From Beck to Woody Allen, some of our most brilliant artists only really hit their stride when they’re forced to grapple with break-ups and frustrated love. Add to the list writer/director Tommy Wiseau, and his 2003 instant classic The Room, which casts Wiseau as the All-American-slash-vaguely-Eastern-European everyman torn apart by…
Andrea Grimes: A month ago, Virgin America began flying direct out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to the West Coast — specifically, Los Angeles and San Francisco. To announce their small-scale coup of local terminals dominated by American flights, Virgin invited horde of V- and not-so-VIPs for a barbecue lunch…
As quiet as Dealey Plaza’s been since the truth-bearing publishers were cleared out, you could forgive a few tourists for being concerned this morning to find the place crawling with cops. Surrounded by Dallas police, some in Gang Unit windbreakers, one officer was able to reassure an elderly woman that…
Back in September, we pointed out what a busy summer it’d been for Denton lawyer Evan Stone, as he kicked off a crusade against BitTorrent users who’d been illegally sharing porn movies. After three months, he had filed a few hundred suits right here in the Dallas federal court, alleging…
While they were busy voting not to extend their term lengths last Thursday, the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees also made the call to extend the district’s partnership with Teach for America, on the heels of the glowing review they heard of TFA’s first year-and-a-half here so far…
Maybe you were up on the roof gawking at some more pedestrian astral dealings over Dallas last night, but today, with Christmas just a few days off, Frank Ford is here to blow your mind with the sun. Ford’s launched a site today, called I Saw The Light, documenting his…
Worries about groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing around the Barnett Shale got a fresh wave of attention yesterday — first with a pair of federal suits filed in Dallas, and then with the Town of Flower Mound’s denial of a request to drill near to Grapevine Lake. Keystone Energy was…
An unremarkable northeast Dallas office park, just outside the 635 Loop, is one of five spots across the United States where Southern Sudanese emigres can register to vote for their homeland’s independence. The referendum on independence is a condition of the peace agreement that ended Sudan’s 20-year civil war in…
A man from Lancaster spent Monday night in a nature preserve 75 miles east of Dallas trying to lure Bigfoot to his black Toyota sedan, police say. Mineola Police Capt. Jack Newman tells Unfair Park he responded to a trespassing call Tuesday morning to find the man camped out in…
We may not have Detective Dan Stark out there to protect us anymore, but this morning a handful of local agencies put their guns together to see how they’d handle responding to a major attack on the city.Dallas Fire-Rescue, Dallas Police (including SWAT teams and a bomb squad) and medical…
Last week, Robert passed along the news that omnipresent North Oak Cliff lawyer and activist Scott Griggs would be stepping up to challenge Dave Neumann for his city council seat in District 3 — but Griggs waited till today, on the afternoon of his 36th birthday, to make it official…
We all know those fast food ad wizards have their tricks — fake water droplets on the fresh red tomatoes, onions peeking just so out from under a perfectly thick sesame bun. Of course, nothing’s going to look delicious oozing out of a greasy wrapper in a blurry cell phone…
Operation Crackdown is rumbling along through Dallas today, as the Texas National Guard continues knocking down abandoned buildings all over the city — dilapidated havens for drug use and prostitution, few, if any, with Christmas decorations to mark the season. Dwaine Caraway told us on Monday afternoon that they’d already…
It’s been 15 years since Ross Williams heard the athlete he claims is his son was coming back to Texas. Since then, the 68-year-old retiree in Lancaster has tracked Ricky Williams from Miami to California and back, trying to convince the 1998 Heisman Trophy winner that he is his father…
As the Dallas City Council wraps up its last meeting of the year, they’ll consider adjusting the city’s Permanent Supportive Housing Program — to keep the council notified when new proposals come in and to “encourage developers and applicants to brief key neighborhood and community groups.” In other words, to…
Last December, Gary Brown helped organize Dallas’s very first (and, later that night, the second) Unsilent Night walk, a local take on the 18-year-old New York City tradition that’s spread to 24 cities around the world. To refresh your memory, the deal is that you bring a boombox, a laptop…
It’s open season on drug houses in Dallas today, with the Texas National Guard kicking off its two-week Operation Crackdown campaign — demolishing around 50 otherwise vacant crack dens and stash houses — and the city tearing down the first of South Dallas’s Summer Breeze Apartments after a years-long court…
Mustangs young and old turned out at the Lakewood Theater last night, for a very special screening of Pony Excess — or “Exce$$,” if you prefer — Southern Methodist film-school grad Thaddeus Matula’s ESPN-bound documentary about SMU football’s high-scoring, well-paid glory days in the early ’80s, when each week brought…
The toughest room in Texas today was a plain white conference room in Garland along Interstate 30, down the hallway in the Texas Department of Safety’s regional office. That’s where Governor Rick Perry joined about three dozen officers, friends and family members to welcome Chuck and Aaron Norris into the…
Saturday’s the big day for this year’s Fair Park Holiday, and Mayor Tom Leppert joined assorted Friends of Fair Park this afternoon in unveiling some of the highlights you can expect this time ’round — among them, rooftop fireworks, the tree lighting ceremony, free admission to all eight of Fair…
All those energy companies with gas drilling permits before the Dallas City Council on December 8, take one step forward. Not so fast, XTO. The Fort Worth-based energy company had been slated to bring its appeal of the City Plan Commission’s specific use permit denial before the council a week…
In the Paper Version of Unfair Park this week, we’ve got a longer look at the life of Lord Bongo Johnson, one of Sierra Leone’s most popular and influential celebrities in the early ’90s, who murdered his common-law wife and killed himself in their Mesquite home last summer. We mentioned…
