Come Hail or High Water

I was none to happy to read the weekend forecast yesterday, seeing as how it called for a chance of rain on Friday night. After all, this weekend is the Denton Arts and Jazz Festival, a cool, free outdoor weekend of music that's notorious for attracting bad weather. Let's recap the past few years, shall we?

• 2004: Arturo Sandoval cancelled because of a tornado warning.


• 2005: Arturo comes back and gets to play. I was there.


• 2006: Joshua Redman is scheduled to play; it monsoons like crazy. My friends and I had to find another place to hear live music that night.

So fast forward to the present, with McCoy Tyner set to headline on Friday night. But first, there's that rain in the forecast. And to make matters worse, Denton got pelted with over five inches of rain in last night's storms. The picture in the linked article shows a stranded person on Bell Place, which is a one-block long street that's but a block away from Civic Center Park (just as this morning's DMN showed a picture of a lady being rescued from her flooded car at Bell and Mingo, which is literally right across the street from the park.

So now we have two wild cards going into the weekend: Will it stay dry from up above on Friday night, and will the ground be dry enough to even spread a blanket on? (While researching this post, I did notice another article that talked about a water-removal company spending quite a bit of time at the Civic Center, so hopefully the situation is well in hand.

This headline would get a lot of laughs in Denton: Riggs Named Most Beautiful Bulldog.

She's obviously not a music major: A 19-year-old student is set to graduate from the University of Michigan after only a year.