Red Six

Besides that obvious exception, two of them have won at least one national championship in a major sport since WWII (hell, since 1980). And all except Aggy have gone past the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA Tournament. I don't know how much cheating played into those performances (SMU's greatest hoops success was in 1956), but... still.

I've always wondered if people realize how truly non-confidential their medical records are.

Primarily by virtue of occupation, but yes. I once had a person act out what happened during a deadly confrontation using me as the dead dude. Once you've done that, it all seems perfectly normal. But it's a story that surprisingly doesn't go over well at cocktail parties.

Walgreen's wanted $340 to fill my sildenafil Rx. Got it for $12 at HEB thanks to GoodRx.

If you take out a home equity loan at 6%-ish and continue to pay $1,450 a month, then you'll have this paid off in 3 1/2 years. Not insurmountable. The issue is making sure it never happens again. "Unfortunate events" rarely are unexpected, and their financial impact on your life is determined by how well you plan for them. This may sound cult-ish, but You Need a Budget did wonders for our household finances. It is software driven by a philosophy, which starts with only budgeting money that you have. We have used it for about a year and a half now, and the impact has been amazing. I cut my owner's draw by a couple thousand a month, yet we have more money in the bank than we ever have before -- much of it waiting to be deployed when an "unfortunate event" hits. The program is similar to Dave Ramsey's, but without the religious aspect and irrational fear of credit cards.

By 1899, Serbia was an independent kingdom. To be fair, I thought the same thing you did until I looked at Wikipedia. The Ottomans primarily held Serbia for hundreds of years, with the Habsburgs taking over every now and again. Austria-Hungary didn't occupy Serbia until 1914.

Omni/Presidential/Bell are pretty interchangeable. Omni is the least expensive by a few bucks. A car service will cost you about $50-$70 all-in, but it's not a bad way to arrive. You know when you get there there will be someone waiting for you and you don't have to worry about ending up in a trashy Uber or taxi. Drivers will make a stop for you on your way to the hotel if you want to pick up booze or weed or just get a pic at the Welcome to Las Vegas sign.

You mean the original Alamo Drafthouse Downtown on Colorado, which was basically Tim League showing weird movies he liked and serving beer, nachos, and burgers while doing so. There were the $1 midnight movies, like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the mashup of Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. They hosted Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, which had a guy in an oversize novelty foam cowboy hat handing out flyers on the West Mall. And if you showed up for the 7 p.m. show, you were turned away because it was full, but you could still buy tickets for the 10 p.m. showing, which gave you three hours to go back home and get blazed before coming back for the premiere of Dr. Tran. Those were good times. But they're over, and the Alamo is now a nationwide chain. I'm not sure if their rise merely coincided with the death of "Old Austin," or if they were a contributor to its demise by commodifying Austin eccentricity with their expansion -- first into Cedar Park, then into the rest of the world -- film festivals, and production companies.

We did this with our kids a couple years ago. Did a day in Los Angeles (La Brea Tar Pits, L.A. County Natural History Museum, and Griffith Observatory), a day at Disney, and a day in Orange County (whale-watching and beach time). The then-7-year-old's favorite day was L.A., and the then-3-year-old's favorite day was OC.

1. This is totally the Dexter origin story. 2. This is an unfortunate way to find out there is a street called Bo Jack. 3. Don't let the fiance totally off yet because... During the time that fiance and Heidi were broken up, Heidi and Maygen hung out and got in a three-way with Heidi's BF. Heidi got knocked-up during this encounter, which enraged both Maygen (because she was trying to get pregnant but couldn't) and fiance (because, WTF, she went out and got boned by some dude and now is great with child?). Maygen wants the baby, fiance doesn't want the baby, so they work in cahoots for Maygen to kidnap Heidi, steal the baby, and kill Heidi. Things don't work out as planned (because they never do), and we end up on Bo Jack Drive in Jersey Village with a body in the trunk and a baby without a mother. P.S. This is true because she lived down the street from me and it hits close to home and I watched that Noe Gaspar movie on Netflix that has a plot kind of like this.

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My wife is making me go to Vegas for my 40th in a couple months. We're trying to find a place for a birthday dinner with a group of 10-14. A local friend suggested Rose.Rabbit.Lie. Has anyone been lately? How is the food/show experience? Any other suggestions for a mid-size group friendly restaurant?

This right here is a big deal. I've started tracking our family finances more closely over the past year, and the cost of a car -- without a car payment -- comes out to about $250/month: $100 for insurance, $50 in amortized maintenance costs (oil changes, tires, brakes, inspection, registration, etc.), and another $100-plus in gas. So even if he gets a part-time job, one week of work a month is going to go straight to that car. He also needs to know that he needs to take care of his tickets when he gets them. Back to the main topic -- Toyotas will go forever if you take care of them. There's a reason why you don't see people in third world countries fighting their civil wars in Fords.

I've wondered that myself. My bizarre theory of late has been that Rivera was about to dump her, and she did it to win back his affection. Like the firefighters who spark forest fires. Or pervy tow truck drivers who throw rocks.

It's called provoking the difficulty. The state can get an instruction negating self-defense if the defendant, basically, brought the situation upon herself. They did a good job laying the foundation for that in cross-examination. Overall, they did a good job. After watching it and looking back through Tweets and posts here, they were masterful in both plan and execution. Her wilting like she did didn't help, but they created their points and hit her hard. I'm in the primacy camp here. Defense has lost control of the narrative and is tanked on credibility. The jury is not going to care what the experts say.

Even if she turned the light on, she would have just thought he was one of those local homeless and/or pot-smoking hippies who were around her place, whom she described in her text to a fellow cop. And that was actually a good slip-in by the prosecution. It simultaneously shows that she didn't have an extreme fear of neighborhood, as well as dismissive contempt for other human beings.

I think the protocol is to make sure they are unarmed, make sure they are incapacitated, then, if both of those are the case, begin life-saving measures. I can't tell if she's a horrible cop or just a horrible person.

No, there is almost no choice in a case like this. The turrible idea was letting her go up there this unprepared. She's not confident in her answers and she's lost control of her narrative. It's like she's never been cross-examined before.

People have been saying they will restore the Baker for as long as I can remember, which is about 30 years. They also used to have some awful "outlet mall" on the eastern edge of town, near Fort Wolters. It was like an Oshkosh B'Gosh store and a couple others. The state park has been there for nearly 40 years, and as far as I can tell, it hasn't proven to be an exceptional economic driver for the city. There's a reason why we called MW "Miserable Smells" back in the day -- it's a putrid dump once you got west of Woody's. I'll believe in revitalization when I can see it.

The 1990s felt good, but there was a shaky foundation beneath all the optimism. 1. I don't know why you think that media was innocent or wholesome. Terminator 2 set the bar for action flicks. Joe Eszterhas basically turned cinema into an orgy of gratuitous nudity and sex, making Sharon Stone a star and showing us that fantasy didn't always match reality when it came to Jessie Spano. NYPD Blue showed butts. Quentin Tarantino made blood and guts funny, so long as it's accompanied with philosophical discussion about foot massages. The shock comedy also came into form, with There's Something About Mary and American Pie. 2. Sex really came out into the open. MTV gave us Sex in the Nineties, and Pedro. And this frankness had to happen, because, suddenly, sex could kill us. If you slept with the wrong person, you couldn't just clear it up with antibiotics. No, you would go on retrovirals and hope that your T-cell count stayed up as long as possible. On the upside, for some, coming out became easier and easier, as "alternative lifestyles" simply became people's daily lives. But sexuality was still a huge battleground in society and politics. 3. We didn't have Internet until the end of the decade, but the 24/7 news cycle made the world a scarier place than it was. 4. Crime was still out of control. To crack down on it, lawmakers implemented mandatory minimums and created substantial disparity in sentencing schemes depending upon whether a person had powder cocaine or crack rock. 5. Once the early-decade recession passed, things started looking better. The stock market went up, up, up, but we would later find out that buying an IPO because the company's mascot was a sock puppet was a bad idea. 6. The Cold War was over, but we still had plenty of forks in the interventionist fire. This would eventually help lay the groundwork for 9/11, and the global "war" we are still fighting today. Unfortunately, we were blissfully ignorant about what our government was really doing in other countries. And if we weren't fighting communism, what were we doing over there? 7. More and more households had two working parents, so kids were coming home to empty houses and watching hours of television or finding ways to get in trouble. The "traditional" family unit began eroding. I could go on, but, basically, the 90s felt "good," but something was amiss, and we knew it; we just couldn't put our finger on it. The cynicism of grunge and Generation X was not unwarranted. We thought things were good after the fall of communism, but then we went to war with Iraq. We put his country in a box, but then, on the homefront, we had the L.A. riots. The economy was supposedly booming, but it seemed like a lot of people were left out. And, besides, how could a company that didn't look like it could turn a profit within the next decade be worth what people were paying? We thought we had good music, then Kurt Cobain shot himself. What happened in the 1990s led to 9/11, the banking crisis of 2008, and the increasing disparity in wealth that we have today.

Information like that -- especially in a high profile case -- is something that I, as an attorney, tend to keep within my "circle of trust." I can't always guarantee that it won't escape, but I think most attorneys know about which information they need to STFU.

The deed of trust will have the secured amount on it. You can work backwards from there to get a very rough ballpark assuming somewhere between 3.5% and 20% down. If you register for Redfin, you can access sold prices. Or call one of your 50 real estate agent friends and have him/her pull comps for you.

Hi Bill!

If I did, then delete thread, ban user, etc. Otherwise... what's growing this season? I looked in my fridge in January and noticed I had a lot of seeds going back as long as five or six years. So I'm back to heirloom tomatoes after a good crop of hybrids last year. I have Cherokee purple, Basrawaya, and Tommy Toe (a plum variety). Hoping get a batch of salsa. I got a late start this year, just getting them in the ground two weeks ago. Also a couple eggplants. I terribly neglected them when they were under the lights. I'm surprised anything is alive. Started my beans a week ago. My 4-year-old got in on the teepee-building fun. BTW, I mentioned it I believe on a thread on the old board, but canning your harvest is awesome. I got a pressure cooker a couple years ago, which means I can preserve my beans in water instead of pickling them as I had in the past. Looking forward to starting Okra in a couple weeks.