Mother of all Websites (really!) As anyone this side of a rosary knows, getting in touch with Yahweh can be iffy at best. But the never-vengeful Virgin Mary is always there to listen–no matter how little juice you’ve got on this plane of existence. Our favorite incarnation of the Madonna…

Whatever happened to “We May Never Pass This Way Again?” Buzz has been monitoring a disturbing trend of totalitarianism emerging in Dallas area high school mottos. Highland Park High School’s football squad’s motto, for instance, is “Nothing Short of Perfection.” Which makes a lot of sense when you recall that…

News hounds KRLD-AM radio sure knows how to kick off a promotional campaign. No sooner did the station put up bold new billboards advertising, “KRLD: The Source For Local News,” than the station made big changes in its newsroom–reducing its news staff by five employees. What’s going on at KRLD?…

San Antonio goes in the toilet It isn’t often that Buzz is lured away from home turf for a choice idiocy, but we couldn’t resist this story out of San Antonio. Station KENS-TV Channel 11 hit the ratings-sweeps bottom with a splash of slime last week when reporter Al Zimmerman…

Unlovely Rita Memo to Dallas’ meter cops: Don’t mess with geeks bearing high-tech equipment. It seems that Dallas’ parking enforcement corps has been having a field day (and night) ticketing the cars that squeeze into the Ross Avenue area once a month to buy and sell computers and high technology…

No hockey face guard? It must have been the pre-Halloween rush that made The Dallas Morning News do it. You know, all the kids clamoring for the newest freaky look that makes Freddy Krueger and Hannibal Lecter look about as menacing as Pumba. This year, any self-respecting kid who wanted…

Fired up Diane Emery wants to know why, if actors can pretend to love, murder, and even have sex on stage, they can’t bring enough method acting to bear to fake smoking a lousy cigarette? Emery, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, enjoys theater, but can’t attend plays if actors, in…

Politicians make so many promises that most people don’t pay much attention anymore. But last week, our ears perked up when Dallas City Councilwoman Donna Blumer took a dramatic stand in defense of city ownership of WRR-FM 101.1. WRR, of course, is the only government-owned commercial radio station in America…

In The Dallas Morning News, politics is no joking matter. Dallas cartoonist Buddy Hickerson learned that lesson the hard way when his quirky, irreverent cartoon, The Quigmans, was exiled from the comics page recently for daring to do what folks–at least those outside certain Middle Eastern countries–do every day: poke…

Getting bigger all the time With the rerelease of the classic film Giant, culture critics are re-examining the Texas Myth. Most are lamenting that the wild-cattin’ Texas cattle/oil baron who lived as large as the Lone Star State is as dead and gone as James Dean, who played oilman-party monster…

What goes around… Texas Monthly was chock full of laughs this month–mostly at the expense of the media. It all started when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed an obit containing a list of spectacular–and questionable–lifetime achievements for the deceased. It would seem that James M. Woodson, who passed on at…

Lord bought ’em a Mercedes Benz You probably didn’t hear about the recent civil disturbance in the Park Cities. In a Dallas blueblood equivalent of a soccer riot, the Parkies got positively inflamed about projection problems with First Wives’ Club at the Highland Park Village Theater. After the first couple…

KFC: Korrupted Football Coaches? In these dark days of cynicism and profiteering, we always figured that if there was one thing that couldn’t be bought–a moral constant, if you will–it was former Dallas Cowboys coach-deity Tom Landry. (Oh sure, he’s been in a couple of ads, but those were for…

Make that 1,000 lap dances Those North Texas Toyota Dealers sure know how to protect their image. When Michael Irvin stepped out of line with drugs and topless-dancer hootchie-kootchie, wham–the dealers dumped him as their shill and, worse, took his Landcruiser away. They shrewdly replaced the Cowboys’ fallen star with…

Anyone for a Bathos chip? Buzz is getting that woozy feeling that we’ve heard enough already about the personal lives of presidential candidates. We’ve not only been regaled with tales of Bill’s philandering and and his tragically unsuccessful attempt to ingest marijuana, but more recently Chelsea’s tonsillectomy. Then there’s Bob…

Truth is stranger than Crusty When Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus was in town recently, you might have noticed that the major attraction touted on billboards and obligingly covered in The Dallas Morning News was Uberclown David Larible. “I am a clown on a mission,” Larible says in the…

Bloodsuckers In a recent Texas Observer (no relation to the Dallas Observer, to the relief of both sides), Dallas-based writer Rod Davis lamented that Texas is becoming a tough place to make a living as a serious writer. Rod said a lot of other important things about the “monopolistic tendencies…

Bartlett who? Sheesh, the promotions folks at D magazine, like most of the city, apparently don’t read D either. We were led to this unsurprising conclusion by their new bus ad campaign, which poses the question: “Where’s our arena?” Had they read D–official magazine for the rich and callous–about a…

X’s and Big O’s With a nod to Spy, Buzz offers the world’s first separated at birth advertisement. On the left, an ad from Texas Monthly for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Grapefest, a wine festival so overwhelmingly wholesome it includes “activities for the whole family.” On the right, we have…

Sorry excuse for “sorry” District Judge Manny Alvarez told The Dallas Morning News that Michael Irvin’s apology “seemed sincere.” The News itself referred to the now-famous apology as “profuse.” Is Buzz the only one around here who spent enough hard time in the fourth grade to know a crossed-fingers-behind-the-back “I’m…

Prayers of trees are answered One of the greatest threats to literacy has, like a bad virus, spread to the Internet. That, of course, would be vanity publishing. Since Gutenberg, self-proclaimed novelists, poets, and pundits have paid to have their loopy thoughts on travel, politics, and beloved schnauzers bound into…

Loe blow Passing off someone else’s words or ideas as your own is a basic taboo among writers, yet it’s amazing how casually transgressions are tolerated at newspapers, including, apparently, The Dallas Morning News. An allegation of intellectual theft has been brought to the attention of the Observer by Stephen…