1/22 Chinese New Year sounds like an intense holiday. On January 1, we eat some black-eyed peas, nurse a hangover and call it a day. Not so for the Chinese. First of all, because the Chinese calendar is based on a lunar cycle, New Year’s falls on a different date…
1/24 One of the more family-friendly running events in town, the Dino Dash is a fun mix of education and exercise that helps raise money for programs at the Science Place. With 10K, 5K and 1K courses, there’s a race fit for all ages and skill levels. The 5K course…
1/23 Happily ever afters make us itchy, though we like when bad ‘uns get their comeuppance–like how Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off toes and heels to fit into the tiny slipper, but the prince notices blood spilling from the shoe and then pigeons peck out the sisters’ eyes. Nice. Maybe it…
1/23 Midwinter. Bleak if you have psoriasis or seasonal affective disorder. Unbearably bleak if your husband crashed his truck, fractured his vertebrae and has to wear a back brace for two more months. Profoundly bleak since all you can think about is sex. Your therapist suggests you try new things:…
1/23 Bernice Johnson Reagon’s father once told her about a “land so rich that when rocks were cracked open, honey flowed from them.” It is a biblical parable that inspired the performer to name the group she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock–an African-American female a cappella quintet. The name…
If MC Hammer can go broke, anyone can. Actually, that’s not quite true. Most of us don’t put everyone we knew growing up on our payroll (street cred is not something your average plumber has to worry about) or spend $20 million on a house. Or, for that matter, attempt…
Feel like an evening at the ballet? Robert Altman’s The Company, a lovely and superficial montage of performance, is less a movie than a series of impressions, a rich sampler of a season with one of America’s premier dance companies–the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. There’s scandalously little by way of…
In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing…
Here is something I bet you did not know, because I did not know it until a month ago, and people who should have known long before me didn’t even know until I told them. There is a record label in Los Angeles called CMH that, through a subsidiary called…
Mention Waiting for Godot and you will often get the sigh and the eye roll. Oh, that old thing. What is it about anyway? What does it mean? It’s weird. It’s long. It makes no sense. The eye-rollers do have a point. Godot playwright Samuel Beckett provides a pretty accurate…
We dislike today’s kids because, first of all, we’re adults now and they constantly step in front of us when we’re walking fast, stare at us at restaurants and burst our eardrums by screaming while we’re trying to talk on our cell phone at Target. Sure, they look cute, but…
Thursday, January 15 It may not be on display like ours, but we’ll bet it’s there. Somewhere in the house there is a toy (old or new) that is special. An item that is so important, no matter what spring cleaning occurs, the toy is staying come hell or high…
At this point in American political history, many Democrats have accepted the fact that they will spend their November sitting in their living rooms watching CNN, knocking back a bottle of Old No. 7 and waiting for Bush’s second presidential appointment. Yes, the Left has pretty much resigned itself to…
1/17 There is nothing more satisfying after a hard day’s work than saddling up the ol’ mechanical bull and letting it toss your troubles away. While this pleasure lasts only a few seconds, the 108th Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show in Fort Worth allows you to celebrate the timelessness of…
1/20 You notice a lot sitting up in the cheap seats, perched so high above the court in the American Airlines Center you’re sitting next to the retired numbers of Mavericks great Rolando Blackman and former point guard Brad Davis. (I refuse to use the term “great” in reference to…
1/17 A long time ago, in a stupider age, boys played a game of flipping baseball cards. The rules were simple: Two kids each hold cards, slightly bent. Release the cards. If only one lands face-up on the ground, its owner gets both. Otherwise it’s a tie. Flash forward to…
1/17 The inaugural Dallas Observer word of the week is “cremaster.” Webster’s says it’s “a thin muscle which serves to draw up the testicle.” For half of you reading this, an involuntary reflex of thanks goes out to cremasters everywhere. Also thankfully, the bit of brawn finally gets its just…
1/18 On the first hangover-free shopping day of the new year, we hightail our cheapskate asses to the nearby Barnes & Noble, where calendars are mercifully half-price. This trip also gives us a chance to buy the books we didn’t get for Christmas. We wanted Dick Wolf’s Law and Order…
Why are we so chronically dissatisfied that we have to make resolutions year after year? Because we suck, that’s why. We are all fat, lazy, too controlling, not assertive enough. We all need to pay off our credit card, get a cheaper apartment, buy a house, get a better job,…
Men and women have been hooking up for tens of thousands of years…or 6,000, in Baptist years. Why, then, does the search for a significant other continue to perplex us? Of course, in the old world we relied upon matchmakers who firmed up marriage plans while Olga and Yuri toddled…
If your New Year’s resolution has anything to do with losing weight, gaining muscle, increasing exercise, decreasing waist size or just generally getting your flabby ass back into shape, then consider yourself lucky to be in Dallas. The weather’s warm enough to exercise outside most of the year, and the…
So you’ve finally resolved to be cool. Well, too damn bad. Cool is one of those indefinable attributes, a blending of formality and comfort, attitude and contrition. Indeed, cool often appears in contradictory form. Bogart was cool when masking the scars of hard living and disaffection with a sharp suit…
