Second StreetReady for a grass-roots, city-funded makeover? Few things are as strangely titillating, and intensively packed with boxfuls of tasty “donut hole” treats, as the collision of practicality and nonsense at an Economic Development Review Committee meeting in City Council chambers, downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 8 am, Thursday morning.

Three key bummers from the most recent meeting:

The PorkmoleAn artist's rendering? So, I'm minding my own business the other night, reading trashy detective novels in my old, red armchair with my dogs curled up at my feet, a tall (oops!) pour of mezcal in my glass and the window open to the scent of rain and the cool, high desert breeze when--smack--I get beaned on the temple by a paper airplane. Not just any paper airplane, either, but a "Nakamura lock," a basic, but perfect, origami masterpiece of flying pulp. It had sailed right through the open window and found its target with Kamikaze precision.

Centex is coming to a magical land near you!It's Phoenix! No, wait, it's Dallas! At least you can tell by the stucco color that it's somewhere in the southwest. It may be Fortune magazine's "most admired home builder," but Centex sounds like a nerve gas to me. The nationwide construction outfit now has 13 "communities" in New Mexico with four in Santa Fe, so it certainly exhibits some of the characteristics of a rapidly spreading, possibly airborn, contaminant.