For me, a good City Hall audit report is better reading than a John Grisham novel. You just have to know how to read it (upside down, holding it up to the mirror, between the lines). Today’s offering is the City Auditor’s report on the police department’s Employee Morale Fund,…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Been meaning to get to this, but The Ticket is so dominant in Metroplex sports talk radio that at this point it’s like digging up Barbaro for another kick to the…
Ah, you know, even a blind hog can find the truth buried somewhere in The Dallas Morning News if he knows how to root-hog-or-die. Reminds me of the thing I wrote about two years ago, when The News waited until the day after the Trinity River referendum to reveal something…
During the 1999 NBA Finals between the Spurs and Knicks I was in New York, covering the series for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. After a particularly long, fun and, yes, expensive off night at this fine establishment, I awoke at around 4 a.m. sprawled out on my hotel bed. Boxers…
You heard it here first. Possibly. If you have already heard it somewhere else, please keep that to yourself. I want the credit. North Oak Cliff is the new Austin. Only better than Austin. Because the new community being created in Oak Cliff is for people who actually have jobs…
Dear Readers: Siempre, the wisest words that appear in this column come from ustedes, y the following two cartas prove this maxim. The first one addresses my year-end column, in which a working-class gabacho insisted his people apapachan a Mexicans mucho: Half-Mexican here. I was fortunate enough to catch your…
Pad Thai Piña CollisionPad Thai Woon Sen (chicken, shrimp, clear noodles and tofu) with pineapple, cashews and squid.After I failed last week to get a rise out of the folks at Which Wich by ordering something terrible, it occurred to me that the problem might have had less to do…
Lori Stahl, over on The News’s Park Cities Blog, is making light of a serious situation in my home. My wife got talked into bringing a lost chicken into the house this week. You could talk her into rescuing anything. She’s never come home with a lost gorilla (and I…
The Schutze household has been working on a mystery all day about how to call the city for bulk trash pickup if the trucks keep skipping your block during pickup week. We found that we could not reach 311 — the service number for the city — from our cell…
In order to help Haiti, you don’t have to just sling cash out into the great unknown. Several groups in Dallas have long-standing involvement in relief efforts there — among them Dallas-Haiti Project, which has been around for eight years. It began with nine women connected with St. Michael and…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Haven’t gotten a chance to ask him about it yet, but did I miss something or is Babe Laufenberg leaving CBS 11? Maybe he was buying CBS 11. Did I get…
Well, we’re sort of zeroing in, slowly, on the answer to my question: Who paid for that “One More Thing” promotional video about Dallas shown to the city council yesterday? You know: scenes from around the city with exciting Dallas celebrities, like city council members, doing goofy dances, put together…
Dear Mexican: I’m surprised by the choice of the word “amnesty” by those who would demonize immigration reform, especially in the South. Doesn’t the modern well-being of many Southerners derive in some way from their ancestors’ having sworn to amnesty oaths, both before and after the Civil War? Isn’t it…
Last week I attended a community meeting in East Dallas where an angry crowd of middle-class homeowners denounced community gardeners as a dangerous, invasive horde of “foreigners” and “maids” seeking to destroy the tranquility of their peaceful neighborhood. Gardeners. Who knew? So, City Hall was right. Community gardening is as…
Last night I’m in my car, sitting at a light in McKinney. I’m third back in the right lane. Minding my own business, pondering Cowboys-Vikings, wondering where is the best place to buy bulk 5-hour Energy drinks, convincing myself that the “thud” back up the road was a box and not…
The Paddy CristoWhich Wich Monte Cristo sandwich with avocado, mayonnaise and Cheez WhizThe ordering system at Which Wich — you build your sandwich one ingredient at a time on a multiple-choice form — is clever and efficient. It’s an impressive way to empower customers. It’s also an invitation for disaster,…
Environment Texas, an Austin-based research group, made available today a report on Texas rivers that lists the state’s most dangerously polluted waterways, particularly those fouled by chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects. And to mark the report’s release, at 1 p.m. the group will gather media types and local…
Maybe nobody else cares, but my wife and I got curious over the weekend why the city’s water mains break in cold weather, since we were left without water for several hours Saturday night. We live in a neighborhood of old houses with poorly insulated pipes. Most people leave their…
I covered a community meeting last night at Winfrey Point on White Rock Lake to discuss plans for a community garden off Fisher Road in East Dallas, and … what can I say? It was pretty much a total rout for the gardeners, portrayed as an ominous invading horde by…
Whether you’re at the end of your rope or merely the end of your week, welcome to Whitt’s End: *Texas Stadium’s last breath will be taken as nothing more than some tween’s mac-‘n-cheese, push-‘n-pulverize, real-life video game? As a whole, we suck. *Alabama > Texas. Toldja. *I will never watch Colt McCoy’s “I…
Dear Readers: The Mexican is still trying to shake off the Herradura from the previous year, so I’m reprinting this week a favorite column of mine from el pásado. To make up for my siesta, though, I’m bringing back the YouTube edition of this column, where I’ll take the questions…
Apparently on the TV news tonight we will see a story I can only describe as the Dallas’s First Truly Awkward Moment of 2010. Dallas Police Lieutenant Regina Smith will lead a cortege of a dozen uniformed officers and several television news crews to strew rose petals at the apartment…
