Richardson Lacks Fight Against TxDOT

At the June 23, 2014, Richardson City Council meeting, city staff presented TxDOT's plans for a tolled express lane on US 75 between IH 635 and Allen. Both the staff presentation and the city council reaction were impotent.

After the jump, why.

Touring the Reagan Library

From 2014 06 12 Reagan Library

While visiting southern California for the Caltech commencement ceremony, Ellen and I took the opportunity to tour the Reagan Presidential Library. This added to our growing list of libraries, having previously visited the libraries of Hoover, Truman, LBJ, Bush 41 and Clinton (we'll soon add Bush 43's library too as it's just down the road in Dallas).

The Reagan library's setting is stunning, high in the hills above Simi Valley. The main exhibits are humdrum -- windowless rooms burnishing the achievements of the Reagan presidency and overlooking the not-so-laudatory events. But it's the Air Force One Pavilion that people identify with the Reagan library. Think of the GOP presidential primary debates, with the candidates lined up under the wing of Air Force One. It's a spectacular exhibit, with the plane facing one glass wall, beyond which the California hills form just as spectacular a backdrop.

More after the jump.

Arsenic and Old Lace

Mesquite Community Theatre

Arsenic and Old Lace at MCT: Classic farce still works 70 years later. Laugh out loud at the same show your grandparents did. "Charge!!!"

Unsafe Routes to School

For the last several months, signs have been up all around the Yale Elementary neighborhood advertising street and sidewalk improvements being made as part of a Safe Routes to School program to enable and encourage children to walk and bike to school. Good intention.

I thought the city would be repairing sidewalks and perhaps installing curb-free sidewalk ramps at intersections. That some intersections that already had curb-free ramps were also being torn up was puzzling, but I thought that maybe they were adding those little round bumps to warn you of the approaching intersection. Still, why would they be tearing up the intersection for ten to fifteen feet? Dunno, but that turned out to be the least of the problems.

Houston Richardson, we have a problem. Someone from the city needs to come out quickly and look at the work being done (Mark Solomon, I'm looking at you). Someone needs to stop this before more work is done that will need to be redone. The program advertised as Safe Routes to School is taking already safe routes and turning them into accidents waiting to happen.

After the jump, one example of Unsafe Routes to School.

120th Caltech Commencement

From 2014 06 13 Caltech Commencement

In his introductory remarks at the 120th annual commencement for the California Institute of Technology, David L. Lee, Chair of the Board of Trustees, told guests some of the things that members of the Caltech community have been up to in the past year. He highlighted three things: the collaboration on BICEP2, which claims to have found the first observational evidence of cosmic inflation during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang; the first determination of the age of an extraterrestrial rock performed extraterrestrially -- on Mars by the Mars rover Curiosity; and the fabrication of a new silicon laser with unparalleled spectral purity that has the potential to speed up the Internet by orders of magnitude.

This last highlight was the result of research by a Caltech Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, a graduate of the Richardson ISD, whose parents just happened to be in the audience. We couldn't have been prouder of our son's achievement or more appreciative of the educational foundation laid in Richardson schools.

More photos from Caltech commencement after the jump.