nicolrenee

That Chili's had a parking lot that was full every time I went by. Mind you, it was a small lot and inconvenient to get to, but it was always full. I could be wrong, but if you ask me, they closed that location because the time was right to make a lucrative land deal with one of the developers making a land grab in the area. That way they can move to a better location with more space/parking and therefore more revenue since it will be easier to get more faces in the place. In another year or so, there is going to be even more traffic in the area. Developers are going nuts over there right now trying to build retail/residential combos as fast as they can that will include an 80k sf Whole Foods Market among the many retailers. I can't wait to see what follows. Construction on the hospital grounds and on Walnut Hill in particular has temporarily slowed the people flow, but what will be gained once all of it is said and done will more than make up for the lull of the moment. All I have to say is that if a restaurant is so bad that even the people otherwise stuck eating hospital food avoid it, there is something seriously wrong. (-:

We used to call this place Rauncho's Mexican Barfit when I was growing up...Still, I miss raising my flag for more sopapillas!

Haw-Haw! Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...Man! Doesn't that just beat all? Perhaps an interested neighborhood reader should call the police out to issue a citation each time this crime is witnessed. Do unto others, after all....

I work in a nearby building and I can tell you that for a restaurant to succeed over there, the food has to be worth eating, and the place can't smell like a garbage scow. It had little to do with location. Neither I nor any of my colleagues would eat over there because the quality of the food was so incinsistent. If lunch isn't worth eating, why would anyone take their families there for dinner? Even during the short time it was open, the grease traps became so fouled on more than one occasion that the stench was unavoidable from even a distance away. All I can say is ewwwww! Good riddance, and I hope that something moves into the location that has greater appeal. A Thai restaurant would be my downfall!

Are we talking abou the same Lee Harveys that has the junkie/burnout apartment complex directly across the street? I would think that His Holiness would have more interest in getting them out than the bar, which seems to attract nicer folk from outside the area than the local residents. Hmm. Thinking of it that way, Lee Harveys actually increases the property value, and there is a built in crime watch when the dog lovers are sitting outside with their pooches. One might think there are beter things to concern one's self with than a bar that was known to be there already when the resident in question moved in. I don't know about the rest of you, but if I don't like the look of a neighborhood and everything that immediately surrounds it, I don't move or go there. It's like beating yourself with a bat every day. Why would you want to, really? Ah, well. To each his or her own.

Wooohoooo!!!! Congrats, y'all, and thanks for all of your dedication & hard work. Power to the People of Pegasus News!!!

Don't you mean the Dallas Boring Snooze? I really miss the days of the Dallas Times Herald...

>sigh<

Honestly, that attitude (if you don't like it, there's the door) is at the root what is wrong with America today. When I don't like something, instead of kvetching needlessly about it but never doing anything, I actually choose to become part of the solution. I vote, I write my congressman, I volunteer in the community, I find ways to participate in creating positive change at home, in my work place and in my community when I find systems that are broken rather than accepting them for what they are.

People with degrees often struggle to find work if the area in which they are degreed is saturated in the community in which they wish to become employed. You will find that here in the US as well as elsewhere. People who want to live in areas where the cost of living is high (London, New York, Cali, etc) will also find it harder to purchase a home and get a job on what they can earn since it is high demand forcing prices up ever higher. That is consumer economics for you, the laws of supply and demand.

That being said, there is no denying the fact that Americans as a group (as opposed to one isolated person, such as yourself) tend to work more hours, take fewer vacations, and accumulate far greater amounts of debt than their counterparts elsewhere. Their health is worse and their life spans tend to be shorter as a result. Nearly 2/3 of Americans are overweight, and of that figure, a huge proportion (no pun intended) of those people are morbidly obese. There is no running from the fact that there are millions of Americans with no health insurance, many of those people earning incomes that fall below the poverty line, and these are often some of the same people with the most serious health conditions due to unavailability of quality affordable food and poor living conditions. Are you aware that there are often few grocery stores, if any, within walking distance in impoverished neighborhoods? In a wealthier neighborhood, there are usually 1-3 grocery stores in a 5 mile radius.

In the poorer neighborhoods, fuel prices are also typically higher. The people who can least afford to pay have to pay a higher price.

In poorer neighborhoods, there are greater percentages of asthma in children because of the living conditions in their homes and communities, higher rates of cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other expensive illnesses to treat.

Are you willing to look at our system and honestly say that it is perfect and there is no way in which it could be better?

Even if you can't agree on all of the points the movie makes, if nothng else, 'Sicko' points the finger at some of the dark little shameful secrets of the healthcare industry, something that is long overdue. It doesn't matter how you look at the facts, we have a broken system and it is time for a change. Will the perfect change be national healthcare? I don't know, but what I do know is that what we are faced with now is unacceptable. You, john doe, might be doing fine and are happy. However, there are many millions of other Americans who are suffering needlessly and dying every year because of our broken healthcare system. We are among the wealthiest nations in the world, we have some of the best healthcare facilities and best physicians in the world. Why, then are we faced with a healthcare crisis?

One other thing that falls completely under the radar in this country by and large is the importance of preventative care. If a person is receiving routine medical care on a regular basis, diseases and warning signs of illnesses are caught much sooner and are treated or managed on an outpatient basis before the patient falls into a critical care status. By treating the patient early and often, the industry actually saves money because the patients are healthier and have better outcomes, are less likely to come down with major illnesses and diseases requiring life long care and expensive treatment and hospitalization.

Think what you like about how your life is going. I am glad it is working for you. Do consider through that not everyone has a life as rosy as your own. Just because something is not broken for you does not mean that it isn't still broken.

I just got back from seeing 'Sicko' with a group at the Angelika and let me tell you, I was impressed. Having read something of the film before going, I understood his data to have been well researched and it certainly was. It was also presented in a manner that opens eyes as well as minds. I won't spoil the documentary by revealing details, but I can say that this one kept me interested and listening the whole way through, and lit my fire even more than it already was. We should be rioting in the streets about the state of our healthcare system, but we are not. We should all be asking ourselves just why that is, and I think more of us will after seeing the movie.

I haven't denied that they are trying to 'catch them when they are young', just scoff at the idea that their campaign is going to achieve the desired result.

As for the bag, having worked in a couple of different industries where costing out bags was a piece of my job, I can tell you from experience that handing out clear or black bags or even solid blue recycling bags with no logo is one heck of a lot cheaper than handing out bags with a 4 color print logo, each with their own custom dye that had to be machined for them. Even taking into account bulk purchasing volume and the possibility that due to the quantity of printed materials being ordered that they might have thrown in the cost of machining the dyes for free, make no mistake, a lot of money went into this collector bag campaign that could have been spent more wisely on a more permanent solution. Heck, having trash receptacles where the people are (bus stops, near street corners, shopping districts, downtown, other high traffic areas) and have the trash regularly collected and cans in greater quantities and more closely spaced so that they are convenient to walk to would be more effective for TXDOT as a clean up campaign. Using that particular idea, if they wanted to really involve the youth, they could hold a trash receptacle logo design contest involving the taggers, let them spray paint the receptacles with creative designs (with some guidelines, of course), post pictures of the designs online with a poll for people to be able to vote on their favorite design, and have the winner of the contest get some sort of a prize.

It isn't the wealthy suburbs that have trash issues by and large, it is the inner city, the impoverished areas, and for whatever reasons, places all along the freeway. The only other time one generally sees mountains of trash are in places where people gather for festivities and/or fun, like concerts, festivals, parks or lakes. Given that, one has to think about the target audience. Well, they got the festivity crowd, but missed out completely on everyone else. That is a large audience to not reach.

I'm not saying I know best, I am not saying I know everything, but I am saying it doesn't take a marketing genius to see that this particular campaign is no going to achieve optimal results. There are better ways of distributing that particular piece of taxpayer pie, and honestly, I wish they had. A little late to be whining about it now, granted, but no one asked me when it would have been more productive to do so (come to think of it, no one ever asked me at all, but I'm not shy about volunteering an opinion when I feel strongly about something). So, I get to whine now.

Just a girl with an opinion, nothing more, nothing less.

In my semi-humble opinion, helping people understand why tossing one's trash on the road is a bad idea has to begin at home, or at least under the influence of someone empowered to make a difference, like a teacher. So many kids spend more time with their teachers than they do with their parents anyway. My point is that if you catch kids when they are young, get them involved and interested, get the communities participating in keeping things clean and then provide trash bins at convenient locations throughout the city (see downtown Austin for a good example) then things tend to stay a lot cleaner. When you don't attack a problem at its source, all you do is treat a symptom and never rid yourself of the actual 'illness'.

Why I ridicule the 'designer bags' is that it is a poor way of treating a symptom, will not result in a cure and is as I see it a complete waste of time. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

...not to mention my amusement at the old fogeys in marketing. If they think that making 'limited edition collector trash bags' really is going to reach today's youth, then they must have been sitting in the vicinity of that huge warehouse fire that consumed the 2 tons of marijuana. Silly, really.

Still, I like the bumper sticker that tells folks to keep their butts off the streets...

Just an opinion. Like fish, they tend to stink after a few days in the sun. (-:

Oh, this is great! I love my tax dollars going toward designer trash sacks for kids. So THAT'S why my property taxes have skyrocketed over the past two years!

Hey, the good news is that if you visit the site, you too can be the recipient of a designer trash sack and a bumper strip, all without leaving the safety and comfort of your house.

What's more, elsewhere on the site you can report the litterbugs you see as you are driving around town. Seriously! They won't get a ticket, but they will get a lovely letter reminding them of the Texas Litter Laws and a free designer trash sack.

Honestly, I do love that part. If you can't fight the litterers, then annoy the dickens out of them, right?

Don't get me wrong, I am all about cleaning up the state and keeping the trash off the roads. I volunteer doing trash pickup at the lake, recycle, try to generate as little trash as possible. Maybe I am getting old, but I fail to see how printing designer trash sacks for kids (okay, young adults) will help with the effort.

Actually rasing the kids right in the first place so that they understand the world is not their trash can will make a bigger impact for a longer period of time and in the long run for less money. How about mandatory ecology classes in school? How about mandatory recycling within the schools and offering free recycling bins to ALL Texans instead of those in certain cities or neighborhoods? How about bottle deposits in Texas to ensure recycling? Why don't we try the things that have worked best across the country rather than trying to create the wheel all over again? Just a thought...

McCrea, you completely miss my point, unsurprising, since it seems you only read what you want to see into things.

My point is and always will be that either you want change or you don't. If you don't care about rampant corruption, politicians who only pander to big business and special interest groups rather than working for the people as they are elected to do, then you won't be voting for Kinky. If, however, you are fed up as Shannon apparently was as long as it was making him money, then Kinky is your man.

Change is only affected when enough people participate in the process. It takes courage, it takes being willing to stand strong even when the going gets tough, and it takes being willing to fight for what you believe it. Our founding fathers got it, throughout history there have been other people who have gotten it, and it is time for the great people of the State of Texas to get it again. Shannon, though liking Kinky, has decided to turn tail and run at the first sign of trouble. That's okay, he's entitled. That's what's great about living in a free country. To encourage others to bail on the Kinky bandwagon because he lost faith is tantamount to treason. No, I've never mentioned anywhere that I consider Shannon a terrorist, as you seem to imply, just someone who, when faced with the choice to stand with the People's Revolution, picked the easy way out when things got tough. Back in the early beginnings of our country, there were those who switched sides when it looked like they might die trying to fight the good fight. Maybe Shannon thinks this fight is lost already, but he is sadly mistaken.

Kinky can win this race, something that is made clear by how hard the other politicians are trying to discredit him as a viable candidate. Kinky is a man of integrity, a man who is not afraid to call things as they are, and isn't in anyone's back pocket. That is what will get him into office. He is a gentleman, a kind and compassionate man, a man of subtleties and not so subtle humor. He is the only candidate who hasn't tried to pander to the masses, who hasn't tried to beat down the other candidates to lift himself up, who hasn't tried to 'put lipstick on this pig'. That is why he gets my vote, why so many thousands of others have volunteered their time across this great state of ours in support of Kinky Friedman.

Call me what you want, call the campaign what you want, it won't change the fact that change is needed and Kinky is the man who can create that change. Kinky knows it, his volunteers and supporters know it, even Shannon knows it but he is choosing the easy way out now that Bell has the big bucks.