Wikipedia

I'm just trying to think of other ways to make body bags funny.

It has taken me a long while -- I was slow -- but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the "Ebola House" is funny. Sort of. Still working on it.

Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of Dallas called "The Park Cities," the Ebola House strikes some people as funny because Ebola is such an exotic, distant, far-fetched phenomenon.

It's OK to make fun of Ebola in the Park Cities area of Dallas because something about Ebola itself is funny -- the faraway places it comes from, perhaps, or the kind of people who get it. Something. Still trying to put my finger on the real joke.

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Wikipedia

Not sure, but I think the yellow flag on the right is for The World Order of Big Guys Against Nurses

Just when we thought we could never show our faces again, thank goodness for Chris Christie. We owe him. Only the governor of New Jersey could make Dallas look good on Ebola.

Look, we won't be bragging any time soon about the day Ebola hit Dallas. It was a mess. We all get that. Now with the perspective of time, we might be tempted to say we suffered the bad luck of being first, and it doesn't really look as if other places would have done much better in the same positon. But that would be whining, and we mustn't do that.

What we did need -- the impossible dream, really -- was someone so callously crass, so utterly ugly, so very vulgar and flamboyantly foolish that he made us look -- well, I have to say, you know, somewhat slick. By comparison. And now we have that person.

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dallascityhall.com

They want to blow up Tietze Pool, fill it in and replace it with nothing. Then they want to build some suburban-looking crap like this way off somewhere else. Really.

Sorry, everybody else, but this is one of those times I have to go all-in, full-tilt, do-or-die East Dallas on you.

East Dallas! Listen to me! They're going to take Tietze Pool away from you!

Tietze Pool! One reason you moved into the Greater M Streets Area, also known as Far Outer Lakewood, also known as Old East Dallas, whatever the hell you want to call it. Tietze Pool! It's cool! It's one of the top cool things.

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dallascityhall.org

Might make a good graphic for a billboard that says, "Remember, only you can prevent shrimp boat accidents."

A little over two years ago The Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit support group for Battery Park at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers on the southern tip of Manhattan, decided that it needed a new chair. The conservancy wanted a new park chair that would be light enough to tote around, heavy enough not to blow away in heavy weather and beautifully wonderfully distinctively designed.

So The Battery Conservancy announced an international competition for best Battery chair design. From 15 nations 679 designers submitted sketches, which a panel of judges whittled to 50 finalists, then five, then one. The winner, Andrew Jones of Toronto, drew a chair described by The New York Times as, "a pale blue flower, its curving petals forming the outlines of the seat, back and arms. Its smooth surface is perforated with tiny, seemingly random holes that will allow the seat to dry quickly after it rains."

A chair.

Here in Dallas decades of botched flood control, official neglect and simple happenstance have endowed us with an opportunity to create the largest urban park in the nation, vast enough to include huge recreational areas, a sprawling natural forest and a serious river. In short, this could be a park that truly redefines the destiny of a city, transforming Dallas from a jerry-built outback outpost to an American 21st century Mecca, a place where urban life and nature itself meld seamlessly at the city's heart.

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Wdstckdr via hitchikers.wikia.com

Hoping it's not bad luck to say this so soon, knocking on wood, rubbing my figurative rabbit's foot (my wife won't let me carry a real one), but I think this city and maybe even the nation deserve praise for overwhelming equanimity in the face of the first American Ebola cases. What the response so far shows is that we handle the truth a lot better than we do lies, and we tend to have real respect for real doctors as opposed to spin doctors.

Sure, there has been some flat-out goofiness, as in the school district in Maine that sent a teacher into quarantine because she had attended a conference in Dallas. But people in Maine are famously xenophobic anyway. Just like Texans.

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Wikipedia

Turf. Its dirty. But people fight for it.

Talk about mixed feelings this morning. On the one hand thanks to a youthful experience I would rather not recount here in colorful detail, I know exactly how Dallas school board member Bernadette Nutall feels about getting rousted by the cops earlier this week in a Dallas school building. My heart goes out.

See also: Mike Miles and Bernadette Nuttall Slap Leather

On the other hand, the same experience leads me to believe she's entirely in the wrong for thinking somebody owes her an apology. If anything, she owes an apology to school Superintendent Mike Miles, who had to sic the gendarmes on her, but even more than that she owes a big mea culpa to the board on which she sits, for violating their basic charter and, frankly, making them all look a bit like fools.

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This is the official dogma from The Dallas Morning News. It's wrong.

News media continue to present a picture of Ebola transmission that is significantly inaccurate by omission. They assert much more certainty than the science justifies. The version repeated like a mantra in most accounts -- only direct physical contact with an infectious person -- is wrong on its face and may be contributing to reduced vigilance.

What the science does say: direct physical contact with body fluids is the most common way and the most extensively documented way for the disease to travel. But science does not know that direct physical contact is the only way the disease can infect human beings. Scientists know the virus survives for significant periods of time outside the body, even dried on surfaces such as doorknobs and table tops. It is not known if a viable virus outside the body can infect a human being, because that research has not been done. But public health policy on decontamination assumes some risk, even if only at low levels, from so-called "environmental" (outside the body) Ebola virus.

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Taylor Callery

Maybe now is when we turn this into less of a food fight and something more like an actual system.

Big teachable moment right now in the Dallas school system -- huge! -- and the school board and superintendent should rush to take advantage of it. I'm talking about the deal I reported here yesterday in which the superintendent called school district cops to physically evict a school board member from a campus.

See also: Mike Miles and Bernadette Nutall Slap Leather

Of course we mediatoids love a story like this because it involves cops and outrageous behavior, our favorite things. But the thing not to miss here is that the showdown yesterday between Superintendent Mike Miles and school board member Bernadette Nutall is really about the entire history of the district. It's about a crucial decision the board needs to make right now to determine the future of the school system.

How far should trustees poke their noses into the day-to-day management of the school system? As it is now, trustees are all over the district every day, in and out of offices in the administration building, in and out of schools, often on very strategic missions, sometimes in direct contravention of the superintendent's own orders to the staff.

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Wikipedia

Proposed venue for next Miles/Nuttall meeting.

Yesterday morning Dallas school district cops forcibly removed school board member Bernadette Nuttall from Billy Earl Dade middle school on Grand Avenue in South Dallas after Nuttall told them, "Go ahead and arrest me."

They didn't. They just put her out of the building. But both Nuttall and a school district spokesperson said it was a hands-on removal by three officers.

See also: No, WrestleMania Is Not Coming to Cowboys Stadium (At Least, Not In the Next Two Years)

Nuttall's eviction followed a schoolhouse showdown between her and Dallas Superintendent Mike Miles. Miles wanted to hold his own closed meeting with staff at the school. Nuttall, who said she had been asked to attend by some staff, wanted in on it.

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Thomas Frieden, CDC Director

Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, speaking on 7/31/2014:

"It is not a potential of Ebola spreading widely in the U.S. That is not in the cards."

"We have quarantine stations at all the major ports of entry. People cannot transmit Ebola to others unless they are sick, and Ebola makes you so sick that it's pretty obvious pretty quickly. A traveler will be flagged by the flight crew and if someone gets sick after arrival in the U.S. they will almost certainly seek medical care."

"Ebola poses little risk to the U.S. general population."

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