Hello, Off the Kuff readers! I’m Ginger and I’ve been friends with our host for nigh onto thirty years. Back in the early 2000s, when they called it “warblogging”, I had a blog, but I’ve long since retired it. I’ve been sending Charles items from the news in Dallas, where I now live, for a while and offered to start doing local news roundups for DFW.
I was born and raised in Houston, lived for a decade in Austin, and have lived in Dallas for four and a half years now: long enough to get familiar with a lot of local politics but not long enough to have found everything about the area that’s interesting. My political interests are broad, from immigration (I used to work as a paralegal for a corporate immigration lawyer) to reproductive choice (Charles and I infiltrated an anti-abortion activist meeting together to report back to our local Planned Parenthood many years ago), to disability issues. When I’m not doing politics, I read a lot, mostly history, mysteries, and science fiction/fantasy, listen to a lot of music, and play tabletop roleplaying games in person and online.
What you can expect to see from me is news from the DFW metroplex, centered mostly on Dallas and the Dallas-side suburbs mixed with some local stories that I get from friends who are still in Austin and a few larger stories that grab my interest. I’ll probably post about a half-dozen links every week and we’ll see how it goes.
- Houses Catch Fire in Tenth Street, Dallas’ Historic Freedman’s Town. This is in South Dallas, which means south of I-30, which means Black Dallas. It’s a city historic district but unsurprisingly there’s not a lot of investment.
- Man jailed in Dallas Zoo crimes plans to steal more animals if released, affidavits say. (DMN, paywalled, no paywall version on MSN). According to the police, it looks like most of the recent trouble at the Dallas Zoo can be traced to this one person, who was responsible for the theft of the emperor tamarin monkeys and attempted theft of the clouded leopard and the langur monkeys. No word yet on whether they’re going to charge him with the killing of Pin, the endangered lappet-faced vulture who was found dead in his cage recently.
- Dallas city council votes to commemorate Roe v. Wade. One council member (mine, who will be hearing from me) voted against it and several others and the mayor absented themselves. Also there’s paywalled story covering the same story at the Dallas Morning News, which goes a bit more into the local politics of Black south Dallas and Hispanic/Latin east Dallas supporting abortion rights and white north Dallas not so much.
- ‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’ This story about a near collision between a FedEx cargo jet and a Southwest passenger jet at Austin Bergstrom terrified me. Also worth your time is this recommended blog post from a retired air traffic controller (linked within above): Austin Disaster; Jfk Incursion; Memphis Police: Safety Systems Gone Wrong. Apparently ABIA doesn’t have AMASS (Airport Movement Area Safety System) [pdf] and that’s a safety problem I didn’t know about when I was flying in and out.
- Blast from the past: Elián González nearly became an American. Now, he’s poised to become a Cuban lawmaker. The struggle over González was huge in its day; I can only imagine the hot takes it would generate now. But time marches on and the five-year-old we middle-aged folks remember from the news is now pushing 30.
- Finally, in local fun: What We’re Cooking for Meow Wolf Grapevine! Meow Wolf is an immersive, interactive art company. They started in Santa Fe and their fourth installation is coming to DFW this summer. A friend from Santa Fe recommended them as a fun thing to visit so I’ve been following news about them as they get closer to opening. This is a peek behind the scenes and is only whetting my appetite to visit.
Note from Charles: The idea to do this kind of Dallas-centric news roundup emerged from an email exchange Ginger and I had. It was Ginger’s blog, which I stumbled across in 2001, that gave me the impetus to do this blogging thing, and I’m delighted to have her voice on here. We’ll see how this goes, and we may come up with a suitable name for the feature if we’re inspired. Let me know what you think.
This is an excellent idea and a great complement to the coverage on this blog.
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