For a long time, a central part of Dallas’ self-concept was the idea that this city had no natural features. At all. The idea was always dead wrong. In fact, because large tracts of land had been neglected and ignored by developers from the city’s earliest days, Dallas always had…
Last year, sportswriter King Kaufman stepped up to the lectern at a symposium held on the Google campus. In a 14-year haul at Salon.com, Kaufman earned a reputation as one of the best and most cerebral sports journalists on the Internet. But his subject that day was his new job,…
In July of 2006, Dr. Barry Fenton began treating a woman for depression and anxiety at the office of the Uptown practice of Live Oak Counseling Center. It was 16 months later that the relationship moved outside of his office, not to mention the bounds of the typical relationship between…
The good news: Meaningful day-time baseball. The bad news: It comes about a week too soon. The Rangers have one more crack at Oakland’s swinging (and walking) A’s this afternoon. It’s win-and-they’re-in, lose-and-they’re-kind-of-in. Since workplace productivity will be in the tank anyway, we figured we’d provide a place to bitch…
Yesterday, a bit after 3 o’clock, police were dispatched to NorthPark Center where employees reported receiving a threatening phone call. Threatening how, the police report didn’t say. One had to assume that some crafty 17-year-old had phoned to say he would be in the mall after the 6 p.m. curfew…
The weather on July 7 quickly turned windy, almost violently so. The sudden gusts, which reached 40 miles per hour, capsized a surfboarding 55-year-old into the waters of White Rock Lake, where he drowned. Even more dramatic was the scene a dozen miles to the north, when a construction crane…
Farmers Branch Latinos have a better chance today at seeing a little color introduced into the all-white tableau of elected city government. Under orders from a federal judge, who determined that the town’s at-large-style districts robbed Latinos of representation, the city council approved single-member voting districts at its meeting Tuesday…
The Church of the IV Majesties imploded two years ago in a very public way. The self-described Satanic church had been planning a staged exorcism at the Oklahoma City Civic Center. Then, a month before the event, the church’s co-founders had a falling out. One of the founders, James Hale,…
Last night’s Senate debate between Ted Cruz and Paul Sadler got surprisingly heated, with the two men snapping at each other about illegal immigration, healthcare, where Barack Obama was born and whether Ted Cruz is, in fact, a troll. Meanwhile, John Jay Myers, the Libertarian Senate candidate who did not…
This spring, Dallas County Community College District’s audit department began looking into the use of gas credit cards. Specifically, they were curious about record-keeping, the policies and procedures that are in place, and, um, where exactly they all were. According to a report presented to the DCCCD’s board on Tuesday,…
Oh, Mark Cuban. Your Dallas Mavericks brought us an NBA championship. You have the best investment-themed reality show on television. You have billions of dollars. But that’s not why we respect you; we respect you because you’re not afraid to do ridiculous things, like be videotaped clutching a Bud Light…
The ACLU of Texas released its annual compendium of books that school districts have pulled from their shelves for being too coarse, profane, sexual, or otherwise too interesting for our precious children, despite every Mom in America having a copy of 50 Shades of Gray by her nightstand. There’s good…
Cody R. Wilson, a second-year law student at UT Austin, has a hobby that’s gotten a fair amount of media attention over the last few months: He wants to print out some guns. But his plan to make and test a pistol using a 3-D printer ran into an unexpected…
Bitching about how terrible the roads are in Dallas is a time-honored tradition. It’s also easy. Quantifying just how terrible they are? That’s more difficult. Luckily for you, TRIP, a D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to transportation research, just released its annual “Future Mobility in Texas” report. First, the bad news. Bad…
Chesapeake Energy, one of the shale boom’s biggest players, has amassed the rights to drill on acreage roughly equal to the size of West Virginia. It’s a shrewd strategy — tie up all the land you can using outrageous sums of borrowed cash (more than $30 billion), freeze out your…
The city’s Park and Recreation Board is looking for someone to replace Paul Dyer, who is retiring after two decades at the helm of the parks department. Last week, a seven-member search committee, comprised of park board president Max Wells and a half dozen other board members, decided to keep…
It was in 2001 that Christopher Bridges, a.k.a. Ludacris, released “Move Bitch,” a song still considered his masterpiece. (The inimitable chorus: “Move bitch, get out the way/Get out the way bitch/Get out the way.”) It was the third single from the album Word of Mouf, and it helped propel the…
It seems to have become a routine occurrence for the Cowboys in the Garrett Era: win one game, lose the next. One step forward, two drunken stumbles into the hot tub. Don’t heap too much praise on any one player, lest you’re prepared to be let down the following week…
Last month, a report from city auditor Craig Kinton’s office enumerated what it politely termed “deficiencies” in the operation of the city’s McCommas Bluff landfill. There were a lot of them, since the landfill didn’t really have much in the way of procedures to safeguard cash, prevent embezzlement or make…
A few weeks back we told you about John Jay Myers, the Free Man-owning, big government-distrusting Libertarian candidate for Senate, who believes he’s being unfairly excluded from a Belo debate that will feature his two major-party competitors. After a small protest in front of WFAA’s Young Street headquarters failed to…
Phillip Ballard figured he was looking at at least 20 years. He’d already been in the federal lock-up in Fort Worth since July, and things weren’t looking good in his criminal case, which centered on seven counts of tax fraud. For almost a decade he had, according to an indictment…
Last night just before midnight, a security guard watched as a red, 1994 Chevy S10 pickup exited the gated Treymore Eastfield Apartments in Far East Dallas. The driver promptly crashed into into a nearby Ford F150, stepped on the gas to flee the accident, lost control of the truck, jumped…
