Is 11,600 enough people to run Dallas? Are that enough? I hope so. Because that’s how many will be left if City Manager Mary Suhm’s plan is passed by the City Council. She has recommended laying off 840 people and not filling 560 vacant positions.
We heard about this before, but now it is official: Highland Park Village’s Regent theater will be Regent no longer, Park Cities People reports. Hillary Artzt of HP Village says it will reopen late next spring after renovations, but Ray Washburne and Co. are looking for a new cinema company to occupy the space.
At the very least, before the former Texas Tech/Carter High wideout does listen to his cousin David Wells and hold out for the entire 2009 season and re-enter the draft, he should maybe read this lengthy profile written by the Dallas Observer’s Tom Korosec back in 2002. It is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky breaks it down like a fraction:
A partial list of curious episodes before and during Wells’s time as head of David’s Bail Bonds:
•Arrested for stealing boxing gloves from the Dallas Police Athletic League.
•Banned for life by USA Boxing over allegations of misuse of funds.
•Served as the omnipresent bodyguard shoving reporters out of the way for Michael Irvin after his arrest for possession.
•Indicted for serving as a private investigator with a license that had lapsed four years earlier, but exonerated after a dubious receipt appeared showing he had renewed it.
•Let off the hook for $50,000 when one of his clients skipped town, after a dubious document appeared showing he had warned the county.
•Started a security company with a court bailiff, which is illegal due to conflict-of-interest rules.
It looks like Dallas is playing a role this week in the national debate over health care. According to this Breitbart video via Drudge, the AARP pulled the plug on a “town hall” meeting on the subject here after the attendees started speaking up. Don’t they know they’re supposed to keep their traps shut?
Turns out, I didn’t need an excuse. A tweeting FBvian has alerted me to the fact that Tales of the Black Freighter was actually made in Dallas, by the good folks at Reel FX.
Lesson: as always, I am clueless.
In a former life, I hosted a radio show on 93.3 FM with a woman named Yvonne. We had a sidekick of sorts whose nickname was Just Jay. We’d send him out to do interviews with celebs with one caveat: every interview had to end with a specific question. That question was “Can I touch your hair?” With Julie & Julia as an excuse to post the audio, here’s
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in circa 2000 and met Just Jay.
An alert FrontBurnervian points us to this NYT DealBook story about TXU’s financial maneuverings. Short version: when KKR took TXU private and formed Energy Future Holdings, it was the largest leveraged buyout ever. That leverage was $44 billion of debt. Now they’d like to restructure it. But some of their lenders aren’t so sure about all that. Is this a big problem for TXU? Naw. Not at all. Right?
After the jump, you can read about all the new art Jerry Jones is buying for Cowboys Stadium. A laudable move on Jerry’s part. And the advisory board that helped choose the 14 artists certainly is impressive (Michael Auping, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth; Charlie Wylie, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA; and Howard Rachofsky and Gayle Stoffel). There’s a media tour of the first installations on August 11. Well, unless you’re the New York Times. In that case, you’ve already had the tour.
Tales of the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic that appeared in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ (rightly) celebrated Watchmen, was notably absent from the film adaptation. At least in theaters. It was produced as a separate animated short, and it’s on DVD now — and, actually, has been since late March. Around Christmastime, you can buy a new version of Watchmen with the Black Freighter footage woven in, and I, of course, plan to. What does this have to do with Dallas, you ask? Well, one of the directors of Black Freighter, Daniel DelPurgatorio (great name) is also the man responsible for the striking artwork on the last two albums by the Paper Chase, Now You Are One of Us and Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol. 1. Why am I telling you now? Because I just found out.
Our DMN delivery person must have read yesterday’s post and decided to fight back. The paper was very late this morning and, this time, lacked the NeighborsGo section. Meantime a whistleblowing FBvian chimes in on the subject, calling The News‘ classified section a “nightmare.” He once spotted a jewelry ad there placed by a “convicted felon” who had more than $1 million in ongoing civil lawsuits over alleged senior-citizen ripoffs, he recalls. When he notified the classified staff of this he says they literally yelled at him to get lost, because the jeweler was paying on time. Then he adds:
Well, a few years later [the jeweler] went to prison and for what? Conning old people out of their savings — selling diamonds and eventually investment jewelry. By the way — the Fort Worth Star-Telegram pulled his ad after one phone call.
Never underestimate the power of a dumb marketing idea. In this case, a Dallas dentist’s said to be getting national attention riffing on the federal “Cash for Clunkers” program with a “Cash for Chompers” offer: Turn in your old false teeth and get a $250 rebate on a new set. Hey; whatever works.
1. A TABC investigation found fault with the officers responsible for a June raid on a gay bar in Fort Worth that resulted in one man suffering a serious head injury. They were faulted for several things, but mostly for acting like TABC agents. Also, the U.S. attorney’s office told the Star-Telegram it would not conduct a special investigation into the Rainbow Lounge raid, presumably concluding, “Hey, they acted like TABC agents. Whadya want us to do about it?”
2. A 13-year-old girl police thought was 17 was mistakenly held for nearly two weeks in the Dallas County Jail with adult inmates. Police are now trying to determine how they didn’t know she was that young, especially since she claimed to be 14, then 17. Also, I should point out, she was caught stealing clothes and candy. I’d call that a clue.
3. To save money, Dallas will probably reduce its trash pickup schedule to once a week. The person most upset about this? Glenn Arbery.