Old Dork Yells at Clouds

According to our friends at Cornell University, this is a red-tailed hawk.

You might know it better from media, as whenever someone needs a sound of a raptor, they use the cry of a red-tailed hawk. Thanks, Wingspan. I did not hear it make a noise, as it was too busy eating a field mouse that it found.

This was in the yard of Little Dork's best friend, so after the hawk was done with their business, the two kids investigated the scene of the mouse murder. A barefoot Little Dork decided that the best course of action was to stick her barefeet into the mouse carcass to investigate. Two disinfecting wipes later, the only lesson learned from the forensic investigation was that sticking your barefeet into a mouse carcass is gross.

I agree with you, Plano Police Department. Let's keep our pedestrians safe. Let's install crosswalks at all corners of mid-block intersections instead of on just one side. Let's give a bunch of overly wide stroads road diets so that pedestrians have more of a buffer from traffic that travels at 40+ miles per hour. Let's make our traffic light cycles actually do something when a pedestrian presses a crossing button instead of having no effect whatsoever. Let's actually create safe alternate routes for pedestrians when we do our endless road construction instead of just closing sidewalks and intersections to pedestrians.

Oh, wait, I'm getting a bulletin from the city council. These signs were just put up to get drivers to harass homeless people since the Supreme Court invalidated anti-panhandling ordinances. Let's only put these signs up in low and middle income areas and along transit routes and not in the wealthy transit deserts.

Le sigh. This is why we can't have nice things.

It's not the fabled Plano Mountain Lion, but it's still a surprising thing to see wandering in a neighborhood pretty far from a forested area.

In Plano a couple of weeks ago, some company opened a goofy licensed Minecraft LARP in an abandoned Buy Buy Baby. For some reason, the company decided that our plain suburb should be the first stop for their "experience". Seems inconsequential right? No one would notice its coming and passing besides some Minecraft enjoyers.

Wrong. Local social media has been flooded with free tickets to this thing. Why?

If you buy a ticket and attend this experience, they e-mail you a code for cosmetic DLC for Minecraft. A cape. A really ugly cape. That is selling for 200 dollars. The catch that you can't get the code without actually going to the event and getting your ticket scanned. So people who live all over the world are spamming local social media with free tickets. Locals go to this dumb thing, and the buyers get a $200 item that they can scalp online since the code is sent to the e-mail that bought the tickets.

Hey, kids, you can mod Minecraft and put any texture you want in there. It's one of the selling points of the game - modability. Please don't incentivize the Internet to scam locals in my city, Minecraft Experience. I hate our lame cyberpunk present.

I was in a weird spot in Plano as I was fleeing from a bait-and-switch at Ewing Subaru. Behold, the saddest DART bus stop in history:

You are standing in an undeveloped field. No sidewalk and no bench. Nothing around it except a gas station and a plastic surgery clinic. The stop is only served by the 239, which comes every hour. You can do better than this.