Dallas Arboretum's 12 Days of Christmas

From 2015 12 30 Dallas Arboretum

The Twelve Days of Christmas, the second most annoying Christmas song ever, celebrates the twelve days between the birth of Christ (Christmas, December 25) and the coming of the Magi (Epiphany, January 6). The Dallas Arboretum celebrates the twelve days of Christmas from November 27 - January 3 (yeah, that's 38 days; I don't think they care). Scattered around the arboretum grounds are twelve Victorian gazebos each filled with animals and characters from the song. The DeGolyer house itself is filled with nativity sets. All in all, the best thing to ever happen to the song.

All photos from our visit to the Dallas Arboretum can be seen in Google Photos.

POTD: Black-Eyed Susan Photo Bombs the Badlands

From 2015 08 15 South Dakota

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The geology here takes center stage. But when a single black-eyed susan sticks its head up how can a photographer resist letting it upstage the multi-colored layers of rocks in the eroded hillsides?

Do I Sound Gay? (2014)

IMDB

Do I Sound Gay? (2014): Is there such a thing? Can it be changed? Does it matter? Surprisingly informative look at a cultural stereotype. B-

POTD: Lincoln's Craggy Face

From 2015 08 15 South Dakota

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It's a close-up of the face of Abraham Lincoln. According to a BBC story ("Abraham Lincoln: The enduring images"), Lincoln was the first president of the photographic era. Lincoln himself credited an iconic Matthew Brady photograph taken in early 1860 with making him president. It shows a clean-shaven, "sober, respectable, powerful intellectual who could become president." Four years later, another photograph tells a different story. "The Civil War was coming to an end and the enormous toll taken by four years of conflict is etched into the lines of Lincoln's craggy face." The granite of Mount Rushmore is the perfect medium to capture that Lincoln.

Yelp Reviews Get a New Useful Feature

You may like a Richardson restaurant for its food, but what do you know about its health inspection rating? Probably nothing. Not because Richardson doesn't conduct health inspections of restaurants, but because the city doesn't do much to make the ratings easily accessible to diners. That may be changing.

It's been a pet peeve of mine for years that Richardson promotes local restaurants with its "Dine Smart Dine Local" program, and Richardson publishes restaurant health inspection scores, but the city made no effort to tie the two together. The Wheel complained about it two years ago, and even pointed to a third party solution that promised to be cheaper and more useful than some in-house development by the city's IT department. That was two years ago. Nothing changed.