Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans , where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. Our local music scene’s bartenders are, without a doubt, some of the hardest-working individuals…
I have a new idea for controlling costs at City Hall. Breathalyzers for the city council, because those people must be drunk. The city is in the toilet, so broke it can’t mow the parks. So broke it can’t fix the streets. So broke it can’t keep the rec centers…
Oh, so now it starts. Here it comes. Camouflaged in a lot of pompous blather about a fair city council redistricting process, The Dallas Morning News is already waving the banner for chopping up the East Dallas city council district. Should have seen that one coming. East Dallas is a…
We added insult to injury a long time ago in this whole business of fracking in Dallas — you know, the kind of natural gas drilling where they blow up underground rocks in a geological formation called the Barnett Shale, releasing trapped gas. Now, if you don’t mind, I need…
I used to be such a mass transit whore. I had this post-’60s idea that cars and highways are bad, which they are, so that must mean trains are good. I examine that reasoning now, and I think, “So if smoking crack is bad, does that mean meth is good?”…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *So Nuggets coach George Karl wants some of the Mavs, huh? “If we had to pick and choose, we would probably say 55 percent Dallas and 45 percent Oklahoma City,” he says…
Really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times about my hometown, Detroit, where the population is now half what it was when I bailed in the late 1970s. It seems Detroit is now on the cutting edge of the “shrinking cities” movement, and I wonder if Detroit may have valuable…
Dear Mexican: I’m a blanquita, and I’ve recently begun dating a CALIENTE mexicano. I adore this man. The first time we were intimate, I noticed his necklace (which I had always assumed to be a rosary) was a name necklace…a WOMAN’S name necklace. He says that his mami gave it…
Honest question. Are you even aware there is a race going on now for mayor of Dallas? Honest answers only, please. It’s OK. Especially in the early phase, the mayoral election is a boring thing. I don’t expect you to be on the edges of your seats clicking updates every…
Check me on this. In an atmosphere of federal, state, county and city funding crises, where we may even see the defunding of federal health care reform, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, an absolute decimation of support for public schools and impoverished children, drastic cuts in Medicaid and…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. As a talent buyer at the House of Blues, Brian Lowe’s kind of the definition…
I’m all for pay walls. Pay walls r me. When newspapers like The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times put up pay walls, charging readers for access to news content, I figure they’re trying to get ink-stained schlubs like me paid. I know there are people out there…
Maybe the biggest problem with the fracking issue is that it involves the deadly, mind-numbing and sleep-inducing phrase “parts per billion.” Otherwise I might have cracked the case long ago. Fracking is deep-well drilling for natural gas in which drillers inject water and chemicals into a layer of underground shale…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: Plaaaaaay baaalllllll! My prediction: Your Texas Rangers will finish second to the Anaheim Angels in the AL West and miss the playoffs. Hey, repeatin’ ain’t easy. For most teams in baseball losing…
Who loans two hundred grand to a college kid from a poor family? There’s just a whole lot about the Dez Bryant stories that does not smell right. Dallas Cowboys receiver Bryant is being sued for the better part of a million bucks he borrowed to buy jewelry and sports…
Dear Readers: Rather than me punk ustedes with a prank, I give you the cruelest joke of all—ex-congressman and eternal Know Nothing Tom Tancredo! In return for his graciously allowing us to debate in Denver last year, I’ve allowed him to answer two questions of my choosing, with no editorial…
You needed to be there. Last week, moments after Dallas Mayor Dwaine Caraway lost his attempt to suppress an embarrassing police voice recording, he strode out into the courthouse corridor loaded for bear. A large crowd of press had been waiting, meek as scolded third-graders in the principal’s outer office…
All of the candidates for mayor say the city’s falling apart but we can’t raise taxes. If both of these things are true, something’s got to give, and I think I know what it will be. Me. First, I’m downtown in the Allen courts building covering a case about a…
Who says the four Dallas mayoral candidates haven’t distinguished themselves from one another? Last night at that forum at Thomas Jefferson High School, the first question they had to answer (and the best question of the night) was why they wanted to be mayor. Dallas city council member and entrepreneur…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans, where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move.The thing with beautiful “rock chicks” that dance onstage is that most of them stop far…
Two experiences over the weekend have given me hope. One was watching a documentary on the catastrophic 1911 Triangle Waist Factory Fire in New York, and the other was a seminar I attended on the state budget crisis. Debacles can be good for us. The documentary made an argument that…
So-called regionalism is a rip-off, a scam and a hoax designed to neuter cities and sell them down the river to the damned suburbs. A few weeks from now the Dallas City Council will take up the issue of fracking, the kind of natural gas drilling in which drillers pump…
