The Houston Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security and something called the regional Catastrophic Planning Initiative have produced a public service video called “Run, Hide, Fight,” advising people on what to do if somebody wants to shoot them. I personally wish to nominate this production for the 2012 “No Shit Sherlock…
Basic rule of American democracy: Anybody who wins an election gets 10 seconds of credibility. Let’s hope in the case of Ted Cruz, lionized today in The New York Times as “A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft,” we can make it to the second 10 seconds…
Dear Mexican: I’m a Mexican-American high school student, and just as patriotic as the Joneses who live next to me. In my neighborhood, a gabacho got mad when someone hung a Mexican flag and ended up cutting it down. I think this whole idea of putting one’s flag up and…
Not trying to be obnoxious. This is not I-told-you-so. But I did told you so. In a column published December 29, I did point out that North Texas was taking all kinds of wild chances with its water supply by refusing to adopt the type of strict safety measures in…
The so-called “New Black Panther Party” in Dallas, now trying to exploit the James Harper shooting in Dixon Circle, always leaves me with the same dilemma. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt like this when they were doing their half-assed ineffectual protest last winter at a South…
Tale of two cities in the morning papers — well, two and a half, if you include Mitt Romney. The Reverend Gerald Britt has a mesmerizing op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News today about the agony of Dixon Circle, the South Dallas neighborhood where a near-riot took place last…
Don O. has been spinning blues records on KNON since 1983, literally about a month after they went on the air. See, he was a listener of the pre-KNON station at that frequency, KCHU, from ’75 until they were switched off in ’77. Heartbroken at the station’s demise and subsequent…
There, next to the Rio Room dumpster, was one of club’s well-suited security men, manned with a velvet rope and a flashlight. The beautiful people were in Rio’s front room, but Saturday night another set of Dallas misfits were making their way down the stairs into that glow-in-the-dark basement. The…
Wait. Time out. Take notice. We are experiencing a new form of national crisis. It can no longer be denied. The United States is now suffering from a crisis of Total Wrongness. Most people are going to think the trigger was a mea culpa speech a couple days ago on…
We’re all holed up behind our verbal barricades on this Dixon Circle deal, me among the worst of them, surprise surprise. So maybe it’s worth remembering that Dallas city councilman Dwaine Caraway was out there Tuesday night. He was urging calm among the hundreds of people angry about the fatal…
I get window shocked every once in a while. I’m in the car going from some pillar to some post, staring straight ahead thinking about stupid City Hall or the stupid North Texas Tollway Authority or stupid Fair Park, and then for some reason I look out the side window,…
Dear Mexican: I know I might sound like a gabacho borracho, but I’m really just a gringo trying to make progress toward getting work legally in Mexico, a side of the immigration debate we rarely hear about. Most gringos who move to Mexico are students at UNAM or retired people…
In Anna Merlan’s coverage of the disturbance last night at Dixon and Bourquin streets about a mile and a half southeast of Fair Park, one particular scenario leapt out. People in the crowd defended the man who was shot to death by police after a running fight with the officer…
The important image is Jerry Sandusky down there in the shower-room doing it to kids. Somehow a penalty that involves not being able to play in bowl games just seems terribly out of whack. I do get what’s right about it. Sandusky and others in this matter face tough criminal…
See also: Jaret Reddick is the new voice of Chuck E. Cheese Colter Hall wasn’t really looking for anything when he happened upon his current gig with Fancorps. He’s also helping out Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup and People On Vacation, who just happens to be Hall’s uncle. After…
You’re kidding me, right? We just sit here like patsies and let the gun nuts tell us we’re not allowed to protect ourselves from the next James Holmes? We know there will be a next one, because we know there was a Jared Lee Loughner, a George “Jo Jo” Pierre…
Here at The Overserved, I like to find the silver lining in Dallas’ highs and lows. Her contradictions and inconsistencies can make the sweet spots in this town that much sweeter. Knowing you’ve worked to discover that dive bar, or come across that perfect little restaurant, can be its own…
An “op-ed” page in a newspaper — the page opposite the editorials — is supposed to be a kind of village square for diverse voices, but does that mean it should be a billboard for lies? The case in point today would be the op ed page of The Dallas…
If I had one of those framed crochet mottos on the wall over my desk, it would say, “Give Credit Where Credit is Due, asterisk.” Below the asterisk at the bottom of the frame it would say, “Except for the Dallas Morning News.” Ah, but you know. Sometimes you gotta…
Some readers, not a whole herd of them but a few, objected recently to my suggestion on our Unfair Park news blog that the city should bulldoze Fair Park — a 277-acre expanse of city-owned land in old South Dallas — because no one knows what it is. I thought…
Dear Mexican: I was wondering about the Spanish going into Mexico and taking the gold and artifacts away from the Indians. Could the Mexican government ask for the gold back? Raider of the Lost Chonis Why doesn’t Mexico’s president demand that all nations and/or entities return stolen artifacts taken from…
The question I hear more frequently now from people in Texas with functioning brains is, “When do we finally have to get out of Texas?” Or is it functioning hearts? There can only be one answer: Never. If anybody has to leave Texas, make it the heartless idiots. Give them…
