There’s no game out at the Ballpark today — shame too, since it’s likely The Last Lovely Day before summer slams into high gear. Nevertheless, at 11:30 this morning Nolan Ryan and Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington will find themselves at home plate, where Ryan will give Washington the keys…
We’re rooting for the Chicago Bulls in tonight’s Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals. Right? I know, in the regular season the Mavs were 2-0 against the Miami Heat and 0-2 against the Bulls. But the longer the series goes — it’s currently 3-1 Miami — the more rest the…
After the jump you’ll find two things of note: the proposed 2011-’12 school year staffing formulas that could be voted on by the Dallas Independent School District trustees at their 5:30 p.m. board meeting today, and a music video featuring a young pianist and singer named Cameron Ordinario. He’s a…
10. Much as I’m giddy over the victory and the Mavs’ second berth in the NBA Finals, I’m almost as happy for the way they handled the win. No confetti on the floor. No champagne in the locker room. Not even a drop of celebratory Ginger Ale. Says Dirk Nowitzki,…
While the gettin’s good: We all need to splash our faces with cold water in this matter of the superintendent of the Dallas school system leaving for a job as superintendent of schools in Cobb County, Georgia. What do we expect? Governor Rick Perry and a cabal of ultra-right ideologues…
For three months last year, Muhammet Atayev—California businessman and, by his own account, a former Turkmenistani cabinet minister—limited himself to a small universe in Dallas. He spent his nights in a room at a Best Western motel. In the morning, he slipped into business clothes, gathered his things and walked…
OKLAHOMA CITY—Kevin Durant, meet Harold Camping. And Dallas Mavericks, reintroduce yourselves to the NBA Finals. Camping is an 89-year-old scam artist, a religious zealot with a troubling propensity for predicting the end of the world and then living to tell about it. Durant is a 22-year-old NBA superstar, the league’s…
What you see above is the official “The Time Is Now” video made last week for the Mavs’ postseason run, which continues in two hours, give or take, but you knew that. Oh, right: Go, Mavs. Cash Sirois, weekend talk-show host and Dallas Mavericks creative director, was in charge of…
You won’t have Chris Heinbaugh to kick around any more — at least, not as a city official. Four years after the former WFAA reporter left journalism to go to work for Tom Leppert as his chief o’ staff, Heinbaugh’s outta there as of the June 8 council meeting. He…
Out of the blue today I got a call from somebody at the Liberty Institute, who said she was returning my message. “I guess you’re calling about ‘The Candy Cane Case,'” she said. Um … no? I think it was about this, actually, but that was a couple of weeks…
Blockbuster, says a new 30-minute doc, was once “900 times the size of Netflix.” Now, it’s…well, you know the story. It’s barely anything at all, except something owned by Dish Network, which hopes to use Blockbuster’s by-mail service to lure new customers. It’s a sad story, the felling of a…
Well, that was certainly fortuitous timing: On Sunday the 7-year-old who lives in my house and I went for our weekly trip to the Scotty’sTop Golf batting cages, after which we took a little drive in search of a nice afternoon hike. At which point we found ourselves in the…
Dallas is all about the hike-n-bike these days, what with Complete Streets and Better Blocks and Bike Plans and Pedestrian Bridges and whatever else will help us ease on down, ease on down the road. Good thing too, since walking ’round Dallas — and Fort Worth and Arlington — can…
Whoever set the table before last night’s DISD board meeting had to be kicking themselves once the trustees got started, with dead-serious Carla Ranger yet again calling for soon-to-be-ex-Superintendent Michael Hinojosa’s immediate removal, saying an interim replacement would be a waste of money, and wondering in veiled terms about other…
As the Mavs prepare for tonight’s Game 5 clincher at American Airlines Center, a cardiac comparison: Down 15 with 5:06 to play. On the road. Game 4 of the 2011 Western Conference Finals. Or down 6, 1:47 to play. At home (sorta). Game 5 in the first round of the…
My old friend and long-ago Observer-er Matt Zoller Seitz, who wrote the definitive making-of piece about Bottle Rocket back in September 1995, sent me a note this morning: The Hillsboro motel where Wes Anderson, Luke and Owen Wilson and Bob Musgrave shot part of the film — known as the…
Didn’t see this with my own eyes, but apparently around 1 a.m. this morning the Ranger who just spent six weeks on the disabled list with a broken arm suffered in a head-first slide … slid three times head-first in one memorable, moronic trip around the bases in Texas’ weather-ravaged 8-6 loss…
Fine — make fun all you want. But I didn’t get to see my Glee last night courtesy you-know-what. Not that I would have been able to enjoy it, what with the sound of hailstones ricocheting off the roof and the sirens turned up to 11. It was the season…
Well, this is certainly is disappointing — there goes my first book. While using the Google Machine to find something Tom Hicks-related this evening, I came across this: a review published two days ago in The Independent of a book called An Epic Swindle: 44 Months With a Pair of…
Thirteen long months ago the city of Dallas finally began replacing those street signs downtown — out went South Central Expressway, up went Cesar Chavez Boulevard. It only took two years’ worth of rancorous debates as city officials and activists went ’round and ’round over which street to rename –…
A few Friends of Unfair Park find those Dirk Nowitzki videos cute … or something? But, writes one, “They’re missing Dirk.” Fair enough. This one, provided by the NBA and submitted by a reader, is all Dirk — in slow mo, no less, his Game Four heroics augmented by a…
In a few weeks, Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm will present to the city council some revenue-generating brainstorms she hopes could offset some of this year’s $60-million-and-maybe-more budget shortfall. Among her proposals, she tells Unfair Park, will be one familiar to anyone paying attention last year: flow control, which involves…
