Hey. Want to know where you can find a billion dollars? Dallas Area Rapid Transit has been saying they are suddenly a billion dollars short of what it will cost them to meet their rail-building obligations, and they’re blaming it on inflation. Nuh-uh. I report in my column in this…
DART, the regional mass transit agency, announced a couple weeks ago that it had underestimated the cost of building a new billion-dollar suburban rail line by, oh, say, give or take, you know… about a billion dollars. Was gonna cost $1 billion. Now the DART staff says it’s gonna cost…
Dear Mexican: U.S. citizens are sick and tired that for more than 40 years, Latin American elites have lived like monarchs because they pimp their poor to American businesses for cheap labor that American taxpayers have been forced to subsidize with health care, food, housing, education and so forth, costing…
So is my son, Will Schutze, ahead of the curve, behind the curve, or did he drive off the curve and get in a wreck? He’s a senior at the University of Texas at Austin. And a month ago he quit Facebook. There’s a story on the front page of…
O.K., the first of two self-referential familial blog item of the day. I am looking at my own street with Google Maps Street View, the way everybody told me to. I see my own house. Wow. I see my own car. Wow. I click on the arrow and go on…
It has been decades since Ron Cowart was a grunt in Vietnam or a SWAT cop on the streets of Dallas, but he still has the bearing. Now head of the city’s homeless outreach team, he is more gray about the ears than when we met a good 20 years…
Dear Mexican: I’m sad that there aren’t more Mexicans here in the Detroit area. We’re one of the few areas in the country that is predominantly Catholic. We’ve welcomed wave after wave of Catholic immigrants for well more than 100 years, and they’ve intermingled and blended into our local society…
Well, well, well. Isn’t this great? An olive branch from the anti-Trinity River toll road folks to Mayor Tom, who beat them in the recent referendum on building a toll road through downtown. I do believe it’s kiss-and-make-up time. All the mayor has to do, in order to accept this…
A lot of what goes wrong at The Dallas Morning News has to do with people who forgot to take their smart pill in the morning. Stuffed way inside today’s paper is a legal ass-covering story by Kent Fischer, in which the paper tries to amend for its atrocious coverage…
Ray Hunt, the most amazing person in the history of ever Am I the only masochist who actually read through all the way to the end of that embarrassing Ray Hunt story on the front page of yesterday’s Dallas Morning News? Well, see, whenever I see one of those stories…
Dallas Independent School District certainly has put itself in a ridiculous position over this Sherri Brokaw deal. She’s the lady they tried to blame for their credit card scandal. Problem was, an internal hearing panel ruled that the credit card mess wasn’t her fault and said she should not be…
Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Fischer has a story on the Metro front today revealing that the Dallas Independent School District (has been lying about fired credit card manager Sherri Brokaw. I wrote about her case in the paper version of Unfair Park in September, and I said she was…
Dear Mexican: I was born in beautiful El Paso, and my parents are from Juaritos. I always wondered why Mexican restaurants en los Estados Unidos use queso amarillo—which I associate with los Estados Unidos—on their food instead of queso asadero or queso Oaxaca, which taste so much better. And who…
Today, after lunch, the Dallas city council will snooze through a lengthy briefing by the city’s economic development staff on how to fix downtown. It’s called “Revitalizing Downtown: Creating Anchors to blah, blah, blah.” One of the high concept ideas here will be spending zillions of tax dollars to create…
Apologies to the civilians in the room. I need to speak directly to the bloodhounds at The Dallas Morning News. Please excuse us while we engage in a bit of canine shop talk, just among us ink-stained wretches. Your managing editor, George Rodrigue, posted a rebuttal this afternoon to an…
Oh, good, my favorite dish. Time for a bite of crow. In my column in the paper version of Unfair Park this week, I wax rhapsodic — apparently catatonic — on urban redevelopment taking place in the concentric rings around downtown — “without any help from and often in spite…
I have always been a member of the Church of We-Have-to-Save-Downtown. Whatever that means. I sing in the choir. It’s a lifelong expression of my profound wannabe urban cosmopolitology. A religion. Why? Obvious. Because downtown is…uh, well it’s down. And it’s…you know…town. Now all of a sudden I have doubts…
Dear Mexican: With a scant four weeks before I cram my mochila with a few clothes for me and a horde of presents (read: bribes) for my future cuñadas, sobrinas y mi mera suegra, I found myself terror-stricken tonight as mi novio and I watched a home video of his…
Wow. Now this takes a little bit of work to follow, but I think it’s worth it. And here is where we are headed: First, The Dallas Morning News hides the ball. Then, to cover themselves, they show the ball — very briefly, sort of a sneak peek. But now…
Very interesting piece on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page today about “cool cities” versus “family-friendly cities,” suggesting cities like Dallas do better because they attract well-employed young breeders rather than sidewalk hipsters. The essay, by The New Geography author Joel Kotkin, cites research that runs against the grain of…
So if East Dallas is Cool Dallas, then everybody in East Dallas must be cool with each other, right? But in fact it’s a strange law of human nature that nobody gets more un-cool with each other than cool people. Yeah, and that is exactly what I am telling myself…
Dear Mexican: What’s the deal with Spanish-language car dealership commercials that feature bikini-clad porn star wannabes copulating with used cars? I just saw one where three girls were rubbing melted chocolate on each other. Surely, no one in mainstream Caucasian America could get away with such overtly sexual, misogynistic advertising…
