INDIA DMZ, 2022–The first mine exploded under an armored personnel carrier. It went up with a bright orange flash and a miserable chorus of faint shrieks. The fire and the cries faded fast. Cursing the Americans, the Taliban commander ordered his armored column to halt and backtrack, waiting for the…
Buzz is always a little uncomfortable when the subject of our attention is the Dallas Observer’s parent company, Phoenix-based New Times Inc., because Buzz likes our paycheck, and those mortgage payments aren’t going away anytime soon. But Buzz is what Buzz is: an annoying little fly, strangely and helplessly attracted…
Vendyl Jones certainly looks like an archaeologist, or at least like an aging, Hollywood back-lot version of one, as the tall Texan stomps about the desert near Jordan dressed in leather boots and hat, a tan shirt and tan slacks held up by snakeskin suspenders. Balding and bearded, Jones puffs…
Stevie grabbed the phone in her parents’ bedroom because the one in the kitchen was bloody, just like the counter and the floor leading to the laundry room. The frantic 13-year-old dialed 911 but hung up after just one ring and went back into the kitchen. Maybe, she thought, it…
Seated at his kitchen table, former Dallas County prosecutor Clark Birdsall–his voice soft, his speech measured–didn’t act like a man who had just left the courthouse a free man, judged innocent of a tawdry crime he had spent the last four months insisting he hadn’t committed. Only a day had…
It’s easy to spot the city’s most pressing issues. In fact, it’s impossible to miss them when you’re driving to a city council member’s Town Hall meeting. The experience of jerking into and out of potholes, rolling past piles of uncollected garbage, and dodging three-legged, mange-ridden hounds shows you exactly…
Frank Lindsay sounded troubled. As the vice president of marketing for Conair hairdryers, Lindsay wasn’t expecting this–a telephone call from a prominent Dallas gay activist telling Lindsay that his company was sympathizing with the enemy. As far as the executive was concerned, all he did was advertise his product on…
The Olympic gold medal is the ultimate badge of international athletic achievement, material proof that its owner has reached the highest rung on the sports ladder. And although the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee will put no monetary value on the gold medal, they do admit that, in fact, precious little…
Here’s a digit for you: To Buzz, a man approaching 40, it was an ominous warning: “You’re about to be digitally converged,” said the Digital:Convergence software we had just installed on our office computer. Not yet, we hoped. Our dad warned us about the intrusive medical exams that men of…
Creating controversy: After reading Jim Schutze’s article, “Sinking Fast” (September 14), I now understand the term “meat-cleaver journalism.” The readers of the Dallas Observer have been offered misinformation that has been diced, sliced, and chopped, then served as investigative reporting. The column implies that I want to help develop an…
Texas state trooper Ted Smith sat in his patrol car north of Pottsboro, patrolling for drunk drivers near the American Legion Hall. It was a warm fall night, and Smith was poised to land a big one. Or so he thought. Just after 11 p.m., Smith saw a silver pickup…
“After review of your taped senior sermon, I am convinced that your ministry is destined to focus on the dying; lending comfort to those faced with death and those who are losing loved ones…” –A written evaluation of seminary student Carroll Pickett in 1956 For hours the young man had…
It’s Saturday afternoon in Plano, and for once, the weather is nice. So nice that a young man leans against the outside wall of the Sprint PCS Store at 1913 Preston Road, smoking a cigarette. This twenty-something Sprint employee, dressed in slouchy khakis and a red polo shirt, is taking…
A year ago, Horace Caraker sat in the bright, sterile visitors’ room of a South Texas federal prison and swore to a reporter that he was tired of spending his life behind bars. He was 57 years old, in ill health, and vowing to stay free of these confines once…
September 14, 2000 For immediate release Belo Chairman Robert W. Decherd Announces New Bureau DALLAS, TEXAS/PR Newswire/-Belo (NYSE: BLC) chairman, president, chief executive officer, and all-around badass Robert W. Decherd announced at a press conference today an exercise in synergy unlike anything the free world has witnessed since Paul Lynde…
First the good news: It’s becoming less likely that Oliver Stone, who shot parts of Any Given Sunday, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK in Dallas, will ever shoot another film here. (Buzz is not a fan.) The bad news? It’s becoming less likely that anyone…
This is no fairy tale: Leave it to the Dallas Observer to go where no other media source–in this town, anyway–will go. A beacon, albeit a small one, but a beacon nonetheless in the mists of a diluted and sugar-coated media fog. We certainly wouldn’t hear this type of story…
Spell it out: So this is it then. After years of spiritual aimlessness and fistfuls of antidepressants, Buzz has finally found our lot, our destiny, our reason to exist. It’s to provide you all life’s little vulgar details that other Dallas media won’t. Sounds like a pretty good deal to…
Last week in Part 1: When Dallas cop Danny Maples turned himself in to police investigators in December 1998, he vowed to tell everything he knew about other dirty cops. But apart from Maples, only one officer, Quentis Roper, was ever charged with a crime. “Danny Maples’ jury gave him…
Inside a one-bedroom Oak Lawn apartment where a cat named Angel saunters among a cluttered field of prescription bottles and small framed pictures, Greg Brown hands me a book. It’s a 1984 portrait collection called Texas Women, by photographers Richard Pruitt and David Woo. I flip through the volume quickly,…
Sometime in the next six weeks, you’ll almost certainly see TV commercials with Regina Montoya-Coggins doing all sorts of touchy-feely things. Flip the channel, and you’ll probably see the same sort of commercial, but with Pete Sessions doing the hugging this time. Don’t know who Sessions and Montoya-Coggins are? Don’t…
