Monday saw temperatures bring near record highs for the day—it doesn’t often get up into triple digits that late in September, especially not 102 or 103 degrees. But that heat foretold the first hint of fall.

According to the National Weather Service, what we saw on Monday is known as “compressional warming.” We had strong southwestern winds from West Texas come into town, compressing as it pushed downward, causing higher temperatures due to the friction of the system meeting cooler air closer to the ground.

The cold front began this morning with a denser blast of air pushing out the hotter, higher-pressure system. That cooler air will settle in for the next few days, plunging temperatures as much as 30 degrees below what they were on Monday. By the time you wake up Wednesday, the NWS believes temperatures will be in the 50s.

COVID Update. Hospitalizations in Dallas County are still high but appear to have plateaued. The average number of new daily cases in the county for the last two-week period is 1,390; for the previous two-week period, it was 1,222. Encourage your friends to get vaccinated.

Rowlett Bar Doesn’t Dig Masks. Hang Time Sports Grill & Bar owner Tom Blackmer has gotten a lot of attention for his no-mask policy. This DMN story reports that a couple was recently told to remove their masks, which their pediatrician recommend they wear because they have a baby with CF. I agree with Blackmer. This shouldn’t be a big deal. Find another sports grill and bar.

More Cops in Deep Ellum. In response to the recent violent crime in the entertainment district (particularly the shooting Sunday that left one person dead and five injured), Chief Eddie García said his department will “take Deep Ellum back.” Part of that effort will include a more visible police presence. (Presumably the folks at Bullzerk are already at work on t-shirts that say “take Celina back” and “take Dalworthington Gardens back” and so forth.)

Cop Watchdog Calls for More Transparency. Tonya McClary is the head of the Office of Community Police Oversight. She says the department didn’t inform her when it cleared a cop in an investigation into a pepper ball shooting of a protestor. McClary will propose new rules about keeping her office and the public informed.

Stay off 635. They’re working on the highway. Here’s where and when lanes will be closed.

Betty Sitton taught Chemistry II my senior year of high school. This was 1988 at Cistercian Prep, in Irving. The course was a real challenge, one that I was not equal to, at least not on Mrs. Sitton’s terms.

Memory is a funny thing, but as I recall, the trouble started somewhere around electron probability clouds. Trying to explain the concept, Mrs. Sitton, a deeply religious, patient woman, compared electrons to the Holy Trinity. Something about not being able to directly measure it but knowing, nonetheless, that it existed. I forget exactly. More than 30 years have elapsed (!). But she brought religion into a science class, and I took that as an invitation to abandon the formal study of chemistry and occupy my mind while in Mrs. Sitton’s class with more worthy matters. I was not alone.

Juan and Brent Reaves, owners of Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que, can’t get on an elevator without someone saying something. “If I get onto an elevator right now,” Juan explains, “and other people get on, too, there’s gonna be a guy that’s like, ‘I know this sounds weird, but you really smell great.’ We’ve gotta figure out how to make this a cologne.”

It’s a typical comment from any good pitmaster. The smell of the smoker follows you, for better or worse. And in the case of the Reaves brothers, it’s clearly for the better. There’s a line of avid regulars trailing out the door of Smokey John’s at 11:15 a.m. on a Wednesday.

But that line wasn’t always there. There was a time, just after the Reaves brothers lost their mother, when the restaurant was hemorrhaging money. “We were losing like $8,000 a month. My mind was blown,” Brent says. They had to do something. Fast.

“I started going out into the neighborhood passing out coupons. I’d take $50 out of the register and go make copies of the menu on orange paper. I would walk every morning and pass out flyers to every building, every person– everywhere.”

Brent remembers, “And one lady, this older lady, she took a menu and she says,” Brent puts on his best high-pitched nice-old-lady voice, “‘Oh! Y’all have a little barbecue place down the street!’”

“I said, ‘Yes, ma’am!’ And she goes,” (Brent mimics the lady taking the paper and shoving it up against her own nose, sniffing it like a kid with a scratch-and-sniff sticker. She’s disappointed.) “‘It doesn’t smell like anything!’”

He laughs. “I was like, ‘What do you want it to smell like?’ And she’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know—you’re selling barbecue!’”

He went right back to the restaurant, took another $50 out of the register to make a new set of copies. Only this time, “I put them in the smoker overnight,” Brent says with bright eyes.

“So, the next morning, I came back out and I hit all the same places all over again. And about 11:15, all these people start coming in the door with this flyer. Catering started coming in like crazy.”

Smoker-scented menus FTW.

In Leading Off today, Zac mentioned SMU’s wondrous win over Louisiana Tech and Rich Phillips’ ecstatic play-by-play call, which he said sounds like “a toddler reacting to a magic trick” if you took that same spirit and put it in a grizzly bear. But what exactly does that sound like? Let your ears tell you. (P.S., that’s Scott Garner in the booth with with Phillips, sounding like he’s having a stroke and an orgasm at the same time.)

THE MUSTANGS ARE GONNA WIN IT‼️

Listen to @Rphillipstexas's call of @SMU_Football's GAME WINNER against Louisiana Tech‼️#PonyExpress | #PonyUpDallas

📻🔥⤵️ pic.twitter.com/8cwFSCmXhw

— Learfield Audio (@LearfieldAudio) September 19, 2021

The battle against the COVID-19 virus steals the headlines, but another war is being waged under the surface. Data analytics professionals and public health officials are constantly fighting to stay ahead of the massive amounts of data generated by the pandemic. In Dallas, the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation leads that effort and develops lessons for future pandemics.

Over the last several months, PCCI has predicted and readjusted its predictions for when North Texas would reach “herd immunity,” defined as when a certain percentage of a population is protected against the virus either through vaccination or post-infection antibodies. Like so much of the medical and scientific world over the last couple of years, the unprecedented nature of the pandemic means that what is a best practice one day becomes obsolete the next. But in a peer-reviewed study published in the New England Journal of Medicine‘s media outlet Catalyst, experts from PCCI help us understand why the virus is acting the way it is and what we can learn from it in the future.

The study is called “Rethinking Herd Immunity: Managing the Covid-19 Pandemic in a Dynamic Biological and Behavioral Environment” and helps explain why Dallas is experiencing new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations at a rate as high as ever. Despite predicting reaching herd immunity earlier in the summer, PCCI has moved the date back and increased the percentage required to reach the barometer from 80 percent to 95 percent. Societal immunity is a moving target because of the dynamic nature of four factors: infection-related immunity, vaccine-related immunity, the opportunity of the virus, and the infectiousness of the virus.