To grill or not to grill 6/25 This Bud's on Bobby--or at least that's how it was when my significant other interned with Bobby Flay at the chef's Mesa Grill restaurant in New York. Flay ended each night with a round of complimentary cocktails for his staff (which almost made...
What I normally think at an airport: Go, go, get out of my way, I'm in a hurry, parking took 30 minutes, I'm a mile from my terminal, I'm late to check in at the airline desk, security will take forever, they're going to make me take my shoes off...
The age of imperialism ended, oh, 50 or 60 years ago. Not a particularly glorious era. European countries exploited distant lands and beat down peoples and cultures. The United States caught on to the trend fairly late in the game. In order to catch up, we had to grab territories...
Why should we pay for home cooking? Hell, it's the same stuff Mom whipped up free of charge for decades. It's always a bit perturbing to see people shell out good money for something they could prepare in their own kitchens for quite a bit less. Besides, most places never...
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn't rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching...
Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian may not be the first to have read media critic Danny Schechter while pumping Slayer. But on Mezmerize, System of a Down's third and most consistent album, the front men take a threadbare theme--the anesthetizing effect of mass media--and have more fun aiming their piss...
A word of caution to the 20 die-hard Gorillaz fans who have held on since the "cartoon band" debuted four years ago: Blur's Damon Albarn is the only contributor to return for Demon Days. While the same fictional characters fill the liner notes, every real-life musician has been replaced, and...
Size matters. We all know that by now. In this case, however, even the traditional version of that axiom is irrelevant. Aside from the catchy sophomoric name adopted by the subject of our Burning Question for the week (and we refuse to research the matter further), the guys who founded...
Told Ya So At last, someone is listening to Texas Lottery watchdog Dawn Nettles It would seem that Dawn Nettles could rest for once. The tenacious critic of the Texas Lottery was for years a lone voice proclaiming the error of the Lottery Commission's ways to all who would listen...
So now the Dallas Independent School District is going to marry the suburban Wilmer-Hutchins district? Let me ask you something. Is this not every parent's absolute worst nightmare? "Hi, Mom and Dad. Me and Wilmer-Hutchins here have something really, really important to tell you. First, I know how you feel...
"Let me set up a, what do you call it, a hypothetical for you," Dawn Nettles says in her Texas drawl, her voice roughened around the edges by her daily pack of Misty menthols. "Let's say you're the boss of a company, and you give one of your employees a...
If You Can't Argue the Facts... County commissioners go to comical lengths to suppress jail study Last March, George Rodrigue, the managing editor of The Dallas Morning News, received a rather stern letter from a high-paid private attorney representing Dallas County. Aggrieved that reporter Jim O'Neill documented the blistering findings...
Secret Code Validation, finally: Thank you so much for this story on the city's code enforcement department ("Kick Down," by Jim Schutze, June 9). To those of us affected by the constant ups and downs of the department, this article was very much overdue. My father was one of those...
The last thing fans want to hear about a band's new album is that it sounds a whole lot like the last one. Nobody wants to spend $15 on recycled songs and unoriginal material, right? Austin's Spoon might be the ultimate exception to the rule, as the group's latest, Gimme...
My mom is such a trendsetter. Before fancy upscale boutiques were selling wallets and purses covered in it, she was using duct tape to fix everything. Hem of your skirt coming loose? Add some duct tape; it's adhesive and flexible. Don't have a lint roller handy? A loop of duct...
My Home, the Hospice With three kids facing a life-threatening illness, the McNair family lives one memory at a time The day after Michael and Heather McNair's wedding, they were in the hospital. Michael's large intestine ruptured, a result of his battle with Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel disorder. He...
Jaw-dropping. Awesome. Near perfect. On Friday night, The Strange Boys deserved just about every one of those hyperboles. The Dallas trio sounded like the entire Nuggets box set squeezed into an ultra-concentrated, garage-rock smoothie, smack dab between the vigor of The Sonics and the mad science of The Monks. Eighteen-year-old...
Cory Helms felt a lump in his neck, a hard, round pebble perched above the collarbone. He hadn't been sick, but, he says, "I immediately thought it was cancer, just because that's the way I think. And I was right." He laughs softly. "Pretty good, huh?" With little other warning...
The past? Americans just can't handle the past. Pop culture informs our understanding of the world. The family values myth, much of that stuff about the founding fathers and Christian faith, our hyped-up vision of the greatest generation--all manufactured by the various brokers of mass consumption. Just think how gullible...
The first thing that catches your eye when you walk into Bajito Onda is the prison art. A four-panel screen near the front entrance is covered in it, as are most of the nearby walls. More boards and canvases lean against the baseboard, stacked three deep. The painstakingly crafted images...
She didn't know the loan would make her ill, make her cry, even make her think her husband would want a divorce. In the beginning, all Kristy knew was that a $300 payday loan would help pay for the vacation she and her husband, Michael, had planned in Eureka Springs,...
A year ago David Cunniff was not the same person he is today. If you met him then, you would have seen a tall, rugged guy, something of a ladies' man, with a handsome face weathered by the sun and an aimlessness that suggested, at 44 years old, he might...
