1/30 If the grass is always greener on the other side, then The Dirt Doctor (a.k.a Howard Garrett) must always be on the other side. Listen to his talk show The Natural Way Sunday mornings on WBAP and marvel at the man’s ability to talk about dirt for four hours…
2/3 Among the new clothing, accessories, toys, social habits and sleeping schedules that come with the arrival of your own little bundle of joy, it’s only natural that some aspects of basic child care take a backseat to more immediate concerns. For instance, why not just pop the top on…
1/30 Let’s get something out in the open. Yes, Ansel Adams made technical discoveries in regard to lighting and in photographing the moon. No, I’m not a big fan of his work. So, yeah, maybe I’m making enemies, but if they’re buying framed Adams prints from Bed, Bath and Beyond,…
1/30 Give us a break. Love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry. It means never hearing a “thank you” when you pick up dirty socks from the bathroom floor. It’s not taking your final breath in his loving arms. It’s prying the box of Cheez-Its away from him…
If you don’t know the name J.K. Rowling, we want to know which spider hole you’ve been living in. It won’t have been in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain,…
There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property-grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real like the original punk or goth movements, or Australia’s cinematic…
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! opens with a movie within the movie. It’s the 1940s, and a hunky, square-jawed soldier (played by Tad Hamilton, who’s played by Josh Duhamel) stops his car along the side of a damp road; a woman, dressed in virginal nursing whites, gets out of…
The setting: an institutional high school in the affluent suburbs. The protagonists: two boys–intelligent, charming and smoldering–with typical suburban lives, including intact families and plenty of spending money. The plot: carnage. Assembling pipe bombs from ingredients purchased at Home Depot and commandeering shotguns slipped from the family cabinet, the boys…
Playing a character named The Maniac, actor Robert Dorfman calmly announces to the audience at Dallas Theater Center that he will serve as the “tour guide” through the zigs and zags of Dario Fo’s political satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist. That’s an understatement. Moments after the lights go up…
We know of a few sex workers. In fact, at least two pages of them help keep a roof over our heads. Some are shockingly witty and artistic. So the situation treads on the old saying about not judging a hook, er, book by its cover. Annie Oakley, founder of…
Thursday 22 We believe that any year that honors the monkey has got to be a good year. Then again, we also believe our horoscopes and trust our TV weatherman. So don’t take our word for it. According to tradition, since today begins the year of the monkey (and more…
The book was gray and dingy, and on its cover a leering miscreant glared at us from behind prison bars. The simple title, Crime, was depicted in red in that ever-recognizable typewriter-style font. The contents of the book–subtitled “A Pictorial History of Crime 1840 to the Present” and peeked at…
1/22 Chinese New Year sounds like an intense holiday. On January 1, we eat some black-eyed peas, nurse a hangover and call it a day. Not so for the Chinese. First of all, because the Chinese calendar is based on a lunar cycle, New Year’s falls on a different date…
1/24 One of the more family-friendly running events in town, the Dino Dash is a fun mix of education and exercise that helps raise money for programs at the Science Place. With 10K, 5K and 1K courses, there’s a race fit for all ages and skill levels. The 5K course…
1/23 Happily ever afters make us itchy, though we like when bad ‘uns get their comeuppance–like how Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off toes and heels to fit into the tiny slipper, but the prince notices blood spilling from the shoe and then pigeons peck out the sisters’ eyes. Nice. Maybe it…
1/23 Midwinter. Bleak if you have psoriasis or seasonal affective disorder. Unbearably bleak if your husband crashed his truck, fractured his vertebrae and has to wear a back brace for two more months. Profoundly bleak since all you can think about is sex. Your therapist suggests you try new things:…
1/23 Bernice Johnson Reagon’s father once told her about a “land so rich that when rocks were cracked open, honey flowed from them.” It is a biblical parable that inspired the performer to name the group she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock–an African-American female a cappella quintet. The name…
If MC Hammer can go broke, anyone can. Actually, that’s not quite true. Most of us don’t put everyone we knew growing up on our payroll (street cred is not something your average plumber has to worry about) or spend $20 million on a house. Or, for that matter, attempt…
Feel like an evening at the ballet? Robert Altman’s The Company, a lovely and superficial montage of performance, is less a movie than a series of impressions, a rich sampler of a season with one of America’s premier dance companies–the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. There’s scandalously little by way of…
In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing…
Here is something I bet you did not know, because I did not know it until a month ago, and people who should have known long before me didn’t even know until I told them. There is a record label in Los Angeles called CMH that, through a subsidiary called…
Mention Waiting for Godot and you will often get the sigh and the eye roll. Oh, that old thing. What is it about anyway? What does it mean? It’s weird. It’s long. It makes no sense. The eye-rollers do have a point. Godot playwright Samuel Beckett provides a pretty accurate…
