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The 2,000-Year-Old Virgin She gets around: I enjoyed the latest sighting of the Virgin Mary; it was an interesting article (“Do You See What I See?” by Jesse Hyde, December 29). She really gets around. My own spiritual journey started off with the myths and superstitions of Christianity and later…

Susana Loera remembers the first time she heard her boss tell somebody to break the law. It was in early 2004, and the parents of a Mexican man arrested in Dallas had come to the consulate seeking advice. Luis Lara, Mexican vice consul for protection, found out that U.S. immigration…

Kevyn Matthew Williams has been a lot of things. Pro football player. UPS guy. Self-published poet. Host of Dallas’ top-rated nighttime radio show for adults. But right now he says he’s just confused–and unemployed. And confused about being unemployed. Better known to North Texans as “Rudy V,” Williams was the…

“Can you see her?” he whispered. We were standing about six feet away from the tree, which was surrounded by a chicken-wire fence. Pink plastic flowers and burnt-out candles circled the trunk. He introduced himself as Martin Espinoza of Oak Cliff. He wore gray sweats, leather sandals and a hat…

When the inspector showed up to make sure Harrold Andresen’s new enterprise complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act, he learned one of Andresen’s clients–a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic–wanted to learn to weld with his mouth. “Impossible,” most people would say. He’d be incinerated. “No problem,” Andresen says. In a large metal…

Grinched: We’ll be honest. Christmastime isn’t exactly Buzz’s season. We prefer caustic sarcasm to the mawkish sentimentality, and it’s not often when we can combine both in one tidy package. But it happens. Like now, for instance. See, we received an e-mail from “Two Guys from Dallas, Texas” asking us…

Trailer-Park Blues Out of sight, out of mind: There’s a deeper issue behind the East Dallas campaign to drive out the “trailer trash” (“Board of Scrooges,” by Jim Schutze, December 21), and it’s one that exposes what is probably capitalism’s most grievous flaw and one that may ultimately prove fatal…

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did…

It’s an unavoidable trend–if two movies make a trend, that is–so much so that if you Google the phrase “return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the very topic, along with its list of some 3,000 titles touted as…

When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics–Luke Y…

War is hell, but it can also be high drama. In boots-on-the-ground documentaries like Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, we got a discomfiting look at the brutal realities and moral ambiguities of America’s war in Iraq, where the death toll rises along with the administration’s rhetoric. “I want some answers,”…

What a difference a year makes. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11 was not only the most-watched and most-debated doc in release, but also among the highest-grossing movies of the year. This year’s most-watched and highest-grossing documentary was, of course, March of the Penguins, which was about as contentious…

This year may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process–from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants zombie…

The sky outside is cloudy over the old Parkland Hospital building at Oak Lawn and Maple avenues. A chilly wind sends dry, dead leaves skittering across the pavement of the basketball court once used when the building was a low-security jail. The gray side door set into the building’s stately…

For the first time in years, Angela Shaw feels more secure living at the Waterview Park Apartments at the University of Texas at Dallas. But Shaw says poor maintenance remains a major problem at Waterview, the nation’s largest private dorm. “They always try fixing things, but you can’t fix it…

At least it’s work: Exotic butterflies dance around in my stomach as I wait in the lobby of Hotel Zaza, where apparently someone has let Pier 1 puke its North African imports rack all over the place. At any moment, Kato Kaelin, professional houseguest, will appear from behind the elevator…

Unholy Hip-hop The devil’s music: As both an observer of and participant in evangelical Christianity for a long time, this former long-haired hippie type found this article both disturbing and amusing (“Hip-hop’s Public Enemy,” by Jesse Hyde, December 8). On the one hand history does repeat itself with frightening regularity…

January-March Lisbon/lesbian. Get it? Democrat Lupe Valdez is sworn in as Dallas County sheriff, becoming the first Latina and first homosexual–as far as we know–to hold the job. News of her sexual orientation comes as a belated shock to her political supporters in the sheriff’s office. “What, she’s gay?” one…

For the crime of driving with a suspended license, Rhenia Chavers lost the ability to walk. She’s usually confined to a wheelchair, although on a good day she can navigate her mother’s apartment with a cane. Nine months ago, Chavers’ misdemeanor offense led her to spend six days at the…