Pets lost or terrified in a tornado are way down the list of urgent concerns when multiple human deaths and casualties occur, but pets are still somewhere on that list. The fact is that animals run, hide, get injured and often get lost in a severe weather event. Sooner or…
Business Insider last month included two Texas cities in a listicle they called, “The 15 Hottest American Cities for 2015.” Not us. Austin and Houston. But I took a look at a particular piece of research that the authors seemed to be working off, a report called “The Young and…
Many people think 18-year-old affluenza-boy Ethan Couch and his enabling mom, 48-year-old Tonya, won’t last long on the lam — too spoiled, too rich, too in need of 1,500-thread-count Egyptian cotton bed sheets. But, hey, some people do manage to elude even the world’s best Wyatt Earps for a very…
This just in: Democracy actually works if you let it. And that’s why the Dallas Park Board shot down the deal last week with the private rowing club that wanted to build a clubhouse in a city park. The demise of the Dallas United Crew floating clubhouse on White Rock Lake…
This is the last thing I will ever write about water, I promise, really and truly. It’s all going to be about space aliens and sexual enhancement operations from here on out unless something gigantic happens. But since we’ve been chatting anyway these last few days about problems with a…
North Texas Journalism professor George Getschow’s piece in The Dallas Morning News on dangers in the Lewisville Dam managed to put urban flooding in Texas in what I have always believed is the most useful framework — the Bible. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for safety of this 6-mile…
Spent the morning yesterday out on Lewisville Dam at the foot of Lake Lewisville with an entire caravan of other mediatoids getting de-panicked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which seems to be in sort of a public relations panic. Small wonder. Publication last weekend by The Dallas Morning…
The city is suing low-rent landlord Dennis Topletz to have a court seize all his property, because his family name, according to City Hall, is “synonymous with dilapidated and often crime-ridden, single-family rental property located primarily in the southern area of Dallas.” (See the suit below.) So, wait. What does…
Far be it from me, at this holiest period in the Christian calendar, to defend slumlords or, heaven forfend, Mr. Scrooge himself, as The Dallas Morning News has now formally characterized low-rent landlord Dennis Topletz on its editorial page. But I do have a few small questions to ask about…
To the court of public opinion: In the matter of City Council member Scott Griggs, who is also member of the board of trustees of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Board, on the question of whether a lawyer representing Griggs as a member of said pension board ever hired…
Yesterday when WFAA was live-feeding a press conference about undocumented immigrant children to be housed in a church camp south of Dallas, I could swear I heard Ellis County Sheriff Johnny Brown say he intended to keep the camp surrounded and make sure his officers keep track of everybody who…
Sorry, Dallas gay Episcopalians. You still can’t get married in your own church, even with the “enthronement” (Episcopal-speak for hiring) of a new bishop last month. As one of his first orders of business, Bishop-elect George R. Sumner announced he’s sticking with a prior rule that nobody gay gets married…
The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments today — again — in Fisher v. University of Texas, so colleges and universities all over America will be on edge — again — to see if UT has bollixed up all affirmative action admissions programs for good. But “for good” has been a…
Like the vampire who lies dead in the crypt, then awakens, the concept of a “Crosstown Expressway” in Dallas — a new highway to run east and west across the northern half of city — has never been truly dead, as in dead-dead. Stephen Young observed here presciently that the…
I was sitting in the gallery at a City Council session last week where they were talking about the city’s deteriorating credit rating, and I felt kind of like Widda Shoots, like a little old white-haired, black-dressed, sensibly shod lady on her cane-bottomed chair with her Social Security check folded…
Everybody not familiar with efforts to resolve chronic homelessness, myself included, is shocked to learn what it costs to do anything effective. Part of what I have been learning this week is that it just does. Like it or lump it. Or we can do nothing, which would make us…
It sounds like The Dallas Morning News is going to take another run at getting people to pay for their online content at some point next year. I am strongly in favor of getting people to pay the media for content, because I want the media to pay me. So…
Ten weeks ago I had my hair shirt on with my sandwich board sign hanging from my shoulders predicting possible Biblical-scale flooding catastrophe as we entered the season of the fall rains. Might be time to grab those Bibles soon. All those stories you saw on TV last weekend of people…
We spoke here yesterday about really big really tough issues – education, mostly — and whether anybody has the stomach or the stamina to keep working on them. My own personal fallback position usually is to hope somebody else does. So today another one: the chronically homeless mentally ill. Between…
Thankful is what I am. But being thankful always worries me. Maybe something terrible is about to happen. I am truly thankful that Dallas right now is pretty much at the forefront of the national school reform movement because of its comprehensive merit pay system for teachers. The Dallas Independent…
Oops. Caught myself again. Hate that. Just yesterday I wrote about brave people who face down mobs, reaching all the way back to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for a case study (Colonel Sherburn, Chapter 22.) But then I’m sitting at my desk counting dust motes, and I think, “Wait, before…
Lawyers for the family of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old kid who made the clock, have notified the school district and city government in suburban Irving (see below) that the family intends to file civil rights lawsuits if they don’t get $15 million in damages. Hold your breath for one second…
