Upping their total contribution to the under-construction Perot Museum of Nature & Science to $25 million, Jan and Trevor Rees-Jones celebrated today in a high-rise room full of their closest philanthropic friends. Two exhibition halls — one, for traveling exhibits and another for earth science — will be named for…
Time after time, when I showed up at Dallas Animal Services over the course of the winter, Lieutenant Scott Walton would razz me about taking home a kitten. I’d outed myself as a cat person in our first interview, and this guy went for the hard sell every time after…
Before it starved to death last May, the cat could be heard by shelter workers, crying and clawing, trying to escape the confines of the break room wall behind which it had become trapped at Dallas Animal Services. Cats do especially badly in animal shelters, naturally preferring dark, quite repose…
Everybody who lives to be 100 years old should get a party in their honor at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. That should simply be a fact of life. It isn’t, though, and for now we’ll have to settle with celebrating the centennials of only the most influential of…
Our table yesterday morning at Trinity “an Irish pub” Hall in Mockingbird Station had the advantage of being as far away as we could get from a long booth full of kids and their tantrum-inured parents, but had the disadvantage of being out of the direct line of sight of…
I’m guessing the male “potential candidates” for mayor listed in a Wednesday Dallas Morning News article have personal lives. They’re probably in relationships or unmarried singles. Some of ’em might have kids. Others could have ailing or aging parents they’re responsible for. Maybe one or two once had or is…
A Dallas Police Department officer filed suit last week against Taser International, alleging that during training exercises, he was Tased to the point of breaking his back. According to court documents, Andrew Keith Butler received a five-second Tasing from the electronic stun guns during a January 2009 training session, and…
Saturday night ended with a glass of “buttershops,” the beverage I make when things look really, really dire on the home bar front. It’s brandy and butterscotch liquer, and generally by the time I get around to making it, “buttershops” is about all I can verbally muster. But we’d been…
Not up for driving out to Mansfield (Hi, Mom and Dad!) tonight in Friday-evening traffic to talk about children who are bought and sold into sexual slavery and will probably live an average of seven years before dying as a result of the danger and trauma of the industry? No?…
“It’s a joy to be free again,” Cornelius Dupree Jr. told a courtroom full of lawyers, courthouse staff, media members and several fellow DNA exonerees this morning during his very brief testimony. Dupree spent 30 years in jail serving time for a robbery and rape he did not commit, but…
Generally speaking, I don’t recommend visiting restaurants that have attached gift shops if you are over the age of 10. And really, if you’re under the age of 10 believe me when I tell you: Absolutely nobody gives a shit about your Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt collection, least of all…
For the last eight months, I’ve lived within earshot of La Grange, this year’s Observer winner for Best Bar 2010, and have come to know owners Rob and Stephanie Schumacher through the drunkest of times and the soberest of times. Their foray into revitalizing their historic Deep Ellum block, along…
There may have been an Observer staff meeting this year during which Jason Roberts’s name wasn’t brought up. Maybe one. The rest of the time, we were either talking about Jason Roberts or talking about how we should probably write about Jason Roberts, except that we were over-covering Jason Roberts,…
A virtual jaunt ’round the Western Hemisphere has led FBI investigators to anonymous users who appear to have used servers from a Dallas-based server company to disable and disrupt PayPal after the money-wiring site froze a WikiLeaks donations account earlier this month. The Smoking Gun has excerpts from the FBI…
A Dallas woman filed suit against Halliburton last week claiming she was fired after her supervisors learned she was pregnant. In court documents filed on December, 21, Lynda Darden alleges she was fired in the summer of 2009 when “she was sexually discriminated against and terminated as a result of…
Because nothing is as important as family time during the holidays, the Man O’ The Hour and I left my parents’ house on Christmas afternoon to drive up to the brand-spanking-new-ish Choctaw Casino Resort in pancake-flat Durant, Oklahoma. Like many folks with family ties in Northeast Texas, I am part…
Typically, seeing the word “BUGS” in all capital letters would be a warning to us vertebrates that it is time to turn around, speed up and take cover. That’s what all-caps is for: to warn you that something’s about to go down, and it is your responsibility as a human…
Mayor Tom Leppert and wife Laura, representatives from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, city council member Delia Jasso, and — dun-dun-dah! — former Dallas Cowboy Cliff Harris gathered earlier this morning in the Flag Room at City Hall to call for volunteers for a new study of a new medication…
These things went into my belly on Saturday night: apple cider bourbon toddies topped with whiskey whipped cream. Mulled wine. Absinthe. Old Fashioneds. Delerium Tremens. And, the kicker: Evan Williams pre-mixed egg nog in a bottle. Holiday party, you know?”Merry Christmas!” was not the first thing on my mind Sunday…
Put down your Angry Birds Seasons, it’s time for the City Plan Commission public hearing! Today the big item on the agenda is the rezoning of Lower Greenville into a Planned Development District that would require businesses to obtain specific use permits if they want to remain open past midnight…
Afternoon, Friends. Thanks for tuning into today’s liveblog of the Transportation and Environment Committee meeting up here in City Hall, during which we’ll hear about plans to market the Dallas Executive Airport and Dallas’s Complete Streets Initiative.Things kicked off late because the Quality of Life Committee meeting ran overtime –…
Friends of Lisa Stone, the Dallas woman who went missing in early June, continue to hold vigils and pray publicly for answers in her disappearance, vowing over and over again not to let Stone’s memory die. On Friday night, tailed by a 48 Hours camera crew, Mesquite High School alums…
