One answer is that the town's elected officials thought that the project served a public purpose and that the various subsidies and favors were worth the price. But they may or may not have thought this.
I've always tried to walk a line between being incisive and acerbic, but not mean. Sometimes I'm going to tip over the line a little bit, but that's usually a line I try not to cross.
There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.
Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two but can't remember what they are.
The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and then put them in my mouth.
I was the youngest child. I got to be myself and ask stupid questions because I was the youngest. It is so important to listen to the questions children have and reward them for the wondrous questions they ask.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
I did my degree in journalism, and I then went on to being a games journalist, reviewing and previewing games and writing about the industry, visiting and interviewing developers.
Later on, I read the end of the New Order described as being 'like sex without orgasm'. It was an unmomentous a historic moment as could be imagined - perfunctory, anti-climactic and unconvincing.
If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.
If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson - what we're doing now in this country is making them roll over in their graves.
We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.
The Democrats need to remind people of where were, in terms of our progress, as markers against where we are, and where we've fallen, and how we've declined under Bush.
That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.
Of course, New Brighton is very shabby, very rundown, but people still go there because it's the place where you take kids out on a Sunday.
I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the '80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain.
Reagan's approach will achieve one of the basic goals of the conservative: Things remain basically the same. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, or even a little poorer.
Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.
