A fugitive from the law for more than a year, former SMU student Douglas Havard is alive and thriving in Hong Kong. No, Spain. Well, try Central Europe. Rio de Janeiro? No, Doug Havard, now 21, is wheeling and dealing in Austin. All of those locations have been reported as...
Last October The New York Times called Texas "a patchwork of dizzying gradations of wetness." In Plano, those gradations are apparently so disorienting that residents there can't seem to ease the regulatory tangle that stands between them and a wet whistle. Consider this: Last month, a petition drive in Plano...
Thursday, March 18 Only the absolutely nerdiest shindigs require their own specialized dictionaries. Latin club, Klingon conventions, Scrabble championships--all havens for people who never got to spend their own lunch money. But they're also full of people who take themselves very seriously. Just check out Word Wars, the 2004 Sundance...
Rancher James Fuqua fancies himself a soothsayer. In 1997, a rainy year, Fuqua surveyed the sprawling fields of green grass near his West Texas ranch in Quanah and smelled impending peril. The uneasiness prompted him to increase his water supplies and buy every blade of hay he could get his...
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed and middle-aged Robert McNamara preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he's set up is visible, and second,...
Cars and dining go together like Botox and TV news anchors. Whole restaurant segments and a rash of clever inventions have been spawned from the marriage of food and motoring: diners, drive-ins, cup lids, drive-up windows, talking Jack heads, cup holders, probably even disposable diaper wipes (keep a tub in...
Shelly Martin was bone tired from the countless hours she spent at the bedside of her sick friend, but she figured she had better return to the hospital, and fast. For the last 10 days, Mike Scarcella had been in the intensive care unit at Presbyterian Hospital of Plano. Now...
"Speedtrucker, motherfucker!" shouted the crowd normally foreign to Club Clearview. These men and women were armed not with facial piercings but with bottles of Lone Star, and they donned not Urban Outfitters threads but Justin boots and cowboy hats. Still, the only surprise bigger than the good ol' country crowd...
Some acts of courage command everyone's respect--the firefighter's return to a burning house to rescue a child, the infantryman's sacrifice of self for a wounded comrade, the weary black woman's refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus. Sometimes, though, courage can seem clouded--especially when it's a response to...
In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the Kerry cascade. The phenomenon, Watts says, is the strange dynamic by which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rapidly swept to...
First, the Dallas Observer's own Zac Crain breaks the news that crime is a growing problem in Deep Ellum ("Cruising for a Bruising," August 14). There is much wringing of hands. Next police use pepper spray to break up an unpermitted but otherwise nonviolent street party on New Year's Eve...
Two weeks ago the mayor and the city council held a news conference slapping themselves on the back for a new law to fight apartment crime. They passed an ordinance putting more of the responsibility for crime-fighting on the backs of apartment owners. I wonder if it occurred to the...
Coming of age as a punk-rock kid in the early '90s was an emasculating experience. Feminism invaded the Pacific Northwest's music scene at its apex a decade ago via record labels like Kill Rock Stars and K, while the region was setting trends that infected the entire country (read: Nirvana)...
Arthur Miller's powerful drama All My Sons, now drawing gasps and tears from audiences riveted by Classical Acting Company's production at Richland College, was written during wartime. It concerns a family wrestling with the postwar realization that the father's success as a defense contractor during World War II was the...
When federal agent Jason Meadows interviewed the elderly resident at the Primrose Oaks senior living center in Oak Cliff, the man presented him with a business card for Universal Health. "Here's your crook," the man told Meadows, according to a recently unsealed affidavit filed in federal court. The name on...
The Spitfire Girl When Mesquite High School drama teacher Jennifer Green, 24, showed up at her first professional theater audition in October, her goal was simply a "call-back'' for WaterTower Theatre's production of the musical The Spitfire Grill (onstage through February 15). Instead, she landed the starring role of troubled...
Wednesday, July 22, 1959: As near as he can remember it, Robert LeRoy Miller was just sitting on the porch of his parents' home. He was 13, about to enter the seventh grade, and he'd been idling away his summer in a languid blur of marbles, neighborhood boxing matches and...
As a reader, it can be easy to assume that all the critics at a particular publication are more or less of the same mind, but here at New Times, that isn't the case. We're just too damn independent-minded to take our colleagues' views into consideration, which is why, when...
Thursday, February 12 As we tick off entries in our checkbook register, we cross-check them with the lovely invention that is the online statement. In trying to create a frugal budget, we researched our spending and found that an excessive amount was devoted to dining out. Makes sense if you...
Four decades of James Bond films have proven that I must die now. Ive seen all the secret plans, uncovered facts and figures. I now know how the evil geniuses in Frisco plan to take over the world; i.e., I know too much. So this is where the needlessly complicated...
McKinney, May 16, 2002, 1:33 p.m. "McKinney, 911," answers a female dispatcher, sounding somewhat blasé. "What was the address of your emergency?" "Yes, ah...I am at the hospital at North Central Medical Center," says a male caller. "Uh-huh." "Right behind the professional building," he continues, his twang as pronounced as...
