For years, former Observer music editor Zac Crain and I took delight in poking at the Dixie Chicks for pretending the former Dallas street-corner performers didn’t exist until singer Natalie Maines joined the band and for acting as though they hadn’t released an album till 1998’s Wide Open Spaces. (Robert…
If you want to keep track of the impact today’s Day of Action (or Day Without an Immigrant) is having not only in Dallas, but in such cities as Miami Los Angeles, Chicago and Denver, NBC News has its peeps on the ground writing about what they’re seeing…and not seeing…
Magnetic yellow ribbons slapped on the back of your ride not troop-supporting enough for you? Yellow bow tied around a prominent tree in the yard starting to lose its impact? Looking for a new way to prove you’re supporting the troops, damn it? Also, do you need a new $3,800…
Renea Walker is angry at illegal immigrants. TV cameras are happy about that. As protests go on this so-called Day of Action, it was pretty mellow: Beginning at around noon today, fewer than 200 people walked around in a circle in front of Occidental Tower, home of Senator John Cornyn’s…
At moments like this, one is tempted to offer only the facts, yet even those aren’t enough to explain something as heartbreaking as this. Jennifer Dawson, wife of former Observer film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, died suddenly and unexpectedly on Thursday. She was 35 years old and in great health,…
The Dallas Independent School District is getting a new top cop: John Blackburn, who’s been the Houston Independent School District’s police chief since 2000. In fact, HISD was the first and only accredited school district police force in the country, and it became that way during his tenure, which began…
Could this be an indication of what the “Day of Action” holds in store? Driving in to Oak Lawn this morning from my home in southern Dallas, where much of the city’s Latino population lives, I encountered the lightest rush-hour traffic I’ve seen all year. A whole lot of people…
Ever hear the saying “As Bee County goes, so goes America?” No? Me neither. But on Wednesday, the commissioner’s court of Bee County, located around two hours south of Austin, passed a resolution urging their 33,000 residents to boycott ExxonMobil “until gasoline prices have been reducted to at least $1.30…
OK, look, I know you’ve seen the Tah-Dahs, like, a thousand times. But they were good, like, a thousand times, right? Their infections poppy punk (not to be confused with pop-punk) kinda made you bounce a little bit, didn’t it? And you weren’t embarrassed, because everybody else was bouncing too…
Twice a year, my pal Mark Walters and his fellow savvy fanboy Ben Stevens put on the Dallas Comic Con at the Plano Centre–which means it’s Halloween this weekend for all those dudes who don’t know what else to do with their homemade Boba Fett costumes the rest of the…
According to local fact-checker and hellraiser Allen Gwinn, WFAA-Channel 8 will air a piece tonight at 1o that doesn’t make Dallas school board trustee Ron Price too happy. It has to do with Price’s May 2005 speech to the 245 graduates of Woodrow Wilson High School, in which Price claims,…
War is hell. Presidents do some strange things when we’re at war. Sometimes that involves telling Congress to go to hell. And that’s great. Because this is America, and we have three branches of government, and they kinda balance each other out, though maybe not so well at the moment,…
Nothing worth eating could ever be described as “to die for.” Hell, the best food in the world makes you grin-like-a-fool glad to be alive. Why would you want to die for perfectly seared foie gras? The duck/goose has already done that for you. (Which is why my silly hometown…
That’s you, Kyle Rowe, former president of the Dallas-based brokerage Salomon Grey Financial Corp. According to this piece yesterday, the securities industry’s self-regulatory arm known as the National Association of Securities Dealers (or NASD) got nasty and not only expelled Salomon Grey on Thursday, but also permanently barred the 39-year-old…
I know, I know. I’m Unfair Park’s sportsy guy–like Anchorman’s Champ, only without the hat and the mutton-chop sideburns. And the humor. But I also know horrible TV, and when I see it, I’m glued to it. That’s why I spent (by which I mean wasted) 35 minutes of my…
Dallas director Gurinder Chadha repeats something I heard last night at the AMC NorthPark 15 opening: The big-screen adaptation of the inexplicably beloved TV series may not be shot in Florida after all. That doesn’t mean it’s coming here–that’s still unlikely, given the state legislature’s unwillingness to deal with funding…
The only thing better than attending the opening of the AMC NorthPark 15 last night would have been running into Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill and D’Angelo Lee, former member of the Dallas City Plan Commission–you remember, the two men who essentially kicked off the FBI investigation at City Hall…
From local immigration Fernando Dubove comes this massive missive about threats of immigration raids throughout Dallas and the state: “What has kept me busy the last few days is trying to track down any truth to the calls I’m getting about immigration raids outside churches, Fiesta parking lots and Oak…
Nerd alert: I’m a huge Guitar Hero fan. To the uninitiated, it’s a video game similar to Dance Dance Revolution, in that you hit buttons to correspond to the beat of a song…but instead of hopping on a dance pad to play, you flick a full-sized guitar-shaped controller to copy…
I’ve received a couple of tidbits since this week’s look at the fall of Last Beat Studios hit newsstands. First was a phone call from Bob Suffolk, a British record studio designer who has called Dallas home for so long that he was one of LB’s original designers. “I’ve been…
Next up, let’s have a big round of applause for The Lodge, the socially conscious strip club where the entertainers are will to put their…their…their whatever on the line to support Latino immigrants. No, seriously. On May 1, immigrant advocates are urging Latinos to skip work and school and boycott…
Losing our Virgin-ity: Come June 18, this place is going buh-bye. On June 18, the Virgin Megastore in Mockingbird Station is closing its big glass doors for good. About 10 minutes ago, I was told this was a mere rumor. Then I found this on the local location’s Web site:…
