Some start-o-the-week news and notes while I roll a few fat blunts in preparation for this afternoon's Public Safety Committee meeting ...
Remember when Tom Hicks said, why, sure, he expects to lose "a couple hundred million" on the sales of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars, but he'll pocket the difference when he unloads Liverpool FC? Sure you do. That's because Hicks and George Gillett keep insisting the Reds are worth some £600 million to £800 million pounds. To which "Chinese businessman" Kenny Huang and other tire-kickers respond: Good luck with all that. Huang and a "Syrian businessman" have reportedly made significantly lower offers, the former with Chinese government funds. Which is how, I believe, Mark Cuban plans on buying the Texas Rangers ...
Speaking of, there's further news concerning Fox Sports' alla-the-sudden interest in buying Your Texas Rangers: Rupert Murdoch "wants to keep a new owner from starting a rival local sports network when the current deal between Fox and the team expires in the coming years." That's from The Wall Street Journal, which Rupert Murdoch also owns. Fox is worried Cuban, who will bid on the team at this week's auction, would start a regional sports net should he get the team. To which Cuban responds: Doubtful. Which doesn't sound very definitive ...
Speaking of the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he makes a cameo in Dorrough's new video. Who's Dorrough? If you have to ask, clearly you're not Pete Freedman. The song has something to do with getting rich, like Sam and Charles Wyly ...
Ooooh, speaking of: Bloomberg profiles their broker, Louis J. Schaufele III, who the Securities and Exchange Commission included in its last-week filing alleging that Los Bros Wyly used offshore accounts to rack up $550 mil in ill-gotten gains. Because in '06, when he was working for Allen Stanford, Schaufele told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that those offshore accounts were too legit to quit ...
Which brings us, finally, to Luke Wilson, who's only guilty of making his first good movie since forever -- Middle Men, which opens Friday. Hence his chat with Newsday, in which the AT&T pitchman discusses his dad's days as KERA president:
Q. When you were a kid, your dad was the manager of the PBS affiliate in Dallas. Was that what got you interested in show business?
A. Public TV in Dallas then was something different. Dallas had culture, but it was a sports and oil town. It definitely felt like he was doing something different. I would walk around the set of the news show, there were these hippie crew guys who were nice to me, and it piqued my interest as a kid. I was also interested in the newspaper business, being around the guys my dad was around. I was a fan of the metro section and the crime stories.
