That little umbrella stroller from the dollar store isn’t good enough for the new Austin, with all its double-income, one-kid (or one-set-of-twins) families. Where they’re being bought, I don’t know, but I have seen Bugaboo high-dollar strollers here in town, enough of them so that Austin really should be included in the day-tour cities (go to “explore” and then go “daytrips”). I think that we’re at least as strollericious as Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Miami (!). Now that the legislature is about to come into session, there’ll be even more of these fancy conveyances around, pushed by those unfamiliar with our fair city. . . . These days, whenever an issue of patient privacy, the HIPAA, or medical records in general is addressed, we see that the news-gatherers seek comments from Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of the Austin-based Patient Privacy Rights Foundation. My most recent sighting in one of these contexts is embedded in an alarming article about medical ID theft (Business Week; January 8, 2007; “Diagnosis: Identity Theft“). . . . The subsequent issue of Business Week (January 15; “What Happens to That Scarf You Really Hated“) looks at “reverse logistics,” or what happens to that item returned to the store. Austin’s own Newgistics provides this out-sourced service for on-line sellers such as Amazon, J. Crew, and Nordstrom, charging by the package. . . . When Met Home magazine (January 2007; page 44; byline Peter Hellman) interviewed Karrie Jacobs, formerly of Metropolis and Dwell and author of “The Perfect $100,000 House,” asking whether she has found any architects truly interested in designing a $100,000 house, she said, “I think first of Chris Krager in Austin, Texas, whose focus is on the quality of space, not the quantity of space, which is where modernism leads,” and went on to say quite a bit more, all of it very flattering. . . . This week’s NYT book review section highlights the issuance in paperback form of “Waterloo,” by Karen Olsson, described in capsule form as a “melancholy comedy of Texas politics, Olsson’s first novel follows a jaded alternativeweekly reporter, a conservative state assemblywoman and several others as they plan, protest or mourn the razing of two neglected buildings: a music club beloved by aging hipsters and a historically black library.” The blurb on the book itself speaks of the “slackers, rockers, hustlers, hacks, and hangers-on who populate Austin, the last little blue dot in Texas.” The marketing for this book is interesting; it’s being sold not just at Book People, for instance, but also from special displays around town in other sorts of businesses. This book is always checked out at the library, so I broke down and bought a copy at the Farm to Market on South Congress, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.