CONAN! CONAN!: Was there any chance at all that Conan O’Brien’s stop through Dallas Thursday night was going to be met with anything short of hysteria? “Even if some of his material was a tad predictable – Texas is really big, Texans sure do love their beer – there was no way anyone at the packed house was not going to whoop and clap with abandon,” Matt Weitz writes on dallasnews.com. Preston Jones’ dfw.com review fills in a few more of the details, including word that Conan wasn’t the only star in attendance whose work schedule was lightened a little earlier than expected. Helping out with a bit: Dirk Nowitzki.

PROTECTING THE PAINT: Have you ever thought much about the museum attendants you see in the galleries – the ones who’ll ask you not to take pictures and let you know when you’re standing to close to the work? Dfw.com spent the day with one at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth recently, who says despite a long day on your feet, the job is not without its perks. “It’s your job to spend a lot of time around great art,” Brittany Stricklin, 25, tells the site. “It’s a pretty nice way to spend your day.” And what about the times when your gallery is empty? “You have a lot of time to contemplate,” she says. “You get to know yourself pretty well.”

A RETURN TO THE CLIBURN: A Surprise in Texas opens around town at a few theaters today. The documentary takes us back to the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. It was an event filled with plenty of compelling stories, none more so than blind Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii sharing the gold. Peter Simek says director Peter Rosen was smart enough to let the story be the star. “At its heart, the film is like a sports film – a competition in which you connect with the characters and then root for their success,” he writes in his review on D Magazine’s Front Row blog. Color Kristian Lin less impressed. “Having spent two weeks covering last year’s Cliburn Competition in exhaustive detail, I know that it was extraordinarily interesting,” he writes in his fwweekly.com review. “You won’t get much of that from the movie, though.”