Articles for January 10th, 2011
FrontBurner Live Ad Makes Me Giggle
Big props to our online ad folks for coming up with this banner ad for FrontBurner Live. That’s some good work. (More details here if you want to join us.)
The Final Installment of Souvenir of Dallas
It has been a great collaboration. For 75 years, Paul Milligan and David Hopkins made a comic for D Magazine called Souvenir of Dallas. Then some jerkwad editor up here decided to use Paul and David’s page to do something else, and he killed Souvenir. By all rights, Paul and David should have been royally pissed and launched a denial-of-service attack on D’s servers. Instead, they were cool enough to make a final comic, explaining what really happened. Click it to make it bigger.
Entire World Population Could Fit in Texas
Robert Kunzig of National Geographic is on Krys Boyd’s Think right now discussing his article, “Population Seven Billion.” He said he did the calculations, and the entire world could fit in Texas if each person were alloted the same average square feet of living space as in New York City. I lived in New York City, and the sqaure footage wasn’t that bad. Give up a private screening room and a wine cellar and a couple of extra bedrooms — and most of your kitchen space — and you’d be surprised.
I’m all for it. Imagine all the room left over for farming, flyfishing, and horseback riding. When it comes to picking neighborhoods, I’d want to move to wherever the Italians settle. (The North Koreans can have Odessa.)
DMN Publisher Jim Moroney’s Memo to Staff on Pay Wall, Ctd.
Now this is more like it. The leaking has returned to its FrontBurner-friendly path.
A couple days ago, Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab published a Q&A that quoted Moroney as saying the pay wall move was “a big risk.” Now, in a memo to staff this morning, Moroney says he doesn’t recall saying that:
Big risk? I recall saying it was a risk. And a smart risk. A big risk? Maybe I did say it, but I don’t recall it.
Is it a big risk to our enterprise? No. It’s simply not. In fact, I believe the upside is far greater than the downside. As I do recall saying, this move we are making to ask consumers to pay for the content we distribute digitally isn’t a “the world is flat or it’s round” proposition where getting it wrong means sailing over the edge never to return.
State Budget Shortfall Hits $27 Billion, Ctd.
Rick Perry on September 10 disputed that the deficit could grow as high as $21 billion:
“That’s just rank political rhetoric,” Perry told an interviewer on BloomburgTV’s InBusiness program. “There’s a lot of speculation.” Perry predicted a shortfall of between $10 billion and $11 billion.
As usual, a lot of people fell for Perry’s puffery, including the normally lucid Kevin Williamson at National Review.
Things to Do in Dallas Tonight: January 10, 2011
Reading a little bit about photographer Annie Griffiths, who will be speaking tonight at the Winspear Opera House as part of the National Geographic Live! series, one thought immediately sprang to mind: I’ll bet she’s never been stuck in traffic for hours to traverse Woodall Rodgers.
To further demonstrate why her life is better than yours, attend the presentation (and watch the clip below):
Then check out other things to do in Dallas.
State Budget Shortfall Hits $27 Billion
On Friday, State Sen. John Carona told a Dallas group that the budget deficit would be anywhere from $18 billion to $25 billion. That guy doesn’t know squat. Turns out, it’s $27 billion. So says Comptroller Susan Combs this morning. Matthew Haag over on the DMN’s Dallas ISD blog wonders what that might mean for class sizes. Awhile back, TexMo’s Paul Burka came up with a way to trim $18 billion from the budget. Super. Now we just need to find $9 billion more.
This is gonna hurt.
DMN Publisher Jim Moroney’s Memo to Staff on Pay Wall
Used to be that when Jim Moroney wrote a juicy memo, the leak would happen on FrontBurner. Now it’s Romenesko. Worse, I’ve got to give a h/t to Big Bob Wilonsky, whose tweet alerted me to it. So sad.
Downtown Dallas CEO John Crawford Could Be Watching Us at This Very Moment
Football-related memorabilia is prominently displayed in the downtown Dallas office of the CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc., John Crawford. Makes sense, since he serves on the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee.
He’s also got inspirational quotes from the likes of Vince Lombardi and Clint Eastwood lying around his workspace, which is featured in the new issue of D CEO. But what he should really brag about is what he can see from his perch in Chase Tower.
Judging by the picture (at right, click on it to get a much larger look), he’s able to spy on the goings-on here at D HQ, just a short way down Ross Avenue. You know, if he wanted. And assuming he’s got a pair of great binoculars in one of those desk drawers. Or is he more the spyglass type?
Consensus: Kay Bailey Running for Re-election
When she was first elected in a special election in 1993 (she went on to win a full-term in 1994), she said she would term-limit herself to two full terms. So 2006 should have been her last year. Then, when running for governor, she said she would resign in October or November of 2009. Then in November of 2009 she announced she wouldn’t resign until after the March, 2010 primary.
Politico last week canvassed GOP operatives and discovered, lo and behold, they all think she’s running — and that she will win.
Let me lay my marker down right now. They’re wrong. Once the state’s most popular politician, her dithering and her drubbing by Perry has cost her dearly. Her approval rating is now at 45 percent, and it won’t rise. She’ll lead a primary but face — and lose — a runoff.
In politics, timing is everything. Hutchison made a big mistake by not taking on Perry in 2006 when she was at her highest point and he was at his lowest. But we all make mistakes. The question is whether we learn to live with them.
Texas Is the Nation’s Chess Powerhouse
Once again, UTDallas won the Pan-American Championships, beating out the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The third and fourth place were won by UTBrownsville and Texas Tech, which is using chess as a recruiting tool for bright students:
“To be quite frank, Tech is not Harvard and we have to compete really hard for the best students,” said Dr. Haraldur Karlsson, an associate professor of geosciences at the university who is also the chess club’s adviser. “And there tends to be a link between good chess skills and good academic skills.”
Leading Off (1/10/11)
1. Dallas has increased police presence in public schools, and, lo and behold, that has resulted in a sharp increase (95 percent) in the number of tickets issued to students. Not sure what to say about this one, except that after reading this quote, I’m real happy I’m not in school anymore: “Disrupting class, using profanity, misbehaving on a school bus, student fights and truancy once meant a trip to the principal’s office. Today, such misbehavior results in a Class C misdemeanor ticket and a trip to court.”
2. Just remember: nothing happened. Sure, the police were called by council member Dwaine Caraway. But when the police arrived at the politician’s house, they found that “both the complainant and the wife [Rep. Barbara Mallory Caraway] stated that they had had an argument and settled it.” That’s it. It was settled. It’s just a big misunderstanding between two elected officials that somehow ended up in the annals of the police reports. Pay no attention. Move on.
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