Loe blow Passing off someone else’s words or ideas as your own is a basic taboo among writers, yet it’s amazing how casually transgressions are tolerated at newspapers, including, apparently, The Dallas Morning News. An allegation of intellectual theft has been brought to the attention of the Observer by Stephen…
A standoff that is bizarre even by newspaper-management standards has been playing out for the past month at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, leaving reporters and editors curious about just who is in charge of the paper’s newsroom. Vice President and Executive Editor Debbie Price, through an attorney, contends that she…
Sweat Jesus Thanks for Kaylois Henry’s excellent story about Bishop T.D. Jakes [“Bishop Jakes is ready. Are you?” June 20]. Having watched his show on TBN several times recently, I wondered about his background and his apparent rising status in the TV-preacher business. Henry’s well-written piece answered my questions, and…
After two years of enduring suspicion that she helped murder her husband, Joan Ridgway finds herself once again a suspect in what authorities are now describing as a murder-for-hire scheme against former Dallas Cowboys punter Colin Ridgway. Joan Ridgway, 53, has not been charged in the murder, but the arrest…
Jayne Loader is too modest to admit it, but she was one of a trio that irrevocably changed American pop culture’s perception of the Atomic Age. Fourteen years ago, she, Kevin Rafferty, and Rafferty’s brother, Pierce, premiered The Atomic Cafe in New York City. Celebrities, including Richard Gere, Christopher Reeve,…
Gary Lewellyn sits behind a massive wooden desk holding a telephone to his ear, but says nothing. From his Carrollton warehouse, the chairman and chief executive officer of Performance Nutrition, Inc. is a guest on a nationally syndicated USA Today Radio Network talk show, “Here’s To Your Health.” But even…
When he was running an insurance-fraud scheme out of his North Dallas office, Jeffrey H. Reynolds III would sometimes pass himself off as the Secretary of Commerce for a fictional country called the Dominion of Melchizedek. But Reynolds’ phony diplomatic title earned him no grace when he finally stood before…
All the news that fits and then some Because The Dallas Morning News would bristle if Buzz characterized its coverage of the Rowlett child murders as sensationalism, we’ll pick a less crass journalistic term. How about “reportorial carpet bombing,” or “vomitous volumes,” or that old favorite, “pointlessly excessive.” Hell yes,…
The mayor wasn’t eating. This was noteworthy for several reasons, not the least of which is that our mayor, if nothing else, is a man of enormous appetites–for politics, for the spotlight, for animated conversation, for a rousing ball game on TV, for good food and drink. So it was…
Laura is jolly I was appalled to read Laura Miller’s article [“Power houses,” June 13] in the Observer. Obviously, Miller was concerned that maybe some people take her seriously. Miller’s article should alleviate that concern. Miller disdainfully comments that Gloria Campos’ home belies her “folksy” image. If Miller knew anything…
With a public-relations extravaganza fit for a Royal Divorce, DART inaugurated its zippy new $900 million train set last week, finally bringing commuter-rail service to Dallas. There were opening-day parties, bevies of dignitaries, television specials, and fawning newspaper accounts. Journalists, in particular, were inundated with mounds of information on the…
When U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins began putting together one of the nation’s first and largest health-care fraud task forces two years ago, criminal defense lawyers were salivating. They dreamed of a business boom like the one that followed the prosecution of the savings-and-loan bunglers by a similar high-profile task force…
It takes a village idiot It only takes a bumper sticker-reading comprehension level to figure out that the first lady is about as popular in Texas as road construction. So when Paul Hoffman wore his Hillary Clinton T-shirt to a recent political gathering, he was more than a little anxious…
Ann’s a snob In her recent article [“Kiss and tell,” June 6], did Ann Zimmerman really need to wield such a snobbish, cruel poetic license? “Weather-beaten cottage…?” Zimmerman couldn’t have been describing Harry Preston’s immaculately kept home. Did she miss the sculpted English garden that fills Preston’s backyard, and the…
It was really a lot like a Marx Brothers movie–except that these guys had guns. “Get him out of here, man, before I put a cap in his ass,” said Rollie Dean Brazier, defense minister of the New Black Panther Party. Brazier–formerly known as Rolan de Brazier and more recently…
Tonight the shoes of Bishop T.D. Jakes are a three-toned reptilian affair. They are dark gray around the sides and white on top; their laces are speckled prominently with red. Jakes himself is a big man, tall and wide, with a booming voice and perspiring presence that is vibrating through…
Sitting in my car, staring at the modest, one-story house, I figured I was in the wrong place. According to Dallas County tax records, this was supposed to be cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash’s house. But there was nothing pink–or queenlike–about it. The house was white. The 1996 Cadillac in…
Artists Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin aren’t the most obvious pair: While he speaks with the rapid cadences of his Boston boyhood, hers are the measured rhythms of a native Dallasite. He projects an active, external hustle–a sense of always leaning toward you–while she suggests hidden currents, processes that continue…
Mad about Ron We finally learned last week that Ron Kirk can get righteously angry. Buzz has been waiting for the city’s celebrated mayor to spend a little of that enormous popularity on both sides of the Trinity to take a stand on something. Anything. Remember Townview and a school…
Some of Dallas’ highest-profile businessmen, including former Dallas Cowboys owner H. R. Bum Bright, are targets of an Internal Revenue Service probe–which amounts to a double whammy for this famous pack of former bankers. “I got a letter from them and sent it down to my accounting firm,” Bright says,…
Kiss and tell off Please thank Ann Zimmerman for her story on me [“Kiss and tell,” June 6], slanted to the sensational and frequently inaccurate as it was. At least she spelled my name right (which she didn’t with Omar–who has only one “f” in his last name). But her…
The middle-class blandness of Garland, Texas, with its great expanse of ticky-tacky tract houses, strip shopping centers, and wholesale stores such as Hypermart, is as far as one can get from the glamour and glitter of Hollywood. Yet every Friday night for the past three years, aspiring local screenwriters, who…
