The Living Room Times

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

First of all, if you haven’t already, join my 12th annual Oscar Pool! (Password: eternalglory) The deadline is 6:30 PM Mountain Time Sunday.

Second, this is where you’ll find Becky’s & my annual Live-Blog / Live-Chat / Live-Snark, a.k.a. SNARKNADO 2016, starting Sunday night at 6:00 PM MST, or thereabouts. We’ll mock the Oscars together, and we’ll also reveal live results of the Oscar Pool. The chat window will appear below.

Anyone can view the chat, but you’ll need to log in with Facebook, Twitter or Open ID to participate in it. (The Cover It Live window below will have a login option once the chat starts.)

(Don’t worry, it won’t automatically tweet out your comments or anything.)

Happy snarking! And good luck in the pool, vying for #EternalGlory!

TO OPEN THE CHAT IN A SEPARATE WINDOW, CLICK HERE.

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[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

The Living Room Times NCAA Pools are no more, retired after a 20-year run. But there’s still a way you can earn ETERNAL GLORY in 2016. I refer, of course, to the 12th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool.

The Oscars are Sunday (i.e., tomorrow), which means – well, it means I’ve procrastinated a bit. (“A poolmaster is never late, Frodo Baggins.”) But never mind that! It’s time to GET IN THE POOL!!! (Password: eternalglory)

The pool is free to enter. As always, there’s no monetary prize – just a shot at bragging rights and…you know.

(Here is the list of past winners. Last year, Vicki Lopez finally won!)

The deadline to enter the Oscar Pool (password: eternalglory) is Sunday at 6:30 PM Mountain Time.

And of course, you’ll want to come back here for SNARKNADO 2016, a.k.a. Becky’s and my annual Live-Blog / Live-Chat / Live-Snark, during which we’ll mock the show mercilessly and
discuss the live Oscar Pool results. The live-chat
has a reputation of being at least as entertaining as the actual show,
if not moreso, so you don’t want to miss it. The Snarknado will start at (or around) 6:00 PM Mountain Time
Sunday. Bookmark this Tumblr and check back then!

But back to the pool. As in previous years, the scoring system is 12
points for Best Picture, 9 apiece for the directing and lead acting
categories, 6 each for the supporting acting categories, 4 each for the
screenplay categories, 2 each for documentary feature, animated feature,
foreign film, cinematography and original score, and 1 per award for
everything else.

As always, contestants are urged to enter using their full name, a
Twitter handle, or some other readily recognizable partial name or
nickname/pseudonym. (After all, what’s the point of “bragging rights” –
never mind “eternal glory” – if we don’t know who you are?)

Anyway, get in the pool!!! (Once more with feeling: the password is eternalglory.)

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Every year on Halloween, at our house on the southwest side of Denver’s Stapleton neighborhood, we get somewhere between 1,100 and 1,250 trick-or-treaters.

I’m not exaggerating.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about how to survive Halloween in our neighborhood for a blog run by Stapleton’s master developer, Forest City. As I put it in that piece, “If you haven’t experienced Halloween in Stapleton, you haven’t really experienced Halloween.”

Here’s the time-lapse video proof. (Things always look busy but manageable until ~6:30pm. Then it gets absolutely crazy.)

2015: ~1,200 trick-or-treaters

2014: ~1,100-1,200 trick-or-treaters

2013: ~1,200 trick-or-treaters

2012: ~1,200 trick-or-treaters

I didn’t take video in 2011, but that year, I estimated we gave out ~1,270 pieces of candy, totaling ~26 lbs 6 oz.

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Sometimes, insights into one’s own thought processes arise in unexpected ways. Like, for instance…

• …that time when a pedestrian, partisan Twitter argument with someone who was Wrong On The Internet turned into an extended, detailed articulation of my Grand Unified Theory of #PANIC about the direction of the country.
• …or that time when listening to a Colorado Public Radio podcast inspired me to put forth the thesis that “the world is such an interesting place, full beyond measure with the incredible richness of human experience. And yet people read Politico.” (This bit of 538-bait was promptly RT’d by Nate Silver.)
• …or that time a rant about partisan tribalism, capped by a Lord of the Rings joke-tweet referring to my erstwhile “Third Party Christie” fanboyism (haha, yeah, that part didn’t age well, did it?), somehow transformed itself into a broad defense of rationalism over dogmatism.
• …or that time my popular rant about how media-created outrages du jour often are none of your damn business & you don’t actually care about them was launched by my idle pondering of the obsessive news coverage of Rachel Canning. (Remember Rachel Canning? No? Exactly my point.)

Well, anyway, it sorta happened again yesterday – introspective insight unexpectedly arising, that is – so, at the risk of engaging in the bad-form practice of contemplating my own former eloquence, I thought I would share.

On Monday night, something inspired me to re-watch JibJab’s brilliant election satire videos from 2004, This Land and Good to Be in D.C., and from 2008, Time For Some Campaignin’. Having discovered that they’ve aged remarkably well (even as JibJab itself hasn’t; they haven’t made anything of a quality or hilarity that even approaches those videos in 7+ years now), I of course had to tweet about it:

What ever happened to JibJab? Their 2004 and 2008 election animations were so damn good. http://t.co/Jl9pOBwT79 pic.twitter.com/MUWmQYYPd1

— Brendan Loy (@brendanloy) September 22, 2015

I also posted something similar on Facebook, writing: “What ever happened to JibJab? Their election satire animations in 2004 and 2008 were so damn good. I was re-watching last night. Still hilarious.” My friend David commented in response: “The first two were amusing but after they just weren’t as clever IMO. One (two?) hit wonders?”

This is where the “unexpected insight into my thought processes” comes in.

In the course of responding at (excessive and overanalytical) length to David’s comment, I came up with the most concise and spot-on description I’ve ever written of how I, personally, feel about our election system – i.e., the conflicting thoughts that I hold simultaneously in my head about it. I wrote:

On the one hand, there is a sense in which voting for president is truly a very grand thing, a quadrennial expression of the awesome power of democracy in action, and yet on the other hand, there’s an incredibly seedy, cynical and depressing side, in which the process is captive to money and false promises and a two-party system that limits our choices and is, in many ways, at least partially “rigged.”

Yup. That. (Can I say “This x1000” about something I wrote?)

Here’s the full context:

People who know me, or follow me on social media, know that I’m an very patriotic guy (yes, conservatives, liberals can be patriotic too!), and that my patriotism is never expressed more fervently than at election time. For example:

I can be cynical, snarky and elitist. I have little faith in the common man’s wisdom. But I always find Election Day inspiring & uplifting.

— Brendan Loy (@brendanloy) November 2, 2010

For all our system’s flaws – and they are many & profound – I am always inspired by our representative democracy on Election Day. #vote

— Brendan Loy (@brendanloy) November 6, 2012

I love Election Day. #America http://t.co/6yx2x9Xz4I

— Brendan Loy (@brendanloy) November 5, 2013

I always feel deeply, genuinely inspired and uplifted by participating in, and observing, the process of We The People expressing our will at the ballot box, and thereby governing ourselves. I love voting. I love elections. And I’m trying to raise my young daughters to feel the same way; hence, things like the #LoyFamilyElectionChart and the balance of power chart and #GiantThermometers and electoral puzzles, as well as encouraging my eldest daughter’s #RomneyCrush even though I’m a Dem. Because elections are awesome. I’m the type of person who can feel genuinely inspired by witnessing the passion of people at a Sarah Palin rally or a Dan Maes victory party, admiring their earnest desire to improve our society, and the extent to which they care and are involved in the civic process – even if I utterly disagree with their substantive beliefs.

And yet… and yet. At the same time, I see tremendously deep, intractable and possibly unsolvable flaws in our system. Some of them are structural or procedural, but many of them are caused by human nature itself – by We The People – as I tried to explain in the aforementioned Grand Unified Theory of #PANIC. Therefore, as inspired as I feel when I contemplate the good things about our system, I feel equally depressed when I contemplate the bad things. If my relationship with our (representative) democratic process had a relationship status on Facebook, it would be “it’s complicated.”

And I figured out how to articulate all that in a single sentence while critiquing a seven-year-old Internet cartoon in which Obama rides a rainbow-pooping unicorn and McCain runs him over with a tank. Go figure.

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Ten years ago, at roughly this hour, I published a blog post titled “New Orleans in peril.” I was just a law student with a moderately popular blog, and hurricanes were one of the many things that I liked to blog about, so of course I was going to write something about the newly plausible threat that a strengthening storm in the Gulf of Mexico posed to America’s most hurricane-vulnerable city.

At the time I wrote it, I had no inkling that this would become my most famous blog post ever. I couldn’t have dreamed that it would eventually be quoted in the New York Times (in an article whose headline called me a “weather nerd”) and the Washington Post, among many other places – still less that I would ultimately read the post aloud in a Spike Lee movie.

Anyway, this is what my old website, “The Irish Trojan’s Blog,” looked like on August 26, 2005, with that post on top:

Later that night, I would get Instalanched, and then I would publish my almost-as-famous “Get The Hell Out” post. And the rest is history.

“100,000 dead” wasn’t hyperbole, by the way. As awful as Hurricane Katrina
was, it very easily could’ve been far worse with just a slightly
different track and slightly different timing of its eyewall replacement cycles and dry-air entrainment in those last critical 6 to 12 hours before landfall.

Anyway, for those unfamiliar with my Katrina blogging a decade ago, here’s a backgrounder. And here, courtesy of the Internet Archive, is my contemporaneous reverse-chronological blog archive, working backwards from 16 hours after landfall (when we realized that the New Orleans “bowl” was in fact “filling”) all the way back to the formation of a humble tropical depression over the Bahamas, T.D. 12.

P.S. As always, I hasten to add that my "15 minutes of fame” vis a vis Katrina are utterly
unimportant in the grand scheme of things – or even the medium-sized
scheme of things. I’m writing about them because, well, this is my Tumblr, and sometimes I use it to write about my life. But as surreal and unforgettable and defining as those days in
August 2005 were for me personally, it’s the people of Louisiana & Mississippi whose experiences actually matter. Not mine.

P.P.S. Also, as I’ve said for a decade, I did not “predict” anything,
display any usual foresight, or say anything unique about Katrina on my
blog during those insane, surreal days. I just shouted obvious things
into the void – a void that soon became less void-like, thanks to links
from Instapundit and others – at a time (namely Friday & Saturday,
the 26th & 27th) when many in the media and government (at all
levels*) were seemingly asleep at the switch, failing to adequately
grasp and respond to Katrina’s transition from run-of-the-mill hurricane
to potential world-historical event.

P.P.P.S. I’d like to be
able to say that we, as a country and a society, learned valuable
preparedness lessons from Katrina. But seven years later, as
Hurricane Sandy approached, Mayor Bloomberg made the same fucking mistakes
as Mayor Nagin. (And some new ones to boot!)

Pardon my French, but it really pisses me off.

*Wondering what I mean when I refer to government failures “at all levels”? I’ll show you!

Here’s my
personal, off-the-cuff power ranking of government officials/agencies
who were utter failures with respect to Hurricane Katrina:

1)
Mayor Ray Nagin (because, as bad as the subsequent post-storm response
failures were, they pale in comparison to the epic pre-storm preparedness #FAIL by the Nagin Administration, including the delayed evacuation order that
could have doomed tens of thousands of people to a mid-storm death – with no chance for even a timely “response” to save them – in a plausible worst-case
scenario that Nagin and his administration had no right, at the time they were dithering, to assume wouldn’t happen … all of which I said at the time, not just in hindsight, BTW)

2) The Army Corps of
Engineers (because, given the not-even-close-to-worst-case scenario that actually ultimately occurred, what with the storm weakening and
turning right at the last minute, New Orleans should have been fine, and
Katrina should have been remembered as NOLA near-miss and a Mississippi disaster… but
instead, the levees inexcusably failed in what amounted to a Category 1 hurricane in
NOLA, with perhaps a Category 2-level surge there, which the Army Corps’ system was supposed to be able to handle)

3) FEMA (because the response was
unconscionably slow, disorganized, ill-conceived and poorly
communicated, despite the fact that everyone remotely knowledgeable
about disaster preparedness had always known that a big hurricane
hitting NOLA was a top-level national disaster threat, and despite the fact that Katrina
was extremely well-forecasted 60-72 hours out, so they had plenty of time to get their act together beforehand)

4) President
George W. Bush (because the buck stops with him for failure number 3, and once it became clear that Katrina was a potential world-historical event rather than just a standard-fare ‘cane, POTUS should have made it his top priority and gotten actively involved, sooner and more forcefully, to make sure FEMA and other agencies were on track)

(Side note: Bush’s infamous “airplane flyover” was not a failure. That criticism was totally unfair and wrong-headed. I say this as a Democrat; I voted for Gore and Kerry. But Bush was
absolutely right not to divert first responders, mid-crisis, to provide security
for a presidential photo op.)

5) Governor Kathleen Blanco (because
she & her administration should have more effectively coordinated
and worked with both the local government and the federal government,
both pre-storm and post-storm, to make sure that this well-forecasted, obviously-potentially-cataclysmic,
long-predicted, not remotely “unforeseeable” event was handled properly)

Honorable Mention: Any idiot in any government agency, at any level, who,
at any point, in any context, ever used the word “unforeseeable” to
describe Katrina (because OMG … I. Can’t. Even.)

How about a power ranking of Katrina government successes? Let’s see…

1) The United States Coast Guard (because they stepped in where others
were failing, and rescued like 50,000 people, or something crazy like
that, if I recall correctly)

2) The National Weather Service / National Hurricane Center (because their forecast was spot-on, and gave
the targeted areas adequate time to prepare – which, despite all the
failures listed above, unquestionably saved many, many lives – and they
produced that forecast while relying on modeling technology that, a
decade later, looks positively primitive compared to what we have now)

(However, the NWS / NHC loses a few points for the evident breakdown in
communication with Mayor Nagin & others, which, while it wasn’t
primarily their fault, they probably should’ve done more to recognize
and remedy sooner)

3) uh, yeah, that’s pretty much it

NOTE: This post originally misidentified Governor Blanco as “Governor Mary Landrieu.” Landrieu, of course, was Louisiana’s senator, not its governor. I just mixed up the names after all these years. My apologies.

UPDATE: A recent article by Michael Brown in Politico, “Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina,” punctures various aspects of the narrative about Katrina (in particular the notion that FEMA dallied while the Coast Guard saved lives) and is certainly worth a read. While the article might seem self-serving, and unquestionably “Brownie” has a bias and his account should be taken with a grain of salt, I gotta say – without having researched it or anything, just assessing it at face value – that various aspects of what he’s saying ring true to me.

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

I’ve been saying for ages – well, for the better part of two years, anyway – that I’m going to do a blog post “one of these days” ranking all the plays and musicals that I’ve seen in the last 2+ years in Denver, as I have emerged from the “fog of diapers” (i.e., the isolation from cultural activities that tends to come with parenthood of young children) and dived into our city’s surprisingly robust theater scene. (Seriously – theater in Denver is awesome, you guys.)

I said it again last night after watching the Denver finale of Wicked at the Buell Theatre with Becky. Gotta do that blog post!

Alas, I keep procrastinating this item on my to-do list. And with each new play I see, the task gets a little bigger, and it feels a little more like I’ll never actually get around to it. Well, screw that! I’m gonna do it! Right now, sort of!

The idea, of course, is not merely to make a BuzzFeed-style listicle, but also to write a little blurb about why I’m ranking each show where I am. However, the “blurb” part is what makes this task feel increasingly overwhelming, as the list of required blurbs gets longer and longer. So, I’ve decided I’m going to do this in stages, starting with this post. Ergo, below is my first-draft, unelaborated listicle, ranking the shows I’ve seen in Denver over the past 27 months. This way, if nothing else, I’ll get all the plays and musicals written down before I forget what they are. And hopefully, this will spur me to come back and add the blurbs later. (And when I do that, I reserve the right to tweak the order.) 

Anyway, without further ado…

(All shows at the Denver Center unless otherwise noted.)

JAW-DROPPINGLY AWESOME

1(a). Mary Poppins
1(b). Book of Mormon
3. Wicked

(Yeah, I haven’t figured out how to rank my top two yet. So sue me. In my defense, it’s really hard to meaningfully compare a show featuring “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” with one featuring “Hasa Diga Eebowai.” It’s sort of like asking: “Which is a better magazine, The Economist or Playboy?” They aren’t really comparable! But, I’ll come back to this issue when I do my final list. Hopefully, I won’t wuss out and keep them tied for the top spot.)

UNEXPECTEDLY AMAZING

4. Black Odyssey
5. Appoggiatura

GENUINELY EXCELLENT

6. The Legend of Georgia McBride
7. Sense and Sensibility
8. The Unsinkable Molly Brown
9. One Night in Miami

REALLY GOOD SHOWS THAT I FEEL BAD RANKING THIS LOW
(but the Top 9 were so great, it can’t be helped)

10. Death of a Salesman
11. Annie 
12. The Singing Room (by Horse & Cart Productions at the Brooks Center)
13. Hairspray (by the Aurora Fox on the Stapleton Green)

GOOD, IF KINDA FORGETTABLE

14. Peter and the Starcatcher

15. Midsummer Night’s Dream (by Three Leaches Theatre Company on the Stapleton Green) 
16. Fawlty Towers (by Equinox Theatre Company at the Bug Theatre)

FLAWED, BUT STILL ENJOYABLE

17. Just Like Us
18. Animal Crackers
19. Pippin

THE ONLY TWO THAT WERE ACTUALLY BAD

20. The 12
21. Evita

I think that’s all the shows I’ve seen since “Sense and Sensibility” on April 18, 2013. If I think of any others that I’m forgetting, I’ll add them. And, like I said, stay tuned for the lengthier post explaining (and possibly tweaking) these rankings. Eventually! Maybe! Hopefully!

P.S. I almost forgot: a bonus ranking of children’s theater shows that I’ve seen in the last 27 months! I’m giving these their own list, since comparing them to the grownup-theater productions wouldn’t be fair (though I’d put them all ahead of Evita).

CHILDREN’S THEATER PRODUCTIONS

1. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Aurora Fox Theatre) 
2. The Emperor’s New Clothes (Heritage Square Music Hall) 
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Aurora Fox Theatre)

Side note: if you count the children’s theater plays, and you consider that I saw Molly Brown twice (first with Fourth Wall, then with Loyette and Loyacita), I’ve been to a live theater production 25 times in the last 27 months!!

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Upping the ante from my “Stapleton Civil War” and “North Stapleton secession” articles for the Stapletonion (our local Onion-style satirical newspaper), I have an article in this week’s issue about fears that the kerfuffle over middle-school admissions may trigger a nuclear arms race in northeast Denver. Because, yet again, when helicopter parents are denied a marginally preferable educational situation and forced into a still-very-good educational situation, THIS MEANS WAR. 🙂

(Obligatory humor-killing caveat: I recognize that both Stapleton and Park Hill parents have real and legitimate concerns, and as a father of three young kids myself, I certainly respect their passion about getting their children the best education. My intention is NOT to suggest that the whole argument is illegitimate, but merely to introduce a bit of much-needed levity to the situation. Anyway…)

The Stapletonion’s standard format calls for longer and denser paragraphs than my typical news-writing style, so as a result, there are a couple of edits in the published version that I didn’t love. Therefore, I’m posting a “de-edited” version below for your enjoyment and perusal.

DENVER—Amid concern that tensions over McAuliffe International School admission priorities could escalate into a wider conflict, Park Hill community leaders insisted Monday that their neighborhood’s uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes only. 

“We are not building a nuclear bomb,” said Jon Mason, president of the Greater Park Hill Community Association. “We just want an independent power source in case the Xcel grid goes down for some reason. Like, say, if it gets overloaded with ‘smug’ from all the solar panels in Stapleton.” 

Experts fear, however, that Park Hill’s nuclear ambitions could trigger an arms race, with Stapleton seeking to build a bomb next, followed perhaps by Lowry, Montclair and Hale. 

Recent conversations on Nextdoor have fueled worries about Park Hill’s possible ulterior motives. For instance, Park Hill resident Janet Kamienski, whose fifth-grader was unable to get into McAuliffe despite living two blocks away from the school, posted over the weekend that “those Stapleton schmucks won’t feel so superior when we have nuclear missiles pointed at their precious airport tower.”  

The Greater Park Hill News also raised eyebrows with its most recent issue, which featured an “open letter to Stapleton” that described Stapleton residents as “savages” and “Smiley-stealing devils” and referenced the “drums of war.”

Rumors have also been circulating about Park Hill residents allegedly sending “measles blankets” to Stapleton families with unvaccinated fourth- and fifth-graders, but those claims have thus far proven impossible to confirm.

One thing is clear, however: Stapleton’s once squabbling neighborhoods, who not long ago were on the brink of civil war over elementary school preferences, have united decisively against the common enemy on the other side of Quebec Street.

“Those Park Hill ingrates have got a lot of nerve,” said Stapleton resident Chris McFarlane, who has a seventh-grade daughter at McAuliffe and a fifth-grade son set to join her in the fall. “They were all sending their kids to private schools, instead of Smiley, until DPS opened the boundary and moved Stapleton’s best middle school onto Smiley’s campus. Now they want to kick the Stapleton kids out, because suddenly they care about the sanctity of ‘neighborhood schools.’ Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

Jill Crowley, whose fifth-grader received her first choice of McAuliffe for next school year, agreed. “Within the space of nine months, they’ve gone from stealing our school to claiming that we stole their school,” she said. “It’s insane. And now with this nuclear program – just you watch. They’ll nuke Stapleton and then blame us when the fallout crosses Quebec.”

At press time, Forest City could not be reached for comment on reports that it is building a secret, nuke-proof underground bunker below the future King Soopers parking lot in Eastbridge.

*     *     *     *     *

Hee hee. 🙂

My previous Stapletonion articles:

• School Boundary Dispute Triggers Massive Rioting, Mayhem
• DPS “Tweak” Triggers North Stapleton Secession Threat 
• New “Stapleton High Holy Day” Spurs Debate
• “Box Wine Challenge” Raises Funds for Eastbridge Park

[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

Due to my daughters’ current obsession with the Pocahontas soundtrack (we watched the movie a couple of weeks ago), combined with the heated local controversy over Park Hill and Stapleton kids effectively competing for admission to McAuliffe International School, I recently found myself imagining wealthy parents from the two neighborhoods shouting “Savages! Savages! Barely even human!” at each other across Quebec Street. It was a funny mental image.

When a co-worker suggested that the McAullife fight is essentially an argument between Denver’s “old money and new money,” I was inspired to go ahead and write a new version of the song…

PARK HILL:

What can you expect
From Denver’s nouveau riche?
Their faux-“New Urban” neighborhood’s a curse
They think their tower’s so cool
They breed like horny fools
And now they want our school! Perverse!

They’re savages! Savages!
Barely even human!
Savages! Savages!
Drive them from our school!

Re-close the boundary
This takeover is evil
We must sound the drums of war!
They’re savages! Savages!
Smiley-stealing devils!
We must sound the drums of war!

STAPLETON:

This is what we feared
The old money’s ungrateful
McAuliffe saved their campus, yet they bitch
They took our school, the louts
And now they want us out!
I wonder if they’re even rich!

They’re savages! Savages!
Barely even human!
Savages! Savages!
Ingrates at the core

They’re less fertile than us
Which means they can’t be trusted
We must sound the drums of war!
They’re savages! Savages!
Keep the boundary open
Or we’ll sound the drums of war!

*     *     *     *     *

Obligatory humor-killing caveat: I’m just kidding around here, folks. Just like with the “Stapleton Civil War,” I’m simply having some fun with the intensity of the fights about this stuff.

(Quick primer for the uninitiated: McAuliffe originally opened in Stapleton, and built a highly successful program there. Then, last fall, the school up and moved – lock, stock and barrel, with existing (Stapleton) students and staff – to the campus of Park Hill’s old failing middle school, Smiley, which closed down. At that point, the middle school “boundary” was “opened,” so that both neighborhoods have an equal chance of admission to McAuliffe, or to any other middle school in the Stapleton/Park Hill “shared boundary.” Now, because McAuliffe-at-Smiley is so wildly popular, over 100 students—some from each neighborhood—were unable to get in, and so Park Hill parents are upset that some of their kids are getting “bumped” into other high-performing middle schools located in Stapleton. Some of those angry parents want the boundary “closed,” so that Park Hill kids will have priority at McAuliffe, even though McAullife started as a Stapleton school with Stapleton kids, and only moved Park Hill—thus rejuvenating the Smiley campus—based on the shared-boundary premise.)