There is a faint but distinct tearing sound as Billy Murkledove flips through a stack of old photos, each showing a group of smiling youths. The pictures are stuck together from age; Murkledove has collected them for almost a decade. “This boy here, he got 40 years,” Murkledove says, indicating…
Ashleigh Banfield stands demurely in front of a police barricade in Washington, D.C., scratching her face as a TV camera captures the moment live. Caught unaware, she adjusts her signature glasses, the source of some local gossip and much national notoriety since her rise last year from Fox 4 anchorwoman…
First-term City Councilman Leo V. Chaney Jr. proudly calls himself a fighter for “poor people’s issues.” And for more than a year, he’s sought to prove it, toiling to hammer out a majority coalition on the City Council capable of passing a so-called “living wage” ordinance. Last week, however, an…
Holidays in Hell Everything but the rat poop: Why couldn’t you have put this article (“Unfair Share,” January 25) out three months ago? Where were you when I was having to stress over my impulsive purchase? Well, thank God that someone might be saved from this hassle after reading your…
TEXARKANA–The enduring legend began not with death, but with a frightening and vicious attack on two young lovers who managed to survive. On a February night in 1946, 24-year-old Jimmy Hollis and his girlfriend Mary Jeanne Larey, 19, had attended a downtown movie, then decided to prolong the evening with…
For Bill Jones, it was the “biggest weakness” question that first had him wondering about job candidate James Simmons. Simmons was interviewing to become the new senior pastor at the White Rock Community Church, and someone popped him the old job-interview standby. He answered, “I guess it’s that I’m a…
Forget Romania. Call off the bloodhounds in New Zealand. The search for the world’s most famous and most missing atheist is now only a forensic test result or two away from being over. In just a few hours of digging last weekend on a remote Hill Country ranch 120 miles…
Solid journalism, the sort that makes kids weaned on All the President’s Men all excited and proud, is rarely flashy. No, solid journalism is like a second baseman who hits .290 and turns a perfect two: It won’t be showered with awards, but it will be vital to any good…
Disorderly retreat: A generally accepted practice in journalism is to write about things that happen, not those that don’t. A general rule for humor is that you put the punch line at the end of the joke. But this being Buzz, which is neither journalism nor, some would argue, funny,…
Rhymes with Asso I’ll see you outside: Let me get this straight: The future of art is right here in Dallas. It is an artist whose name rhymes with Asso (Letters, January 11). If I understand him correctly, the future of art is basically major corporate underwriting. The future of…
No news…: Sanger police last week removed a prominently placed 4-foot-by-2-foot sign proclaiming January 15 “James Earl Ray Day.” For Buzz’s historically unaware readers, January 15 was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. James Earl Ray is the man who murdered MLK. And the person or persons who put up that…
You’re driving the 110-mile, high-speed burn from Dallas to Flint, Texas, with visions of gold in your mind. OK, maybe not gold, but at least enough cash to pay that exorbitant TXU Gas bill that hit you like Ray Lewis earlier this month. As you pass the junk shops and…
The small crowd huddled inside and around a tent pitched on a vacant lot on Good Latimer near Swiss. The weather hit below-freezing temperatures, and the TV news broadcasters stirred panic over a coming ice storm that never came. But the citizens and city employees who collected here had waited…
“How badly do you want this story?” he asks, leaning forward, saying that he has the scoop that could expose the truth behind Chris Christian’s management of The Studios at Las Colinas. This anonymous source, this “Deep Throat” of the Dallas film community, soon pulls from his pocket a letter…
Sex Offenders Married to one: I really en1joyed your article “Hello, My Name Is Pervert” (January 11). It was very interesting and hit close to home. I am married to a so-called sex offender, but I would not trade him for anything. Your article kind of touched on the people…
“I’m off like a prom dress,” says Shannon Ritch, finishing an afternoon of 330-pound bench presses–not bad for a guy who weighs 190 tops. He brushes back his bleached-blond flattop, adjusts a black T-shirt over his T-bone shoulders, and swaggers toward the door. The aggressive blare of Limp Bizkit and…
With the exception of the city limits sign, which sells Glenn Heights as the “Gateway to Southern Country,” there is little to alert drivers bouncing down Hampton Road leaving DeSoto that they’ve entered a city of more than 6,000 residents confined to nine square miles of generally neglected territory. With…
Jason January, a Dallas County special prosecutor until he suddenly and inexplicably quit in October, accumulated some impressive photographs during the last couple of years. There’s the one where January’s arm is around Peter Jennings’ shoulder at Jennings’ ABC News office in New York City and one of January on…
Sinner man: When it comes to the seven deadly sins, Buzz has never had a particular problem with envy. Gluttony? Mmmm. Lust? Heh-heh-heh. As for our personal favorite, sloth…well, we’d get into it, but it’s late and we want to go home and get some couch time. But we’ve never…
Unnatural Selection Academic martyr: Baylor professor Charles Weaver complains that William Dembski’s work has been published in forums that lack peer review (“Monkey Business,” January 11). If Weaver isn’t satisfied with the grueling reviews Dembski’s dissertations (two, count ’em) received at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois…
One after another, they drift into the cramped Dallas offices of counselor Phil Taylor–a half dozen of America’s Most Unwanted, registered sex offenders all. Reeking of strong coffee, summer sweat, and stale cigarettes, they have come this Saturday morning seeking group therapy for the same reason they do every Saturday…
In the beginning, there was a bang. A very big bang. Nothing exploded into something. Quarks and leptons collided violently in an intense fireball of plasma. As the plasma expanded and cooled, the collisions became less violent, and particles joined together to form protons and neutrons and electrons, then nuclei…
