Bonita de Boer

Beneath Turtle Creek's placid surface, tension, anger and turned off sprinklers.

At a condominium near Turtle Creek, there is a bitter, strange battle brewing between the building's homeowners' association and the domestic partner of one of the HOA's members. In January, the 3081 Gilbert Homeowners' Association felt so threatened by the man, they filed a lawsuit.

The court filings start out innocently enough, if a bit snooty. The couple lived together in a condo on Gilbert Avenue for years, but only one of the men is listed as owning the property, the HOA explains in its petition, reducing his partner to undesirable non-HOA member status: "Ken Ray is not an owner of [the unit] under current Texas law and is, therefore, not a member of the Association."

That wouldn't be an issue, according to the petition the HOA filed, if the non-member resident in question wasn't going around being a jerk to all the legitimate HOA members: "Ken Ray ... has no right to challenge the actions of the Board."

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Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com

Dear Arlington Martin High School Parents: Your children are sneaky, conniving savages. They have the morals and senses of humor of ... well ... pirates, and will, if you so much as blink, do their best to make you -- adults -- look like fools.

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They're tough to see, but teeny white dots could be boats on the lake, or big birds, or maybe flotillas of plastic bags. Hard to say.

Stephen Young told you earlier about the latest renderings of plans lakes along the Trinity River near downtown in a post that seemed just a bit doubtful. "Impossible Fever Dream," he called them.

It's sad, really. Stephen is a young man, and already he expresses such cynicism toward City Hall. Not Buzz, though. We've spent a few fun hours playing around with some of the conceptual photos in the Trinity Lakes Amenities Design Plan, and we must say, we're pretty darned excited.

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That image you see above is of a surprising email that just hit my (and probably yours) inbox from RickPac, Governor Rick Perry's federal political action committee.

The surprising part isn't that Perry's PAC is using his recent indictment to solicit contributions. All's fair ... when life gives you lemons ... etc. In fact, one wonders what took his people so long to throw this together. The indictment came down Friday, and here it is Tuesday already. Did someone have weekend plans?

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Government + education + news media. Why didn't anyone think of this before?

Dallas Independent School District has some important things to tell you, stuff that doesn't get reported in the regular old media, so the district is looking at getting into the news media business, Superintendent Mike Miles said this week. Or we guess he said it. The Dallas Morning News said he did, but they're ... ugh ... old, private media. Who knows?

DISD spokesman André Riley, that's who. Buzz called him up to welcome him to the fold -- we media folk are famously collegial -- and to see if there were any tips we could give him. He said the district has just begun exploring how to expand its news offerings beyond the usual dry press releases and wants to maybe do more reporting and offer more information than standard news outlets have time or space for.

The district is very early in the process, he stressed, sounding a bit like a man who was handed a short-handled shovel last week and woke up today to find his employer had announced he was going to dig a canal.

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In 2006, hunters generated $2.63 billion in retail sales for their sport in Texas, paying nearly $284 million in state and local taxes and supporting more than 44,119 jobs, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. That doesn't include the millions spent by birdwatchers, photographers and others who enjoy wildlife they don't kill.

A large chunk of money also goes to private landowners who sell hunting leases, providing revenue to farmers and ranchers, whose operations are being pinched by the same long drought that threatens the population of game animals.

This is a problem, obviously. But luckily Texas House candidate Tony Tinderholt has inspired Buzz to come up with a plan to harness Texans' love of sport and free enterprise, along with our basic nativism, in a way that everybody wins.

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Let's make it interesting and combine two of Dallas' favorite pastimes -- pursuing the Olympics and arguing over the damn Trinity toll road. Old school style.

The U.S. Olympic Committee met yesterday, and one of the things reportedly on the agenda was which American city, maybe Dallas, will get to bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. It's a long, obscure, secretive convoluted competition -- sort of a modern bribery pentathlon -- and we're just excited as heck about the prospect.

No, not about the Olympics themselves. Jesus, who wants to boil in traffic for weeks so the world's best synchronized swimmers and table tennis players can duke it out for the gold in North Texas? We're excited because we can't wait to see how supporters of the Trinity toll road will use the Olympic bid to justify building that albatross -- untenable, unfunded and now unwanted by growing numbers of former supporters. The most recent was the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which last week said it is "unable to endorse" the current plan for the road until it knows more about the whole redevelopment plan around the river corridor, something that has been debated around here since about 1857.

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Staff in Governor Rick Perry's office must have had a case of the Mondays. It was noon before we got his emailed statement blasting the Obama administration's proposal to cut carbon emissions from power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels over the next 15 years.

Seriously? That was, like, hours, and we all knew the proposal was coming. You'd think Perry's staff would have this stuff programmed on a keyboard shortcut by now. Good IT help is so hard to find, isn't it?

What did Perry say, you ask? Oh, that. Well, stop us if you've heard this before ...

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Earlier this week, the Dallas County District Attorney's office mysteriously dropped all felony charges against Columbia Packing Co. and its vice president, Joseph Carl Ondrusek Jr., for dumping pig blood into a tributary of the Trinity River in January 2012. Counting last month's dismissal of the charges against Donny Ondrusek (another vice president and Joseph's cousin), 30 counts of criminal water pollution and evidence tampering vanished.

In exchange, the company pleaded guilty to "unauthorized discharge," a misdemeanor, and agreed to pay a $100,000 fine.

It's a stupefying end to what has seemed like a slam dunk case from the time a hobbyist's remotely controlled aircraft first photographed a ribbon of scarlet flowing into the Trinity. Councilman Dwaine Caraway is stupefied, charging that the two-plus year investigation conducted by Dallas County Health and Human Services, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency, was "mishandled."

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He'd kill you if he got the chance.

Every week, Managing Editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, anti-depressant-gobbling, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz.

Listen up, fellow leftist members of the conspiracy to destroy America. It's time to lay off the Boy Scouts of America and other Scout-like groups. We had a good run there last year with the homophobic Scouts story, but if we focus too long at any one target, we eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.

When PETA joins the dog pile, you know we've reached that point.

The animal rights group this week released a letter it sent to Wayne Perry, president of the Irving-based BSA, demanding that the organization stop teaching Scouts how to kill animals. It was signed by former Scouts upset over a Florida Scout leader who demonstrated how to dress a pair of rabbits, which he then cooked and fed to the boys. By "dress," we mean "whacked on the head with a stick," which if done properly is an accepted method for humanely dispatching a bunny. (Another, the "broomstick method," does not involving conking Mr. Bun on the noggin. You can Google it and find many videos demonstrating the technique, but we don't advise that unless you have some spare rabbits cluttering up your apartment and need a nosh. Let's just say it sucks to be a bunny.)

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