MESA, ARIZONA — I come to you today live from HoHoKam Park, better known as Wrigley West. It’s the little ballpark here where the Chicago Cubs hibernate in the winter. The quaint joint is littered with retirees with bald heads, beer bellies and baseball scorebooks. There are as many walkers…
I so love the new video for Ben Kweller’s single “Penny on the Train Track.” Maybe you’ve seen it on MTV’s Total Request Live; if not, well, here it is. And, yeah, that is Ben’s grandmother: 82-year-old Marylin “Bubbie” Kweller. And Ben shot the thing all by hisself at the…
So, weirdest thing happened late yesterday. I was starting to write an item about the AFI Dallas International Film Festival entry The Go-Getter — featuring a cameo appearance from former Denton legend John “Corn Mo” Cunningham — when the phone rang. On the other end was a woman who identified…
Wow, so this is cool. I just got my copy of Halo Effect: An Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time, an anthology published by Dallas-based BenBella Books. Editor Glenn Yeffeth has pulled together 13 essays on the video game Halo. Yeffeth calls it the “first-person…
If you’re interested in what life’s like at James Madison High School, you need go no further than YouTube: Today, whilst doing our usual browsing for items of local interest, we stumbled across the work of one “bryanrotge,” who clearly digs bringing a video camera to school in order to…
Last night, before the Mavs throttled the Knicks in NYC, somebody with a video cam was recording Erick Dampier taking a few warm-up shots. What they caught was something accidentally spectacular: this shot by former Mav-turned-Dallas assistant coach Popeye Jones, who’s one of four on the player development staff. In…
Is it us, or does Eric Gagne look like Seth Rogen from The 40-Year-Old Virgin? SURPRISE, ARIZONA — No, this guy didn’t show up and go dumb yesterday afternoon here at Texas Rangers spring training. But this guy went deep. Twice. Which, for a team in desperate need of some…
Gilbert Patterson, presiding bishop of the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ, died yesterday of heart failure. He had been ill for some time. Patterson was much admired within his denomination, the largest Pentecostal body in the United States, with some 5 million members. He commanded respect throughout Pentecostalism and…
Maybe you saw the Mavs blow out the Knicks last night; if not, it was a typical Dallas ‘dozer, 92-77 over a catastrophucked NY team somehow still in the playoff hunt at 30-37. Which puts Your Dallas Mavericks at 55 wins for the season thus far; most NBA franchises won’t…
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that while African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, they also account for 37 percent of all abortions performed in the United States, and that while the abortion rate has declined slightly in recent years, rates are “declining more slowly…
The AFI Dallas International Film Fest’s getting off to an early start — today, matter of fact. From 2 to 3:30 p.m., Fort Worth native Bill Paxton’s gonna do a meet-and-greet courtesy the Dallas Producers Association. It’ll take place at the Sambuca on McKinney Ave., and it’ll cost you a…
The Dallas Cowboys just put on their Web site plans for a memorial service in honor of Wilford “Crazy Ray” Jones — the team’s “unofficial mascot of 44 years” who died Saturday morning at the age of 76. If you’re so inclined, it will take place at 10 a.m. this…
Hal Samples By now you likely know the Polyphonc Spree’s third full-lengther, The Fragile Army, is due out in June on TVT records. You can hear a bit of it on the band’s Web site; the song’s called “Section 22 (Running Away),” if you’re in need of some specifics. First…
Jeryr Springer’s the new host of America’s Got Talent. How many oxymorons are in that sentence, anyway? Remember the last time you ran into Jerry Springer? Uncle Eb was wearing his designer KKK hood because you’d impregnated your Nepalese dwarf girlfriend for the sixth time and the family was sick…
We are so not endorsing Rudy Giuliani, or any one else, in any way. But we couldn’t help but point out that Mayor Rudy, who comes to Dallas an awful lot trolling for dough as he gears up his run for the White House, will be down in Victory Plaza…
When I arrived at Mockingbird Station for the peace rally organized to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq — and to protest the George W. Bush presidential library at SMU — there were police cruisers everywhere. Three helicopters were flying overhead. “Wow, this must be pretty big,”…
Late last week, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed a bill to outlaw cockfighting in his state, ending a decades-long struggle by animal rights activists to ban the bloodsport from the state. Now only one state remains where cockfighting is legal — Louisiana — and senators there are already promising…
I didn’t come here today to lament the transformation of my March Madness bracket into toilet paper, to publicly apologize to anyone I might have maimed with a well-intended string of beads during Saturday’s St. Paddy’s Parade or to rehash Monday night’s 16-10 loss by the Dallas Observer co-ed softball…
If you have nothing better to do — and I mean nothing better, including shaving your legs with a cheese grater and watching Leonard Part 6 with the French-language option on — then by all means read Patricia Marx’s story in the latest issue of The New Yorker headlined “Dressin’…
Hot Fuzz will, guaranteed, be the best cop picture of all time — at least, of all the ones made in England last year. The AFI Dallas International Film Festival 2007 gets underway Thursday night with a screening of Music Within at the Majestic Theatre you can’t attend, unless you…
Yesterday, we mentioned that downtown Dallas is now under the watchful eye of 40 Sony security video cameras, 35 wireless radio transmitters and seven electronic storage devices that have been mounted on streetlight poles and building rooftops. The point, of course, is to deter crime or capture incidents if and…
A few moments ago, a Friend of Unfair Park called our attention to Richard Durrett’s posting on The Dallas Morning News’ Texas Rangers blog, specifically the item about how Ameriquest Field is now the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. But, see, what got our Friend really interested was the way in…
