Stefani Carter Fiddles While Texas Burns

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.

Springtime in SpringPark

From Flowers

More photos after the jump.

When Does Daylight Saving Time Begin?

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. ;-)

Richardson City Council Races Heat Up

Kinda. Sorta. We don't have any new officially-filed candidates, but the agitators are beginning to stir. In a move eagerly anticipated by many (and by many, I mean me), the Richardson Citizens Alliance launched a website this week.

After the jump, what we can learn about the Alliance from their own words.

Things I Learned In Grade School

As I grow older (and wiser), there are more and more things that I learned in my Catholic grade school that I'm now finding out are not universally shared beliefs as I had once assumed.

After the jump, what I once believed was common sense.