Liberty Tax Service doesn’t let just anyone don its trademark Lady Liberty costume and dance for potential tax customers. There are tryouts and specialized training on proper singing, dancing and waving techniques. A lot of dreams are crushed. Channing Gould was one of the lucky ones. A 19-year-old performing arts…
Creationists wield outsized influence in the shaping of textbooks in Texas. In the past, they’ve worked to burnish history’s less-than-glowing view of Joseph McCarthy and to bring to the classroom Intelligent Design — creationism gussied up with the thinnest patina of science. And because the State Board of Education has…
Some way, somehow, Mark Cuban managed to whittle down the 1,000-plus quality entries in his design-the-next-Mavs-uniform contest down to a final 10. For whatever reason, Buster the Armpit Lion didn’t make the cut. The submissions are currently up for a vote here. All of them are pretty quality, save for…
You’re a public health policymaker in Texas. Teenage girls in the state are getting knocked up at an alarming rate, then they’re having babies and getting knocked up again. The data, along with the bulk of the scientific literature, suggest that the state’s longstanding strategy of telling kids not to…
Kiowa Park, a postage stamp of green space tucked behind Prestonwood Elementary in Far North Dallas, is not known as hotbed of Voodoo or Santeria, a fact that makes yesterday’s discovery all the more puzzling. According to police, a neighborhood resident was walking a dog through the park at about…
Every week or so, managing editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, nicotine-addicted, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz. So The Associated Press last week reported the results of a survey it sent to the top Republican candidates for statewide office, including Texas Attorney General…
It’s probably been a while since you read Charlotte’s Web. Maybe a few details from the spider-hatching scene have slipped your mind. If so, here’s a refresher. One fine morning, a tiny spider crawled from the sac. Then another, and another. They were no bigger than the head of a…
Good news: The vast majority of Texans think global warming is real. Seventy percent, according to a just-released study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. That’s way more than one might expect from listening to the people they choose for statewide office and proof that Texas’ massive, multi-year…
You had to know that the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, would spawn a host of conspiracy theories, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Pearl Harbor before it. So, we here at the Dallas Observer office weren’t all that suprised to receive multiple hand-mailed…
Craig James’ tenure as a college football analyst on Fox Sports Southwest was hilariously brief. It took all of one day for the station’s corporate parent to learn of the hire, review James’ comments on homosexuality from his failed U.S. Senate campaign, and show him the door. College football fans…
At some point, after a year-plus of hand-wringing and delays, the push for DART to offer benefits to the domestic partners of employees took on an air of inevitability. Two weeks ago, the DART board’s administrative committee overwhelmingly voted to move forward with a “plus-one” plan, allowing unmarried employees to…
When TCU and SMU’s football teams face off this weekend in the battle for the coveted Iron Skillet, the Horned Frogs are expected to dominate. The three-touchdown spread falls a couple of touchdowns shy of an abject humiliation, but it at least represents a solid pounding. That’s not good enough…
U.S. Representative Ralph Hall isn’t dead. The Rockwall Republican hasn’t even left Congress, forging ahead in a Bob Barker-like battle against the ravages of the time. Despite all that, Hall is now the namesake of a reservoir. Lake Ralph Hall hasn’t actually been built yet. The project, planned for 12,000…
In mid-July, CBS 11 carried a brief report about a near-drowning at a University of North Texas swimming pool. A teenager attending an overnight football camp had been pulled from the bottom of the pool by lifeguards around 9 p.m. on July 11 and rushed to the hospital. The boy…
Back when he was trying to become president, Rick Perry was ridiculed by Mitt Romney for Texas’ growing population of illegal immigrants. Romney had said in a debate that while California and Florida had “no increase in illegal immigration, Texas has had 60 percent increase in illegal immigrants.” Turns out,…
This is what 13-year-old Taylor Storch left behind when she died in a skiing accident three years ago: a heart, which went on to beat in the chest of a 39-year-old mother in Arizona; two kidneys, which saved two separate people in Colorado; two corneas, which helped restore sight to…
Van Dralan Dixson, the man accused of raping as many as nine women in South Dallas in recent months, is sorry. He’s sorry that he raped a woman as she walked home from her job at at a fast-food chicken restaurant on September 1, then stole her cell phone, cash,…
Ted Cruz did not make the cover of the October issue of GQ, an honor reserved for The Wire’s Idris Elba. That’s probably for the best. The appearance of Texas’ junior senator on the cover of a national magazine, this one not a political rag but one that defines itself…
Claudia Yamell Castillo may not come out atop North Texas’ (unofficial) Most Hated Person list for September. With a week to go, that Balch Springs teen who beat a puppy’s eye out with a tree branch has to be the current favorite. But Castillo is a strong contender for runner…
Mulligan Mint is sort of like the companies that hawk gold coins through Sunday newspaper supplements and daytime cable TV, in that the money it produces isn’t legal tender, but the similarities end there. While the other companies play on the misty-eyed patriotism of octogenarians who still scour the ads…
Dallas County recently discovered its sixth person to test positive for the West Nile virus this year, in a season that’s seen one death. It’s a much less troubling situation than last year, when there were 400 human infections and 20 deaths. The Dallas Morning News has an easy explanation…
Last year, we brought you the story of Steve Lipsky, whose little slice of paradise in Parker County became a proxy in the war between the EPA and state regulators. It wasn’t long after Range Resources began stimulating a nearby natural gas well by hydraulic fracturing that Lipsky noticed his…
