Dr. Norman Borlaug has a Congressional Gold Medal he can now hang around his bust. Though he didn’t live to see it, golf legend Byron Nelson picked up a gold yesterday -- that is, a Congressional Gold Medal. But buried 20 paragraphs or so down in this DMN piece --...
Dear Mexican: Why don't Mexicans ever drop their Spanish? Even third- and fourth-generation Mexican-Americans still speak the language to some degree or another. I speak Japanese, but I'm losing it quickly, and when my mother passes on, so will my language. The typical Asian-American kid may attend Chinese, Korean, or...
Dear Readers, You love us, you really love us! Mere moments after publishing my July 12 column (in which Know Nothings had their say on the failed Senate amnesty bill), ustedes bombarded the Mexican with letters expressing your disgust toward those pendejos. Space prohibits the printing of all, so let's...
"Any line-up is like a marriage," says Nick 13, leader of Tiger Army and one of the best practitioners of psychobilly. "You hope it will work, and it either does or it doesn't." Speaking from a stop on the Warped Tour, Nick 13 (born Kearney Nick Jones) is happy with...
To hear him tell it, Richard Chichakli would like nothing more than to return to his humdrum life as a Richardson accountant. But thanks to the U.S. government, that may never happen. In April 2005, federal agents with guns drawn stormed Chichakli's modest brick home, informing him that they had...
Several Friends have e-mailed, wondering if Matt Pulle will be reporting from county elections HQ tonight as he did back when we had 11 candidates from which to choose. Yup -- and, from the sound of it last night 'round the office, Mr. Schutze will also join in the fun...
Whether reading Wine for Dummies or surfing tasting-wine.com, I still can't distinguish mahogany from purple or master the swish and smell. Does it have to be this hard? Can't I just take a swig and either grimace or grin as a result? I'm this close to being done with my...
Sandra Bridewell's never been convicted of murder. But now she's got federal forgery charges pending, which makes her like, what, Al Capone? It's been, what, six days since our last item on the Black Widow; we're due an update, right? Especially when it turns out to be this interesting: Yesterday,...
Maybe you can help out a local couple -- if, ya know, you're into polygamy or just dig Big Love and wanna give it a shot. In Canadian newsweekly Macleans this week there's a piece on the pros and cons of the polygamous lifestyle, and way down in the story...
OK, so you want me to feel guilty about picking on the county judge for being non compos mentis. Jim Foster is an accidental officeholder, swept in last November on a countywide anti-Bush, Democratic tide. Give the man a break, you say. He's a guy who owns an alarm business...
A film snippet showing a California preacher boasting about his opulent lifestyle on 20/20 has dunked ABC and correspondent John Stossel in hot water, thanks to Dallas-based religious watchdog Ole Anthony and the Trinity Foundation. Not only was the network forced to air a retraction, the preacher has filed a...
Carol Reed, Tom Leppert's $30,000-a-month campaign manager, sounds jubilant. As well she should: Her candidate could fall to second, as results keep coming in and Ed Oakley slowly creeps toward the top of the heap, but Leppert can't possibly fall to third place and out of the runoff. With more...
Steve Buscemi the director is nothing like the art-damaged auteur Buscemi the actor played in 1995's Living in Oblivion. No dry ice and dwarves for the victim of the cinema's most celebrated wood-chipper massacre, who as a filmmaker inhabits tight spaces (an ice-cream truck, a prison cell) and trapped lives...
Matt Pulle's Our Man Downtown tonight with the results from early voting, which are as follows: Your early clubhouse leader is Tom Leppert, with 29 percent of the early vote (7,403 votes). Ed Oakley comes in at second, with 19 percent (4,957). Don Hill comes in third with 14 percent...
In 1991 -- "eight years before my conversion," she says -- Dawn Eden was 23 and, ahem, sharing a bed with Buzzcocks Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle. Dawn Eden is taking the train to Washington, D.C., and we are talking about masturbation. Just before the connection goes bad, she suggests...
A couple of weeks back, Rolling Stone published a lengthy, thoughtful music-biz obit that resonated with industry insiders, with its bad news (album sales down 200 million units since 2000) and inside-baseball history lessons (the collapsed talks between Napster and label heads seven years ago) and the larger and still-unanswered...
The most perverse moment on R. Kelly's new album is, surprisingly, neither "The Zoo"—a slow-jam full of animal noises that suggests he and his lady had some company in the sack—nor "Sex Planet," which offers a particularly unfortunate metaphor for back-door action. It's "Rise Up," the product of Kelly's belief...
...we will be live-blogging the election, beginning, most likely, in the late morning, between voting and going to Home Depot to buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Matt Pulle will be at county election HQ around 7 p.m., when early results start coming in; Jim Schutze...
Richardson's Richard Chichakli, now in Moscow, denies being an accountant for the "Merchant of Death." Former Richardson resident Richard Chichakli -- alleged accountant to the world’s biggest reputed arms dealer -- dropped us a line this morning to say that he has “escaped Syria” and is now residing safely in...
And in other Belo-related news: Dallas Morning News reporter Steve McGonigle is trying like hell to keep from becoming a government witness in its case against the Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation. The trial against seven former Holy Land Foundation and Development officials, charged with funding Hamas-supported terrorist activities prior to...
There was a strange site outside my polling place this p.m.: a Dallas County Sheriff's Department car, parked on the curb at Leonides Cigarroa Elementary School. Looked promising. Turns out, there was indeed a deputy inside, plugging cables into a laptop while a county voting official futzed with the voting...
You think you're mad about your tax appraisal? Well, apparently you're not quite as pissed off as 11 local shopping centers, who today filed suit in Dallas County District Court claiming that the the Dallas Central Appraisal District and Dallas Appraisal Review Board jacked up their respective tax appraisals using...
