If you think–and we do–that the State Fair of Texas is actually a gastronomic event, then the image of Julia Child meeting Big Tex is irresistible–a star-crossed conjunction as inevitable as that of King Kong and Godzilla; two giant legends linked by food, the clash of the cholesterol titans, the…
By an overwhelming margin, a strikingly insignificant fraction of Dallas residents believe city council member Donna Blumer should remain with us a bit longer. Blumer, you may recall, exhibited rare political courage recently by vowing to “lay down my life” if necessary to prevent the city from selling WRR-FM 101.1…
The Texas Attorney General’s Office may be spared the task of answering a question that could change the face of Texas college football forever: Can an Aggie read the Longhorn playbook? The question was formally posed on August 27, when Texas A&M graduate Michael Kelley sent University of Texas President…
Eternally yours One can never be politician enough to know how far to go when talking in a lighthearted manner at lunch with a Belo reporter. Now I know. At first, I was peeved at Dallas Morning News reporter Todd Gillman for failing to quote my WRR remarks in the…
Nowhere can you look so far and see so little–or so you think while traveling across the Texas Panhandle on the way to the little feedlot town of Hereford. The railroad tracks and telephone wires and tar-covered highway race across land so flat you can see into the middle of…
Politicians make so many promises that most people don’t pay much attention anymore. But last week, our ears perked up when Dallas City Councilwoman Donna Blumer took a dramatic stand in defense of city ownership of WRR-FM 101.1. WRR, of course, is the only government-owned commercial radio station in America…
When was the last time an adorable child sold you a raffle ticket for some charity fund raiser? When was the last time you actually heard who won the grand prize? Joanne Groshardt, a technical writer in Dallas, recently decided to find out who won the grand prize in a…
Fired up Diane Emery wants to know why, if actors can pretend to love, murder, and even have sex on stage, they can’t bring enough method acting to bear to fake smoking a lousy cigarette? Emery, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, enjoys theater, but can’t attend plays if actors, in…
A tale of two cities Hey, would somebody kindly point out to whichever idiot is in charge of your Buzz column that the Palace of Wax is in Grand Prairie, not Arlington. That’s twice now that you’ve slammed Arlington for being tacky by associating it with something that isn’t even…
It is nothing but an open field, a nondescript place beside a row of battered mailboxes along Seeton Road near Joe Pool Lake. But for months, it has been a site of pilgrimage for Adrianne Jones’ friends. They have visited the field dozens of times since Jones’ brutal murder last…
Everything, really, was quite perfect. The Women’s Council of The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden was gathering last month in the historic DeGolyer House for its Fall Informal Luncheon, each of the ladies dressed in “casual garden attire,” as their bluebonnet-bordered invitations had instructed. The luncheon tables were whimsically decorated…
Getting bigger all the time With the rerelease of the classic film Giant, culture critics are re-examining the Texas Myth. Most are lamenting that the wild-cattin’ Texas cattle/oil baron who lived as large as the Lone Star State is as dead and gone as James Dean, who played oilman-party monster…
It wasn’t long ago that Alphonso Solomon was considered a rising star among black business owners in Dallas, a walking testament to the notion that ambition and business savvy could bring prosperity to the city’s minority community. Solomon had started three independent companies in South Dallas–a consulting business, a janitorial…
In The Dallas Morning News, politics is no joking matter. Dallas cartoonist Buddy Hickerson learned that lesson the hard way when his quirky, irreverent cartoon, The Quigmans, was exiled from the comics page recently for daring to do what folks–at least those outside certain Middle Eastern countries–do every day: poke…
Nothing but the truth To Laura Miller–great work on “Combat zoning” [September 19]. You and the other great writers at the Dallas Observer go underground to tell the real truth about the stuff the Morning News will not touch. Keep up the great work, and we will keep abreast of…
About 12 years ago, syndicated columnist Mike Royko traveled from Chicago to Dallas to write some material about the Republican Convention. He promptly delivered the standard barrage of complaints that “real city” people bring forth when they describe our landscape and the people who live on it. Too bland. Too…
In the annals of business history, what took place in the high-ceilinged ballroom of the posh Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas late last July surely qualified as a moment: T. Boone Pickens Jr. very nearly cried in public. The occasion was the annual meeting of Mesa Inc., the oil…
What goes around… Texas Monthly was chock full of laughs this month–mostly at the expense of the media. It all started when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed an obit containing a list of spectacular–and questionable–lifetime achievements for the deceased. It would seem that James M. Woodson, who passed on at…
If Nancy Goodstein’s allegations are true, the devil inside Dr. Edward Porter has taken over his true personality and is leading the Plano preacher and counselor down an evil path. Whether the 61-year-old Porter is still paddling his patients on the butt and biting them on the shoulder during this…
Peekaboo I have been somewhat surprised by your paper’s total lack of coverage of the indictment of Dallas City Councilman Paul Fielding. I hate to suggest that you may be guilty of biased coverage, but I feel certain that if it were any other city official, you would have had…
Where was the mayor? That was the question on a lot of people’s minds on the night of Sunday, September 8. It was 8:30, and 367 nicely dressed people were assembled in the Galleria Ballroom of the Westin Hotel–all of them friends and supporters of a small Jewish day school,…
Eleventh-grade English at Wilmer-Hutchins High wasn’t what Tiffany Pullum had hoped it would be. Instead of reading novels or writing compositions, her class dozed in front of Bad Boys, Forrest Gump, and just about any other Hollywood video the kids thought to bring in and unspool. “The teacher told us…
