Buzz

The tryouts begin
Please, would someone explain to Buzz how George W. Bush has become the Republican front-runner for the 2000 presidential nomination?

It's not that we don't like him, you understand. Any man who's a baseball fan and fesses up to a hard-drinking youth has gone a long way toward earning our respect. But the man hasn't even completed one term as governor yet, and his baseball team couldn't even win a lousy pennant. Isn't there some sort of qualifying test for the leader of the free world? (Yeah, yeah, obviously not.)

Our point is, what do we really know about this George W., other than who his daddy is?

Well, maybe soon we'll know a lot more, thanks to Dallas Morning News staff writer Bill Minutaglio, who has taken a year's leave from his job at the paper's Austin bureau to write a biography of Bush.

Given the News' history of hard-edged reporting, particularly when it comes to Texas Republicans, we're sure the bio will be filled with all sorts of juicy details. Is Bush a jogger? Does he like dogs better than cats? What's his favorite color?

Just be sure not to hit him too hard, Bill. You wouldn't want to screw up your shot at that presidential press spokesman's job.

Wowboys
If you listen carefully in the still of the evening, you might hear a faint thump, thump coming from the northwest. That sound, we suspect, is Col. Charles Goodnight--of Goodnight-Loving Trail fame--spinning in his grave. What might have disturbed the old cowboy's rest up in the Panhandle is next week's edition of Time magazine.

"We are the new cowboys," says one of the partners with local video-game company Ion Storm in the Time article that declares Dallas the bloody-video-game capital of the nation. (One of Ion Storm's founders is John Romero, a co-creator of the 3-D shoot-'em-up games Doom and Quake, which made him something on the order of a kabillion dollars.)

Now, Buzz loves video games. In fact, we would gladly put down our pencil to become a play-tester for Romero and pals, if they'd give us some of those kabillions.

But a bunch of post-adolescent programmers as Texas' "new cowboys"? Listen up, pardners, you might want to keep them words to yourself should you ever find yourself anywhere west of Fort Worth, less'n you find a Tony Lama's up your Doritos- and Ding-Dong-plumped keisters.

Crib note
OK, we're cribbing, but since few of you likely read the Columbia Journalism Review, we thought we'd pass on this "dart" tossed at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in CJR's recent darts and laurels column.

The magazine reported that the Star-Telegram failed "to divulge the ending of a real-life Seinfeld saga" in its report on a newspaper-sponsored Kramer look-alike contest, marking the end of the television series. The winner, selected by a group of judges that included a Star-Telegram columnist, was arrested soon afterward on charges of public intoxication, assault, and indecency with a child--a fact the newspaper failed to note in its coverage. They must have put it in the vault.

--Compiled from staff reports by Patrick Williams