D

Leading Off (10/09/09): Moving Day Edition

Today D Magazine will officially vacate the building that it has called home for nearly the entirety of the Aughts. Most of us have already emptied out our desks. We’ll be “working from home” while a moving crew and our soon-to-be-suffering IT department get our new downtown office set up. We’d like your business to be as unproductive as ours while that happens.

1.  The Oak Lawn Avenue building we’re leaving is Hampton Court. That name is shared by a 16th-century English palace originally built for Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, a key adviser of King Henry VIII. The king later took possession of Hampton Court himself and expanded it. Excuse enough for us to do a little jousting.

2. For the last three years, I have had a dream of a commute to work. I live close enough to our office that I walk nearly every day. But come Monday, I’m back to relying on an automobile. Strangely, because I am opting for a less-expensive parking option downtown, I’ll actually have to walk a greater distance from the parking garage to our downtown office than I currently walk from my home to our Oak Lawn building. And so a little practice walking under difficult circumstances could still be helpful.

3. We’re relocating to St. Paul Street, in a building called St. Paul Place. To help familiarize you with the D Empire’s new patron saint, see if you can avoid being martyred. You may need to brush up on your Baltimore Catechism, or maybe just Wikipedia.

Name That Corporate Lobby

Cool Bike Festival Rides Into Town Today

If you’re the pedaling sort, you need to check out Cyclesomatic, a bicycle festival put on by Bike Friendly Oak Cliff. It goes all weekend and involves beer and bicycles and movies and bicycles and scavenger hunts and bicycles.

From the Great Headlines Department

An alert FBvian draws our attention to this story on NBC Channel 5’s website. It ain’t so much the story, which isn’t local, but the headline. The one on the website right now reads: “Self-Loving Trucker Flips Rig, Loses Load.” But check the URL. You can tell someone made the headline writer tone it down a bit. The original was: “Masturbating Trucker Flips Rig, Loses Load.” [standing, clapping] There are a couple gems in the story itself, too.

Charity Beaver Still in the Hunt

Lest you forget, the “10 Most Beautiful Women in Dallas” contest — or, as we affectionately refer to it, the “10 Most Beautiful Women in Dallas” contest — is chugging along. Three more women were eliminated. But Charity Beaver wasn’t one of them. I know I speak for semi-aquatic rodents everywhere when I say, “You go, Ms. Beaver!”

Leading Off (8/21/09)

1. I thought this headline said the Dallas Convention Center hotel operator outlined its “flood” options, which I thought sounded like a very important story. But then I figured, hey, it’s Friday. You don’t want depressing news. You want to know it’s going to house a Bob’s, a Morsel’s, and other casual dining options. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month. Unless it floods, of course.

2. Another miscalculation: leaving my computer in the car on the morning we get hours of thunderstorms, complete with continuing flood warnings. Um … duck?

3. And the Dallas Cowboys play their first game in the new stadium tonight, albeit of the preseason variety. Yours truly will be doing my poor imitation of the great Bob Sturm, offering a game recap tomorrow on Inside Corner. Unless it’s raining and my computer is in the car again. That wasn’t fun.

Cowboys Stadium Hosting PlayStation/Madden NFL 10 Event This Saturday

The headline is pretty self-explanatory, and all relevant details are after the jump, in the form of what we in the business call a “press release.” Before you go clicking, I will add that it’s invite-only, as far as I can tell, but you can still secure a spot by going here. Also, based on the latest issue of ESPN The Magazine (no link, since they’ve hidden it behind the pay wall), Cowboys Stadium is a fitting locale, since the Jerry World will, indeed, appear in the forthcoming version of the Madden franchise. In fact, the game’s developers have been behind the curtain, so to speak, since the blueprint stage, so the Madden version of the stadium will be identical, down to the last beam. Okay, now you can jump.

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Grapevine, Get Ready: QuakeCon 2009 is Almost Here

Full details after the jump. I could pretend I know something about this, but I’m on deadline.

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Zac Crain Is Sleeping With Dick Washburne?

Timmy, thanks for the information. That explains a lot. I can really pick ‘em.

Duke Nukem Forever Maker Gets Nuked Forever

A trickily named FBvian alerted us to the fact that local gaming concern 3D Realms has shut down. Notable because 3D Realms is…

…the guys who have been “making” the game Duke Nukem Forever for over TWELVE YEARS. It was originally supposed to arrive ten years ago, when PCs were as big as suburban houses and the Pentium III was imaginary.

Go here for more.