Pulse

American Beauty
If you met Mimi Roche on the street, you’d never guess that she’s a model. Oh, she’s gorgeous, all right. But the Colleyville Heritage grad would rather lounge at her Dallas home with her friends than schmooze at Candle Room. She wears trendy discount threads instead of pricey couture. She would never brag that she has walked the runway for Fendi, Moschino, and Tom Ford’s goodbye Gucci show. And she would just die if someone mentioned that she has been compared to über-model Naomi Campbell. “It’s so funny,” the 21-year-old Roche says with a slight Southern drawl. “When I am in New York, everyone always says, ‘Oh, Mimi. You’re so country.’” Her attitude—combined with her piercing, high cheekbones and long legs—is part of the reason she gets jobs most up-and-comers would die for. She signed a contract with the Kim Dawson Agency just three years ago, and she is slated to appear in the United Colors of Benetton advertising campaign. But we still know where to find her when she’s back in Dallas. Just look no further than Chili’s on Knox Street: she’ll take the chain’s home cookin’ over sushi and foie gras any day. —RYAN MENDENHALL

Photo: Larry Travis

———————————-

{ POLITICS }
Calling All Candidates
May 7 didn’t just mark the night Dallas voters beat the stuffing out of the strong-mayor proposal. It also signaled the unofficial start of the May 2007 mayoral race, when Laura Miller will be up for reelection. Her opponents—her many, many opponents—are eager to kick her now that she’s down. Given her knack for reinvention, we’re not going to count her out just yet, but it’s clear that the next election will be a doozy. Here are the latest odds from D’s research department on who might run.

NAME	OCCUPATION	ODDS	CONSULTANT’S NOTES
Darrell Jordan	Lawyer	EVEN	PRO: Looks very mayoral. Plus, he gained credibility helping defeat the strong-mayor proposal. CON: Needs to keep supporters from sending out letters of support boasting about his “breeding,” which happened in 1995 when Ron Kirk beat him handily.
Mark Cuban	Mavericks owner; testy blogger	7-1	PRO: When an ordinance passes, everyone gets a free chalupa. Even testy blogger better, all members of the Council would get plush robes and DVD players in their offices. CON: Job generally requires a suit, a decent haircut, and an attention span longer than three seconds.
Sharon Boyd	Web site gadfly	15-1	PRO: Already attends all of the Council meetings. Plus, she could call the members by those witty nicknames she uses on her site. CON: On second thought, she would use those nicknames. And what’s that we heard about her? Oh, yeah. Never mind.
Ron Kirk	Lawyer	20-1	PRO: Still enormously popular among the power elite, and he would love, love, loooove to clean Miller’s clock for old time’s sake. CON: Has his heart set on a bigger race, even if a bigger race doesn’t have its heart set on him. Sigh.
Roger Staubach	Real Estate mogul; No. 12	50-1	PRO: Could inspire the Council by telling the members to “huddle up” and “drive for the winning touchdown.” CON: Has to worry about splitting the Cowboy vote if Troy Aikman (250-1) decided to enter the race.
Gable Vines	D Magazine intern	100-1	PRO: Real go-getter who brought her Inspiron laptop to work when theoffice was short of computers. CON: Still finishing her undergraduate degree at Texas A&M. Oh, and she has absolutely “zero interest” in politics.

Photos: Miller: Richard Michael Pruitt; Jordan: Irwin Thompson; Boyd: Jim Mahoney; Kirk: Melanie Burford; Staubach: Evans Caglage (All from Dallas Morning News)

———————————-

The Fine Art of Safe Surfing
Hacking into a Highland Park laptop is easier than you think.

Browsing the Internet is always more fun with a stiff drink, so it’s no surprise more folks are adding a wireless router to their broadband Internet connections so they can surf and sip in the kitchen, by the pool, or in the Lamino lounger, next to the humidor. But going wireless can leave you open to hackers, spammers, and, for all we know, burglars who hate Swedish furniture. Recently we cruised through Highland Park, and in less than an hour, we found three unsecured connections: Cornell, between Sewanee and Abbott; Gillon, just Northeast of Abbott, next to Abbott Park; and Highland Park Village, outside of Harold’s.

So what to do? Here are three easy steps you can take to keep the bad guys off your network:

1 Don’t set your router near a wall of your home that faces the street. Otherwise, it’s easier for a drive-by ne’er-do-well to “see” with a laptop.
2 Change the default passwords set by your router manufacturer when you set up your home network. Your children can help you with this.
3 Change the wireless network’s name (the router’s Service Set Identifier, or SSID). If you leave the SSID as “default,” you’re begging for a network break-in. And begging is so not Highland Park. —PHIL HARVEY

———————————-

MAXIMUM SECURITY: Thuraisingham has emerged as a key player in the field of data mining. Photo: Scott Womack.

{ HOMELAND SECURITY }
The Terrorist Hunter
A UTD professor’s inventive technique takes aim at the bad guys

The first thing I notice about Bhavani Thuraisingham is that she likes to be in control. When I arrive for our interview, she tells me where to sit. Then, in her clipped Indian accent, she starts pumping me for information: about my job, about this article, about magazines in general. It’s hard to know who’s interviewing whom.

Fortunately, she is only being friendly (I hope), but you can’t blame me for being skittish: the director of UTD’s Cyber Security Research Center is one of the leading experts in data mining and data security. Data miners sift through various databases and public records to produce profiles of individuals. Marketers do it to target audiences. Businesses do it to find new revenue opportunities. And the government does it to help identify potential terrorists. “You can put several pieces of declassified information together and deduce or infer highly classified information,” Thuraisingham explains.

Before she came to UTD in 2004, Thuraisingham worked for the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that has close ties to the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. That’s where she developed her expertise, and in the months after September 11, 2001, the government tapped her to find clues about terrorist activities. She created a unique program that allowed the government to sift through vast amounts of information and continued to develop more sophisticated data-mining techniques.

For example, a person who takes flying lessons isn’t that suspicious. Neither is a Middle Eastern man living in America. But a Middle Eastern man on American soil who is interested in learning how to fly a plane and is known to have anti-American views might be. Data mining can help lead officials to such subjects, but the results aren’t foolproof—or without ethical problems. Finding a balance between security and privacy remains central to Thuraisingham’s work. “You have to do both,” she says. “You have to find a way to secure privacy while data mining.” —ROGER BROOKS

———————————-

The New Gossip

In the Picture

We were agog at the cover of a recent New York Post, which featured a late-night snapshot of Teri Hatcher holding hands with a young, rougish (did we say “young”?) hottie.

It turns out that the desperate housewife’s boy toy is Dallas’ own Jim Marconi, whom the paper referred to as a “young, tattooed stud.” The 30-year-old Marconi graduated from the Episcopal School of Dallas in 1992, and his parents still live in the Bluffview area. Marconi ditched Texas, though, to pursue a career as a fashion photographer. In fact, the pair met after Marconi shot Hatcher for the cover of Glamour. Marconi told the Post that all of the attention “was just the price you pay to hang out with her, I guess.” Sounds like a small price, if you ask us.

From Graham To Kelly
The home crowd was all in a tizzy when Kelly Clarkson >> rolled into town recently to perform at the Nokia Theater. But some of our spies, who sat on the front row with all the 8-year-olds, were disappointed to find that the American Idol from Burleson wasn’t everything the glossy mags have promised. Still, that hasn’t stopped her love life from blooming. We hear that she’s cozied up to former SMU student Graham Colton (of Everwood fame), whose band opened for Clarkson.

Photo: John Gress

———————————-

{BIG IDEA}

Marshmellow Madness

A local entrepreneur hopes that the little white confection will bring him lots of green.

Johnny De La Valdene—having already brought the world the Off-Road Commode, a portable camouflaged toilet seat that attaches to a trailer hitch—is now endeavoring to do nothing less than change the marshmallow as we know it.

In his Deep Ellum office, De La Valdene, a father of five, cracks open a Monster energy drink and explains how he came to this point. As an SMU student, he opened a video rental outfit and sold it to Blockbuster. Then the second-floor gym that collapsed because the weights were too heavy. Then the Fitness Factory, a chain of gyms that did not collapse and were sold to 24 Hour Fitness. There were tanning salons (sold) and juice bars (also sold). And the reality television show called Stag that throws bachelor parties, tapes them, then shows them to the fiancées. And the other reality show called American Badass, which De La Valdene calls “the Seinfeld of ultimate fighting.” An underwater device that is too top-secret right now to talk about. And so on.

Then, one day in 2003, De La Valdene and a friend used some PVC pipe to build a gun that used air pressure to shoot mini marshmallows. Thus was born the Marshmallow Fun Company, whose first product was the Marshmallow Shooter. Soon, De La Valdene and his partners developed an entire marshmallow franchise around the concept of Marshmallowville. There is a board game. A comic book. Coming soon is the computer-animated Marshmallowville movie, in which the M-Force uses the Marshmallow Shooter to save Earth from the evil Marshans.

But here’s De La Valdene’s secret: “We think the biggest opportunity is in the marshmallows themselves.” That’s because unlike, say, the heavy-duty water gun known as the Super Soaker, De La Valdene can own the ammunition.

He takes a visitor to his office kitchen and begins handing over jars of experimental marshmallow paste, including coffee-flavored and orange. “There are only two companies right now that make marshmallows,” he says. “Boring, white marshmallows. They’re old fogies who don’t care. But marshmallows used to be the No. 2 candy in this country; now they’re not even on the list. We’re going to change that.”

De La Valdene worries about corporate espionage, so he has taken his manufacturing process to a secret location in Mexico. It’s just crazy enough to work.—Tim Rogers

Photo: Allison V. Smith

Pulse

Credits

Related Articles

A Look Into the Life of Bowie House’s Jo Ellard

D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: Cullen Davis Finds God as the ‘Evangelical New Right’ Rises

The One Thing Bryan Yates Would Save in a Fire

One brand, four magazines.

Pulse

Get our weekly recap

Credits

Related Articles