The Sting
Operation Lightning Strike, the FBI’s bizarre NASA probe, accomplished many things—all of them negative. Plus, the bureau strikes (out) again in Houston.
August 1996 Issue
Features
Perot and Con
From the war on drugs to education and his new Reform Party, Ross Perot has ideas about everything. Too bad they’re usually wrong.
To Dive For
For breathtaking snorkeling in subterranean rivers and caverns, take the road out of Cancún and head for the Yucatán rain forest.
Texas.100.best
Separating the hits from the pits on the World Wide Web: A guide to a hundred of our favorite Texas-related sites.
Columns
Shooting on the Border
THERE IS AN OBLIGATORY SCENE in every movie about the border between Texas and Mexico: A man draws a line in the dirt with his boot. The line means something different in each movie, and yet, there it is, a narrow little rut in the ground that the characters gesture
Bad News, Baird’s
This spring, Texas’ leading white-bread maker was ordered to pay a fine of $10 million and settled a lawsuit for another $18 million. Why does the company have to cough up so much dough?
Spin Control
Vertigo isn’t just the stuff of Hitchcock thrillers—it’s a debilitating disease, as Dallas radio talk show host Kevin McCarthy found out the hard way.
Magic Johnson
From the Paris Bastille to a duet with Pavarotti to a PBS documentary: Amarillo’s resident opera star, Mary Jane Johnson, has had a career full of high notes, and she has savored every one of them.
A Good Bet
There are no showgirls or musical revues, but the four casinos in and around Lake Charles, Louisiana, do a nice job approximating the Vegas experience. Deal yourself in.
Reporter
Stephen Stills
WHEN WE LIVED IN RIVER OAKS, three or four boys and I would go down to the creek when it was hot, when the dragonflies were louder than the wind and the air was so still that it felt like it weighed a ton—but you’re seven years old and you
Grady Spears
“I feel like I’ve been put through a blender!” says Grady Spears, the executive chef and co-owner of Reata restaurant, whose maniacally successful second location opened in May atop Fort Worth’s Bank One Tower. “On Saturdays we’re serving nearly six hundred customers. It’s just nuts.” Spears may be grousing, but
Nye Anxiety
San Antonio poet, essayist, and anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye is completing work on her first novel. The protagonist of Habibi (Simon and Schuster) is an Arab American teenage girl in present-day Jerusalem. The book is based, Nye says, on her own “travels and travails before coming to Texas” and explores
CD and Book Reviews
Hot CDs The boys from Bedhead wipe the sleep from their eyes with Beheaded (Trance Syndicate), a volume of 1995 recordings that serves as the band’s second album. The brainy Dallas quintet’s three-guitar setup shimmers and creeps, foreshadowing the hypnotic bursts of woozy but assertive riffs and unassumingly catchy tunesmithing.
How to Ride a Wave
The surf in Texas may not be the biggest, but it was an early training ground for 43-year-old surfing legend Ken Bradshaw, who has spent his life riding waves as tall as buildings. Bradshaw, a native of Houston, first paddled out at age twelve on a family trip to Surfside,
Drinksmanship
How Seagram uncorked a national controversy by airing TV ads in Corpus Christi.
Web
Grilled Marinated Shrimp
1/4 cup pure olive oil 2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar juice of one lemon 8 strips lemon peel, about 11/2 inches long and 1/2 inch wide 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard salt and pepper to taste 12 shrimp, 10 to 15 per pound size, peeled and deveined
Red Bell Pepper Crostini
olive oil for brushing on peppers 2 red bell peppers 1 teaspoon fresh chopped thyme 2 tablespoons pure olive oil salt and pepper to taste 8 slices French bread, 1/2 inch thick 1 clove garlic, peeled 6 sprigs fresh thymeBrush olive oil on peppers and place on a sheet pan
Miscellany
Around the State
At the twenty-fifth annual Texas Folklife Festival in San Antonio, you can nibble on Lebanese kibbeh, sample Nigerian suya, gnaw on a Filipino inihaw—or stick to watermelon from Luling. Plus: A Fantastick show in Fort Worth from the boys of Tuna; powerful photos from Richard Avedon in Austin; a hellish
Seeing Stars
In the summer of 1992, when Jason Cohen was a relatively unknown journalist and Matthew McConaughey was an extremely unknown actor, the two met on the Austin set of Dazed and Confused. “He looked so weird,” recalls 28-year-old Cohen, who was writing about the movie for Details. “He had
Tom Foolery
THE LEGACY OF THE TUMULTUOUS Republican state convention in San Antonio is that the state GOP is headed for open warfare between its mainstream and ultraconservative factions. The defining incident of the convention was not the unsuccessful attempt by pro-life dissidents to prevent U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison from becoming
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