On May 5 I wrote a column about the city’s bungled “whitewater feature” in the Trinity River — a fake rapids for kayaks that cost $4 million to build — and I included the following observation about a so-called safe bypass around the fake rapids for canoers: “One powerful current…

Yesterday’s city council committee briefing on restoring Dealey Plaza was all very well. The well-intended and the well-heeled have joined together to raise money for a well-designed refurbishing of the place where President John F. Kennedy was … well, you know … shot. I’m sure it will be well done…

We all need to splash our faces with cold water in this matter of the superintendent of the Dallas school system leaving town for a job as superintendent of schools in Cobb County, Georgia. What the hell do we expect? Governor Rick Perry and the Tea Party are charging ahead…

As you saw here yesterday, Dallas mayoral candidate David Kunkle has made releasing financial data on the Trinity River Project a plank in his platform — well, a stick, anyway — in part in response to stories he has seen here about it. Kunkle is making ethics a theme in…

Apparently a whole lot of people around the country took a look at the very strange campaign advertisement for Debbie Georgatos that Wilonsky posted here Sunday morning — a video to promote her unsuccessful campaign for chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party. Judging by the comments, most people focused…

Soon the Reign of Dwaine will end. My life will change. But the city will not. Next month, by law, a new mayor of Dallas must be sworn in, and the curtain must fall on this brief, unlikely and delightful chapter in the history of City Hall. Acting Mayor Dwaine…

Yesterday on Unfair Park Patrick Williams posted an item reporting that the city of Dallas is going to court to sue rather than follow the instructions of the Texas Attorney General to release basic information to the Dallas Observer about the money the city has spent so far on the…

The Oak Cliff secession movement in 1990 was one of Oak Cliff’s very few expressions of political will in the last 30 years, and even that weak attempt at assertiveness was based on the region’s profound inferiority complex. Its ethos was sort of: If you’re going to treat us like…

People hate lawyers and lobbyists. Not me. I hate people. If you wonder why, I offer you last week’s outlandish hearing on city council “ethics.” Back in April, the city council passed major revisions to its ethics code, loosening the rules that restrict companies from showering City Hall with money…

Southern Dallas, especially the ministerial leadership, seems to be pretty locked up behind mayoral candidate Mike Rawlings. In explaining that to myself, I do allow for Rawlings’s charismatic personality and his track record on community issues. He’s got things going for him. (Well, maybe not today.) But there is also…

Thank goodness. Finally reached Judy Schmidt, marketing director for the city’s Trinity River Corridor Project, to ask about tomorrow’s grand opening of the Trinity River Paddling Trail. I had been trying to reach her since last week to ask if she was going to warn people they might be killed…

Yesterday The Dallas Morning News published an editorial written in a style that I, as a journalist and one-time editorial writer, could only describe as screaming hissy fit The newspaper is incredibly pissed off because a recycling yard they’ve been trying to run out of business for the last year…

Wilonsky just knows how to push my Yankee carpetbagger buttons. He keeps calling to jab me about the charges that Dallas mayoral candidates Ron Natinsky and Mike Rawlings are trading today, each one accusing the other of wanting to make Dallas like Chicago or Detroit. Being a native of that…

The “Standing Wave” is a $4 million-plus kayaking feature that the city recently installed in the Trinity River, and it’s a failure. It’s ugly. It’s dangerous. It’s an insult to the river. The Wave, just south of downtown, was intended to be a whitewater play park, a place with rapids…

The city of Dallas sent out a lovely little notice earlier this week inviting people of the canoe paddling ilk — which would be me — to attend the opening of the Dallas Trinity Paddling Trail, a canoe “path” on the Trinity River, established as part of a statewide system…

Last night Wilonsky and I co-moderated the GLBT Chamber’s mayoral debate forum, a rather tony affair, as these things go, at the Cityplace Conference and Event Center. It so happened the day before I had attended the “A Peep at the Coops” tour in East Dallas, so I had chickens…

Last week The Associated Press did a story about the disgust and dismay of black Americans confronting the birther issue. “I find it hard to summarize in mere words the amount of pain and rage this incident has caused,” one man was quoted as saying at the top of the…

Dealey Plaza, subject of my feature story in this week’s paper version of Unfair Park, is a monument to horror, a locus of global grief, a vortex of paranoia and all that stuff. But on a spring weekend when the weather’s good, it’s also just kind of a cool place…

What is it that people here have against voting? I’m thinking about the item I saw here yesterday about the Dallas City Council clamping down on campaign signs. Right, we need to do everything we can to contain this voting thing. Fewer signs. Voter photo ID laws. Anything we can…