What Beats What? Poker hand rankings of five-card hands, from best to worst: royal flush (A-K-Q-J-10, same suit), straight flush (five cards of the same suit, in order, e.g. J-10-9-8-7 of hearts), four of a kind, full house (any three of a kind, plus any pair, e.g. 9-9-9-3-3), flush (any…
Scared of the Kink Struggle for acceptance: I loved “Happy Nappy Girls” (July 5). It was as though the writer had interviewed me for the piece. As an African-American woman, I had been conditioned to think that I am not beautiful just the way I am. Thank you for letting…
Like a lot of other homeowners in Dallas, Wanda Taylor wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her annual property tax appraisal when it came in the mail this April. In each of the past four years, the Dallas Central Appraisal District has raised the value of her stone cottage in East…
On quiet evenings, before Malcolm X Boulevard teems with late-night life, Harold Williams climbs into an old pickup with a cranky transmission and visits the ghosts of the city’s past. Caretaker of the 60-acre Oakland Cemetery, one of the oldest and most historic graveyards in Dallas, Williams takes with him…
Even barren and buried beneath a construction crew’s detritus, the Angelika Film Center & Café–a long-standing promise on the brink of becoming a reality in the middle of Mockingbird Station–is a remarkable building. For now, one can only imagine what it will look like when its café is serving food…
When the public complained about how animals were being cared for at the city’s educational farm located north of Dallas, the city’s park department responded. It got rid of most of the animals. When the public complained about how the horses at Samuell Farm’s privately operated trail ride were being…
Ain’t too proud to beg: As sins go–and in Buzz’s experience they go quite nicely, thank you–running a ministry that’s too proud to ask for money seems a pretty minor, and rare, offense. Yet pride is a sin nonetheless, one that Ole Anthony of the Dallas-based Trinity Foundation, publisher of…
Muzzle the Barking Dog Narrow and intolerant: Bravo to Dave Faries for writing this article (“Being Avi Adelman,” June 28). I, and many of my neighbors, are tired of the media portraying Avi Adelman as the “voice” of Lower Greenville. He isn’t. Many, if not most, of Mr. Adelman’s neighbors…
Once was blind: When Buzz has a problem with our eyes it gets written off to any number (one, to be exact) of seedy activities from the night before. But when former Dallas Observer managing editor Emily Benedek briefly lost her sight a few years back, it was a religious…
PRESIDIO, Texas–On April 2, 1839, a caravan of Mexican traders led by Missouri merchant Henry Connelly left Chihuahua City in search of a more direct trade route to the north than through El Paso. Accompanied by 50 Mexican dragoons, Connelly and his company marched northeast through the Chihuahuan Desert past…
To hear some insiders tell it, finagling absentee ballots out of elderly voters has become routine practice in some of Dallas’ thinly attended city council and school board races. This type of vote cheating, in which campaign workers magically show up at an elderly voter’s doorstep the day he receives…
“Hair is not just expression It’s a form of oppression regardless of what ignorant justifications they’ve taught you to think We all scared of the kink…” –from “Madam CJ” by Dallas-born poet Von, from The Slave Tree, Balance Books, 2000 It is a rite of passage for an African-American girl,…
Now the largest ethnic group in Dallas, Hispanics fought hard recently for a city-sponsored holiday to commemorate one of their own: farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez. Union and civil rights leaders, who see the late Chavez’s legacy akin to that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, joined Latino supporters in seeking…
Just Plain Mean Pure, inexcusable evil: I truly enjoyed Jim Schutze’s article chronicling the metamorphosis of his book to a movie (“My Day of the Locust,” June 21). I admit to liking most of his work, but this particular story really needed telling. Mr. Schutze is right. Hollywood is afraid…
Don’t have a cow: At the end of a tidy yet depressed street in Pleasant Grove chock-full of pawnshops and ethnic restaurants, a shuttered Army-Navy store bordering Interstate 30 awaits demolition. A new Golden Arches is going up here. Maybe. Plans for McDonald’s in this quiet neighborhood face resistance from…
A song has been written as part of the massive marketing effort under way to lure the 2012 summer Olympics to Dallas. It’s called “Our Time to Shine,” and the title suggests that the city, along with North Texas, is ready to bask in the international glow the games bring…
In case you’re wondering–and lots of stockholders/employees at Belo Corp. are–there were plenty of people who knew the CueCat was a ridiculous investment. Mark Cuban said as much. Newsroom grunts who were asked to evaluate its worth said, in the kindest terms possible, that the digital scanner cat-lookin’ thingie was,…
For the Birds Remember the passenger pigeon: In Charles Siderius’ article about the grackles in Carrollton (“La Cage Aux Folles,” June 21), Jack Moravits of Hoover Landscaping is quoted as saying, “To me, they are June bugs; there’s plenty of them.” That’s what everyone thought about the passenger pigeon and…
Sean Anderson wanted to throw an intense, all-night rave featuring the pulsating electronic dance rhythms of techno music–plus his favorite DJs and friends. So last March, the 21-year-old promoter and turntable jockey rented the Forest, an old movie theater near Fair Park that regularly holds concerts ranging from rap to…
Channel 4 investigative reporter Becky Oliver makes it look easy. The ambush, that is. But ambushing somebody is harder than it looks, especially for a first-timer like myself and especially if the target is Becky Oliver. On paper, Oliver is the winner of countless awards for investigative reporting. On TV,…
Mike Carter Field sits off Front Street, just past the convention center and the rose garden. Across the way is the football field where Earl Campbell played during high school. Earl’s old haunt, much like Tyler, Texas, has seen better days, idling in a state of disrepair, a fading memory…
As a boy growing up in postwar Vietnam, Lai My Truong was different. At school in a peasant village near Ho Chi Minh City, teachers and other children harshly ridiculed him, causing him to drop out by the fourth grade to work in a rice field. Because of Lai My,…
