Buzz

Silence is not golden The last time Buzz took a potshot at Dallas Park and Recreation Board member Ralph Isenberg — for painting over graffiti on an Arcadia Park house without the owner’s permission — he was not happy. So unhappy was he that he sent us a 5-gallon bucket…

Letters

The problem is you Once again, I realize why there is no hope in Dallas. I left this city almost four years ago because Latinos can’t tell their own stories in this city — not in The Dallas Morning News opinion section, not at KERA, certainly not in the Dallas…

Game boy

ngel Munoz meets only one of the demographics of the gamers in his Cyberathlete Professional League. He’s male. He’s not Anglo, and, at 40 years old, he’s old enough to have fathered many of the 17- to 25-year-olds who flock to his tournaments to play Quake and compete for cash…

Lost and found

Sonia Even when her bags were already packed in her friend Anthony’s car in the driveway, her parents continued to beg her not to make this terrible mistake. But she was stubborn and determined. Her mother cried, but she refused to change her mind. Finally her mother stepped forward, exhausted…

Beggars’ banquet

On a recent Friday evening, the third-floor foyer and ballroom of the Galleria Westin Hotel was crawling with well-fed Dallas matrons. Clad in jeans and T-shirts, the 50 or so women were keenly focused on their task: transforming the standard-issue upscale-hotel-chain version of splendor (ostentatious chandeliers, ruby carpets) into a…

If you crow, you go

Since Dallas City Council enacted a ban on roosters last summer, the Oak Cliff Coffee House on Davis Street has become a shrine to the forbidden bird. Partly out of protest, partly from nostalgia, the cock has been made the caffeine hangout’s logo; the is bedecked with stuffed and illustrated…

Clearing the air

When Sam Wyly began kicking around the idea of environmental advocacy ads in late February, the Dallas billionaire called his son. A 20-year-old freshman at the Denison University in Ohio, Andrew David-Sparrow Wyly says he wasn’t surprised to hear from his dad: Sam Wyly knows his son has long been…

Buzz

Caught napping How many tranquilizers would it take to put an entire lake of fish asleep? One, Buzz figures, if it was the same brand of sleeping pill used by the staff of The Dallas Morning News, who let a fishy tale slip into print last week. On March 30,…

Letters

Those magic bridges Thank God for Jim Schutze, the Dallas Observer, and the truth. Schutze’s series of fine investigative reporting on the city of Dallas’ Trinity River project has revealed a shocking level of deception (recent articles include “Jack! Jack!,” March 16, and “Whoa, Noah,” March 9). Trinity project proponents…

Reasonable doubt?

Catherine Shelton puts down her glass of Beaujolais and walks quickly out of her bedroom, searching through her pitch-dark house for a gun. “Where is that damn gun?” she says, walking back into the room and rifling through two sets of dresser drawers. She’s looking for a handgun loaded with…

Out of step

On a Sunday night in Brooklyn, Misty Owens sits cross-legged on a worn futon, methodically mending holes in the black tights she wears for dance class and performing. She selects one pair at a time from the amorphous pile of spandex and cotton resting beside her on the comforter that…

With friends like that…

Over the last two years, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have purchased 63 dogs for use in federally funded experiments that began as far back as 1988. The canines, mostly foxhounds and mongrels, are trained to run on treadmills, and are then anesthetized for…

Everyone’s a critic

Rhae Lumpkin’s property is a mess. The house looks to have been built in chunks — one painted white, one painted red, and one rendered in unfinished cedar. On the porch, a large industrial spool serves as a table. An old rusted still, a piece of found art, sits in…

Buzz

Location, location, location For two years, Amelia Core Jenkins, proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast at the corner of Young and St. Paul streets downtown, dutifully paid her dues to the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The money earned her inn, in a converted abandoned warehouse, the right to be listed in…

Letters

Eyes wide shut Your article “Impossible dreamer” (March 2) reeks of skepticism. I’m sure you have a duty to explore both sides, but I have discovered that what Bobby Wightman-Cervantes says is true, as I too have been subject to the oppression that is endemic in this Texas system that…

Little people

Eddie Deen wants to correct Gov. George W. Bush’s calculations or, short of that, squeeze more money out of him. “Looks like I might need to send his people another bill,” the Dallas caterer says with a laugh. On the campaign trail the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has told audiences…

Letters to the Editor

This blows Federal workers who make charges of waste, fraud, or abuse can be subject to severe reprisal and recrimination for their efforts. I am a federal government employee and a union officer. I want to point out some pitfalls in Mr. Schutze’s comments about whistle-blowing in the federal sector…

“Babe, I leave this for you”

“I don’t know if I should say this or not,” she says, her voice shaky, her hands pressed together in front of her mouth. As she sits in her modest Fort Worth home, Lydia Galvan recalls what she found days after her husband, a Dallas police officer, was killed in…

Planting SEEDs of hope

It’s an early Tuesday afternoon at Barbara Jordan Elementary School in South Oak Cliff, and Chet Baker, a tall and cheerful visitor dressed in a dark gray suit, takes off his jacket and makes this straightforward inquiry to Jeff Sughrue’s third-grade class: “What signal would you show if today is…

Smoke gets in his eyes

Like other organs of local government, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department adopted a strict no-smoking policy in 1988. Over the last two decades, such edicts have become routine and largely unquestioned in workplaces, exiling the nicotine-addicted to sidewalks. But Thomas Reilly, a sheriff’s investigator, charges that his department holds itself…

Buzz

Bark, don’t bite So, how is KTVT-Channel 11’s newscast now that popular anchorman Tracy Rowlett has joined the team? Has Rowlett’s former station, WFAA-Channel 8, suffered noticeably? If you have an opinion, please feel free to voice it, unless you’re Dallas Morning News TV critic Ed Bark. The word from…

Letters

Judging John Marshall “Bench press” (March 9) was a great article by Thomas Korosec. I’ve known John Marshall since I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and have always been impressed with his wit and integrity. The citizens of Dallas County can be proud that John has rendered judgments that have…