Two for the Road

We’ve been hurtling down the highway toward Houston for two hours now, and it’s time for a potty break.MMOur driver turns her plush, 50-seat bus into the Conoco Travel Plaza somewhere south of Dallas, and a bevy of nationally known celebrities pours out. Most of them are young women, dressed…

Countermove

It seems that two Arlington high school girls have spooked the men with whistles who have officiated at area high school wrestling matches for the past 25 years. The north central chapter of the Texas Wrestling Officials Association officially voted to disband last week rather than face the prospect of…

Buzz

Torts for tots If you’ve heard any of Windle Turley’s recent radio ads, you know there’s more than one jolly geezer in a bad suit loose this holiday season. Famous plaintiff’s attorney Windle and his litigator elves are using the airwaves to offer advice to anxious moms and dads about…

Letters

Tartar sauce with that? In his article about a local flame war on the Internet [“Cyberbunk,” November 21], Thomas Korosec opined that some newsgroups should be called “kook groups.” “People use them to discuss JFK assassination theories, sex acts with fish, or how the black helicopters are about to enslave…

To Tell the Truth

Long after prime-time television hours, speaking by phone from a Marriott hotel room in a suburb of Chicago, Doug Hamilton is sounding anything but happy. His wife and three school-age children are back at the family’s home in Rockwall, just east of Dallas. But Hamilton had to accept the only…

Footprints of Fantasy

They come here for evidence, pilgrims searching for proof. The soul-searching ends at Dr. Carl Baugh’s tiny Creation Evidences Museum, housed in a doublewide trailer alongside the highway near Glen Rose. The truth is laid out plainly here in a single murky room. To the right is a diorama featuring…

Observer honored

Dallas Observer staff writer Kaylois Henry received two Griot Awards, given by the Dallas/Fort Worth Association of Black Communicators to honor “journalism which promotes greater understanding of the lives, conditions, and cultures of African and African-American people.” Henry captured top honors in two of the three Griot Award categories for…

Buzz

Mother of all Websites (really!) As anyone this side of a rosary knows, getting in touch with Yahweh can be iffy at best. But the never-vengeful Virgin Mary is always there to listen–no matter how little juice you’ve got on this plane of existence. Our favorite incarnation of the Madonna…

Darling, you smell

Las Colinas company which operates a rendering plant in southern Minnesota is under federal investigation for allegedly violating a number of environmental laws–including allowing employees to dump animal carcasses, blood, industrial solvents, and acids into drains that lead directly to a Minnesota river. Although the U.S. attorney for Minnesota and…

Letters

Dry day at Texas Stadium The article on Promise Keepers written by Jimmy Fowler [“60,000 naked men,” November 14] gave a very clear sense of what Promise Keepers is all about. I have been a volunteer at all four conferences held in the North Texas area and have never really…

The Hare, The Tortoise

Robert Riggs and John Miller were in New York to bask. Riggs, a 16-year veteran reporter for WFAA-Channel 8, was about to be invested as a top gun. At a ritzy luncheon, he would accept the George Foster Peabody Award for Investigative Reporting. For broadcast journalists, there is little to…

Losing Faith

It’s political theater imported from another time and place. In the packed pews of Kirkwood Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in South Dallas on a recent night, two groups of actors–one speaking English, the other Spanish–reinterpreted a biblical story of Moses seeking God’s counsel. In this version, Moses, played by…

Dog daze

Bandit, our winsome, butterscotch-colored golden retriever, is like a lot of men I know: not very complicated and utterly focused on meeting his basic needs. In Bandit’s case, this means eating as often as he can and getting his tummy rubbed even more frequently. (This, too, could apply to several…

Buzz

Whatever happened to “We May Never Pass This Way Again?” Buzz has been monitoring a disturbing trend of totalitarianism emerging in Dallas area high school mottos. Highland Park High School’s football squad’s motto, for instance, is “Nothing Short of Perfection.” Which makes a lot of sense when you recall that…

Letters

Cyberhubris Congratulations on an excellent presentation of all sides of the issue about the cyberstalker incident [“Cyberbunk,” November 21]. I believe you correctly portrayed that all principals are both “guilty” and “innocent” in the affair. No clear black and white for anyone. A few comments about the portrayal of Robert…

Down on Sherman Street

The mimosa tree stands between two houses sheathed in aluminum. It grows in a yard on Sherman Street, in the waning heart of Dalworth, a predominantly black Grand Prairie neighborhood where drugs are sold in vacant lots amid boarded-up houses waiting to be torn down. The tree’s branches shade a…

Nothing But The Truth

Sometime in the early 21st century–when America is scourged everywhere by violent crime, and terrorist groups roam the world with biological weapons and suitcase-sized nuclear bombs–a computer programming genius and his Dallas-based company perfect the first 100 percent foolproof lie detector. Its use throughout American society–in law enforcement, the judicial…

Grab your torches

Gather the elders. Light the faggots. After a 300-year hiatus, witch-hunting is back! Not since the days of the Massachusetts Bay colony has the prospect of barbecuing Satanists been so much the rage. And it’s right next door in Arlington. Bless their hearts, those godless witches of Interstate 20, and…

Buzz

News hounds KRLD-AM radio sure knows how to kick off a promotional campaign. No sooner did the station put up bold new billboards advertising, “KRLD: The Source For Local News,” than the station made big changes in its newsroom–reducing its news staff by five employees. What’s going on at KRLD?…

Letters

Reefer madness A recent article [“Just say maybe to nicotine,” Buzz, November 7] described “a cop in Arlington” who was seen smoking a cigarette “in a spanking-new, tricked-up Ford Taurus emblazoned with the DARE logo.” I am writing this letter on behalf of all the officers in the Arlington Police…

“As an expression of racking emotion, and as a trip into an eroticized universe, ‘VERTIGO’ is nonpareil”

San Francisco isn’t just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: It’s the movie’s muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and co-star Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, San Francisco enables Hitchcock to conjure a nether world…

Cyberbunk

Kevin Massey gets so worked up before he “posts,” he can feel the sweat. His face aglow in the blue light of his 20-inch Sony monitor, he grips a pencil-shaped “mouse” in his right hand–the letters “F-T-W” (Fuck The World) tattooed between his knuckles–and prepares to cast his thoughts worldwide…