What are we smoking, you ask? Uh...we'll take the Fifth on that one, but stay with us on this bridge thing. There's reason in our madness. See, we figure that regardless of what Dallas voters want or need, the city council will always have some large, pointless, high-dollar bauble on its priority list. They're like parakeets: They need something shiny in their cage to keep their brains occupied, some little bit of inanity to help them deal with the tedium of running City Hall. Besides, small-time politicos love building big monuments to themselves, and a fancy-schmancy suspension bridge over the Trinity Ditch...er, River...is much, much sexier than the more mundane stuff the city might actually need, such as parks, firehouses or a few hundred miles of repaved streets. Sure, the bridges seem kinda gaudy and a bit absurd--Is anyone really going to swap a vacation in San Francisco to come see our bridge over the mighty Trinity instead?--but as bad big ideas ago, the Calatrava Bridges are relatively harmless. So, let the council distract themselves with trying to scrounge enough money to turn the Trinity into the Seine. That'll never happen, but in the meantime, any minute spent on the bridges is a minute the council won't spend doing something worse.