Amy Silverstein

Eh.

Every hour or so, the Save the Cabana Hotel Facebook page reminds its 900-plus followers to SAVE THE CABANA HOTEL. Dallas' luxury Cabana Motor Hotel opened on Stemmons Freeway in 1962, and photographs on the fan page show legends like John Bonham and Robert Plant hanging out. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrex and Raquel Welch were also once inside the building.

In more recent years, the Cabana hosted a man named Danny Marvin, who describes his visit in the comments section of a Dallas Voice article:

I stayed there ... the food was horrible, staff wasn't very nice, and the worst part i had to stripe naked in front of other men. Nice architecture though.

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Brian Stauffer

(Editor's note: This week's cover story comes courtesy of our sister paper, the Houston Press. Visit here for more stories by reporter Angelica Leicht.)

BY ANGELICA LEICHT

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in her apartment outside of Houston, Faith's mother looks over at the toddler repeatedly as she talks. There are no physical indicators that signal the start of a seizure, but Faith's mother can tell one is on its way.

Everything about raising Faith involves watching and waiting, and today is no different.

Suddenly, Faith's mom jumps up, her words stalling mid-sentence, and makes her way to the mat where the chocolate-haired child is lying. She plops down next to her daughter, gives her moon face and chubby-cherub limbs a once-over, and places a hand across her tiny chest, feeling for any sign of what's to come.

It's an unnerving ritual, the watching and waiting, but Faith's mom can feel what is happening in her own bones. She knows that Faith is about to seize.

Slowly, the toddler's eyes begin to flicker. The gut-wrenching convulsions quickly follow, working their way up her tiny body, while the anxiety that has worn premature lines across her mom's forehead works its way into sheer terror.

Fear fills the room, and she yells out to no one in particular.

"It's a seizure," she says. "Faith is having a seizure."

Seizures are nothing new to the family -- they've been happening since Faith, now 2, was about 4 months old -- but they are terrifying just the same. There is no respite from the epilepsy for the child, and modern mainstream medicine has no solutions for the young family.

Until recently, Faith's parents, who have asked that we not use any of their family's names, would call 911 and take her to the emergency room, where doctors would give her antiseizure drugs. The drugs didn't work -- they never worked -- yet the doctors would try anyway.

With the fear of what's to come -- Dravet Syndrome only worsens as children grow -- Faith's parents have decided to go an alternative route. They're ready to break the law for their daughter, and this means getting their hands on some cannabis oil.

Treating medical patients -- children or others -- with cannabis is illegal in Texas, and they could lose custody of their daughter for it, despite the clinical evidence of the drug's efficacy. But Faith could lose her life if they don't get a handle on these seizures.

Losing Faith is an unfathomable thought.

---

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Google

Ronnie Lummus, 71, must not look like the type to carry a gun.

But it's a good thing he was packing last night. He and his wife were shopping at Aldi's on Forest Lane in Northwest Dallas, close to LBJ Freeway. When the couple finished, they walked through the sliding glass doors to the parking lot around 7:20 p.m., and that's when Lummus' wife's gold necklace caught one man's eye.

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The Loomis Agency via YouTube

Dr. Jerry specializes in pizza, rapping and back injuries.

Jerry Jones, who's served as the Dallas Cowboys' team physician since 1989, told KRLD 105.3 Wednesday morning that the team's quarterback, Tony Romo, will be medically able to play Sunday against the 6-1 Arizona Cardinals.

Romo, who had two back surgeries in 2013 -- one before the season to remove a cyst and one after the season to repair structural damage -- took a vicious Keenan Robinson knee to the back during the third quarter of the Cowboys' Monday night game with Washington.

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Joe Mabel

Dallas ISD police have not seized any weapons so far this year. But how much of that is due to increasingly angelic students, and how much to kids failing to report when they see a peer with a weapon?

When it comes to reporting weapons in schools, kids are often each others' best watchdogs. In light of the recent Washington high school shooting, and the school shootings in recent years at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and Columbine, police departments across the country are constantly brainstorming new ways to decrease the likelihood of violent events occurring on school grounds.

Researchers at UT-Dallas compiled specific data concerning how, when and why students report seeing weapons in school. According to the study, 34 percent of students anonymously report seeing a weapon of some sort on campus sometime in the last three months.

"That number was higher than we expected," concedes Dr. Nadine Connell, one of the authors of the study. "But the flip side was on average over 90 percent reported being willing to tell someone about that. They're not ignoring it; they're not taking it on as their own responsibility."

In Dallas ISD, Police Chief Craig Miller says campus security depends on students coming forward when they see a potentially dangerous situation. "What would happen, and it's not unusual, is if social media or a friend told us someone had a weapon, we would discreetly confront or try to ascertain whether that was correct," he says.

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A judge asked the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and The Dallas Morning News to salvage their relationship Monday, but instead the two parties will duke it out in court.

A lawyer for the Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says politics is behind a Dallas Morning News lawsuit seeking to force Watkins' office to comply with Texas' public records law and release documents about how the district attorney spends forfeiture funds.

"This is not about trying to get records," Russell Wilson, an assistant district attorney, told state District Judge Jim Jordan at a hearing Monday. The timing, Wilson said, was "suspicious" since the News filed its lawsuit on October 23, one week after its editorial board endorsed Republican Susan Hawk, who is running against Watkins in next week's election.

It's an interesting theory, and usually Unfair Park is willing to believe all sorts of dark motives lurk behind decisions at the Morning News, but it ignores the fact that News courthouse reporter Jennifer Emily filed her first request for records about Watkins' use of his office's civil forfeiture funds on September 4. She filed a second request for additional records on September 15. The News' lawyer sent his own letter asking about her request on October 1 and another on October 9. In the latter, he even warned the district attorney's office that the paper was ready to consider its legal options if Watkins' office didn't respond by October 13.

The News' suit says Watkins' office didn't respond at all to the September 4 request and only partly to the one filed September 15.

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DFW Airport DPS

Merry Christmas.

Earlier Tuesday, we told you that we didn't yet know the identity of the drunk, gay-slurring man who attempted to assault a man at DFW airport before being tackled by a group of good Samaritans. Now we do. His name is McCleish Christmas Benham and he lives in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

The police report included below outlines what happened before you see Benham get his butt kicked in the now-viral video. Benham began swearing at an airline employee while she attempted to help him with his flight reservations. When she asked him if he had been drinking, he told her that he'd had 100 drinks -- which, having seen the video, seems on the low end. The unidentified man whom Benham would later kick in the junk came to her defense. Benham called him a "San Frisco faggot" and then punched him in the right eye, the man said. It's at this point the recorded portion of the video begins:

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Mike Mezeul

Not sure about the cowboy hat, really. Wrong sport for that.

Here are some other things I like about ice hockey.

See Also: Our Englishman Falls In Love With Weird-Ass Hockey

There are approximately 11 billion shots per game (I discovered this number using a complex analysis that may or may not be flawed). There are so many shots that you need intermissions just to calm down. It's tiring watching hockey if you support a team. Your heart is in your mouth every 11 seconds.

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Mark Haslett

Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, is no longer recommending Texas Turnpike Corp.'s private toll road project. But the state still sort-of is.

North Texas' regional transportation officials recently announced that they would no longer recommend forcing people out of their homes in the countryside northeast of Dallas to build another toll road, because it turned out that people didn't like the idea. "We thought we had consensus that we should proceed in this direction, and obviously we were wrong," said Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, when we talked last week.

But does a regional transportation official's recommendation even mean anything anymore? In this fast-paced world of Texas transportation officials and unpopular toll road projects, the state is sending mixed messages about whether the toll road is really dead.

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KXAS via Twitter

Amber Vinson hugs her doctor at the close of her press conference at Emory.

Amber Vinson, the second Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to contract Ebola during treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, is being released from Emory University Hospital near Atlanta.

"I'm so grateful to be well," she said. "While this is a day of celebration and gratitude, I'd like to request that we don't lose focus on the thousands of families still being affected by the disease in West Africa."

During her stay at Emory, Vinson received blood plasma from Dr. Kent Brantly and Dr. Nancy Writebol, both of whom were also received successful Ebola treatment at Emory.

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