Dream a Little Dream

How did that song about the "Merry Old Land of Oz" go again? "We get up at 12 and start to work at one/Take an hour for lunch, and then at two we're done/Jolly good fun."

Well, that pretty much describes Buzz's workday, so maybe Mayor Laura Miller is right. Maybe Dallas is the "Emerald City."

Can we get a couple of la-di-das from the congregation? Amen.

That's right, the mayor is at it again with the lame Emerald City stuff she first trotted out last year after being re-elected. This time, it's in the foreword she wrote for a new glossy coffee-table book, Dallas, Where Dreams Come True, which features full-color photographs by Carolyn Brown. It's the perfect Christmas gift for in-laws, distant grandparents and other people you don't really know or like too well but are obligated to give something.

"I'll never forget the first time I saw Dallas as a college student in the mid-1970s. I saw smooth ribbons of road, perfectly manicured yards, tall glass buildings, a bustling downtown, all things shiny and new--it was truly the 'Emerald City,'" Miller writes.

So, in other words, Dallas started to go to shit just about the time she arrived. Hmm. Probably just a co-inky-dink.

Not to worry, though. Things are getting better, the mayor writes. "Dallas is, once again, in the midst of a new beginning--a reawakening-- a renaissance."

It's been a long time since the mayor worked here as a columnist and had an editor, so she can be forgiven the redundancy in that sentence. That's an old hack trick to kill space when you don't have much to say--needless repetition, tautology, redundancy, use of synonyms, saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, repetition. Lucky for you, such tricks are beneath Buzz.

Back to the mayor: "We are creating an overall cocktail of vibrancy that makes people from all over the globe want to be here with us. It begins with a robust, dynamic, 24/7 downtown."

Apparently it begins in Fort Worth, unless the mayor has been sipping too many cocktails and got confused over what 24/7 means. Laura, that's 24 hours seven days a week, not seven hours, 24 days a month. Just FYI.