It’s a long drive to the Omni Hotel downtown from the nearest Waffle House, which is three-fourths of the way to Farmers Branch. It’s a sleepy one, too, when made at the typical Waffle House hour of 4 a.m. Nevertheless, an unidentified gentleman driving a 2004 Lexus SUV decided to…
It’s easy to forget, immersed as we are in creepy YouTube renderings of Big Tex’s face, that the rest of the world probably isn’t obsessively tracking the progress in replacing the gangly 50-foot cowboy. And so, over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal filled them in on the rebuilding effort…
Drivers and liberals can breathe easy: Central Expressway is still officially Central Expressway. The state legislature opted over the weekend to retain the familiar name for the roadway’s entire length. That said, the three-and-a-half mile stretch between Knox Street and Northwest Highway will also be called George W. Bush Expressway…
Terry Costa owner Tina Loyd would like it on the record that she fully supports cross dressers. Her North Dallas dress shop happily supplies the gowns for any number of men competing in local drag shows and employs a pageant consultant who often attends the events in support of customers…
For a time, coal was moribund, on life support. We thought perhaps the country was permanently shrugging off its dependence on the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Coal-fired power plants were being mothballed en masse. The share of electricity generated by them fell 25 percent between 2005 and 2012. This…
Many in Dallas have no doubt been eagerly awaiting the June 4 unveiling of the Dallas Stars’ new logos and uniforms. Probably not as many as are eager to glimpse Buster the Armpit Lion on the Mavs’ new duds, but logo changes always generate a bit of buzz. It looks…
Josh Brent has managed to stay mostly out of the headlines since the blitz of media coverage that followed his indictment on intoxication manslaughter charges in the December 8 death of Cowboys teammate Jerry Brown. That changed today. Brent was back in court this morning after prosecutors said he’d violated…
You’d think the clerk might have recognized the man as he waited in line at 7:30 Thursday morning. After all, he’d made memorable appearances at the same Ninth Street 7-Eleven twice in the previous 27 hours. In the first, which happened just before 4 a.m. on Wednesday, the 200-pound Hispanic…
The Trinity Groves project is still in its infancy. Babb Bros. BBQ and Four Corners Brewing arrived last year, followed by Hoffman Hots. The restaurant incubator hasn’t just started incubating. The stores and apartments are still just a glimmer in Phil Romano’s eye. But backers aren’t letting the preliminary nature…
We were sad, distraught even, when Six Flags announced that it was closing the Flashback last summer. The news that it would be replaced by the 400-foot Texas Skyscreamer, and that the Skyscreamer would stand as the tallest swing ride in the world, failed to move us. No matter how…
It’s hard to tell sometimes, but Texas does in fact have gun restrictions. Handguns, for instance, are barred from sporting events, courtrooms, polling places, racetracks and schools, particularly when gunowners are drunk. They still can’t be carried out in the open or onto college campuses, despite some lawmakers’ best efforts…
When preservationists began lobbying Sylvan 30 developer Brent Jackson to return the Alamo Plaza sign to its home along Fort Worth Avenue, this isn’t what they had in mind. From the Sylvan 30 website: We’ve heard you and we agree: The Alamo Plaza sign will stay at Sylvan | Thirty…
In a key win for the district’s embattled administration, Dallas Independent School District trustees voted tonight to fire two principals and as many as 400 teachers, over the often heated objections of employees and activists. It was the culmination of months of debate and protests over Superintendent Mike Miles’ reform…
The Boy Scouts of America have formally voted to lift the longstanding ban on openly gay scouts, according to a tweet from a delegate at the meeting where the vote took place. Openly gay scoutmasters and other paid adult staff, on the other hand, are still not welcome in the…
In October of last year, at around 11:15 p.m., 17-year-old Jake Evans placed a 911 call from his upscale home in Aledo, a tony suburb just outside of Weatherford. “It’s weird,” he said, his voice eerily calm as he spoke with the operator. “I wasn’t even really angry with them…
If you’ve ever been curious what it would be like to watch a century-old railroad trestle go down in flames, the video above should give you an idea. The bridge, which spans 900 feet over the Colorado River near San Saba, Texas, was built in 1910 on a spur of…
Man. We remember a time, long ago last legislative session, when all your state lawmakers wanted to do was talk about abortion and how much they hated it. They were super-duper against it, as they could not seem to stop talking about, so much so that they cheerily decimated the…
For some Dallas ISD students, the senior year of high school is immensely valuable. There are mountains of college credits that can be accumulated free of charged through AP, IB, and dual-credit courses, and the mechanically inclined can enroll in vocational programs like Skyline’s aeronautics cluster. But what of the…
White Rock Lake has become a favored hunting ground for knife-wielding bandits. At the end of March, one made off with a cell phone and bicycle from kids walking along the path cutting through the park below the dam. Two weeks later, at almost the same spot, a young couple…
Today is a key moment in the battle for school reform in Dallas, as a list of school principals to be fired goes before the school board. (Check back tonight for the body count.) The main opposition to the reform effort has come from southern Dallas black leadership allied with…
It’s almost tradition by now. Every year at Exxon’s annual shareholder’s meeting, New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who oversees state employees’ retirement dollars, introduces a resolution calling for the company to ban discrimination against gay and transgendered employees. And every year, it gets voted down. And there’s nothing to suggest…
The Texas House and Senate have both passed the “Merry Christmas Bill,” which allows public schools to openly celebrate Christmas without fear of legal action. The bill specifically allows teachers to say “traditional greetings” for “traditional winter celebrations,” such as Christmas and Hanukkah and, theoretically, others that aren’t specifically mentioned…
