I’ve been to my fair share of comic book and science fiction conventions. But until this month, Claire St. Amant had never been to one. So when we went to the Sci-Fi Expo at the Irving Convention Center recently, I did the talking and she did the filming. We hope you’ll do the watching.
I pointed yesterday to a dispatch from the Dallas Observer about Ralph Isenberg, a fellow who seems to be a bit, um, forward. Turns out, he doesn’t limit his threats to Observer writers. In the comments to that Observer post, our own Georgia Fisher related a similar encounter with Ralph Isenberg:
I write for Oak Cliff People, a sister pub of D Magazine, and had a near-freaking-identical experience with Isenberg a few months ago. He broached the subject of his wife, then went off the deep end — screaming, shaking, calling me a bitch, threatening me legally, telling me my career was all but ruined … you get it.
He was enraged and out of sorts to a degree that could’ve easily beget physical violence. I don’t say this for dramatic effect, either; It was just obvious, and made me feel sorrier than ever for his wife.
All the while, Isenberg left a couple of immigrants to sit near the receptionist’s desk, quietly waiting on him for 45 minutes (they’d made an appointment), and finally tried — still howling and sweating and panting — to drag them into our one-sided fight.
Anyway. Over the course of the next few days, he blew me up with text messages, trying to coax me into a trip back to the Bank Tower (though he’d supposedly “alerted security to never allow [me] on the premises again”) and take a second stab at the story — the same one, more or less, that the News printed this past Saturday. And finally, after sending about eight text unanswered text messages, he gave me a line about having problems with his “medication.”
Nice, huh?
Makes me wonder just how much the Dallas Morning News regrets publishing this glowing profile of Isenberg on January 21.
I have a very innocuous question that I need to pose to someone, anyone, in the Pizza Hut media relations office in Plano. When I call the office’s number, a recording gives me three options:
Press 1 if you’re a member of the news media calling about something other than paid advertising.
Press 2 if you’re interested in a media sponsorship.
Press 3 if you’re a customer and want to register a complaint.
When I press 1, I get routed to the “Restaurant Support Center.” When I tell the operator there that I’m a member of the news media who is calling about something other than paid advertising, I get routed back to the original recording.
I’ve called the media relations office for Pizza Hut’s Kentucky-based owner, Yum Brands, and the only “help” I received was the phone number for the Plano media relations office. So, if anyone in that office is reading this, please call me at 214-523-5272.
And a Twitter fight, no less, which is like when people had fights with graffiti in bathroom stalls in days of yore, in case you are not on the Twitters and have never seen a Twitter fight in action.
The Dallas Morning News (because Twitter fights are awesome and so why wouldn’t Dallas’ paper of record cover them) has the rundown here. But basically, here’s how it went:
Former Bengal/something else/Cowboy Terrell Owens (from his couch, since he’s kind of unemployed at the moment) makes fun of Terence Newman, sort of, for tackling Brandon Marshall and failing to bring him down during last week’s game, likening Newman to a “superman cape” hanging around Marshall’s neck as he ran in the TD. But he totally added “LOL” at the end of that, which should’ve made it cool in the Twitterverse.
Local NBC sports anchor Newy Scruggs then points out that Owens is unemployed, and says that his mocking of Newman was “petty.” Then it gets interesting, because OMG – Owens straight up called Scruggs fat. To be accurate, he called him “fat-so.” He then insisted that he wasn’t slamming Scruggs, but instead gave him some weight loss tips, like “u’re FAT & need 2 hit the treadmill ASAP!!”
Scruggs then reiterated that while he might be rubber, TO is glue, and whatever he says, bounces off of him, and sticks to Owens. Or maybe he just said something to the effect of, “I have a job and you do not, kind sir!” And then maybe it went back and forth for a little bit longer, with Scruggs telling Owens to pay his child support and quit claiming poverty.
But Owens got the last word, which was “fatmeat.”
Why isn’t there a market for Twitter war play-by-play?
Can Water Recycling Make Fracking Less Wasteful? Texas in the midst of one of the worst droughts in state history, which is having a lasting effect on Texas trees. But natural gas fracking pushes on, a process which uses up to 2 or 3 million gallons of water per new well. Now companies are trying to figure out how to recycle that water, and they are having some success.
Life Just Got Scarier for Mexican Burros: If you’re traveling out west be sure to shoot a burro. That’s because state officials don’t like all the donkeys that are crossing the border from Mexico illegally, prompting park rangers in Big Bend to shoot and kill 130 of an estimated 300 burros to date. Defenders of the beasts of burden blame the plentiful shrubs and other forage-able foods on the United States side of the boarder which offer incentive for the opportunity-starved Mexican donkeys to take their lives into their hands and make the dangerous trek to America.
Jerry Jones Is Insane: I wasn’t going to post about sports. The last five days have been too traumatic for local sports fans. It’s time to turn our attention to other things for a little while. But then, there is this brief piece by David Moore in which Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says that “There is absolutely no alarm in me” after last night’s rout in Philadelphia. “This is not about re-inventing everything we do,” Jones continues. “This is about being disappointed about not winning this football game.” Okay, Jerry. Whatever you say.
We mentioned the Honest Tea experiment/publicity stunt that was running in cities across America yesterday. According to the “official” results, Chicago is the most honest city in America, since 99 percent of people there who took tea paid for it even though they may have thought that no one was monitoring. Dallas did OK, but only showed a 96 percent honesty rate.
But those raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. As Freakonomics notes, there were substantial differences in the weather of the cities involved. So I did a little number crunching and devised a new stat: TAH (temperature-adjusted honesty.) It’s a simple formula. ((Temperature in degrees Fahrenheit/100) * (Honest Tea raw honesty percentage * 100)).
And I so present the true ranking of the honesty of America’s cities:
| City | Temperature (F) | Raw Honesty | TAH | |||
| Dallas | 101 | 96% | 97% | |||
| Cincinnati | 100 | 96% | 96% | |||
| Atlanta | 96 | 96% | 91% | |||
| Philadelphia | 92 | 96% | 88% | |||
| Washington, DC | 94 | 91% | 86% | |||
| Miami | 92 | 92% | 85% | |||
| Chicago | 85 | 99% | 84% | |||
| Boston | 86 | 97% | 83% | |||
| New York | 95 | 86% | 82% | |||
| Los Angeles | 92 | 80% | 87% | |||
| San Francisco | 74 | 93% | 69% | |||
| Seattle | 67 | 97% | 65% | |||
Texas Tribune via The New York Times outlined the latest in the Amazon sales tax collection plan for the Lone Star State. As you will recall, Amazon was charged $269 million for sales taxes it was supposed to have collected from Texas buyers, the result of its having a major distribution plant in Irving. But shelve that one for a moment. Amazon has a new proposal, ostensibly to make that tax bill go away. It’s promised to create 6,000 new jobs and spend some $300 million on five or six shiny new warehouses and distribution plants in Texas if the state will give it a pass on collecting sales taxes for 4 ½ years. Exceptin’ the taxes would still have to be paid. By us. Texans who buy Amazon products would have to remit the sales tax owed on these purchases directly to the state. Not exactly one-click shopping. Plus, how on earth would this be enforced? And, rather than write a check for 8.25% of your purchase directly to the state, wouldn’t that make you want to shop online at Barnes & Noble or, even better, patronize one of the few remaining independents in Texas? In which case I am all for it.
I love emails like the one below, because they make blogging easy. Many thanks to the FrontBurnervian who brings us the following cool study about the tendencies of Dallas daters.
This is fascinating. Media artist Roger Luke DuBois joined 21 online dating sites to see how singles from different parts of the country describe themselves in their dating profiles. He then mapped the responses — literally on map — by replacing the names of cities and towns with the words used by people in those cities and towns to describe themselves and their ideal dating partners. Each word appears in the place it’s used more frequently than anywhere else in the country. Here’s his explanation.
Here’s the map of Texas.
Having grown up with the innate and utterly reasonable chauvinism that knows Dallas to be sophisticated and Houston crass, I was delighted to see that Dallas daters most use the word “Symphony” in their profiles, while Houston goes for “Rich.” Also, it’s nice to see that Fort Worth is “Loving.” And “Clubs” makes sense for Austin when you consider the music scene.
Other towns are more puzzling: Amarillo=”Setting”; Abilene=”Decision”; Waco=”Exception”; and San Antonio=”Correct.”
If you follow DMN baseball writer Evan Grant (Evan_P_Grant) on Twitter, you already know about his hashtag-gate. After the Rangers’ bullpen blew last night’’s game in Seattle, Grant innocently wrote:
Now Rangers’ going to 40-year-old interim closer in tie game with 0 outs in eighth and go-ahead runner on third. #bullpenisamess
He told me he didn’t do it on purpose. He didn’t realize the “brilliance” of the tweet until the tweet was posted. Needless to say, it’s rocketing through the Internet.
.
D Magazine food photographer Kevin Marple went to LA to shoot pictures of an In-N-Out burger. His life will never be the same.
This video was shot last Wednesday night when it seemed more than apparent that Michael Young would not be playing for the Rangers again. I admit I felt just like this kid last Wednesday. I’m just glad someone didn’t have a video camera.
Under fire from critics, everybody from DART and the NFL to the Super Bowl XLV host committee has been stressing the “rare,” record-breaking nature of last week’s storm. But according to this opinion piece from CBS11’s Jay Gormley, harsh snow and ice storms have become almost routine in North Texas in the 2000s. So maybe it’s time for the spinmeisters to quit relying on that particular excuse, and come up with something else that has more credibility.
1. Is there ever an excuse to whistle to techno music in an office setting?
2. If not, what’s a suitable punishment?
3. What’s your favorite No Doubt song? And do you want to hear it more? If so, click here.
4. Are you going to the Granada tonight?
5. Lemon, lime, orange or plain La Croix?
OK – go. And don’t disappoint me, people.
For all you budding would-be lobbyists or special-interest devotees or just plain regular good citizens, here is a great new tool for following bills introduced in the new session. You can choose by category or by representative/senator. You can read the bills. You can follow their progress or lack of same. You can decide which representative/senator is insane and which is actually doing the job you paid him to do.
What’s New Year’s Eve without a few resolutions? Here are mine:
Be more accountable. When former TV anchor/reporter Brad Hawkins, now a spokesman for Southwest Airlines, was busted by cops on a public lewdness charge in a Dallas park, I made a joke here regarding Southwest’s LUV symbol. But when the charges were later dropped, I failed to note that on FrontBurner. Which wasn’t fair to Hawkins.
Don’t have such a short fuse. After my car was broken into in a DART parking lot the first day I rode the light-rail, I swore off DART here for good. That was dumb. Even though I’ve never parked in a DART lot again, I’ve ridden its trains since and most always had good experiences.
Trying to save money, do not order in sliced turkey breast instead of a full cooked turkey for Christmas dinner even though you know your Better Half prefers the dark meat and the turkey legs. After that happened something else almost got sliced, too.