Prepare Your Protesting Accordingly

You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, I’m telling you why: A statue of a crucified pregnant teenager is coming to town. Not any time soon mind you, but that is the plan of Danish artist Jens Galschi�t, who debuted the statute outside Copenhagen’s Lutheran cathedral…

Modano Getting Married. Lucky Him?

So it’s official: Dallas Star Mike Modano is marrying Dancing with the Stars non-winner Willa Ford. But dunno if this bodes terribly well: “The couple has been dating on and off for four years, Willa told Access Hollywood.” Or this: “During DWTS Willa was rumored to be dating her dancing…

Things About Tony Romo You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know

USA Today says Tony Romo’s a “sex symbol” now. And, apparently, women like him too. USA Today’s the latest media outlet to go Romosexual, with a lengthy piece about how the Cowboys QB is giving the team “the same confident aura it had when Aikman engineered three Super Bowl championships…

Someone Needs to Teach Sheriff Lupe How to Use E-mail.

Sheriff Lupe Valdez exposes a rather small-minded philosophy about the press in an e-mail she accidentally sent me this afternoon. Earlier, I sent a public information request to her legal advisor, Leslie Sweet, for copies of internal affairs complaints of four Dallas County Sheriff’s Department employees. I copied the sheriff…

Farmers Branch: It’s Scary

Illustration by Craig LaRotonda After Farmers Branch passed a series of measures targeting illegal immigrants two weeks ago, the opposition is mounting a fight to prevent the laws from taking effect. (If you need reminding, those laws make English the town’s official language, authorize local law enforcement to check the…

The Forbes 35 (Drunkest)

Now that Dallas-Fort Worth temperatures are plummeting, sleet and ice are thickening and the need for nips is extremely urgent, its time to revisit this story we missed last August in Forbes ranking the nation’s 35 drunkest cities. Yeah, Dallas-Fort Worth squeezed its way in. But we pull in a…

The Biggest Loser

First, we get buried beneath the Arctic Blast’s sub-zero temperatures and six feet of ice. And now Dallas is about to get dumped on again. Somehow amidst the downed power lines and white-out conditions comes news that Saturday’s Big 12 Championship Game between old Big 8 rivals Oklahoma and Nebraska…

Keven’s Roky Road is Now Paved With Indie-Film Gold

Roky Erickson, left, and Keven McAlester now have a Spirit Award nomination to show for their years of making You’re Gonna Miss Me. Congratulations, mazel tov and big ups to our pal Keven McAlester, the Dallas boy who today was nominated in the Best Documentary category at the Spirit Awards,…

Staubach: Army-Navy’s Where It’s At, Yo.

The 107th game between Army and Navy takes place this Saturday at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, and who better to comment on the great gridiron battle than former Naval Academy QB — and, sure, Greatest Dallas Cowboys Quarterback Ever — Roger Staubach? He tells The Baltimore Examiner today that…

Dirty Old Men

Comix great Peter Bagge captures the essense of Al Goldstein. Odd, thought you needed a jar for that. In keeping with Unfair Park’s groundbreaking coverage of First Amendment Champ-cum-Fallen Porn King Al Goldstein, Josh Alan Friedman provides this dispatch from the front lines. A cocktail party for our book, I,…

The Times “Experiences” Verizon in Southlake

There’s a story — or is that an ad? — in today’s New York Times about Verizon’s new “experience store” in Southlake, where customers can download music, play video games, watch football games in high-def and, for all we know, get a happy ending. Sounds like a little bit of…

Belly Up, Baby

Everybody’s got a talent. Something they’re just really, really good at. Like Jim Schutze. He’s good at lighting Wick Allison’s bow tie on fire. Or Kevin Federline. He’s good at being a douchebag. But some of us are extra-blessed, fortunate enough to have not one but two skills. Take 25-year-old…

A Broken FEMA (Yes, Again)

As we pointed out in August, the Health and Human Services Commission figures there are about 251,000 Katrina evacuees still living in Texas–66,000 of whom ended up in North Texas. Most are African-American; most are women; most are making very little money. And yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the…

Bump and Grimes

Techno music churns throughout the room, weaving around Japanese businessmen, bouncing off greasy-haired guys from Long Island and assaulting my ears with its incessant bass thump. To me, the loud music is the most distracting thing in the room. My guy friends, seated at the other end of our booth,…

Anna Nirvana

Anna Kournikova grabbed my balls. Relax. It was for charity. Some aspire to climb Mount Everest, facilitate world peace or concoct a beer-flavored cure for the common cold. Me? I just want to hit on the hottest human ever to pick up a tennis racquet. And have her hit back…

Tongue Twisted

No matter what the city, school board meetings can be bizarre spectacles that blend clumsy gestures of civic pride with demoralizing flashes of stupidity from elected officials and parents. Around 10 years ago, the people who came to Dallas Independent School District meetings recast this shopworn script, adding dramatic flourishes,…

Old Building, New Lives

Larry James steps through the dusty glass doors of his new building and flicks on a low-powered flashlight. He points the light toward a bank of elevators that haven’t been used in years. “We’ll have to take the stairs,” he says, shuffling in the darkness. The building, at 511 N…

Trial by Fire

There are hazards in allowing partisan voters to select local judges. As a defense attorney, Carter Thompson handles mostly low-profile misdemeanor cases, which are typically easy to turn around and bill than the more languid and complicated felony cases such as aggravated assault and murder. Then Thompson ran for criminal…

Red light, Green light

Red light, green light: Brace yourself, Buzz is about to delve into the world of high finance, proving once again that ignorance is no bar when you have a deadline and a column to fill. Today’s subject is a “scandal” involving Affiliated Computer Services, the Dallas-based technology services company to…

McRats | The Last Days | Smart Doggies | Margaret, Phone Home | Chain of Fools

McRats Better than the evil clown: McDonald’s served a rat—so what? (“I Smell a McRat,” by Richie Whitt, November 23.) It’s only marginally more disgusting than their usual slop and possibly better for the customer and the environment because rats aren’t pumped full of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, don’t require…

Beige Book Filled With Gray

The Federal Reserve’s eight-times-a-year Beige Book report’s out today, and economic conditions in the good ol’ Eleventh District — which is almost exclusively Dallas but also includes most of the state — ain’t so hot, says the Fed: “In October and the first half of November, the Eleventh District economy…