Caffeine jitters: So the McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., owner of financial services firm Standard & Poor’s, has sued local coffeehouse Standard & Pours over alleged trademark infringement (see “Poor Standard & Pours?” by Robert Wilonsky, July 6). As we reported on the Dallas Observer’s blog Unfair Park, fans of the artsy…
Here’s some good news for fans of the cable networks Logo and Here!, two channels with content aimed at gay viewers that had been dropped from local cable programming when Time Warner Cable took over the Dallas cable from Comcast Corp. on August 1. That had some local viewers mighty…
Time for another weekly Unfair Park giveaway. Today, we’re offering two fabulous prizes. The first is two tickets and a parking pass to the Mary J. Blige concert tonight a Smirnoff Music Center. The first person to correctly guess Unfair Park blogmeister Robert Wilonsky’s favorite color will be obliged with…
I began watching Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen in its first season after developing love and mad respect for foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay, thanks to his BBC ventures. Before the current season, the show held auditions here in Big D. I had friends that went. None made it, but Texas had showing…
The Invisible Sheriff strikes again. This week, we wrote about how Lupe Valdez infuriated her rank-and-file officers when she declined to fire Larry Locke, one of her top chiefs, for keeping a Thompson submachine gun in his storage cabinet. Valdez had overruled her highest-ranking employee, Jesse Flores, who wanted to…
Six weeks after my story on the truck-eating railway trestle on Garland Road near the White Rock Lake spillway, DART told The Dallas Morning News that it is looking at tearing the bridge down. Three bright yellow signs warn drivers that the abandoned trestle has a clearance of 12 feet…
Doyle Davidson is an old-fashioned kind of guy who likes to write love letters. To married women, yeah, but still. Water of Life preacher Doyle Davidson has been posting weird “messages to Lisa” again, including one that seemed to signal a possible change in his “marital” status. As Dallas Observer…
Barbara Lorenz Carly Patterson is gonna be on reality TV. With Cyndi Lauper. On Fox. Those are the teardrops of pride, my friend. Remember two summers ago when a spunky 16-year-old from Allen won our hearts and the gold medal in women’s gymnastics at the Athens Olympics? Then, like, remember…
You’ve tried the personals; you’ve tried MySpace; you’ve tried blind dates and virtually everything else to find a mate–or a least someone worth a second date. What, oh what, is a girl to do in Dallas’ dating desert? No. Not that. Sheesh. Get your mind out of the gutter and…
We now take this brief T.O. from T.O. to talk about positive, harmonious, winning football: So what do two consecutive mythical national championships, a 63-1 record over four years and a 32-game winning streak get you? If you’re the Southlake Carroll High School football team, it gets you a slap…
It’s amazing what the muddy, turtle- and tire-filled Trinity River can inspire. While some see a polluted ditch, others see a reason to spend millions for a fancy-schmancy bridge to nowhere. Still others see a good place to dump old couches, refrigerators and the occasional corpse. The artists at McKinney…
Dim bulbs: Buzz doesn’t cry, but even we can be moved by the news once in a while. The stories in April about Mercy, the dog that rescuers tried and failed to save after she was intentionally set afire, were pretty sad, for instance, but years in the news biz…
He brought down Robert Tilton, W.V. Grant and Larry Lea, three of Dallas’ high-flying televangelists in the early 1990s. And when he wasn’t diving in dumpsters to pick through preachers’ trash, he was entertaining journalists from around the world at “The Block,” Trinity Foundation’s collection of homes in East Dallas…
For two weeks all anyone’s talked about is the imminent arrival of the award-winning New York critic known for his brutal critiques of “critic fellows” here at the Theater Farm. He’s so tough, they say, he’s made professional journalists cry as he ruthlessly dissects their prose syllable by syllable. “Das…
In his last two stops, Terrell Owens has driven quarterbacks, coaches and fans crazy. After exactly two days of Dallas Cowboys training camp here in Oxnard, California, there’s evidence his presence is already pushing coach Bill Parcells to the brink of insanity. In a fascinating, frustrating 10-minute span on a…
OK, if I had it to do over again, I might not have made that crack about Whiney McKnuck (my secret nickname for my Critics Camp nemesis). It’s just that she was fawning all over a certain Big Name Critic from a New York paper. “I just looooove your work,”…
It’s only the first day of Dallas Cowboys training camp here in Oxnard, California, but at least one major player is already in mid-season form. Long-time WFAA-Channel 8 sports anchor Dale Hansen got Day 1 off to a rousing start, purposely directing football-specific questions to owner Jerry Jones and away…
If you read The Dallas Morning News this morning, you maybe got the impression the state of Texas just gave Dallas County a big old pat on the back for the fine way it has been managing its Homeland Security money. But the actual state audit that just came out…
Admit it, Carl Monday is your new hero. Cutthroat investigative journalism at its finest, right? (You know, it’s really too bad we don’t have cameras on us as we’re reporting stories. We are so like that.) Well, Monday went back for more after Mike Cooper, famous for the “mono log”…
I’m not saying the prospect of being on a reality show isn’t a little bit tempting, but there are limits. Wanna be one of seven strangers picked to live in a house? Fine. You’ll probably get all kinds of ass courtesy of MTV for the rest of your life. Wanna…
Want to know what your daily newspaper will look like in the future? You’re looking at it, sort of. It’s your computer screen. Well, duh, you say. Haven’t we known that for at least 10 or 15 years? Yes, we have, smartypants, but Belo Corp.’s earnings report for the second…
Friday: College kids would be wise to haul ass to Denton tonight, where DJ extraordinaire Diplo and Brazilian electro-popsters Cansei de Ser Sexy touch down at Hailey’s, while jangly, out-of-town indie combo the Minders and the Kingdom play at Rubber Gloves just a few blocks away. Closer to home, this…
