In many respects, Son Nguyen is a typical practitioner of Cao Dai, a Vietnamese religion that bubbled up from the spirit world in 1926. His voice is gentle but firm. He is dignified, yet relaxed. He wears a bright white tunic and a pleated black headdress. He is a refugee…
More than half a century has passed since Harrison Ocie Jones was seized in the night from his sharecropper’s cabin in North Texas and beaten to near death by a group of white men supposedly trying to collect a debt. The story goes that after they beat him, they dumped…
Betty Culbreath-Lister insists there’s no hidden agenda, no friend she’s supposed to snag a job for and that she “ain’t mad at nobody.” But the outspoken Dallas County official’s decision to run for the Dallas school board against longtime trustee Hollis Brashear has caught some by surprise. She may not…
Business My WayDemon Laura: I am fortunate among those who have had their reputations gratuitously trashed by the Dallas Observer: I can rely on the city of Dallas Ethics Advisory Commission to pass fair judgment on the slanders of bar owner-cum-victim Robert Ramirez (“Code Breaker,” June 13). Will Rose Farley…
Imagine this: A local purveyor of Serious Journalism begins publishing ads of a sexually and commercially suspect nature, offering “private shows” and “private pleasures” and featuring photos of women with provocative “hey, sailor” grins. And it’s not us. Well, it’s not just us. It’s The Dallas Morning News, too. Shocked,…
The winding footpath that once connected the next-door homes of the two men is now overgrown, lost in a tangle of waist-high weeds and the shadows of the ancient oaks that green this serene Cedar Creek Lake area. Tom Cherry, wandering his back yard with his dogs, points toward the…
Lois Finkelman had questions about Dallas’ residential recycling program before last month. Now, both the city councilwoman and the city’s auditor are, you might say, a lot more curious. Just how does a driver make two trips across the scales in the same truck with a purportedly new 2,000-pound load…
Dallas Observer staff writer Charles Siderius was named Texas print journalist of the year in the Houston Press Club’s recent Lone Star Awards, a statewide journalism contest. Siderius finished ahead of two finalists from the Observer’s sister paper, the Houston Press, for the best portfolio of stories by a reporter…
From start to finish, there was something carnival-like about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which gathered in Dallas last week to draft a national policy regarding sexual abuse of youths by clerics. For one, members of the media outnumbered the 252 bishops and cardinals by 2-to-1, and the entire…
The Last MeowFunny is good: Please bring back “Sack of Kittens” right away. You still haven’t shredded my band! And more stuff like the Snoop Dogg preview and Jeff Liles’ Danzig thing (Out & About, June 6), too! Funny is good. Funny is good. Funny is good. Funny makes me…
It’s late on a Wednesday night in a warehouse district west of Dallas. Dozens of teen-agers face each other across a wide road. Between them, headlights from two muscle cars shine white in their faces. The snaking group presses closer into the lanes while unmuffled engines growl and clatter as…
Robert Ramirez, a successful artist and a family man, wants the same thing other business owners in the Bishop Arts District in North Oak Cliff already have: a chance to open a full-service restaurant and capture the dollars of local residents, who clamor for more dining options in the burgeoning…
Maryln Schwartz is ticked. The 20-year lifestyle columnist at The Dallas Morning News, who was granted “permanent medical leave” from the paper after acknowledging multiple mistakes in her columns, is upset at an item in last week’s Dallas Observer that suggests she made up names and sources in her columns…
Buzz is feeling a bit out of touch lately, having spent the better part of the past two weeks cowering under a blanket. This was prompted by the many letters we received after our recent cover story “Open Season” about the growing number of incidents of South Texas homeowners shooting…
CounterattackGreat horny toads: These attack ads (“Mad TV,” June 6) are the reason a lot of people don’t vote. Originally, I was thinking of voting for Sanchez due to some things Governor Perry has done in the past. Then the Sanchez attack ads came out. So, I thought I better…
So you say your double-wide manufactured home has been socked with a higher property tax appraisal this year, meaning heftier taxes for you and more meals of Hamburger Helper, sans hamburger. (That would be “Helper.”) Oh, quit whining, you big baby. It could be worse. You could be rich. Turns…
It’s not as though we didn’t already have the two most challenging kids in the world. Max is 5, a Harry Potter clone; he’s an exhausting, whirling dervish of a child, a cultural sponge who soaks up the latest media images–Spider-Man, Anakin Skywalker, Otto Rocket–assuming they can be reduced to…
Michael Flemons was like a lot of tough bosses. As president of MDF Enterprises, a Dallas company that provided “trauma” therapy to Medicaid patients here and in Houston, Flemons always kept one eye fixed on the company’s bottom line and the other open for opportunities that could help him reach…
Low-income housing developer Virginia McGuire has resigned from the troubled nonprofit that paid her and her husband’s company roughly $500,000 to buy an aging East Dallas apartment complex. In late April, on the same day the Dallas Observer published a story about the big fees McGuire and her family collected…
Sanchez: Photo by John Anderson
For years, I had a yellowed, slightly torn “Calvin and Hobbes” newspaper comic strip attached to my refrigerator with a magnet. In it, 6-year-old Calvin held open a book. In a soliloquy to his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, he explained his frustration with the process of acquiring information: “The more you…
Up in ArmsCall out the Army: Mr. John MacCormack has written an insightful essay on the plight of Americans who live along the Rio Bravo in the Vega Verde area (“Open Season,” May 30). I would like to comment that I cannot understand why armed U.S. forces are not placed…
