Linda Dannhoff

Bentley needs you to buy him a poop scooper if we are going to rid Dallas of Ebola.

Update: DAS wants Observer readers to know that any goods or money donated on behalf of Bentley will, for the most part, go to DAS animals.

"Someone has apparently misunderstood. The [Amazon] wishlist is for the shelter dogs, it's not for Bentley. There are a few items on there for Bentley, but the majority are for the shelter," said DAS social media coordinator Rebecca Poling in a voicemail.

DAS included the Amazon wishlist link in the Facebook comments section of a photograph of Nina Pham and Bentley to let viewers know how they could help the dog. Nice to know that throwing a picture of Pham and Bentley up, and hashtagging Ebola, has been great for DAS donations -- although CBS reports that the shelter has suspended the donations request for Bentley.

Incidentally, we assumed that most readers would grasp, as we did, that the lawn mower was for the shelter, not Bentley himself, since his legs are too short to reach the handle.

We understand you just fine.

Original post: The last few days have been filled with dark news: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed on Sunday that Nina Pham is Dallas' second Ebola patient, having been one of the nurses to Thomas Eric Duncan. And the World Health Organization announced Tuesday that the fatality rate for Ebola patients has risen to 70 percent. More than 10,000 people per week could be contracting the virus in West Africa by December 1.

But Dallas Animal Services knows what's really the crucial issue here: Pham's dog, Bentley. Poor Bentley, a King Charles spaniel, has been removed from Pham's apartment an placed in an "undisclosed location," according to the city of Dallas. DAS has launched a donation drive for Bentley the Dog, to ease his transition and provide some small comforts in his hour of need.

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Dallas Weekly, one of the city's main black-owned newspapers, just published its latest issue online. The issue date suggests the cover was designed pre-ebola, but the timing of the email blast they just put out is ... unfortunate.

Jonelle B.

Most likely not the casket the man stole to prank his sister.

A little before 1 a.m. this morning, a 34-year-old man broke into a hearse at Hughes Funeral Home in northwest Dallas. He managed to take the casket out and abscond before officers arrived on scene. This was the high point of his night, we're guessing.

With the casket in tow, the man, Angel Jamaica, went to his sister's, on Browder Street in South Dallas. From the funeral home, that's about 10 miles. After his sister saw him and the casket, she called the police. It was now around 1:30 a.m. The sister told dispatch that her brother had dug up their father's corpse from a cemetery and brought him home.

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#TacoBell's cousin #banhmi restaurant logo angers #Vietnamese community http://t.co/nZcTJiAut5 pic.twitter.com/beYc2AKQpV

— Sonny Lê (@sonnylebythebay) September 17, 2014

JaviP96

Hey Yum! Brands: Just slap a sickle and hammer on that star, and maybe you can offend Russians too.

Banh Shop's theme is apparently as red as the tomato slabs on their overpriced sandwiches. The fast food joint, owned by the Taco Bell parent company Yum! Brands, opened three days ago as a pilot restaurant near SMU. But visitors may have noticed more than awkward guacamole and sour cream on their sandwiches. Looking around, the place is rife with underhanded Vietnam War references.

First, visitors are greeted by the shop's red, five-pointed star logo, the symbol for communism. Their motto is "Saigon Street Food" -- which sounds catchier than Ho Chi Minh City Street Food, but gives the creeping impression that the red star, looming overbearingly above the motto, might soon encroach on former Saigon. And there's the overpoweringly red and black website, which lists sandwich choices such as "Grilled Steak," "Grilled Tofu," "Grilled Chicken Breast," "Grilled Pork Meatball," and then, oddly, "The American."

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CBS 11

Mireya Villareal

Our apologies to WFAA's Brett Shipp. After a lengthy run as our favorite local investigative TV journalist -- occasionally prone to hyperbole, sure, but a fantastic reporter with the proper evening-news mix of charm and obnoxiousness -- he has been displaced. That coveted spot in our heart now goes to CBS 11's Mireya Villareal.

Villareal is a relative newcomer to the Dallas media market, but she appeared on our radar early in her tenure when her sleuthing revealed that there is sex on the Internet and that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings enjoys fine wine.

Last night she delivered another hard-charging report, this one revealing that Dallas PD's godawful new computer system was purchased from Unisys, one of the companies that may have paid bribes to John Wiley Price.

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Whywhynot

Anti-Domestic Violence advocates say victims often turn to their faith leaders for support, which is why some pastors have formed the Safe on Sunday campaign.

It's Monday, which means, according to federal data, that you're more likely to be forcibly sodomized today than any other day of the week. Sorry if we just made your Monday blues 10 thousand times worse.

Information gathered by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention from FBI crime data points to a jump in certain crimes on certain days of the week. On Sundays, aggravated and simple assaults, which often indicate domestic violence, go way up.

And Sunday's crimes are getting a lot of attention in Dallas.

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This was the Dallas Morning News' weather report on their Google+ page on September 10.

This is their weather forecast for today:

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Don Johnson via Creative Commons

Behind the scenes of the USA Today list that says downtown Dallas has the best skyline on the planet, there is a team of three expert panelists who provided commentary on all of the cities for the winning skylines slide show. Of those three panelists, two of them are architects who live and work in Dallas. Is USA Today's skyline ranking corrupt?

One of the Dallas architects assures us that the experts had no say in the final decision. Choosing the best skyline "was up to the readers," says panelist Preston Kissman. "We just provided descriptions to each."

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Photo illustration by Eric Nicholson

It has begun.

In what is being called (by me) the greatest public-safety threat to strike the popular walking path since a proposed high-rise threatened to blot out Highland Park's view of the sun, the Katy Trail has been overrun with feral cats.

So says a WFAA story from last night, though maybe "overrun" is a bit of an overstatement. Let's say "littered with." Whatever the proper adjective, the danger is very, very real:

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Jerry Jones in simpler times

Football-wise, it seems obvious by now that the Cowboys defense is destined to be so incredibly bad, they could use all the help they can get. By this point, you and I are viable candidates for the Cowboys defense, let alone Michael Sam, a man who, physical pending, will arrive on the Cowboys' practice squad with more preseason sacks and tackles than any defensive lineman already in Valley Ranch.

Still, if there's one place people with "outspoken" opinions love to gather, it's surely Twitter (or possibly the Morning News' comment section), and so, after the longest browse of Twitter we could stomach, we present you to some really tragic attempts at humor, along with some general confusion at the idea someone might be gay like Sam is. It should be said that these were scattered among a lot of balanced opinions, but still.

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