thursday november 17 Phyllis Schlafly vs. Sarah Weddington: What causes a democracy's national mood to shift from left to right, liberal to conservative? While many politicians on both sides like to appear accessible by defining themselves as moderates resting squarely in the center, the moderate voting bloc doesn't change the...
Throughout the fall, the Krasniqis diligently abided by the court order. Krasniqi rented an apartment and attended a sexual offender's group treatment program run by Chester Grounds, a staff psychologist with DHS. Grounds said in court that Krasniqi originally admitted in group that he had sexually abused his children, including...
Most of the houses in this quiet, middle-class Richardson neighborhood look alike --wide, one-story, brick homes with small, manicured front lawns. The home of Sam and Kathy Krasniqi has one distinguishing feature: rain or shine, several pairs of men's and women's shoes can be found lined up on the porch...
Stephan the Red In the last few months, Dallas-bred fantasy novelist Stephan Grundy has been the subject of plenty of ink, from a cover story in Dallas Observer (July 21) to reviews in Publisher's Weekly and the fantasy magazine Locus of his first novel, the Norse epic Rhinegold--a number-one bestseller...
Bad memory chip? The East Dallas reader of The Dallas Morning News thought what she was reading seemed familiar--suspiciously familiar. Veteran News editorial-page columnist Ann Melvin was weighing in on the debate over whether books on computer will someday make the paper-and-ink version obsolete. Absolutely not, Melvin opined, in a...
At the end of an afternoon spent together, John Nitzinger takes his interviewer aside and says, in a rare quiet moment, that "God has wiped the slate clean." He is standing outside the door of his Fort Worth apartment, looking just slightly older than his 46 years, wearing a black...
Stone alone Keith Richards once said Bobby Keys' greatest problem in the early '70s was that, for a while, the Lubbock-born sax player deluded himself into thinking he was a member of the Stones' inner circle. Richards and Keys were great pals, drug buddies from way back whose passion for...
Fifteen minutes into a thoughtful, often painful discussion of the music of Ween--one that goes into influences and intent, touching on technique and style and the influences of Leonard Cohen and Prince--the man known as Gene Ween lets out a loud sigh. "Hey, you're sitting here making me analyze Ween,...
The 1994 Dallas Video Festival is as eclectic and erratic as the medium itself. The good stuff is some of the best you'll see anywhere in any medium, and the bad stuff is damn near unwatchable. But that's what makes this Festival so invaluable, not just to the audiovisual scene...
While sitting through Dreams of Equality and Thinking Like a Woman: the Life and Times of Mary Kay Ash, two locally produced movies scheduled for opening night of the Dallas Video Festival, I couldn't help wondering: at what point, exactly, did the passion go out of Cynthia Salzman Mondell and...
Four years ago, a New York-based wine company met with Federal Trade Commission officials, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Surgeon General. The subject was a fortified wine called Cisco that was posing serious health risks--particularly to teens. The company, Canandaigua Wine Company, was under fire...
Everyone has to keep up with the latest information in his field. Doctors have to learn about lasers, teachers have to learn about guns, mothers have to learn about Power Rangers. (The white one is named Tommy.) And food writers have to go to tastings. The palate needs constant education...
My dad, one of my regular dining companions, doesn't like goat cheese. He'll tell you so with great firmness and maintain that opinion right up to the moment when he puts it in his mouth. "Mmmm...that's good. What is it?" "Goat cheese, Dad." He's not a wishy-washy guy; it's just...
thursday november 10 John Wayne Bobbitt and the Bobbitt Girls: C'mon, you know you want to. Cast aside, for a moment, all those tiresome warnings from the cultural elite on both the left and the right--I mean journalists, scholars, and others who control the information flow--about America careening into moral...
Rabbi David Shawel is not an imposing figure. Standing only five feet and four inches, he talks fast and rarely stands or sits in one place for long. But lately it is Shawel who has had powerful grocery chains hopping. Shawel is The Man--that's The Macher in Yiddish--in Dallas when...
Beyond the beach Director Quentin Tarantino explains that he opened his paean-to-afros-and-junkies-and-sodomizers, Pulp Fiction, with Dick Dale's 1962 surf-rock classic "Miserlou" (derived from a 1940s-era Greek pop hit, actually) because "it sounds like the beginning of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with those trumpets, that almost Spanish sound...
Talk to me a minute about this term "home cooking." When is the last time you had this kind of food at home? Fried chicken, wilted greens, chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, chocolate pie, sweet biscuits, mashed potatoes? I don't think so. Even if you allow yourself a thousand fat...
The FBI is investigating allegations of public corruption in Ferris involving Waste Management and its consultant, former Ferris mayor Billy Don Dunn. In a nine-page affidavit filed in federal court to establish probable cause to obtain a search warrant for Dunn's home, Dallas FBI agent James Kendall states that he's...
By 1989, Earline Jackson recalls, the convoys were rumbling down old highway 75, trailing behind them that awful smell. They'd line up at the gate to Skyline Landfill--dozens of trucks from God knows where--dumping ton after ton of trash in the tiny burg of Ferris. Residents of the little town...
The San Francisco publishers of STEAM magazine are in an uproar over a waggish letter from Fort Worth police Chief Thomas Windham. The national gay and bisexual-oriented publication, which reaches about 45,000 readers each month, prints a directory of the best places around the country for public sex. A copy...
Clueless Your recent two-part series on the construction of Reunion Arena ["Arena wars," October 13 and October 20] confirms my worst fears about the city of Dallas. Our city managers who presided over this fiasco were either too behind to see the obvious or crooked. They should be sued for...
There are, of course, two Dallases. There's slick, soulless, sprawling, sterile Dallas, the one that all right-thinking boulevardiers disdain. And then there's quirky, progressive, funky, interesting, artistic Dallas, its wee heart beating like a field mouse in its hole, which is all the more cherished by the cognoscenti (you and...
