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.

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.

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".

Open Mic Night in the RISD

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.

Religious Bigotry in Richardson

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.