The shallow end Imagine how bitter the taste of defeat must be for Laura Miller on her wading pool deal, especially since it looked like she had the thing won. Miller, trying to keep two city wading pools open in poor neighborhoods in southern Dallas, persuaded the ExxonMobil Foundation to…

Silence is not golden The last time Buzz took a potshot at Dallas Park and Recreation Board member Ralph Isenberg — for painting over graffiti on an Arcadia Park house without the owner’s permission — he was not happy. So unhappy was he that he sent us a 5-gallon bucket…

Caught napping How many tranquilizers would it take to put an entire lake of fish asleep? One, Buzz figures, if it was the same brand of sleeping pill used by the staff of The Dallas Morning News, who let a fishy tale slip into print last week. On March 30,…

Location, location, location For two years, Amelia Core Jenkins, proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast at the corner of Young and St. Paul streets downtown, dutifully paid her dues to the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The money earned her inn, in a converted abandoned warehouse, the right to be listed in…

Bark, don’t bite So, how is KTVT-Channel 11’s newscast now that popular anchorman Tracy Rowlett has joined the team? Has Rowlett’s former station, WFAA-Channel 8, suffered noticeably? If you have an opinion, please feel free to voice it, unless you’re Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark. The word from…

The new Mod Squad Last week, a group of cops went to the city council to ask whether it would please pay Dallas police officers wages competitive with such crime-ridden hot spots as Plano. This week, the cops aren’t playing quite as nice. The Dallas Police Patrolman’s Union has posted…

Author, author Chris Beamon, the Ponder seventh-grader who landed in the pokey in Denton County last fall after writing a Halloween essay that described shooting a teacher and students, has moved beyond Big Chief notebooks to having his work appear in a tonier rag, Harper’s magazine. (True quote from a…

By-buyout D magazine got at least this much right about columnist John Anders’ split from The Dallas Morning News: He left behind a high salary from the daily, and he’s moving with his wife, News columnist Helen Bryant, to Austin. The question, which D purports to answer in its March…

Mission improbable OK, class, here’s another Buzz pop quiz: Give us three words that best describe The Dallas Morning News’ editorial content without using a synonym for “boring.” Time’s up. The correct answer, according to the daily’s recent in-house editorial newsletter News news — kindly faxed to us from an…

Slip up Buzz was just a boy when the great Sears catalog penis scandal rocked the nation. Maybe you remember. A model for a pair of men’s boxer shorts had a vague shadow on his inner thigh that might have been the man’s dangling johnson peeking out — if you…

Image is everything We’re sure resting easier now that The Dallas Morning News assures us that folks in, say, New Jersey aren’t troubled by the stink of corruption rising from City Councilman Al Lipscomb’s conviction for taking bribes from Yellow Cab. At least we think that was the point of…

Breaching the stonewall There’s a saying newspeople like to toss out whenever we’re feeling particularly macho: “Don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” It’s probably not a good idea to start battles with people who buy videotape by the mile, either, but apparently word hasn’t reached…

With friends like this… Representatives of seven historically black Texas colleges have a message for the anonymous author who is circulating an e-mail that claims Gov. George W. Bush is responsible for the schools’ imminent closings: Knock it off. The e-mail says that Bush, who once served on the board…

Paper tiger Here’s a quick question for you regular readers of this column — both of you. If Buzz were to get in a fight with our boss and wind up suspended or sacked, would you organize to save our skin? You can stop laughing now. Obviously Buzz needs to…

Good God, a good grade A bit of good news published in last Thursday’s Dallas Morning News surprised Buzz so much that we nearly spit out our morning bourb…um, coffee. A study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation found that Texas is “one of only a handful of states” that…

Self-flagellation People who live near Lower Greenville Avenue have long complained that they get little help from the city when it comes to regulating the glut of bars — and the shortage of parking spaces — choking their neighborhoods. Whose side is the city on? they wonder. Now they have…

Nineteen ninety-nine, the last year of the millennium, a time to… OK, hold it right there. Among the dozens of you reading this are no doubt some who just slapped their foreheads, muttered “idiot,” and grabbed a pen to fire off a letter pointing out that 1999 is not the…

Rest of the Tubervilles Linda Dennis, meet Alex Troup. He’s the guy who knows what the city did with your dead relatives — at least one of them, anyway. “I know where the Tubervilles are,” says Troup, a local historian who recently contacted the Dallas Observer after reading a news…

Art lovers Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit. Maybe the folks at Deep Ellum Center for the Arts are really, really good sports. Whatever motivated them, we here at the Dallas Observer would like to thank DECA for not pressing charges against two of the paper’s advertising staff who undecked DECA’s…

Buzz’s holiday gift guide The desperate hours are approaching. The holiday is almost here, and Buzz still doesn’t know what to get Mrs. Buzz for Christmas. She asked for a vacuum cleaner, but Buzz knows a marital test when we see one, and there’s no way we’re dumb enough to…

This space to let Federal prosecutors are challenging defense attorneys’ efforts to introduce the results of a lie-detector test into evidence in city council member Al Lipscomb’s bribery trial, The Dallas Morning News reports. The prosecutors apparently don’t think polygraph exams make good evidence. Buzz wonders, have they talked with…

Exhibit D Back when men were men, women were women, and lawyers were blessedly fewer in number, newspaper editors and reporters who offended the mighty in print stood a good chance of getting a horsewhipping. Now we’re more likely to get sued. This is yet another sign of the decline…