Power play

Played in Quebec City in front of as many as 13,000 screaming French Canadians, the International Pee Wee Hockey World Championship is one of the sport’s biggest tournaments. Top-notch teams fly in from Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and other hockey powerhouses. Over the years, many of the National Hockey…

After the fall

The first thought Mike Perryman had as he climbed out of bed that Sunday morning nearly two years ago was that it was his son Colt’s birthday. His quiet, brainy boy, his first-born son, his hunting buddy and best friend, was turning 15, and for the first time, he would…

Unraveling a mystery

Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sounds as exuberant as a schoolboy winning his first science fair when he talks about all the media attention garnered by his team’s latest study on Gulf War Syndrome — results of which unequivocally point to…

Squeeze play

After six months of apparent drift, the case of the vanished atheist came abruptly to life last week when a federal grand jury in Austin indicted Gary Karr, a Michigan handyman, on conspiracy charges of kidnapping, extortion, and robbery. The five-count indictment — the first against anyone in connection with…

Buzz

Buzz’s holiday gift guide The desperate hours are approaching. The holiday is almost here, and Buzz still doesn’t know what to get Mrs. Buzz for Christmas. She asked for a vacuum cleaner, but Buzz knows a marital test when we see one, and there’s no way we’re dumb enough to…

Art sale

Do you know TITAS? The Dallas-based arts organization has brought avant-garde dance and theater performers from around the world to North Texas, but many people don’t know the name. Maybe TITAS needs an American Express card, recognized around the world. If not a card, then perhaps a sizeable grant from…

Defensive driving

Arlington taxi driver Eric Owusu always said he felt safe driving his cab, provided he steered clear of Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities the London-raised cabbie deemed hazardous. Unfortunately, he could do little to save himself when danger found him on a suburban street on St. Patrick’s Day 1996…

In search of the Tubervilles

On November 29, Linda Dennis sent Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk a letter containing what may well be the last and weirdest claim made against the city this century. Dennis, a Dallas native whose family has deep roots in the city, announced she was formally claiming an eighth of an acre…

Buzz

This space to let Federal prosecutors are challenging defense attorneys’ efforts to introduce the results of a lie-detector test into evidence in city council member Al Lipscomb’s bribery trial, The Dallas Morning News reports. The prosecutors apparently don’t think polygraph exams make good evidence. Buzz wonders, have they talked with…

The Dropout Piece

Even by graveyard standards, the Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie is a desolate place, littered with decaying tree branches and beer cans and stray dogs that piss on tombstones. On this clear, crisp November morning, the sun seems to shine around the cemetery without ever making it through the…

Vanity of the Bonfire

A Texas A&M University student belts out commands like a Marine drill instructor. His crew of 10 college kids in storm-trooper helmets plays the most macabre game of pickup sticks imaginable. The crew grabs a heavy log, about eight inches in diameter and eight feet tall, lying several yards away…

Skating along

This Is How We Do It” blares on the sound system, its driving rhythm pumping up the already fevered crowd. Preteens in their Tommy Hilfiger uniforms and fluorescent-colored skates sail across the polished maple floor, shrieking as they pick up speed, giggling as they watch their parents fall. Older siblings…

Too many cooks…

When Sandora Cooper told an old family friend that she wanted to sublease a restaurant during breakfast time to dish up chicken and waffles to commuters, the friend warned Cooper that her plan would never work. The problem wasn’t with the menu. Cooper’s friend, Elizabeth Wilson, had served the Harlem…

Buzz

Exhibit D Back when men were men, women were women, and lawyers were blessedly fewer in number, newspaper editors and reporters who offended the mighty in print stood a good chance of getting a horsewhipping. Now we’re more likely to get sued. This is yet another sign of the decline…

Hungry girl

Until about five years ago, there lived a grasping old man with an enormous appetite for pretty young women. His name was J. Howard Marshall II, and for many years, he lived respectably in Houston, doing something dull with oil. At last, he diversified his interests. He is chiefly remembered…

Ashlee Simpson’s Sitting Behind Me…

I could have spent the entire weekend posting from the film side of the annual spring-break multimedia orgy South by Southwest, which wraps up Sunday; God knows there are dozens, if not hundreds, of pasty-faced folks doing that very thing after every panel, after every screening, after every party. But…

Your cheatin’ heart…

Just south of downtown sits the Ervay Theater, the former home of Jack Ruby’s nightclub the Silver Spur. It’s only appropriate that attorney Bobby Goldstein has turned this venerable old joint into his office, a building now strewn with the carcasses of behemoth oak desks, tables, and leather chairs. One…

Penney pinched

In 31 years, Kay Baker rose from a job as a teenage sales clerk at a J.C. Penney store in Oklahoma City to become one of the retail giant’s top-ranking female executives. Her fall from Penney’s corporate headquarters in Plano would take only days. It was a swift end for…

Chess game

Is he in, out, suspended, reinstated, praised, excoriated? Not even sometime-Dallas NAACP chief Lee Alcorn, the subject of those questions, knows the answer. But things are happening in the local branch. That’s about the only statement anyone can make with certitude concerning the latest political machinations of the Dallas NAACP…

Buzz

Now you don’t see it… And we were so getting used to its junior-high design and elementary-school writing. But it turns out we won’t have DFW Icon to kick around anymore — at least not every week. Seems the city’s latest weakly isn’t anymore: Shortly before the third issue was…

Slippery tale

An Amarillo teen who was convicted of manslaughter for intentionally driving his Cadillac over a 19-year-old punk rocker initially told police the victim had slipped on the ice and fallen under his car, according to written and oral confessions to Amarillo police. Dustin Camp’s statements, taken just hours after the…

Judge shake-it-baby

A titty bar, $200 worth of beer and tequila shots, and a conservative Republican judge: a combo more volatile than atomic fission. The question is, Will the Texas GOP go thermonuclear when it learns one of its highest-ranking jurists, Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller, owns the building and…