Friday News Digest

The baseball season is in is second week and tonight I finally get to my first game. Hopefully the Twins will do better against Torii Hunter and the Angels than they did against the Toronto Killer-Jays. Perhaps management is starting to double-think that strategy to continue with the same, poor-performing bullpen we had last year. We can only hope.

Enjoy this week's news. 

• Living in Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, we don't often stop and ponder water-shortage issues. This is a quite alarming article from the Economist, a publication not known for alarm. 

• Even when I was an engineer, it always amused me how my fellow engineers could turn just about any nice piece of land into a stormwater pond. And not just do it, but find beauty in it. What's not to like, really?  

• Not quite in time for Easter, but put another one in the win column for Jesus. 

• One of the many tragedies of our current development pattern is the impact on schools, and thus kids. Neighborhood schools, and everything that they provide a small community, are being replaced, for many reasons, by the campus. Instead of a place for kids to spontaneously gather and play, we've committed them to hours of bussing in the name of efficiency. Even so, I am not sure what I think about this news.  

• Do you believe house prices are really at "rock bottom"? If you want to believe that, don't read this article. What is hardly mentioned in all of this is the fact that the market for homes is so much smaller now, not because people are out of work (that will change at some point), but because not nearly as many people are going to have the actual down payment, which I hear they require now.

• All these vacant homes has created some resourceful people however. 

• Resourceful, but not always smart. 

• Many small towns value their police department, but few can afford them, especially the modern version. 

• If you read our post this week on highway funding and the $1.1 billion hole Mn/DOT District 3 is in,check out the cost of California's stimulus projects in comparison. 

• Bill Bishop does it again, this time with a fascinating article about small towns and WalMart. 

• Meet George Jetson. More information is available here.  

• In celebration of my first Dome Dog of the year and Spiderman back in the house, here is one of my all-time favorite commercials. Have a great weekend, everyone.