Bye Bye Birdie at BHS

Bye Bye Birdie at Berkner High School: A+ all around -- orchestra, lead singers, chorus, choreography, comic acting (Shriners hilarious). Best sound ever.

Little Shop of Horrors at RHS

Little Shop of Horrors at Richardson High School: Intimate setting of black box theater works well. The macabre has never been this much fun. Feed me!

S2L77: Kathmandu Durbar Square

From 1977 02 21 Nepal

Durbar Square is a generic name for a plaza outside an old royal palace in Nepal. There are three in Kathmandu. These photos are of Kathmandu Durbar Square. Palaces, temples, courtyards, all with elaborately carved and decorated architecture make up this UNESCO World Heritage site. Because much of the architecture is wood, few buildings or carvings more than a few centuries old have survived, but the site has been in continuous use since at least the third century.

More photos after the jump.

Unconventional Wisdom About Austerity

Recently, I challenged the conventional wisdom that when families and businesses are tightening their belts because times are tough, that government should, too. (See "Enough with the Belt-Tightening Already" and "Spendthrift Sam and Judicious Janet.")

To argue the point I used words, mostly paraphrasing an argument made more compellingly by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. After the jump, another tack: a picture that's worth a thousand words.

Main Street/Central Expressway Study

Source: City of Richardson.

The time for study is over. Now it's time for recommendations and implementation. The result of the Main Street/Central Expressway Study was presented to the Richardson City Council Monday night. It's full of nice pictures of street layouts and glass and steel office buildings all bordered by row after row of trees. Beyond that? It looks to this observer like the presentation could have been created by an advanced team of college students from a university in, say, Oregon or Massachusetts who were assigned a theoretical exercise in urban planning and given Google Maps and a drawing app. I see SimCity, not Richardson.

After the jump, a look at just the ideas for the heart of Richardson.