This is up there in the pantheon of best-things-ever-eaten, and works fantastic as an appetizer to the Odd Duck food trailer, next door. An because its a savory treat, you can wash it down with a glass of cheap BYOB wine and still feel classy.

Maybe this is why people move towards management as they get older. The spark is faded, replaced by an inexplicable need to hold too many multi-hour meetings (something I have thus far avoided), and create an endless array of spreadsheets that explain your yearly activity in excruciating, cent-by-cent detail. And maybe the spark isn’t gone, it’s just focused on other things. The weird part is, I find myself liking it. There’s a deep underlying sense of stability there…can I make solid decisions that will benefit myself and my employer? Chances are yes. Can I consistently dream up awesome, kick ass designs while working in a creative vacuum? Spock is telling the Captain there’s low statistical chances of success on that one.

MoPac would not be widened. Instead, in the tight section between RM 2222 and the lake — where the Union Pacific railroad sits in the median — officials envision that the managed(tolled) lanes would be squeezed in by narrowing lanes slightly in some spots and using most of the existing shoulders. The new lanes would be separated from the free lanes by a row of flexible pylons and have a handful of entrances and exits.

As Germ said re-striping the shoulder is like putting a Band-aid on a severed arm. But hey, at least all those tolls are going to pay for those sound barriers in Tarrytown…God forbid that the house you over-paid for that next to a highway, be you know, loud. I know that TxDOT is secretly (or maybe not so secretly) trying to destroy Austin through a mix of strangling us with unused tollways, while letting I-35 (you know, the last free road) rot out from underneath us, but this is just absurd.

Courtesy of Mr. Pinero..

“The Depression, as bad as it was, would have been much worse without the government spending,” says Alan Brinkley, a historian of the Depression at Columbia University. “And the 1937 effort to balance the budget — I think almost every economist would agree — was a catastrophe.”

Ok, setting aside the negative humanitarian (and economic) impact of axing benefits for 1million people, I get the tough on big-government thing, and in some ways I agree with it. But when you have economists telling you to keep dumping money into public projects, and historians saying, look this has happened before, it might do you well to listen for change, as opposed to cranking out another soundbite for your conservative base.