Brand control: Self-restraint has never been high on Buzz’s list of virtues, as anyone who has ever seen our nicotine-stained fingers and fat gut can attest. Still, we appreciate virtue in others when we (very rarely) see it, so we kind of admire Eric Johnson, the lawyer running in the…

Burn, baby: Well, that’s distressing. Here Buzz is, due to dispense our bit of weekly wisdom/news/crapola, but we just can’t get into it. Really, what’s the point? See, we just got off the phone with a reader, who was upset with our column last week suggesting that the city should…

Pay to stay: If Emma Lazarus were alive and living in Dallas these days, she’d probably throw up. Lazarus—for those of you who were sleeping in civics class—is the author of “The New Colossus,” the poem that adorns the Statue of Liberty. Why would she be a nauseated Dallasite? Well,…

Well-mannered: Well, that was awkward—one of those embarrassing breach-of-etiquette moments, like when some guy on the bus asks to borrow your comb. You want to be generous, do the polite thing, etc. but geez… In our case, the uncomfortable moment involved U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, who presided over the…

True confessions: Many of us carry some secret shame, a memory of youthful indiscretion that we’d rather no one else know. Maybe you shoplifted or felt up a cousin at a family reunion. Hey, it’s cool. We understand. Even Buzz has an ugly secret, but since we have no shame,…

Governor nutso: So, whaddya think? Is Governor Rick Perry crazy like a fox or just plain crazy? Dallas Morning News editorialist William McKenzie posed a similar question in his column Tuesday…well, sort of similar. “What is Rick Perry doing?” McKenzie asked about the governor’s recent gutting of the Texas Forensic…

“Perry sets up pay for recruiters”—headline in The Dallas Morning News about Governor Rick Perry’s Amway-like campaign program that pays cash incentives to “volunteers” who recruit additional “volunteers” Coming soon to a cable channel near you: Perry, dressed in an electric-blue dress shirt, white belt and tan slacks, rushes from…

Don’t blame the system: We’ve been hearing a lot of chatter from commenters on the Observer’s Web site about how former city council member Don Hill’s trial on charges of corruption is, in fact, an indictment of the city’s 14-1 council system. Under 14-1, created under federal court order in…

Defining inanity: It’s not often anything we read in The Dallas Morning News makes us laugh out loud, but we giggled last Thursday morning when we read this headline over a story out of City Hall: “Lobbyist registrations, gift limits discussed in closed-door session.” That’s right, the city council, tackling…

Copy cats: You’d think the activist folks on the left of the political spectrum would be pretty chapped right about now. After all, they’ve been in the protest and civil disobedience game for decades, speaking out against everything from war to the death penalty to environmental rape. And now we…

Leaking dollars: Buzz is not what you’d call a materialistic person. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou is paradise enow for us. Still, there come moments when we’re gob-smacked by how much money other people make and become a little bit envious. OK, a large bit…

Smoke ’em if you got ’em: Craig Johnson, executive director of ProtectYouth.org, a Dallas-based nonprofit and lobbying group, doesn’t smoke marijuana himself, he says. He doesn’t think your kids should be smoking it either. No drug dealings in the neighborhood; none in the schoolyard either. But he and his group…

Immodest proposal: Buzz has yet to weigh in on the draconian budget cuts facing City Hall, which could spell layoffs for 840 city employees, because, frankly, no one at City Hall has offered us an exorbitant fee for our advice. Given the way city government operates, as revealed at the…

Oh, sure, Mr. Private Sector Wage Slave, you probably get formally evaluated by your boss every year. That annual review by your boss—that idiot—is a painful, tedious, unfair rite of passage annually. Well, if it makes you feel any better, you can take comfort from the fact that local judges,…

Now he tells us: Regrets. Mitchell Rasansky has had a few—and not too few to mention. For example, the former city councilman now regrets supporting Mayor Tom Leppert when the mayor was elected in 2007. “Not too many people pull the wool over my eyes, but he did,” Rasansky tells…

Too smart: Buzz, being a geek, was pretty excited about the rollout of new-fangled “smart meters” in Texas by Oncor, the giant electric transmission company. A new gadget that allows us to see exactly how we’re using electricity by measuring consumption in 15-minute increments and even allows us to monitor…

Dallas two-step: Buzz has been a crime victim four times in Dallas: one car break-in, two break-ins of a shed and one home burglary that cleaned us out. The number of times Dallas police have been at our house? Zero. Now, Buzz is a realist, so we understand that the…