Bob Brightwell is reluctant to talk about it, and he damn sure doesn’t want to be photographed. Not with the skin grafts that discolor his forehead and temple. Not with the scars that disfigure his arms and hands. Not with the memory of the fiery crash more than 19 months…
Head hunting Buzz was ecstatic that DISD Superintendent Waldemar Rojas (SWR) wasn’t fired last week. We don’t care that SWR appears to be borderline certifiable, or that he’s helping to further screw up one already twisted school district, because we home-school our little brats. (“You call that a pony? Go…
I have two recurring, absurd, paranoiac fears: one, that when I fall asleep, I’m not really dozing off but instead I am succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning; two, that the Dallas Observer will soon enter into a joint news-sharing agreement with “WB33 News @Nine.” Which, in my nightmare, looks something…
A local Nightline? One of the most annoying gripes people have about the media is this: “News coverage is all surface; it isn’t in-depth enough.” It’s annoying, because those same people increasingly read fewer newspapers and get more of their news from television. Worse, they get it from bad television–for…
It’s the money As the wife of an immigrant, I am much more familiar with the bureaucracy and snail-like pace of the INS than I would like to be. I think there must not be any agency, public or private (with the possible exception of any long-distance provider), that has…
The last time anyone admits seeing Danny Fry alive is September 30, 1995, when he sat mutely, seemingly ill or in shock, on the veranda of the Austin apartment of his old buddy, ex-con David Waters. “He was sitting out there and he looked so…just really horror-stricken, like something was…
Donna Morris lives the good life. Each day, the well-groomed 40-year-old attorney wakes up, whispers good morning to her husband, Roy, sees the three kids off to school, and heads to work, sometimes with her husband, sometimes solo. They always meet at the only law firm in town: Morris and…
Did the city of Dallas deliberately blow a permit hearing last month and let the much-dissed Baby Dolls topless club stay open another year at Bachman Lake? Neighborhood opponents of strip clubs, who believed the city had a slam-dunk case against granting the permit, are convinced that’s what happened. “The…
Inside Rabbi Asher Goldschmidt’s North Dallas home, a visitor can learn about Judaism in at least four different languages–English, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. “Oops,” gasped a woman, sitting with the rabbi and six other students at a dining-room table last week. A fellow student, speaking Yiddish, had just explained to…
When a chicken lays an egg, it actually comes out soft. The hard covering you crack on the frying pan is the result of a chemical reaction between the surrounding air and calcium in the shell. Probably the last mouth one would expect to hear such trivia from is that…
Daddy got his gun So, how much time do you plan to spend picking out your dad’s Father’s Day present this week? Two minutes? Five? Let’s be honest: When it comes to filial affection, Dad gets the short end of the stick giftwise. Still, you have to get the old…
Every egg matters After reading Lisa Singh’s article on egg donors and recipients (“Good eggs,” June 1), I am troubled by the amount of secrecy, shame, and emotional denial that seems to be part of the process. Although agencies and doctors may call the egg “a piece of tissue” over…
Over espresso and orange juice, Dallas developer Louis Garfield Reese III huddled with several would-be business partners in a suite in Milan’s four-star Excelsior Hotel. Amid sophisticated chatter about the charms of Florence and Milan, Reese ran through a series of possible real estate deals in Hawaii and Dallas, most…
At the time, Tracy Feith probably wouldn’t have admitted to many people what he was doing more than a decade ago. Sneaking into a Dallas garment factory to sew shorts for your skateboarding pals is not exactly “sick” (this hour’s thrasher term for what was once quaintly called “cool”). But…
As with other behemoth multinational companies, Irving-based ExxonMobil’s annual meeting is strictly a formality. Most of the crowd that packed the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in downtown Dallas to vote on shareholder resolutions last week were retirees who own relatively small amounts of company stock. The majority of big…
The bumper sticker on the truck outside of Karen Joiner’s Richardson home sums up what she wants. “Adoptees deserve their original birth certificates,” it reads. Yet for Joiner, a 40-year-old Missouri native, and thousands of other adoptees nationwide, gaining access to their records is no simple task. Petitioning the courts,…
Convicted contract killer and insurance swindler Michael Lee Davis has a gift for making money from other people’s mortality. Now someone finally might make some from his death. Davis, who was called Walter Waldhauser Jr. when he took part in a triple murder in Houston 21 years ago, was sentenced…
Elijah, please shut up The last time we heard from Elijah McGrew, the Oak Cliff activist and erstwhile city council candidate, he was making his third forlorn attempt to win the District 4 council seat. McGrew, a gadfly who gained recognition in the early ’90s by crusading against topless clubs…
Talk to Evan Smith for long–and you will talk to him for long, because every answer is a speech, every speech a term paper–and two impressions quickly emerge: ··· One, that Smith is a very sharp guy, a good thing given that he was recently named the third editor in…
Dented reputation Last week, in one of his final columns at the San Antonio Express-News, former Dallas sports writer Jim Dent asked the following question: How will we remember Michael Irvin–as the ultimate team player, or as a seedy cat? His answer: “In truth, his life has been a succession…
The prophet The Dallas Observer should hereby tithe one fifth of the advertising spoils to Eric Celeste. After his May 25 column, “Misguided Muslims,” we can be sure of one thing: Celeste is a prophet. How else to account for his opening paragraph, where he states that he’s “asking for…
HUGHES SPRINGS–From the porch of her red-brick home, poet Leafie Mason could stand watch over the energy that kept the small town she called home alive. Just beyond West First Street, yards away, runs the railroad track, a pathway for Kansas City Southern trains that daily hurry westward from Shreveport…
