Bodice rip-offs If things seemed a little, well, hotter around the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier this month, there may have been a good reason. The 13th Annual Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, Book Fair and Romance Festival was being held at the Tarrant County Convention Center. Texas, it seems, has the…
All about Eve Displaying its characteristic gumption in the fight against ignorance, the News on March 14 reported the Richardson Public Library’s refusal to display an oil painting of a bare-breasted Eve. The painting, titled Eden, was included in the selections by the Richardson Civic Art Society for an annual…
Big fish in a stagnant pond The following thoughts were prompted by David Pasztor’s recent article on Wendy Lee Gramm [“Take my wife–please!” March 30]. How loudly to yell at football games and whether to eat at Burger King are probably as stimulating as intellectual debate gets in the Economics…
Censorship in cyberspaaaaace! (Why is it that computer issues lend themselves to horror comic book headlines? “Tiny Mummies in Cyberland!”) Aside from fear of technology (one of the most sensible phobias of our time–did anyone ever ask a fly if it needed eyes on its wings?), I think we’re stuck…
Mike Marcotte is a very busy man. This was especially obvious on the afternoon of December 9, a day when I was having absolutely no luck getting in touch with him. Marcotte works for the city of Dallas. Once the virtually anonymous director of the Dallas Water Utilities department, Marcotte…
If you’re a topless dancer who wiggled at Cabaret Royale some time during the past six years, you may be eligible for back pay. So ruled a federal judge last week in a protracted dispute between the U.S. Department of Labor and Dallas’ best-known topless club. The Labor Department won…
Definitely not resting in peace D Magazine writer Jim Schutze sheepishly phoned former city councilman Max Goldblatt last week to ask his forgiveness. In Schutze’s April cover story on the Dallas mayor’s race, he had mistakenly referred to the retired Pleasant Grove hardware store owner as the “late Mr. Goldblatt.”…
Aging with grace In regard to the “Yippie traitor” story [“Confessions of a Yippie spy,” March 16]: it’s not the missteps we make, but the grace with which we recover from them. Michael Helsem Dallas Even if I did not personally know George de Merle to be a gentle, compassionate,…
Worsening storm If you don’t like the News’ coverage of the Texas weather, just wait a minute–it’ll change. The Monday, March 27 story on the previous Saturday night’s bad weather put the price tag for damaged roofs and cratered cars at $15 million. “Storm damage in area could hit $15…
For complicated reasons, Cincinnati is sensitive about sin. The city is graced with militant antipornography brigades, somewhat reminiscent of the Smut-Snatchers in Greater Tuna. It turns out that this is one of the more peculiar legacies of Charles Keating, who later went on to become famous in the savings-and-loan debacle…
Only a sliver of the new moon shone through the overcast evening sky. It was humid and felt like rain. Ho’opuka E-ka-la Ma Ka-hikina. Ho’opuka E-ka-la Ma Kahikina. On the second floor of an old Oak Lawn house, a primal chant resonated through a room where 35 women and men…
Randall Dale Adams is married and living a quiet life in Columbus, Ohio, near his mother and family. Clarence Brandley has turned to preaching, opening his own church in Houston. What the two men have in common, of course, is that each–after years in prison and torturous legal appeals–managed to…
Bullish on Cow Town Is there no stopping them? First they revitalize their downtown–while ours begins to look like Robocop’s New Detroit. Then they capture the preeminent arts event of last year–the Barnes Collection–for their already thriving arts district. Then, their ballet company renames itself and pirouettes all over our…
I notice we’re having one of those spates of national concern about how dumb we are. “Nation of Nitwits,” “Pervasive Ignorance,” fret the pundits. The latest survey of how dumb we are shows that 60 percent of Americans can’t name the president who ordered the first atomic bomb to be…
Charitable counter-charge Speaking on behalf of the more than 1,000 volunteers in Dallas, we appreciate the opportunity to inform the community about the American Cancer Society and answer some of the questions raised in David Pasztor’s article “Uncharitable Charges” [February 2]. Unfortunately, Mr. Pasztor’s article failed to include the facts…
The earth moved at Dallas City Hall last week. But in more ways than you know. On Monday, Dallas lost the race to build an auto racetrack to Fort Worth. Which was a bad thing. On Friday, First Assistant City Manager Cliff Keheley–the City Hall veteran who has orchestrated much…
Every Tuesday evening, several hundred profoundly disaffected citizens gather in the ballroom of a hotel near Dallas Love Field. Tax protesters, survivalists, anarchists, conspiracy nuts, and Biblical literalists, they are drawn together by a shared conviction. Some force beyond the Ramada lights–the government, bankers, Jews, maybe all three–is relentlessly closing…
If you’ve got a smooth, north-south stretch of two-lane blacktop in your neighborhood, you might want to enter it in the race to be the official “NAFTA Highway.” You’ll join a crowded contest to be the road that will carry billions of dollars worth of goods between Mexico, the United…
Death sentence Continuing in its tradition of giving its readers a twisted version of reality, the Star-Telegram did what not even Judge Lance Ito would dare try–it fired a jury. In this case, it was the celebrated Arlington 10, the group of “ordinary citizens” that the S-T had impaneled to…
Ware must go I want to commend the Dallas Observer and Laura Miller for the excellent coverage on this arena outrage [“Arena stonewalling,” February 23] for which the taxpayers are being asked to subsidize the very rich trio of Ray Hunt, Don Carter, and Norm Green. There is no way…
Wheeee! In the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Nootsville, we’re coming right up on a hairpin turn at 90 mph. No joke–a total 180 in the middle of the road at high speed, such high speed that no one seems to have taken the time to consider just what…
The truth awaits Channel 8’s report on its stormy undercover foray into Sunset High School has been pushed back another week. Station news director John Miller told BeloWatch on Friday that Valeri Williams’ story about security in the Dallas public school–originally scheduled for last week–has been slowed by “the editorial…
