The State Fair of Texas operates as a tax-exempt nonprofit outfit because its mission supposedly is “educational.” With that in mind, Buzz dug up his old Abercrombie & Fitch baseball cap and frayed chinos and headed out for a day of post-graduate research at Fair Park University. Technically, Buzz doesn’t…

It’s not yet last call at the Lounge, the beloved bar adjacent to the Inwood Theater. On August 8, the bar’s owner, Theresa Alexander, was told by Landmark Theaters, which runs the theater and controls the Lounge’s lease, that she had 60 days to vamoose. The reason: Landmark wanted to…

A fine line separates indefatigable optimism from loopiness. Buzz, whose sense of optimism abandoned us about the same time we started losing our hair many years ago, isn’t certain exactly where that line is, but we’re pretty sure that Bobby Wightman-Cervantes, once and future Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has…

So City Council member Laura Miller says she never said those mean things about untidy, code-violating Hispanic businesses in Oak Cliff that the Dallas Observer quoted her as saying in our August 30 edition. Here’s what she says she didn’t say: “I’m going to go up and down that motherfucking…

Damned faint praise: A herd of Pegasuses…Pegasi…whatever…have started cropping up on downtown streets, drawing swift reaction from some of our more aesthetically picky co-workers, specifically: “Gack! What is that?” “That” is the first among a planned 200 brightly decorated, 6-foot-tall, fiberglass winged horses being placed about the city center by…

Peace of the action: We thought it must have been a joke. A co-worker dropped on Buzz’s desk a price list for being listed on a new Web site (www.lowergreenville.org) that aims to promote businesses, including bars, on Lower Greenville Avenue. The guy passing out the flier was Avi Adelman,…

Black not like them: As the Dallas City Council’s redistricting panel wraps up months of mind-numbing labor, some residents in East Oak Cliff’s black middle-class neighborhood of Cedar Crest are aghast at their neighborhood’s late entry into redistricting politics. They fear the hardscrabble neighborhood of black South Dallas is attempting…

The Rangers are in the toilet; the Cowboys are teetering on its rim. Dallas needs a winner. What’s a sports fan to do? Try poetry. Dallas’ entry in the National Poetry Slam Competition held recently in Seattle narrowly edged out Los Angeles 113.3-113.2 to take first place in a field…

Kissy, kissy: With the uninterrupted lovefest celebrating the opening of the American Airlines Center under way in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, regular readers of this paper might expect us to have something nasty to say. Lord knows Buzz tried, but so far the arena seems to be…

When we last checked in with Amelia Core Jenkins, proprietor of a downtown bed-and-breakfast, she was in a tussle with the Convention and Visitors Bureau over that agency’s decision to remove her inn from bureau publications that recommend lodging to tourists. There were too many street people near her establishment,…

Oh, shut up: Although still low in the ratings, KLIF is emerging as a pioneer in the crowded talk radio genre. In recent weeks, it’s broken new ground by eschewing the conservative AM-talk format for flat-out fascism. If you’re looking for radio that makes your skin crawl, turn to KLIF…

Ain’t too proud to beg: As sins go–and in Buzz’s experience they go quite nicely, thank you–running a ministry that’s too proud to ask for money seems a pretty minor, and rare, offense. Yet pride is a sin nonetheless, one that Ole Anthony of the Dallas-based Trinity Foundation, publisher of…

Once was blind: When Buzz has a problem with our eyes it gets written off to any number (one, to be exact) of seedy activities from the night before. But when former Dallas Observer managing editor Emily Benedek briefly lost her sight a few years back, it was a religious…

Don’t have a cow: At the end of a tidy yet depressed street in Pleasant Grove chock-full of pawnshops and ethnic restaurants, a shuttered Army-Navy store bordering Interstate 30 awaits demolition. A new Golden Arches is going up here. Maybe. Plans for McDonald’s in this quiet neighborhood face resistance from…

Digging in: To Buzz, it doesn’t look like much–the tunnel on Good-Latimer Expressway on the northwest corner of Deep Ellum. It’s dim, the traffic lanes are narrow, and the mural art lining it…well, it may be good for all we know. It’s just hard to see it when you’re whizzing…

Fighting fire: On June 5, a long-running lawsuit against the Dallas school district hit a wall. Now the people who filed it may have their backs against one. The case began March 10, 2000, after the school board voted 5-4 to hire a private company, Edison Schools, to run up…

We shall overcome: Buzz, being in the free-speech biz and somewhat left-leaning, generally supports an adult’s right to view and purchase images of nakedness and consensual sex acts on the Internet. Not that Buzz would ever, ever take a peek–goodness gracious no–but we fully support your right to do so,…

Dallas-based CompUSA Inc. and its former chief executive James Halpin must be feeling pretty happy this week, thanks to a decision by District Judge Carlos Lopez that took them off the hook for a multimillion-dollar judgment awarded by a local jury earlier this year. Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú, one…

Flip a coin: Dwaine Caraway is black. Ed Oakley is white. Which one is best fit to be the District 6 City Council representative? Buzz, who lives in the district, would suggest that voters need a little more information than that to decide. We would say that the best candidate–for…

Busted: At the risk of sounding like the crotchety old guy we’re in danger of quickly becoming, Buzz must ask: What kind of bizarro world do we live in that arrests school administrators and puts them in detention because a kid can’t read well? Oh, that’s right. This is Dallas…

Suckers: “Pigeon drops,” home-remodeling scams, vacation time-share offers, the Texas state lottery, recording contracts from major labels. They’re all obvious scams that no intelligent person would fall for if he or she just remembered one simple rule: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Pretty basic…

Sauce for the goose: Steady now. This is tricky. Buzz is going to sermonize about civility while trying not to look like the biggest hypocrite since evangelist Jimmy Swaggart went looking for love in all the wrong places. Here goes: That Mayor Ron Kirk, when he’s right, he’s right. Buzz…