Friday, May 26, 2006

The Rundown The Lightning Round:
Is That A Dress You're Wearing, Or Am I Looking At The Girl Behind You?

A lot of other blogs make their bread and butter commenting on the news, so I don't. But let's put an idea into beta testing: a few quick hits on some of the stories I'm running across here in Tucson and on the wires.

Fashion Sense. A gay Indiana teen was barred from entering his high school prom because he was wearing a dress. Eighteen-year-old Kevin Logan, we should point out, has been cross-dressing all year to school, wearing makeup, nails and girls' jeans apparently without any trouble.

From The AP:
Sylvester Rowan, assistant to Gary Schools Superintendent Mary Steele, said school policy bans males from wearing dresses. Excluding Logan from the prom was based on "the dress code, not the student's homosexuality. That's his personal preference."
Maybe, but it still begs the question: if you've been permitting cross-dressing all year long at school, why not the prom? Stay tuned for the lawsuit. And in other fashion news...

Engage The Cloaking Device. Someday, Harry Potter's invisibility cloak may end up in your closet. Researchers at Duke University are part of a team who have developed a theoretical blueprint for the ultimate in see-through fashion. The theory is certain materials can be composed to steer light rays around an object, rendering it out of sight.

Duke's lacrosse team should find it handy.

Life's A Pain... And Then You Need Health Care. Tucson First Lady Beth Walkup is still struggling with neck pain three months after an accident at the Tucson Rodeo Parade, when horses drawing the KOLD wagon spooked and ran into the back of the Mayor's wagon.

From the Arizona Daily Star:
One of Mrs. Walkup's biggest frustrations has been the slowness of her HMO to authorize treatment, she said.

She had to wait five weeks for the HMO to approve an MRI scan of her head and neck, and she has been waiting four weeks to begin physical therapy.
Mrs. Walkup should sign up for Barbaro's health care plan.

River In Egypt Department. After more than three months at trial, mounds of documents and dozens of witnesses, a Texas jury came to the reasonable conclusion that Enron's Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are a pair of low-down, money-grubbing parasites, something most of us knew long before the gavel dropped.

But not Lay: "I firmly believe I'm innocent of the charges against me," he said after the verdicts were announced. "We believe that God in fact is in control and indeed he does work all things for good for those who love the Lord."

True, Kenny Boy, hence your guilty-as-sin verdict.

RTA And The F-word. Tucson voters last week passed a 20-year, $2 billion transportation plan which will expand bus service, widen roads and make other improvements to hopefully decongest the city's traffic. This plan passed after several others failed over the course of a decade. Let me offer some amateur insight into why:

* Things can only get worse. Tucsonans are finally at the point where they realize the traffic problem is not going to fix itself, and the city is not going to stop growing. Thus, something is better than nothing. And after a decade of approving nothing, something needs to be done.

* The freeway's day has come and gone. A crosstown freeway would have been the solution twenty or even ten years ago. Phoenix realized that back then and starting building them. Tucson didn't because it didn't want to become... ahem... Phoenix. Infrastructure snobbery carries consequences, and now it's too late. Gridlock or not, a lot of us don't feel like tearing up part of midtown to expand Aviation Highway north, or blading and grading more desert space. Those of you who still want that freeway, no problem. We'll put you on the delegation that will go door-to-door, kindly explaining to your neighbors why their home sweet home must give way to the asphalt albatross. Make sure you don't have Beth Walkup's HMO.

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