Letters From Here

Texas BBQ Posse Favorites

The Texas BBQ Posse hit 10 highly rated barbecue joints in 48 hours, sampling brisket, pork ribs and sausage. Each meat was rated on a scale of 1 to 10 (best) and scores from six judges were averaged. Here’s how the top six spots fared. (Best possible score is 30.) More about how the Posse judges meat here.

1. Franklin, Austin 27.48

2. Pecan Lodge, Dallas 26.83

3. Snow’s, Lexington 26.5

4. Kreuz, Lockhart 25.82

5. Louie Mueller, Taylor 24.66

6. Fargo’s, Bryan 22.98

Top brisket: Snow’s

Top pork ribs: Pecan Lodge

Top sausage: Kreuz

El Paso is a city with a distinct flavor. It juxtaposes authentic Mexican culture with a growing hipster scene, and though it’s one of the largest cities in Texas, it still often ends up as a mere pit stop on I-10. Once the storied heart of the Old West (and playground of Billy the Kid), El Paso has recently gained much of the big-city feel of its neighbor across the border, Ciudad Juárez. It has come into its own with new theaters, restaurants and nightclubs, many of them transplants from its sister city, the epicenter of the Mexican drug war.

Hm.

Yesterday morning, Denton musician and concert promoter Glen Farris noticed something peculiar at the corner of the college town’s Hickory and Locust streets. There, embossed in brass and set in the concrete sidewalk in front of the Wells Fargo Bank on Denton’s town square, sat a plaque he had noticed many times before — one that marked the location of a time capsule buried 20 years earlier, on September 12, 1992. The capsule, the plaque explained, was set in place two decades prior by the employees of Denton’s First State Bank — a company that no longer exists, as, years ago, Wells Fargo bought out that initial entity — and was to be opened yesterday, as that company turned 100 years old.

“I just thought it was hilarious that we forgot about it and that it’s in a brass plaque literally set in stone,” Farris says today of his re-discovery.

So Farris did what any Internet-connected young Dentonite might do: He took a picture of the plaque with his camera phone, then uploaded it to his Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Within minutes, hilarity ensued.

Definitely worth clicking through for the story.

Thx Chip G.!

The population estimates released Thursday show that cities and suburbs across North Texas far outdistanced national growth trends. Plano, McKinney and Frisco each grew by about 3.8 percent, ranking fourth, fifth and sixth, with Denton up 3.4 percent to rank seventh and Carrollton growing by 3 percent to rank 14th.

In numerical growth, Dallas and Fort Worth joined Houston, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso in the Top 15, with Dallas adding 25,413 people between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2011, far more than it added in the entire decade ending in 2010.

In the Dallas area, the fastest growth rates remained in the suburban counties, with Collin and Rockwall counties growing by about 3.8 percent, and Denton by 3.6 percent. Both Tarrant and Dallas counties grew by more than 2 percent.

Denton, Texas, is a small city home to two universities in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan region. Several years ago, Chris Flemmons, a long-time resident and singer/songwriter for the Sub Pop band The Baptist Generals, decided he wanted to stem the annual exodus of his friends who went looking for jobs in cities outside of Denton. He thought the best way to do this was to leverage what he saw as the city’s “best export” – its music scene.