Hugh's Worthless Blog

On this past Saturday, I received two note cards in the mail about the Proposition 1 tax increase for the Ladue School District . The first was from the district itself and spelled out the same old facts I had already heard. The second piece was much more interesting, a flyer from Takebackladueschools.com that spelled out exactly how much my tax would increase for next year and then tried to convince me to vote NO for the proposition. I flipped over the card to read the arguments, and was surprised to see some which seemed to contradict the well known facts given the on the district proposition site . The first claim was pretty surprising -- declining enrollment. I knew as a fact the middle school had the largest enrollment in years while my son was just there, so I thought I would check the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education site which should know the facts. They had a nice synopsis of every school district in the state, including one for Ladue. I have in...

With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology. On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase ...