It wasn’t long ago that we found country singer Randy Travis drinking wine in front of the First Baptist Church in Sanger. But the man has topped himself. Pretty much everyone is now reporting that Travis walked naked into a Grayson County convenience store to buy cigarettes last night, crashed…
Shortly after it was established in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency undertook a project called “Documerica,” which paid freelance photographers across the country to document the environmental and human conditions of the country. All told, more than 15,000 images were collected for the project, and then more or less forgotten…
Wendy Donahue’s Chicago Tribune dispatch from her recent trip to Dallas begins with her family driving their rental car across the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, the “symbolic hub of Texas-sized ambitions.” She notes the breeze passing over the grasses along the Trinity and that the bridge is otherwise empty. “Here,”…
It’s inevitable in a district the size of DISD that, in the lead-up to a new school year, there’s a mismatch between the number of teachers the district has and the number of teachers it needs. But as DISD Blog pointed out, the district still has more than 300 vacant…
Lennie Small was the simple-minded field worker in Of Mice and Men who, in a moment of confused panic, inadvertently kills the wife of the boss’ son. He’s an iconic character in American literature, so iconic that Texas used him as a benchmark to help decide when it’s okay to…
Update on Aug. 8: I spoke with Mayor Beth Van Doyne who told me, basically, that LVG doesn’t have much of a case. “The Las Colinas Group is in a corner,” she said. “The city has done everything they were obligated to do. It’s nothing but a smear campaign.” The…
What would 120 acres of pristine, undeveloped green space in the heart of booming Lakewood go for on the open market? Hard to know, but it’s a fair bet that it would be much, much more than $7.4 million the 100-year-old Lakewood Country Club is listed for on county tax…
There’s a reason State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homes against earthquakes. Injecting millions of barrels of fracking waste water loosens faults the way whiskey loosens tongues. Cliff Frohlich of the Jackson School of Geosciences deployed seismographs throughout a 43-mile grid in the Barnett Shale. They detected eight times…
So I was right yesterday. As Eric just reported, the pressure is on to escalate the local war on West Nile from truck spraying of pesticides to airplane spraying. This decision will be left to that august body the Dallas County Commissioners Court, scheduled at its next meeting to take…
Update at 11:57 a.m.: Dallas County spokeswoman Maria Arita tweeted a response to reports that commissioners are considering aerial spraying. Aerial Spraying for West Nile NOT BEING PONDERED by Dallas County Commissioners. About virus: cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/w… 1.usa.gov/Rik5P6— Dallas County (@DallasCountyTx) August 7, 2012 Original Post: Dallas County is having a record…
Since its inception in 1996, the City Center TIF has captured property taxes from that neighborhood and flowed them back into downtown projects — nearly $59 million for projects like the Joule Hotel and Republic Tower. Its neighbor, the Downtown Connection TIF, was established in 2005 and has poured $188…
Mavs owner Mark Cuban is making sure conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart will continue to provoke some five months after his death. Big Hollywood, a site Breitbart founded, reported yesterday that Cuban’s company, Magnet, plans to release “Occupy Unmasked” in theaters. “This film is controversial, and that’s exactly the reason we…
Performance pay in public education is a touchy subject. It seems like a good enough idea in theory, but once you get into the details of how exactly performance will be defined and measured in practice, things start to get thorny. One option for avoiding controversy: Define performance as attendance…
A recent opinion out of a state appeals court in Dallas sheds no light on whether Scott Wiseman of Garland is a complete scumbag. It does, however, make one thing clear: Prosecutors, do not let your expert witnesses opine on the statistical likelihood that your victim is telling the truth…
Update at 12:34 p.m.: Police have identified the victim as 23-year-old Vilma Esperanza Alvarado. Original post: Early Sunday afternoon, about 1:15 p.m., officers were called to an empty warehouse parking lot at 7301 Ambassador Row, just off Stemmons, where they discovered the body of a Hispanic woman who had been…
Word came this morning that Dallas police were involved in yet another officer-involved shooting. This time, no one was shot. According to a police report, 50-year-old Luis Ramirez placed a $700 backpack leaf blower and other lawn care equipment on his apartment balcony to load into his truck for the…
The Inland Port, the sprawling warehousing and transportation center meant to be an economic boon for southern Dallas County, has never really taken off. It opened in 2005 and has seen some development, but the project was stalled by a rocky economy and the bankruptcy of its largest property owner,…
Mac Breedlove is a junior at Westlake High School. He plays lacrosse. He skips in line while boarding Southwest Airlines flights with his lacrosse teams. And we wouldn’t know any of this if Breedlove didn’t have such awesome lacrosse coaches. Said coaches, Evan Welchel and Kenny Pailes, found out about…
Over the past six years, the number of 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons, marathons, fun runs, not-so-fun runs, French-themed bicycle showdowns and other organized races has exploded in Dallas, up 60 percent, according to the city. It speaks well of the city, both that it indicates that more and more people are…
Morning News reporter Jennifer Emily is tweeting that Judge Tracy Holmes has suspended Constable Derick Evans from office pending a decision on his appeal. Evans was convicted of a felony count of engaging in organized crime. Typically, that’s grounds for being removed from office, but Evans promptly appealed, and he…
So on the radio this morning I hear all about the spike in West Nile deaths in Dallas and how the county health department will be on the job tonight protecting us by sending the pesticide trucks through three more neighborhoods, this time in North Dallas. I just hope we…
At some point last week, the Dallas Cowboys surpassed five million “likes” on Facebook. They’re the first NFL franchise to hit the mark, which I suppose is worthy of a Tweet, or maybe a Facebook post. But during Garrett’s daily press conference on Friday, Cowboys beat writers, apparently out of…
