The Dallas Mavericks started the season with a broken-down Doug Christie, flirted late with signing has-been Shawn Kemp and gave extended minutes all the way through to isn’t-yet Rawle Marshall. Key guard Devin Harris only played seven games after the All-Star break. Keith Van Horn was injured more often than…
I believe in the enterainment biz this is called “repurposing.” Yesterday we mentioned former Observer music editor Sarah Hepola’s piece on Slate about how she intends to give up her blog to do other things, like watch TV. Turns out some folks at National Public Radio dug the piece too…
According to a new Census Bureau report, Americans are skedaddling from big cities and foaming up the burgeoning “exurbs,” the outer rings around urban cores—a move driven primarily by housing affordability, or lack thereof. New York, for example, had a net loss of more than 210,000 residents per year between…
Maybe this is old news to you–and if it is, you were probably baptized and bar mitzvahed–but Dallas “Hebrew Christian” Zola Levitt died on Wednesday after a protracted battle with cancer. Or, as his Web site puts it, “the promotion to the home office came through,” a line of humor…
The Bluebonnet Trails Festival takes place this weekend in Ennis, and it’s pretty much the biggest thing that town has going–no offense, y’all. The Dallas Morning News has a predictably puffy preview, written by an Ennis freelancer who briefly addresses and then dismisses concerns that the drought has put this…
Haven’t heard much from Harriet Miers since she asked George Dubya to withdraw her nomination to the Supreme Court last October: According to this piece from Time magazine, after helping to turn conservatives against the president and being branded an unqualified crony by Republican senators, Miers “went back to the…
May 1 is scheduled to be “A Day Without a Mexican,” so named for the great-idea-lousy-execution 2004 movie in which Californians wake up one morning to find all the Mexicans simply vanished overnight. Some folks are also calling May 1 El Gran Paro Americano 2006 (“The Great American Boycott 2006”)…
Broke as a joke? Good Records feels your pain with a late in-store line-up tonight. Touring acts Cordero and Koufax play at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. respectively–they don’t even have gigs in the area, so this free show is your only chance to catch either of ’em. Dallas’ Blackheart…
Just when you thought local radio couldn’t get any worse, it does. Two words: Opie. And Anthony. Come back, Diamond Dave, all is forgiven. Except for “Just a Gigolo.” –Robert Wilonsky…
Former Observer music editor Sarah Hepola has decided that the blog is the great blob that writing blots ambition even as it spawns prose bloat. So she turned hers off. Or will. Eventually. “Blogging had been the ideal run-up to a novel, but it had also become a major distraction…
I love it when out-o’-staters get all Texas up in this piece. It’s like they think we live in some giant-sized theme park, where everything’s bigger ‘n’ better ‘n’ battered and then deep-fried, which isn’t wrong, mind you, just a little beside the point. From The Grand Rapids Press up…
Longtime local activist and politico Lorlee Bartos has a message for us regarding our Belo Mansion post of this morning: Belo Mansion has nothing to do with the Belo Corporation. It is the headquarters of the Dallas Bar Association. Can’t blame Belo on this one. Its history includes being a…
Belo Corp. just posted its first-quarter earnings, if you can call ’em that. The news for the News’ owner? Not so hot. That said, Belo’s stock was up considerably in morning trading–by some 27 cents at post time. –Robert Wilonsky…
If you drive near the American Airlines Center you can’t miss the giant banners featuring the Dallas Stars’ Stanley Cup quest and star Mike Modano. But if you subscribe to Dish Network, you will miss the NHL’s Western Conference Finals, likely a showdown between your Stars and the rival Detroit…
Laurie David, environmental activist and wife of irritainer Larry, was in town this week to premiere Too Hot Too Handle, the global-warming warning she exec-produced for HBO. (It debuts this Saturday, which appears to be Earth Day by the looks of this styrofoam cup I just threw out.) Seems she…
Last night’s thunderstorms had even my cat thinking the Rapture had come. Anxious to see what kind of damage the weather had done throughout the city, I checked my trusty Dallas Morning News this morning, where I learned that traffic is snarled, power is out and–horror of horrors–“Overnight storms knocked…
Dallas oilman Jim Oberwetter, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has been keeping a low profile; a Lexis-Nexis search of U.S. newspapers and wire services for the last 90 days shows little mention of him. “That’s probably a good thing,” says Rachel Bronson, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations…
I fear this kind of news–because I know I’ll have to see it at some point–but this morning came word of a high-definition movie shot in Dallas called The Long Shot, touted as “the second time anyone has successfully created a feature-length movie in one continuous shot (no breaks, one…
According to the conservative talk radio station KLIF-AM (570), UTA professor and Texas native Jose Guitierrez wants to “kill the gringos.” Guitierrez reportedly said, “We have an aging white America…They are dying…We’ve got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that, if the worst comes to the worst,…
American Airlines execs, standing alongside Mark Cuban, gave away some 19,000 airline tix to everyone at last night’s Dallas Mavericks game at the American Airlines Center. The kicker: The vouchers are for American flights at Love Field, the same airport I am pretty sure American wants shuttered in the near…
Filmed in Dallas, the new movie Rain–starring Faye Dunaway, Robert Loggia and Khandi Alexander–will debut tonight as the opening movie of the Palm Beach International Film Festival. It was exec-produced by Dallasite John Valdene, who grew up in Palm Beach, and is based on the novel by V.C. Andrews. The…
Late in the first half of the April 8 game against Real Salt Lake, Dallas native Kenny Cooper uses every inch of his 6-foot-3 frame to get his head on a long ball and flick it up the field toward a sprinting Carlos Ruiz. The Guatemalan star known as El…
