No Mas

Boxing fans had anticipated the superfeatherweight championship bout between unbeaten champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and No. 1 ranked Jesus Chavez for more than three years. That’s how long it’s taken Chavez, dubbed “El Matador,” to convince immigration officials to allow him back into the United States from Mexico. (See “Knockdown,”…

Deck the Malls

To you, what best epitomizes the beauty of the holiday season? Is it a midnight Mass? A child’s delight on Christmas morning? Serving food to the homeless? Yeah, well, good for you, Norman Rockwell. It’s good to know that people like you exist, to counterbalance people like us, who prefer…

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

To the end, Herbert Lee Madison insisted he was no cop killer. Maybe not, but he definitely should learn to look both ways before crossing the street. He’ll have plenty of time in jail to consider that lesson. A Dallas County jury last week didn’t buy Madison’s story that he…

In the Screening Room

Two years ago, a colleague of Michael Cain’s asked the founder and director of the Deep Ellum Film Festival just why the hell he named his fledgling fest after a part of town in which there were, ahem, no movie theaters. “There will be,” Cain insisted, like a W.P. Kinsella…

Run, Domingo, Run

Domingo Garcia confirmed to Buzz this week that he is “forming an exploratory committee” to look into the possibility of declaring his candidacy for mayor. That’s pol-speak for: “Vote for me for mayor.” He will run, presumably, in the upcoming special election sometime early next year to replace no-longer-sitting Ron…

Pay for Play

It wasn’t a good week at The Dallas Morning News. The city lost out on its Olympic bid to friggin’ Houston. (Hey, but that means the streets will be fixed and cops ‘n’ teachers ‘n’ firemen will be paid more. Right? Hello? Isn’t that right?) The rank-and-file reporters don’t care…

Buzz

First, a little disclosure on Buzz’s part. We were talking this week with Gilberto Cortez, publisher of the local Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa, concerning a list of complaints he has about the way the city communicates with Spanish-speaking media. Interesting, we said. Is there anyone else who feels the same…

Ride’em, Cowboy

In a previous life in San Antonio, each February our boss would send out a memo encouraging employees to wear Western clothes to work to celebrate the annual arrival of the stock show and rodeo. His assumption was that a bunch of pasty, pudgy people who worked every day in…

Buzz

So the daughter of City Council member Laura Miller called a family meeting to reveal her list of eight reasons why Miller should not run for mayor, Gromer Jeffers Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News. Not to pick a fight with a child, but Buzz thinks the little waif…

Buzz

The State Fair of Texas operates as a tax-exempt nonprofit outfit because its mission supposedly is “educational.” With that in mind, Buzz dug up his old Abercrombie & Fitch baseball cap and frayed chinos and headed out for a day of post-graduate research at Fair Park University. Technically, Buzz doesn’t…

Buzz

It’s not yet last call at the Lounge, the beloved bar adjacent to the Inwood Theater. On August 8, the bar’s owner, Theresa Alexander, was told by Landmark Theaters, which runs the theater and controls the Lounge’s lease, that she had 60 days to vamoose. The reason: Landmark wanted to…

Buzz

A fine line separates indefatigable optimism from loopiness. Buzz, whose sense of optimism abandoned us about the same time we started losing our hair many years ago, isn’t certain exactly where that line is, but we’re pretty sure that Bobby Wightman-Cervantes, once and future Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has…

Buzz

So City Council member Laura Miller says she never said those mean things about untidy, code-violating Hispanic businesses in Oak Cliff that the Dallas Observer quoted her as saying in our August 30 edition. Here’s what she says she didn’t say: “I’m going to go up and down that motherfucking…

Buzz

Damned faint praise: A herd of Pegasuses…Pegasi…whatever…have started cropping up on downtown streets, drawing swift reaction from some of our more aesthetically picky co-workers, specifically: “Gack! What is that?” “That” is the first among a planned 200 brightly decorated, 6-foot-tall, fiberglass winged horses being placed about the city center by…

Buzz

Peace of the action: We thought it must have been a joke. A co-worker dropped on Buzz’s desk a price list for being listed on a new Web site (www.lowergreenville.org) that aims to promote businesses, including bars, on Lower Greenville Avenue. The guy passing out the flier was Avi Adelman,…

Buzz

Black not like them: As the Dallas City Council’s redistricting panel wraps up months of mind-numbing labor, some residents in East Oak Cliff’s black middle-class neighborhood of Cedar Crest are aghast at their neighborhood’s late entry into redistricting politics. They fear the hardscrabble neighborhood of black South Dallas is attempting…

Buzz

The Rangers are in the toilet; the Cowboys are teetering on its rim. Dallas needs a winner. What’s a sports fan to do? Try poetry. Dallas’ entry in the National Poetry Slam Competition held recently in Seattle narrowly edged out Los Angeles 113.3-113.2 to take first place in a field…

Buzz

Kissy, kissy: With the uninterrupted lovefest celebrating the opening of the American Airlines Center under way in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, regular readers of this paper might expect us to have something nasty to say. Lord knows Buzz tried, but so far the arena seems to be…

Buzz

When we last checked in with Amelia Core Jenkins, proprietor of a downtown bed-and-breakfast, she was in a tussle with the Convention and Visitors Bureau over that agency’s decision to remove her inn from bureau publications that recommend lodging to tourists. There were too many street people near her establishment,…

Buzz

Oh, shut up: Although still low in the ratings, KLIF is emerging as a pioneer in the crowded talk radio genre. In recent weeks, it’s broken new ground by eschewing the conservative AM-talk format for flat-out fascism. If you’re looking for radio that makes your skin crawl, turn to KLIF…

Buzz

Ain’t too proud to beg: As sins go–and in Buzz’s experience they go quite nicely, thank you–running a ministry that’s too proud to ask for money seems a pretty minor, and rare, offense. Yet pride is a sin nonetheless, one that Ole Anthony of the Dallas-based Trinity Foundation, publisher of…

Buzz

Once was blind: When Buzz has a problem with our eyes it gets written off to any number (one, to be exact) of seedy activities from the night before. But when former Dallas Observer managing editor Emily Benedek briefly lost her sight a few years back, it was a religious…