We’ve seen a bunch of news organizations, locally and nationally, putting together their annual Christmas playlists recently. They were great! Bing Crosby, Wham!, more stuff you’ve likely wanted to off yourselves to while counting down the hours til you can leave Aunt Sally’s.
So Peter, Zac, Mosley, and I put our sad, Christmas-hating heads together and came up with a new playlist, one that will hopefully make you want to punch through a gingerbread house. Or at least make you drink enough so “A Britney Spears Christmas” doesn’t make you burn down Aunt Sally’s split-level ranch.
tp://frontburner.dmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/george-bush-ford-f150-300×179.jpeg” alt=”" width=”300″ height=”179″ /> George, strikin’ a pose. Source: Barrett-Jackson, “the World’s Greatest Collector Car Auctions”
A pickup former President George W. Bush used on his Crawford ranch will be auctioned off to benefit Fisher House Foundation, a program dedicated to assisting U.S. military families.
Let’s go straight to the announcement:
“President Bush has used this stunning white F-150 at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, since shortly after he left the White House in 2009. With a 5.4-Liter V8 engine commanding 310 horsepower, this impressive truck has a luxurious adobe King Ranch premium leather interior and 11,200lbs towing capacity. President Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush have since used the truck to work around their ranch; entertain friends, family, and dignitaries and to give tours of their Crawford property.”
The most interesting thing to me: he used the truck to “entertain friends.” Donuts, presumably, or maybe some sort of demolition derby. Also, why’d he stop at the 150 model? Seems like a man who’d at least go F250, with all that ranching.
The auction is January 19, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Get more info and tickets (tickets?) here.
My mother always said the best press releases include the subject line: “WIENERMOBILE VISITS DALLAS AREA THIS WEEK.” I thought it was a strange maxim as a child, pushed it into the back of my head, and forgot about it for 20 years. Yesterday, it bounded back into my consciousness.
I found the Wienermobile at the Fiesta on Jefferson Boulevard. It was being ignored. Hundreds of little kids preferred the free cake and clowns in another corner of this makeshift, Monday-evening festival, so I had the wiener all to myself. 27 feet of wiener, just waiting to be loved. (more…)
Around 5 p.m. yesterday, I got a text from Mooney. Edited for content: “Josh Brent is on the [humping] sideline right now.” We were both confused, I think, and I responded with: “Saw that. So strange.”
Several of the Cowboys players called Brent and implored him to come to the game. They wanted him there. Since Brent is on the non-football illness list, he can show up at any time before the game like a player on injured reserve and gain access.
Owner Jerry Jones, executive vice president Stephen Jones and head coach Jason Garrett weren’t aware that Brent was going to be at the game until they saw him on the sidelines. Brent eventually left the game once he realized he was being a distraction.
ds/2012/12/large.jpeg” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”338″ /> Photoshop, at its finest. Source: Barack Obama Park’s Facebook page
Carol just directed my attention to possibly the loneliest Facebook page in the history of Facebook pages, the one dedicated to renaming Klyde Warren Park ‘Barack Obama Park.” As of this morning, it had one “like.”
The main thrust behind the page: “Who @KlydeWarrenPark was responsible for the decision to name ‘a central gathering space for Dallas and its visitors’ after a 10-yr-old boy?” Answer: the dude who donated more money than all of us, combined. A series of tweets – from an account with 11 followers – continues to tell the story.
And, was/were that/those person/people intoxicated? Pressured by unpleasant forces? Confused? Unaware of effects? Or just simply unaware?
“Let me take the pro-gay marriage people and the religious people – I believe that there is a connecting dot there that nobody is looking at, and that’s the Constitution…The question is not whether gay people should be married or not. The question is ‘Why is the government involved in our marriage?’”
Glenn agreed with Penn, noting that gay marriage does not “pick my pocket nor break my leg” and he doesn’t feel like the government needed to be involved. He said that as long as the government doesn’t come into his church and say he or his church (or any church) need to change their belief system and their practices, he doesn’t care. But right now, people of faith who may not want gay marriage in their church are being shut out of the conversation by activists and progressives.
The difference between endorsing same-sex marriage from a libertarian sense and endorsing it from a religious sense could take up more bandwidth than we have. And the Venn diagram of fiscal conservatives and social conservatives overlaps enough that the point may be moot. Still, it’s heartening to see a prominent conservative take such a public approach to a typically liberal stance. An Yglesias Award for Beck.
According to Wikipedia, “Cathie L. Adams (born 1950) is a homemaker from Dallas, Texas, who is the former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.” There are many, many strange things on Wikipedia. That intro is, somehow, not the strangest thing that will likely soon appear on that page.
According to Right Wing Watch, a week before the presidential election, Adams spoke at the Lakeview Church of the Nazarene, in Tyler, next to Ted Cruz. The evening was billed as a “call to action” in a posting that included the phrase “Now is the time for Amnericans to remember the roots of our greatness.” Sic.
Some of the best quotes from the speech:
Who is a Marxist in our White House? Of course, it’s Barack Hussein Obama. And I don’t know why we’re not calling him what he is as a Marxist. It’s as if, when the wall fell that communism died; it didn’t. Today, it is green on the outside and red on the inside. It is as red as ever and Barack Obama is implementing his green agenda, which is Marxism, and that is exactly why our economy is hurting as badly as it is and why twenty three million people are still out of work. That is exactly what is happening.
Folks, we have a rule of law, we have a Constitution and those things must be upheld. We cannot think that, well, if what their trying to do, for example, right now on a ballot in Colorado is legalize marijuana. And if we legalize it, will we empty out our jails and will we be safe for ever more? No. I’m telling you, Barack Hussein Obama has got to have a teleprompter because he fried his brain on drugs.
Adams now runs the Texas Eagle Forum, which, if its tagline wasn’t “progress through preservation of traditional values,” I’d think was the coolest name ever.
For those counting, that’s three negative Cowboys stories, plus the news that Robert Griffin III’s injury could be so minor that he might play against the Browns on Sunday.
Warning: unless you work at a depraved office like I do, the language in this video is incredibly NSFW. Still, it’s worth it just to get to the end (starts at 1:50) where dude shows his true roots and starts rhyming about Highland Park and St. Mark’s. Shot last night on Lower Greenville.
A spread of Nancy Newberry’s project “Mum” in a German photography magazine.
Though this is a tradition I’m completely unfamiliar with, DFW-based photographer Nancy Newberry’s latest project involves shooting the biggest freaking homecoming corsages you could imagine.
Artificial, shiny and virtually unknown outside of Texas, the Homecoming Mum is an elaborate corsage, exchanged between friends and lovers. They are ritually worn and subsequently immortalized, tacked to bedroom walls as trophies. Â At a time when many American high schoolers seem purposefully disengaged from the world around them, the Mum constitutes both a unique act of cultural immersion and a specific brand of folk art.
Only a quarter-inch of rain fell – on average — across Texas in November, prompting meteorologists and climatologists to worry about a second (third? fourth? thousandth?) wave of the state’s crippling drought. The rain report for Dallas-Fort Worth for the month was even more bleak – .05 inches, according to the Star-Telegram, the fifth-driest on record.
So where does that leave us? If you look at the fancy map atop these words, D-FW is in much better shape than most of the state. The Panhandle and far South Texas are still mired in droughts of epic proportions, far worse than our area. Take a closer look, though, and the picture becomes less clear.
This is just a warning/reminder to check back in at some point this week. Zac will have live, up-to-the-minute Photoshops (MS Paints, really), color commentary, and Chuck Norris quotes. Chill the chard.
A few months ago, before I took this position, I interviewed Jane Bryant, who owns a crumbling apartment building off Davis Street in Oak Cliff. The conceit was this: Lee Harvey Oswald used to live there, the city wanted it torn down due to its condition. The city won, sort-of – read some of the saga here – so Bryant is selling off the building piece by piece.
LEE HARVEY OSWALD BATHED HERE! Original 1925 cast iron bathtub from historic unit #2 at 600 (602-604) Elsbeth, Dallas, Texas, listed in the Warren Commission. Oswald lived there from November 1962 to March 1963 with wife Marina and baby daughter. Building to be demolished November 2012! To view property contact 214-577-7119. Buyer responsible for arranging and paying for shipping separately.
If that’s the kind of thing you enjoy – bathing in the tubs of presidential assassins– the opening bid is $235. No bids have been placed.
FrontBurner® launched in March 2003, the first blog in Dallas run by a media organization. This is where the editors of D Magazine come to waste a tremendous amount of time.
