This Thursday, the Boy Scouts of America will teach its young men a lesson as indelible as any they're likely to learn from a scoutmaster. Its national delegation will vote on a longstanding prohibition against gays in the country's largest youth organization.

BSA leaders have floated what they see as a compromise -- permitting gay scouts, but banning gay scout leaders. Yet it can't be often that the Family Research Council finds itself in agreement with The New Yorker, which have characterized the proposed policy as "incoherent," a "mixed message."

FRC, though, is opposed to gays in and out of scouting, and it can count as a supporter at least one influential former scout. In a webcast it sponsored, Governor Rick Perry referred to homosexuality as "pop culture," and the "flavor of the month," before vowing, "Not on my watch."

Citing scripture, opponents of openly gay scouts claim their sexual orientation violates both biblical law and the code at the heart of scouting. One Dallas church, however, would like it known that not all Christians agree with that interpretation.

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Texas Country Reporter

Spoiler alert: Charlotte Brown did not win the state pole vaulting championship over the weekend. The sophomore at Emory Rains High School, 70 miles east of here, cleared 10'6" on Saturday, putting her eighth out of nine contestants and more than two feet shy of victory.

Still, her performance was pretty impressive. Brown's legally blind. She was born with normal vision but developed infant cataracts and has been losing her vision ever since. She compares her vision to peering through a coffee stirrer, only everything on the other end is blurry, flat, and devoid of color.

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If you're not one for delayed gratification, skip to the 2:45 mark. That'll take you past the jolting takeoff and soaring panoramas of rural North Texas and straight to the money shot, in which you'll discover what it's like to be a falcon killing a duck in midair.

The video was posted to YouTube by Fort Worth falconer Roger Crandall, who decided to strap a camera to one of his birds of prey, Dora. It offers a perspective that ground-based lifeforms don't typically get to enjoy, along with wordless testimony for Crandall's business Fal-Tech Bird Control, which gets rid of nuisance birds like grackles or starlings the natural way.

(h/t CBS-11)

Hang on to your hats, everybody, because I'm about to give you a super-duper exciting glimpse into the inner workings of the Dallas Observer. We get a lot of email from our readers. Some of it comes directly to our various email addresses, but a lot of it goes to a general account. (I have no idea why. When I said "inner workings," I meant "vague overview").

Our lovely editorial assistant, Catherine Downes, has the joyous task of reading all that mail and figuring out who it's meant to go to. Sometimes it's pretty clear: "Dear, Eric," "To the editor," "all you jackasses better listen here and listen good," etc.

But occasionally we get an email whose intended recipient we just can't figure out. Since it worked so well for Reddit, we're going to crowd source our investigation: Which writer was the following irate email intended for?

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Fox 4

The community of maternal marijuana legalization activists was rocked this past weekend when a cannabis quilt, the product of two years and more than 70 pairs of hands, was stolen from atop a Ford Explorer parked at the CVS on Thornton Lane in Irving.

The quilt, self consciously modeled on the more famous AIDS quilt, was en route to the state capitol lawn in Austin, part of a cross-country, awareness-raising journey on behalf of the pot advocacy group Moms for Marijuana when its caretaker, Tracy Ansley, took the ill-fated CVS pit stop.

Ansley was shocked and dismayed when she found that the quilt had disappeared. So were her fellow marijuana-loving moms, who within two hours had put out a call to action on Facebook.

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Image via Facebook

Titus County's Most Wanted: Belle

Titus County is a little spot on the far northeastern part of the map, comprising some 32,000 people total. Belle is a infirm, chocolate-colored, 16-year-old dachshund. She also lives in Titus, and it appears that she's made an enemy.

Belle's person is named John Mark Cobern; he also happens to be the county attorney for Titus. Five days ago, in a scandal that's apparently rocked the entire county, Belle was removed from Cobern's office, where she likes to hang out. Belle's removal was the result of a vote from the Titus County Commissioners, who decided to ban animals from inside the courthouse, where the county attorney's office is located, with the exception of trained service animals and those belonging to law enforcement. Now, Cobern is appealing to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for help.

Belle's been coming to work with Cobern for years, starting back when he was in private practice, according to the Mount Pleasant Daily Tribune. He was elected to the county attorney position back in 2008, and Bell has occupied a corner of Cobern's first-floor office ever since. In a statement to the attorney general, Cobern writes that he brings Belle to work to provide "a safer work environment."

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Patrick Michels

Ron White, memorizing a deck of playing cards underwater.

Ron White spent nights during his eight-month tour in Afghanistan in 2007 holed up in his bunk with his laptop, poring over lists of words and numbers until they were committed to memory. It struck his Navy comrades as unusual, but memory is what White does. He founded a memory training business after dropping out of the University of North Texas and, just three months after returning stateside, would compete in the 2008 USA Memory Championship.

He came in fourth that year, but doubled down on his training -- as we wrote in a 2009 profile, he'd hired a Navy SEAL to coach him on mental toughness and taken to memorizing decks of cards underwater -- and won back-to-back titles over the next two years.

But all that is child's play compared with what he has planned. On February 28 in downtown Fort Worth, he will write out the name and rank of each of the 2,200 members of the U.S. military who have died in Afghanistan.

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Now, picture an ice rink in the middle.

The news technically broke two weeks ago when, buried in a Frontburner post about the Stars' home opener, team officials mentioned that they might put an ice rink at Klyde Warren Park.

But it wasn't until yesterday that the Dallas Business Journal asked the obvious followup: Are you guys serious?

In a word, yes.

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When last we heard from Southlake resident, event planner and patriotic pants designer Glenn Beck, he had just announced his plans for a $2 billion libertarian community, which he's dubbed Independence, USA. Will Independence be located in Texas? Can a theme park designed by Beck and David Barton possibly be any fun? Is this what happens when you persistently roll up and smoke pages torn from Atlas Shrugged? We don't know the answers to any of those questions just yet. Except the last one, which: yes.

As Right Wing Watch points out this morning, Beck made one other announcement while outlining his plans for Independence, an announcement which we really didn't give the rapt attention it deserved at the time. Namely, Beck plans to produce a live Fourth of July show, told from the perspective of the man in the moon. The man in the moon, as you may have guessed, loves America.

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via Reddit

Click to embiggenfy.

Here's what we know: a guy named Adam who works at the Dallas County Clerk's office was late to the office this morning. Fourteen minutes late, to be precise, according to the "Kronos Workforce Timekeeper System used by Dallas County."

So says the rather officious form Adam was given when he finally arrived at work, and which a buddy of his subsequently posted to Reddit.

After being informed, in devastatingly curt bureaucratic language, of his 14 minute lateness, Adam was given a space of four lines to explain the reason for his "tardiness."

Awesomeness ensued.

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