that members of the Caltech community have been up to in the past year. He highlighted three things: the collaboration on BICEP2, which claims to have found the first observational evidence of cosmic inflation during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang; the first determination of the age of an extraterrestrial rock performed extraterrestrially -- on Mars by the Mars rover Curiosity; and the fabrication of a new silicon laser with unparalleled spectral purity that has the potential to speed up the Internet by orders of magnitude.

This last highlight was the result of research by a Caltech Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, a graduate of the Richardson ISD, whose parents just happened to be in the audience. We couldn't have been prouder of our son's achievement or more appreciative of the educational foundation laid in Richardson schools.

More photos from Caltech commencement after the jump.

A Round of Applause for RISD Insurance

The Richardson ISD is not perfect (no one is), but it's willing to correct its mistakes when they are pointed out. That's worthy of notice and applause.

When I first looked at the issue of school districts leaving its student athletes on the hook for thousands of dollars in doctor and hospital bills for injuries suffered while playing sports for their schools, the RISD was one of five out of sixty five in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that did not provide catastrophic insurance for its student athletes. As I said then, "Richardson ISD?!? No coverage? Seriously?"

Now, the RISD has corrected that egregious oversight. According to The Dallas Morning News, the RISD added a catastrophic insurance policy that will take effect before the 2014-15 school year. Three cheers for the RISD!

So be true to your school now
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school now
And let your colors fly
Be true to your school

Source: The Beach Boys.

Something in the Air (2012)

IMDB

Something in the Air (2012): Paris 1971. Rebellious teen drawn to revolution, art, love. Seeks purpose. Not my life story but I relate. A-

Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Amazon

From A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson:

That to me remained the greatest of all amazements -- how scientists work things out. How does anybody know how much the Earth weighs or how old its rocks are or what really is way down there in the center? How can they know how and when the universe started and what it was like when it did? How do they know what goes on inside an atom?"

After the jump, my review.

Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

IMDB

Much Ado About Nothing (2012): Shakespeare comedy shot in 12 days in B/W, set in director's house. Mostly works. It is still the Bard. C+