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…
Buzz’s mother had three essential life lessons she attempted to impart to her son: 1) Shut up; 2) Show some respect; and 3) God help you if I ever catch you hanging around that pool hall. Despite her best efforts, delivered with the loving strokes of a left hook that…
Condom sense: Ignore the two charts that appeared this week on the Metro page of The Dallas Morning News—one showing a sharply sloping line tracking a boom in the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in Dallas County, another a graph tracking a decrease in new cases. The charts accompanied…
Cheers: Ten years have passed since we last spoke with Pamela Gail Johnson of Lewisville, founder of the Secret Society of Happy People. As you might have noticed, life for many has deteriorated somewhat since 1998, when the society, which promotes happiness, was created. So, we wondered how she was…
No offense, IwannaBeFamous2007, but we kinda doubt that you were what Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had in mind when they wrote their 1950s musical version of the fairy tale Cinderella. Don’t get us wrong. Your YouTube video of yourself singing Cinderella’s dreamy solo “In My Own Little Corner”…
Howdy, neighbor: Well, it looks like Buzz is going to have to find a new place to bike ride. The Bushes, W. and Laura, are moving into our ‘hood. OK, not exactly our neighborhood, but in the same ZIP code and four miles to the east, in an area where…
Draw, pardner: How many times has this happened to you? You’re out doing the grocery shopping, picking up the dry cleaning, etc. You get back to your car and realize you left your lights on. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the lead starts flying. A crazed gunman has opened fire…
There goes the neighborhood: When Inclusive Communities Project Inc.’s lawsuit against the town of Flower Mound crossed Buzz’s desk last week, we had one of those “gambling in Casablanca” moments. ICP, a nonprofit that helps poor families use federal public housing vouchers to rent homes in non-minority neighborhoods, is accusing…
Sometimes you’re too old to get it…the joke, that is. Sometimes you’re too young. In the case of The Smothers Brothers, I’m both. I’m just the right age to vaguely remember brothers Tom and Dick’s late ’60s variety show, canceled on CBS in 1969 because it was just too edgy…
Numbers game: Ooo, looky here. In Buzz’s hands we have a copy of an investigation report from Dallas Independent School District’s Office of Professional Responsibility. It’s labeled “highly confidential,” and it’s about how some ne’er-do-wells at DISD submitted false Social Security numbers to a state agency—fake numbers for foreign nationals,…
Hanxious: A couple of weeks ago, Buzz traveled with family to Reno, Nevada, for a vacation that involved lots and lots of drinking. It was Reno, after all, a city that can best be described as being a lot like Las Vegas, only not quite as tasteful. We’ve never really…
Election? What election? Oh, that presidential thingy. Is that still going on? We hadn’t noticed, ’cause we’ve been in a freakin’ coma for the past eight years. Lucky for us, Steve Forbes, chairman and chief executive officer of Forbes Inc. and editor-in-chief of Forbes Magazine, will tell us all about…
Sentimental journey: So it’s damn the petitions, full speed ahead with City Hall’s plan to spend a half-billion dollars to build a convention center hotel. Nearly 60,000 people signed petitions calling for a public vote, but the city intends to sell bonds for the project in January, though the earliest…
Crises management: The news breaks suddenly, spreading anger, fear and distrust. Massive miscalculations and shaky financial structures threaten imminent doom. Our leaders should have seen this coming but didn’t. Now only massive, painful and unprecedented action will keep us from the abyss. Wait…are we talking about the international banking crisis…
Never, ever volunteer: If there’s a lawyer or, say, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives out there reading this, could you lend Nicholas Zimmerman a hand before the electric company turns out his lights? Zimmerman is a local guy who joined the Army in 2004. In April 2005…
Irrational discourse: In 2004, when Iraqi terrorists beheaded American Nick Berg and posted a horrific video of the murder online, we watched it. One time. Not out of morbid curiosity, we like to think, but to get better informed about the barbarians Americans are up against. Were we wrong to…
Pity poor zucchini. Like its squash cousin, the pumpkin, it’s a fairly useless fruit that grows large and abundantly. They’re watery and bland, and the gardeners who grow them always wind up with more than they can eat–just like the pumpkin. But Charles Schulz didn’t create The Great Zucchini, did…
Falling on a sword: So, Dallas Independent School District announces last week that—whoopsie daisy—it inadvertently blew its 2007-’08 budget by $64 million. The school board president, Jack Lowe, was very apologetic about it. “I’m the member of the board with the most business experience,” he told the Dallas Observer blog…
Have you ever read any of the original German, pre-Disney-fied versions of classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales? The story of Cinderella, for example, in which the ugly stepsisters cut off their toes to try to fit their feet in the glass slipper, only to be exposed by birds singing “blood…
Goin’ to the chapel: If Buzz were introspective, we would pause and contemplate the creeping conservatism that has overtaken us in middle age. It’s the thing that causes a vein to throb in our temple as we cry, “Oh, come on!” whenever we hear about the latest expenditure of tax…
How to tell if you’re a dude (in case there’s any doubt): You consider bacon appropriate as an appetizer, entree and dessert dish; you bought a DVD burner just so you could save all the episodes of Shockwave on The History Channel; and, finally, going to see “Warbirds on Parade,”…
In the cards: Only a fool would predict the outcome of a hotly contested election more than two months out. So, all righty then, here goes: The election for Dallas County sheriff will go 52-48. You read it here first. What, you say you want to know who will win?…
