Randy Travis is the guy in the middle, in case you didn't know.

Reuse Jeans sent out an email today to share pictures from the Jan. 21 grand opening of its new store at the Shops at Park Lane. In the email, they were sure to note how grateful they were that country singer Randy Travis had been able to stop by (see photo above.)

This new photo, and Mr. Travis’ recent Denton County Sheriff’s Department mugshot, have sparked an intra-office disagreement.

Settle the argument: Does he look more like a vampire bat or a vampire from the TV shows Buffy and Angel?

In it, in addition to declaring that he’s a “militant atheist,” he decries the GOP presidential hopefuls, especially Gov. Rick Perry:

He went on to say that he has been “disgusted, amazed, stunned” by candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination, such as Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann, who have been openly hostile to gay rights.

“But they disgusted me less than candidates like Rick Perry, who made that ridiculous advert wearing ‘the Brokeback jacket’, and I think pretend to be homophobic just to win votes.”

You remember the ad he’s talking about, right?

(H/T: DMN Trail Blazers blog)

It's good to be Mark Cuban.

I’m a fan of the ABC show Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs ask for investments from a group of venture capitalists (the “Sharks.”)  Some of the business ideas are great (like the “Netflix for kids’ toys”) but others seem to be ideas that the producers only allowed to get on the air because they’re so laughable.

During the second season Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made several appearances, and in this current season he’s become a regular. At first I found him to be a nice addition, but his celebrity power — he’s by far the most famous of the “Sharks” — is killing the game of it.  Entrepreneurs seem to get weak-kneed when they see Cuban, and they’re willing to accept lesser deals from him (rather than a better deal from another Shark) just for the chance to continue to bask in the glow of his star power. The playing field is tilted in his favor.

Also, on last week’s show, he invested in a website where a guy will draw a cat for you for $10.  The idea was worth a good laugh on TV, but I thought surely the Sharks would say thanks-but-no-thanks.  Cuban put $25,000 into this “business.” He said he was investing more in the guy himself than in the cat-drawing enterprise.

And because of Cuban’s star power?  TMZ says the cat-drawing website has gotten over a thousand orders in a few days, when it had been averaging fewer than 40 in a week.  Cuban tells TMZ he is “fired up.”  Basically he thinks he’s found himself the next Cosmo Kramer.

Mr. Cuban, I will sell you 33% of any of the following ideas in exchange for $25,000:

1) “I Will Draw You a Rabbit.” — Cats are over. Rabbits are the future.

2) FurryBook — Social networking site for the “Furry” community.

3) ToastFlex (Netflix For Toasters) — If you’re like me, you get tired of using the same toaster every day. But who can afford to keep up by constantly buying the latest bread-roasting technology?

4) Gaggle —  A search engine specifically geared towards all your goose-related searches. Just type any phrase in the Gaggle box, and it will automatically append the words “goose,” “geese,” or “gander” onto your query. It may seem as though it saves only seconds off your typical search, but, over the course of a lifetime, our calculations show that those seconds will total nearly three full years of life for the average person.  (Note: Study results assume the average person is a goose or poultry fetishist.)

5) How to Improve the NBA —  Everyone knows you don’t have to watch anything more than the last few minutes of a typical professional basketball game. Few contests are decided before that point, and those that are are dull blowouts. Plus, no one likes to watch teams dragging out the last minute of play by intentionally fouling on the off-chance that turning it into a free-throw contest will turn the tide. The solution? Simple: The end of NBA games should no longer be determined by the clock. The first team to 90 points wins, period. Or 95. Or 85. Or whatever. You can work out the details.  I’m just the idea man.

Watch Cuban continue to big-foot around the Shark Tank when the show airs at 7 p.m. tonight.

What? You're not using venison on your Super Bowl Frito Pie, like this version at Tillman's Roadhouse? Photo by Kevin Marple

While the organizers of last year’s North Texas Super Bowl are wondering why the football gods couldn’t have delivered us the weather we’re having this week in 2011 — instead of the Snow-and-Ice-Mageddon we got — Smithsonian.com reflects upon another Texas contribution to our country’s annual orgy on football and new television commercial campaigns: the Frito.

Those little fried corn chips were given birth in San Antonio in the 1930s, and they remain a cornerstone of business for the Plano-based Frito Lay company, which owns the trademark for the “Frito Chili Pie”: officially a “packaged meal combination consisting primarily of chili or snack food dips containing meat or cheese corn-based snack foods, namely, corn chips.”

But Smithsonian traces the true roots of Fritos much further back in the history of the Americas:

As much scorn and derision as today’s leading nutritional gurus heap onto processed foods, it’s worth noting that Fritos arrived here by way of a Mesoamerican staple and their invention and flavor owes a debt to one of the greatest food processing technologies ever invented: nixtamalization. The 3,000-year-old tradition adding calcium hydroxide—wood ash or lime—so greatly enriches the available amino acids in masa corn that Sophie Coe writes in America’s First Cuisines that the process underlies “the rise of Mesoamerican civilization.” Lacking this technology, early Europeans and Americans (who considered corn fit for slaves and swine) learned that eating a diet exclusively based on unprocessed corn led to pellagra, a debilitating niacin deficiency causing dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death.

Just a little something to think about as you’re dipping your chips this Sunday.

Dallas Economy Underperforms State Average: This story about the Dallas Fed’s report on the Texas economy is behind the paywall, but this scribd.com link should get you to the meat. The takeaway, Houston boasts the state’s strongest economy, thanks to a healthy energy market, while DFW (Dallas/ Fort Worth-Arlington) has underperformed the state average over the past five years.

Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Second Best: That’s right, according to some guy at CNBC, the Super Bowl-bound Patriots have better cheerleaders than the team that introduced the sideline gimmick. What’s wrong with our ladies? Well, not allowing the cheerleaders to have their own social media accounts doesn’t help.

That there is a video of Mr. Glenn Beck—who comes across like that uncle of yours who spends all his time in his wood-paneled den fiddling with electronic doodads he bought at RadioShack—giving a tour of his new HQ being built at the Studios at Las Colinas.  You may remember that he was initially going to set up shop in a former megachurch in Southlake, but he decided instead to work from the place that made Walker, Texas Ranger such an iconic television program.

He’s calling the place the “American Dream Labs,” and he hopes that it both inspires and will “drive the left out of their mind.”

Speaking of the left being driven out of places, July 26-28 might be a good time to plan to leave town for your summer vacation this year. Those are the dates when thousands of Beck’s acolytes will descend upon Dallas-Fort Worth for his “Restoring Love” event, which will conclude with a rally at Jerry’s Death Star.

(H/T: NBCDFW)

*Yes, it’s behind a paywall. The takeaway is Eminem is a Cowboys fan and he’s frustrated.

‘Dallas’ Looks To Capitalize on Recessionary Escapism: A flurry of news stories about the revival of the television show “Dallas” hit the inter-webs this weekend. This is all you need to know, via Larry Hagman: “Remember when ‘Dallas’ was really big, we were in a major recession,” he said. “People couldn’t afford to hire a babysitter and go out to dinner. So they had to stay in and watch something on TV, and that was us.”

Rick Perry Continues To Self-Destruct Presidential Hopes: Rick Perry believes that calling for the prosecution of legal adults serving in the marines who made a video of themselves urinating on Taliban corpses shows “disdain for the military.” Cue Zac.

Since then, not much has been heard of Carruth, though he apparently is still working on his next project. IMDB says he’s in preproduction on something called Upstream Color. This week, The Colony Courier-Leader reports, Carruth was visiting family in The Colony and Frisco, and decided to get a little work done on his film at the The Colony Aquatic Park. The crew consisted of just Carruth, his producer, and a “well-known actress” from the Dallas area whose name the newspaper was asked to withhold from the article:

Attired in a one-piece, modest, black swimsuit, she worked tirelessly diving to the bottom of the pool, performing an action that may have been pretending to pick up things. She and the director did this over and over.

All of this went on for several hours after the pool closed. The Colony Aquatic Park Manager Elise Knox stood by to make sure the trio had everything they needed. Lifeguard Josh Naph also was on hand, just in case.

Knox said she thought at first Carruth was doing a film project for school, but was delighted to discover she had seen his first film, “Primer.”

She charged them the same rate a small group renting the pool for a party would be charged. She also showed the director other locations he could use. She said he would consider The Colony for other projects.

“It took two hours and we got about 10 seconds of film we’ll use,” Carruth said as he dried off.