When you got nothing, the great Bob Dylan once sang, you got nothing to lose. Maybe perennial mayoral candidate Bill Jack Ludwig has been jamming to “Like a Rolling Stone” lately. Or maybe he’s just loopy. Whatever the case, in recent days Ludwig provided some much needed, if unintended, levity…
Last week the Dallas Observer printed an article about Charles Wilkerson, an itinerant minister who seems to have a knack for buying struggling private schools and closing them down. The article reported that those he left behind with piles of debts dispute Wilkerson’s versions of how school closures came about…
(Editor’s note: The following contains a very un-P.C. sexist rant. The author is not normally a pig, but Yuletide avarice has affected his reasoning. Please forgive him.) Here’s a conversation that’s been taking place about every week lately at a certain married couple’s Northwest Dallas home. Their names have been…
Shit happens: During this mayoral campaign season, when talk of getting back to basics–fixing streets, sidewalks, etc.–is all the vogue, the city’s plans to replace aging, overburdened sewer lines in Deep Ellum should be good news. You’d think that business owners there would be happy. They’re not happy. In fact,…
Whoever decided to release a flock of caged white doves at the end of the Cowboys halftime show Thanksgiving Day no doubt intended them as symbols of peace during these unsettled times. Except they weren’t doves. At least one was a pigeon. How does Buzz know that? Because we located…
The rubble of the World Trade Center towers had not stopped smoldering before ideas began surfacing about how best to memorialize the destruction of September 11. Should the towers be rebuilt or replaced with some sort of memorial park? One proposal suggests installing a piece of artwork in the interim…
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,”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
