Her name, like most of her life, is forgotten, but her one defining moment is carved into memory: She is the girl who played dead. That moment came in a South Dallas crack house, where she’d been hanging out with four other teen-agers “in the game,” dabbling in the margins…
The road to Tennessee Colony passes through rich farmland and acres of spreading trees; it’s some of the prettiest scenery in Texas, but Mark Anthony Larmond has never seen it. Sentenced to 99 years in one of Tennessee Colony’s maximum-security state prison units, the stiffest sentence of the Cleveland Street…
Whether in his small corner spot on the 11th floor of his Central Expressway workplace or, later, in his spacious office at Valley Ranch, he was always pacing, ever on the move as he thought and spoke. For longtime Dallas Cowboys president and general manager Tex Schramm, who died Tuesday…
Despite the name of this gray box, Buzz is not always concerned with being what we in the journalism world call “timely.” So, if you happen to have, say, a Dallas Morning News memo from earlier this year that we may find interesting, go ahead and slip it under our…
Scary Place Do something: The timing of your article was uncanny (“Make Yourself at Home,” by Charles Siderius). As I was dropping off books at the library last Thursday, I thought to myself, “Someone should write an article about the scariness of the library.” And as I arrived at my…
Like flies to honey, they swarm into the Sonic Drive-In on Northwest Highway near Garland Road, revving their high-performance motorcycles as if to announce their “Hey, look at me” arrival. Some ride their sport bikes solo, others travel in packs, a few have passengers draped across their backs. No protective…
When a tough-talking, scar-faced convict named David R. Waters died of lung cancer in January in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina, an unusual flurry of coverage followed. The news hook was Waters’ role as evil mastermind of the infamous kidnapping and murder of Austin-based atheist leader Madalyn Murray…
So, The Dallas Morning News is going to publish announcements of same-sex unions alongside traditional marriage and engagement announcements. Buzz, being liberal and all, can get behind that. The daily, it announced this week, also is going to be more restrictive on advertisements for firearms, only taking ads from federally…
Q & Eh After interviewing Lisa Loeb about her role as Mary Jane Watson in MTV’s new animated series Spider-Man almost a month ago, we set the tape aside, thinking we’d get around to transcribing it closer to the time the show was set to debut–July 11, 9 p.m. No…
Your Library For the people: As a faithful reader of the Dallas Observer, I appreciate your ability to write what The Dallas Only News won’t; however, “Make Yourself At Home,” by Charles Siderius (July 26), disappointed me. Apparently the J. Erik Jonsson Library that he visited was not the same…
Rogelio Sanchez Brito drove his red Ford pickup south to the Millennium Hotel in the Mexican border town of Ojinaga, where he turned it over to a man he’d never before seen. Brito, young and nervous, waited at the hotel for two days before his truck was returned, loaded with…
Dallas Independent School District police officer Mike McKinney was working an off-duty protection job at an auto parts store one night in March when he went out for some food. Walking back toward the store with a cheeseburger and a pizza, McKinney saw the door of a parked van open…
“Ernie Kent” sounds like a superhero name, or at least the name of his alter ego. Which is fine, because his mannerisms and speech fit that mold. Kent–the University of Oregon basketball coach by day, USA junior world team coach by off-season–shoots across the court like the Flash and grabs…
You can always tell when rumors begin that a new publication is entering the media market in Big D, because the cancer-loving sales staff at the Dallas Observer doubles its number of smoke breaks. And were you to drive by the back side of the Observer’s downtown offices these days,…
Buzz likes to gamble, and we would hereby like to put serious scratch on D magazine’s publisher and editor, Wick Allison, if he were ever to rumble with Belo Chairman Robert Decherd. Not that Allison is a badass. In fact, we suspect the only thing he’s ever tussled seriously with…
Rhaving Mad in Rhome Life in the slow lane: Why in the world would you write such a hateful article?? (“Get Wise,” by Jim Schutze, June 26.) First of all, the city of Rhome is named after Colonel Byron C. Rhome from the 1940s. Wise County is a beautiful place…
We suspect that many Full Frontal readers think we on the FF desk spend all our time thinking up jokes involving weed and hot women. Well, you’re wrong, or least you’re only 90 percent correct, max. Sometimes we turn our attention away from bongs and thongs to consider Serious Weighty…
Final Score With the NBA draft only a few weeks away–what?…it’s today?…no, it’s not…look it up…oh, you’re right–we at Full Frontal thought that a great way to fill space and excite readers would be to look back at the hits and misses from previous Dallas Mavericks drafts. (Remember, our evaluation…
A fortyish man wearing a wrinkled baseball cap, jeans and a dirty nylon jacket steps into an elevator at the Dallas central library and directly in front of the panel of buttons. He insists on pushing the buttons for the others in the motley group assembled on board, including an…
They came from opposite directions, Glowing like the stars they Would become, Arriving in the same place To shed their remarkable light. Old friends Cleatus Rattan and Jack Myers have, at first glance, little in common aside from a passionate devotion to their faded art and the fact one of…
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison sure sounded like a Democrat last week when she bitch-slapped the boys at Belo. In the wake of the FCC’s ruling that a media conglomerate can own enough TV stations to reach 45 percent of the U.S. market (it used to be 35 percent), the Texas…
Dallas Observer staff writers Charles Siderius and Mark Stuertz have been named winners in one of the most prestigious national contests for feature writers, the University of Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards. Siderius won in the consumer category for “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” a May 16, 2002, cover story that exposed…
