In our cover story on the local private spaceflight pioneers at Armadillo Aerospace, we mentioned that the team’s contract work with NASA included testing a set of legs for a lunar lander based on an Armadillo design. At the time, NASA’s big plans to return to the moon were all…
Cowboy Chow 2801 Commerce St. 214-742-2469 Dude Factor: 7, or “The Cowboy,” Mulholland Drive, on a scale of 1 (“The Cowboy,” Innerspace) to 10 (“The Stranger,” The Big Lebowski) Cowboy Chow’s slick ‘n’ quirky take on upscale trail grub — what they call “Texas comfort food” — has been written…
Like a good mix tape, there’s an art to making a really fine diptych. You need a connection between the two images, but you don’t want to make it too obvious. Layer a few ideas together in some fresh relationship that’ll make people think. A shot of a man lying…
A couple of days ago I happened to find myself, during the waking hours of business, standing in front of Dallas City Hall, where the only person in sight was the one half-submerged in the reflecting pool. In black hip-waders and a Parks & Recreation baseball hat, Jose Peña was…
The Orbans dropped their new album When We Were Young onto a half-packed house of fans and friends at Sons of Hermann Hall Friday night, bringing an agreeable live face to their good-time, don’t-call-it-country rock set.The band set an intimate feel for the night straightaway, as singer Peter Black hushed…
Above the tunnel where we’re sitting, cars rumble across the blazing asphalt on the northbound Stemmons Freeway access road. I can see flags on the Medieval Times towers from down here, blowing in a strong summer breeze. The wind sends cooling gusts down the length of the tunnel, picking up…
“So are you pretty excited to try the 106 flavors?” That’s how they’ve been greeting folks at a Garland Wingstop lately (the one on Northwest Highway), and they’re not talking about wing sauce. Coke’s testing out its new Freestyle soda fountain at three Wingstops around Dallas, and naturally one of…
There’s really no telling what the animals at the zoo get up to after hours. Their daily routines–swatting flies, tearing into raw meat and walking the same slow circle of their pens–are no great mystery, but most of us can only imagine what goes on at the Dallas Zoo when…
Avid mug-shot magazine readers (or picture-lookers) will have noticed some changes in that sliver of the media landscape since our first mention of Busted and Mugly! earlier this month. I’ve been trying to reach Busted’s Ryan Chief to learn more about the shame rag business around here, and finally caught…
If you happened to stroll past Pegasus Plaza downtown over the lunch hour, what follows may not be news to you. Odds are, you already noticed the 20-some protesters wielding signs with behind-the-scenes photos of elephants and anti-circus slogans. Or maybe you noticed the half-naked woman lying on the sidewalk…
Around the world they called it The Incredible Trip in a Crazy Airplane and Tighten Your Seat Belts…The Pilot Is Gone!, but here in America we needed just one word and one big punctuation mark to name the greatest disaster comedy of all time. Airplane! turns 30 this year, and…
La Paisanita Tacqueria 2505 Inwood Road 214-351-3232 Dude Factor: 9, or a Ford Ranchero, on a scale of 1 (Ford Fiesta) to 10 (Chevy El Camino) There are, give or take, 98 taquerias lining Maple Avenue between the Observer offices at Oak Lawn and La Paisanita’s taco shack in a…
Even if he’d secretly been hoping for a pony on his birthday, Mayor Tom Leppert was all smiles this morning at the Dallas Zoo, where the formalities of a press conference quickly gave way to a birthday cake, singing and fun times feeding exotic birds and giraffes. The morning’s occasion…
The beer may run a little weaker in Oklahoma, but yesterday’s big eating contest at WinStar World Casino proved their hot dogs are some of the toughest around. In his bid to qualify for this year’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Championship at Coney Island, Sean “Flash” Gordon put away 30…
Competitive eating is a hard-hearted mistress, courted by many but gracing few with even a moment of her fickle affection. Most who enter a contest never do so again, and even those who do usually manage only a brief, painful and unheralded career before they wise up at last.Why not…
The good people with the Republican Party of Texas are just beginning to get their biennial convention locked and loaded into the Dallas Convention Center, where the next few days promise a wealth of political theater, and this year, even a little more substance than usual. As Robert pointed out…
We’ve been watching from Unfair Park HQ as pieces of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge have been lifted into place, and earlier today Mayor Tom Leppert and the rest of the City Council bunch saddled up to get their own up-close look at the construction. It’s a closed-off site, but…
That Twitter feed of mug shots from Denton has been around for more than a year now, and online collections of goofy mug shots were all over well before that. But for dead-tree sentimentalists who love the feel of the newsprint as they flip through pages of miserable strangers, Dallas…
The long war over Gaza played out in miniature down at Dealey Plaza Friday, with supporters of Israel and Palestine facing off across Elm Street, separated by rush hour traffic and a temporary fence. Hundreds of people turned up around 6 p.m. in a show of support for the nine…
Paul Woodfield had already spent years fighting Dallas’s bike helmet law in county court, when the city decided to drop the original ticket he’d been given on a bare-domed ride around White Rock Lake back in 2007. With no ticket to fight, the Fifth Court of Appeals dismissed his three-year-old…
Dairy-ette 9785 Ferguson Road (214) 327-9983 Dude Factor: 9 (or Bodacious), on a scale of 1 (Ferdinand the Bull) to 10 (Bevo).After a long weekend soaking up culture down in Ennis, and sun out at the FOE pool, yesterday’s return to traffic, cubicle walls and that car alarm that keeps…
Sure, the Texas Rangers may be bankrupt, but at least they’re not the Seattle Mariners. Messy as the home team’s accounts may be, they’re finally looking at a new owner and a good shot at the playoffs. The Mariners? Bankrolled by Nintendo, and they’re still pretty much the worst team…
