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Preparing Forney for a Cold Snap: Or, Why Winter Keeps Catching Us by Surprise

By Tony Hicks
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Every year, without fail, winter arrives in North Texas the way an unexpected email from HR does: polite on the surface, quietly threatening underneath, and carrying the strong implication that someone, somewhere, should have prepared better. This week, the forecast promises temperatures dipping into the 20s, the kind of numbers that send panic rippling through neighborhoods where barbecue grills outnumber pipe insulation kits by a factor of ten. Social media fills with screenshots of weather apps. Hardware stores experience a sudden run on faucet covers. Group texts ignite with the same question repeated in twelve variations: Are you dripping your faucets? Welcome to cold-snap season in Forney. If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is. We do this dance every year. The only thing that changes is which pipes freeze, which roads glaze over, and which unlucky soul learns the exact location of their water shutoff valve at two in the morning. The truth is, cold weather in North ...
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Indiana Erases Forgettable History With an Unforgettable Title

By Tony Hicks
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Or: How College Football Woke Up in an Alternate Reality and Just Decided to Roll With It College football is built on tradition, which is a polite way of saying it is built on memory. Long memory. Selective memory. Memory that refuses to die even when presented with overwhelming evidence that maybe—just maybe—it’s time to update the operating system. And then there’s Indiana football, which spent more than a century acting like memory itself was the problem. For 156 years, Indiana accumulated losses the way other programs accumulate boosters. Seven hundred and fifteen of them. Not “character-building losses.” Not “learning experience” losses. Just plain losses. Losses that stacked up so high they became a trivia question, then a punchline, then a personality trait. Until Monday night. Until a frozen field in Bloomington, a confetti-soaked field in Miami Gardens, and a scoreboard that refused to make sense to anyone raised on the old rules of college football gravity. Indiana did...
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Bill Self Gets Medical Care, Skips Colorado Trip — And Everyone Suddenly Remembers What Actually Matters

By Tony Hicks
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There are sports stories that feel enormous because of the score. There are sports stories that feel enormous because of the standings. And then there are sports stories that land quietly, without a buzzer-beater or a ranking shake-up, and remind everyone that the entire spectacle rests on the shoulders of very real, very mortal people. This is one of those stories. On Monday, Bill Self , the longtime head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks , received medical treatment and did not travel with the team to Boulder for a Big 12 road game against Colorado Buffaloes . The university said he felt under the weather, was taken to LMH Health as a precaution, received IV fluids, and was doing better. That was it. No melodrama. No cryptic language. No spinning it into something else. Just a pause. And for a fan base trained to dissect rotation minutes, officiating tendencies, and February road records as if they were matters of national security, that pause landed with unusual clarity. Because whe...
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Alias Is Closed. Add It to the Pile of Culinary Ghosts Haunting Northern Virginia.

By Tony Hicks
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There’s a specific kind of silence that settles over a restaurant after it closes. It’s not the peaceful quiet of a place that’s finished its work. It’s the awkward, haunted hush of a dining room that once promised an experience and now offers only square footage and a faint smell of ambition. As of January 18, that silence belongs to Alias , the modern American eatery in Vint Hill that just last year basked in the glow of being named one of Northern Virginia Magazine’s 50 Best Restaurants of 2025. Yes, that Alias. The one with the tasting menus. The one with the reverent language about local sourcing and seasonality. The one where scallops were described with the kind of poetic intensity usually reserved for doomed lovers in a Victorian novel. Closed. Permanently. Lights out. Menu retired. Another “unforgettable chapter” quietly boxed up and sent to storage. If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Northern Virginia’s dining scene has become a revolving door of beautifully d...
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Congratulations, Your Body Has Been Quietly Quitting Since 35

By Tony Hicks
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There’s a particular kind of insult that only science can deliver. Not the dramatic kind. Not the “your lifestyle choices will catch up with you” kind. No. Science prefers something far more devastating: Matter-of-fact documentation. Charts. Longitudinal data. Forty-seven years of patiently watching humans decline while everyone else was busy arguing about carbs. And now, after nearly half a century of observation, a Swedish research team has calmly informed the world that your physical peak showed up around age 35… and then quietly left without saying goodbye. No fireworks. No warning siren. No Apple Watch notification. Just a slow fade, like a band you loved that stopped releasing albums but still tours county fairs. This isn’t a hot take. It’s not wellness influencer content. It’s not a “do these three exercises to reverse aging” headline. It’s the result of the Swedish Physical Activity and Fitness (SPAF) study , run by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and published...
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The 24-Hour Rule Is the Only Financial Advice That’s Ever Actually Worked for Me

By Tony Hicks
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No more quick clicking equals more cash in the bank, fewer boxes on my porch, and significantly less shame. There is a very specific sound my phone makes when an order confirmation hits my inbox. It’s not an actual sound, but my brain hears it anyway. A soft little cha-ching , followed by the distant rumble of regret warming up in the bullpen. For years, that sound ruled my financial life. I didn’t grow up reckless with money. I grew up reasonable . Bills got paid. Savings existed in theory. But somewhere between one-click purchasing, targeted ads that know my emotional state better than my therapist, and the illusion that $19.99 “doesn’t really count,” I became an adult with a steady income and a mysterious talent for buying things I absolutely did not need. The breaking point wasn’t a luxury handbag or a spontaneous vacation. It was a kitchen appliance. A sleek, promising countertop miracle that promised to “change how I cook forever.” I used it twice. Twice. Once to prove it worked....
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Fashion Campaigns Are Getting Good Again (And It’s About Time)

By Tony Hicks
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There was a stretch not so long ago when fashion campaigns felt like waiting rooms. Beige ones. You’d scroll past them, glance at a famous face draped in something allegedly directional, and move on with your life unchanged. No spark. No curiosity. No sense that clothes—or the people imagining them—had anything urgent to say. And then something shifted. After the Great Designer Reshuffle of 2025, a phrase that already sounds like it deserves its own Netflix docuseries narrated by someone whispering reverently, a new generation of creative directors stepped into freshly vacated offices, inherited cavernous ateliers, and did something quietly radical: they remembered that fashion advertising is allowed to be weird again. Not “we hired a celebrity and lit them nicely” weird. Real weird. Thoughtful weird. “Why is this happening and why do I kind of love it?” weird. This year’s early campaigns don’t feel like content obligations. They feel like points of view. Like someone argued in a r...
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