Money for Nothing Ron Kirk, Esquire: I am a Summer Associate at a prominent Dallas law firm. My firm is often compared to Gardere & Wynne, although we are a little bigger and, I think, better. There is a lot of truth to the article (“Conspicuous Presumption,” August 3), in…
Cold embrace How confusing it must be for old-school, pro-family, Christian-right Republicans now, watching the GOP lurch toward the center, toward inclusiveness, toward sodomy. Some longtime GOP faithful must be feeling like the devoted wife suddenly cast aside for a younger woman — or man, as the case may be.For…
“Hey, lookit — Superman’s got a boner,” says The Joker, giggling beneath his white makeup. “Hey, Superman! Is that kryptonite in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” The Joker keeps laughing, and suddenly, beneath the green hair and purple suit, he sounds like a 12-year-old girl, perhaps…
The business used a lot of cable and amplifiers and low-tech electronic gadgets with names like “load isolators” and “heliax.” That much is evident on the videotape his daughter’s attorney shot a few weeks after Randy James Angle went on the lam.Inside Angle’s shop in an industrial section of Garland…
Dick Simkanin lights a cigarette, leans back in his chair behind the desk in his office, and casually speaks the words that could ruin his business and land himself and his employees in jail.”We at Arrow Custom Plastics choose not to withhold any federal income taxes from our employees,” he…
Louis Farrakhan was in pain. He had lost six units of blood, and his doctor feared the worst. But the Nation of Islam leader somehow survived his ordeal with prostate cancer, and by December 1999 he was telling reporters that he was a new man.”We must try to end the…
Where Did Our PLUR Go? Raving mad: I think this article is absolutely disgusting. I am new to the rave scene (“The Straight Dope,” August 3), but this is not why I go to raves. I can honestly say that I and more than 100 of my closest friends go…
The Russian musician who played at The Old Warsaw restaurant impressed Jim Blythe. When the music stopped, the Russian and the rest of his quartet took a break, sitting at a table near Blythe’s group.An immigrant, the Russian lamented that his job at a grocery store paid little and occupied…
Mike Looney vividly remembers his most nerve-racking day as a parent. It happened in early February of last year, when his oldest daughter, Sloan, made an unlikely life transition, officially leaving the exclusive milieu of private education in Dallas, a thriving industry not known for defections, for the less heralded…
Charlie Whitney wasn’t thinking about personality tests last month when he walked into Dave & Buster’s looking for work as a bartender. His previous experiences with interviewing and job hunting were exceptionally humane: references from acquaintances, informal meetings with bar owners, and a firm pressing of palms as a contract…
They love rave, these 10 teens at Irving Mall’s food court. Seated with them around some tables, “party kid” Trey Mosmeyer is talking about starting a local chapter of DanceSafe, an organization based in Berkeley, California. He’s seen ravers get too loaded at parties and agrees with DanceSafe’s tactics: providing…
Why wait? Dallas school board member Jose Plata, a two-term trustee and staunch supporter of now-booted Superintendent Waldemar Rojas, says he’s throwing in the towel. Slowly. Plata won’t seek re-election when his term expires next May, and he’s advising his fellow trustees to do the same. He says he can…
If you wonder why the Tuesday “Today” section of The Dallas Morning News often resembles a parenting magazine, or why there seems to be an unending number of touchy-feely family stories in the paper, or how come it’s working on a multipart project focusing on young children, you should have…
McKinney resident Bill Lynch doesn’t know exactly what caused the strange turtle his daughters named Godzilla to wash up dead from the East Fork of the Trinity River behind his home, but he has his suspicions. “It’s all mutated and weird,” Lynch says of Godzilla, one of three turtles he…
On being a man I wonder if what really bothers Mr. Randy Thomas (“Mr. Fixit,” July 20) is not the “it” but actually the lifestyle. The comments on his “gay dream” and the fact that he is not his sexuality really touch me. I believe many of my homosexual brothers…
If you squint hard enough, it’s 1990 again–only the affluent have cell phones, George Bush The Original resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Randall Cunningham is back scrambling in a winged helmet and ghastly green Philadelphia Eagles uniform. He is unpredictable from the moment the ball is snapped, deciding at…
Stan Miklis farm — and its future, it seems — lies somewhere between Fate and Poetry. Halfway between these two tiny burgs, in Royse City, Miklis owns and harvests his 100-acre stretch of land. In this farm-rich area, cattle and horses graze and lazily canter amidst prairie grass, juxtaposed nicely…
GUN BARREL CITY–On early East Texas evenings, when the frustration becomes unbearable, Keith Tarkington, a 34-year-old cable installer, takes a solitary drive south into an isolated section of Henderson County. Past Cedar Creek Lake, out Highway 274, then onto a blacktop lane leading to a narrow dirt road that winds…
In the Oak Cliff neighborhood where Juan Ontiveros operates his furniture shop, signs on the barred store windows advertise “recámaras” and “comedores.” For most customers at the shop on West Davis Street, no English translations of the Spanish words for bedroom suites and dining-room sets are needed. In recent months,…
Ernest Sherman has been playing with fire, and the Dallas Fire Department is not pleased. In what his opponents call a carelessly worded press release, this trustee of the Dallas Police Patrolman’s Union let the heated word go out last week: The fire department has a paramedic shortage. Twenty-nine, to…
Very personal injury Dennis Rodman has settled a lawsuit filed in Dallas County by a woman who alleged he infected her with herpes. Stacie Shobe claimed in her 1998 case that she had unprotected sex with the former Dallas Maverick after he told her he did not have any sexually…
At a glass-topped dinette table, beneath a framed painting of Jesus Christ, 15-year-old Quinton Dixon quickly eats lunch before heading out the door of his small Oak Cliff apartment. “Don’t stay out too long,” his mother, Ada Dixon, 48, cautions from the couch in the living room a couple of…
