Buzz has been a bit afraid to go to sleep lately. For decades we’ve been a proud, left-leaning, pro-choice, social-program-supporting, anti-drug-war liberal, but apparently there’s something in the water in Dallas that takes perfectly normal people of the Democratic stripe and turns them into (shudder) Republicans. It’s happened with mayoral…
Naim Alasaad would like Buzz to deliver the following message to mayoral candidate Laura Miller and anyone else with bright ideas about breathing life into downtown: This is Texas. It gets hot in the summer. That’s obvious, you say? You suspect she already knows that? Then why, oh why does…
Maybe you’ve seen them, the billboards selling “Erma Bombeck for Dallas mayor” and “Cesar Romero for Dallas mayor.” You have? You don’t get it? Neither did Buzz. Was this some sort of hip, postmodern commentary on the mayoral election? A dig at mayoral candidate Laura Miller’s new happy homemaker persona…
Imagine this: Actors perform a comic space opera that spans the galaxies, featuring a lone hero battling futuristic evil threatening to undo the galaxy. There are no blue-screen or computer-generated special effects. In fact, apart from cobbled-together sound effects, there are no special effects. There’s just you and the actors…
The Belo empire is too preoccupied with pumping up its favorite candidate to report this, so we’ll let you in on a little secret. Former Dallas Observer columnist Laura Miller is kicking fanny in the mayoral race. So maybe that wasn’t such a secret, at least to anyone who judges…
When the press release for the “all-new” Pink Floyd LaserSpectacular hit our desk, our first reaction was to check the calendar. Nope, it’s not 1985. Our second was to inspect the release more closely, in case it was some ancient leftover. (The Dallas Observer’s offices are not what you’d call…
This is going to be tough. Now comes the point at which Buzz annually recounts some of the more significant events and people of the past 12 months in Dallas and makes fun of them. In the past, this has been fairly easy, as the months generally have provided a steady…
When you got nothing, the great Bob Dylan once sang, you got nothing to lose. Maybe perennial mayoral candidate Bill Jack Ludwig has been jamming to “Like a Rolling Stone” lately. Or maybe he’s just loopy. Whatever the case, in recent days Ludwig provided some much needed, if unintended, levity…
Last week the Dallas Observer printed an article about Charles Wilkerson, an itinerant minister who seems to have a knack for buying struggling private schools and closing them down. The article reported that those he left behind with piles of debts dispute Wilkerson’s versions of how school closures came about…
(Editor’s note: The following contains a very un-P.C. sexist rant. The author is not normally a pig, but Yuletide avarice has affected his reasoning. Please forgive him.) Here’s a conversation that’s been taking place about every week lately at a certain married couple’s Northwest Dallas home. Their names have been…
Shit happens: During this mayoral campaign season, when talk of getting back to basics–fixing streets, sidewalks, etc.–is all the vogue, the city’s plans to replace aging, overburdened sewer lines in Deep Ellum should be good news. You’d think that business owners there would be happy. They’re not happy. In fact,…
Whoever decided to release a flock of caged white doves at the end of the Cowboys halftime show Thanksgiving Day no doubt intended them as symbols of peace during these unsettled times. Except they weren’t doves. At least one was a pigeon. How does Buzz know that? Because we located…
Boxing fans had anticipated the superfeatherweight championship bout between unbeaten champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and No. 1 ranked Jesus Chavez for more than three years. That’s how long it’s taken Chavez, dubbed “El Matador,” to convince immigration officials to allow him back into the United States from Mexico. (See “Knockdown,”…
To you, what best epitomizes the beauty of the holiday season? Is it a midnight Mass? A child’s delight on Christmas morning? Serving food to the homeless? Yeah, well, good for you, Norman Rockwell. It’s good to know that people like you exist, to counterbalance people like us, who prefer…
The rubble of the World Trade Center towers had not stopped smoldering before ideas began surfacing about how best to memorialize the destruction of September 11. Should the towers be rebuilt or replaced with some sort of memorial park? One proposal suggests installing a piece of artwork in the interim…
To the end, Herbert Lee Madison insisted he was no cop killer. Maybe not, but he definitely should learn to look both ways before crossing the street. He’ll have plenty of time in jail to consider that lesson. A Dallas County jury last week didn’t buy Madison’s story that he…
Two years ago, a colleague of Michael Cain’s asked the founder and director of the Deep Ellum Film Festival just why the hell he named his fledgling fest after a part of town in which there were, ahem, no movie theaters. “There will be,” Cain insisted, like a W.P. Kinsella…
Domingo Garcia confirmed to Buzz this week that he is “forming an exploratory committee” to look into the possibility of declaring his candidacy for mayor. That’s pol-speak for: “Vote for me for mayor.” He will run, presumably, in the upcoming special election sometime early next year to replace no-longer-sitting Ron…
It wasn’t a good week at The Dallas Morning News. The city lost out on its Olympic bid to friggin’ Houston. (Hey, but that means the streets will be fixed and cops ‘n’ teachers ‘n’ firemen will be paid more. Right? Hello? Isn’t that right?) The rank-and-file reporters don’t care…
First, a little disclosure on Buzz’s part. We were talking this week with Gilberto Cortez, publisher of the local Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa, concerning a list of complaints he has about the way the city communicates with Spanish-speaking media. Interesting, we said. Is there anyone else who feels the same…
In a previous life in San Antonio, each February our boss would send out a memo encouraging employees to wear Western clothes to work to celebrate the annual arrival of the stock show and rodeo. His assumption was that a bunch of pasty, pudgy people who worked every day in…
So the daughter of City Council member Laura Miller called a family meeting to reveal her list of eight reasons why Miller should not run for mayor, Gromer Jeffers Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News. Not to pick a fight with a child, but Buzz thinks the little waif…
