Howdy istites. My name's Mike Dahmus, otherwise known all around various ratholes of the internet as M1EK, and I've been invited to write an honest-to-goodness post instead of a wimpy little comment. Normally, I crackplog ("crackplot blog") at my own place, M1EK's Bake-Sale of Bile, which is "Mostly Austin. Mostly Transportation. Mostly Bile.". I served on the city's Urban Transportation Commission from 2000 to 2005, before Daryl Slusher gave me the boot for being insufficiently slavish to Mike Krusee's plan to screw Austin's rail fans forever. I've been writing that crackplog since about 2003, starting in the run-up to the commuter rail disaster. ...

The run-up to the 2058 mayoral election will see Austin’s first competition between two ‘green’ candidates. No, I mean literally. Competition for the mantle of ‘most green’ will compel contenders to start taking a chlorophyll-based diet supplement that gives their skin a greenish pigmentation. On the downside, both candidates will be notoriously unproductive after sunset....

...there’s some kind of breakdown in logic going on here. As in, I made an effort to move here, whereas the people who claim to be native—well, they just fell out of their moms’ vaginas....

Proof that people are already growing more tired of presidential campaigns. Just how fat is the fattest city in the nation? Houston zoos are receiving multiple requests from area hospitals to borrow MRI or CT machines. The only tenor worth remembering died late last night. Just when you thought they were done: Apple came out with a new iPod yesterday. "I do a lot of crying in this job." Atlanta high school student suspended......

We have to admit, we were a little skeptical when we first heard about the 2nd Street Shopping District redevelopment a few years ago. It sounded great, but we envisioned another vacuous, conspicuous consumption festival like Dallas' Mockingbird Station which, even with the West Village, light rail, and a preponderance of lofts, still doesn't do much to help make Dallas a real city. Boy, were we wrong! We started our evening at Jo's Coffee......