Yesterday, mayoral candidate Marcos Ronquillo came out with his own take on a topic we discussed Monday — the number of political contributors who have given Mayor Mike Rawlings way more than the $5,000 limit per candidate per campaign. See also: Well-Heeled Donors Flood Mayor Rawlings with Money. Hey, Know…
We’ll say this much about Henderson Avenue Country Club: They’re not bashful. The new venue in the Knox-Henderson neighborhood opened just last month, but they’ve already bestowed themselves with the tag of “Best Honky Tonk and BBQ Bar in Texas.” Yeah, right. That’s stepping into some shoes that are almost…
Last weekend we saw Stagger Lee, the Will Power and Justin Ellington musical doing its world premiere at the Dallas Theater Center. All the way through it I was thinking about John Wiley Price. Elaine Liner has reviewed it for us already, and it wouldn’t occur to me anyway to…
A few weeks ago, there was actually a decent song playing on country radio during my drive for the first time in what might have been years. I didn’t recognize the track, but I quickly pulled up Shazam on my phone in the middle of traffic to save it for…
The Dallas school board is scheduled to take up the case of the Instant Messages from Hell today — the matter of a recently resigned personnel director who penned irreverent and even profane messages to colleagues and did so on a computer system owned and operated by the school system…
Over the past six weeks, Leon Bridges has been at the center of one of the biggest stories in Dallas music in recent memory. On Christmas Day, it was announced that the 25-year-old R&B singer from Fort Worth had been signed to Columbia Records. It was a huge accomplishment. But…
Why is Mayor Mike Rawlings so strong for the Trinity toll road? Several months ago he made sort of a show of thinking about it. Then he announced his support. But was there ever any doubt? As we move closer to the May elections, the focus of those elections is…
I get it: It’s 87 degrees in January and it hasn’t rained since the early ‘1990s. We all should be conserving. But considering the overflowing dumpster the size of a short bus behind every restaurant in America, I’m having a hard time thinking drinking straws are where we should focus…
If Sarah Palin is the canary in the coal mine, Texas is the bats.
In this town, if you say you don’t think we should build a highway practically on top of the Trinity River through downtown, the people who want to build a highway on top of the river through downtown always say, “Well, what’s your idea instead?” As if that’s the perfect…
Great story in The Dallas Morning News yesterday by Brandon Formby revealing that the toll road agency in our area has been sitting on $1.7 million worth of traffic studies for the one they want to build along the Trinity River through downtown. The North Texas Tollway Authority just won…
Once in a while a really brilliant idea pops up in a relatively obscure place, a diamond in the coal mine. The particular coal mine I have in mind is the letters to the editor section of The Dallas Morning News (why not just put your idea in a bottle…
Last week right after the Texas attorney general released an investigative report on the University of Texas Law School, we talked a little bit about it here on Unfair Park. Reflecting my own journalistic and literary values, I went for the really lurid stuff first, like the former law school…
Comebacks are a bitch. More often than not, they’re a plain bad idea. But when we kept hearing, throughout the summer and fall of last year, that the organizers of 35 Denton were planning to bring back the festival after its one-year hiatus in 2014, we couldn’t help getting excited…
We have this basic impasse in Dallas where the public schools are concerned. The deal struck by the white and black leaderships 12 years ago was supposed to be that elected black leadership would get to run the school system and hand out the jobs and so on, and the…
This item is in answer to a comment on Unfair Park yesterday that I thought deserved a more detailed response than I could provide in the comments section. Let’s see if I can use more words to make things even worse. This week I have a story in the paper…
The legal event called criminal indictment is a familiar theme in the news of any given day: It’s the step where a grand jury formally accuses a person of a crime and thereby launches the process that will lead either to a trial or a plea of guilty in some…
Last week when the Texas attorney general released a long-stalled investigation of a lucrative off-the-books compensation system at the University of Texas Law School, The Texas Tribune, the on-line news service that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the University of Texas System, blew off the…
Lots of people — and by that I mean Steve Blow — base their faith in fluoridated drinking water on what they believe to be the preponderance of scientific opinion as expressed by dentists. I refer to Blow’s recent column in The Dallas Morning News. The implicit assertion — made…
There’s something about a man in a band. Or who can play the guitar. Or who can sing. Or really who even hangs out with the band. Put a guitar in front of or in the general vicinity of a man and women will drop their panties. Men will drop…
Okay now, hear us out on this one. Last Friday, we ran a piece arguing for the benefits of Denton bringing in a larger, mid-sized music venue to help make the scene a little more robust. Not everybody liked that idea, which is fine; the point of healthy conversation is…
Selma was on my mind again a few days before Martin Luther King Day, for unexpected reasons. I had to call my old friend, Peter Johnson, to ask him to talk to another journalist. He picked up, but he couldn’t stay on the phone long because he was walking out…
