Via.

That can't be comfortable.

As inventive as human beings can be, we've never come up with a solid way to keep dogs from mournfully licking their unhealed junk after being neutered. The ubiquitous Elizabethan collar or Cone of Shame, if you will, does the trick but inevitably destroys a pet's self-esteem in the process. Alternatives (See: the BooBooLoon) have their own issues.

Enter a Dallas-area cockatoo named Hagar. Several years ago, the bird began obsessively plucking its feathers. A veterinarian decided it best to put Hagar in one of the ridiculous cones to keep the bird from injuring itself.

Hagar was not impressed.

"They had to put him under to get it on. It lasted about 15 seconds," the bird's owner, Els Bowen told UT Dallas' news service. "As soon as he woke up, he got hold of the corner of it with his beak and it was gone."

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Mark Graham

Angela Hunt and Scott Griggs: Drilling opponent Hunt is leaving the council, but that might not help Trinity East's plans to frack on parkland.

Even with two seats in limbo, the complexion of the new Dallas City Council looks decidedly unfavorable for Trinity East, the would-be fracker from Fort Worth that paid the city millions for the rights to its natural gas. Because the Plan Commission voted against the company's drilling permits, four "no" votes on the council is enough to deny Trinity East's appeal of the commission vote. It looks like the opposition gets to four easily.

See also:
Trinity East's Vapor Chase

Counting noses, there's Scott Griggs, a stalwart opponent of drilling, who defeated Delia Jasso for a redrawn District 1. You've got Adam Medrano, newly elected to District 2, who has said without equivocation that he doesn't believe in drilling urban areas. Carolyn Davis, just handily re-elected, has also opposed drilling in the city. Sandy Greyson is considered a likely "no" vote, as is Monica Alonzo in District 6. Philip Kingston, Angela Hunt's handpicked successor in District 14, is looking strong against Bobby Abtahi in a run-off. My, how the balance has shifted.

"I think the past year's public debate has had a profound influence ... so that the Council has shifted from hardcore, unquestioning support to something less than that," says Jim Schermbeck of Downwinders at Risk.

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Governor Rick Perry at the ribbon-cutting in Plano, Huawei's U.S. base of operations.

Last fall, Huawei, the Chinese telecommunication giant whose U.S. base just happens to be in Plano, was the subject of intense scrutiny over fears that it might serve as a Trojan horse for cyber-spies in Beijing. Huawei, for its part, did little to allay fears by dummying up during a congressional inquest of its own urging. It refused to elaborate on the amount of daylight between itself and the Chinese government; its in-house Communist Party; the backgrounds of its powerful board members; and allegations that it provides network service to the People's Liberation Army cyber-warfare unit.

The U.S. House Select Committee concluded that the telecom -- the main service provider in Kansas, by the way -- posed too great a risk to "critical infrastructure" and "national-security interests." Later, a White House review reportedly found no smoking gun to indicate Huawei had engaged in cyber-sleuthing for the Chinese. Yet fears persisted that certain security vulnerabilities in its software may have been inserted intentionally -- a cracked door for spies to sneak through.

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Peter Ryan

Dallas-based utility Oncor has collected half a billion dollars from ratepayers to cover federal income taxes it has never paid. Last year alone, customers paid $230 million to reimburse the utility for a "phantom" tax bill, according to a new report from the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power.

The fact that Oncor doesn't pay federal income taxes isn't illegal, or even all that remarkable. Most regulated utilities don't. And one like Oncor that's a subsidiary of a holding company wouldn't pay Uncle Sam directly anyways. Its parent, Energy Future, would. The problem is, the report indicates EFH hasn't since at least 2008.

That might be because in its quarterly filings the power generation and utility company has logged huge net losses due to low electricity rates pretty much since it was taken private in the biggest leveraged buyout in history.

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Since news of Walmart's plan to build a scaled-down supercenter at the corner of Arapaho and Coit Road in Far North Dallas, neighborhood opposition has been building. The outcry was covered this weekend by the Morning News and NBC 5, and the Change.org petition promising a boycott is at 2,300 and counting. Opponents now have a full-blown website and, coming soon, yard signs!

Momentum aside, stopping the store remains a long shot, particularly given that the 90,000-square-foot model the retailer has is within current zoning and therefore doesn't need City Council approval. But there remains at least a glimmer of hope.

Council member Sandy Greyson met with Walmart representatives on Thursday and posted her notes from the meeting online.

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With the mammoth six-year, $108 million deal he signed last week, Tony Romo became the most richly rewarded player in Cowboys history. That put him fifth on the list of current NFL players, ahead of Eli Manning and Tom Brady but well behind Ravens QB Joe Flacco's $20.1 million per year.

Those numbers are a little misleading, at least according to Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. The group has seized upon Romo's deal to bolster its anti-tax message, arguing that, after taxes, Romo's salary actually tops that of Flacco, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, and every other player in the league.

The main reason? Texas has no state income tax. AFP makes its case:

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There remains a pressing need for meaningful, statewide regulation of payday lending in Texas, since the industry has shown a willingness and ability to skirt restrictions passed by Dallas, Austin, and other cities.

Those reforms look like they are still at least a couple of years off. Despite high hopes for a slew of bills aimed at reining in the industry's more blatantly usurious practices, the one that has gotten the most traction, Dallas Senator John Carona's SB 1247, has had its teeth yanked.

Carona's bill was never perfect. It was particularly criticized for stripping municipalities of the authority to pass stronger regulations, and it didn't place a hard cap on interest rates. But, as the Texas Tribune reported this morning and the Texas Observer noted last week, the bill's most meaningful provisions have been seriously watered down.

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Walmart

At an ungodly hour this morning (2:38 a.m.), a member of the new but active "Stop Walmart Spanish Village" Facebook group posted the lease, signed back in November, giving the Arkansas-based retail giant rights to the northwest corner of Coit and Arapaho roads for at least 20 and as many as 70 years.

This, as we noted yesterday, has been met with chagrin by many neighbors who dislike the idea of a sprawling big box opening next door.

Walmart might take issue with the term "sprawling." Company spokesperson Daniel Morales got back to us today via email and noted that, at 90,000 square feet, the location will be half the size of a typical supercenter. And there's little, outside of civil disobedience, that can be done to stop the store. The property is already zoned for commercial uses, meaning it won't get reviewed by the Dallas City Council.

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You wouldn't know it from glancing at his bank account, but Mark Cuban used to be poor. This isn't exactly news. Cuban embodies the modern version of the peculiarly American up-by-the-bootstraps fairy tale, in which a hard-luck young person, through hard work and business savvy, transforms himself from struggling peon to billionaire tech entrepreneur. He even wrote a book about it.

It's a good story, though, satisfying both in its adherence to the familiar rags-to-riches archetype and because it provides hope to other would-be entrepreneurs that they, too, will strike it rich. Cuban recounts a portion of the tale for Forbes this month, the second Dallas billionaire in recent months to recount his hardscrabble beginnings for the magazine, though T. Boone Pickens' beginnings were decidedly harder scrabble.

He came to Dallas at age 24 at the behest of college roommates driving a 1977 Fiat X19 with a hole in the floorboard that constantly hemorrhaged oil.

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Walmart

When I was growing up a few blocks away from the Spanish Village shopping center in Far North Dallas it was, if never booming, at least heavily trafficked. It was the site of Chuck's Hamburgers, where we'd walk for lunch when my junior high got out early for end-of-semester exams. Border's was there, too, where I whiled away some dull summer hours and bought handful of criminally overpriced CDs in the days before I discovered the ease of online music piracy. My family frequented a decent but unfortunately named hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex place there, Mexi-Go, where we were once shocked to see local celebrity/WFAA weatherman Troy Dungan eating sans bow tie (he was, in fact, wearing a brightly-colored nylon track suit).

There are a few small businesses holding on at the northwest corner of Coit and Arapaho, notably Durango, the quirky desert Southwest-themed furniture store where a friend's mom started working after going through a divorce, and a couple of others, but it's mostly depopulated, a retail ghost town that has withered as commerce at the Coit-Campbell intersection just to the north has boomed.

But that's all in the past. George and Andrea Underwood, who own the property, are now looking to the future. And that future, as the Advocate noted yesterday, is Walmart.

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