People hate lawyers and lobbyists. Not me. I hate people. If you wonder why, I offer you last week’s outlandish hearing on city council “ethics.” Back in April, the city council passed major revisions to its ethics code, loosening the rules that restrict companies from showering City Hall with money…
Southern Dallas, especially the ministerial leadership, seems to be pretty locked up behind mayoral candidate Mike Rawlings. In explaining that to myself, I do allow for Rawlings’s charismatic personality and his track record on community issues. He’s got things going for him. (Well, maybe not today.) But there is also…
Thank goodness. Finally reached Judy Schmidt, marketing director for the city’s Trinity River Corridor Project, to ask about tomorrow’s grand opening of the Trinity River Paddling Trail. I had been trying to reach her since last week to ask if she was going to warn people they might be killed…
Whether you’ve reached the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End:*Mavericks-Lakers and Rangers-Yankees in our town in the same weekend. Delicious. If you had a front-row ticket to just one, which would it be? Are there really semi-sane humans who’d choose baseball regular-season…
Yesterday The Dallas Morning News published an editorial written in a style that I, as a journalist and one-time editorial writer, could only describe as screaming hissy fit The newspaper is incredibly pissed off because a recycling yard they’ve been trying to run out of business for the last year…
Wilonsky just knows how to push my Yankee carpetbagger buttons. He keeps calling to jab me about the charges that Dallas mayoral candidates Ron Natinsky and Mike Rawlings are trading today, each one accusing the other of wanting to make Dallas like Chicago or Detroit. Being a native of that…
Dear Mexican: Please settle a dispute. I’m an Anglo living and working in Mexico for years, in Culiacán, Sinaloa (I married one of the famous Sinaloa beauties). My Spanish is passable, and I live and function in Spanish. Where I live, there are virtually no other North Americans, other than…
The “Standing Wave” is a $4 million-plus kayaking feature that the city recently installed in the Trinity River, and it’s a failure. It’s ugly. It’s dangerous. It’s an insult to the river. The Wave, just south of downtown, was intended to be a whitewater play park, a place with rapids…
The city of Dallas sent out a lovely little notice earlier this week inviting people of the canoe paddling ilk — which would be me — to attend the opening of the Dallas Trinity Paddling Trail, a canoe “path” on the Trinity River, established as part of a statewide system…
Last night Wilonsky and I co-moderated the GLBT Chamber’s mayoral debate forum, a rather tony affair, as these things go, at the Cityplace Conference and Event Center. It so happened the day before I had attended the “A Peep at the Coops” tour in East Dallas, so I had chickens…
Welcome to Local Music ‘Mericans , where we meet some of the people behind the local music scene — those who aren’t necessarily members of local bands, but more the people who make the scene move. KPWR-89.7 FM Power FM jock Adrian Hummel holds a lot of noble titles in…
Last week The Associated Press did a story about the disgust and dismay of black Americans confronting the birther issue. “I find it hard to summarize in mere words the amount of pain and rage this incident has caused,” one man was quoted as saying at the top of the…
Dealey Plaza, subject of my feature story in this week’s paper version of Unfair Park, is a monument to horror, a locus of global grief, a vortex of paranoia and all that stuff. But on a spring weekend when the weather’s good, it’s also just kind of a cool place…
10. When I first heard President Obama was making an emergency announcement at 9:30 on a Sunday night, my first thought was … asteroid. Then aliens. Then NFL lockout. Then Osama Bin Laden. And somewhere along the process I figured it was just a ploy to interrupt Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice…
What is it that people here have against voting? I’m thinking about the item I saw here yesterday about the Dallas City Council clamping down on campaign signs. Right, we need to do everything we can to contain this voting thing. Fewer signs. Voter photo ID laws. Anything we can…
[jump] *For all the Mavs’ fascination and obsession with beating the Lakers, the teams haven’t met in the playoffs in 23 years. It was 1988 when the Mavs — led by Mark Aguirre, Rolando Blackman and Roy Tarpley — pushed the eventual champs to a Game 7 at The Forum. Bad…
[jump] 5. Dumbest moment of the night: Sheen, wearing a CBS — “Can’t Beat Sheen” — T-shirt, bragged that “I got fired because I told my boss to fuck off.” Inexplicably, the crowd cheered. Some stood and cheered. Yeah, ‘cuz nobody’s gonna pay me $2 million an episode for a TV…
Oh, now the city council has decided it needs to revisit its vote weakening the ethics rules on donations to city council members. Maybe they’ve decided to have themselves re-virginized. We pointed out here a thing that seems to have slipped past most media eyes: The council voted two weeks…
Dear Mexican: Why does every Mexican rap/hip-hop song always contain the lines “No paramos,” “Nunca paramos,” or some other logically equivalent statement (e.g. “Siempre avanzaremos,” “No acabaremos de seguir,” etc.)? Can’t you people be more original? I mean, come on! It’s not like you all speak a language that makes…
OK, pretend you have to bet money on this. Here’s the set-up. On one hand, you’ve got these huge natural gas drilling companies coming down the road with their gigantic rigs, tons of money and very expensive haircuts. Where are they headed? Oh, no! They’re headed to Dallas City Hall,…
Did anybody else have a serious gag reflex reading our former mayor’s what-a-good-boy-am-I essay on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday? Does Tom Leppert just assume people don’t remember a single thing about him? Or does he not remember a single thing about himself? His op-ed piece…
What is this crap about the importance of attracting more businesses to the city? They throw it out like a line from the Bible or something — especially mayoral candidates Mike Rawlings and Ron Natinsky. Got to “grow that tax base.” Only way we can grow that tax base is…
