Perhaps it’s my Midwest, Protestant upbringing that prevents me from enjoying a party unless everyone is invited. Every year, I go on the Parade of Homes, touring only the priciest entries. I love seeing what people with more money than they know what to do with do with it. The economy has had its effect […]

You’d think that Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, a lawyer, would know better than to try to bluff in a situation where he could so easily be proved wrong. Yet Monday night’s Town Council meeting had shades of prosecutor Christopher Darden asking O.J. Simpson to try on a pair of shriveled leather gloves, which led to defense […]

Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, tells of a study he conducted in which he asked people to choose between two prices for a service. The vast majority chose the lower price. Then he presented the same scenario, keeping the first two prices the same but adding a third, higher, price. The vast majority […]

Don’t you hate it when your own words are thrown back at you in an argument? Council member Jim Ward must have been thinking that during the Town Council meeting of Sept. 27 when Citizens for Responsible Growth lined up a passel of experts to speak out against rezoning part of the Jordan Lake watershed […]

Take a tour of Church Street any time, and you’ll see a bigger concentration of students than in most classrooms on campus. That’s usually not a problem. There are times, though, when that concentrated studentness flares into the sort of behavior that a friend complained to me about a few weeks ago. He lives in […]

While foraging for something for dinner one night last week, Don and I realized we were one ingredient short for anything we wanted to make. Not wanting to be so environmentally unfriendly as to drive to the grocery store for just one item, one of us got the idea of going by bike. After all, […]

A skeptic by nature, I couldn’t believe that sidewalks in town are 5 feet wide. I paced off 5 feet on the living room rug, and was even more certain that the figure in the ordinance must be a typo. So I dug out the tape measure, and Don and I hiked to the nearest […]

To segue into it a council discussion on where to build sidewalks, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt read a proclamation – would someone please buy the town’s video caption writer a dictionary? – supporting National Walk to School Day, which is Oct. 6, one day in National Walk to School Month. Beside him was a prototypical family […]

I wanted to learn more about tonight’s Town Council business meeting and the Consent Agenda item concerning Percent for Art allocations (still not sure why my tax dollars have to go to fund town art projects, but then there’s a lot of Town Council actions that don’t make the least bit of sense). So I […]

One of the more poignant moments at a Town Council business meeting came a week ago Wednesday at the council’s season premiere, as it were. When it came time for council members to make announcements, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt talked about N.C. Pride Day, saying that he would be riding in the parade and had been […]