CAFR: Those Pesky "Deferred Outflows"

For city finance wonks, Christmas comes twice a year: once in August when the city budget is set and again in February when the city financial audit is published. The budget specifies the city's cash flow (its planned revenues and expenses). The financial audit details the city's assets (the value of city property, bank accounts, etc.) and its liabilities (outstanding debt, pension obligations, etc.).

Consider this a layman's adventure into the netherworld of municipal accounting, otherwise known as the CAFR. Fun fact: CAFR happens to be the abbreviation of a Latin phrase that means, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." (Warning: I have the same lack of training in Latin as in accounting). Open the door and you'll be lured into a spider's web of terms and numbers that will bring you down and overwhelm you and smother you. Last warning: run away!

After the jump, the descent begins into this year's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for the City of Richardson.

Review: Welcome to Braggsville

Amazon

From Welcome to Braggsville, by T. Geronimo Johnson:

It's not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person — No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person — and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said."

Those four diverse characters are the self-identified "Four Little Indians." They meet at UC-Berkeley and travel together to rural Georgia on school break. An "incident" there changes all their lives.

After the jump, my review.

Gleason (2016)

IMDB

Gleason (2016): Documentary of former NFL player with ALS. Raw and relentless as real life, clichéd as movie. Needs more of wife's story. C+

Fences (2016)

IMDB

Fences (2016): Denzel Washington in a Willy Loman role, raising questions about what it means to be a husband, father, man. Oscar-worthy. A+

OTBR: South Mountain Creamery

Latitude: N 39° 27.918
Longitude: W 077° 36.498

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".