Articles for November 30th, 2010
Hot Ticket: Coppell v. Trinity
By the time I arrived at Coppell High School this morning to pick up tickets for Friday night’s game 
against Euless Trinity—about 7:30 a.m.—a line was already forming around the building. So it’s no surprise that by mid-afternoon, a friend (and fellow Coppellian) had to drive to the Trinity field house to snatch up some tickets of her own.
The high school football match-up has all the makings of a great game: Both teams are 13-0 and are playing for the Class 5A Division I Region I title. The only thing that stinks is the venue. Trinity won the coin toss and opted to play Friday night at Dragon Stadium in Southlake, which has a seating capacity of about 12,000. (Coppell had wanted a Saturday game at SMU.)
Even when CHS plays Southlake during the regular season, the stadium sells out. Trinity’s choice gives Coppell one less day to prepare, but it means a lot of fans—from both schools and of high school football in general—will be left out in the cold.
Five Best Words Used on D Magazine’s Blog, FrontBurner, Today
1. pickpockets
2. capita
3. clarification
4. architects
5. flexisexuality
(Obviously, I have excluded proper nouns here, which I suppose I should have made clear in the headline. But I’m trying not to use my delete key today, in accordance with the wishes of my new life coach, Fran Pepperpaw. So, sorry. And, honestly, I’m not a giant fan of “flexisexuality” as a word; it’s, like, hey, do something first, right? But I feel like, oh, Daniel, or maybe Hein would have wondered why I didn’t pick that, in favor of, say, gingerbread, and then that would have become a thing. I guess what I’m saying is: I love the word pickpockets and will fight to the death anyone who disagrees.)
Ambassador Talks Up F-35s, Oil Sands, Crown Royal
Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Gary Doer, likes to point out that his country is the
biggest foreign supplier of energy to the U.S., as well as Texas’ second-largest trading partner, after Mexico. And that the relationship with Texas plays out in sometimes-surprising ways. “Did you know,” Doer said with a smile during a visit to Dallas yesterday, “that the highest per-capita consumers of [7-Eleven] Slurpees in North America is Manitoba? And that the highest per-capita consumers of Crown Royal–made in Gimli, Manitoba, with beautiful clean water–is Texas?”
Doer (pictured) was in town to make some more serious points, though. One was with a visit to–and a show of support for–Fort Worth’s Lockheed Martin facility, whose F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project is threatened by U.S. budget-cutters. Canadian companies are doing $16 billion worth of work on the F-35, and the Canadian government’s buying 65 of the planes. Doer said possible cuts to the program “concern” him.
The ambassador was also here to talk up Alberta’s oil sands–attacked as “dirty oil” by environmentalists–and TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil-sands crude through Texas to Houston. “There’s no question that in the alpha stage, oil-sands emissions were higher than they are today,” Doer said. “But emissions have since gone down 40 percent. They’re now lower than emissions from California thermal oil that was excluded from California’s light-crude standard. And, water utilization for oil-sands production has gone from 10-to-1 to 2-1.”
(That’s not the same water, presumably, that goes into the Crown Royal.)
Things to Do in Dallas Tonight: Nov. 30
If you’re nothing like me, you’re getting your Christmas shopping done a little early this year, which means you might very well be visiting a local shopping center after work. If you’re in Plano, take Mr. Fluffy Tail (I’m referring to your dog, weirdo) to have his photo taken with Santa at the Shops at Willow Bend. If you’re willing to brave the well-groomed masses of Uptown, check out the West Village’s Winter Wonderland celebration. And if you’re buying a new coat for your wife at Burberry in NorthPark Center, stop by Gingertown Dallas, where you’ll find crews of architects, engineers, and designers building gingerbread houses.
Not ready to subject yourself to the holiday retail madness? Can’t say I blame you. Jump with me to the next page for more options.
NFL Says You Can Watch Cowboys on a Sunday
Hey, remember the Dallas Cowboys? They’re in last place now, so you may have either just decided to pretend they’re not there, in that giant glass and steel building that, from aerial view, looks kind of like a hemorrhoid pillow. Or maybe you are are True Believer and are on your computer right this very minute, working out mathematic schemes that would still get America’s Team to the Super Bowl, if pretty much every team got sucked into the ground, save maybe the Lions.
Well, there was a chance that their game against the Eagles would get pulled by the NFL from the televisions this Sunday on account of mental cruelty and nobody caring. Only now the NFL says, “Nah, we won’t pull your game. Have fun watching it, Philadelphia.”
I plan on watching either like this, or like this. Just like I did when I originally wrote this post.
Mark Davis vs. Barrett Brown
Davis illustration by Steve Brodner
In our November issue, Barrett Brown wrote a story that we labeled “a wholly unfair and sneaky takedown of Mark Davis, Dallas’ most influential conservative commentator.” The article occasioned a good-humored letter from Davis, which we published in the December issue. But hang on. We’re not done yet. Barrett read the letter, and he wishes to clarify a few points. To wit:
—
Davis writes the following about the process by which I prompted him to unknowingly attack Ronald Reagan in the course of answering my questions:
But I want to make sure readers understand how he played his catch-the-conservative game. In the first part of the game, he concocted a question about something fairly arcane, and I gave him an answer. But in the second part of the game, he applied as my “answer” a paragraph from a column I’d written about something else. Maybe if one admits to sneakiness up front, that is Teflon for whatever follows.
Contrary to what Davis writes here, the portion of his prior column which I introduce in the course of demonstrating its flaws was not portrayed as any sort of “answer” to the questions I asked him via e-mail; it was clearly marked as having been taken from that column. In fact, that portion of the article is introduced with the following two paragraphs:
Now, the reader may perhaps object that it is unfair to set someone up in such a fashion, akin to baiting deer in an effort to shoot them. If that is the case — and it is not — then let us do something more akin to sitting around in the woods and waiting for a deer to walk into a tree over and over again until it dies; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan without any prompting from me. Better yet, let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan not only while himself bringing him up by name, but also in the course of lauding him for having refrained from doing several things that he actually quite famously did.
A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians. “The ignorant assertion that our nukes and their nukes are the same is not new,” Davis noted in a column for the Dallas Morning News. “Ronald Reagan ignored such droning 30 years ago, driving the Soviets to their knees by refusing to gut U.S. nuclear capability and by refusing to scrap missile defense technology.”
It would be impossible for any reasonable person or even an unreasonable person in the midst of a PCP binge to interpret this as a claim that what follows from Davis is in response to a question I had asked him. At any rate, I wanted to provide this clarification for the record, as anyone who read Davis’ letter without being familiar with my article might assume that I am in the habit of falsely presenting information as deriving from some particular context in some sort of devious effort to make a mainstream political pundit look incompetent, whereas such a trick would hardly be necessary in the current media environment, unfortunately. –Barrett Brown
Leading Off (11/30/10)
1. This is something that actually occurred: “A Louisiana man was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for stealing a newborn calf and beating it to death with a shovel after the Saints lost to the Dallas Cowboys last season.”
2. The Mavericks are rolling, winning their sixth in a row last night against the Houston Rockets. Good way to celebrate Dirk Nowitzki being named Western Conference player of the week. And so I continue having a Google stranglehold on this phrase: I see you, big German!
3. Apparently, the Super Bowl will be a magnet for pickpockets. I called my usual pickpocket source, the Artful Dodger, but he would neither confirm nor deny the report, suggesting I try his boss, Fagin, instead.
4. Parents, be sure to talk to your teenage girls about flexisexuality, but maybe skip the reference to Madonna and Britney Spears kissing, because they probably won’t remember that happening or who those people are. Also, don’t talk to them about some made up word.
5. Also, Virgin America is almost here.
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