Rick Perry has already asked the Obama Administration for help in combating the wildfires that continue to devour much of the state. Now, he turns to an even higher power: Moments ago the governor’s office sent word that Perry has proclaimed Friday through Sunday as Days of Prayer for Rain…
Frackers, oil companies, plastics makers, wastewater managers — more or less anyone who spews a little shit into our midst in order to keep things running around here has dumped some money into the lap of Rep. Warren Chisum, the Republican from Pampa heretofore known for his fight against gay…
The Pickens Plan — Dallas oilman T. Boone Pickens’s plan to equip every American with his very own riding natural-gas fracker — is enjoying a wave of consensus not seen since The Simple Life got canceled. Pickens’s latest pitch for an OPEC-free America would give large tax breaks to manufacturers…
Today marks the middle of SMU’s Engineering & Humanity Week, where, as Robert already told you, students are field-testing some the latest in emergency shelter technology, cooking their meals outside and carrying their own water in an operation called the Living Village. I dropped by this morning, where a few…
Speaking of big doings on the SMU campus …Next week brings the first-ever Engineering & Humanity Week to the Hilltop, courtesy the Hunter & Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity. And among its myriad highlights is the construction of the so-called Living Village, where students will “live, cook their…
If you need Governor Rick Perry or Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief this afternoon, they’ll be at the intersection of Belt Line Road and Montfort Drive at around 2:30 — at that Walgreens, to be specific. (Update: I’ve been informed that Perry and Moncrief will actually be at the Arlington…
Yesterday, in the comments accompanying the item about the old central library on Commerce, George Gimarc asked this of the sculpture Dallasites once knew as Youth in the Hands of God: “Anyone recall the gigantic statue on the face of the building of the two open hands holding up a…
Former New York State First Deputy Comptroller-turned-investment banker Tom Sanzillo released a report this morning, via the Sierra Club, demanding that Dallas-based Energy Future Holding (and its Luminant subsidiary) shutter three of its coal-fired power plants: Big Brown (in Fairfield), Monticello (in Mount Pleasant) and Martin Lake. In a press…
Alan Smith says he can’t get any clean water to drink because his tap’s poisoned — and that’s the same old tap water everyone else in Dallas is drinking. Every drop, of course, is treated with fluoride to reduce cavities — but each time Smith pours a cup of water,…
Six months ago came word: Park Cities Bank, which had taken possession of circa-1925 807 Elm Street in the West End, wanted to raze the building, which sits in a parking lot across the street from El Centro and which one Friend of Unfair Park had pursued, briefly, as a…
This week the Paper Version of Unfair Park’s cover is a profile of Al Armendariz, who took a leave from his gig as a Southern Methodist University engineering professor to run the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Dallas, stepping right into a simmering fight between the agency and Rick…
The McCord Theatre Museum on the SMU campus closed some 20 years back; says here that since then, the thousands of odds and sods collected by its curator, Edyth Renshaw, have been in cold storage. Five years ago, though, theater student Emily Grubbs decided to sift through the stuff –…
A few weeks back we were reminded that the city still has plans to widen César Chávez Boulevard from Live Oak to Commerce downtown. At which point we were also reminded that the plan calls for the purchase and demolition of several historic buildings along Elm Street — chief among…
It hasn’t been easy reaching a preservationist in this state in the last couple of hours. Or in D.C., for that matter. Not since Governor Rick Perry announced earlier today that in order to save the state some money, he’s proposing the elimination of the Texas Historical Commission, at least…
Almost as soon as Gasland nabbed one of this year’s Academy Award nominations for best documentary, industry groups rushed out with a fresh wave of criticisms of the film and director Josh Fox’s argument that natural gas drilling is spreading new health risks across the country. I reached Fox by…
Speaking of vehicles powered by compressed natural gas …Mayor Tom Leppert was deeply involved in the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board’s decision (after much debate and delay) to spend $210 million to convert its liquefied natural gas and clean diesel bus fleet to CNG. Mayor Tom was also deeply involved…
The redo of the once-deteriorating Embarcadero Building at Fair Park was among the recipients of Preservation Dallas’s 2006 Preservation Achievement Awards; so too were The Big Thicket at White Rock Lake, the Belmont Hotel, the restoration of SMU’s Dallas Hall Dome and Rotunda and ARCHITEXAS’s job well done restoring the…
A little more than a month ago — and before the Environmental Protection Agency assumed control of Texas’s greenhouse gas permitting — the EPA looked to be drawing a line in the sand over water contamination from gas drilling in the Barnett Shale, with an emergency order for Fort Worth-based…
Almost as soon as we published that very popular post about University of Texas at Dallas researchers’ efforts to silence that high-pitched problem known as tinnitus, readers began leaving comments and sending e-mails in which they all asked the same question: How can I participate in the forthcoming human clinical…
When U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reps dropped in last August to hear the public’s thoughts on new gas drilling regulations, it was a ¡Three Amigos! sort of moment, the townspeople pleading for help wrangling with Governor Guapo and his jefes at the TCEQ. Now that the EPA’s muscled them aside…
If you were all revved up yesterday for a few solid hours of public debate on the environment, only to be abruptly denied, well, take heart — at the Crowne Plaza Hotel tomorrow, the Environmental Protection Agency’s holding an all-day hearing on its proposals for regulating greenhouse gases. From 10…
First I’d ever heard of tinnitus was when Who guitarist Pete Townshend announced the ringing in his ears had gotten so bad he might have to hang up his Fender Eric Clapton Stratocaster for good. Then I became a music critic, stood too close to too many stages and speakers…
