Buzz

Part-time Jew, fulltime kvetch
You remember, of course, back in August when city council member Paul Fielding sent Mayor Ron Kirk a scathing memo complaining that a meeting had been scheduled for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

“It saddens me, this insensitive policy,” Fielding wrote, putting the needle to the city’s first minority mayor. Kirk fired back a caustic letter of his own that noted that the council, which includes Fielding, had scheduled the October gathering before his inauguration.

Last Monday was Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, a day on which observant Jews refrain from working. Council member Fielding, however, was not at temple but in his business office, returning phone calls to reporters and signing papers. It saddened Buzz that he was insensitively working on a religious holiday. But Fielding, as usual, had an explanation: “I’m only half Jewish–so I worked half a day.”

Big V
It looks like unexcellence in television programming has put Big D on the map again. Dallas’ reputation for avarice, backstabbing, and tasteless fashion is already reinforced daily around the world through reruns of “Dallas.”

But in the past two years, the city’s image has been upgraded to that of a butt-kickin’ martial-arts mecca thanks to Chuck Norris’ “Walker, Texas Ranger,” also syndicated worldwide. “Walker,” which celebrates the North Texas values of violence, police brutality, exploding houses, and wooden acting (and that, as someone once said, is an insult to wood), has been found one of television’s most disturbing shows in the “UCLA Television Violence Monitoring Report,” a 190-page survey of the 1994-’95 season.

“Virtually every episode of ‘Walker,'” the report says, features Dallas’ high-kickin’ hero “in prolonged, graphic scenes of hand-to-hand combat.”

Second-best answers
When, as part of our Best of Dallas ballot, we asked Observer readers for their guidance in finding a location for a new sports arena, downtown Dallas overwhelmingly won. But we’d like to report the also-ran ideas, including: “anywhere not owned by Ray Hunt,” “Botswana,” “Donald Carter’s bank account,” and finally, “Tijuana,” which tied with “Hell.”

On the follow-up question about uses for Reunion Arena when and if a new arena is built, the readers were even more creative with answers, ranging from a “homeless shelter” to the ominous “burial ground for DART officials.” Our favorites were: “air-conditioned smoking area,” “boxing arena for city council,” a place to “house Ross Perot’s ego,” and “poodle races.” The last two, we think, would make an especially compatible mixed use.

Your way to a slimmer wallet
Just when we thought we’d put her in the “whatever-happened-to” file, Susan Powter, our favorite bleached-blonde, stubble-headed, tummy-tucked, caterwaulin’ fitness guru, is getting ink again. A recent article in Forbes ranked her $7 million earnings as fourth among “happiness hucksters,” surpassed only by Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, and Deepak Chopra.