Birdman (2014)

IMDB

Birdman (2014): Pretentious. Over-acted. Movie and theater-industry navel-gazing. Oscar mistake. C+

Apportioning Blame for City's Mess

Yesterday, when I wrote about the difficulties of using the Richardson City Charter's recall provision to force a special election for mayor, I came down hard on the unknown author of the charter amendments specifying direct election of the mayor. After I wrote that, I was privately chided for not apportioning any blame to the city council itself.

Guilty as charged, although let me say two things in my defense.

Recall: Solution or a Can of Worms?

In 2012, Bill McCalpin published a lot of editorials arguing that the proposed Richardson city charter amendments, calling for direct election of the mayor, are "inconsistent, incomplete, and full of unintended errors." He was dismissed by some at the time for attempting to scare the public into voting "no." Now, in just the second election since the charter changes were adopted, the city is in an uproar caused by some of those inconsistencies and ambiguities in the new charter.

Short Season of Richardson Idol Starts

Given that only two seats on the Richardson City Council are being contested this year, and all the focus has been on the mayor's decision not to serve another term, although she is running unopposed, this season of "Richardson Idol" will necessarily be an abbreviated one. That's not to say it won't be an exciting one.

The April 2015 edition of Richardson Today listed a "Highland/Terrace N.A. Council Candidate Forum" for April 7. I made plans to attend. Then I read this comment by Shelley McCall on Facebook:

We are holding a "Neighborhood" only Forum and [Mabel] Simpson never even had the courtesy to respond to our invitation. I suspect she was told she didn't need our votes.

Source: Facebook.

There were two things I found strange about that. First, that a candidate forum wasn't open to the general public. Second, that the president of the neighborhood association that was hosting the forum would make negative comments about one of the candidates and cast aspersions on her motives.

Luckily for me, Shelley McCall added later in the same Facebook thread, "our Forum was for our neighborhood only but we have opened it up to the rest of the city's residents." So, off I went.

OTBR: Las Vegas Skyline

Latitude: N 35° 56.556
Longitude: W 115° 08.556

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".