Save Ferris: Elsewhere in this week’s paper, Jim Schutze is mounting a spirited defense of DISD’s magnet schools for talented and gifted students. The district’s magnets and its learning centers for disadvantaged students were threatened with staff cuts thanks to a federal funding formula that requires each DISD campus to…
Hey, have you heard this? You can help the planet by recycling, saving energy, composting, going organic, etc. It’s true! We read that somewhere. OK…we actually have read it pretty much freakin’ EVERYWHERE, all the freakin’ TIME! Gotta do our part to save the planet! Do it! Do it now,…
We know what you’re thinking, right-wing worrywarts, but it’s cool. Frog and Toad are just really good friends. Your marriage is safe, and no one is “indoctrinating” your children. Well, maybe Casa Manana Children’s Playhouse is trying to teach them a thing or two about the joys of best-friendship with…
“Blown Away,” by Tom Korosec, April 16 Cats and Dogs Living Together So, Dallas is not ready for a flood or a tornado. Next week, a cover story on how we are not ready for an earthquake, and the week after the cover story will be that we are unprepared…
Lost in translation: Wow. That was some piece of reportage The Dallas Morning News produced this Sunday about Richard Allen’s inland port project in southern Dallas County. Reporters Kevin Krause and Gromer Jeffers Jr. spent two months reviewing allegations that a coterie of southern Dallas pols and businessmen tried to…
Free Jenny Thank goodness Margaret Morin hasn’t given up on Jenny—without hope, there often is nothing. If Jenny knows, she appreciates it. Morin has a wonderful vision for Jenny, and she won’t give up. We need more people like Morin who fight for what is right, even when the system…
The stammered, oh-so-polite, made-up telephone conversations. The wry, deadpan, gently satirical delivery. Comedian Bob Newhart is the guy you wanted to be your uncle, the funny one who cracks up the dinner table at Thanksgiving. At 79, Newhart has become the sort of entertainer pretentious people call “a national treasure.”…
Remember Jenny?: Give Margaret Morin credit for perseverance. For nearly a year, the leader of Concerned Citizens for Jenny has lobbied, cajoled and pleaded with city leaders to send Jenny—until last week the Dallas Zoo’s only elephant—to a sanctuary in Tennessee. In that time, she says, she’s learned just how…
Somehow, I missed all the Thomas the Tank Engine stories as I grew up. Though the Reverend W. Awdry’s tales of the plucky li’l anthropomorphic locomotive have been around for six decades, I never heard of him. That’s probably because I spent most of my boyhood playing around on real…
Truth hurts: A political gaffe, it’s been said, is what happens when a politician accidentally says something honest. So, we figure former Dallas City Council member Craig Holcomb must have been wishing for a do-over for his comment in last Sunday’s page-one Trinity River story in The Dallas Morning News…
Democracy inaction: On May 9, thanks to folks who signed a pair of petitions, Dallas voters will decide whether the city should build a convention center hotel and whether to enact strict limits on public subsidies to private developers of hotels, condos and shopping centers. Odds are most of you…
Crazy talk: As much as Buzz would prefer to ignore anything Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow says, it behooves us to respond to his Sunday column in which he basically calls the Dallas Observer’s own Jim Schutze a conspiracy-minded, tinfoil-hat-wearing nut job. It behooves us because when we told…
Sex=death: The good news, for all you Texas parents out there, is that the state’s public schools are not teaching your kids that babies are delivered by water fowl or that “touching yourself down there” leads to blindness. At least as far as we know they aren’t. Though, to judge…
Abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work. You know it. Bristol Palin knows it. Shoot, anyone who has ever been or met a teenager knows that telling them to “just say no” is the best and possibly only way to get them to says yes, yes, YES!Still, it’s nice that the folks…
Remember “Killer” Keller?: State Representative Lon Burnam knows how to hold a grudge. The Fort Worth Democrat this week filed a resolution in the House calling for the appointment of a commission to investigate whether the House should impeach Sharon Keller, the presiding judge on the Texas Court of Criminal…
During the Great Depression–the last one, we mean–lavish, light-hearted Hollywood musicals like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 helped Americans forget their troubles for a while and escape to a glittering, fantastical world. This weekend, the 49th Annual O’Reilly Auto Parts AutoRama brings a slew of custom-made hot rods,…
Around my house, when it comes to lubricating the gears of love, I’m more inclined to reach for a 12-pack of Coors light–for her, not me–than shuck open a bucket of oysters. Those of you who are traditionalists (and have some class), however, might be more interested in the aphrodisiacal…
BUZZ Higher purpose: Here are a couple of surprising facts: First, the Texas Legislature has yet to provide property owners with adequate protection from government misusing its power to acquire private property through eminent domain. Second, when the Texas chapter of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit, was…
BUZZ Never forget: Give actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin some credit. She’s coming to understand that the best way to reach Dallas’ heart is through its wallet. Tomlin last year took up the cause of Jenny the psychologically scarred elephant at the Dallas Zoo, joining in a communitywide effort to…
We’re trying to care, really we are. It is Super Bowl XLIII, after all. The Steelers are making their seventh Super Bowl appearance, the Arizona Cardinals their first. Cardinals QB Kurt Warner, who is, like 60 years old or something, is making an unlikely third trip to the championship. Bruce…
Who’s counting: Got a head for numbers? Recently laid off from your job in financial services? Well, Buzz has a hot job tip for you: Become a Dallas cop. By the time you read this, the city council likely will have considered an amendment to the city code that will…
If you haven’t carefully checked the fine print in the city’s proposed high-crime apartment ordinance, which the Dallas City Council will take up today, you might have missed this little gem: Apartment owners whose properties become too crime-ridden according to the city’s calculations will be required to collect credit reports…
