Pop quiz: A young high school athlete isn’t getting much playing time. As a parent, do you a) Encourage your teenager to buckle down and work harder; b) Have a few choice words with the coach; or c) Suggest that, you know, maybe academic decathlon might be a better fit…
The first Highland Park police officers to fatally shoot a suspect on duty are now also the first Highland Park police officers to be cleared of criminal wrongdoing for shooting a suspect while on duty. Town Public Safety Director Chris Vinson made the announcement at a Thursday afternoon press conference…
Shirlee Perry doesn’t get out much anymore. Eighty-four years old with ailing legs, going outside usually is too much of a challenge, so she spends her days mostly watching TV at her Oak Cliff condo and caring for the two semi-feral cats that were born near her back porch and…
No one seriously believes anymore in the Reefer Madness depiction of marijuana use, in which this new-fangled devil weed transforms otherwise upstanding teenagers into murderous sociopaths. Even some otherwise staunch social conservatives (e.g. Rick Perry) are beginning to embrace some degree of decriminalization as a fair and necessary step toward…
The way he described it, Dallas police officer Matthew Antkowiak could have very easily been killed on the night of December 18, 2009. It started just before midnight, when the officer spotted 62-year-old Ronald Bernard Jones in the 300 block of Reunion Boulevard. Jones “appeared to be intoxicated or high…
The casual observer will be forgiven for overlooking Councilman Lee Kleinman’s role in Dallas’ debate over plastic-bag regulations. With Dallas City Councilman Dwaine Caraway constantly sermonizing against them on the one hand, and with Sheffie Kadane and Rick Callahan’s dismissal of any attempt to regulate them as a thinly veiled…
The bloodless but brutal Plastic Bag War of 2013-14 has finally come to a close. The final battle, waged primarily through hyperbole and terrible metaphor, came today with the Dallas City Council ultimately voting 8-6 to impose a fee on single-use carryout bags at most retail stores. Under the ordinance,…
As a general rule, it’s probably best to avoid driving through Cockrell Hill. Police in the tiny hamlet, a .6-square-mile splotch in the middle of Oak Cliff, wrote 7,890 traffic tickets last year, nearly two for each of its residents. That’s doubly true if you lack proof of insurance. Each…
The Texas legislature’s decision to cut $5.4 billion from the public education budget three years ago had some rather predictable consequences: fewer teachers, larger class sizes and a sizable drop in the telling funding-per-pupil metric. Texas promptly dropped to 49th on the latter metric among states and Washington, D.C. This…
Karen Cameron doesn’t spend much time in her front garden anymore. Her yard, though separated from Dallas Executive Airport by Ledbetter Drive and a winding, tree-lined front driveway, is made unbearable, or at the very least extremely unpleasant, by the roaring engines and noxious jet fuel that waft over from…
Just yesterday, Johnson County officials were boasting of breaking up a cockfight outside Alvarado. It was, by most measures, a respectable bust, with 17 people involved and 97 birds seized. But Johnson County? Johnson County’s got nothing on Pleasant Grove. This morning, as if to one-up their rural colleagues, Dallas…
When Eddie Gossage last week unveiled the “Big Hoss TV” — a 12-story, 20,633-square-foot video screen — it wasn’t just a coup for Texas Motor Speedway, it was a win for the entire state. Having North Carolina claim the country’s largest jumbotron is something no self-respecting Texan should be willing…
When intrepid Observerer Amy Silverstein recently took DART to DFW International Airport, she missed her hypothetical flight and narrowly avoided being devoured by coyotes. She ultimately discovered that there was a bus that took her to the terminal, but the trip was long, arduous and complicated. That problem will be…
You might have heard the news yesterday: Quinton Ross, the former Kimball and SMU basketball standout-cum-NBA journeyman, was found murdered, his body found stuffed in a plastic trash bag and buried in a shallow grave in Queens. It was certainly news to Ross when he woke up Monday morning at…
The first three months of 2014 have been exceptionally peaceful ones in Dallas. Robberies have dropped by 15 percent compared with the same period last year. Aggravated assaults are down 12 percent, murders a whopping 30 percent. There are still nine months to go, but the city is on pace…
Mark Cuban has always been part prophet, part crazy person. His early entry into online radio proved to be prophetic. The Benefactor, his short-lived reality show, was not. So when Cuban predicts that, within 10 years, the NFL will go the way of Toygaroo, it’s hard to tell whether Cuban…
During eight years working for Plano-based Goodman Networks, Jef Mindrup’s Buddhism was never really an issue, and why would it be? Serving as the marketing director for a large-ish telecom company requires allegiance to no specific creed. Mindrup says that changed on March 14, 2012, when Jody Goodman — Goodman…
It’s entirely possible that the Dallas City Council will show up on Wednesday, argue for an hour or two, then decide that it’s not quite ready to vote on banning plastic and other single-use carryout bags, Dwaine Caraway’s March-vote-or-bust pledge be damned. But, thanks to a draft of the ordinance…
First off, we’d like to make a correction. Yesterday’s report that the Trafficpocalypse was upon us was premature. Yesterday’s bizarre configuration of vehicles stuck on LBJ did not augur a world-ending traffic jam. Commutes this morning were regular terrible, not apocalyptic. What actually happened was that at least seven cars…
The 6900 block of Hemlock Avenue would have been dark at 9:30 Tuesday night. There are no street lights, just whatever light spills over from the adjacent apartment buildings. It would have been hard to see a couple of kids playing in the grass on the side of the road,…
It took more than two years following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 for NASA to launch its next manned space flight. Shortly before it returned to earth, a bouquet of roses arrived at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I didn’t actually decide to do it until the day…
Leroy Nelson, it’s fair to assume, has never owned a “remote aircraft landing marker.” Or a “seismographic probe.” Or a “chemical pipeline examiner,” which sounds like it would be a person but actually appears to be a made-up piece of equipment. Nelson, though, is not the type to let bourgeois…
