December’s been a big month for McKinney, Texas.
And that’s not just because I passed through it one (1) time on my way to and from Illinois for Christmas.
No, the Collin County seat (as the saying goes, “Plano might be large, but McKinney’s in charge”) didn’t rely on me saying “oh, hey, I’m in McKinney” after popping-off-some-tollway-Waze-took-me-up-to-avoid-downtown-Dallas to have a good Christmas.
The 2014-Money Magazine-rated #1 Best Place to Live in America made it great themselves.
For starters, the NCAA Division-II football national championship was last Saturday, in McKinney—the nation’s fastest-growing-city-for-five-nonconsecutive-years-last-decade-among-cities-with-more-than-50,000-people itself. West Florida, in case you didn’t know (I didn’t know), won it. Six touchdown passes from Austin Reed. You can watch them online, which I now know because I visited McKinney’s D II national championship website: d2mckinney.com.
It’s a great website. Peruse it yourself sometime, but here are the hits:
- The “Explore McKinney” section has six pictures, presumably of McKinney, with no explanation of what they are. No caption. No link from them. Just a gallery, all laid out there at once.
- There was a DII Fan Fest™ the night before the game. It lasted two hours.
- If you aren’t interested in the DII Fan Fest™, but you came “for the game…and the parties” as the website suggests, or you want to double down on the party piece and do both the Fan Fest™ and a Tex-Mex exploration, you could participate as a voter in the “Tacos, Tequila & Cerveza” competition going on between 13 local establishments (I was really hoping Chili’s would be participating, but no dice). The rules for this allowed you to vote for three restaurants a day through the three-day weekend, which at first seemed dumb to me because are you really going to go to four in a day, but I now understand is actually ingenious because you’re really just giving a no-confidence vote to those that are bad. I now support instituting this model of voting in federal elections.
- El Mejor received no votes in Tacos, Tequila & Cerveza. I tried clicking on it to see if it had gone out of business prior to that Friday, when the competition began, but I found no information because, as with photos in the Explore McKinney section, the picture of its logo just enlarged when I clicked it.
- After clicking on El Mejor’s logo, I was unable to get it to disappear and had to leave the Tacos, Tequila & Cerveza page in order to come back. Cue McConaughey.
- The social media feed at the bottom of the page is solely Facebook posts by the organization D2 McKinney. No tweets. No Instagram. We’re hitting Division-II football fans at their sweet spot, which is the dads-over-40 demographic.
- The Community Event Center is heavily advertised on the front page (meaning it gets prime location, alongside the stadium itself) despite having no clear connection to the proceedings.
- The Community Event Center boasts that it “utilizes online scheduling software,” which could mean anything from an Open Table-like setup to email.
- The McKinney Independent School District football stadium cost $70 Million. It was specifically designed for football. As it should be.
- There is a super fan contest.
- The promotional video on the website includes dancing policemen (two consecutive clips), some tennis-playing geezer getting muted for the last half of what he says (or going mute, we know not why his lips move soundlessly), a red carpet that stops rolling halfway through the roll-out, and—my personal favorite—an enthusiastic endorsement of McKinney as having “one of the most beautiful downtowns in all of North Dallas.” I watched this video three times.
- The fans pictured on the website are pretty clearly from a high school game.
- The first restaurant listed in the “Plan Your Trip” portion of the website is Chick-Fil-A.
But enough about Division II football.
Texas’ 19th-most populous city (and the nation’s 130th-most populous city, in between Tempe and Mobile) also had a magnifying glass-induced fire this week. Here’s the full article: LINK, and here it is boiled down to the most inspirational quotes:
- “The boy’s parents through their son was going to use a magnifying glass for reading, but instead, he wanted to try and spark things on fire.”
- “‘Cayden (12 years old) asked for a magnifying glass for Christmas,’ his mother, Nissa-Lynn Parson, said in a video posted to Facebook. ‘We though, ‘Oh, he wants to magnify something.’ No, he wanted to see if he can make fire with it, and they did.’”
- “‘I just wanted to start a little fire,’ her son, Cayden, said.”
- “‘And Christmas morning comes along and we’re opening presents and stuff, and he opens the magnifying glass and goes, ‘Yay, magnifying glass,’ The other son in the background, ‘Yay, now we can light stuff on fire.’ And we’re like, oh dear,’’ Cayden’s father, Justin Parson, said.”
- “‘He (the brother, I think) came outside and he picked up the newspaper which had a little fire on it,’ Cayden said.”
- “‘The flame starts, so I picked up the newspaper and just kind of like throw it,’ Ashton (yep, that’s the brother) said.”
- “‘The smoke was getting like as high as the tree,’ Ashton recalled.”
- “She added that when her son asked for the gift, she didn’t expect it to be a fire starter. She said it won’t be again. ‘No burning, like, it is in house. I want it like for reading or words,’ Nissa-Lynn said. ‘I shouldn’t start anymore fires,’ Cayden added.”
- “Along with the lawn, the fire destroyed a portion of the family’s Christmas lights.”
Congratulations, McKinney. You won.
