Community

One of the most conspicuous differences between great towns in first-world countries and less developed countries is the amount of trash the litters the side of the roads.

Take Boquete, Panama, for example. This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to, surrounded by verdant mountains and ubiquitous colorful flowers. It was a shame to me, then, that in certain places there were so much trash (plastic bags, food containers, aluminum cans, etc.) littering the sides of the roads or banks of the rivers. Being a near-obsessive/compulsive neat freak, I felt the urge to come out with some garbage bags and pick up some trash — a feeling only pacified by the reminder that I was not going to be in Boquete that long and that our schedule was already jam-packed as it was. Continue reading »

Fort Collins is a town that loves its dogs. Seemingly every one of my neighbors and pals have a furry, feisty, four-legged friend. When I run on the recreation trails around my neighborhood, every few minutes I’d see (and hear!), say, a pup bouncing up and down behind a glass sliding door or a majestic terrier standing erect like a human with his front paws over the three-foot-high fences out here while barking to the clouds. Once in a while, one of these friendly yappers even join me on my run for a minute or so, trotting alongside while wildly wagging his tail — until he sees a more interesting subject, like a squirrel or something. Continue reading »

I have long blogged about how compared to some places, Fort Collins is pretty darn safe. For example, there were no homicides in this town in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004, and even though I do lock the doors to my house, I don’t really feel like I need to.

However, that is not to say crime here is completely non-existent. There was a fantastic story in the Coloradoan underscoring that today. This one involved a shoplifting incident at the (usually) super-friendly downtown Ace Hardware store that “turned downtown Fort Collins into the Wild West” on Saturday afternoon. Continue reading »

Hmmm, it looks like yesterday was a big day for my alma mater. In addition to being featured in the new Knight Rider last night, Stanford was the venue of the prologue in America’s premier bicycle stage race, the Tour of California. Too bad I did not know this yesterday, otherwise I would have watched the live video feeds for that online instead of wasting 15 minutes of my life watching Fox’s NASCAR commentators try to put together coherent sentences while drivers went round ‘n’ round in left-hand ovals. Continue reading »

I have to admit, when I was kid, one of my favorite television shows aside from The A-Team and The Fall Guy was Knight Rider. It only ran for four years (from 1982-1986), but reruns remained popular long after that — something I was reminded of in 2003 when I watched a French-dubbed version in Paris (where the show was called K-2000).

Therefore, when I heard a new made-for-TV Knight Rider movie was coming out, I was pretty excited. Tonight it will be shown on NBC (8:00pm MST). Continue reading »