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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Today marks the arrival of our new and improved Dallas Observer app, your pocket guide to the city and direct line to our always fair-and-balanced take on things. It features:

- Event listings and concert calendars searchable by date, artist, neighborhood, venue or genre
- Restaurant listings searchable by cuisine type and neighborhood
- Access to daily blogs for updates on local news, politics, music, food and arts
- Editors' picks of the best things to do and reviews from our writers
- Slideshows of local nightlife, concerts and events
- Access to Voice Daily Deals spotlighting terrific deals from local events and merchants

I've spent some time with it, and it's a pretty seamless way to access our many, many buckets of diverse content. If you're so inclined, download it from iTunes or Google Play. And if you have any problems with it, email me directly and I'll pass your concerns on to someone smarter than me.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage.

Via.

Party wisely, folks.

And by "slow" we mean dead. And by "few" we mean four. We'll rouse ourselves from our Christmas stupor again on Wednesday.

Until then, you'll have to find another way to infotain yourself. Better yet, go spend time with family. Don't like your family? Okay, then go hang out with your cat. You don't like cats either? Has it occurred to you that your heart just might be two sizes too small?

See you next week.

It's safe to say that Livefyre, that fancy new commenting system we rolled out four months ago, has been an unqualified success. Sure, there were some technical hiccups at the beginning and some ongoing cries of anguish from the comment section, but what you haven't seen are the mountains of fan mail -- thoughtful, hand-written missives in real stamped envelopes -- that litter our desks. I really love how my typos are etched in stone and can't be edited! they say. How much did you pay for this thing? Not enough, I'll tell you that!

Still, even perfect can get perfecter. So starting today, you can embed things from Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube and Spotify. You can also add links and -- we're pretty sure this one will revolutionize the Internet -- bold, italicize and/or underline text.

Otherwise, all the features you have come to know and love -- the anonymity, the seamless interface, etc. -- are there. Except for the typos. In a shameless pander to our online correspondents, you can now edit your posts. In other words, you'd better get busy. You've got four months of typos to correct.

The new company's new logo.

The longtime owners of the Dallas Observer have sold the paper and its 12 Village Voice Media sister publications to a group of VVM executives, creating a new holding company and cutting ties with Backpage.com, the controversial classified advertising company.

So: We have new owners, but the same old bosses. Which I think means we're not all getting fired tomorrow. We'll let you decide whether that's good news or bad.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but I would not be surprised if there were several barrels of scotch involved.

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Ah, the good ol' days.

Every year, the wealth fetishists over at Forbes compile an exhaustive list of the 400 richest Americans. It's a rarefied club, whose admittance requires an aggregate worth in the billions. Not surprisingly, a number of Dallasites made the cut -- 16 in fact.

They range from oldies-but-goodies like Ross Perot, T. Boone Pickens and Harold Simmons, along with a few you've probably never heard of. May I introduce you, ladies and gentlemen, to a few members of the 0.0001 percent living among us. Remember their names because, by and large, these are the people flooding Republican Super PACs with cash in this post-Citizens United age.

Andrew Beal is apparently the richest guy in Dallas. He's number 41 on the least, and is worth some $8.4 billion. He's an investment banker who made a lot of smart moves as the economy slid into recession. Last year, he lost a federal appeals court decision, which ruled he had constructed a sham partnership to evade taxes.

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The Dallas Observer: You built that. Or you can, anyway, if one of the following opportunities suits you.

Clubs Editor
The clubs editor researches, reports, writes and maintains the Observer's clubs and concert listings, helping ensure that our newspaper and web site offer the city's most comprehensive, liveliest and most battle-tested nightlife guide.

This is a part-time (32 hours per week), hourly wage position, with no benefits.
Successful candidates will have a working knowledge of the local nightlife scene; a proven ability to produce lively, clean and accurate copy; and a can-do attitude. As in, "Hey, can you go down to that new bar and check it out on the company dime?" "Yeah, boss, I can do that!"

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Will my arm ever be the same? Also, my arm is much more muscular than it appears in this picture. Swear.

Just after 8 o'clock this morning, I was riding to work, as I always do, along the Sante Fe Trail. I'd just passed Woodrow and was riding along the fields at Randall Park when I heard pop, pop on my left. It sounded like when a squirrel drops a half-eaten pecan to the ground, but it obviously wasn't since that particular stretch is treeless. What it was, I learned when I felt the bee sting on my arm and glanced at the black Cadillac El Dorado (or maybe Seville) matching my pace along Santa Fe Ave, a kid, maybe 18, tracking me with a paintball gun through the open passenger window.

I casually gave him the finger as I rode then, after he shot me twice more, I glared hard at him gave him the finger, much more emphatically this time. This was satisfying, I guess, but not very smart since it meant that I didn't see the yellow metal pylon straight ahead of me. I crashed into the pylon, was thrown from the bike, and landed on the pavement. I started to stand to catch the license plate, but my left leg hurt like hell and I just sat in the grass.

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Your anonymous comments are safe and sound.

And no, it's not Facebook, so don't worry your pretty little anonymous head. You will still be able to fire-hose the general populous from the cave of privacy afforded by your clever screen name. You will just be able to do it faster, and hopefully with fewer quirks.

The new system is called Livefyre. It's up and running now, although it may take a bit for previous comments to show up. I've put some things I know about it below, and will attempt to answer any questions you might have, as soon as I get back from picking up my kid at "preschool." (He's four months. His big thing is rolling onto his stomach and then whining about not being able to roll back. I think we can call it daycare.) Nick or Eric may also jump in.

Please be patient. We had to migrate every last pearl of wisdom uttered by you fine folks -- a job that took several days and sent several people to therapy. I expect some hiccups and you should too.

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Every week writers for Dallas Observer and our parent company, Village Voice Media, produce elegant magazine-style feature writing -- a gritty portion of which comes in the form of true-crime stories.

Now VVM has collected some of its best recent true-crime yarns into an ebook: Seven Sins: A True Crime Anthology from Village Voice Media. Available on Amazon and iTunes, the book features seven stories, including the incredible tale of a young American Muslim woman "honor-killed" by her own father; the odd story of a young San Francisco woman so enamored of serial killers that she became known as America's most prominent "murder groupie"; and a historic murder case in Colorado in which the golden age of tabloid journalism collided with Erle Stanley Gardner, the larger-than-life creator of the Perry Mason mysteries.

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