Look, I’m not even the world’s biggest fan of political conventions, because they make me feel like I’m trapped in a cubicle with a car salesman. What’s to believe about an event where they hire a consultant to do the balloon drop? But with these two conventions freshly behind us,…

Great editorial this morning in The Dallas Morning News, coming about as close as the News is ever going to come to endorsing the will and wishes of a neighborhood over development plans that would violate those wishes. It puts Mayor Mike Rawlings into a most useful kind of focus…

I see everything through flood control. The world. Why? You become what you do. If you take a guy like me and make him a flood-control reporter his whole life, he’s going to come out with a flood-control point of view. Or drainage. Take your pick. No wonder nobody ever…

Guilty little secret time. I’m glad the Dallas County Commissioners voted themselves a 4 percent pay raise Tuesday. I would appreciate it if we could keep this just between us here on Unfair Park, because it’s not exactly the best thing for me to be saying out loud in terms…

Pins and needles, waiting for the Democrats to open in Charlotte. I am so worried the Obama campaign might stumble on an editorial from The Dallas Morning News and actually read it. Well, not that worried. That would take a lot of stumbling. But what a shame if they did…

I had a private little laugh and moment of startled disbelief while my wife and I were watching Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night. Romney described his father as having started out in life as an apprentice “lath and plaster carpenter,” a term so arcane…

The big City Hall racial blow-up over a reform of our very screwed up municipal court system — subject of a sort of weird editorial in The Dallas Morning News this morning — is probably a harbinger of worse things to come. Which is probably good. In all its attempts…

Well, I guess Eric Nicholson and Jeff Siegel just know everything, don’t they? Nicholson, our own blog editor here, and Siegel, a columnist for the Lakewood Advocate, have been having fun making of Lincoln Properties, a real estate company, over a scheme to get Garland Road in East Dallas re-named…

While I was away on vacation The Dallas Morning News published an editorial saying Angela Hunt, Scott Griggs and Sandy Greyson, our three brainiacs on the City Council, are stupid, don’t know how to add and came up with all the wrong conclusions about the News’ favorite project, the idea…

Gone for a week. Vacation. Back. First thing, walked the dogs in the ‘hood. Got a half dozen mosquito bites. So I thought the mayor bombed the mosquitos while I was gone. What is up with that? Are there still mosquitos where you live? Also just back from vacation, next…

Years ago. How many? I don’t know. When was the time before the time we started fighting about the Trinity River toll road? Was there such a time? I first talked to City Council member Angela Hunt about the Trinity River before the Trinity River was a brawl. So it…

Great. So tonight the government sprays us with piperonyl butoxide. To reassure us, the TV news last night shows us a guy from the company doing the spraying who tells us just not to worry. I say worry. The airplanes tonight will be spraying us with a compound called “Duet”…

Last week in a Dallas City Council session someone suggested that maybe Dallas has fallen a bit behind in the race to become a primary continental shipping hub. Yeah. You could say. Race started. Other guy took off. Crowd roaring. We’re still stuck in the gate, and our jockey’s drunk…

Reading about the Medicare debate and listening to friends and neighbors talk about it, I always come to the same conclusion: Your opinions depend entirely on your personal experiences. A commenter here the other day said he thought most old people are “responsible” and have provided for their own medical…

Gosh, I’ve been reading about the secret negotiations between the two groups of fancy people downtown over how to control the light, and I can’t help thinking of the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War between 1968 and 1973. I don’t know how much you may remember or…

What country is this? Have I been on some kind of horrendous toot, and did I sleep for a month, and did I wake up in the wrong country? All weekend long on my TV set I kept seeing Paul Ryan, the right-wing social Darwinist cheese-head, and they said he…

All right. A brief time-out? Before we all die of West Nile or shut down our endocrine systems with toxins, should we call in somebody who, unlike me or some editorial writer at the Morning News, actually knows something? An editorial in The Dallas Morning News today more or less…

Wait. I’m a libtard. I’m politically correct. I hate bullies. I despise people who make fun of a co-worker for being different from them. But they sent a Dallas police sergeant to deep nights at the jail because he came back to his division with a bag from Chick-fil-A? You…

The Carnival Cruise Ship boat club barge that a rowing club wanted to build on White Rock Lake seems to have shrunk back into a modest, nicely designed facility that shouldn’t really bother anybody. More amazing, the rowing club people themselves seem to have shed their long forked tails, horns,…

The moment Channel 8 reporter Teresa Woodard opened her mouth to tell viewers Dena Schlosser, the Plano baby chopper, had been seen working as a checker at Walmart, you knew Dena Schlosser was already no longer working at Walmart. Of course they fired her before the story ever hit the…