Words of Wiz-dumb

Words of wiz-dumb: Here’s an interesting bit of polling news reported by political Web site Daily Kos: Democrat Rick Noriega has pulled within 4 points of…beg your pardon? Who’s that, you ask? Noriega is a candidate for U.S. Senate, running against incumbent John Cornyn. Anyway, recent polls show… No, not…

Pix of a Polygamist Smooch Is Worth a Thousand Icks

The ick factor: Here Buzz was, ready to congratulate the 3rd Court of Appeals on its courage and commitment to the rule of law for deciding last week that the state overreached in taking more than 450 kids from the polygamist FLDS compound in West Texas. Gotta be tough, hearing…

Getting Very Sleepy

For many, an evening watching actors in period costumes hoof it and sing bouncy tunes is heavenly. For others, it sounds like the ninth circle of hell. If you’re in the latter bunch, is The Drowsy Chaperone, a comic musical-within-a-play set to a 1920s beat going to change your mind?…

Want to save an old hotel? Be our guest.

Oh, all right already: Its outside smells like street-person pee. Its inside, when Buzz was in the bar years ago, looks like your parents’ basement rec room. Its concrete and metal exterior reminds one vaguely of the nicest hotel ever built in the old Soviet Union. So Buzz, who considers…

Life’s an Eskimo Pie

Man, I never thought I’d say this, but I kinda liked Steve Blow’s and James Ragland’s little dialogue on race this past week in The Dallas Morning News. Of course, the bar there is set pretty low — at least they weren’t writing about their love of Luby’s. I’m not…

High noon at Seven

You hate the robber who mugged you last week, but we celebrate outlaws who made Texas their playground in the 1800s. Why? Blame the hats. Criminals in stylish hats such as Stetsons and fedoras seem cool, even if they were killers. Get the skinny on some hat-wearing outlaws when Dallas…

Kids Rule

Kids rule: Buzz was wondering when the Liberty Legal Institute, that Dallas-based network of lawyers who labor on behalf of religious freedom and parental rights, would weigh in on Texas authorities’ raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in West Texas. How could Liberty…

Chocoholic

Thanks a bunch, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. You’ve taken a perfectly good childhood memory—Gene Wilder sing “Pure Imagination” in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—and replaced it with your own mocking, nefarious version from the violent South Park episode “Imaginationland.” Seriously, thank you. That saccharine Wilder number never really…

Logo Jam

Logo jam: At last…at last we can see some real progress in the Trinity River Project, that ambitious $800 kabillion—give or take a few kabillion—plan, approved in 1937, to turn the Trinity near downtown from a muddy, levee-lined ditch into a muddy, levee-lined ditch bordered by a toll road. So…

Strong Arm of the Law

Why is Greg Abbott smiling? Something to do with watching an old lady bathe, mebbe? If you’re old, a minority and a Democrat who loves your country enough to vote regularly, you should draw the blinds when you take a bath, ’cause Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and his boys…

Don’t Be a Spare

Simulated bowling on a videogame console strikes us as something similar to drinking non-alcoholic beer. What’s the point? You’re still bowling, only you don’t get any exercise (at least you don’t have to wear rented shoes ). At the Tipperary Inn’s Wii Bowling Leagues you can get plenty of Guinness,…

Hear Ye

You say you want to experience the Renaissance? Fine, try this: Stop bathing for a few months, get yourself some body lice, cut off your nose to simulate syphilis, kill off a couple of your kids with the plague, burn your sister as a witch and dig a ditch in…

Shoe Doesn’t Fit

Shoe doesn’t fit: More than a decade has passed since Buzz visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., so we remember little about the exhibits there. One image remains firmly embedded, however: a large pile of worn shoes taken from death camp victims. That pile seemed especially poignant, it’s hominess…

Never Have Kids

Never have kids: It should probably be a warning for anyone wanting to enter the field of family and divorce law that the story told to prove King Solomon’s wisdom involved a family dispute. You gotta be super-wise to wade into those mares’ nests. Solomon had a tricky dispute over…

Albatross Necklace

Albatross necklace: So what was the late political commentator Rufus Shaw talking about when, in the weeks before his suicide, he wrote a blog post bemoaning what he called “the purveyors of hate and personal destruction” in the community? Here’s one possible example: Halice Furtado was executive principal of Redirections…

The Moon and the Tides

Dear Dad: Listen, I know we haven’t spoken in a while, since you’ve been dead the past 10 years, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor and PLEASE GET OUT OF MY HEAD. See, I have to tell people about The Moonlady Fest: A Celebration of…

Bloomin’ Vaqueros

Must…not…make…Brokeback Mountain…joke. Listen, Dallas Arboretum: You have one the coolest places in the city. Your annual Dallas Blooms festival, now in its 24th year and continuing through April 13, is a truly amazing event. Crowds flock to see a breathtaking array of more than 400,000 blooming bulbs on 66 acres,…

Workin’ for a Livin’

Workin’ for a livin’: Buzz caught excerpts from a Hillary Clinton speech to Ohioans this week in which she was all charged up about helpin’ workin’ folk. She talked just like that because, you know, hourly factory workers are incapable of pronouncing a hard “G,” a fact she no doubt…

Green Gloves

Hey, Neil Sperry, Texas horticulture guy, do you have an evil twin brother? Maybe, in producing your annual All Texas Garden Show, coming Friday through Sunday to the Arlington Convention Center, you’ve run across some shady types? I don’t mean a tree here. I need a plant hit man. Oh,…

German Engineering

German engineering: Like many, Buzz is confused by the Democratic Party’s process for selecting a presidential candidate. You’d think it would be simple—voters vote, votes are counted, whoever gets the most, wins—but we’re talking Democrats here, so things are not that straightforward. We tried to read the original blueprint for…

Serpents For The Takin’

I was set to rip on people who might want to attend this weekend’s North American Reptile Breeders Conference and Trade Show at the Arlington Convention Center. Seriously, who wants a rattlesnake or lizard for a pet? People with intimacy issues? Or how about this slogan: “You’ve made a fortune…