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Hey, party people, D Magazine’s “Best of Big D” party is Thursday at The Factory in Deep Ellum. Get your party tickets here. I hopped on with FOX 4’s Tim Ryan this morning to talk about crotch blowouts (read: where to get your jeans fixed) and Italian swear words (read: where to eat ice cream). Tim is one of my favorite Tims. I’ve mixed it up with him in the wild just a little bit. He’s a super approachable guy. And on the air, he is unflappable. Have a watch to see what I mean:

The year is 2057. The average temperature in Dallas is 121 degrees, and ERCOT would prefer you set your thermostat to a balmy 83 to conserve power on the grid. D Magazine remains available in print but also transmitted directly into your brain via microchip. And we are still, somehow, getting fresh drama between Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson.

From the afterlife, presumably, although you’re a fool to dismiss the idea that Jerry will outlive us all. But after yesterday, you’d be even more foolish to suspect this will end before we’re able to commute to work via jetpack.

I bring this up after an eight-minute sitdown Jones did last night with NBC 5’s Newy Scruggs, which the sportscaster closed by telling Jones that “it seems very petty” Johnson was not yet in the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor a year after Jones announced his two-time Super Bowl-winning coach would someday be inducted. Jones interrupted by literally calling B.S.—a battle-tested strategy for warding off accusations of pettiness—before going on to say the following:

The Dallas City Council could consider a resolution in August aimed at blunting the impact of the Texas Legislature’s trigger law that will go into effect following the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade. 

Dallas’ measure would direct city staff—which includes the Dallas Police Department—to make investigating and prosecuting accusations of abortion “the lowest priority for enforcement” and instructs City Manager T.C. Broadnax to not use “city resources, including … funds, personnel, or hardware” to create records regarding individual pregnancy outcomes, provide information about pregnancy outcomes to any agency, or to investigate whether an abortion has occurred, a draft copy of the resolution obtained by D reads.

“I would say that it technically really does accomplish the decriminalization here locally,” said Dallas City Councilman Adam Bazaldua, who worked on the resolution and chairs the committee that will consider the matter before it goes to the full Council. “Being the lowest priority, … there’s not much of an investigation that could be done if there’s no resources that are able to be allocated.”

The measure does not apply to instances where law enforcement officials might need to investigate cases of criminal negligence by a practitioner in the care of a pregnant person, or where force or coercion is used against a pregnant person. 

The resolution will be introduced in a special-called meeting of the council’s Quality of Life, Arts, and Culture Committee Tuesday. If approved by the committee, he aims to have it before the full Council at its Aug. 10 meeting. If it passes, Dallas would join many cities that have sought restrictions with similar resolutions, including Denton, Waco, and Austin. The San Antonio City Council will vote on its resolution Tuesday.

Man Shoots Woman, Is Struck By Same Bullet, Dies. According to Dallas police, Byron Redmon shot an unidentified woman in the neck on Saturday. The bullet ended up hitting him in the leg and he bled out. Police aren’t saying if it was intentional or an accident, and I still am unsure on the angle and physics and so on involved here. I don’t mean to be glib, but neck and leg—it’s strange. Also: a man in his early 20s or late teens was shot in the back and killed Sunday afternoon in West Oak Cliff; a Pleasant Grove homeowner shot an intruder; and a woman was found stabbed to death early Sunday in Far East Dallas.

Rangers Get Comeback Win. They scored three in the ninth on rookie Ezequiel Duran’s bases-loaded double to take down the Angels. They overcame Angels pitcher Reid Detmers tossing the third “immaculate inning” (meaning three strikeouts on nine pitches) against them, tying the 1979 San Francisco Giants for the most given up by a team in a season. I, admittedly, don’t watch much baseball these days. But I have watched a fair amount in my life and am a pretty regular consumer of sports, and have never once heard someone, and I mean never, refer to an immaculate inning. Was everyone aware this existed?

FC Dallas Defeats LA Galaxy at Home. Franco Jara scored in the ninth minute and that was all it took. Good job, gang.

If you thought the neighbors who lived near Shingle Mountain would catch a break after the operator was forced out and the illegal dump was hauled away, you would be wrong. The mountain may be in the nearby McCommas Bluff Landfill, but neighbors in Floral Farms say plenty of issues still exist.

Take, for instance, Marsha Jackson’s neighbor. The infamous mountain of shingles sat on two lots bisected by a creek. The city acquired the larger lot and hauled off the shingles, but Almira Industrial, the Irving-based company that owns the second lot at 9505 S. Central Expressway, did its own remediation. That kept it out of the city’s litigation. And it started operating again quickly after the shingles were taken to the dump.

In May 2021, Almira applied for a certificate of occupancy and claimed it would use the land for, “Machinery, Heavy Equipment, or Truck Sales & Service.” It stated it planned to “sort out and separate Metals to supply to mills, trading companies and export.”

It’s the latter “sort out and separate” part that is the bone of contention. The land is zoned for industrial research, not metal salvage, and there is no specific use permit issued that would override that zoning.

Almira received a certificate of occupancy—which allows it to operate—in January 2022, but it specifically says that no recycling can happen on the site. However, neighbors say that the company is now operating as a metal salvage site, churning up a lot of dust and air pollution in the process. 

Jackson, the neighbor directly next door, says it is not surprising to her that the company appears to not be complying with its CO. Blue Star Recycling, the creator of Shingle Mountain, had the exact same CO while it was piling up shingles. She had complained with the city early on about Almira, too.

David Schechter has, in the past few years, done the following: witnessed an execution, stood on a glacier with a viewer, eaten Little Caesar’s in a Walmart parking lot because his electric Chevy Bolt ran out of juice on a 24-hour road trip, and forced sommeliers to pair champagne with brisket. That was “Verify,” the WFAA series that used road trips to challenge what a viewer believed.

He followed that up with “Banking Below 30,” which gobbled up a number of awards as it explored how, generations after redlining, banks were still not investing in neighborhoods in southern Dallas.

WFAA is to be commended for taking the risk on these investments. It’s rich storytelling, journalism that had an impact. That decision almost certainly ushered Schechter out the door. He has landed a new job as a national environmental correspondent for CBS News. He’ll have a few weeks off, and then he’ll get to work chronicling how we are killing our planet.

I worked with Schechter for about two years when I was an online producer at WFAA. He’s a mensch, the type of colleague who didn’t look down on a 24-year-old who had a habit of over-verifying (natch) sourcing for daily online stories. He’s the rare local news reporter who can cover just about anything like it’s his sole beat. I can’t wait to see what he and his photographer, Chance Horner, find—in their own self-defined brand of “cheerful nihilism.” (Horner is also leaving WFAA for CBS.)

In my 20-odd years with D Magazine, we’ve published some important journalism that fills my heart with pride. We’ve solved a few murders and exonerated a man who’d been executed. We’ve pushed the city to rethink its relationship with highways. We got an objectionable statue removed from Love Field. We got a cabal of dirty cops fired. Good stuff. But it all pales in comparison to the accomplishment I can share with you today.

I got the basketball goals at Carpenter Park leveled out. Mostly.

The patio door at The Wild Detectives banged open behind me. I sipped my happy hour red wine, a Thursday tradition since I’d moved to Oak Cliff. A book with pages wrinkled by weather hung like an ornament from a string of lights above my head. I strained to read the text to see what type of book it was. 

River water baking in the sun filled my nose as a young Mexican woman with long, messy black hair passed by. I recognized the smell immediately. She wore a black tee and jeans and sat down with a beer at the picnic table in front of mine. Her face was smooth, a single shade of golden brown with red undertones, like mine used to be. I was 63 now. She hadn’t aged a day.

My sunspotted, wrinkled hand shook as I took a large gulp of wine. I must have made a noise because her eyes flicked to my stiff shoulders and jaw. She regarded me with a mix of disdain and curiosity. “I never see the same person twice.” 

“It’s been 46 years.” My tongue felt like the sandy bottom of a dried riverbed. 

Dallas’ Invitation Homes Kept Trying to Evict Despite Federal Ban. A U.S. House committee yesterday unveiled findings that showed four corporate landlords, including Invitation, had evicted residents and made record profits during the CDC’s eviction ban. Invitation also is accused of not sharing its eviction totals with federal housing lender Fannie Mae, which had in 2017 provided the company a $1 billion loan. Invitation owns about 80,000 homes across the country.

Will You Get Rain This Weekend? Hm. Tough one. Rain chances are 20 percent as a summer front settles in later today, dropping highs by the unbelievable amount of two degrees. Our last measurable rain came on June 3 and we’ve had 33 days of triple digit temperatures, which is already good enough for the 15th hottest summer on record. Here comes August.

Possum Kingdom Fire Sparked by Glass Bottles in a Trash Can. Sunlight bounced off the bottles in an open trash can and ignited some paper trash. The fire quickly spread to some nearby cedar trees, where it began burning over 457 acres around Possum Kingdom Lake. Five homes and another five additional structures have been destroyed.

Gov. Greg Abbott Spent Hours in Huntsville After Uvalde Shooting. In the hours after the massacre in Uvalde, the governor had maintained that he only attended a previously scheduled fundraiser to let attendees know that he “could not stay” and that he “needed to go to Austin.” But the Morning News used campaign finance reports and flight-tracking records to show that the governor spent just about three hours in Huntsville after the jet landed. He was driven to the home of a supporter, where he raised as much as $50,000. His campaign maintains that his comments that he had only briefly stopped there en route to a planned news conference in Abilene remain accurate.

More than 43,000 names have been added to the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., in a rededication ceremony that happened this week. But if you ask Dallas brothers Hal and Ted Barker, they’ll tell you that the memorial does a disservice to a great deal of them. The new piece leaves out hundreds who died in the war but are prevented by bureaucracy from being memorialized. 

The August issue of Texas Monthly looks at the brothers Hal and Ted Barker’s work and their labor of love to catalog and preserve the stories of Korean War soldiers, starting with their own father. They also describe their frustrating efforts to convince the Department of Defense to correct misspelled names and make sure that the agency addressed omissions. In the end, the Barkers told the magazine, the newly unveiled wall had “868 misspelling and formatting errors—eight times the number of mistakes on the Vietnam wall, in a war with almost 22,000 fewer deaths.”

Like your dad telling you how much he loves Yellowstone, Texas summer is being 100 percent on-brand this year. It’s July, and it’s hot. We knew this would happen, because it has been hot in Texas every summer that Texas has had a summer. It’s our thing.

It’s a proven science fact that Texas has eight seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Pre-Summer, Summer, Unrelenting Terror, Hades’ Balls and Fake Fall. As every meteorologist will tell you, July 1 marks the first day of Unrelenting Terror season. We all know the worst is yet to come.

The forecast shows that stepping outdoors this week is going to be a serrano to the eyeballs once again, with no respite in sight. Looks like we’re a 10,000 on the Scoville scale today (closer to Carolina Reaper if you’re putting your hand on the sidewalk).

With all this totally predictable weather showing up, ERCOT is once again concerned. Because somehow, they didn’t see this coming?

It’s one thing to be unprepared when Texas winter hits negative fourteen degrees. But Texas being this hot in summertime is just Texas wearing its signature outfit.