Don’t scramble the county air force just yet. We need to do some serious reading and talking before the Dallas County does a repeat of last year’s aerial spraying for West Nile disease. I have a copy of the final Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on last year’s…
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
Some stuff won’t spin. Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm is trying desperately to spin the story of her side-deal with Trinity East Energy. But that story is stuck in the ground like a tree. The Observer reported yesterday that Suhm signed an agreement five years ago with a gas drilling…
Those end of the weekend blues. As the sun sets on a Sunday night, a Super Bowl Sunday in this case, you take inventory of your successes and failures at the 48 hours of free time you may have been granted this week. Maybe there was a birthday, or a…
Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on the same day of every week, making it a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. Oh awesome! You’re single on Valentine’s Day?! You are about…
Dear Mexican: The pinche Republicans are making a gigante ruido about their “Hispanic” senators in Congress. Wachale! Let’s call a pendejo a pendejo. Please discuss with tu audienca what Mexicans really think about Cubans in these Estados Unidos. El Güero Tejano (no Cubano) As a recent transplant from Miami to…
The Trinity toll road is undead. It walks in the night. Forget garlic. It is coming. It’s a fundamentally crazy idea. But it lives. If anything, the idea is protected by its basic craziness. It’s so crazy, it never quite comes together in people’s heads, and that’s how the powers…
Maybe Dallas has a shot at stepping out from under the redneck yoke of Austin after all. In today’s news we see that a Dallas judge, Eric Moye, has tossed out a lawsuit by the usury industry in which payday lenders claimed the city had no right to protect its…
This isn’t the first time the Observer has reached out to “VideoBob” Moseley. If memory serves, he popped up in the City of Ate blog when he took over Reno’s Grill for a spell, with a pretty visionary menu of barfood taste sensations, lots of self-designed movie props (Moseley does…
The killing Saturday of former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle at a gun range near Fort Worth prompted a call to my office phone from a retired Dallas police officer. He was upset by use of the word “sniper” to describe Kyle’s specialty as a soldier, pointing out that “sniper” was…
Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
This whole thing is my fault. I blame only myself, not so much because I really believe it’s entirely my fault, but because I know trying to blame anybody else will not do me any good. I just need to go get my water bill paid. Yesterday City Council members…
Wait a minute. We here in Dallas know all about people who have used cancer research to promote themselves. Nancy, Lance, Rick, for three. But when do we ask questions about the research itself? The Dallas-founded Komen Foundation blew up last year after founder Nancy Brinker allowed it to be…
As you’ve recently read in DC9, Amber Campagna’s family is practically the subject of a new documentary on fallen Dallas musician Frankie Campagna Jr.’s local punk assembly, Spector 45. We got a chance to know Frankie Jr. pretty well here at DC9 over the years, as well as his father,…
Some weekends are just an exercise in multiplicity. When the raining turns to pouring there is really only one decision to make: stay in and away from water or jump right in the puddle? In 2013, if we are to keep Dallas excessive, we might have to jump in more…
Dear Mexican: Grammar question/rant. If Spanglish is a legitimate dialect/language, why do you feel the need to italicize every instance of code switching? I seriously doubt that when you speak you emphasize every puta palabra (emphasis intended here), but that’s what your article reads like. We all know that you…
Democracy in action last night. Never a pretty picture. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of flood control in this country, held a meeting at City Hall to update the public on the Trinity River Project, a massive campaign of public works that has dragged on…
Welcome to Alice Column, in which Alice Laussade writes stories about things on the same day of every week, making it a column. Got an idea for a column? Start your own blog and write it up, you lazy shit. Reunion Tower got new lights last year and, like someone…
When I made a call yesterday about John Hargrove, owner of Orr-reed Wrecking who was beaten to death in a Dallas bar over the weekend, I told the person I called I was calling only for personal reasons and not working on a story. I guess I’m going back on…
[Are you a musician? Is your group having issues? Ask Fan Landers! Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to…
There’s a big Associated Press story making the rounds now, based on work at MIT and elsewhere, all about the permanent loss of many high and better paid jobs like meter reader and travel agent, gone forever because those posts have been filled by robots and software. Good jobs are…
So, back to the new fake suspension bridge we’re building at enormous cost over the Trinity River, and, in fact, let’s go back and review the whole Trinity River project. In fact, let’s go back and review everything. Here is my question: Why are huge, obviously stupid projects the best…
