Five stories North Texas is talking about: Massive southward migration to Fair Park, Veepish to English translation, Twitter parody rules.
Road construction projects are being suspended. Extra trains and buses are waiting in the wings. Why for?
Texas-OU weekend is here, and it usually brings about 300,000 fans to Fair Park with it. Transportation agencies still feel a sting from 2009’s debacle, when DART wildly underestimated demand for help wading through the Red River Rivalry.
Even Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer made special arrangements to cart down Boomer Sooner sympathizers. As for local public transport, folks in Denton, Carrollton and Lewisville: this is (finally!) mostly about you. Tips of special note:
- When departing the fair on game day, passengers must board the Green Line at the MLK Station for access to the Trinity Mills Station. Trains serving the Fair Park Station will not provide an A-train connection this Saturday.
- To catch the last northbound A-train departure from Trinity Mills, passengers must board the 11:38PM Green Line departure from MLK Station.
A complete guide with more tips is here.Red River Rivalry Tips
For a glancer, consult the full special schedule here.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
Crowds On Crowds This Weekend At The Fair. Hear For Yourself
The Texas-OU lot will meet already slammed fairgrounds this weekend. Weekday crowds at the State Fair are packing Fair Park after a slow, rainy start 12 days ago. And they’re lining up deep at concession stands.
At noon Thursday more than three dozen people were lined up at the Fletcher’s Corny Dog stand in Big Texas Plaza. No one was griping about the wait. These fair goers love their corny dogs.
Lines are likely to be longer tomorrow. Vendors are stocking up on extra food, soft drinks and beer for Texas-OU weekend. Kick-off for the annual Red River Rivalry is 11 a.m. in the Cotton Bowl.
-- BJ Austin
Last Night’s Veep Debate: No Girl, Let Me Cut The Malarkey
Between all the replays of Joe Biden’s guffaws and Paul Ryan’s incessant stream of numbers, NPR’s Alan Greenblatt gets a word in with 5 takeaways from last night’s debate. Greenblatt points out that the vice presidential candidates spoke to their bases and not the middle.
And the fiery one-liners as vehicles for such a heavy amount of information, especially when it came to foreign policy, made the real issues hard to track at times. Joshua Benton, president of the Neiman Lab at Harvard, tweeted early: “I honestly have no idea how a low-information voter would deal with this.”
Evan Soltas and Ezra Klein’s recap on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog checks facts in context for post-debate research. And NPR has a full transcript and audio of the debate to sift through here for follow-up.
And there’s always “a bunch of stuff” for dessert, courtesy of the @LaughingJoeBiden and @PaulRyanGosling streams.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
Free Speech? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Free Speech!
On the subject of parody Twitter accounts, it seems the Huntsville City Council is upset after a few phantom users satirized city council members’ words and actions during official meetings.
Their feelings were apparently hurt so badly that the Texas Rangers have been called in to investigate.
From the Huntsville Item:
“Eight of nine council members ….. are the subjects of fake Twitter accounts. The accounts have names like “Fake Keith Olson,” “Phony Don Johnson” and “Smack Woodwork.” After Texas Rangers began investigating the accounts, another satirizing Weeks — “David Wee Peeks” — opened as well as an additional account satirizing Olson, “Olson's Mustache.”
Twitter’s guidelines are very clear on this:
“In order to avoid impersonation, an account's profile information should make it clear that the creator of the account is not actually the same person or entity as the subject of the parody/commentary. “
Which leaves this intrepid reporter scratching his head: If the accounts are marked as a parody, their tweets appear to be. protected. speech.
I highly suggest you check out the chock-full-of-details article on the Huntsville Item.
The Chewbacca reference alone is worth the click. (Please note: The preceding click is not a video of any member of the Huntsville City Council)
-- Justin Martin
Denton Ex-Pat To Read At Newest Lucky Dog Books Location
The two-story, well-stocked Lucky Dog Books in Oak Cliff still feels like a cozy secret I selfishly don’t want to tell. But there’s a good reason to slip the mention: Author Aaron Teel, who attended the University of North Texas and played music in Denton for a time in the early-to-mid-aughts before moving to Austin, will be reading from his chapbook thanks to Wordspace at the store on Saturday at 7 p.m.
Shampoo Horns is a chapbook of short fiction published by Austin’s Rose Metal Press, a stamp with interest in hybrid genres -- namely flash fiction and nonfiction. Teel’s book won the publisher’s chapbook contest before being course-adopted by Indiana University.
Teel told Jessi Cape of The Austin Chroniclethat his stories about the trailer park of 12-year-old Cherry’s childhood are largely autobiographical. They grew from Teel’s desire to write a Nabokovian memoir like Speak, Memory, and went off those rails when Teel realized memoir was too restricting. Fitting, because a host of illusions define his memories:
Austin Chronicle: I found the difference in Cherry, Tater, and Clay's relationships with their fathers interesting. Were you consciously trying to create contrasting portraits of the father/son bond, or did that sort of emerge as you were writing the individual stories? Aaron Teel: The idea was to focus on the kids, and to allow all of the adults in their lives to be sort of mysterious and unknowable, which is the way I felt as a kid. Fathers are the most unknowable of all. They’re masculinity personified. Huge, mythic beings to be loathed and worshipped in equal measure.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
