Back Talk Far North Dallas

City officials narrowly avoid criminal prosecution after trying to keep Dallas Stars jerseys

Now here's a conflict of interest issue you don't see every day: Cedar Park city officials won't be prosecuted for accepting Dallas Stars jerseys from Hicks Sports Marketing (special note" check out Hicks' website's self-reference to himself as "one of the premiere sports owners in the world") to promote the Stars' new AHL team in the city. Cedar Park is a city near Austin; the city is kicking in $43 million to help build an arena for the new Stars affiliate. Here's the real clincher: Knowing full well that the value of a hockey jersey far exceeded the $50-gifts-to-public-officials-limit law set by Texas, the Cedar Park city council passed an ordinance allowing themselves to accept gifts valued up to $250, only to have their ordinance snuffed in favor of the state law. Passing an ordinance to allow themselves to accept hockey jerseys ... now that took an amazing amount of courage, for lack of a better term, that I haven't seen anyone here in Dallas try. What is it about politicians: When people are elected, why do so many of them seem to lose track of why they supposedly wanted to be public servants in the first place? Anyway, let's hope no one here gets any ideas ...

Convention center hotel gets the OK, but why not the Rangers?

Wamre is going to write something later about the news today that the city is going to own the convention center hotel. (Quick question -- do we all get discounts as stockholders?)

Until then, consider this: The hotel is expected to cost at least $500 million. Forbes says the Rangers are worth $412 million. Which means we should have bought the Rangers instead. As a taxpayer, I'd much rather own a baseball team, and it would be a lot more fun to rip the city for mismanaging the team than it is to criticize Tom Hicks (who, frankly, is an easy target).

And no one can argue that the economic benefits wouldn't be just as good -- if not better -- than the convention center hotel? We buy the team, move it to Dallas, and leave Arlington high and dry.

Think I can get Mitch Rasansky to introduce this motion in the council?

Technorati Tags: Convention center hotel,Texas Rangers,Mitch Rasansky,Tom Leppert

Josh Howard and the Mavs get smoked

Happy birthday, Josh Howard. Congratulations. You’re 28 today. You have the world at your fingertips, living a life most people can only dream of. You beat the odds as a kid and emerged as one of the NBA’s most promising players.

So why let all that go up in smoke? (Sorry I'll stop.) For those of you who were out of the country or maybe doing a little too much partying yourself, Josh Howard, Dallas Mavericks’ small forward admitted on Michael Irvin’s radio show Friday that he’s a pot smoker, “no big deal”. In fact he indicted the whole NBA saying, "everybody in the media world and in the sports world knows that NBA players do smoke marijuana". No, this isn’t the first time he’s publicly admitted to this but it reeks a little bit more this time, especially when we are forced to watch his painful decline as a player. He said he smoked in the off-season but he sure looked high last night — or maybe he’s just real anxious to get the Mavs into the off-season.

Umpire hit in the face by a 96 mph fastball

In case you missed it, check out the video of one very unfortunate umpire who took a 96 mph fastball to the face during a Dodgers game this weekend. The pitch skimmed the tip of the catcher’s mitt, hitting the umpire in the jaw and knocking him unconscious. He was taken to the hospital, and although he was wearing a protective mask, doctors suspect he still suffered a concussion. Geeze, talk about on-the-job hazards.

An aerial view of the Northwood Club

An outfit called Stracka.com, which bills itself as a social networking site for golfers, posted this on YouTube. My favorite bit (and no, I'm not a golfer) are the little yellow stick golfers.

For those of you who are golfers, the site has similar flyovers for other courses, including Augusta National, home of the Masters, interactive yardage maps, and other golf-y things.

 

firewadephillips.com -- in case you're interested

One more Cowboys bit, and then I promise to stop. Jeff Mast, who is obviously quite a far-sighted thinker, owns the firewadephillips.com URL. Given the weekend's results, and the resulting ranting and raving, he stands to make a couple of bucks.

Turns out Mast, who lives in the Northeast, bought the web address when the Cowboys hired Phillips. "Hopefully the sale will help pay my heating bills," he told me in an email. "Here in the northeast we still use oil, and it costs about $400 a month for heat."

How can you argue with that?

If any disgruntled fans are interested, there's an eBay site for the address. The starting bid is $250.

What? No free Cotton Bowl tickets for council members?

Looks like the bloom is off the proverbial rose downtown, as a few council members are bickering among themselves — and directing their ire at the mayor — concerning tickets to the New Year's Day Cotton Bowl game, or so says the Morning News. It seems that in years' past, council members have been given a couple of gratis tickets to the football game, which none owned up to using themselves but a few said they passed along to relatives/friends. This year, Mayor Leppert and the city attorney apparently decided that accepting the tickets didn't seem ethical, so they sent the tickets back to the Cotton Bowl people. The problem? Leppert didn't consult with his council colleagues before taking the action, and I imagine a few had already committed the tickets to someone else, so they wound up looking a little powerless. So Leppert took, from what I can tell, his first public shots from his colleagues in the DMN story. A few more autocratic moves like this one — regardless of whether he's on the right side of the issue or not — will give us some clues about how thick or thin his skin really is. And as for the council members, too bad they didn't spend this much time, effort and energy trying to keep the game in town.