You may have seen the come-on around town: “Rent Your Home for the Super Bowl. Up to $10,000 per day. Call 1-877-ONE-LODGE.” When I did that, a very nice man named Frank White, regional director of Major Event Rentals in Phoenix, said MER is a 3-year-old outfit that will help “maximize your revenues” next February. The company put out 100 signs and 1,000 fliers in DFW starting last week, he said, and “a couple of people are in the process of signing up.”
Major Event rents out homes for lots of big affairs like the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR races, White said. But you wonder if the company isn’t just a little optimistic, maybe, on its pricing. After taking a virtual tour of this 4-bedroom place called a “perfect Indy getaway,” I’d be surprised if they could get $1,750 a week for it, much less $17,500. (Then again, it does include maid service and a personal chef.) Candy, what say you?
Over D Magazine’s sister pub, Oak Cliff People, Josh Hixson knows I love a good hog story. There’s a bit of a back story to this – last fall, we had a little bit of a bet going on about whether or not my Arkansas Razorbacks could indeed beat Texas A&M. I believe the answer was yes, they could (47-19, but really, who’s keeping score? Me. I’m keeping score).
Today though, Josh alerted me to a story in the print product of Oak Cliff People. Now, it’s not online, so if you want to see the whole thing, you’re just gonna have to go eat a slice at Eno’s or something and pick up copy while you’re in the neighborhood. Unless you already live there. Then you should probably subscribe or something.
It seems Kiest Park has a bit of a feral hog problem. I don’t think they’ve eaten anyone (the mascots at Arkansas have historically been known to get loose and kill coyotes and things), but the Keist varietal are considered by experts to be a threat. The city apparently wanted to just trap them all and dump them in the Trinity Audubon Center, but the state said, NUH-UH, and that it was also a misdemeanor to do so. Also, apparently the hogs could weaken the levees on the Trinity River. They are also germy and stuff.
SPOILER ALERT: So the new plan is to trap them, then kill them.
A trapper estimates there’s four or five of these feral hogs roaming the Kiest Park area. They can have tusks as long as four inches (that’s what she said) coming out the sides of their mouths.
Joel Kotkin Jason Roberts is an effective urban advocate because he works in images: ‘I like cities that look and feel like this, and Dallas doesn’t. Why?’ It’s that “why,” like a four-year old pestering his or her parents to explain the world, that is so effective and annoying to the bureaucratic status quo. Today on Bike Friendly Oak Cliff, Roberts cracks open the Dallas Development Code and finds that many of the street pleasures enjoyed in other cities are either forbidden in Dallas, like fruit stands, or levied with huge fees ($1,000 per awning, canopy, café table, or flower stand). Why?
This is all a lead-up, of course, to Roberts’ urban performance piece this coming weekend, “The Better Block Project,” in which a stretch of Tyler Street will be transformed into the kind of place we would like our city to look like, this time asking, “if only. . .”
This story has bothered me since I read about it this morning. I’m sure I’m not the only one that was angered and saddened to read that yet another family lost loved ones because a habitual offender chose to get behind the wheel and drive drunk.
And I know many think the answer to this is no refusal blood draws. And I do understand that the idea (or part of it) is to gather enough evidence to make it difficult to get the charge dismissed.
But I do know this: It is entirely too easy to step out of county lockup (anywhere, really, not just Dallas), and get into a car and continue driving after being charged with a DWI – even after being convicted. I know because we’ve seen so many cases such as John Patrick Barton’s – on parole for a third DWI when caught. Only in Barton’s case, it ended in death.
I’ve seen men with ignition locks convince family and friends to blow into it so they could start the car, even though they’ve been drinking. I’ve heard offenders talk about driving to their parole meetings and parking blocks away to make it appear they’ve been behaving according to the terms of their parole or probation and not driving.
And as a cops and courts reporter, I saw a man once nearly wipe out a family while barreling down a Fannin County highway — trailer attached to his truck – and a BAC almost twice the legal limit. He wiped them off the two-lane road. At a pre-trial hearing, he showed up both late and drunk.
So given all that, I’m not sure that a blood draw is what is going to prevent these instances. It seems to me that the biggest problem is not the before conviction, but the after.
Your Texas Rangers open the 2010 season at 1:05 p.m. against the Toronto Blue Jays. Scott Feldman will be on the mound. That traitor* Evan Grant will be in a press box nearby. And your thoughts are welcome in the comments. (I’m looking at you, Dr Pepper Presents Batface McGee.) Don’t make me engage in generic baseball talk alone!
Okay, she’s maybe not as out front on this as the headline makes it sound, and this project — Record Club, which has previously taken on the Velvet Underground and Skip Spence — is certainly more Beck’s baby than anyone else’s. But Annie Clark’s Dallas expat status is the reason for posting it. So there you go.
Record Club: INXS “New Sensation” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
Maybe I just didn’t get out to Texas Stadium often enough to be upset that it’s going away. Some people are obviously shaken by its passing. Or maybe I’m just not the nostalgic type. Either way, I couldn’t agree more with the open letter we ran in our April issue — good riddance. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve helpfully included it below.
Dear Mr. Stadium: Now that you’re getting blown to bits this month in a Kraft Mac & Cheese “Cheddar Explosion,” you’re maybe expecting us to wax nostalgic, tell a story about the time our father took us to a game in the 1970s, and how that was one of the only times we bonded as men. No dice, fella. Try Kevin Sherrington if that’s what you’re looking for. We, sir, could not be more delighted that you’re getting exploded. We’d rather throw a basket of newborn puppies off Reunion Tower than see you — you sorry, dank, decrepit, stupid-roof-having excuse for a stadium — survive for one more day. You deserve to be a pile of rubble. We hope it hurts. We hope they screw it up, so they have to dynamite you twice. Later, jerk.
1. On his blog, Pete Oppel makes the kind of unsubstantiated, left-field speculative prediction that could just become a self-fulfilling prophesy: Mary Suhm is thinking of retiring. His argument is based on the timing of budget woes, Trinity River Project delays, the hiring of a new police chief, and the recent retiring of the city’s CFO David Cook, who Oppel calls the “Ying to her Yang.” Though Suhm strikes me as the kind of person who likes to leave on highs.
2. Remember when Joel Kotkin was in town? Our friend Patrick Kennedy at Living Car-Free in Big D isn’t too impressed, and he has taking the time slice and dice a piece Kotkin wrote for Forbes about Texas’ future prosperity. What’s Kennedy’s beef with Kotkin? Well, to start, “Kotkin routinely displays all the writerly hypocrisy of unprincipled, think-tank whorishness.” Trust me, it gets better.
3. About that Broad Prize DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said the district would win by 2010, yeah, he meant 2011. So bug him next year.