Due process

Your blogger thought he was being all slick in preparing for a Chapel Hill Town Council meeting regarding a proposed development, spending half an hour on the phone trying to piece together a clever argument or two with which to dazzle the audience.  But, oh no, that was not to be the case.  I arrived there to find a meeting packed with lawyers making arguments based on hair-splitting procedural arguments, referencing obscure precedents dating back to 1976. Other concerned citizens -- who had been fighting an aligned but different battle with the same developers for years now -- arrived with well-thought out powerpoint.

In the end, your scribe saw fit to raise his hand to show that he was a member of a potentially impacted group, and that was all.  Actual arguments were left to those who knew WTF they were up to...


Earlier in the day, while meeting with somebody in Carrboro for coffee, I let Natalie loose upon the town with several weeks worth of allowance and her cell phone. I thought to ask her if the durned thing was turned on, but decided that was patronizing.  But no, it would have been a good idea, for when I called, I went straight through to non-existent voice mail.  After a few minutes of anxiously rooting around for my first born, I found her in the place one would have expected, the children's/young adults' section of a used book store, loading up on printed matter.