Five stories that have North Texas talking: New divorce rules, cheap flights, a tree made of cars and more.
Point for Tom Wolfe (and for local writer David Hopkins, who reminded me in conversation recently of Wolfe’s controversial prediction decades ago that divorce would be as simple as returning a rental car one day.) The Texas Supreme Court is now allowing low-income couples to divorce without hiring lawyers if they don’t have kids.
A standardized form will be released for public comment and could ultimately replace the divorce process for uncontested cases. Might seem crazy, but Texas is only one of two states in the nation that doesn’t have such a form, the Dallas Morning News’ Christy Hoppe reports.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
It’s Not Too Late To Fly Cheap -- If You Leave On Thanksgiving Day
Quick, before more procrastinators cave to necessity! KERA contributor Courtney Collins has some tips on planning for December departures; mostly, you should just suck it up and plan to leave on Christmas Eve or Day.
Collins put her sources to the test and sleuthed some Thanksgiving Day flights using plain ol’ airline web sites and found round trip tickets that are much less than painful: A flight on Southwestfrom Dallas to Chicago, leaving Thursday, Nov. 22 and returning Tuesday, Nov. 27 costs $238. And though Mexico and the Caribbean are famously expensive during the holiday stretch, she found a ticket on American Airlines to Miami and back for those same dates at $315.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
Find Yourself In This Time-Lapse Video Of The ArtCon Graffiti Wall
Art Conspiracy 8 was Saturday. Naturally, Art&Seek created a way for people to interact with the space and each other, this time in the form of a chalk graffiti wall. Dane Walters made a time-lapse video of scrawlers, some impressively tall, some toddler-sized, and some who might be reading this post right now. Pretty cool.
-- Lyndsay Knecht
Neiman Marcus Car Tree Ripe For … Viewing
Cars don’t grow on trees, except for maybe at Neiman Marcus. They haven’t yet debuted a deciduous BMW-bearing specimen, though. Instead, the retailer is displaying a Christmas Tree of sorts made out of tail lights, trunk sections and fins of 13 classic cars. It’s at Pegasus Plaza, and you can see it at right.
The sculpture was inside the downtown NM location in 2003.
(Fort Worth can look forward to the Sundance Square Christmas tree lighting at close of the Parade of Lights Nov. 23.)
-- Lyndsay Knecht
Doh! Museum Officials Can’t Find Rare Pistol
It’s usually a bad sign when a gun goes missing. It’s even worse when that gun is a rare 100-year-old pistol. Sadly, that’s the case at Fort Worth’s Museum Of Science And History.
The museum is basically being mum about the “missing” pistol and can only say that it vamoosedTuesday afternoon, is 100 years old, and belongs to the Cattle Raiser’s Museum. That’s it.
We don’t know if it was stolen or lost, we don’t know of it’s size, shape, color, or even caliber. The museum is (of course) investigating and might release more info.
So, if any of you stumble upon an old looking pistol that is.. perhaps lost.. or maybe stolen; you might want to report it to museum officials.
-- Justin Martin