Pins and needles here.At 2:30 pm the Corps of Engineers releases its report on the city’s proposed fix for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. They’re doing it not at any public venue but at the Oak Lawn offices of The Trinity Trust, the private lobby group for the Trinity River…
For his role, Dale Hansen got death threats, extortion ploys and, um, a dead bird. “It was a black crow delivered right to our office,” recalls Hansen, WFAA-Channel 8’s sports anchor upon the events surrounding his uncovering the SMU football scandal of 1986. “It had a note pinned through its body:…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *This year’s Super Bowl halftime entertainment is The Who. What the what? Springsteen. The Who. Next year at SB XLV in Arlington: Lawrence Welk? Maybe I’m just bothered that 1) The…
Dear Mexican: I live in a little village in England in a house that’s 200 years old, just down the hill from a tiny church that’s so old that it was actually built before God said “Let there be light,” thus proving that Stephen Hawking is a blowhard. The only…
I have been a reporter all my working life, half of that time for daily newspapers, so who knows what volume of fish-wrap I must have ground out over the years, how many tens of thousands of interviews I’ve done. Yet in all that volume of chat, a very few…
After the jump, you’ll find a letter Angela Hunt sent today to the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in which she begs Troy D. Collins, the deputy district engineer, not to hurry up the approval process for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. She wants the…
Sunday was the 46th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. A couple questions …..
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Screw me. I’ve been inside Cowboys Stadium a dozen times now and never noticed there wasn’t an American flag hanging somewhere. JumboJerry will do that for you. When during the National…
As I write in this week’s Dallas Observer column, SMU picked a bad year to have a good year. And now – on the verge of his school’s first bowl bid in 25 years – Mustangs’ head coach June Jones is picking a strange time to get homesick. Behind freshman quarterback…
I am still trying to absorb the 189-page ruling of U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood J. Duval yesterday in the Corps of Engineers Katrina lawsuit in New Orleans, but an early read of it produces this clear and overwhelming impression: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just took one big…
Supposedly we just had ethics reform at Dallas City Hall. Let’s talk about ethics. But let’s talk about the real world. There’s this thing in Dallas I call death by a thousand tables. It was at the center of the recent Dallas City Hall corruption trial in federal court in…
Why do Mexicans put lard in their beans? I don’t know any fit ‘n’ trim Mexicans. Even the skinny ones have a li’l belly. I just made some excellent refried beans with Goya extra virgin olive oil and butter. Just wondering. —Skinny White Boy Vegetarian From Dallas Who Loves Healthy…
Your Trinity River correspondent and advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, which would be me, had two interesting experiences yesterday. First up was a screening of Living with the Trinity, KERA Television’s hour-long documentary by award-winning producer-director Rob Tranchin, which airs Monday at 9 p.m. The second experience was a “scoping meeting” (which, as…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *OK, so let it be known that my buddy and Ticket founding father Mike Rhyner has been/is calling for a Cowboys’ appearance in this year’s Super Bowl. This, after 14-plus years…
Dear Mexican: Whenever I see an ad for a Mexican ramera, they always describe themselves as “spicy.” Are Mexican women hiding habaneros in their panochas? —Concha Curious Dear Gabacho: “I wish I could say that ‘Mexican Spitfire’ Lupe Velez was to blame for the ‘spicy’ epithet so often associated with…
This is so sad. It’s tragic. I’m going to write about the Trinity River project again. I did all 12 steps. For what? After the voters of Dallas, in their infinite and manifest wisdom, voted in favor of the project (for the second time) in a referendum two years ago,…
Almost 200 people squeezed into a stuffy Dallas Center for Architecture conference room last night to see plans for the deck park being built over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, and guess what, Dallas! A New York architect has designed a vast mainly treeless expanse with glass buildings for us! Those…
Don’t look now, but there’s finally a legit BCS buster. And, even more surprising, the team is right here in our own backyard. Are you ready for TCU in the BCS? For years Gary Patterson’s Horned Frogs have been a power, but just not quite strong enough to win the game that…
This morning the city council is debating lobbyist reform, and the lobbyists are all here. And nervous. They have their own corner of the city council chamber, front row, extreme left (from my direction in the peanut gallery, extreme right from the council’s perspective). They’re all over there looking like…
Hate to bring the room down in the wake of Cowboys 20, Eagles 16, but I’m sitting here crying. Tears streaming down my face. Off my cheeks. Onto my keyboard. I shit you not. A year ago I was introduced to one of the bravest, most courageous men I’ve ever…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Haven’t received a return call all week from Greg Williams, which is weird if not troubling. Something’s up. Maybe he’s merely at his vacation condo in Colorado and temporarily out of…
Every once in a while – unfortunately – we’re reminded that sports is just a toy-box diversion. And that life, it ain’t fair at all. Our own soldiers killed on our own soil, by one of our own…
