Last year, D Magazine didn’t throw a Christmas party. Economic s-storm and so forth. This year, we’re having one, but it figures to be a fairly sober affair — mostly because it’s tonight, a Wednesday, and it’s scheduled to last only two hours. I’m not complaining, understand. Just laying it out there. I’d rather see how many drinks I can consume at Ozona in two hours and listen to my co-workers sing karaoke for fabulous prizes than go home to my wife and children. Right?
So how is your company handling it this year?
Oh, and if you want to follow along tonight, get your Twitter on. Your best feeds: zaccrain, timmytyper, ericceleste, kostelny, rhondareinhart, and dmagazine. One of the issues I intend to explore tonight is the following admonishment that just came over the email from she who has organized the party. It read: “Remember: dress is super casual and you can wear whatever you want. Just please wear something appropriate.” Because if dress is not just casual but super casual, how is one to dress inappropriately? Like, I can’t wear a bathing suit, or what?
Krista Nightengale and I spent much of today up to our ears in applications for spring internships. A few things we noticed: No one wants to be a journalist anymore—a good 80 percent of applications were for the marketing department, which means journalism professors may finally be getting through to kids about the lack of jobs in the field. The one-page résumé is apparently a thing of the past. (It baffled us, but some professors are telling students it is OK to send potential employers three-page résumés. Don’t listen to those teachers, kids, because it isn’t a good idea. Unless you’ve had 50 years of experience, keep it to one page.) And proper AP Style is a rare thing in aspiring journalists’ CVs.
The police are still trying to sort out whatever happened this morning at a Denny’s on 75 and how involved Mavs forward Tim Thomas was. The police version (so far):
Thomas, another man and three women entered the Denny’s. Damien Pettie, 29, recognized Thomas. He told police he addressed the basketball player by saying, “What’s up?” Thomas told him not to talk to him, using curse words and racial and anti-gay epithets. Pettie responded with profanity.
The man with Thomas then struck Pettie twice in the face, breaking his lip open.
“Then all parties within both groups began to throw chairs, knock over tables, and fight each other” until the store manager told them he was going call police.
The other side, courtesy of Donnie Nelson:
“What I can tell you is that Tim was not involved. He’s 30 years old with a wife and kids. When the situation started to escalate, he left the property immediately. Certainly we’re working with authorities and our security folks to get to the bottom of it. But this is something that’s way, way, way overblown. Innocent until proven guilty in this country, last I checked.”
Only certainty: he probably shouldn’t have been there at that time to begin with. You’re rich, fella. If you want a Grand Slam Breakfast or Moons Over My Hammy in the middle of the night, get someone to pick it up for you.
SMU is officially announcing what readers of the “print product” knew back in October: the creation of the Hunter and Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity. In our November issue, we profiled the institute’s director in a story titled “General Badass.” Jeffrey Talley more or less let slip the name of the institute. The story contained the following passage:
Less clear is Talley’s charge vis-à-vis his Caruth Hall-based institute, the name of which [Lyle School of Engineering dean Geoffrey] Orsak, of course, declines to reveal prematurely for fear of unsettling his donors.
“The Institute for Engineering and Humanity,” crows Talley. “It should be the Stephanie and Hunter Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity. That’s what I think.”
It seems that the name of the institute changed. A couple months ago, one gathers, the Hunts’ names were not attached to it; now they are. As they should be.
It was a picture of Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief that appeared as if he had horns coming out of his head. Note: I said “remotely.” Okay, go back to griping about Apple and iPhones or Verizon or whatever.
The best thing about having an iPhone is how easy it is to jump on the Internet and get any piece of information I’m looking for quickly. And it’s all for one flat monthly fee. I’ve found Dallas-based AT&T’s 3G service to be outstanding in terms of its speed and reliability. Even when I venture out into the wilderness, to areas off AT&T’s 3G map, I’ve been pleased with what I’ve been able to pull up on my iPhone. (Now, making phone calls, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.)
Apparently things aren’t nearly as good for users in New York and San Francisco, as the head of AT&T’s wireless division admitted today that the company needs to do better for them. He noted that most iPhone users don’t know how much bandwidth they’re consuming. (I certainly don’t.) Three percent of smartphone users drive 40% of the data traffic.
And the company is considering how it might begin to charge users for what they use, which could be on a per-byte of data basis.
So after getting rid of class ranking, the Southlake Carroll school district appears ready to ditch Latin as well.
Reason enough to link to this clip, which may only be funny to those of us who took the dead language in high school. (Say it with me: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant)
The two new area teams that started play in the minor American Basketball Association — the North Texas Fresh (who play in Fort Worth) and the Dallas Generals (whose home court is Fair Park Coliseum) — have already forged an intense rivalry, after having played their first game against one another on Saturday.
It looks like the Generals, who were the home team, were in charge of the official scorecard. Their numbers show that they won, 103-101. But the Fresh have reviewed the tape, and they claim that a three-point basket early in the game that was waved off because of traveling was incorrectly counted in the score. The Fresh claim to continue to have an unbeaten record. The Generals owner wants the Fresh kicked out of the ABA. More on their war of words, which is enough to make Will Ferrell proud, after the jump.
I was just reading a newsletter out of Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson’s camp bragging about how the 30th District has so far received more than $360 million in federal funds from the Recovery Act. That seemed like a lot of cash to me, so I navigated my computer’s browser to the part of the Internet that houses the government’s website that tracks all that money. If you’re busy today, whatever you do, don’t go to www.recovery.gov. Because that’s one badass website. If you dig maps — and who doesn’t? — that thing will have you clicking around for most of the morning. For instance, if you go here, you can zoom in on North Texas and click around to see where the federal dollars are going. Did you know SMU has gotten nearly $1.4 million, which it says created or saved 20.35 jobs? Meanwhile, the University of Dallas has gotten only $48,000, which it says created or saved no fewer than 28 jobs. What the hell is going on here? I’m not sure, but it sounds like I’d rather work at SMU (and make about $68,000 a year) than the University of Dallas ($1,700).
1. Big news out of DISD. In the runoff election for the school board, Bruce Parrott beat incumbent Leigh Ann Ellis, and Bernadette Nutall bested Sally Cain. The election was decided by only 4,500 voters, but it looks to shake up the school board. The two new trustees are seen as being critical of the district’s administration and will change the balance of power on the board.
2. Speaking of the district’s administration, Patricia Viramontes, DISD’s executive director of information technology, was fired yesterday. No one is saying why she was let go, but the district’s annual financial report, released last month, pointed out that Viramontes’ IT system was a total mess. Too, critics had charged that Viramontes (who made $126,041) got her job through nepotism. Her husband is the district’s chief of staff, Arnold Viramontes.
3. There was much debate here yesterday about what constitutes the Knox-Henderson area, which the DMN identified as the location of a kidnapping. Well, the News is reporting that police are questioning three men in connection with the attack — which the paper now says happened in Old East Dallas. (Geographic matters aside, let’s hope the cops have the right guys. They need to go to jail for a very long time.)