There have been a lot of FEMA fraud stories since Hurricane Katrina, but none like this. Late yesterday, Ken McLain, 33, of Dallas, was found guilty of scheming the disaster relief agency out of more than $70,000 in claims connected to Katrina and that other hurricane, Rita. McLain went by…
Nightline, the venerable ABC News program, will be airing a segment on Dallas Crown, the horse slaughtering plant in nearby Kaufman. The program is scheduled to air this evening and will feature interviews with Robert Eldridge, who has the misfortune of living a few hundred yards from the facility, and…
If you watched him shank two field goals in last week’s preseason tie, you couldn’t believe your eyes. And if you go to his Web site, you won’t believe your ears. Even before he scores his first point in Dallas, kicker Mike Vanderjagt is already the cockiest player in franchise…
Hard times: Thousands of words have been written on the Dallas Observer’s blog, Unfair Park, as well as D magazine’s The FrontBurner and elsewhere online about impending job cuts at The Dallas Morning News, but so far nothing has appeared in our print edition. The reason for that is that…
Indulge Buzz in a childhood flashback: We were around 10 when a buddy got his hands on some discarded window counterweights–about a dozen bars of iron, weighing roughly a ton. (Maybe it only seemed that much.) A local junkyard paid money for scrap, so we dragged the bars about two…
Caffeine jitters: So the McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., owner of financial services firm Standard & Poor’s, has sued local coffeehouse Standard & Pours over alleged trademark infringement (see “Poor Standard & Pours?” by Robert Wilonsky, July 6). As we reported on the Dallas Observer’s blog Unfair Park, fans of the artsy…
We appreciate the efforts of those who encourage children to study the sciences. After all, it’ll be up to the next generation to come up with the nifty scientific advances we’ll need to counteract the abuse we’ve given our bodies. Smoking, drinking, fatty foods, no exercise—those chickens should be heading…
Seeing as the Dancing Tongue Literary Cabaret does not, in fact, have anything to do with the works of Anaïs Nin, we’ll endeavor to avoid any skeevy, tired jokes using naughty Latin words. Rather than overheated diarists, Dancing Tongue’s focus is on poets, blending their words with live music and…
Here’s some good news for fans of the cable networks Logo and Here!, two channels with content aimed at gay viewers that had been dropped from local cable programming when Time Warner Cable took over the Dallas cable from Comcast Corp. on August 1. That had some local viewers mighty…
Time for another weekly Unfair Park giveaway. Today, we’re offering two fabulous prizes. The first is two tickets and a parking pass to the Mary J. Blige concert tonight a Smirnoff Music Center. The first person to correctly guess Unfair Park blogmeister Robert Wilonsky’s favorite color will be obliged with…
I began watching Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen in its first season after developing love and mad respect for foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay, thanks to his BBC ventures. Before the current season, the show held auditions here in Big D. I had friends that went. None made it, but Texas had showing…
The Invisible Sheriff strikes again. This week, we wrote about how Lupe Valdez infuriated her rank-and-file officers when she declined to fire Larry Locke, one of her top chiefs, for keeping a Thompson submachine gun in his storage cabinet. Valdez had overruled her highest-ranking employee, Jesse Flores, who wanted to…
Six weeks after my story on the truck-eating railway trestle on Garland Road near the White Rock Lake spillway, DART told The Dallas Morning News that it is looking at tearing the bridge down. Three bright yellow signs warn drivers that the abandoned trestle has a clearance of 12 feet…
Doyle Davidson is an old-fashioned kind of guy who likes to write love letters. To married women, yeah, but still. Water of Life preacher Doyle Davidson has been posting weird “messages to Lisa” again, including one that seemed to signal a possible change in his “marital” status. As Dallas Observer…
Barbara Lorenz Carly Patterson is gonna be on reality TV. With Cyndi Lauper. On Fox. Those are the teardrops of pride, my friend. Remember two summers ago when a spunky 16-year-old from Allen won our hearts and the gold medal in women’s gymnastics at the Athens Olympics? Then, like, remember…
You’ve tried the personals; you’ve tried MySpace; you’ve tried blind dates and virtually everything else to find a mate–or a least someone worth a second date. What, oh what, is a girl to do in Dallas’ dating desert? No. Not that. Sheesh. Get your mind out of the gutter and…
We now take this brief T.O. from T.O. to talk about positive, harmonious, winning football: So what do two consecutive mythical national championships, a 63-1 record over four years and a 32-game winning streak get you? If you’re the Southlake Carroll High School football team, it gets you a slap…
Dim bulbs: Buzz doesn’t cry, but even we can be moved by the news once in a while. The stories in April about Mercy, the dog that rescuers tried and failed to save after she was intentionally set afire, were pretty sad, for instance, but years in the news biz…
It’s amazing what the muddy, turtle- and tire-filled Trinity River can inspire. While some see a polluted ditch, others see a reason to spend millions for a fancy-schmancy bridge to nowhere. Still others see a good place to dump old couches, refrigerators and the occasional corpse. The artists at McKinney…
He brought down Robert Tilton, W.V. Grant and Larry Lea, three of Dallas’ high-flying televangelists in the early 1990s. And when he wasn’t diving in dumpsters to pick through preachers’ trash, he was entertaining journalists from around the world at “The Block,” Trinity Foundation’s collection of homes in East Dallas…
For two weeks all anyone’s talked about is the imminent arrival of the award-winning New York critic known for his brutal critiques of “critic fellows” here at the Theater Farm. He’s so tough, they say, he’s made professional journalists cry as he ruthlessly dissects their prose syllable by syllable. “Das…
In his last two stops, Terrell Owens has driven quarterbacks, coaches and fans crazy. After exactly two days of Dallas Cowboys training camp here in Oxnard, California, there’s evidence his presence is already pushing coach Bill Parcells to the brink of insanity. In a fascinating, frustrating 10-minute span on a…
