Articles for April, 2009
Who Hasn’t Sent Threatening E-mails to the Boss While Drunk?
Interesting story by the greatness that is Reese Dunklin over at the DMN Investigates blog. Seems that Florida-based Office Depot may be under investigation by our AG for overcharging businesses in Texas. A whistleblower from Florida, David Sherwin, was the one who, um, blew the whistle. And blew it hard. Before the “disgruntled” employee was fired in April 2008, he did the following:
Sherwin has acknowledged sending an e-mail to Office Depot’s chief executive in which he threatened to “kick your ass so hard that you would fly across Florida like Tinkerbelle.”
Sherwin said he was drunk at the time and has entered rehab since he was terminated. He said he was frustrated that Office Depot superiors had not taken seriously e-mails and memos that he sent warning of liabilities from the alleged overcharging he found.
For the record, Tinker Bell is two words, no “e” on the end.
The End of Comments on FrontBurner, Ctd.
The first person to send me a note about this change — a powerful man with an expense account that is rumored to be limitless — simply said, “Amen.” The second note I got, from a newsprint-loving FrontBurnervian, said:
I won’t give up on FB, but Wick’s edict, I’m afraid, will make the conversation here less interesting for me. I think what Wick is saying is that I’m not smart enough to discern the difference between an intelligent or idiotic comment. I give the FB Nation more credit than that.
By the way, you took a kick to the crotch yesterday with your public relations post. A lot of the comments were sophomoric and stupid, but I still enjoyed reading them.
Me, I’m ambivalent. I agree with Wick: too often the comments were noise. But every so often, someone would offer something that made me laugh or made me think. If we lose those fruitful contributions because people will only make them anonymously, then I’ll be sad. But I hope we won’t. As evidenced by the comment I’ve included above, smart people don’t mind sending e-mail to editors using their real names.
Only problem now is, of course, I’m not exactly suffering from a deficit of e-mail.
Goldfield Manse: Biggest Little Teardown In Texas?
Like many homeowners who built huge during the housing bubble, cellphone mogul Alan Goldfield is in a pickle–just a much bigger one than most people. Goldfield’s $65.5 million Champ d’Or mansion near Hickory Creek has been on the market for seven long years. (Estimated monthly mortgage payment a buyer might face for the 35,000-square-foot palace: $314,000!) Now there’s a chance this Lone Star Taj Mahal could be torn down for redevelopment. The May issue of D CEO mag has the whole bizarre story, written by Mark N. Vamos–formerly of Fast Company and Newsweek, currently the O’Neil Chair in Business Journalism at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.
Adam McGill Is No Longer Unemployed
In these turbulent times, we will not give you updates on every employee who leaves our warm embrace and winds up working elsewhere. Adam is different. He was here when this blog launched on March 20, 2003. So we’ll give him the space to say this:
I think I’m past the point where I fear a) jinxing it and b) that it’s all an elaborate practical joke. Now it can be said: I got a job. Starting today, I am a managing director at Perry Street Communications, which is a small but sophisticated corporate and finance communications firm. (I’ll be specializing in modifiers.) A friend of mine from St. Mark’s, Jon Morgan, started Perry Street in New York about three years ago. He moved to Dallas and opened an office here last year. Jon tells me we do strategic PR, which sounds neat. You can check out the Web site, but you won’t find my bio there yet. And I’m pretty sure my email is going to be amcgill AT perryst.com.
What does my job entail? Near as I can tell: take people to lunch, look at the Internet, and pretend to be very busy (e.g., Twitter, iPhone Scrabble, and surreptitious visits to The Pearl Cup). At least, that’s what I plan on doing for the first few months. (After that, most of my efforts will be devoted to embezzling from the company, using my “friendship” with its founder as a coverup.)
For reals: the job is great, the company is growing, and I’m totes excited. Exclamation point.
Press release TK. Two times.
The End of Comments on FrontBurner
We launched FrontBurner in March 2003, with the intent of holding a public conversation about Dallas among the editors of D Magazine. Many fads have come and gone during that time. Some have been wildly successful (hello, YouTube) and some have gotten mired in a morass of their own making (hi there, MySpace). One technological development that we embraced when it became available was comments from readers. No longer.
Many of our commenters have been thoughtful and intelligent, but as months turned into years, Gresham’s Law took hold. Comments became increasingly intemperate, irrelevant, and illiterate. Some good people hung on, but many good people left. The concept of user-generated content is fine — for other Internet sites. But for ours, it has not been a successful experiment.
The key to FrontBurner’s success is that it has always primarily been a conversation among the editors. Our readers don’t buy our magazines to find out what other people think; they buy them to find out what we think. Similarly, people come to FrontBurner to read our take on the news and opinions of the day about our city. If that’s not why you come, then enjoy your several billion other options on the Internet.
Disagreement, dissent, and amplification are still welcomed and even encouraged. So we will return to status quo ante. If you have a comment to make, please address it in an email to the editor who posted. Give your real name (it will not be used). If your point is valid and well-made, the editor will post it.
In time, we may be technologically capable of posting comments directly from invited participants who add to our conversation with the quality of their intelligence and the perspicacity of their writing. We hope to have that up and running in a few months (our web developers have a few hundred other agenda items ahead of it). Until then, we hope you enjoy FrontBurner the way it used to be.
Our Position: Vote Yes On 1, No On 2
Sam Merten over at Unfair Park dug through the documents accompanying the city’s February 11, 2009 refinancing of the convention center debt. In them, he discovered an analysis by HVS (the same group that has done all the convention hotel analyses) that estimates the city would produce higher revenues without a hotel than with it.
As I wrote back in our November issue, I support the concept of a convention hotel, but I believe the current proposal is badly conceived from a financial standpoint.
Our position:
On Proposition 1: Vote yes. Force the city to come up with a better alternative.
On Proposition 2: Vote no. This union-backed idea would stifle neighborhood redevelopment and economic growth.
Slate Shows The Growing Recession In Dallas
Slate has posted an extraordinary way to view the recession’s effects on unemployment since January, 2007. Push the green arrow and keep your eyes on the Dallas area. While the rest of the country is getting hit, our jobs continue to grow, then the growth becomes slower, then stalls until December, 2008 — then wham!
Texas exceptionalism was, I regret to report, a temporary phenonmenon. The ABC News/Forbes list I posted yesterday was not as up-to-date as Slate’s.
Watch My Friend Whip Tony Romo’s Golf Butt
In the Adams Pro/Scratch tourney (click through for leaderboard) out at Stonebridge Ranch CC, Romo is the amateur (paired with pro Mark Walker) on the leading team at 7 under heading into today’s round. Just two shots back is local real estate magnate and Bent Tree CC member Todd Phillips, paired with Bent Tree assistant pro Dean Larsson. If you want to cheer/heckle either of these amateur superstars, they tee off at 2 (Larsson/Phillips) and 2:10 today. Go Batfaces.
Colbert Does Texas Secession
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Tip/Wag – Texas Secession & MACA | ||||
|
||||
Leading Off (4/21/09)
1. Normally a bad economy means an increase in crime, but that’s not true for Dallas in the first quarter of 2009, as crime dropped nearly 20 percent overall in Dallas through March compared to last year. It’s down 11 percent downtown, and many attribute that to the success of using surveillance cameras, even though there still isn’t enough money to properly staff the surveillance centers. I’ll be onboard with these things when they finally help Pamela Lundy catch this guy.
2. A new Dallas convention hotel feasibility study on whether the city should own such a hotel is being worked on but won’t be released before the May 9 vote, much to the dismay of its chief critic, hotel owner Harlan Crow. Assistant City Manager A.C. Gonzalez says the new hotel study shouldn’t be “released half-baked.” I agree, but I’ve also seen the cover image on its front page, which suggests the tenor of the report.
3. The Texas Senate easily passed new legislation aimed at eliminating minimum grade requirements in many school districts across the state, ensuring that, no matter how bad the outlook for print journalism, I ain’t goin’ back to school.
Does An Aging Population Spell The End Of Suburbia?
Matt Yglesias highlights one trend, aging, to posit another trend, a return to urbanism. From what he says, I doubt if he has ever been to Frisco, McKinney, or Southlake. He certainly never has had to drive kids to the only great soccer fields around, which are in Plano. However, I did note two interesting comments. One makes the point that some suburbs are becoming self-contained urban centers in themselves, and if the urban trend is true, it will take place in pods like those as well as in core cities. The other notes that aging suburbs are already being infilled by the poor, which is a trend we are seeing here.
Show You Should Check Out Tomorrow Night: Tommy Keene @ The Cavern
I have two recommendations for you: 1) go see Tommy Keene at The Cavern tomorrow night, and 2) show up early, buy him a drink, and hope he rewards you with some stories. Because he has some great ones. (That tends to happen when you spend three decades in the music business, back up Paul Westerberg and Robert Pollard, record with Peter Buck, and generally know everyone worth knowing that sprang out of the college/indie rock world in the 1980s and ’90s.) Even if he’s not in a talkative mood, the show is worth your dime. Keene writes the best kind of power-pop songs, the sort that stick in your head immediately but don’t get old after the 10th listen.
An Open Letter to Matt Moss at N3L Optics
Dear Mr. Matt Moss: Today I received not one, but two FedEx packages from you. Both were sent standard overnight from your Lake Forest, California, location. Each package contained the same promotional materials, informing me of the new N3L Optics store soon to open in NorthPark. Each package contained the same press release, wherein N3L Optics senior VP Kendra Reichenau was quoted as saying, “N3L is committed to educating each customer on the benefits of performance optics.” Each package extolled the greatness of N3L’s “smart mirror” and its “Newton immersive display” and its “custom fit station.”
Here’s the thing, Mr. Moss. And I’m betting you can see where I’m headed with this. I don’t care.
In the future, try the good folks at ShopTalk. Pick one person. Say, Sarah Eveans. Or Stephanie Quadri. But pick just one. And then send the FedEx to her, maybe with a personal note. Just a quick one. “Hey, Steph, I saw that post you put up about Jellies. I used to wear those, too! Check out our sunglasses!” Something like that.
Helpfully, Tim
New Nasher Director Jeremy Strick’s $$ Problems
Strick has a complicated financial relationship with the Museum of Modern Art in LA, where he was dismissed as director in December. DMN reporter Brooks Egerton now reports that he hasn’t repaid a loan extended to him by the museum so that he could buy a house in LA. The LA market was soaring when he was hired, and museum directors are hard to find. So I am unsurprised that the museum extended a loan, and that with the collapse of the market he has been unable to repay it. However, it does tend to remind us of the severe financial difficulties the LA museum ran into during Strick’s tenture.
Home |
Masthead |
News from D |
About Us |
Contact Us |
Subscribe |
Advertise |
Privacy Policy |
Customer Service |
Awards | Archives | Reprints | d custom | Jobs | Advertiser's Index
Awards | Archives | Reprints | d custom | Jobs | Advertiser's Index