Buzz has never understood the love affair Texans have with their cars. (Now in their cars--that's a different story.) We've also never been one to snub mass transit, particularly since the old Buzzmobile is about as sexy as a pair of Dr. Scholl's sandals. That's why the idea of hopping a bus to work has never been a problem for Buzz--as a matter of fact, we kind of like the feeling of community that comes from sharing a ride with the great unwashed. It's the smell we're not too fond of. But the power snooze we're able to grab as the grumble of the engine lulls us into unconsciousness is well worth it.
Until the other day.
While riding home from work, a nearly napping Buzz noticed one passenger in particular passed out in his seat, drunk in the skunk sense of the word. The bus driver pulled to a stop in East Dallas, walked to the back of the bus, raised the drunk up and slapped him across the face. Silly. "Hey man, wake up, this is your stop!" shouted the driver. And the guy snapped to, thanked the driver, and stumbled out the door.
Buzz later contacted a DART spokesman, who revealed that the transit company had just instituted its new "stop and smack" service, at the request of transients, vagrants, vagabonds, and narcoleptics who were missing key appointments around the city. "The Stop and Smack is a sensible plan that guarantees that no one, no matter how stoned or tired, will miss their stop," says the spokesperson, yawning. "And drivers go through a rigorous five-hour certification to ensure excessive force is never used."
DART's new service comes as a wake-up call to Buzz, who now has plans of using the old Buzzmobile with more frequency.
Payback
A Dallas cop called Buzz the other day and gloated that he and three of his brothers in blue recently took the bar exam and passed.
But it wasn't the fact that these cops will be brothers in green (as in the color of money) that made him so euphoric. It's that his alma mater--Texas Wesleyan University Law School, which has had trouble getting respect since the day its doors opened--had doubled the bar-exam passing rate of the more prestigious Southern Methodist University Law School.
Students at Texas Wesleyan, which received provisional accreditation in 1994, had a passing rate on the February test of 72.5 percent, while the SMU grads' passing rate was an embarrassing 37.5 percent. SMU has recently taken some hard hits in the media about its loss of quality, though the hiring of its new dean, Dr. John Attanasio from St. Louis University, may well stem its decline.
Nevertheless, the cop who called Buzz took particular pleasure in these numbers because he had contacted SMU a while back to inquire about transferring and was told by a woman in the admissions office that she didn't think SMU accepted students from Texas Wesleyan.
Texas Wesleyan will hear this fall whether it has been granted full accreditation. Buzz thinks with those kind of bar results, if they don't get accredited, someone oughta sue.
--Compiled from staff reports by Mark Donald
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