Like Crack Cheesecake Bars

2 cans of croissant rolls
2 pkgs cream cheese (8 oz.)
1 stick melted butter
1 tsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp vanilla
1.5 cups sugar

Roll out one can of croissant dough and press together the seams in a 13x9 pan. In a large bowl, blend cream cheese, one cup of sugar and the vanilla. Spread the mixture on top of the dough. Roll out the second can of croissant dough. Press the seams together and place on top of cream cheese mixture. Pour melted butter over the dough, drizzling some along the sides of the pan so it gets down to the bottom too. Mix 1/2 cup of sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle on top.
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Serve warm for breakfast or cold for dessert.

   The vaunted art critics with Charlotte Area Transit System's art-in-transit program call Thomas Sayre an artist. Rip-off artist is more like it. As I've written in the past, for years, Sayre has been selling similar looking circles, squares and cucumberesque art pieces to public art commissions around the country. (See http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A5586)
   Sayre's modus operandi is the same in every city. He meets with people from the area to find out about the history of the place, then builds them circular or square "castings" that look remarkably like the ones he has done in other cities. He then invents some localized back story for the piece and claims it represents some unique aspect of local history.
(read more below ...)
 
 
 Look familiar? Sayre is doing this project, which he calls "Harrow," for the Indianapolis Airport.


Here's the Charlotte version, along South Boulevard, which Sayre calls "Furrow."


Sayre is doing this unnamed piece for the University of Oregon's Living-Learning Center.

  As you can see from looking at the pictures above, the "sculptures" he has done in three cities look remarkably similar. Sayre claims the disks he is doing for the University of Oregon's Living-Learning Center are "reminiscent of the organic shapes of leaves" and will link the outdoor spaces at the center through "visual echoes." They're supposed to "link the organic/industrial chasm," whatever that means, and act as "reminders of the earth's essential elements."
   In Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer reports, Sayre met with Scaleybark area residents who said they wanted artwork that recalled a past when farms covered ground now dotted with subdivisions and strip development. So Sayre built us big red disks whose color he claims represents the "classic North Carolina red clay color." One problem. The similar looking disks he's doing in Oregon and for the Indianapolis Airport are the same color and texture.
   Sayre calls the disks along the light rail line on South Boulevard "Furrow" and says they recall the harrowing disks farmers around here used to use for planting. In Indianapolis, Sayre's art disks are called "Harrow" rather than "Furrow" and represent -- you guessed it -- Indianapolis' "unique" farming heritage.
   For mass producing these disks and claiming they represent some abstract aspect of local history, Sayre has been paid hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. 

   Charlotte topped the congestion charts among mid-sized cities again in the Texas Transportation Institute rankings report released today. The Queen City is the third most congested of nation's 30 mid-sized cities, falling behind only Nashville and Austin (which has a light rail line that Charlotte leaders recently traveled to the city to admire.)
   Charlotte ranked 34th most congested overall in terms of travel delay out the country's 85 largest cities. Charlotte also earned two F+ marks for being above average in congestion growth. (Atlanta, which has an extensive light rail system, was the second most congested city in the nation overall.)
   None of this is good news when you consider that the Charlotte's own city traffic engineers predict that our congestion will surpass Atlanta's over the next 15 to 20 years.
    The Charlotte region is one of the nation's fastest growing, and by 2020, it is predicted that a million additional people will move to this region and flood our roadways. Some 340,000 of the them will locate in Charlotte, the rest outside it.  That's on top of the 146,211 people who already live outside the county and commute in, according to the Charlotte Chamber. Worse yet, transit planners predict congestion here will at least double over that period. Light rail doesn't have the capacity to carry even a single percentage point of the traffic when current and future drivers are counted. So what's the plan? As I've reported before, if the city's own future road construction maps are to be believed, there apparently isn't one.

     On May 29, 2006, someone driving a Ford Taurus station wagon pulled into a grocery store parking lot near Old Steele Creek Road on Wilkinson Boulevard around 8:30 p.m. and shoved something out the door that looked remarkably like a corpse.
   Shocked onlookers scrambled to call 911 after they discovered the bloody body of Philip James Kaczmarek. Kaczmarek died from stab wounds, police later determined, and the Ford Taurus, which belonged to him, was later found a few miles away.
   Police quickly arrested Jackie Bennett, 44, who had rented a room from Kaczmarek on Avalon Avenue.
   A letter in Bennett's file states that he was charged with first degree murder and that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney "presently intends to seek the death penalty in this matter if this matter is not resolved with a guilty plea."
   The letter, which winds up in the files of defendants in most first degree murder cases, is a joke. Despite hundreds of murders here, it has been almost a decade since Mecklenburg County sent a killer to death row.
  
       
   A selection from the Jackie Bennett mugshot collection courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Correction and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office

   Instead, Assistant District Attorney David Wallace cut one of the stunning plea deals that the underfunded Mecklenburg DA's office is famous for. The plea deal Bennett signed knocked the first degree murder charge down to second degree murder and combined the charge with the robbery with a dangerous weapon charge he received for robbing Kaczmarek.
   The maximum punishment for the two charges was 40 years for the murder and 19 years for the armed robbery. But the charges were consolidated as part of the plea deal, and Bennett received a sentence of a minimum of just 12.5 years in prison.
   As Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory recently reminded constituents in an email asking them to contact their state legislators and grovel for more money for the underfunded justice system here, there are 144 murder suspects in the Mecklenburg County jail awaiting trial and the DA has the resources to try just 12 of them a year. The rest must be plea bargained. That the DA doesn't have the resources to push for tougher plea deals -- under threat of going to a trial -- in the remaining cases is well known among defense attorneys and public defenders, who cut some incredible deals for their clients.
   Recently, the state agreed to provide Mecklenburg County with half a dozen more prosecutors. That's great, but it is still less than the 15 to 20 more it needs to catch up with similar-sized cities like Portland and Austin.