Month: August 2006

I’ve been catching up on some of my blogs tonight that I don’t read on an every day basis.
So get ready for some fun posts…
A church in Memphis, Tenn. has constructed a 72-foot Statue of Liberation Through Christ, which is basically a Statue of Liberty with a cross instead of a torch in one hand and the 10 commandments in the other.
Are you serious?!
“[It’s] a creative means of just really letting people know that God is the foundation of our nation,” said World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church pastor Alton R. Williams.
Williams has also bought full page ads in a Memphis paper condemning homosexuality, lists “legalized abortion, a lack of prayer in schools and the country’s ‘promotion of expressions of New Age, Wicca, secularism and humanism,'” among the nation’s ills, and claimed Hurricane Katrina was punishment for the sins of New Orleans.
It keeps getting better and better doesn’t it?
Kevin Hendicks says, “Just add it to the other religious monuments, including ‘touchdown’ Jesus and the 99-foot eyesore.”

Just hangin
Originally uploaded by Jdblundell.

Just hangin out at my crib with Laurie

Updated information from contacts at Cingular:

Areas affected appear to be limited to parts of Texas.

Having trouble making or receiving calls from your Cingular phones? Or maybe having trouble calling someone with a Cingular phone? Well this just in:

About 2:45 p.m., Cingular began experiencing a problem with the long distance signaling system between Texas and Washington state. The problem may affect customers’ abilities to make or receive calls. Areas affected include parts of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Repair teams are fully engaged but we have no estimated time of restoral at this time.
Customers can still communicate by text messaging, since data services are unaffected.

And my friends said text messaging was just a fad. You know technology has moved from a fad to useful when you start text messaging the county judge and commissioners.

The Startle Gram suggests we should be pointing blame the Texas PUC, not TXU for our high electricity rates.

It’s a natural thing to blame TXU for our high electric bills, but is TXU really at fault?
If we’re going to blame anybody or anything, it should be Texas Public Utilities Commission, which has allowed TXU to jack up rates by 24 percent in just one year …
Twice a year, TXU is allowed to ask for a rate increase and it usually does, and the PUC usually says “Sure!” …. You all might be interested to know that TXU has never asked for a rate decrease.
You all also might remember that the PUC will go out of business in January. That’s when deregulation of utilities in Texas is supposed to kick in …
I have no idea how this is going to play out, but it can’t be as bad as having an agency as ineffective as the PUC looking out for us …

In the August edition of D Magazine, Joe Bob Briggs spends a week in Dallas without a car and gives his 10 decrees for making DART even better. In case you’ve missed the advertising, the DART Light Rail turns 10 this year, years after DART’s original executive director Maurice Carter was basically laughed out of town for suggesting the system use light rail.

DART is the most socialistic city service Dallas ever came up with. In fact, it’s not unlike the transist system built in Moscow under Stalin, where the infrastructure is massive, the stations are pristine symbols of civic pride, the trains and buses run on time and the service is almost free. It’s what communisim was supposed to be!

Briggs also points out that fares on the system only make up 11.6 percent of the cost for running the system. Yet with subsidies from member cities (a 1 percent sales tax) the system is working and train stations have become a commerce magnet.
So you’re asking, why should I care? Well according to studies by the North Central Texas Council of Government, Waxahachie and Ellis County could have two commuter rail lines connecting the county to the rest of the DART system within the next 20-50 years.
If history stands true, the train stations will continue to be economic and commercial magnets – and one of those train stations are supposed to end up in downtown Waxahachie.
Briggs also suggests that more parking downtown leads to less economic development. Bet you never thought you’d hear that. But Briggs points to Jane Jacobs who suggested that under the principals of urban traffic, more downtown parking spaces destroy downtown.

The more parking garages and parking lots you have, the more street life you lose. There’s very little parking in the West End; that’s why it hangs together as a neighborhood.

So pick up a copy or read the story online and discuss it amongst yourselves.