I Ran

*cue Flock of Seagulls song/Chariots of Fire theme song*

I went for a run today. Started at my apartment, ended up at the north shore of Town Lake. Three miles, not much for most people but for me, basically a half-marathon (a marathon having been convinently shortened to six miles in this case).

Real Estate Babel

There has been a massive high-rise building boom in the city (Austin), in the past few years. This is largely due to a push by Mayor Will Wynn and the City Council to make downtown as much of a residential area as it is a governmental and entertianment (often one can be the other in Texas) district. Austin, being the famiously livable city that it is, has seen this idea suddently burst into over a dozen high rise projects being built concurrently. More than a couple of the projects are over 40 stories in height. To put this into context. The current tallest building in Austin is the Frost Bank Tower which measures 33 stories (and was only completed three years ago). I originally hoped that such overbuilding would occur, which would drive down prices of downtown housing, which are currently astronomical by Texas standards, with many high rise units selling briskly at as much as $500,000 in a city where the median house value is roughly $175,000 (and also rising sharply). However, it's looking more and more like this will not be the case and living downtown (where many people work simple service jobs in addition to the typical white collar stuff) will be the domain of the affluent.

I guess we'll always have William Cannon Drive, until some real estate genius decides to make it trendy, give it a nice catchy trendy name like "WilCan"...

Ted "I'm a Flaming Heterosexual" Haggard

The news has been on the depressing side lately...then again, when is it not. I found the following items to be funny (in the bad way) or just plain sad)

• Ted "I'm a Flaming Heterosexual" Haggard

Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and pastor of a Colorado Springs "megachurch"...my favorite kind of church to dislike...resigned last year after a former male prostitute revealed that Haggard, who had (and still has somehow) a wife at the time, had a sexual relationship with him for three years, and also committed the lesser sin of using Meth. He decided to reveal the affair after learning that Haggard had been working and preaching in support of Colorado's same-sex marriage ban referendum. Having felt the true brunt of Haggard's hypocrisy he eagerly assembled a horde of salivating press members that passionately spread the news of the bombshell revelation. Having nowhere to go but up, Haggard tearfully apologized and resigned in front of his large stunned congregation. Haggard then went to Phoenix where he has spent the last three months in a self-imposed exile. But then it gets kind of funny...

One of four pastors who is overseeing Haggard's...I guess I'll call it rehab...in Phoenix basically ran to the press this week and exclaimed that Haggard has "discovered" that he is "completely heterosexual".

Hallelujah!!!

That's a very convenient discovery. The kind of convenience that only finding weapons of mass destruction in recently invaded countries can afford. It's amazing that someone can (as is most likely the case) have sex with another man over the course of three years and still be completely heterosexual. Now I don't want to get into the whole debate over whether one can or can't help being gay, I just find this to be somewhat ironic...the fact that three months of bumming around in the desert can cure three years of some pretty not completely heterosexual behavior. I wonder if his rehab consisted of having to sit in a lawn chair on a rocky hillside covered in tall phallic shaped Saguaro cacti until Haggard was unable to notice how phallic they are and then suggest, on his own mind you, that he be taken to a melon patch instead.

A close advisor has recommended that Haggard take on "secular work" for the near future. But I sense that an evangelical (a.k.a. theocratically political) comeback is in his future. I mean, if you can be cured of being gay in just three months, then obviously gays shouldn't get married and Ted Haggard, knowing full well what being gay is like, should lead the moral crusade. Only he has been both fully gay and fully heterosexual. He understands the moral enemy better than most. He's been on the inside...okay I'll stop.

Save us and our institution of marriage Ted Haggard! It doesn't matter how badly you personally violated your own. We need you! Pat Robertson has gone crazy, Falwell is washed up and Ralph Reed is too busy trying to get indian casinos built, or not built, depending on which side pays him the most.