Ferre Closing? Moving?

WTF?

Shopping for Green the Day Before the St. Patrick’s Day Parade: Bad Idea

Spider Monkey Lavin and I decided 2:30 today was a good time to go look for a green shirt to wear to the festivities tomorrow. You know who else did? Every other girl in town. Good luck finding anything if you’re female. If you’re a card-carrying male, there’s an entire display at Urban Outfitters with your name on it. Guinness t-shirts and green plaid shorts galore. Plenty of those to go around. It’s tough being a chick.

Time to Get Your Green On

Tomorrow is the St. Patrick’s Day Greenville Avenue Parade. I’ve gone just about every year since, oh, 1992 or so, rain, sleet, or shine. So, unlike those conflicted Catholics, I’m very excited about tomorrow. Now, this year, for various reasons, I won’t be a judge of the parade, which I’ve been six or seven times in the past. Two D mag superstars, staff photographer Elizabeth Lavin and assistant managing editor Stacey Yervasi, are taking my place. I have a few pieces of advice for them:

• Work out a scoring system. There are a lot of floats/groups/drunks, coming at you fast. You need to not only decide what category they can compete in (best overall, most green, stripper-iest [may not be an actual category]), but decide how you’re going to rank them (numbering system, five stars?) so that others can decipher your scoring system.
• Look out for Tom Stephenson. He’s the mustachioed gentleman who basically started the parade back in the ’80s. He’s a fabulous raconteur and a general all-around bad-a. So, you know, look out.
• Look out for Jake, one of the owners of Desperado’s, the great Tex-Mex place on Greenville. Look out for him because my wife thinks he’s an absolute hunk, and I think she may be correct. So, you know, look out.
• The liquor store next to the judging stands will open before the parade starts. So don’t panic.
• Last year, the good folks at Black-eyed Pea let us use the bathroom there. But be kind and buy some green brews from them occasionally to show your support. They’re good peeps.
• Coach Joe Avezanno may or may not be a judge this year. He was last year, but his joint is in Frisco now. However, if he is there, befriend him. He is a good person, and makes the parade entertaining. However, you will have to do his judging for him. IJS.
• Don’t get distracted by the flying beads. Don’t get caught up in all the flashing. And, if you do, use your iPhones.

Dallas Cup About to Runneth Over

(Alt. Hed: I Am A Lazy, Negligent, Forgetful Blogger Person)

Just last night I was flipping through a notebook I used to use more often than I do now, searching for an empty page for jotting. There I saw, several pages ago, the note to myself: “Gordon Jago. Profile?” I remember writing that, about a year ago, at the time of last year’s Dallas Cup, the international soccer tournament. Jago is the executive director, but he’s much more than that to North Texas soccer, as listeners to Bob and Dan found out about an hour ago. So a year passed and I failed to pursue a profile of Jago, whom I met nearly 30 years ago when he was sort of affiliated with the Dallas Tornado and my next-door neighbor was Al Miller, the head coach of that team. But I can still hype this year’s Dallas Cup, where soccer’s future all-stars play. Check it out. I did last year and might do so again.

The Other Story Out of SXSW: Geek Edition

Zac’s doing the cool stuff down in Austin, so he probably missed the geekfest where journalist Sarah Lacy’s interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned ugly — and not because she was asking tough questions but because she was more clueless and self-absorbed than, well, I usually am. The whole thing appropriately turned Digg style when the crowd essentially took control of the microphone and started asking Zuckerberg interesting questions. The print story doesn’t do this justice — watch the video here. It gets really good by the sixth minute.

At A Floss For Words

A hygiene-minded FrontBurnervian passes along news of yet another questionable survey about cities and rankings and health issues. This time it’s Men’s Health determining the cities with best and worst teeth. Dallas is 87th in the top 100. Lubbock, if you’re curious, is dead last. The survey was determined by annual dentist visits, canceled appointments, use of flouride, and regular flossers in any given metro area. As for Lubbock’s low score, no one seems to know for sure the root of the problem. Hi-yo.

Rate Your North Texas Cops

Despite some pretty ugly intimidation tactics and phony baloney concerns about “officer safety” (I think they mean “job security”) the website Ratemycop is up and running, and it includes most of the North Texas police departments. The site lists the name of every officer for each PD, and the idea is for people to be able to give a sort of user feedback for their encounters with individual representatives of the gendarme. Basically like eBay feedback for cops — attaboys for the good officers and darts for the bad cops. It’s a great exercise in the public being able to put the watchers back under scrutiny, instead of scrutiny being a one-way street. And if it’s true that it’s just a few bad apples out there giving the bulk of officers a bad reputation, this should help that argument. That is, so long as police unions and pols don’t try to strong arm the site’s ISP for a third time or try to outlaw it.

Dirk on the Move

Real Estate Maven Candy Evans hints very, very strongly that Dirk Nowitzki is moving to Strait Lane. Here’s the listing. It doesn’t look very MTV Cribs-y. Yet.

Outrage On South Lamar Street

Was anyone else sickened to read this morning how two 70-year-old, husband-and-wife liquor-store owners have been repeatedly robbed, beaten, and shot by criminals at the couple’s store on South Lamar Street? She’s paralyzed from the waist down now after being shot, but he died. Outrageous. This kind of thing hit home for me personally several years ago, when the sweetest lady in the world–she worked at a dry cleaner I patronized in downtown Albuquerque–was terrorized after being accosted and held at knife-point by a robber. It is truly understandable why people like the guy interviewed famously by Rebecca Aguilar blow these criminals–that’s really too kind a word for them–to kingdom come.

A Chance to Give Some Great Art a Good Home (For the Right Price)

Approximately 200 pieces from the personal art collection of the late, great Ray Nasher, who died a year ago this Sunday, will be going up for auction in May at Sotheby’s New York. A few of the prominent pieces to be sold include Picasso’s Le Baiser (estimated to sell for between $10 and $15 million) and L’Atelier (expected to fetch $6 to $8 million), as well as a rare series of Jasper Johns prints. Nasher’s entire collection—including those works on display at the Nasher Sculpture Center—is valued at more than $350 million.

I was lucky enough to get to interview Mr. Nasher in September 2006 at his home, for a piece that appeared in D CEO. He was so proud to show off each of the incredible pieces he kept at his residence, and talk about what each one meant to him and his late wife, Patsy. He credited his passion to his parents, who exposed him to music and art in his hometown of Boston, where, at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, he fell in love with Van Gogh’s Postman as a child. “Art has made life just so much more meaningful,” he said. “We just wanted to have in our home pieces that we loved and lived with and liked to get up every morning and enjoy. … [but] you’re selfish if you don’t utilize your art properly, because it’s something for everyone to share.” When asked how many pieces he owned in all, he replied, “Six hundred or something? I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know numbers. It’s quality that counts.”

SXSW: Day/Night 2

Let’s do this.

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Friday Fun

Today’s Friday Fun is called Nanotube. It makes more sense to play than describe: You control this outer orb with a colored, rotating wall, see. And you need to block these colored balls that are trying to escape. It’s kind of like the old-school arcade game Tempest. The game starts out as very simple and you’ll wonder, What kind of fun is this? And then the colored wall splits and the colored balls trying to escape multiply and your head will start to hurt and you’ll wonder, What kind of fun is this? What kind of fun? Friday fun.

Rod Dreher Is A Reluctant Vegan

And I have proof! How about them apples?

Leading Off

1. Gov. Perry is upset that the EPA wants Texas to clean up its air, because we have a lot of polluters who generate a lot of money for our economy and these regulations could affect their profits. You’d think I’m summarizing this in a biased way, because it’s so ridiculous, but read the story, and his quotes, and, you know, not so much.

2. As much as I’ve mocked Southwest for its arrogant denial of wrongdoing in its current FAA squabble, I don’t think it’s going to hurt them any in terms of passenger loyalty or traffic.

3. The development of the city’s core continues, as the Design District will add apartments and retail within the next year.