station 4 Archives - Memos and Mirth

Bills, Bills, Bills

December 1, 2016

Coffee picture by Mikesh Kaos via Unsplash

Here’s what I’m talking about this morning.

1. Dallas has some bills: Last week, The New York Times had a horrifying article about Dallas’ Fire and Police Pension fund.

The rundown:

The pension fund was set up with the unrealistic expectation that it would make a 9 percent annual return.
The fund has unorthodox withdrawal rules which have made some retirees millionaires.
And now Dallas has a hidden pension debt of about $7 billion, which it can’t pay. Cue bankruptcy.

The latest: Dallas Mayor Rawlings is pissed, so he sent a CYA letter to the fund on Tuesday, asking it to stop some of the most ridiculous withdrawal policies. TBD on how Dallas is going to avoid bankruptcy.

2. YouTube stars: Last night, we went to the Windmill Bar near the Dallas Medical District. Our twinkish bartender told us that he was getting his degree in communications so he could be a YouTube star.

This reminded me of an article from Fusion about the sad economics behind being a mid-level YouTube star. Basically, it’s a “winner-take-all” system where some vloggers are rich and “mid-level” vloggers (with 50k-200k followers) have to wait tables to pay rent.

The Verge has a fascinating article about a specific YouTube vlogger called Connor Manning, who is trying to make it in Hollywood. I think that’s our bartender in two years.

Drag queens and buses

July 25, 2016

Last week I started my new job and it was exhausting.

Moving to The Dallas Morning News was a dramatic change for me.

Back in Minnesota, I worked on a 7,000-person suburban corporate campus. The Thomson Reuters campus was so huge that I had law school classmates who worked there for years before I ran into them. It was also common not to recognize anyone in the hallways if you didn’t work in that part of the building.

Since moving to Dallas, I worked from home and didn’t see coworkers in-person unless I was visiting a client’s office.

Now, I go to a downtown office every day. It’s nice being back in a real office because working from home started feeling like being under house arrest. I also had clients in every time zone, so there wasn’t a clear end to the work day.

Oak Lawn / Restaurants

The People I Met

June 20, 2016

What a weekend! There were long dog walks on the Katy Trail, new restaurants, drag shows, and lots of new friends from all over the world.

There was John from Arkansas, Matt from Boston, Walter from Chicago, Carlos from Mexico, Victor, Geoffroy, and Kenneth – all from France… no one seems to be from Dallas, but so many people wind up here.

Well, except for Ty.
Ty is from Dallas. He’s the exception.

The large number of recent arrivals is why it is so easy to meet people in Dallas.

Most people are new and open to making new friends. It feels silly to point that out, but this is a huge contrast to Minnesota, where the saying was “A Minnesotan will give you directions to anywhere except their house.”

A full article about that is here, and my whining is here.

Pride flags hang over JR’s bar in Oak Lawn.

Having dinner at Ai Sushi in Oak Lawn (in the iLume building.)

The friendliness backfired this weekend.

We met one group of people at JR’s. Introductions were made, and people discussed where they came from and what they did for work.

Jack: “I am a Walmart manager.”
Me: “Oh that is so interesting! Our friend Jill works at Walmart too! I think she was Cedar Springs Taphouse. Let me text her.”
Jack: “Oh great…”

Jill arrives and Jack looks alarmed.

Life / music / Oak Lawn / TV

Weekends with Yonce

April 18, 2016

This weekend was delightfully quiet.

We spent our time chowing down on Gardein and watching TV.

This is what 29 looks like.

One of the best things about the new apartment is that we have HBO Go, which means that I finally got an opportunity to watch the Beyonce On The Run Tour special.

The timing for my Beyonce binge was perfect because she’s apparently going to release a new video album/TV special/whatever-the-hell soon:

I am so excited.

This must be how diehard Apple fans feel when a new product is about to be launched.

However, the brooding preview video looks like the silly clips that preceded Rihanna’s ANTI album.

Oak Lawn

Gay Bingo!

March 23, 2016

I made it to my second gay bingo event at S4 this weekend.

Gay bingo at Station 4 is a fabulous event. It is basically a Texas-sized version of Minneapolis bar bingo.

Gay bingo events in Minneapolis and Dallas both support local HIV/AIDS resource centers, but the experience is dramatically different. In Minneapolis, bingo is informal, occasionally violent, and very frequent – you can play up to 4 times per week.

However in Dallas, bingo is a once-per-month extravaganza.

LGBT / Oak Lawn