Articles for October 7th, 2009
Kidd Kraddick Destroys Me Real Hard
The folks at Avid Golfer did a mock golf tourney wherein I faced Kidd Kraddick in the first round. It did not go well for me.
Eric Celeste and Evan Grant Form Mutual Admiration Club
The salesman and the turncoat. 
Win Valuable Prize Package in FrontBurner Trivia Contest
If you’ve been playing along at home, you know that we’re moving to new downtown digs at the end of the week. We’re right now packing up our offices and throwing away — I mean, recycling — about 8 metric tons of old magazines and other publishing effluvia. We’ve also got some items that don’t need to make the move but which you might find useful and/or entertaining and/or desirable. So right about now, we will launch a trivia contest to win the items you see pictured here. The trivial questions all deal with FrontBurner milestones. The questions are after the jump. Here’s what you’ll win:
Talking Mark Cuban doll (ages 3 and up), Bell Sonecor microcassette recorder (including original microcassette recording of Mark Cuban’s infamous threat to slice the f—ing nuts off of yours truly), copy of the August 28, 2005, edition of the DMN (wherein the FBI investigation into the just-concluded City Hall corruption trial is first laid out in full), bottle of Isis-brand sweet white wine, canister of adhesive bandages that look like strips of bacon, 2 bars of Obama soap (made locally!), 3 hollow-point bullets (caliber undetermined), Parissa-brand body hair removal system, can of escargots, The Dallas Myth (the book by that Harvey J. Graf guy who hates Dallas), Crosshairs (novel by noted local author Harry Hunsicker), Home Plate (recipe book), Dallas Texas (photography book by local photographer and sometime D Magazine contributor Peter Calvin, signed), HKS press kit for Cowboys Stadium (including DVD), Reebok football, Inwood Theatre throw pillow, Saveastud.com mini flashlight (batteries included), desk lamp, Starck t-shirt (size medium, made by American Apparel), picture of Kyle Kearbey showing her love for Dr Pepper (signed), Piano Landscapes (compositions written and performed by Jon Dahlander, head DISD spokesman), and framed Best Blog 2003 award from Dallas Observer. Plus these bonus items, not pictured: a framed and signed handsome photo of Terrell Owens and a $100 gift certificate to Celebrity Cafe!
T. Boone Pickens Defends Truth of Swift Boaters
There have been plenty of stories about T. Boone Pickens’ plan for American energy independence. Today brings another.
What I hadn’t realized is that Pickens, even with his new Democratic friends, still defends the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign:
In November 2007, Pickens had offered $1 million to anyone who could dispute claims in the Swift Boat ads that said Kerry had exaggerated his military service. Kerry accepted the challenge.
Pickens required Kerry to provide his Vietnam journal, his military records and the movies he shot on patrol. Kerry didn’t supply the items, a Pickens spokesman says. Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith says the senator offered to meet with Pickens but didn’t get a response.
Then, in 2008, a group of veterans took up the challenge. So far, Pickens says, the veterans haven’t disproved the claims in the ads and he has yet to concede the $1 million.
No one has disproved the claims?
Recession Bad For Pizza Hut, Good For Frozen Pies
Addison-based Pizza Hut has seen its sales drop 13 percent in the third quarter. If most their customers are receiving undercooked piles of dough like the Pizza Hut pie I ate a few weeks ago, I’m not surprised.
Apparently, more people really are choosing DiGiornio or buying a frozen Wal-Mart pizza and heating it up. I’d be interested to know whether Pizza Hut’s cheaper “Pizza Mia” option–a clear move to compete with concepts like Pizza Patron– is doing as poorly as the rest of their menu.
Anyway, sales are down, so let’s blame the advertising.
Darwin Deason’s $800 Million Payday
That’s how much he’ll make on his share of ACS in the sale to Xerox, according to this analysis at Muckety.com. The article also refers back to Tim’s 2003 piece on Deason (”Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless“), which was memorable for many reasons, not the least of which was the fineness of its opening paragraph, which needs to be quoted in full:
Accounts differ as to what exactly happened aboard the Cartoush II during its pleasure cruise in the Bahamas in September 2001. Darwin Deason denies that he threatened to kill the chef. Others claim he did. “There certainly was a threat of getting a gun and doing something,” says one person intimately acquainted with the details of the incident. As for the chef, he isn’t saying much.
To think, just the other day someone wondered aloud to me why Dallas doesn’t breed characters like it did in the good ol’ days.
Denton Approves Gas Drillers’ Plans
Last night Denton approved gas drilling on the Rayzor Ranch site. Long-suffering FrontBurnervians will remember that that’s where a group of determined young neo-hippies-in-search-of-a-protest fought the powers that be.
The Denton City Council comes off looking pretty impotent in the face of the state’s protection of the rights of mineral owners. One resident of the McKenna Park neighborhood summed up the decision pretty well:
“It all comes down to money,” McFarling said. “That, and the fear of being sued.”
LA Times Finds Nothing New To Say, Prints Review of Arts District Anyway, Gets It Wrong
Christopher Hawthorne is a fine architectural critic, so it was nice the bankrupt LA Times scratched up the money for him to look over Dallas’s new AT&T Peformings Arts Center. That he found nothing to add to what has been already been said (by John King here or by Peter Simek here) does not necessarily betray any lack of imaginative critical acumen. His lack of success didn’t keep him, however, for searching for something, anything, to say:
This month’s issue of D Magazine, which is almost entirely dedicated to coverage of the new performing arts center and the larger arts district of which it is a part, is full of sentences like this one about the developer Trammell Crow: “Crow was the first developer to buy into the proposed arts district, and the 90,000 square feet he purchased in the summer of 1978 for about $20 a square foot was worth $125 a square foot within three years.”
Actually, I can’t find another sentence like that in the entire issue, so it is not “full of sentences” like this at all. And by the way, that one sentence appeared in this article we reprinted from 1982 to give readers a perspective on the 25-year struggle to build the arts district . I’m glad Christopher was even able to find it, much less pluck it out. But it’s a long flight home, I suppose, and he did have column inches to fill.
Leading Off (10/7/09)
1. The Tollway is confusing people with conflicting speed-limit signs. Should they drive 50 mph? Sixty-five? Then, of course, there’s the whole question of which way to drive on the Tollway, which has also confused too many people recently.
2. Mack Choice has lived in a cardboard box under I-45 for the past 15 years. At noon today, though, he’s moving into a townhome that was bought with donations. If this movie is anything like Castaway or Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, Choice will be uncomfortable sleeping in a soft bed, and he’ll set up his cardboard box in his new living room.
3. The Mavs held open auditions for a new PA guy. I can’t tell you how much it tickles me to think of Zac Crain performing that role. If the Mavs were playing well, he’d mumble through his beard and toss off one-liner movie quotes that would have half the stadium laughing and the other half scratching their heads. If the Mavs were failing, between drags on his electronic cigarette, Zac would yell obscenities at the players and coaches. We need to make this happen.
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