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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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".
Among the things I learned not in school but at a school board meeting, I can now add the word "recognee". Google doesn't find the word in any dictionary but it's a word all right. You know what it means without needing a dictionary to tell you. And it was used in public with the audience understanding the speaker's meaning. That's how language works, so it's a word. (By the way, Google records only 226 hits on the word "recognee" in an advanced search of billions of documents in its vast database. Try to come up with some other somewhat plausible word that scores more than 0 but fewer than 226 hits. It's not easy.)
The recognees were teachers and students honored for outstanding achievement by the Richardson school board (RISD) at its regular meeting Monday night. Honored were All-State musicians (RISD has one of the best music programs in the state, no, in the nation), art students who won scholarships and awards, schools that won national recognition for high performance, and teachers who won state or national awards (Jim Ledford is an RISD treasure who was named a national finalist for the "2011 Positive Coaching Alliance Double Goal Coach Award." Try parsing that. It sounds more like a trick play you call when you're down by two touchdowns with time running out in a football game.)
After the awards, the school board quickly went through the rest of the agenda, approving items on the consent agenda, recognizing gifts and gaveling the meeting to a close.
The only unscripted part of the meeting was the Visitors section, where members of the public address the school board on any topic they choose. After the jump, this week's two visitors.
A few days ago, another blog injected religious bigotry into local politics. Here is an excerpt of what was posted.
"There are several other small local city governments around Dallas that have muslim city councilmen on their councils, and they are being watched closely. As their bases are growing, their power is growing. Texas politicos tell me this is their Plan and this is the trend and it is going the momentum is building. Expect more city governments (small) to be headed by muslims. Then they run for State level positions, then Federal. They are building LEADERS. Soon they will be OUR LEADERS."
After the jump, getting down and dirty.
Texas is in financial crisis. The state faces a $27 billion budget shortfall over the next two years. Raising revenue is off the table. Huge spending cuts are on. Schools across the state may lose 100,000 teachers. The Dallas school district (DISD) alone fears having to lay off 4,000 teachers and increase class sizes from 25 to 35 students. Medicaid cutbacks are in the works, along with cuts to the children's health insurance program. You would think the budget crisis would be top priority for our legislators in Austin. You'd think saving jobs for Texans would be their own Job 1. You would be wrong.
After the jump, what first-term Dallas representative Stefani Carter (TX House District 102) is working on instead.
Remember the old days when the supermarket checkout lanes were full of tabloid newspapers with attention-grabbing headlines like "Hillary Clinton Gives Birth to Space Alien Baby"? Anything to get you to put that newspaper into your shopping cart. Well, those days of the news media using sensational headlines to attract eyeballs aren't gone -- if anything, they've expanded from the supermarket to basic cable television to the local news.
Now, on the Internet, there's a new twist in the old headlines game. The new goal is to ensure your story shows up high in Google's search results. As The New York Times explains, search engine optimization (SEO) is the new game. Headlines with puns and double entendres are out. Headlines chock full of trending Google and Twitter search terms are in. Anything to increase the number of clicks that lead to your website. If the story you deliver is relevant to the searcher, that's a plus, but it's not a requirement. Huffington Post is a master of the game, so much so that AOL just paid $315 million to buy Huffington Post to get those clicks.
By the way, Daylight Saving Time (abbreviated DST, EDT, CDT, MDT, PDT; also called Daylight Savings Time with an "s"; or Summer Time in Great Britain, Sommerzeit in Germany, zomertijd in the Netherlands and l'heure d'été in France) begins (or starts) in the United States at 2:00 a.m., March 13, 2011. And it has nothing to do with Mardi Gras, which this year falls on March 8, 2011. ;-)
