Buzz

We bought it for the prose
For the past year, Buzz has chronicled the obsessive publicity-seeking of former Dallas Morning News plagiarist and world-class depressive Elizabeth Wurtzel as she desperately clung to the 15 minutes of fame that her fellate-and-tell book, Prozac Nation, generated. Well, Elizabeth's popped up again, you might say, this time across the pond in British GQ.

How does an over-exposed, undertal-ented writer get yet more ink? By ex-posing yet more, of course. Yup, Elizabeth doffed her blouse for the Brits. (Of course, some say she did the same for Dallasites, albeit one at a time.) In GQ's "Prozac Girl," Elizabeth shares her thoughts, her bummer, and her breasts in a series of photos. (Ironically, an article in the same issue on Europe's hard-corn porn queen revealed less flesh.)

Wurtzel, who described her breasts in Prozac Nation as "peachy," obviously has not been to the Farmer's Market in a while. Buzz did note that the media-savvy writer kept her knickers on, presumably to reserve something for a last interview on the true meaning of the X Generation.

Laverne and Shirley get the ax
Considering that she went from Texas to Wisconsin, it must have blindsided former Fort Worth Star-Telegram managing editor Mary Jo Meisner to be called a "carpetbagger."

Meisner, who left Fort Worth two years ago, is editor of The Journal Sentinel, the newspaper created when the afternoon Milwaukee Journal and the morning Milwaukee Sentinel combined operations--and, in the process, eliminated 400 jobs.

According to an article in The New York Times, Meisner, who oversaw the downsizing, has become a lightning rod for criticism and frequently has been cast in "the carpetbagger role." Ironically, when she first accepted the job in Milwaukee, Meisner emphasized her Texas background by sending her employees-to-be a videotape of herself in a cowgirl outfit, riding a horse.

A couple of high-profile missteps surrounding the layoffs didn't help Meisner's reputation as a callous cost cutter. The worst occurred when she scheduled a Caribbean vacation during the time when her employees were learning from leaks that they would soon be axed. She exacerbated the vacation faux pas when, during an interview to defend her Caribbean holiday, she referred to both hosts of a well-known radio talk show as Bob. Unfortunately, only one of them was named Bob; the other was Gene.

Meisner says she knew the hosts' names; she was just having difficulty hearing them on the telephone.

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