Last week Jim Schutze wrote about open-records guru Russell Fish getting booted from his apartment for speaking up at a management-sponsored crime meeting (“Scapegoats,” March 25). Fish got steamed and walked out when he discovered that the so-called Crime Watch meeting at Celery Stalk Apartments in North Dallas was really…

We here at the Dallas Observer do read and sometimes even care about the letters you send us; they serve as a handy barometer of how we’re being received. So with that in mind, we’d like to ask a question: What is up with you people? Sorry. Shouldn’t criticize the…

Buzz is going to keep it short this week because we have a whopper of a headache, thanks to one Larry S. Kilgore, Republican candidate for the Texas House. It’s not his fault, really. When we spoke to Kilgore about his problem–we’ll get to that in a bit; hang on–he…

Brace yourself, Buzz is feeling a bit George Will-ish this week, so we’re gonna do some literary quotin’ here. Our victim is George Orwell and his political fable Animal Farm, about animals that stage a revolution and take over a farm. (Hence the name. Der.) It ends with poor, hungry…

Buzz, being born and raised in the heart of United Mine Workers territory in Illinois, can’t help but feel some sympathy with organized labor. So it pains us to say this to Steel Workers Local 9479: Guys, did you really have to sink so low as to play the awful,…

Michael Bills thought he had a pretty good gig with the federal Transportation Security Administration. His job as a screener at Love Field was government work–good bennies, nice retirement package. An ex-Marine and former quality inspector for a company in Garland before he was laid off, Bills says he even…

OK, now we’re confused. What else is new? Buzz essentially has only three states–confused, pissed off and asleep. Right now, we’re vacillating between the first two, thanks to Deep Ellum and The Dallas Morning News. First, a little background. Last summer, the Dallas Observer’s own Zac Crain wrote a story…

Technically, Buzz is supposed to limit our insightful, thought-provoking commentary–OK, lame jokes… whatever–to local issues. Which is why we want to give a shout out and say gracias to the fine people at the Plano-based Free Market Foundation, a conservative pro-family group. Thanks to them, Buzz has the local hook…

A while ago, Buzz came across a T-shirt stenciled with the words “Jesus loves you. Everybody else thinks you’re an asshole.” We didn’t buy it, but now we wish we had, because then we could wrap it up and send it off to the fine, morally upstanding pharmacists at the…

There’s a reason Buzz slaves away every week in the journalism mines, sweating to produce the fine product you hold in your hands. The reason is that we are dumb. We know this because A) friends and family routinely tell us so, and B) as a media-type person we often…

It’s January again, time for us to take one last gratuitous unkind swipe at the various adults who spent the past 12 months doing the grown-up stuff that keeps Dallas a functioning city, such as it is. Maybe it’s because we’re getting older, but Buzz is feeling kind of bad…

This is the time of year when Buzz spends countless hours at Dallas’ central library, doing research for our upcoming annual year-end story. (By “research” we mean “cadging from The Dallas Morning News microfilms.” Please don’t tell them.) It has become something of a holiday tradition for us, hanging out…

Is a shop that sells condoms, lubricants, risqué novelties, lingerie and, um, “massagers” a sexually oriented business? Sara Lee Goff, owner of Condoms to Go, doesn’t think so. The city of DeSoto begs to differ. Goff opened her seventh Dallas-area shop in DeSoto in September, though this time she called…

After having spent the better part of the past six years voicing opinions on politics, culture, the law and other things we know little about, Buzz feels it’s time to expand our horizons and venture into new, fancier territory. So this week, Buzz tries our hand as opera critic. That’s…

Listen up, people: If you want to continue to get a weekly dose of quality vicious Buzz product, you’re all going to have to stop being so damn reasonable. We’re talking to you, Mr. Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at Plano Independent School District. Buzz received a press release…

Dallas Morning News publisher James Moroney III wants to know why the morale among his Metro reporters is low, sources at the News tell Buzz. Good question. What, oh what, could the answer be? Perhaps theyre less than happy that the papers covering more board meetings out in Lewisville, thanks…

Stop the presses: “You might think the possibility of forged documents would have come up by now,” The Dallas Morning News opined Saturday in an editorial about the Dallas police fake-drug scandal. The self-congratulatory editorial appeared the same day the daily ran a front-page story “revealing” that a lawyer for…

When Buzz last checked in with the Dallas-based Vice Fund (VICEX) at its birth late last August, the mutual fund’s managers were betting that investing in sin would pay off big. There are few certainties in life, the reasoning went. There are death and taxes, then there’s the human hunger…

If you want to hang at the ICE house, first you have to know the rules. It’s easy; they’re posted on the living-room wall, scrawled in felt-tip on a poster. There are six, first among them no cursing. Second, no violence. Third rule, show respect for…wait a second, let’s go…

When we last left Richard Daniels, he had been removed as a security guard at the Dallas office of KTVT-Channel 11 (Buzz, October 9). He was let go after he had a run-in with Deborah Norville of Inside Edition, who was in town and had to tape her show in…

First, a disclaimer: Buzz doesn’t speak Spanish. We tried to learn. Even got so far as to be able to hold a conversation, provided the person we were talking with: didn’t speak; didn’t object to a grown man babbling like a 3-year-old with a cleft palate; and could simply point…

Well, shoot, that was disappointing. We’re talking about fired police Chief Terrell Bolton’s appearance this week before a city council hearing. (Jim Schutze writes at length about the event in this week’s issue, so yes, Buzz is just piling on. What’s your point?) Anyhow, the day before the hearing, Bolton…