Last week on a KLIF talk show, former Mayor Steve Bartlett tore into Observer columnist Laura Miller. Of course, Miller hadn't been invited to defend herself, but why quibble?
What Buzz found interesting was Bart-lett's parting shot--that the personal ads in the Observer were more accurate than the articles.
Hmmm. How does the former mayor know that? We can only assume the always well-prepared ex-mayor has been taking advantage of the Observer's Romance classified ads.
Romance maintains absolute confidentiality and wouldn't let even Buzz take a gander at the identities of its advertisers. But by studying the classifieds diligently, we found an ad that looked suspiciously like the work of former Mayor Steve.
Stick to pictures
Channel 4, perhaps trying to adapt to the Fox network culture, crossed the crass line last week with a report on a Dallas man accused of dousing his wife with gasoline and lighting her on fire. The woman, horribly burned, died. On a strip across the bottom of the screen, the KDFW report was labeled: Woman torched.
And people complain about our tabloid headlines.
F. Flintstone with a buzz-cut
The self-dubbed "Richard Simmons of paleolithic nutrition," Ray Audette is the latest Observer profile subject ("Neander-Guy," by Rebecca Sherman, July 6) to find a friend in literary agent Jan Miller. (See related story in News.)
With only 1,000 copies of Neander-Thin: A Cave Man's Guide to Nutrition in circulation (that's a sellout of the first printing), Audette's theory that eating and living more like cave folks will cure just about everything that ails ya--except maybe drive-by spearings--has apparently found enough of a niche that Miller believes she can make a fast buck.
Miller, of Dupree, Miller and Associates, who originally turned Audette's book down, now will pound on the doors of New York's publishing houses on his behalf and possibly explore infomercials, which made tubs of money for another client, fitness guru Susan Powter.
"Jan's going to work her magic on it--that's all I know," says Audette.
No BS (at least not enough)
A sticky correction in last week's Fort Worth Star-Telegram dealt with some smelly math on the part of a letter writer that went right by S-T editors. In a scintillating letter on the effect of cattle on water quality, Danny Moffatt posed an old-fashioned story problem: If one cow produces 100 pounds of manure and urine (the S-T correction tastefully changed that to "waste") a day and there are 700 cows on a dairy farm, how much total stuff (our word) is produced each day? Moffatt and the S-T fact checkers came up with 7,000.
Which, of course, is a load of crap.
