Last Christmas, while Americans feasted on turkey and roast beef, the French celebrated the season by devouring approximately 22 tons of snails. During the Christmas and New Year's holidays alone, the Parisians eat 200 tons of snails; over the course of the year, they eat over 25,000 tons of snails...
Picture a gangly 10-year-old kid--his brown hair tousled, his face dusted with freckles, and looking more than a little like Beaver Cleaver--walking the azalea-lined streets of Highland Park, hawking his own newspaper. He writes the stories and sells the ads, mostly to Highland Park Village merchants thoroughly charmed by the...
Injured pride and prejudice Some things are even hard for Buzz to discuss, but not, thank God, for the judicial system. Consider a recent Texas Court of Appeals decision in a case of an aggravated sexual assault of a child. The defendant had hoped to overturn his 16-year sentence on...
Two weeks ago, Kathy Krasniqi collapsed at her job, gasping for air, her chest pounding with pain. After a week of tests, doctors have determined that she suffers from serious heart and lung disease. Albanian Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, Kathy, 41, and her husband, Sam, lost custody of their...
The wrath of God In response to your article, "Classless act" [January 25], regarding the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's reassignment of gay journalist Todd Camp, I want you to know you are the classless act. But what did I--and everyone else--expect? The Observer is undoubtedly the worst pro-pot, pro-gay, and pro-Clinton...
Exploitation first WFAA Channel 8, the "Family First" station, rushed to remain at the head of the ratings pack in hosting a February 3 town meeting in Arlington tied to the slaying of Amber Hagerman. Call BeloWatch cynical. But what public purpose did this session serve? Venting outrage before the...
For most baby boomers, Tobacco Road was one of those books which, if encountered at all, was found in dad's dresser drawer buried beneath the boxer shorts and the scented, monogrammed hankies. Its lurid cover--usually a WTV (white trash vixen) in a dirty, strategically decaying dress--made you ponder the mysteries...
Slip and slide Pavement was playing Lollapalooza in Austin on the day that Jerry Garcia didn't wake up. A reporter, sent to do a reaction piece, asked guitarist Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannenberg to comment on the passing of the hippie icon. "One thing about Jerry Garcia was that he made...
Record label executives like to say, in that snide sideways-speak they call language, that artists can't sell records unless they have a story to tell. They insist the music doesn't always speak for itself, and that an artist must first have a gimmick in order to get played on the...
It's my impression that Highland Park is populated largely by people who like to pretend they live in Connecticut and commute to the big city. There's the perfect little park with its gazebo and ducks (and tennis courts). There's an old-fashioned annual Fourth of July parade, full of children, Sousa,...
A lot of people have told me lately that I need to take notice of Dallas Affaires' cakes, but it's hard to notice some things until they're shoved in front of your nose, which is exactly what happened a Super Bowl and birthday party. Two moist, velvety cakes from the...
The boys should have been having a ball. It was a sunny autumn day, and on the greensward that is Garland's Winters Park, the culmination of everything for which the Genesis '85 boys soccer team had worked so hard all season lay before them. They were at the annual Celtic...
Patrick Owen sits on his stool, gently cradling his acoustic guitar in his long fingers. Running through an impressive rendition of Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Mary Had a Little Lamb," Owen plucks and pulls at the instrument's strings, bending them until they almost break. Though it's early in the night, his...
Cowed Town daily The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's embarrassing and shameful overreaction to a right-wing Christian group went national this week in a lengthy article in the The New York Times. S-T Executive Editor Debbie Price, as you'll recall from the Observer's January 25 story, booted openly gay editor Todd Camp...
It was the night of Domingo Garcia's annual Christmas party, but not every guest was in a festive mood. In fact, Sylvana Alonzo couldn't stand the idea of attending her third holiday party in three nights. "Roberto, do we have to go tonight?" she said tiredly as she was getting...
News: graceless under pressure Talk about lack of class. No, not "Da Boys," as The Dallas Morning News' intensely unhip editorial page habitually--and ludicrously--refers to them. BeloWatch is speaking, of course, about Dallas' Only Daily. In a January 26 pre-Super Bowl editorial headlined "Da Boys--It's time to show class as...
I was walkin' along, mindin' my own bidness the other day, when Our Man Phil Gramm popped up and announced to the world that he's a "blue-collar Republican." So now I know how Jessica-who-fell-in-the-well felt. I went home to lie down from the shock, and then class warfare broke out...
Winners and whiners Julie Lyons, get real! You're just another whining Green Bay Packer fan ["Evil's triumph at Texas Stadium," January 18]. Sounds to me like you're also another one of those people that is jealous of the Dallas Cowboys, "America's team." Thought you might like to know who named...
Teisco Del Rey, the self-proclaimed "King of the El Cheapo Guitars," has just sat down for lunch at Guero's, a popular South Austin restaurant and taco bar. He barely begins his life story when a distinctive twang and rumble spills out of the sound system. "Hey, that's appropriate!" he gushes...
History lessons Dean Wareham has long disavowed the Velvet Underground comparisons that have dogged him since his days fronting Galaxie 500; he has shrugged them off even as he has begged for them (inviting the late VU guitarist Sterling Morrison to guest on 1994's Bewitched), astutely claiming no one sounds...
Record-industry executives and musicians insist bootleg recordings are the bane of their business, the product of plunderers and profiteers who have little regard for the music itself. With the assistance of the Recording Industry Association of America, those very same musicians and executives have tried for years to outlaw bootlegs,...
Paul Size doesn't recall much about the day (or even the exact year) he went into the studio with Mick Jagger--or, for that matter, if it was a day at all. It might have been two days spent recording with the flabby icon, might have been even more and could...
