S2L77: Red Fort of Agra

Agra, India
March 7, 1977

At night we attended a Sound and Light show at the Red Fort - a very good way to present history.

Source: Personal travel notes.

From 1977 03 02 India

More photos after the jump.

Review: The Time Keeper

Amazon

From The Time Keeper, by Mitch Albom:

A man sits alone in a cave. His hair is long. His beard reaches his knees. He holds his chin in the cup of his hands. He closes his eyes. He is listening to something. Voices. Endless voices. They rise from a pool in the corner of the cave. They are the voices of people on Earth. They want one thing only. Time."

After the jump, my review.

How to Revitalize Collin Creek Mall

And, at the same time, how downtown Richardson can learn from our northern neighbor.

The Dallas Morning News endorses Harry LaRosiliere for Plano mayor. Several sentences in the News' editorial are relevant to Richardson, too, but I'll focus on just one:

To counteract loss of retail to northern suburbs, [LaRosiliere] says, the stagnating Collin Creek Mall area needs a makeover and should be re-established as a destination, perhaps through a bond vote and a public-private partnership that opens up the creek and connects with downtown.

Source: The Dallas Morning News.

Does that sound familiar? It should. After the jump, a flashback to a blog post here from last October.

OTBR: An Ice Road over the Baltic Sea

Latitude: N 58° 37.716
Longitude: E 023° 02.076
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".

Who Killed D.E.? A Richardson Whodunnit

One question is guaranteed to come up at every Richardson mayoral debate. It's worded something like this: Who killed direct election of the mayor? OK, maybe not as dramatic as that. Maybe more like this: Did you support direct election of the mayor?

Amir Omar makes his answer the centerpiece of his campaign. He says not only did he support direct election of the mayor, but he took a principled stand in favor of it despite being warned that he would have difficulty winning re-election if he did so. Further, he accuses Laura Maczka of "leading the charge" against putting the matter before the voters in a charter amendment election.

Maczka denies Omar's charge, saying "it simply isn't true." She says she recognized that the city council votes weren't there to call a referendum on the question. There was no point to continue discussion and so she moved to end it. She says she has confirmed her account of what happened by going back and listening to the January 30, 2012, council meeting at which the issue was deliberated. She encourages voters to do the same.

I remember watching this drama play out in its first release. I reviewed it in "Campaign Promise? That Was Then". Here was my appraisal then:

Frankly, I was shocked with how cavalierly the council dismissed what I had considered to be a campaign promise. Not a promise as firm as, say, "Read my lips, no new taxes" but still, a consensus expressed during the campaign forums that it was time, after 25 years, to look into cleaning up our city charter and bringing it up to date. In one meeting, with no call for public input, with little or no homework evident on their own part, with no wrestling with conscience, the council quickly and decisively disposed of any further discussion of a charter review for this council term.

Source: The Wheel.

Still, in case my memory was faulty, in case the benefit of time might have me see things differently now, I took Maczka up on her call for voters to go back and watch it themselves. After the jump, what I learned from a second viewing.