She laughs often, a big whooping holler that makes you feel stupid for taking this interview and this story and your life so damn seriously. It’s what makes her well-known, what makes her special. That in a 10-minute conversation, by sheer force of personality, she can make you forget about…
Letters…We’ve Got Letters: It looked like an April Fools’ joke, except that it was announced on April 3, and the organization that announced it, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, isn’t–how should we say this?–a big fan of the yuk-yuk. According to the DFW chapter of CAIR, it had reached an…
Give Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith credit for being honest. “In some quarters, we’ve become a coaster for the leisure class,” he says. Issues of TM, Smith rightly fears, were being bought because of the magazine’s reputation within an aging demographic, not because the publication was working its hardest to…
He wears short shorts: Look, you gearheads can have your Palm Pilot VII, your Franklin Planners, and all the other fancy-pants scheduling systems you can find. Buzz keeps track of appointments the old-fashioned way–by writing them down on a calendar featuring a half-naked Dallas County court commissioner. What? You’ve never…
Thumbing through our copy of this past Sunday’s Dallas Morning News–a.k.a., “All the news we’ve already read online at CNN.com, ap.org, and espn.com”–we came upon a revelation: Once a decade, the DMN shows some balls. This discovery was made by reading every word of Section E, a special project titled…
Before I put in context for you the just-announced “scale-back” of the Arlington Morning News–the bastard child of The Dallas Morning News will now be published only five days a week instead of the previous seven and will be just a section within the DMN itself–I want to make clear…
What passes for “reality” under the great video eye of network television is pretty lame these days. Personally, we’re not going to take that prefab national phenom known as Survivor seriously until someone dies of exposure, snakebite, or hunger during the show. Similarly, we’ll consider Temptation Island “reality-based programming” only…
When you work for an alternative weekly, it’s not popular to say that you like or admire the publisher of your town’s daily newspaper. So my approbation for Dallas Morning News publisher Burl Osborne needs explanation. Osborne, who also holds the Belo-conferred title of “president/publishing division,” is, to me, a…
Solid journalism, the sort that makes kids weaned on All the President’s Men all excited and proud, is rarely flashy. No, solid journalism is like a second baseman who hits .290 and turns a perfect two: It won’t be showered with awards, but it will be vital to any good…
Sometimes she tells herself that no one remembers, convinces herself that everybody has forgotten her songs and her three network television shows and every last one of her 84 Top-40 singles. On those days, she’s certain the era of Vic and Frank and long, luxurious gowns and singing in tune…
You think I’m mean. That hurts. I know I’ve written some not-so-nice things this year about reporters and Belo executives and Cuecats and such. But it’s the holiday season, and I’m infected…sorry, I mean filled…with the spirit of joy. I will no longer mock the 42 f-‘in MILLION BUCKS those…
Today is Soapbox Day, a great day, a day when I get to tell the local media suits why I am so smart and they are so dumb. It is, in fact, my favorite day of the year, with the exception of the rarely celebrated Box Day, a discussion of…
It’s an accepted irony that local news television stations shine only on the darkest days. So it was with KTVT-TV Channel 11 a year ago, about the time it became CBS-owned and Tracy Rowlett-led, when the heretofore news-lite station covered the Texas A&M bonfire collapse. It was the day Channel…
Fart of the deal: Unlike nice people, Buzz just loves to say we told you so. The words roll off our keyboard especially sweetly when we get to say them to Belo Corp., the owner of The Dallas Morning News, as in, “We told you that buying a share of…
k.d. lang: There are several good reasons to make the trek to downtown Fort Worth to catch k.d. lang, chief among them the ideal merging of artist and venue: Her sumptuous vocal artistry fits perfectly and warmly inside the acoustic flawlessness of Bass Performance Hall, like your daughter’s hand in…
(Editor’s note. Our media columnist disappeared at approximately 6 p.m. on election night. At 7 p.m., we declared him dead. A few hours later, we received word he was not dead. We rescinded our declaration. By 2 a.m., we were tired and annoyed, so we declared him dead again. But…
Rhode outta town: To quote Bart Simpson, these are “crazy, topsy-turvy times” in which we live. The NASDAQ swings like Dennis Rodman after 10 cocktails, more people are interested in the Mavericks than in the Cowboys, dogs and cats are sleeping together–it’s mass hysteria. Luckily for Buzz, there’s one thing…
Sexy-tary of State: One of the few good episodes of Sex and the City this season saw Carrie riding the wild pony with a state politician. It was memorable not just for the shot of Sarah Jessica Parker’s supple backside, but also because of the story line–that the sex columnist…
If you didn’t hear Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban on The Ticket 1310-AM last week, you missed a beautiful thing: someone (besides us) launching an all-out piss-storm on The Dallas Morning News. Cuban–who declined comment after the show–told Ticket listeners that he’d just come from a meeting with News bigwigs…
We should be ashamed for overlooking the Vistas Film Festival last year, its first in existence. In our haste to cover those in Deep Ellum and Fort Worth, and in our haste to once more bury the USA Film Festival, this four-day celebration of Latin film fell between the cracks,…
The music was too loud for anyone else to hear the stripper crying. She was weeping, begging the coked-up humor columnist for more money because her car was about to be repossessed. The columnist, high and drunk, felt sorry for her and ordered that a lap dance be given to…
Buzz is always a little uncomfortable when the subject of our attention is the Dallas Observer’s parent company, Phoenix-based New Times Inc., because Buzz likes our paycheck, and those mortgage payments aren’t going away anytime soon. But Buzz is what Buzz is: an annoying little fly, strangely and helplessly attracted…
