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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

Don’t have a cow: At the end of a tidy yet depressed street in Pleasant Grove chock-full of pawnshops and ethnic restaurants, a shuttered Army-Navy store bordering Interstate 30 awaits demolition. A new Golden Arches is going up here. Maybe. Plans for McDonald’s in this quiet neighborhood face resistance from…

Digging in: To Buzz, it doesn’t look like much–the tunnel on Good-Latimer Expressway on the northwest corner of Deep Ellum. It’s dim, the traffic lanes are narrow, and the mural art lining it…well, it may be good for all we know. It’s just hard to see it when you’re whizzing…

Fighting fire: On June 5, a long-running lawsuit against the Dallas school district hit a wall. Now the people who filed it may have their backs against one. The case began March 10, 2000, after the school board voted 5-4 to hire a private company, Edison Schools, to run up…

We shall overcome: Buzz, being in the free-speech biz and somewhat left-leaning, generally supports an adult’s right to view and purchase images of nakedness and consensual sex acts on the Internet. Not that Buzz would ever, ever take a peek–goodness gracious no–but we fully support your right to do so,…

Dallas-based CompUSA Inc. and its former chief executive James Halpin must be feeling pretty happy this week, thanks to a decision by District Judge Carlos Lopez that took them off the hook for a multimillion-dollar judgment awarded by a local jury earlier this year. Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú, one…

Flip a coin: Dwaine Caraway is black. Ed Oakley is white. Which one is best fit to be the District 6 City Council representative? Buzz, who lives in the district, would suggest that voters need a little more information than that to decide. We would say that the best candidate–for…

Busted: At the risk of sounding like the crotchety old guy we’re in danger of quickly becoming, Buzz must ask: What kind of bizarro world do we live in that arrests school administrators and puts them in detention because a kid can’t read well? Oh, that’s right. This is Dallas…

Suckers: “Pigeon drops,” home-remodeling scams, vacation time-share offers, the Texas state lottery, recording contracts from major labels. They’re all obvious scams that no intelligent person would fall for if he or she just remembered one simple rule: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Pretty basic…

Sauce for the goose: Steady now. This is tricky. Buzz is going to sermonize about civility while trying not to look like the biggest hypocrite since evangelist Jimmy Swaggart went looking for love in all the wrong places. Here goes: That Mayor Ron Kirk, when he’s right, he’s right. Buzz…

Humorless: It’s not that Buzz is getting a big head or wishes to take credit–or blame–where none is due, but we can’t help but feel a little responsible for some of the foulmouthed picketers who gathered outside City Councilwoman Laura Miller’s house twice this week. Last week, writing about how…

Sticks and stones: Give ol’ Al Lipscomb credit. The former city councilman may have been on the take, but at least he was always polite, a gentleman, even on his way to the pokey. Apparently he didn’t pass his good manners on to his progeny. Testifying before the Dallas City…

Java jive: It was a small protest–one 19-year-old girl standing outside a Dallas Starbucks on Tuesday to object to the coffeehouse corporation’s sale of milk products from cows treated with a bioengineered hormone and food and beverages containing genetically modified ingredients. Who says kids today aren’t politically active? The girl,…

What passes for “reality” under the great video eye of network television is pretty lame these days. Personally, we’re not going to take that prefab national phenom known as Survivor seriously until someone dies of exposure, snakebite, or hunger during the show. Similarly, we’ll consider Temptation Island “reality-based programming” only…

Try the fricassee: The Dallas Zoo is letting children pet baby chicks before the birdies are gassed and used for their intended purpose–food for bigger animals. (See “Chick Fillet,” February 15.) This is widely regarded as reprehensible. Now PETCO, the national pet-supply retailer, is selling rabbits at some of its…

When the Tejano Democrats threw their support behind Elsa Tovar, a political neophyte challenging state Rep. Harryette Ehrhardt in last year’s Democratic primary, the four-term Democrat of East Dallas was perturbed. Why not concentrate fire on Republicans instead? Some Hispanic political leaders brushed off such sentiments then, and they’re not…