A month ago, I wrote about which Dallas City Council members were using VisitDallas’ suite at American Airlines Center. Well, first I complained that the city wouldn’t tell us who was using it, and then the city told us it was southern Dallas council member Casey Thomas and former West Dallas member Monica Alonzo—so I wrote about that. Soon after, I got a fun email about an adjacent situation in Irving.

One request for city records later, I’ve come to realize a few things. The city of Irving’s deal with the Toyota Music Factory gives it seven premium seats to every Live Nation event held at the Pavilion, the mixed-use development’s outdoor concert venue. The mayor, Rick Stopfer, gets first dibs on four of them. The city’s seven attendees also get a $12,500 monthly bar tab to spend via servers who swing by their seats. And Stopfer has a live music habit that would put the most seasoned festival-goer to shame.

In July, Toyota Music Factory hosted Coheed and Cambria, Jill Scott, Young the Giant with COIN, PRETTYMUCH, The Head and the Heart, Chaka Khan and Michael McDonald, Rock the Yacht, The Try Guys, Caravana Del Amor, Yes, Third Eye Blind, $UICIDEBOY$, and Alice Cooper and Halestorm. Stopfer received at least four tickets to all 13 shows.

According to a list of the ticket distribution, in the three years the venue has been open, the mayor has attended 148 events in all.

Uber Makes it Officially Official. The transportation tech company will ship in 400 jobs by the end of the year, moving into six floors of a building at Deep Ellum’s The Epic development in 2020. It’ll eventually move into a new 25-story building in the same development, occupying just about the whole thing. Total incentives for the deal could reach $36 million. And then there’s this.

Dallas County Commissioners Vote Down Raises. County officials up for a bump in pay were not happy with Judge Clay Jenkins and commissioners Elba Garcia and J.J. Koch, who decided nah.

22-year-old Charged in Double Homicide. On Monday, police arrested and charged a man name Dangelo Johns for capital murder related to a shooting in a Pleasant Grove game room last week that left two dead.

Woman Killed in Old East Dallas. Authorities found Sara Hudson, 22, after extinguishing an SUV that was on fire.

Cowboys Extend Jaylon Smith. It’s five years and $64 million, with $35.5 million guaranteed.

It’s official. Uber is opening an office in Deep Ellum that will eventually employ 3,000 people. The company will have 400 people in place by year’s end. The mayor, the county judge, the governor, the Dallas Regional Chamber — everyone is super pumped about the decision to give Uber $36 million in incentives to set up shop. So good on us. I hope this works out. I’ll put aside for now my concerns about whether the company will ever turn a profit. Never mind the 400 employees who were laid off in July. Course correction. It’s all good.

Except wait a second here. One passage in the DMN story about the news caught my attention. It’s this:

Firstly, if you’re already caught up in Jeffery Epstein murder conspiracies, as several of my coworkers are (Tim), please read this. Christine Tartaro, author of Suicide and Self-Harm in Prisons and Jails and a professor of criminal justice at Stockton University, makes a good point in an interview published today with Mother Jones. Part of the reason people find Epstein’s suicide hard to believe is because so many Americans don’t understand the current state of correctional facilities across the country. They suck. New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Epstein died, has been the subject of prisoner complaints for its torturous conditions for years.

Secondly, if you thought the whole Epstein thing had nothing to do with Dallas, read this. Over the weekend, The Daily Beast traced the twisted family tree of Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell. One of Ghislaine’s older sisters, Christine Maxwell, spearheads Special Projects for Information Resources at the University of Texas at Dallas. The board director of Chiliad Inc. made her fortune as one of the founders (along with her twin, Isabel) of Magellan, one of the first internet search engines. She’s also the author of the international bestseller The Pergamon Dictionary of Perfect Spelling. Apparently it is very helpful for people with dyslexia.

Thirdly, as to why Christine may be relevant to the whole affair, the New York Post reported yesterday that she was spotted picking up bags near the Massachusetts home of Scott Borgerson, a tech CEO who had been romantically linked to Ghislaine, leading to speculation that she might be aiding her sister.

Fourthly, if you thought the Maxwells were a crazy clan, The Daily Beast also goes down the rabbit hole of Christine’s husband’s lineage. Christine is married to the astrophysicist Roger Malina, who is a professor of physics at UTD. His father is Frank Malina, a member of Caltech’s infamous Suicide Squad (so-named because their rocketry experiments were so volatile) who is described as “an early Elon Musk type who was part of the ragtag group whose daring rocket experiments in 1930s Pasadena led to the formation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in L.A., the precurser to NASA.”

But because the FBI labeled Malina a socialist during the McCarthy era, and he was subsequently forced to flee to Paris, he is often not credited as one of the early space race pioneers. The upside is that he took up painting and launched Leonardo, a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to provide a scientific take on art.

And like father like son: Roger, as the Arts and Technology Distinguished Chair and founder of the ArtSciLab at UTD, works to create collaborations between artists and scientists.

That’s all I’ve got.

In recent days, Dallas’ Manhattan Project Beer Company has been called to task for its atomic-based nomenclature, in particular, a beer called Bikini Atoll. The brewery claims that by naming its product after an atoll in the Marshall Islands, it’s building awareness. But many people disagree, in particular, Pacific Islanders. One approach to the outpouring of public objections would be to listen and learn. After all, who better to speak authoritatively on the myriad associations conjured by a product named Bikini Atoll than Islanders in the Pacific?

The brewery, unfortunately, has doubled down and will not drop the name. Another perspective to consider is the audacious act of commodification that precedes the most recent one and the kind of multiplier effect this exerts on Pacific Islanders, in particular, Bikinians.

Remember how Dallas built two fake suspension bridges on either side of I-30 which were supposed to allow pedestrians and bicyclists to cross the Trinity River, except the construction of the Santiago Calatrava-designed bridges was so dangerous they never opened? Yeah. Hard to forget that one.

Well, the bridges are still not open, but this story about another Santiago Calatrava-designed bridge reminded me of Dallas’ saga. Venice is fining Calatrava for “macroscopic negligence” over a bridge he designed that crosses the Italian city’s Grand Canal. The glass-and-steel bridge near the tourist mecca’s main train station supposedly can’t withstand the intense daily traffic. A court in Rome ruled that the architect failed to account for the huge number of tourists that cross the bridge every day. “This is negligent, the court said, because it is something ‘everyone understands’ about the floating city,” Artnet reports.

The story reminded me of Dallas’ Calatrava soap opera because, well, this kind of thing follows Calatrava around the globe. His sleek designs are notoriously high maintenance, over budget, and prone to failure. Here’s a short list of his debacles: