Slampo's Place

Vigorous Exercises of Free Speech, and So Forth

2010-08-28T10:15:00.006-05:00

How come an act of "censorship" (broadly defined) by the Humble Independent School District rates a page-one story in the Houston Chronicle, but a singular act of censorship (narrowly defined) by the Houston Chronicle rates ... no mention at all in the very same paper (at least that we can find)?

Five Years After, Part I

2010-08-26T18:02:00.018-05:00

After viewing Spike Lee’s two-part follow-up to his justifiably acclaimed documentary When the Levees Broke, we must conclude that Lee is a very talented filmmaker. How else to explain the fact that we were again moved, on several different levels (including, yeah, intellectually) by Lee’s handiwork, despite the cartoonish lack of subtlety in his politics –– similar to what the filmmaker would doubtless impute to Tea Partiers –– and the occasional teeth-grinding bzzzzzz of his polemics. Not that Lee makes any pretense to two-sides-to-the-story objectivity (Correction: Apparently he does!). He’s a storyteller, not a reporter. Still, the first season of David Simon’s Treme, a fictional account of post-Katrina New Orleans, demonstrated a greater journalistic scrupulousness than Lee’s non-fictional If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, even though Simon surely shares Lee’s somewhat unfocused and widely diffused anger ––and, hey, we must be angry, all goddamn day long ––- at what happened to New Orleans.

Houston, we should note, comes off pretty good in Lee’s latest, although the segment on the city launches off in unpromising fashion with pictures of the rodeo parade and a sign for the annual big gun show at the Brown center. The music and hue of the film both darken at that point –– to suggest, we guess, that “These peckerwoods are liable to string me and any other person of color up in the middle of the night,” but we suspect, hope, that Lee, who’s got a pretty good sense of humor, offered up these rodeo week vignettes as sly juxtaposition to what follows (if not, then he’s a big dummy).* A couple of pastors –– a black preacher who relocated from New Orleans and now leads a church in South Houston, a white guy (not Ed Young) from Second Baptist –– recall those hectic post-Katrina weeks when Houston took in who-knows-how-many hurricane refugees and, in what was surely one of this nation’s recent great moments of charity and forbearance, worked like hell to get them settled. Our alcaldesa appears in an interview on the steps of City Hall, looking like a spunky cowgirl in her Go Texan Day attire (is her name, we idly wondered, hand-tooled on the back of that belt with the gigantic buckle?) and, or so it seemed to us, slightly inflating her role in the resettlement effort (she does mention that she was called into action by the then “present mayor” or “mayor at the time,” something like that, although Bill White remains anonymous and unseen throughout the short Houston segment of Lee’s film). The mayor notes that while many New Orleanians have returned home from Houston, plenty of them, who knows how many, decided to drop anchor and have blended into the city. Lee interviews three of them in what, to us, was the most arresting part of the film’s first installment, as their comments neatly illustrated the differences between the two cities, for better or worse. One of the evacuees, a Calvin Green, or Greene, formerly of Treme, tells Lee that once he landed in Houston he decided to find him a wife, the first prerequisite being that she own a house. Next to him is home-owning now-wife, a nurse he first ran into at the Reliant Center in the days after Katrina and later re-hooked-up with, somehow. Green says his second criterion for a suitable mate was that she have good feet –– “I have a foot fetish,” he helpfully explains –– and Lee obligingly gives us a brief shot of Mrs. Green’s nicely pedicured and painted toes. I’m sorry, but Houston needs more people like Calvin Green, or Greene.

Listing more toward deeply ambivalent are Colvina “Rita” McCoy and Catherine Montana Gordon, mother and sister, respectively, of Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who was such an engaging presence in When the Levees Broke, later landed a prominent role in Simon’s Treme (nobody, not even that “Susie” character from Curb Your Enthusiasm, does cuss-fueled spousal anger like Mrs. LeBlanc,), and opens Creek Don’t Rise stridently declaiming some Bad Poetry while wearing a Saints‘ jersey. Mses. McCoy and Gordon are living in what appears to be a very nice and comfortable brick home in Humble, and Ms. Gordon goes on at length extolling the virtues of the local school district, where, apparently for the first time, her special-needs son was able to access widely available services that apparently were not provided in New Orleans. (“Life Skills,” she says, enunciating the name of the routinely available class for special-education students. “I had never heard of Life Skills!”) Still, Ms. Gordon wishes aloud that “we could take what we have here and move it all [to NOLA],” while her moms, in a moment sure to endear her to the local chamber of commerce, avows, “I hate Humble.” This sounds churlish and ungrateful, and probably is, but we forgive:** Humble isn’t New Orleans (Humble isn’t even Houston), and Houston’s not New Orleans, and what Houston obviously lacks in NOLA’s je ne sais qoui and joie de vive*** and [insert overworked French phrase of your choice here] it makes up for in an ability to put people to work and make the trains run on time, or at least in offering Life Skills classes.

*We personally don't care about how the media "portray" Houston, but we know that many locals do, so let us note the obvious: What Spike Lee says about Houston is exponentially more influential than, say, what the Greater Houston Partnership says about Houston.

**Actually, we wouldn't want to live in Humble, either, unless somebody gave us a free house there (even then ....).
***That, at least, is the outside perception, but not, as we long-timers know, the reality. We believe it was the late philosopher manque Juke Boy Bonner (Christian name: "Weldon") who proclaimed that Houston Is an Action Town ("We got womenfolk in the street flagging the menfolk down" ... and, as Mr. Bonner might have added, we got menfolk flagging menfolk down, etc.). As we've often noted in the past, recent and distant, you can find just about anything you want here, if you look hard enough.

We wrote it down so we wouldn’t forget: Past postings on Katrina.

Dumb Justice

2010-08-22T12:27:00.016-05:00

Hate to be presumptuous, but we presume we’re not the only semi-regular reader of the Houston Chronicle left a tad nonplussed last Friday by the vehemence of sports hack (a redundancy, we know) Richard Justice’s full-throated, half-hysterical page-one denunciation of Roger Clemens, who, according to Justice’s weasely arms-length formulation, is destined to be “remembered as a liar and a cheat.” (Not that Justice’s calling him either.....) That, of course, is because Clemens, simply by virtue of having been indicted by a federal grand jury for denying to to some congresspeople with nothing better to do that he used steroids, is stone guilty of what his accuser, ex-cop Brian McNamee, says Clemens did. Justice rushed to judgment with no hesitation: "Even an acquittal won't get his good name back. There’s too much doubt.” Clemens' mortal sin, according to Justice, is not having himself hit in the tush with a proscribed substance but rather his lack of "contrition," his unwillingness to bow down to sports-world ayatollahs like Lil' Richard and acknowledge regret for doing something he's denied doing, repeatedly and adamantly.

We find it interesting that at the Chronicle the presumption of innocence until proven guilty extends only to Death Row inmates, long after they’ve been convicted by a jury (except for this unrepentant scuzzbucket, whose crime was so heinous and guilt so clear that he didn't rate the usual boo-hoo treatment the paper accords capital murderers), but a rich white guy like Clemens is automatically guilty by indictment. (Perhaps Justice has some empirical evidence of Clemens' guilt: Perhaps McNamee called him over and showed him the bloody gauze he purported to have saved after allegedly bangin' Clemens in the butt with steroids and HGH; perhaps Justice even witnessed the bangin' himself!) Adding to the pile-on nature of the Chronicle's coverage was this Sunday editorial wherein the writer gamely allowed that "maybe [Clemens] didn't" take steroids before quickly adding: "But plenty of people who know more about it than we do think he did." And who might this "plenty" be? Why none other than the all-knowing Richard Justice, whose "liar and a cheat" pronouncement is quoted in the editorial as if it had been inscribed on a stone and trundled down from The Mount. Apparently no other in-the-know types were handy for citation.

We are not, as we’ve noted several times in the past, a big fan or much of an admirer of Clemens (he’s no Stan the Man, is he, but who today is?), but we have no idea, no evidence at all, whether he took illegal performance-enhancing drugs or didn't (and, as we've also noted, we find the phony hand-ringing over steroid use to be not only silly but hypocritical in this, our drug-besotted society –– and we’re not talking about just the illegal ones). However, we are now rooting for his acquittal and awaiting the page-one column by Richard Justice that will follow, surely as night follows day, celebrating Roger Clemens' grit and determination and refusal to give in to his persecutors.

Here's some past postings on Clemens, et. al. They're all good: What We All Knew, and When Did We Know It?, They'll Hunt Me Down and Hang Me For My Crimes, When I Tell About My Dirty Life and Times, Precious Keepsakes of Our Fleeting Time Together, No Time for Vegans.

Be TRU to Your School, Like You Would to Your Girl (If You, Like, Had a Girl)

2010-08-18T20:50:00.008-05:00

NOTE: Despite an almost unanimous lack of public interest in his return to the “blogosphere,” if that’s what it’s still called, Sr. Slampo has reluctantly agreed to take a temporary “hiatus” from his extended hiatus to clamber up on his wheelchair-accessible soapbox and bloviate on an issue that has pitted brother against sister and is rending the very fabric of the city: the proposed purchase of Rice University’s KTRU radio (or its frequency and transmitter, whatever) by the University of Houston. In addition to his overweening need to dictate public policy to his fellow citizens, Slampo says he hopes this exercise in what he quaintly calls “typewriting” will help expunge the chorus of the Bar-Kays’ 1967 smash hit Soulfinger from his head, where it has been in more or less continuous rotation since a chance hearing on 6-23-10. He promises an imminent return to radio silence. -- Hidalgo Hidalgo, editor emeritus and under-assistant West Coast promotion man, Slampo’s Place

We see that the University of Houston’s regents, without bothering to consult us, have voted to proceed with UH’s planned purchase of Rice University’s KTRU, thus angering tens if not dozens of 30ish and 40ish Houstonians who fondly remember Marilyn Mock’s (was that her name?) “S&M Show” on the student-run station’s heyday back in the ‘80s (or whenever). We’re busy and we know you are, too, so we’ll get right to it: This ill-advised bit of empire-building and mission creep by UH is bad. It’s bad for the city, it’s bad for both schools, and, most importantly, it’s bad for us –– that is, me, myself and moi.

Oh, we’re not exactly a regular listener –– we don’t much “listen” to anything on a regular basis, ’cept for the sound of the gently falling rain –– but 91.7 is locked into rotation on our car radio’s digital scan, after KUHF (we do listen to the NPR news shows, and the classical music for its generally calming effect, but never the tiresome Car Talk or that noisome Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me [unless Paula Poundstone gonna be on!], KPFT (where we rarely stop anymore, the wall-to-wall self-righteousness usually giving us a reflexive ear-gag), KTSU ( for the music, especially Myron), and before the couple of stations our 16 year old routinely tortures us with. We couldn’t name a show or a DJ –– OK, it appears that we once immortalized The Soul and Funk Hour in this space –– but we know we can always find something reliably interesting on KTRU, even if it’s that show in the morning (do they still have it?) where somebody reads the Chronicle for the blind (or lazy). We alight on KTRU in the hope that we will hear some obscure blues, jazz or country music or even some screamin’ punk medley to get our blood pressure up in the pre-hypertension zone, and only occasionally are we disappointed. (Yes, we know this is not to everybody’s taste, but that’s because not everybody has taste, ya dig?). So, as Ken Hoffman would put it, here’s five reasons this sale is a bad idea (although we may run out of reasons well in advance of No. 5):

1. We didn’t look this up in Wikipedia, yet, but isn’t the purpose of a college radio station (like that of a college newspaper, or college mahjong club), to teach, to give youngsters hands-on training, “real-world” type experience in running the boards or punching the right buttons or whatever labor is required at a radio station these days? Yes, we believe it is. At Rice, of course, the student deejays get the added benefit of being able to show off their deep and hard-won knowledge of, say, pre-1965 Jamaican proto-ska while routinely mangling the pronunciations of various song titles and artistes (but that’s cool, ’cause, as the Rice motto holds –– or perhaps it’s that of DeVry Business School –– Vita est pro eruditio, meaning, roughly, “It’s Good to Fuck Up Now Because Not Only Is It Humbling But That’s How You Learn.”) We do not detect much of the hand of the student, the amateur, in the production of UH's KUHF.

2. We don’t see this as doing much for Rice-UH relations (the state of which we have absolutely no knowledge of).* Perhaps the mayor, a Rice alum, will be weighing in shortly (but we hope not).

3. Why in the name of Allah and/or Sweet Jesus does UH need two frickin’ radio stations? Will that somehow elevate the school to that coveted Tier 1 status? Perhaps UH’s assembling of a veritable chain of stations –– a broadcast empire! –– will do it. Does HBU have a station, and is it for sale?

4. According to the Chronicle

KUHF CEO John Proffitt said the present station, at 88.7 FM, will switch to an all-news format and the new station, to be named KUHC (91.7), will offer classical music and arts coverage. Both stations will be affiliated with National Public Radio.

Based on the dreary local “news and talk” products pushed by KUHF and sister TV outlet Channel 8, we assume this means the addition of another snooze-inducing, irrelevant outlet to today’s challenging media local landscape, and .... more Car Talk! (sheesh).

5. We’re all out of reasons, but the previous four amount to an unassailable case that should force both institutions to see the error of their way and JUST LEAVE THINGS THE HELL ALONE (which, even here in Houston, is often times the best policy).

*With apologies to Brian Wilson and whoever else of the Beach Boys is still alive.
**Although by inclination we are more of UH person, we have no horse in this race at all. In the interest of disclosure: We were once asked to leave the grounds of Rice by a campus cop or security guard while visiting there back in ’76 or ’77, which left us sore, but later we took a couple of continuing education courses there (one of which, taught by an instructor from St. Thomas, either the high school or college, was pretty good). We did teach as an adjunct prof for a couple of years in the late’90s at UH, our last semester there being highlighted by our single-handed apprehension of four –– count ’em ––plagiarists out of the 15 or so students total. The thefts were so blatant and pathetic that we almost felt like teaching the guilty a lesson in how to be a successful sneak, instead of giving them gentlemen’s ‘C’ that the ol’ boy who ran the department suggested. Whenever Rice is pitted against UH in an athletic contest, our neutral policy dictates that we cheer for whoever’s ahead.

On Hiatus

2010-04-26T19:45:00.004-05:00

Due to the demands of "real life," whatever that may mean, we must temporarily suspend operations here at Slampo's Place. We hope to return soon to continue our self-appointed mission of smiting the wicked, exalting the righteous and improving the mediocre.

Meantime, as always, the window of the Official Clearinghouse for Al Hoang News & Infotainment remains open at the email address to your immediate right.

Thanks for your patronage.

Man in a Hurry

2010-04-16T20:57:00.023-05:00

In what simply may have been a case of the natural phenomenon scientists call "a blind squirrel rolling up on a nut," the Chronicle's Teen Columnist recently had a pretty all reet examination of the situational complexities at Lee High School in southwest Houston, which has lost two well-respected principals –– one to firing, the other to getting-out-while-the-getting's-good –– under the new Houston schools superintendent. The columnist noted that the new super –– who initially impressed us as a smile-and-shoeshine sort of fellow (although judging from what we've seen of him on TV that probably should be amended to snarl-and-a-shoeshine) –– had never set foot on the Lee campus, despite overseeing the rending of the school's somewhat delicate fabric. (Lee, as you may have seen and read, has been in the news a bit this school year.) In a follow-up posting last week on her blog, Ms. Falkenberg reported that in the wake of her column* the super was preparing to head down the freeway and actually plant his feet on the campus, and, in response to her email asking him why he was doing so, he had emailed her back that:

Frankly, I have not been able to visit our schools as often as I would like.
Tomorrow, I am visiting Lee and Cashmere (SIC)--two of the schools that the state has labeled as 'failing.' Next week, I plan to visit Jones and several of our other 'failing' or low performing schools.

Obviously the super meant "Kashmere," another HISD school that has been in the news a lot this year. Other than the insertion of the parenthetical "(SIC)" –– that's Latin for "you big dummy" –– Ms. Falkenberg correctly passed on making any ado of the miscue, although some of her online commentators couldn't resist the opportunity.

Our first, admittedly knee-jerk, reaction was: Gee, that's terrible –– the superintendent of schools misspelling the name of an old Houston school that's been all over the newspaper lately and was even the subject of a lengthy investigative report the district ordered up. It certainly did not reflect a reassuring grasp of detail. Upon more sober reflection, though, we realized that the city's top public educator shouldn't be expected to spell the name of one of his schools correctly, especially in an email to a journalist, because, as lots of kids today know, spelling is just so passé.

And anyhow, he spelled L-E-E correctly.

*Unfortunately, Ms. Falkenberg thought it necessary to puff out her chest and aver that she had "called out" the superintendent, thus precluding her immediate promotion to "Young Adult" columnist.

Bill White’s Big Dropout Problem

2010-04-13T21:58:00.013-05:00

It has come to our attention, and perhaps to yours, too, that Bill White is under the misimpression that Texas’s “dropout problem,” as he undoubtedly has phrased it somewhere along the line, is the hobby horse he’ll be able to flay straight into the under-repair Governor’s Mansion. It also appears that White is blaming Rick Perry for the problem, or at the very least suggesting that Perry hasn’t done anywhere near enough to keep those hard-working, knowledge-starved kids in school. (We must shrug and stipulate into the record here that, as best we can recall, we have never voted for Perry for any office, and we’re unlikely to do so this year, although, as with all things in heaven and on earth, we’re open to the possibility, in the unlikely event that Perry says or does something that impresses us.) The issue flared last week when, according to this story in the local newspaper, White and Perry argued over the extent of the, um, problem, with White proclaiming that “nearly 1 million Texas students have failed to graduate or get a GED on time” during the nine years Perry has been governor and Perry riposting that “the [number] that Mr. White uses is taking the number of kids starting their freshmen year and then the ones that graduate in four years the following May or June. If a child dies, they count that as a dropout. I think that's a little harsh.”

Now this particular debate over numbers strikes as being almost as meaningless as the semantic one over whether Houston is a “sanctuary” city ('tis what it is, y’know), although we have to give Perry comedy points for his baldly risible assertion that child mortality is is a factor in whatever the actual dropout numbers are. On the larger issue that White has been raising, however, we must rise again, all by our lonesome it seems, to point out what no other member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media has the wit, or the stick, to point out, and that is this: Bill White doesn’t have any more of a clue than Rick Perry about how to fix the “dropout problem” (we’re using quotes here because we are not fully convinced that the self-selecting clearing-out of the schools by teenagers who don’t want to be there is an entirely bad thing, but that’s pretty much beside the point we’re driving at, so let us keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel).

So far White has a little better than nothing, zilch, but clownish and ill-advised catchphrases and gusts of hot air, such as, “The governor is more interested in his own future than the future of Texans.” Yeah, that’s probably 'cause Rick Perry hates kids and wants them to be failures. You can see it in his eyes. And we all remember his wildly successful “Drop Out of School Right Now, Ninos” campaign. The Chronicle story kinda-sorta pointed out White’s nearly empty basket:

White, the son of public school educators, conceded there is no single or easy answer to the problem.

“You need to start early with early childhood education,” he said. “You need to offset summer learning loss (programs) for those elementary school kids who do not have access to books and computers at home during the summer. You need to have more flexible programs that accommodate and support those students in their attempt to graduate who must work when they are in high school.”

Oh, it’s not like anybody ever thought of that before, or tried it. Scouring White’s campaign Web site last week, we saw the first item under the heading “reducing the dropout rate” was this classic example of Bill White’s full-court noblesse:

When a student drops out of school, it must be treated as an emergency, not just another statistic. In Houston we launched Expectation Graduation to cut the dropout rate. For example, each fall, my wife Andrea and I led thousands of volunteers to go to the homes of high school students who have not returned to school. Approximately 8,800 students have returned to school as a result, and this initiative has been replicated in communities across Texas.

Yes, that’ll do it: A statewide version of the PR stunt that HISD and now other school districts pull every summer whereby teachers, administrators and concerned-citizen types go to the houses of dropouts to try and talk them back into school. (We are skeptical in the extreme of this 8,000 number and would suggest that some bored journalist –– a journalist, not a publicist –– track, say, 20 of these kids who answer the door when Bill White and Co. come a’knockin’ this summer to see how many of them actually make it back to school, and how many eventually graduate. Ah, but that would be real work and take lots of time and in any case would probably be a downer, so never mind.) There’s was one decent and very modest idea that White appears to have made, which we can't do justice to at this moment because the "issues" link on his site isn't loading, but it had something to do forging closer links between schools and businesses that employ students in after-school jobs.

If White were serious about the dropout problem and not just trying to warp reality by blaming Perry, he'd buck up and demonstrate some of the intestinal fortitude his successor as mayor seems to possess by doing the following:

1. Call for the immediate end of "bilingual" classes in Texas public schools in favor of strict and unrelenting English immersion for all students. This is one of our frequent hobby horses, so we’ll just direct your attention to this Heather McDonald article exploring how, as the author put is, the “curtailment of California’s bilingual-education industry” and its “counterintuitive linguistic claims” have led to slightly higher test scores for Hispanic students in that state. The “dropout problem" is not, of course, exclusively a Hispanic problem, but in large urban school districts it is a disproportionately Hispanic one, and anyone who thinks the early-grades barrio-izing of non-English-speaking Spanish speakers doesn’t contribute, directly, to the “dropout problem” down the road is a fool. White won't do this, of course, because he's already demonstrated a pronounced disinclination to break with Democratic Party orthodoxy, and the fear of course is that such a stand would alienate Hispanic voters, although we'd expect the blowback would be a lot less than you'd imagine among Mexican-Americans who actually vote (and speak English). But White needs to do this, not just because it's the right thing (always reason enough), but because he requires his own "Sister Souljah" moment ––and this, unlike Clinton's, would be a moment on something that actually matters–– if he wants to avoid having “Lost to Rick '39 Percent' Perry in First Bid for Statewide Office” as his next resume entry. This is a no-brainer when it comes to sound public policy. Maybe that's why we can't recall Rick Perry ever having anything to say on the subject, either.

2. Call for an immediate end to the requirement that students must complete four years of math, four years of science, four years of English, etc., to graduate high school. This, too, would skirt the boundaries of bipartisan heresy –– that no man's land where Bill White has rarely ventured –– because it would implicitly acknowledge the cold fact, verifiable by 4,000 years of human experience, that not all kids are cut out to master Algebra II. What you could do instead is retain the 4-year requirements for a college-bound track of study but offer an alternative for kids who’d rather learn some vocational skills and who probably aren't going to get a whole out of reading, say, Love in the Time of Cholera. Beginning with or just after 9th grade, the bewitching hour for most dropouts, the non-college track would consist of three hours in the morning of intense instruction and/or remediation in math and language arts, with three more hours after lunch devoted to the teaching of skills (plural) that will come in handy in the workplace. The choice of tracks would up to the student and his parents. This, too is no-brainer, but come to think of it we can't recall Rick Perry saying much on the subject (maybe he has and we missed it).

3. Start addressing the nettlesome and unpleasant cultural factors that are the main contributor to the “dropout problem.” Take to the bully pulpit and emphasize that it’s not a good idea for 12-year-old “shorties” to be having more shorties. Suggest to parents that it’s an equally bad idea to pull their kids out of school for a month in the middle of the semester to go back to Mexico. Explain why it’s not a sound parenting practice for mamas to drop their kindergartners off at school in the morning with the godawful rap music with its “motherfucker this” and “motherfucker that” blaring out of the windows. In other words, start putting the onus where it belongs: on the parents. Because no halfway sensible person is going to look at the "dropout problem" and think Rick Perry's the daddy.

More Chicks Than You Could Stuff Inside a Pullman Car (If They Still Made Pullmans)

2010-04-11T15:08:00.008-05:00

Yep, we know: when you're trying to beat the rap in Texas it probably helps to be a semi-renown musical legend, and it certainly can't hurt to be able to afford Dick DeGuerin as your Bar-accredited courtroom mouthpiece. We'd imagine that being white is still an advantage, too, although maybe not as much as that accident of birth once was. Still, we must confess to having swelled just a bit with a Bullock-ian sense of Texas pride when we read of this exchange Friday during a courtroom proceeding up in McLennan County, which resulted in a jury's acquittal of old five-and-dimer (and illegally pistol-packing barroom patron) Billy Joe Shaver of aggravated assault for shooting and wounding an obnoxious, liquored-up gentleman outside a bar two years ago*:

[Lady prosecutor] suggested that [Shaver] could have just left the bar if he had felt so intimidated.

That would have been "chicken shit," Shaver replied.

[Lady prosecutor] asked whether Shaver was jealous that [the victim] at the time was talking to Shaver's wife, Wanda.

"I get more women than a passenger train can haul. I'm not jealous," Shaver said.

For readers unfamiliar with Mr. Shaver and his oeuvre, we must point out that he is not a 23-year-old hip-hop artiste of the Southern school but rather a 70-year-old Caucasian who could pass for 80 and many years ago lost parts of a couple of fingers while working in a lumber mill. We needn't add that they don't make 'em like Billy Joe Shaver anymore, although we're not entirely certain how we feel about that.

*Brought to our attention by the omnivorous and erudite Banjo Jones.

For Real (So Far)

2010-04-04T19:18:00.014-05:00

After catching the public speakers’ portion of the 3-30-10 Houston City Council meet-up on the access channel,* we were moved to wonder why the mayor’s unilateral move to increase the insurance payments of under-65 municipal retirees hasn’t occasioned more comment and commentary, especially from Our Town’s legions of conservative bloggers and the other vociferous gum-beaters of the blogosphere,** for whom public employees and public-employee unions are generally bête noire, generally speaking. (We, of course, expected absolutely nothing from the likes of the Sexiest Blogger in Houston,*** or Most Influential-est and Boring-est Block-Quoter in the Western Hemisphere, whatever, and we have not been disappointed, although this wily old vato, who was briefly in the employ of the mayor's runoff opponent last year, did weigh-in from the port side with an appreciative acknowledgement of the mayor's bulls-by-the-horn approach. We know it's early, but we expect to see at least one and possibly more pro-Parker op-ed pieces by erstwhile mayoral would-be Bill King (checking his Web site, we see ... nada, but as we said it's still early).

We are not saying here that he mayor was absolutely 100-percent right in this move (and how could such an unpalatable action be "right"?), 'cause we don't have enough information to issue such a snap judgment, especially on the, um, complex political ramifications, not to mention the financial ones. We must admit that we did blanch a bit, in sympathy, as several under-65 and able-bodied (or at least able-bodied enough to get to the microphone in council chambers) ex-city workers bewailed the extremely large increases they'll be forced to bear in their monthly payments –– one guy said his were in the neighborhood of $700+ –– but then the il’ dude inside us who hut-huts along like either John Calvin or Edmund Burke (he dresses like a city employee –– a cop!) came a'strolling, twirling his nightstick and wondering, "Who but a public employee could afford to retire well before 65 in this day and age?"**** and "How many dependents are you carrying there on your policy?" Council members Clarence Bradford and Wanda Adams, especially the former, raised concerns about the mayor's action, which, if we can interpret their meanings within the broad confines of necessary council collegiality, seemed to imply that the mayor had been high-handed and not sharing information with them. The mayor, we noticed, did not flinch.

So we have some predictions here: No. 1.) Expect the public bonhomie and good feeling and general unanimity of the White Era City Council to be a thing of the past, a development that will be the direct result of No. 2.), and that is: This mayor apparently came into office prepared to actually do stuff.

*In case you were wondering, we heard District F Councilman Al Hoang say nothing stupid or needlessly insulting during the part of the meeting we saw –– in fact we could not tell whether Hoang was actually present and accounted for.

**We would also paint local conservative talk radio with this possibly unwarranted broad brush, except that we rarely listen to any of it.

***Who was see is actually encouraging people –– or a person, to be exact –– to move away from Houston, but presumably only after he's returned his Census form.

***The aggrieved retirees we saw all looked to be of our vintage, mid-range Baby Boomers. One, who seemed to be a friend of the mayor, spent an unusually large portion of his allotted minutes congratulating her and the council for various unspecified fiscal accomplishments.

Aloysius Chronicles, Continued: The Hoang Way Leaves 'Em Scratching Their Heads at Alief Super Neighborhood Council Meeting

2010-03-30T21:38:00.010-05:00

A correspondent, who wishes to be known only as “a correspondent,” sent along the following eyewitness account of the Tuesday, March 23 meeting of the Alief Super Neighborhood Council, which included an apparently impromptu appearance by Pearland and District F’s own representative on the Houston City Council, Aloysius “One-Term Al” Hoang. Not having been anywhere in the vicinity of the meeting site, we cannot vouch for the particulars of our correspondent’s account; however, this especially detailed and well-written report comports with another we’ve been privy to regarding the councilman’s demeanor in a public setting. We present the report in full, without elaboration (because it speaks for itself):

The councilman arrived, unannounced (not that he needed one, but this is the first meeting he ever attended) after the meeting started and sat in the back of the room. Two of the officers gave a report of the District F CIP meeting along with their observations of the District G meeting (they attended that earlier meeting in order observe the process). The report by the chair and vice-chair included data about how F compared to G in the number of projects that are currently on the CIP (39 for G and 6 for F) and the number of new CIP requests (including District G’s request to purchase a 100-acre tract of land near Beltway 8 and Westheimer for a city park and their thanks to the city for completing the $8 million Kindle library). The Alief SN board wanted to illustrate with facts what is generally known anyway –– F has been under served. M.J. Khan, the former District F council member, often said that F was the “Forgotten District,” and that phase was used in the comparison by the officers. Their entire report was about what happened in the past, with no mention of the current and new councilman ... period.

Toward the end of the meeting, the council member’s aide asked if the CM could address the group for a few minutes. He was recognized and took the floor with his young daughter clinging to his leg. The councilman got up and began, in a loud voice, what could only be described as a scolding of the members of the Alief SN council in general, and the chair in particular, over the CIP requests. “District F is not the forgotten district, he shouted, “it’s the future district.” Now, we don’t want to sound like a bunch of bigots, but the English of Mr. I-have-many-addresses is not the easiest thing to understand. As he continued his harangue, people were looking at each other trying to guess what the hell he was actually talking about and why he was speaking in such a belligerent tone, especially when he kept referring to the chair (or at least we think that’s who he was referencing) as “her” or “she,” probably because he had never taken the time or effort to learn anyone’s name.

"You want something you have to write it down," they were told several times. (The three Alief CIP requests had been input online as instructed by the CM’s office before his CIP meeting and were presented on camera at the District F CIP meeting). "You ask for things, it takes time, it takes a long time." Somewhere in his bullying Al mentioned that if he couldn’t get something done, he would pay for it, and that he needed help because his family took up a lot of his time. We're not sure what he was going to pay for since by then not only were the Alief residents in disarray, a lady, who had been one of the speakers earlier in the meeting, had taken Al's child out into the hallway because she felt the little girl was reacting to her father's raised voice, and the CM's aide was crying openly.

After the meeting, attendees were talking in the hallway and parking lot about being stunned by his bizarre behavior. In fact, one of the guest speakers for the night suggested reporting his conduct to the Mayor. We here in Alief have rarely experienced such a strange performance by an elected official. What on earth was he trying to gain by scolding his constituents?

Whew! Our correspondent also sent along an a copy of an official missive from the councilman’s office regarding an upcoming District F Clean-Up, which, as our correspondent noted, included a rather odd, not to mention grammatically tortuous, salutation as well as a glaring typo that seems to calls the hygiene of District F residents into question. We'll turn it back over to our correspondent in the field:

Besides the grammar thing about the singular "resident" and plural "supporters", what in the world is the word "supporters" doing on an official email from a councilman to his constituents? Maybe Pearland Al doesn’t know how to transition from campaign mode to actual governing. We know that things are done differently in Alief, but this must be a one-of-a-kind clean-up because the second sentence reads "This annual clean us.” Ok, then. Do we bring bath towels or rakes?

Meanwhile, another member of the growing Al Hoang Fan Club recently informed us that the councilman and his wife had acquired yet another property, this one at 6865 Turtlewood Dr. in a gated community off Bellaire near Wilcrest, giving Hoang a grand total of two domiciles in District F. Neither the newly acquired property nor the one at 4403 Bugle that Hoang is listed as having purchased in March 2009 carries a homestead exemption for the current tax year, according to Harris County Appraisal District records, but Brazoria County Appraisal District records show the tax exemption is still being retained on the Hoang house at 2702 Sunfish in Pearland, which Hoang's wife is listed as owning by herself. This is the same house that Hoang was listed as co-owning with his wife, and upon which he was claiming a homestead exemption, when he made unsuccessful runs for an at-large Houston council seat in 2003 and a Harris County judgeship in 2008 (he transferred full ownership to his wife after that defeat).

Despite the acquisition of the new digs, we notice that Hoang, his Brazoria County homestead-exemption-claiming wife and three other adults are still listed for voter registration purposes as residing at 4403 Bugle. We presume the councilman, between alienating new constituents and fulfilling family obligations, has just been too busy to take care of such mundane details as keeping his stories straight.

Three Dollars and Twenty-Four Cents Per Month of Stupid

2010-03-26T17:54:00.015-05:00

We returned home late Thursday afternoon to discover that CenterPoint Energy, the self-described "electric delivery company" that endeared itself to so many Houstonians in the wake of Hurricane Ike, had finally installed one of those "smart meters" on our electric box. We were vaguely aware that the smart meter was out there and possibly headed our way, but we had not paid much attention to the particulars––that is, the fine print––of their impending placement, other than the odiferous fact that we had already been paying for the thing through an "advanced meter surcharge" tucked into the line items on our monthly bill.

It just so happened that much earlier that day we had read a story in the Houston Chronicle by Purva Patel reporting that information on customers' power usage available from a Web site CenterPoint unveiled with much fanfare was, as the faintly clever headline phrased it, "not so current." According to Patel, CenterPoint initially claimed that "the site would give consumers with smart meters information about their power usage in 15-minute intervals so they could make better choices about how much power they use." Turns out, though the "15-minute incremental information can take as long as 48 hours to hit the Web site," although a CenterPoint mouthpiece promised that "eventually" electricity users (and abusers, presumably) will be able to access "real-time electric consumption information directly from their smart meters using in-home monitors."

So right now, for instance, say it's Tuesday afternoon in mid-summer and you've got the thermostat set to 65 and the A/C cranked, all the lamps and overhead lights are on 'cause you're finishing Madame Bovary while watching that 70-inch flat-screen plasma TV and straightening your curly locks with a CHI Flat Iron, and the kids are upstairs "sexting" or whatever it is they do from their PCs ... but you'll have to wait until Thursday to find out from the CenterPoint Web site that YOU'RE A MORON WHO'S USING TOO DAMN MUCH ELECTRICITY.

We've had our own "smart meter" for years, and it's the voice in our head that sounds very much like our old man, who used to get extremely agitated if we'd stand too long in front of what he quaintly called the "icebox" with the door open while we contemplated the bountiful late-20th century selection of foodstuffs therein, which would invariably result in a brief lecture on how much electricity we were wasting due to the fact that we were an irremediable dumbass (or so we inferred). This happened approximately a million times, not including the many similar lectures that attended our waiting too long to get in the shower or our accidentally forgetting to turn off a sole light in our room, etc. We used to write this off to the fact that he grew up in a series of "labor camps" next to the lignite mines of East Texas, where electrical service was intermittent, when available, and indoor plumbing non-existent, but after having children we found our self channeling the old boy's very voice when we'd pleadingly ask our kids why, upon leaving the house, they had to leave on EVERY FRICKIN' LIGHT or why they had to let the shower "warm up" for a full 5 minutes before climbing in, etc.

It was in that spirit that we perused the door hanger that CenterPoint left touting the swell new "energy future" the smart meter is ushering in. Among the supposed benefits are "remote meter reading ... virtually eliminating the need to come to your house to read the meter" [as well as the jobs of the guys who used to do that, it apparently goes without saying], "energy efficiency and savings" by allowing consumers to "see your electric usage history* to better manage your energy costs by making small changes such as adjusting your thermostat" [can't they just do that by remote-control from headquarters?], "environmental benefits" resulting from more efficient consumer management of electric usage, and, of course, the always looming "new products and services" peddled by customers' retail electric providers, that is, the companies that actually bill you for the juice (REPs––got it?). Now we're definitely all for saving our nickels and dimes and helping to throttle back on electricity production, at least that generated by burning coal, but the only alleged benefit that really impressed us was the promised "automatic outage notification" of CenterPoint when our electricity is on the blink, and that's because anyone who's tried to call and report an outage knows what an infuriating, nerve-mangling time suck that can turn out to be.

We had to open up the foldable door-hanger to get to what we were looking for, the very last section, which CenterPoint had thoughtfully headlined "What will this cost me?" (¿Cuanto me costará este servicio?) Answer: $3.24 per month for two years starting in February 2009 (a full year before we got our digital doo-hickey) and $3.05 per month for an unspecified "thereafter." The curious and the pissed-off were instructed to call their REPs to learn more. We called ours, which does business under the handle of TXU, and a nice lady told us that this smart-meter charge, which of course is a pass-along from CenterPoint, would be costing the specified amount(s) for 10 years, meaning we'll be able to draw on our Social Security to pay off our smart meter. We later calculated the cost to be in the vicinity of $375 or so, for something we'll probably never use but apparently had no choice but to accept. We told the TXU lady that we didn't really need a smart meter and in fact were already missing our old dumb meter, whose spinning gauges it took us several years to learn to read in the correct order. She replied with some canned ham regarding the savings the smart meter will help us realize, which we politely interrupted to ask, "So have y'all been getting a lot of angry calls about this?" The nice lady hesitated––wary, perhaps, that we might be, say, Purva Patel––then replied with an emphatic "Yes." Seeking further confirmation, we asked again, "So lots of people are mad about this? "Uh ... yes," she replied, again without elaboration but with the clear implication that she was damn well tired of hearing from 'em. Well, said we politely, put us down as another PO'ed smart-meter owner-leasee.

And this was before we learned of today's announcement that CenterPoint Houston has reached agreement with the DOE to receive $200 million in stimulus money for its "advanced metering system and intelligent grid projects." So, we're thinking now, can we get the $3.24 back, or at least the amount we paid before our meter got so smart?

*"HPH007," a commentator on the above-mentioned Chronicle story, handily dismissed that supposed benefit: "What am I going to learn? I already know that I use more electrical energy during the summer when I run my air conditioner and that I use more electricity at night when I have lights on. I use less during the winter when I do not run my ac and I use less in the middle of the night when I am asleep and all the lights are off. I do not need a smart meter to tell me that. I have been managing my energy consumption quit nicely on my own for almost 40 years, thank you."

Mark Lanier for (Sophomore) Class President!

2010-03-15T20:35:00.010-05:00

It was unfortunate, perhaps, that on the very day that the much-circulated story of the runaway Prius was being called into question, Texas Tombstone pile-driver plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier was quoted in the Wall Street Journal drawing an especially apt analogy for his and perhaps countless other litigators' jockeying to be chosen as lead attorneys in the expected consolidated mass tort against Toyota. (The Wall Street Journal has some funny idea that you should pay for its content, so we can't link to Monday's story, or even cut-and-paste the relevant verbiage, and in fact will have to type-in what follows by hand.):

All the positioning has the air of a high-school election, according to several attorneys involved.

"If it's not a high-school election then it's at least like being voted most popular," said Mark Lanier, a Houston attorney whose firm has filed numerous suits against Toyota.

Mr. Lanier, who led litigation against Vioxx maker Merck & Co. ... isn't shy about his desire to play a lead role in the Toyota suits. "Pick me, pick me," he said. "Vote for me for class president."

As previously noted, Mr. Lanier already has cornered the crucial Vietnamese vote.

They’re Getting Downright PISSy at the Houston Chronicle

2010-03-12T21:24:00.007-06:00

We’ve noticed a lot of piss in our daily newspaper lately. Not the literal kind––what self-respecting pooch would even bother to lift a leg over The Good Life?––but the figure-of-speech kind. By that we mean variations on the verb form of “piss” that mean mad or angry, as in pissed and pissed-off. Here’s one from the March 7 column by Austin bureau columnizer/reporter Peggy Fikac:

[Former Texas Medical Association lobbyist Kim] Ross acknowledged his ouster didn't much register with the public: “At the end of the day, the general public neither knows nor cares about someone in the lobby who's put to sleep by a pissed-off governor. My parents were upset.”*

Whoa daddy! And here’s another one from an entry in a March 3 story plumping staff members’ picks for "best movie" Oscar, by our old pal Andy Olin:

It portrays Jews not as self-deprecating and neurotic, a la Woody Allen, but as empowered, fearless and pissed off.

Wait, lookee here--a Chronicle deployment of piss in the literal scene, from a super-lame column on 2-16-10 by Norman Chad For the Chronicle (may not be his real name) on the Westminster Dog Show (or something---we can’t read the whole thing):

My Uncle Scruffy loves to tell the story about the time his dog-obedience class took a field trip to Washington, D.C., and he pissed on the White House lawn.

That’s a whole lot of pissin’ going on, Jerry Lee, and that’s just dating back less than a month. We stuck the word pissed into the Chronicle search engine and it returned 137 hits, but in a few of the more recent stories on the list we could find no piss, or even pissed-off-edness, so maybe the pissing (and moaning, too) was in the readers’ comments affixed to the online versions; prior to this year most of the pissing appeared to be confined to the billion-and-one Pulitzer-quality Chronicle blogs (not the tasteful, adult ones we read, though).

[According to our 1981 abridged edition of Slang and Euphemism by Northwestern University linguistics professor Richard A. Spears, which includes a full page and a half of piss-related entries, including the fantabulous piss-Willy (“an insignificant person”), piss itself is from Vulgar Latin and is onomatopoetic––makes sense––and “in some parts of the English-speaking world can be used in polite conversation without giving offense.” Well all right! as Mick Jagger used to say.]

We must admit that when we first noticed the phenomenon––or perhaps trend is the better word––were somewhat taken aback, although not shocked (in either the literal or over-used ironic sense of the word). Back in the day when we toiled at 801 Texas Avenue we’re pretty sure no piss would find its way into the Chronicle, because the Baylor alums who ran the editorial side were squeamish about the (public) use of even such mildly scatological terms, and, mostly, because they didn’t relish having to deal with complaints from pissed-off deacons among the readership who would’ve phoned into complain that Jesse Jones never, ever printed piss in the Chronicle. We remember some years ago––this was after we vacated the premises––the word “shit” somehow slipped into a story in the features section, resulting in all manner of h-e-double hockey-sticks to pay. Now we fear the day may be coming when “shit” will appear in the Chronicle on a piss-level frequency, perhaps even a f--k or two. We feel deeply ambivalent about this, like when the pre-Safeway Randall’s started selling booze.

[Our own policy on bad words is ... we don’t have one. We just go with the flow, do what we’re feelin’. And sometimes we feel like bustin’ loose with a piss or shit or even a f--k, although mostly we use dashes with the latter because we’re old and it even offends us. We use these terms not to épater le bourgeois but because we have a severely stunted imagination. (Also because, as we once heard someone say––it was the very Yoga Lady of whom we’ve written––”I’m from Louisiana so I cuss a lot.”)]

Just like the executive editor of the Chronicle, we don’t read the paper that closely, so as a control for our experiment we entered the term “shit” into the paper’s search engine and got 11 returns, all appearing to be found in comments affixed to blogs. Alas, the word “fuck” brought forth no returns from the newspaper itself, but it did yield “sponsored links” for “Want to Fuck” (no question mark––where's the copyeditor?) and “Free Fuck Videos.”

It’s a good thing Jesse Jones is dead.

Excellent line, former TMA lobbyist!

The Vietnamese-American and His (Or Her) Toyota: A Story of L-U-V Gone Wrong (Very Wrong)

2010-03-10T11:35:00.020-06:00

On Monday the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood reported on the media-abetted* client-recruitment efforts of Houston plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Lanier, who, like many members of the legal profession, is damn near salivating over the big payday he sees up around the bend in the accelerator problems afflicting Toyota products. "This is a mass tort," proclaimed Lanier, with dollar signs almost literally spinning in his eyeballs. "Toyota is in for billions of dollars and a number of years."

Lanier's non-corporeal presence has always left an oleaginous smudge, at least in our eyes, similar to the one we always detected after viewings of the now-disgraced boy evangelist, that phony hambone populist with the $400 haircut who once actually made us feel sympathetic toward Dick Cheney.** The nature of the Lanier enterprise was summed up, perhaps unconsciously but most likely not, by the Chronicle scribe's use of such skepticism-tinged phraseology as "called a press conference largely to mark his legal turf" (like a peein' hound dog--get it?) and "lawyers in Texas and around the country have smelled Toyota's corporate blood in the water and mustered" (like certain sea creatures whose teeth are pearly white--check it out!).

Although we are a founding member of the Weekley YMCA in southwest Houston, our purpose here today is not to prattle on about product liability, mass torts, smilin' plaintiffs' lawyers with expensive hair-dos, negligent corporate entities or the whole host of phenomena that surely will attend the upcoming legal disemboweling of the Toyota Corp. (which can only be good for the American auto industry, right?). No, what caught our eye in Flood's story was the following:

Lanier, a nationally known plaintiff's lawyer, stood on the courthouse steps with lawyer Tammy Tran, who supplied 300 possible cases from the local Vietnamese community.

Though they had boxes of files and Lainer's firm is one of those with priority advertising on Google, Lanier and Tran have filed only one lawsuit against Toyota so far over unspecified injuries by an undergraduate student whose Camry hit a parked car.

Three hundred possible cases from the local Vietnamese community? Dang, we're thinking, does every Vietnamese in Houston drive a Toyota (with or without a malfunctioning accelerator )? Well, apparently so,*** at least according to this report by Fox 26's Isiah Carey, who relates that the afore-mentioned Tran told him:

"When Vietnamese come to America there's three things they want: No. 1, a good job; No. 2, a house, and No. 3, a Toyota ... and they're very disappointed in the automaker."

Ms. Tran added:

"Each Vietnamese family owns two Toyota [sic]. Toyota is the dream of every Vietnamese."

(Carey reported that the driver of the afore-mentioned Camry is "in medical school" and was "seriously injured" and that her family is "the first of at least 300 Vietnamese families in Houston to file a lawsuit against Toyota, claiming acceleration problems." As a news consumer you sorta wish the media could get their story lines straight.)

It's stories like these that make us think back, fondly, on our late father, the obstinate son of an immigrant who after World War II resolutely refused to buy any product––car, radio, lawn mower, etc.––made in either Germany or Japan,*** not only because he had spent four or five months in continental Europe getting his ass shot at by Nazis on a semi-regular basis but also because so many of his college classmates (A&M, '41) fell and never got up at the hands of Hitler's and Tojo's minions, apparently to ensure that future generations of Vietnamese-Americans could fulfill their American dream by stocking up on Japanese-made automobiles. (You're in America now, so buy American, por favor.)

By the way, we noticed on her Web site that the afore-mentioned lawyer Tran is, like her litigation lord and overseer Lanier, a big-time Bible thumper ("Leading with Faith, Winning with Experience"). When we lay us down to sleep this evening we will ask our Lord Jesus to please shield us, not only from defective accelerators in Japanese-made automobiles but from smug, sanctimonious Bible thumpers, and Koran thumpers, too––especially smug, sanctimonious Bible thumpers, or Koran thumpers, with Bar cards.

*But as Tony Soprano often shrugged, "What are ya gonna do?"

**By the way, did you see that the National Enquirer is being considered for a Pulitzer for its eviscerating of the boy evangelist? Yeah--and it deserves the prize as a frontal rebuke to the prissy Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (M-NIM).

***Come to think of it, though, we know at least a few Vietnamese who do not drive Toyotas but instead chug around town in Hondas––perhaps we just know the wrong sort of Vietnamese.

****We, of course, are made of flimsier stuff and once owned a Volkswagen, although we have since stuck with American-made vehicles.

Aloysius Update: Too Many Siddiquis for One Dummy to Behold

2010-03-06T07:16:00.015-06:00

Early Saturday morning, about the time the rooster was crowing and the buckwheat cake was in our mouth, we caught a TV rebroadcast of the March 2 Houston City Council meeting, or at least most of the public comments portion of that convocation, which featured several speakers associated with the ISGH Mosque on Old Galveston Road in southeast Houston. They had come before the council to complain about a false report of a hostage-taking allegedly phoned in to HPD by two Muslim gentlemen who, if we caught the speakers' drift, are also somehow associated with facility and one of whose name is "Siddiqui."

It was difficult to discern exactly what was the nature of the mosque-goers' complaint(s)––one seemed irked that HPD had responded to the call with (according to him) guns drawn, while another, a hijab-clad lady who for upcoming Census purposes most likely will check off "non-Hispanic white," seemed to be complaining that no criminal charges had been filed in the incident, although, thanks to deft questioning by the mayor and some council members, it apparently* was established that no one had bothered to file a formal complaint about what was described several times as a "prank." (We suspect that such "pranks" aren't commonly used to settle disputes or get attention at, say, Second Baptist Church, but we could be wrong, as usual.)

The mayor and several council members lobbed forth some queries in an effort to suss-out the murky episode, then the wheel of misfortune spun 'round to our very own non-resident council member from District F, the less-than-honorable Aloysius D. Hoang, who, while addressing the above-mentioned hijab-clad complainant, veered off into a little vocal jag we can only accurately describe as "bizarre." As best we could tell, Al D. appeared to be suggesting that this "Siddiqui" was a cop or some kind of city employee who had done a lot of good for the community, the city, whatever, by translating documents to or from Urdu as well as some other stuff and that the hijab-clad complainant ought to balance and take into account all the good that Siddiqui had done against this one apparently isolated incident, or something exactly like that. We began paying very close attention at that moment, for it appeared that not only had Al Hoang revealed that someone stupid enough to phone-in a false report of a hostage-taking to the police was in the employ of Houston taxpayers but that this person was deserving of some kind of preferential treatment. (When Aloysuis D. is indicted on some criminal charge or another, don't say you weren't warned.) The mayor, seeming to sense that the episode had entered new territory, told the complainant that she needed to take the matter up with so-and-so at the back of the council chambers, apparently because an open council meeting was not the proper venue to discuss such an allegation against a city employee.

At that point, Council member Clarence Bradford, who's been impressing us with his crisp, Joe Friday-approach to council discourse, interjected, "Mayor, I believe this is a different Siddiqui."

"Well," laughed the mayor, looking relieved, "as we know, there are a lot of Siddiquis."

We interpreted this as a factual (there are indeed a lot of Siddiquis) and diplomatic stab at bringing the proceedings back to Earth from Planet Hoang. We, however, have no use for diplomacy in our line of work (truth-telling), so let us unequivocally state what everyone around the council cul-de-sac was thinking at the moment: "My God but AL HOANG IS ONE COLOSSAL DUMBASS."

*We must employ such weasel words because this entire mosque incident was very poorly explained by the complainants, although it sounds as if it'd be a fascinating subject for some credentialed member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (MNIM) to explore at length.

Rick Perry: Unheralded Savant of Texas Politics ...

2010-03-03T23:36:00.005-06:00

Or Lucky Doofus Who Fell Off the Back of a Pick-Up and Landed on a Mattress Lying in the Middle of the Freeway?

Time will tell. It has occurred to us, though, that Perry might be an age-defying phenomenon similar to the Rumble-in-the-Jungle era Ali, employing his version of the rope-a-dope to lay back on the ropes and suck up the gut punches and bide his time until his adversary is exhausted and then step right to it--BAM! Yeah, they saw that 39 percent and thought he was done, spent, washed-up, a goner, but....

On the other hand, we are reminded that Perry first obtained his office by constitutional succession and has held it since by first dispatching the colorless, odorless Tony Sanchez and then the tag-team duo of Chris Bell and Grandma Whazzhername, and that Bill White, if we may extend the boxing metaphor into hazily obscure territory, is no Jürgen Blin.

Like Perry, White did what he needed to do on Tuesday. What he needs to do from here on out is pay close attention to the deeply encoded instructions we will be issuing in this space (the anagram spells “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y”). Our first bit of advice, which as usual we are providing free of charge as a selfless act of civic-mindedness, is to STAY AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE from all other Democratic nominees for statewide office, and never, ever, speak of the “Democratic ticket.” If you should accidently run into one of these people at, say, the airport terminal in Junction,* ACT LIKE YOU DON’T KNOW THEM, in case a weekly newspaper reporter or Republican operative obtains photographic evidence of you in flagrante (in the legal sense) with, say, Barbara Ann Radnofsky. In fact, and we know this will probably be impossible to do, instruct your scheduler to make sure that you’re never any closer than 50 miles to any other Democratic statewide officer-seeker.

Also: Go negative right away. Ali’s off the ropes.

*Did we ever tell ya about the time we were flying ‘round the Lone Star State at nighttime with some humble office-seeker or another and they were trying to land the plane in Junction, but the pilot couldn’t spot the airport and finally he had to raise the sheriff’s department on the horn to get somebody over to the facility to turn on the runway lights? The candidate was going to lose anyway and if we'd died in a crash that night we might not even have made the last paragraph of the obit.

Late-Breaking Pre-Primary Non-News (With Hyphens!)

2010-03-01T17:03:00.024-06:00

Non-news from nowhere, and points in between:

We recently went on at length regarding the re-rematch between state Rep. Al Edwards and challenger Borris Miles and noted that should we shrug our spindly shoulders and participate in the Democratic primary––as a nominal Democrat/committed independent it will depend solely on how we feel upon awakening tomorrow, most likely at 5:30 or thereabouts*––we would probably cast our lot with our new Facebook pal, Rep.-for-Life Edwards. Since that writing, we have moved–––or, more passively, been moved––from the “leaning somewhat” to Rep. Al to the “leaning strongly” to Rep. Al column. This oh-so-subtle shift occurred after we realized that almost everybody who’s anybody is against the Rev. Al (or, more positively, for his opponent, Borris the Third Ward Insurance Magnate). And when we say "everybody" we mean everybody from Mayor Annise Parker to the Houston Chronicle editorial board to what appears to be the entire labor-liberal Democratic Party establishment to a veritable host of Borris-believing lions and lionesses of Judah who've lent their names and faces to the pro-Borris propaganda (it's all phony,* BTW, as some Jewish bard from northern Minnesota once sang) that's been cluttering our mailbox (under the apparent and possibly proven assumption that a goodly number of white Democratic primary voters in District 146 are/will be Jews, although an endorsement by the publisher of the Jewish Herald Voice means bupkis to us, and we doubt it means a while lot to the two Jewish households on our block, but whadda we know). Yeah, we're sticking with Rep.-Rev. Al DESPITE the franked mailing we received from his legislative office last week touting a $5.7 million grant to the city from Rick Perry's Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs to help Houston's homeless "transition" to rental housing and "access services designed to enhance self-sufficiency ..." (In fairness to the Rev.-Rep. Al, he has sent us previous mailings from his legislative office, although these were mostly end-of-the-legislative-session wrap-ups that we found generally informative.)

On Sunday we received a warm and engaging personal call from Anthony Hall, the former city councilman, Metro chairman, city attorney and mayoral assistant, on behalf of his daughter, Ursula Hall, who's pursuing the Democratic nomination for a civil-court judgeship in the party primary. Hall's delivery was so slow and precisely enunciated that for a moment we thought he might be live on our telephone machine, but after we interjected an "Anthony?" and a "Hey, Anthony, are you there?" we deduced that the call was recorded, or else Hall has become extremely hard of hearing. In either case, there's nothing like an endorsement from your father to sway voters (and it probably will in the Democratic primary, given the elder Hall's party credentials). Ursula Hall's legal experience––or lack thereof––was the subject of a pretty decent recent offering from the Chronicle's Teen Columnist, who followed up with an equally interesting piece on the primary endorsements of inexperienced district criminal-court contenders by the lordly Coalition of Harris County Elected Democrats (perhaps motherhood has had a maturing effect on the young columnist, although, possibly because the subjects of her explorations were Democrats, she couldn't fully bring the hammer down to squarely nail it, y'understand). We're not wholly convinced that a criminal court judge needs past experience in the criminal courts any more than we believe that a daily newspaper columnist needs past experience as a daily newspaper columnist, but we suppose it couldn't hurt in either profession.

So do we have any predictions on Tuesday's primaries? Nah––all the polls and predictions seem about right to us, most especially this one from Prof 13, aka the Bob Lanier Professor of Public Policy at the University Houston, who based on the early-voting turnout for the GOP primary has the intra-party gubernatorial race a little tighter than other pollster/forecasters/all-knowing seers, with Mofo Perry at 44 percent, K.B. "Maybe You Like Us Both" Hutchison at 37 and D. "I Transcend All Attempts at Semi-Clever Nickname-ry" Medina at 19. On the D side, he guesstimates it as 65 percent for White, 18 for Shami and "others"--there are five such no-names––at 17 percent. Let us be the first, or possibly the 301st, to say that if somehow White gets below 60 percent and/or Shami cracks 25 percent, White loses. (God forbid he's forced into a runoff.) White needs to run up the score, like the Yates High basketball team. We think either of these possibilities is unlikely, but that's why we hold elections (in addition to picking our elected officials, etc.).

*If it's dark, rainy and gloomy outside we may give into our Burkean impulses and vote in the GOP election.
**And we don't mean just the Borris Miles propaganda.

The Metro Shelter on Beechnut Just East of Hillcroft Was Smashed to Smithereens Late Tuesday or Early Wednesday by an Unknown Assailant (Updated)

2010-02-24T20:04:00.014-06:00

... And now there will be no refuge from the elements for riders of the No. 4 inbound. The Metro guy who appeared to be waiting for the clean-up crew told us the shelter was minding its own business either "late last night or early this morning" when a person or persons unknown plowed their vehicle (or vehicles) into the taxpayer-funded facility. This must have been quite a fearsome impact (there's one of those concrete-lined garbage containers somewhere in there under the former shelter's roof). These scenes were captured early in the a.m. and by late in the afternoon all the detritus had been removed and there was no visible trace of the shelter. (Who says the transit agency's not efficient?) This happened before, about 10 years ago, to the shelter around the corner on the southbound side of Hillcroft, although the results were not as visually arresting. Metro never replaced that shelter.
Update: As of late Thursday afternoon the shelter had been replaced, rebuilt or somehow miraculously restored to its former grandeur. So one-and-a-half cheers for Metro! Now if it could just get the transparency and accountability thing straight.

Blood and Smooches, Spo-dee-o-dee (Updated)

2010-02-23T08:43:00.012-06:00

We enjoy a blood feud as much as the next guy (or gal). We’ve been embroiled in a few our self, some dating back to elementary school. They’re clarifying and cleansing of the soul, especially if you’re capable of nursing a grudge for going on 5 decades. But we really, truly and mostly enjoy a long-running vendetta in which other people are involved and no expenditure of blood, bile or other bodily humors is required on our part. Which is why we’re hoping the Al Edwards-Borris Miles Democratic primary rematch becomes a (possibly WWE-sanctioned) biennial affair, one that we’ll be able to savor every other spring well into our dotage, when we’ll care even less than we do now who our state representative is, or at least until our precinct is mapped out of Texas House District 146.

Channel 11’s Leigh Frillici on Monday brought us an update on the latest Al-vs.-Borris set-to, which Democratic voters will settle in their party’s March 3 party primary (WARNING: FRILLICI’S REPORT INCLUDES GRATUITOUS "EXPERT" COMMENTARY FROM RICE UNIVERSITY'S BOB “ROBERT” STEIN). Apparently there’s not been a whole lot of note and newsworthiness going on in the race, at least since Miles took a drug test live on KCOH radio a couple of weeks back. Frillici’s report included the standard file footage of a (strangely, all white) cheerleading squad throwing down some semi-suggestive moves, to illustrate the immortal “booty bill” that Edwards sponsored a few legislative sessions back, the piece of attempted law-making that landed him his one and only appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and will surely follow him to his grave. (While we wholeheartedly agree with critics that this was not a “problem” deserving of government action, at the time it occurred to us that much of the booty-bill derision aimed at Rep. Al emanated from white sophisticates––or would-be sophisticates––who don’t have a clue––not even an iota of a shred of a clue––about what actually transpires at the public schools where the great majority of Edwards’ child-bearing constituents send their kids. Al, of course, has spent so much of his adult life at the public trough that he just reflexively looks for a government "solution" to any ol' "problem" that comes down the pike.)

The Channel 11 report also included the obligatory balancing mention of criminal charges lodged against then-Rep. Miles after he was alleged to have “kissed a married woman and brandished a gun at a Christmas party,” as Frillici put it. Borris the Third Ward Insurance Man was acquitted of those charges, which he apparently took as a green light to pursue the seat he won in 2006 against Edwards and then almost immediately turned around and lost to Edwards two years ago (because of the gun-brandishing, married lady-smooching “scandal” he says was a result of a conspiracy among Edwards and his “Republican friends”). It also included this startling new information: Despite his run-in with the law, Miles ain’t gonna stop kissing the ladies! It is, according to what he told Frillici, “part of his upbringing as gentleman.” He even planted one on the comely reporter when she arrived to interview District 146's Gangsta of Love.

“How did I greet you?” Miles asked Frillici, in a manner we construed as rhetorical. “I gave you a kiss on the cheek and a hug, did I not? I have not changed. I’m gonna continue to do that.” (In the interest of inclusion and diversity, would he not greet, say, Channel 11’s Jeremy Desel in the same manner? Just askin’.) For some reason, Frillicci did not recap the earlier episode when Borris made his bones as a bona fide deep-red Texan by employing a pistol to drill an alleged burglar who was stealing stuff from the insurance man’s then-under construction Third Ward mansion, an act whose commission we personally had no problem with at all.

Thus far neither campaign has sent us a direct-mail piece anywhere near as sublime as the one Edwards mailed out in 2008, which featured pictures of .38-caliber handgun, spent cartridges and a puddle of what appeared to be blood (or ketchup) spilled from an overturned bottle of wine––all, apparently, elements of some Platonically ideal bad-hangover night with Borris Miles. Al, however, has been calling and writing us every other day, leaving messages on our machine that say something to the effect of, “Let’s not go through the shame and embarrassment again,” meaning (and we’re taking a wild guess here) the shame and embarrassment of being represented in the Texas House by Borris Miles. (This argument does not sway us in the least, most likely because we’re not the sort of citizen who’d suffer shame or embarrassment because of who represents us in the Texas House, unless it was, you know, Hitler.)

Although the district is predominantly African-American, it also includes a sizable white and heavily-voting populace on its west side, where it takes in a sliver of Meyerland and a good chunk of Westbury, home to many––but not all!––of Houston’s Jewish voters. And Representative-for-Life Al is leaving no demographic stone unturned, as evidenced by the mailing we got that featured a picture of him with a white guy who was identified as--regrettably, we tossed the flier in the recycling sack and can’t be sure of our accuracy--either the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. or maybe just an Israeli consul (possibly consul to Meyerland!). According to the caption--and this we recall with precision---Al and the diplomat were “discussing the similarities between Texas and Israel.” (Let’s see, both have some Jews and Arabs, Israel more than Texas, and both have protective barriers or parts of protective barriers on their borders, of varying effectiveness ... )

It probably goes without mentioning (WARNING: HERE COMES THE “SERIOUS,” SERMONIZING PART OF TODAY’S ENTRY), that there is no Republican running in District 146 and that the winner of the two-way Democratic primary will be the holder of the seat come January 2011, and it further goes without saying that there’s no way in hell a Republican could ever win the seat, even if Borris and Al were to engage in a shoot-out on South Post Oak at high noon, because the district--like almost all legislative jurisdictions in these United States, state or federal––has been drawn to ensure maintenance of “communities of interest” and one-party dominance and thus no actual competitive, substantive debate and ... you get what you pay for. (Personally, if we do vote in the Democratic primary we’ll probably go with Rep.-for-Life Al, because he occasionally shows a streak of independence and is safe and comforting––like a big side of mashed potatoes ’n’ gravy.)

UPDATE: Just today we received a mailing touting a veritable all-star line-up of Caucasians who "believe in Borris Miles," including Houston's new alcaldesa, Annise Parker (who appears to be the only Gentile of the four pictured Borris-believers––is it possible, we idly wonder, to take the pandering thing too far?). Now we like the mayor and know she's a proud Democrat, etc., but when it comes partisan politics we prefer the arms-length approach of Bill White (and every other mayor we can think of, come to think of it), unless there is some pressing municipal need to get involved, and whether Borris Miles or Al Edwards represents District 146 just doesn't rise to that standard. Besides, we'd think the mayor would want to have as many friends as possible in the Legislature, or at least no dire enemies ... in case, y'know, Al Edwards is re-elected.

Wait, Wait ... Please Tell Us!

2010-02-18T20:35:00.007-06:00

The Autobiography of an Execution, the new book by University of Houston law professor David Dow, received a light going-over by Dahlia Lithwick in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. It was an odd review. Lithwick, who reports on the Supreme Court and legal issues for Slate, appears to share Dow’s anti-death penalty views. And she seems to like Dow himself, at least at a critical remove, especially what she deems to be his regular-guyness. Not only, reports Lithwick (a graduate of Yale and Stanford Law), is Dow “a far cry from a shouting lunatic,” he’s also

... the farthest thing from a bleeding-heart abolitionist. He has a pickup truck, a taste for bourbon and a dog.

He’s got a dog? Damn, he’s a regular redneck!

And:

You’ll find Dow at least three stops past the Clint Eastwood mile marker on the Flinty Guy Highway. He is so bare-bones he won’t even use quotation marks.

Lithwick also seems to like Dow’s book, or the idea of Dow’s book, but there’s something about it that left her obviously uneasy, a matter to which she devoted the lower one-third of her review. Other reviews also have mentioned this rather large problem, although we’ve seen none that addressed it with anything near Lithwick’s intellectual honesty, so we’ll quote her at length here, despite the lapse in taste and tone at the conclusion of the passage:

Nobody but Dow could have told Dow’s story. The problem is, he cannot fully tell it either. As he explains in an author’s note at the start of the book, the demands of attorney-client confidentiality have forced him to use pseudonyms, attribute procedural details of certain cases to other cases, and alter the timing of some events, though he insists that the “basic chronology” is correct — and that he never changed the facts of the crimes. His publisher appends a letter explaining why this was done and a memorandum from an ethics professor explaining the legal basis for this choice. Whatever the legal issues, the result is a book that is less an autobiography of an execution than a powerful collage of the life of a death penalty lawyer.

In describing the fraught relationship between law and truth, Dow laments the fact that when it comes to the law, “the facts matter, but the story matters more.” But having created a brilliant, heart-rending book that can’t be properly fact-checked, Dow almost seems to have joined the ranks of people who will privilege emotion over detail, and narrative over precision.

For those who already oppose the death penalty, Dow’s book provides searing confirmation of what they already know to be true: the capital system is biased, reckless and inhuman. But had a prosecutor written a book arguing that the machinery of death is fantastic, just trust him, Dow himself would weep for strict adherence to facts, however ungainly. We’ve seen too many books lately suggesting that facts and sourcing matter little. It isn’t a trend to which lawyers should contribute.

Perhaps Dow just doesn’t care. He describes the impotence of witnessing the last breath of an innocent client: “I stood there. I was idle. I was a man making phone calls, a wordsmith, a debater, an analyst.” His book — not quite fact but not quite fiction — may be another lifeline back from a kind of helplessness that is its own death chamber.*

Hmm. Not quite fact but not quite fiction. "Faction," perhaps? This refusal to actually name names, as they used to say in the newspaper business, strikes us as a very peculiar conceit coming from a vigorous anti-death penalty advocate, even one who eschews quotation marks, since one of the objections raised to executions and by the defense bar in general is the elusiveness of witnesses’ memory and the (yes, proven) sometimes unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Not to mention the roundhouse accusation that politically pressed prosecutors ignore inconvenient facts and construct false narratives to assign guilt to a seemingly randomly selected capital defendants. (We’re not saying that’s outside the realm of possibility.)

You would presume that Dow has written his book to influence, or at least be considered in, the never-receding debate over capital punishment, despite the portion––and Lithwick suggests it’s a too-sizable one––the author devotes to chronicling T-ball with his 6-year-old son and recording how much bourbon and steak and how many cigars he's consumed. (We haven’t read the book, so we’re relying on Lithwick here.) But if there’s no possibility of fact-checking by an opponent, or even a reviewer, or any third party, what’s the point in the first place, other than the pursuit of self-glorification on the Flinty Guy Highway?

So readers must take The Autobiography of an Execution on faith. They should be cautioned, however, that at least a few of Dow’s “facts,” when tested in an adversarial proceeding by a much more seasoned and equally vigorous advocate, did not fully hold up.

*Ugh.

Mardi Gras 1976

2010-02-15T15:55:00.027-06:00

Recently we've gone on a Facebook bender, belatedly (we're a late adopter, adapter, whatever), and primarily to reconnect with people we haven't seen, or not so much, in 20, 30, even 35 (!) years (as opposed to people we haven't seen in 5, 10 years––we always figure we'll run across them at Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods, or a Metro stop). We're naturally wary of anything as mind-habituating as Facebook, and very shortly we may be seeking out a 12-step program to cure us of this new enthusiasm, our latest in a long line of attention-deflecting addictions. The Facebooking, as we were warned it would, sent us stumbling down Memory Lane and into our "archives," a sturdy hatbox we've lugged with us for 30+ years and into which we've stuffed old photos, letters, unserved arrest warrants and such, and where we came upon the photo accompanying these words.

It shows a street scene during Mardi Gras, 1976, captured in the Hub City by our pal R-b, an avocational photographer who grew his own at home---that is, shot and "developed" his photos with chemicals and trays an so forth in makeshift closet-darkrooms. (How ... old-fashioned.) About 10 years ago we were visiting R-b at his southwest Houston home and remarked on how much we dug the photo, and he asked---or, to be accurate, demanded––that we take it off his hands and never return it. We said, "Sure,"* because this picture speaks to us on many different levels and draws forth a wealth of associations--most all of them blue-sky happy, in their way.

We're not 100-percent positive of the photo's vintage, but the movie advertised on the marquee was released in 1976, according to various authoritative Internet sources (and starred Elliot Gould and Diane Keaton––we never saw it and don't even wanna know what it's about). It's obviously from some time in the '70s, as you can tell from the gent in the foreground with the shades and form-fitting denim and the extremely boss hat (all of which he may have purchased down the street at an establishment called Right On Fashions, which last we looked was still extant, with a somewhat updated and hip-hop-ized selection of couture). It was for-sure taken at Mardi Gras––R-b confirmed this for us––and froze a typical instance of street-dragging on Shrove Tuesday, possibly between parades (there was the big "white" one in the a.m. and a "black" one at 1 p.m.). The street is Jefferson and the theater likewise was the Jefferson. (For recently arrived immigrants or students who failed their 8th grade U.S. history TAKS exam, this "Jefferson" was un presidente de Los Estados Unidos who swung the steal of the century [19th] when he "purchased" a broad swath of the North American continent, then called "Louisiana," at a fire-sale price from this dude Napoleon, who was kinda like the mack-daddy or whatever you call it these days of this country called France, which is in Europe, thus doubling the size of los Estados Unidos and priming future generations of Yankee Traders to [thank God] steal most of the rest of the continent from Mexico.)

The movie title, of course, speaks to us across the years of the fleetingness, the ephemerality, of time and desire. The theater is long-gone, razed at least two decades back. It was where, we believe, our father took us to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--why, we have no idea, as it was the only time we remember him taking us to a picture show, although he took us lots of other places. Some years later, right out front there, we had a non-Mardi Gras Epiphany or revelation of sorts, after our mother had dropped us and some other goofballs off to catch a Saturday afternoon matinee of an Elvis movie (which one we can't recall––they were pretty much all the same after Kid Creole, and all good). While standing in line we noticed something we had never noticed before, although it may have been there all along, right in front of us, and that was the presence of a second line of youngsters at a smallish ticket window off to the side. The kids in the other line, we noticed, were all directed by the manager up the side stairs to the balcony. We took our seat, unwisely, on the floor just in front of the balcony's edge, and sometime during the movie a shower of popcorn and ice rained down on first-floor customers, causing considerable commotion as the ushers hoofed it upstairs to police the antisocial behavior. Although at the time we did not enjoy that uncomfortable, sticky sensation, if we ever meet a black man or woman our age who was in the balcony that day to watch Elvis we'll ask them if they threw ice or popcorn on us, and if he or she says "No" we'll ask "Why not?"

But mostly this picture makes us think of Mardi Gras, and all the great fun we had, from the time we were a little kid until late adolescence and early adulthood, running wild and free and mostly unsupervised with boon companions through the downtown streets of the Hub City. How we discovered those hidden spots--like the bleak, urine-stained pedestrian passageway that ran alongside the underpass beneath the train tracks, and still may--and how we found you could traverse a good portion of the downtown by going roof-to-roof atop the adjacent storefronts. How blue the sky looked, and how there seemed to be no boundary between that blue sky and our mind, on the Mardi Gras Day when we experienced a bit of heightened consciousness and stood staring upward, transfixed, right there on Jefferson Street. How at 11 or 12 we threw up after gorging our self on junk at the street carnival that was always staked at the foot of Jefferson, and how we subsequently spent what seemed like two long, queasy hours searching for a usable pay phone so we could could call our parents to come and get us. How, going back to when we were 5 or 6, before we were running wild and free, we were forced to costume-up in a "Confederate general's" uniform--with epaulets!--that our Granny, bless her, had lovingly sewn for us. And much later on, how we'd unhesitatingly hook up with––in the dated sense of the term, meaning hang out with--people we didn't know and would never see again after that Tuesday.

We learned some other stuff at Mardi Gras, too, like what Hemingway (or we think it was Hemingway) meant when he said that one of the educational advantages of growing up in a small town is that you come to realize why the man with the big cigar has the big cigar. In our case, it was realizing why the man on the float in the crown, robe and fake beard was on the float, while we were down on the street with the jostling throngs waving our hands and begging him to toss us some plastic junque.

And it was, truly, all good.

We don't know anybody in the picture, but we know everybody ... the little fellow with his dad, walking purposefully off to the right ... the pig-tailed girl in the back, turning to look down at something on the street, maybe something she stepped on, or in ... the little girl in the foreground, gazing up pleadingly at her father, with the look of distress, maybe ... her father in the boss hat, waking tall and proud with his shoulders back and the pretty-good-lookin' woman with the popcorn at his side ... Everybody happy, or sad, or happy-sad ... stunned, expectant, searching, hungry ... dragging the street ... throw me something, mister ... in the moment we call "now" that's always passing.

*Dialogue guaranteed verbatim.

Two Kinds of Smart

2010-02-14T12:40:00.005-06:00

We were kibitzing just yesterday with a couple of the Korean kids with whom we work on the weekends, when we pretend to instruct them in the finer points of some of the liberal arts (a Chinese guy handles the math). They are first cousins, a girl and a boy, in 8th and 9th grade respectively, and both either were born n the U.S. or came here while very young. Thus they are thoroughly assimilated--the male, a husky kid with an athlete’s swagger, runs track and plays football, or did; the girl, who possesses a droll and perhaps even overdeloped sense of humor for an 8th grader, is not only good at math but draws extremely well and speaks much like our own 10th grader, with the prevailing adolescent female vocal tendency to occasionally turn a declarative sentence into an interrogatory. They also, as we probably shouldn’t add, are both very “good with people,” which we’ve noticed is not a naturally occurring trait among many Koreans in the United States. (We could be misimpressed, though.)

Our conversation turned to a third kid who’s usually with them , another Korean who’s only been in the country for a couple years and who we mistakenly thought was a third first-cousin but apparently is only a good friend. They explained he was absent because of a proir commitment having something to do with “science,” perhaps the science fair, although this engagement sounded a little more elvated than the district-wide UIL competition (maybe not, though).

“He’s really, really smart” said the girl, as her cousin nodded along.

“Yeah, but you guys are real smart, too,” said we, not only as conversational space-filler but because it’s true.

“Yeah,” sighed the girl, “but we’re, like, um ... American smart”--and here she raised her hand to eye level, giving the internationally recognized signal for about this high--”and he’s like, Korean smart”--and here she raised her hand clean above her head.

“You mean,“ said we, raising our own hand very high above our noggin, “like Korea Korean smart?"

“Yeah!” said they.

Recommended further reading and listening on this topic.

Smucker (Rhymes with Pucker) for Guv

2010-02-12T21:18:00.011-06:00

Ordinarily we assign no value whatsoever to pronouncements by "political consultants," be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Rosicrucian. We've found, based on extensive past experience, that any utterance issued for public consumption by a hired-gun political type has only the most tenuous relation to the truth, or even thruthiness. However, the tart observations regarding hometown Dem gubernatorial contender Bill White that gut-punching, 'nad-slapping GOP consultant Allen Blakemore provided the Houston Chronicle's Joe Holley (or so Holley reported––we were not a party to the alleged conversation) certainly had the tang of truth, or truthiness, delivered, as they were, in the spirit of fun and bitter partisanship:

In addition to questioning White's business acumen, Blakemore wondered whether his mayoral persona — a wonkish guy with ears and hair made for radio — will effectively translate to a race for governor. “His schtick became, ‘I absolutely, positively couldn't be a politician and speak as poorly and to present as poorly as I do.' It's the old, ‘with a name like Smucker's, it's got to be good' routine.”

A mayor, Blakemore contends, can get away with portraying himself as a colorless, competent technocrat. It's harder, he says, for a statewide candidate in Texas, where the relatively weak office of governor is about symbol as much as substance.

This is pretty much in accord with our own trenchant insta-analysis, delivered in the spirit of fun, hard science and non-partisanship following the one and only televised debate between White and some foreign-sounding guy who definitely lacked Rick Perry's easy "Adios, mofo" insouciance. This synchronicity is most likely a case of weak minds thinking alike, or recognizing the painfully obvious.

Holley's story also touched, glancingly, on a matter we've long suspected would be raised when (not if) White sought statewide office, one that we don't remember getting a whole lot of traction when he first ran for mayor, although we were temporarily retired from the punditry and blogging game at the time ("blogunditry") and not paying full attention:

White's Republican opponent also will try to portray him as a less-than-successful businessman in years past. It's a tack his Democratic primary opponent, Houston hair-products magnate Farouk Shami, has attempted, charging that White's initial business venture, Frontera Resources, exploited contacts he made in the Energy Department to seek oil and gas opportunities in the former Soviet Union. His Republican opponent likely will make much of the fact that Frontera lost its assets in Azerbaijan after defaulting on a loan and that the company reported $23.8 million in losses in its two most recent quarters.

We did notice that White, whose primary pre-mayoral vocation was that of "trial lawyer," was quite insistent during this week's debate when plumping his business credentials, suggesting that he and his have been practicing a detailed line of rebuttal to that expected attack.

Despite these potential vulnerabilities, White remains a viable, highly marketable alternative to Mofo Perry, not having (at least thus far) gone out of his way to alienate the state's largest bloc of voters or questioned whether the U.S. government had a hand in 9/11.

So he's got that going for him.

A Brief, Polite Throat-Clearing (Ahem) on the Subject of the Recently Departed Charlie Wilson

2010-02-11T22:48:00.008-06:00

We liked Charlie Wilson as much as the next Texan, probably for most of the same reasons. It’s unlikely that a rough-hewn sort such as Wilson, who would have had difficulty finding himself a sponsor for a deaconship in the First Baptist Church, could get elected to high public office in Texas these days, although Wilson, once in, was the sort of Democrat who could have been re-elected in perpetuity, health permitting. Wilson did a lot for veterans but the greatest thing he did was helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve (a project, of course, that required, and requires, many other hands). There was no Tom Hanks movie on that effort, nor will there be.

There is, however, one item on Wilson’s CV that gives us pause, and that is the matter for which he will be best-remembered, thanks to the Hanks movie and the George Crile book on which it was based. For some reason, a congressman’s engineering of a covert CIA-backed war with taxpayer dollars and without public sanction is considered a grand, praiseworthy endeavor, blindly celebrated, or so it would seem, in most of the obituaries we saw in the Texas media. (Here’s an otherwise very good and highly literate one from Channel 13’s Ted Oberg, in which the “charm” of Houston socialite Joanne Herring and Wilson’s ability “to secretly appropriate $500 million in U.S. tax dollars” are credited with having helped the Afghan rebels send the Soviets packing. The New York Times story on Wilson’s passing set the figure for U.S. support at “$750 million a year” throughout the 1980s.) This is the sort of notion that offends the proud isolationist in us and makes the little William Jennings Bryan inside (you’ve got one, too, although maybe you haven’t gotten in touch with him) want to roll up his sleeves, take to a lectern and began declaiming in an overwrought, Frederic March-like lather. True, this particular intervention did not require the expenditure of American blood, only tax dollars, and we suppose upending the Soviets to inadvertently pave the way for the Taliban might have seemed like the right thing to do, at least for a while, even though things didn’t work out so well for us taxpayers on down the road.

We did not read the well-regarded book on which the movie was based, but the film, if we remember correctly, did take note of the unintended consequences of Charlie Wilson’s War, which we won’t bother to enumerate here, aside from mention of ~~Bush’s~~ Obama’s continuing war in Afghanistan. One local station, Channel 11, also referenced the aftermath of that secret war, even hauling out Herring––who appears to have supplied her own creamy-dreamy backdrop for her interviews with both 11 and 13––to provide this shrugging acknowledgement of the vagaries of history: “You can’t predict future wars.”

As William Jennings Bryan could have told her.*

*If he hadn’t died four years before her birth (!?!).

Shami + White = Sleepy Time (With Mexican Sunshine!)

2010-02-09T16:30:00.003-06:00

The lone televised Bill White-Farouk Shami debate before the Democratic gubernatorial primary*––an event watched by perhaps dozens of voters across Texas––was a major snooze-inducing disappointment, primarily because Shami failed to say anything really off-the-wall or lay down some of the gratuitous nastiness he'd been laying down when out of White's earshot. Of course, we're not 100-percent positive Shami didn't say anything truly outrageous, because, frankly, we had a difficult time understanding a lot of what the native of the West Bank (not of the Brazos) said.** In fact, we were hoping that White, after Shami had reeled off a long, winding, half-sensical ask-your-opponent-a-question query,*** which had something to do with "butadiene" and "benzene" (or, maybe, "Benzedrine"), was going to pause for a beat and reply, "Would you repeat the question?" Now that would have been nasty!

But that was not to be, because White was there not so much to debate Shami as to tune-up for his expected main bout with Rick Perry. Shami, however, was not a worthy sparring partner. White even seized on the relative sedateness of the hour-long (seemed like two,) encounter when he asked voters to note that he and the well-coiffed hair-care products manufacturer had "treated each other with respect"--not like those impolite Republicans who were "shouting" over one another and throwing gang signs, etc., during their debates.

We did not keep a scorecard, because this wasn't really a sporting encounter worthy of scoring, but we must offer the following observations, annotated by the cold light of morning:

1. White seemed up-tight and bit constricted in the early going, wearing a strained grin that he couldn't seem to wipe off until one or two questions in. He settled down later, but somehow he needs to project his sittin'-'round-the-council horseshoe persona. Otherwise, he just won't show when he debates Sr. Perry, the unacknowledged promotional genius of Texas politics.

2. Shami needs to learn how to pronounce "moratorium," especially since he's calling for one on executions. White wisely rejected that notion out-of-hand, knowing full well that no one's getting elected governor of Texas by promoting a stay on the death house action. The ex-mayor, who we suppose did not have to add that he's against executing the innocent, also set forth a rather stout defense of the current criminal justice system, which he described as "for the most part" just (or something close to that--our notes are squinchy and hard to read). We'd bet this did not sit well with the editor of the Houston Chronicle or his wife or their new favorite author, but it's unlikely to keep White from winning the newspaper's endorsement. It's also the correct position.

3. White also came on like a tough guy on potential voting abuse, declaring that any "non-citizen" caught voting should be "investigated," "indicted" and then "serve time" (Ouch!) ... but, of course, he couldn't bring himself to stray from the party line and endorse the display of a photo I.D. as a requirement for voting. This is why Democrats can't win a statewide election, in case you were wondering.

4. The one indisputable Shami-esque moment came when the hair-care magnate, in answering some question on border control, said––and we believe he was grinning wildly when he did––"Without Mexicans it would be like a day without sunshine." (By which he meant, if we can interpret: "A day without Mexicans--that is, people from Mexico, as opposed to Mexican Americans--is like a day without cheap, easily exploitable labor.") At first we weren't sure we had heard him correctly and scribbled in our notes, "w/o Mex.s=day w/o s-shine????", but according to subsequent news reports our ears had not betrayed us.

5. White will have a difficult go of it facing-off against Perry, who during the Republican debates was affecting a very pronounced Paul Newman-as-Hud swagger and smile. (Unfortunately, K. B. Hutchison is no Patricia Neal, either in the brains or the smouldering, self-possessed sexuality department, so their verbal confrontations lacked the snap of the movie's.). White, meanwhile, seemed to be channeling Arnold Stang, with a Texas accent, during the first few minutes of Monday night's debate.

So you got Hud in a top-down Caddy vs. some smilin' bald guy from Houston. How do you think the odds stand right now?

*The field also includes five other candidates who, as the debate moderator noted, "did not meet the criteria" to participate in the debate, meaning "they aren't rich like Shami and White."

**Unlike some minor local media celebs, we would never mock or belittle someone for the way they talked, because our parents raised us better, but we do believe that communication is one of the key duties of a governor and therefore he or she should have the ability to make himself or herself easily understood.

***Allowing candidates to "question" their opponents during televised debates is a horrible idea that needs to be abandoned immediately, as these question-posings are just another occasion for the candidates to deliver some of their canned ham.

The Good Life: It’s Still Bad, In Case You Were Wondering (Updated)

2010-02-07T07:20:00.011-06:00

Readers who’ve kept up with their daily dosage of ginko biloba will recall that it was only last Monday when we wrote, in an uncharacteristically derisive tone, of the Houston Chronicle’s new The Good Life section and how that misguided effort at content delivery, or whatever it’s called, had contributed to the scenic blight in our neighborhood. We intended to say no more on that subject, ever, at least until the “Looking Back” retrospective we’re planning to commemorate our 10,000th posting, but subsequent to that trenchant examination of The Good Life we were contacted by someone claiming to be a Ms. Kyrie O’Connor, who in an initial emailing identified herself as “deputy managing editor/features” of the Chronicle. (Having never had the pleasure of meeting her in person, we can’t of course say for sure that the human with whom we communicated was indeed Ms. O’Connor, so we must hedge a bit; if it were some prankster-imposter we’d like to apologize to the real Ms. O’Connor here and now.) Ms. O’Connor, or the Ms. O’Connor impersonator, claimed that our handiwork of Feb. 1 was rife with what she called “wrong facts,” a not-too-clever formulation she attributed to an anonymous co-worker. In a follow-up phone conversation of seemingly unending duration she scolded us, quite mercilessly, for failing to open the sandwich-baggy-like wrapping of which we wrote and inspect a copy, or copies, of The Good Life that were pitched on the lawns of non-Chronicle-subscribing residents of our neighborhood, which she described as a whole ’nother product, or sort of a whole ’nother product, or in some way kinda-sorta different, a little bit, than the one that was home-delivered that Sunday to paying subscribers such as yours truly (and possibly non-paying ones). We explained––or tried to explain, as we found it difficult to squeeze in more than a desultory defense here and there during the wide-ranging conversation––that we are not a thief, at least not anymore, and that making an unauthorized entrance into a sandwich bag to retrieve a Good Life from a neighbor’s yard might constitute theft under Texas law. We did not add, for we did not feel the need to, that in our neighborhood many residents possess not only BAD DOGS but loaded firearms that more than a few probably leave lying around the living room with the safeties off. (In fact, our next-door neighbor, who is recently returned from a spell in the V.A. Hospital after suffering a serious stroke, within the past year or so failed to follow the rules of handgun safety when he drunkenly waggled what he described as a “loaded” .357 magnum in our presence, though not directly at us, while supine on his bed near the open window where he passed most of his hours, pre-stroke. It was just 2 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and at the time we had not even thought of stealing his The Good Life, nor, most likely, had the Chronicle’s master marketeers brainstormed it into existence.)

Anyway, as Ms. O’Connor surely understood from her close reading of our posting, we were not moved to throw down on The Good Life until we noticed so many copies still lying on our neighbors’ lawns late Monday afternoon, which by that time had been turned to gelatinous wads of newsprint mush by the heavy rains, thus rendering them extremely difficult to read (although we fully understanding that “reading” The Good Life is not the point of The Good Life). After many minutes of pleasant exchanges with Mr. O’Connor––we hate to be so formal, but for some unexplained reason Ms. O’Connor refused our request that she tell us how to say her first name, and we’d feel uncomfortable referring to her in print by a name that we might mispronounce aloud––we established, solely on what we believe to be Ms. O’Connor’s good word, that a story we may have suggested was in the yard-pitched non-subscriber copies of The Good Life, a story having something to do with vacationing in Aspen (which we cited, among others, to suggest that the newspaper’s marketeers were overshooting the demo in our zip code), appeared only in copies of The Good Life that were tucked into subscribers’ home-delivered Chronicles. (Are you hanging with us here?) After more pleasant repartee with the deputy managing editor/features, we further established––again, based on Ms. O’Connor’s good word, as we still have not screwed up the courage to steal a sodden week-old copy of The Good Life, although many are still available hereabouts––that the other two stories we cited, having to do (we think) with Creole cookin’ and Parisian couture––were indeed in both (that is, presumably, all) versions of The Good Life, subscriber and non-subscriber.

Also on Mr. O’Connor’s short bill of non-particulars was the allegation that we somehow had mischaracterized the commercial imperative behind The Good Life by suggesting that this episode of legalized littering apparently was meant to spur subscription sales.* In retrospect we see how stupid this conjecture of ours was, because obviously the last thing a daily newspaper needs these days is more paying subscribers. (What The Good Life is aiming to do, you see––and once again we rely solely on Ms. O’Connor’s expert testimony.––is simply to serve as a much-needed vehicle for the delivery of ad content to non-subscribers. Pure genius, no?) Additionally, Ms. O’Connor seemed disturbed, or pretended to seem disturbed, by our jesting suggestion that The Good Life had been hand-delivered by Chronicle publisher Smilin’ Jack Sweeney, although after some moments of intense palavering we believe we were able to wring from her the admission that she well-knew we were only playin’.

Ms. O’Connor had a whole lot else to say, most of which we did not commit to memory because it did not seem at all relevant to the matters at hand, although we do recall her bald and somewhat unscientific assertion that, and we quote, “Your blog is crap.” We took exception to the declaration but did not argue the point at length, since it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility. (Mrs. O’Connor at one point also mocked, or tried to mock, our vocal mannerisms, which we sort of let pass because we were multitasking at the moment; we did, however, verify the attempted mimicry by asking whether she was “mocking” us, to which she replied: “Yes, I’m mocking you.”)

The deputy managing editor/features seemed overly het-up about the entire matter, which had the effect, perhaps the intended effect, of making us equally het-up and forcing us to retreat from our backyard to the interior of our domicile so as not to disturb our neighbors with the increased volume (we’re thoughtful that way). Oh yeah, we almost forgot: To illustrate the egalitarian impulse behind the standalone yard-pitched version of The Good Life, Ms. O’Connor informed us, possibly with a straight face, that a big story in the upcoming edition had something to do with a “$7.99 ring you can buy at Target.” To our joshing query as to whether Target had “paid” for the story Ms. O’Connor seemed to take serious umbrage, and later, in reeling off a long list of our various sins of commission and omission, she claimed that we had accused her, personally, of taking a “bribe” from Target. (After sobering up, however, it seems clearer to us that the pimping of a purchase, no matter how small, from a major advertiser is––and we’re being polite here––a tad unsavory and possibly in contravention of the ethical standards of Sigma Delta Chi, if not the Geneva Convention.)

Alas, the conversation, after not advancing especially far, reached an impasse, with Ms. O’Connor accusing us of a (her word) “Birther”-like solipsism (our word) for our steadfast refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing or malfeasance. Mrs. O’Connor, whose own solipsism rivals that of our sitting governor––and we hope she understands what we mean here, and it’s not altogether a bad thing––remained similarly unyielding in her professed belief that The Good Life is NOT mere crap and that a story on a “$7.99 ring you can buy from Target” rises to the level of “journalism,” broadly defined.

We do, though, occasionally acknowledge the validity of others’ realities, in addition to being an open-minded and big-hearted sort, so very early this morning we gave The Good Life another shot, reading (sort of but not really) not only the one in our home-delivered edition but discreetly “borrowing” one from a slumbering neighbor’s yard under cover of darkness (which we’re returning shortly, FYI). Here’s what we found:

Our 8-page Good Life: Two travel stories on Big Sur and snuba-ing in Honduras not in our neighbors’ dowdy downscale edition, as well as a tout for some beer from Southern Star Brewing Co. of Conroe (at least it’s local, but, hey, did they pay for that?) and some personal-fitness shinola.

Our purloined 6-page Good Life: All, or most all, of the rest of the schizz in the subscriber-only version, plus a Parade magazine, several ad inserts (coupons!) and––check it out––a very large advertisement for Carter's Country, where one of those Glock Model 27s can still be had for only $559.97 (maybe the Chronicle's better at the demographic fine-tuning than we thought). Cover "story" is “Hello Sailor!”, which, contrary to the headline suggestion, is not about port-side prostitution but enjoins readers to “Get nautical this spring with stripes that will take you to the yacht club” (for your job clearing tables, we guess). This appears to be the story involving the $7.99 ring from Target of which Ms. O’Connor pridefully spoke.

Sad to say, but we must conclude, oh-so-predictably, that The Good Life, in however many permutations it may be available in our expanding universe, is still crap. Yet we hope this fact-opinion, empirically verifiable though it may be, will not present an obstacle to our remaining a fast and loyal Facebook buddy of Ms. O’Conner, and she of us, until this good life draws to its inevitable close.

As for The Good Life, the newspaper section: We predict its end will be coming within the month, two at the outside. But we could be wrong!

*After posting this entry, which surely will be a finalist in the Pulitzer competition for Superior Blogurbatin', we were returning the contents of The Good Life sandwich bag for re-delivery when we noticed that it included a flier offering "complete Sunday Chronicle delivered for $1.00 a week!" Ms. O'Connor stands corrected.

Stein Watch: The Professor and the Wedge Not-Wedge

2010-02-05T17:57:00.009-06:00

We know--we've been falling down on the Bob Stein Watch job. But it would be a 'round-the-clock task keeping up with the public utterances of Rice University's Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science. Fortunately, Stein Watch is a collective effort, and one of our correspondents has called our attention to some Stein-ian verbiage that graced a story on NewsRadio 740 KTRH regarding the "first gubernatorial ad" by our own ex-alcalde, Bill White. How to explain the ad's "focus on education"? Call 1-800-YOU-NEEDA-QUOTE and ask for "Bob," or "Robert," when the occasion demands [the following is lifted verbatim from the station's Web site, without the necessary corrections, which ordinarily we might be moved to make but which we're just not in the mood to fool with at present]:

“You’ve got lots of suburban school districts which are Republican based that are suffering under the new tax reforms and tax cuts—Cy-Fair, Goose Creek, Klein—that are not able to meet their payrolls—that are not able to meet their increasing demand” said Rice University Political Scientist Bob Stein, adding such a focus covers much of the political spectrum.

“It’s a kind of wedge issue that isn’t a wedge. It’s actually a bridge between two important political constituencies—suburban Republican voters who have young children in public schools—and growing urban areas—particularly in the Valley, San Antonio, El Paso, where there are growing Hispanic populations” Stein said.

In the end, Stein said the strategy is pretty easy to understand.

“What you’re beginning to see is Bill White try to fashion a campaign strategy that anticipates that Rick Perry will be the (Republican) nominee—the Kay Bailey Hutchison will not be the nominee” Stein said, seeing a push for Republican voters who may be looking for more Progressive leadership.

Our correspondent, a droll sort, even went the extra mile to help us polish off this installment of Stein Watch:

You need a quote? Here's one: "Didn't his wife work for White?"

Second Thoughts, Re: Memorializing Lightnin' Hopkins

2010-02-04T23:08:00.011-06:00

After our previous posting it occurred to us that the large and probably insurmountable obstacle to Sam Hopkins' attainment of big-time post-mortem memorializing here in Houston is that he just died too early. If Hopkins, who exited from this vale in 1982 at 70 or thereabouts, had somehow defied the actuarial odds for a hard-living black man of rural background and continued chooglin' up into at least the early 1990s, we suspect he'd be rating more than a small historical marker in Third Ward.

Just a few more years of drawing breath and he'd certainly have a cut an album of duets, or two, with Willie Nelson. He might have won a Grammy or three for Best Traditional Blues Album, an award that was inaugurated the year after his death. Maybe there would have been a brief sit-down set at the Rodeo. Posthumously, there'd be a couple of tribute albums, including the one with that ballsy, bombastic version of Let Me Play With Your Poodle by Rufus Wainright. (It might work.) If somehow he'd lived past the turn of the century, a marvel of medical science, we all would have gotten a chuckle from the light-hearted number he recorded with Beyonce, during which he ad-libbed that lecherous PG-13 observation on the 'liciousness of her booty.

As it is, Hopkins got frozen in time too soon. With his shades, his extra-long mentholated cigarettes, that leering laugh, those decidedly non-P.C. lyrics and the fierce native intelligence, he's as foreign to the Houston of today as the ghost voices captured on those old Marvin Zindler radio broadcasts. He didn't stick around to let time sand those rough edges down to smooth, marketable contours.

Some Guy Called "Mahatma" Gets His Own "District," But Lightnin' Hopkins Only Rates a Historical Plaque? (Which Is Better Than Nothin')

2010-02-02T12:28:00.035-06:00

Like all good Americans, we were pleased to learn that Sam Hopkins is finally getting some belated semi-official recognition in the form of a Texas Historical Commission plaque on a corner of Dowling Street in Third Ward, a thoroughfare named in honor of the Confederate-Irish barkeep who headed off the Yankees at the Pass in the service of the effort to keep Lightnin' Hopkins' forebears enslaved. (Pardon our "presentism," but, man, history is just so damn ironic!)

This is a good thing, of course--the plaque, not slavery--and temporary culmination of efforts that at least to our knowledge began with a long-ago suggestion by the late City Councilwoman Eleanor Tinsley (to whom it was most assuredly suggested by someone else) to rename a street or part of a street after Hopkins. Unsuccessful as it was, this always struck us as a sweet gesture, since Tinsley didn't seem like the kind of gal who'd have listed her self as a friend on Lightnin's Facebook page, if he'd lived long enough to have one. Along the way we, among others, tried to do our small part, weather and our limited attention span permitting. Just think how much hipper it'd be if you yoga ladies (and ge'men) were performing your Sun Salutations in Lightnin' Hopkins Park, rather than the faceless and flavorless Discovery Green (an excellent name for a park in Dubuque, Iowa). So congrats to Eric Davis, the local who spearheaded the effort to make the plaque a reality, or near-reality.

But the plaque is not enough. Just recently, a small swath of the home turf on and around Hillcroft Avenue was designated as the Mahatma Gandhi District, after attempts to rename a nominal stretch of Hillcroft after the most renown member of the Vaishya caste were passed over, shall we say, by property owners of other ethnic origins on the street. (This sepia-toned jester has better suggestions.) As we observed when first apprised of the Hillcroft renaming effort, Gandhi, if we remember the movie correctly, never set foot in Texas, or Houston, or on Hillcroft. (Of course, the street probably wasn't platted until after his death, but that's beside the point). Our understanding is that this designation--made visible by placement of small signs, in the shape of a Hindu temple and bearing Gandhi's likeness, atop the regular street signs--was the result of a private fund-raising effort. (If we're wrong, please correct us.) Our question is: Can anyone apply to so designate a district? And if so, where is the Lightnin' Hopkins District? A memorial sign on Dowling is good and appropriate, but it sort of ghetto-izes the man, who, as we pointed out back on Aug. 23, 2006--yes, we must stoop again to quoting our self, 'cause supper's gettin' cold--"embodied the country-come-to-town spirit" of our big hick burg better than almost anyone we can think of, except for its namesake, the illustrious Illiad-spouting farmboy and drunkard.

Sure, Gandhi made his bones with the non-violent resistance thing and was a huge influence on MLK, but let's be honest: Did he ever play and sing a song that spoke so directly to the human condition as Mini-Skirt? ("You better let your dress down a little more, baby.")

We'd envision this zone as a place where an aging flaneur such as our self could stretch out on a park bench in the sun and enjoy a strong drink (make ours coffee with lots of soy milk) and a roll or two of the dice (we'll just watch, thanks.) All the women, even the old ladies, would be required to wear mini-skirts or clingy athletic wear. There would be no bocce.

So the plaque is but a first step. Now let's get to work on the Lightnin' Hopkins District.

By that we mean: You get to work; we'll just keep scratchin' that thing.

Also: Nick Tosches smokes, FDR-style, and discusses the devil's music with the Guardian UK.

That Good Life Just Makes Us Feel So Bad (Boo Hoo)

2010-02-01T17:15:00.010-06:00

Up and at ’em and out for a jog on Sunday morning, we saw that the Houston Chronicle, perhaps in the person of Smilin’ Jack Sweeney himself in a packed-to-the-roof Toyota, had pitched thinly wrapped copies of the newspaper’s all-new wham-blam (according to the Chronicle’s master marketeers, anyway) whatsis section, The Good Life, onto the driveways of our neighbors who do not subscribe to the paper, which we’d estimate is at least 80 percent of all residents (margin of error: plus or minus 10 percentage points). Coming home through the neighborhood late Monday afternoon, we noticed perhaps up to half of these copies were still lying in the driveways, now soaked and flattened to near-mush by the rains, despite the sandwich-bag-style wrapping––testament to both our neighbors’ unflagging laziness as well as the desperation of the local Hearst-owned franchise.

After eyeballing the first edition of The Good Life, we can kind of understand why our neighbors might not be inclined to stoop down, retrieve their copies and eagerly rip off the sandwich bags to devour the new section, a reading experience that someone at the Chronicle apparently expects will be so rewarding that the reader will excitedly ring-up the newspaper and DEMAND that his or her home delivery start right away. We suspect that such offerings as “Loving Aspen,” “Parisian Chic” (“It’s springtime in Paris. What fashion looks are ahead?”)* and “Take Comfort in Creole” (the “cuisine,” not the people, that is) won’t have much appeal in our neighborhood, particularly on its northern reaches, a resolutely working-class area where few vacation in Aspen, vehicles sometimes rest on blocks and many adult residents have difficulty speaking English, much less reading it. (Is there no Spanish-language La Buena Vida? ¿Por qué?)

We don’t claim to understand today’s newspaper biz, a business that we devoted a considerable expanse of our relatively worthless life to, but perhaps we never did. We do know that such flailing-away projects as The Good Life leave us feeling a little embarrassed for our former line of work, the way we sometimes feel embarrassed for a Jeopardy contestant who does nothing more than betray the magnitude of his ignorance on national TV. Not that we have any solutions. We suppose hiring lots more good journalists to write interesting stories that people might want to read (and not the dreary set-’em-up, knock-’em-down kind that are indeed contributing to newspapers’ decline) is out of the question, so we shan’t pitch that out as a possibility. Or making people pay for the online content, something like that.

But wait: The Chronicle's Teen Columnist is back, or almost back.

Life is indeed good.

Predictably good.

*If that don’t win the Pulitzer for good writin’ there’s no justice in this sorry world.

The Nativist

2010-01-30T16:24:00.019-06:00

As a senior though uncredentialed member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (that's MNIM, pronounced mmm-nim, for short), we must again bound far ahead of the baying pack to boldly point out that the spectre of nativism has reared its somewhat uncomely head* in the Texas gubernatorial race. Given that this year marks the first time that a Palestinian-American Muslim (or ex-Muslim, depending on audience and day of the week) ex-hairdresser-turned-hair-care-products-manufacturer has sought the seat once held by such worthies as "Ma" Ferguson and G.W. Bush, perhaps it was to be expected that some candidate would rise up to declare that he is more of an "American" than the others. Perhaps not as expected, that candidate is not Deborah Medina (she's just like you, FYI) but is none other than Farouk Shami, the Palestinian-American Muslim (or ex-Muslim, depending on etc.) ex-hairdresser-turned-hair-care-products-manufacturer himself.

We first learned of this semi-revoltin' development from the Jan. 15, 2009 edition of the Indo American News [sic, no apparent hyphen], which we procure on a weekly basis while on culinary business in Our Town's newly designated Mahatma Ghandi District. According to the News' extensive page one coverage, Sr. Shami wrapped himself all up in red, white and blue back on Jan. 8, when he declared, "I am more American than others [and added] It is 'old thinking' versus 'new thinking,' and now is the time to make a difference" [punctuation corrected] while speaking to what the publication described as a "small group of influential Asian leasers--many South Asian––and media." The News did not elaborate on the Shami Man's claim, but fortunately Peggy Fikac of the Chronicle picked up the news-and-infotainment baton on Jan, 24 and reported with a straight face that that El Shami

reaches into his business background to discuss his current quest, including when he speaks against the notion that “one person is more … American than the other” based on whether the person was born here.

I would judge it by who pays more taxes, me or Rick Perry? Me or Bill White? Every year, I pay more than they ever made in their life. … And since I'm paying taxes, I'll be careful spending people's taxes.”

So that's it! Well, step to the front of line, Mr. Alleged Inventor of Amonia-Free Hair Lightener and of course the world-famous CHI Flat Iron. Perhaps only Bill Gates and Warren Buffet outrank the Faroukster when it comes to being a red-blooded American, although it's likely they have better tax accountants. (We should point out that as far as we know, no other gubernatorial candidate has raised the Fikac-ian "notion" that "one person is more ... American than the other," including Shami's fellow Democrat, Bill White––most certainly not Bill White. We also call your attention to the fact that Shami is actually running a seriously nasty slash-and-burn campaign against White [although not on the scale or with the interest-generation of the Hutchsion-vs.-Perry doings, of course], including, according to this straight-faced report from the Dallas Morning News, Shami's in-so-many-words accusation that White is a racist. Now we find it humorously ironic when white Democrats are hoisted on their own affirmative-action and identity-politics petards––ask Chris Bell, D-Houston, about his two rough hoistings––but this allegation is just patently ridiculous, undocumented BS, if you'll pardon our language.)

The unhyphenated Indo American News went on to report that while speaking to these influential Asians (we did not see Aloysius D. Hoang among their photographed number, in case you were wondering) and South Asians, Shami also

... reprimanded Governor Rick Perry for being out of touch with common people, citing his $12 million ranch and his son's lavish wedding in Las Vegas.

His son's lavish wedding in Las Vegas** ... yes, we must conclude that Farouk Shami is a real American boy, as acclimated to the soil as any 6th-generation Texas taxpayer, a regular William Jennings Bryan with a CHI Flat Iron.

*As regular and even semi-regular visitors to this place know, we are not of the opinion that "nativism" is an entirely bad thing, and at any rate consider it a poorly understood and badly misused term, facilely employed by agenda-bearing gum-beaters and fund-raising hacks to discredit those who might simply believe that English should be the sole language of instruction in the public schools––it's an assimilatin' thing––or that immigration is fine and even necessary so long as it's legal and accrues some benefit to those of us already here; said gum-beaters' prejudices having been conditioned by passing and superficial understanding of over-simplified and somewhat discredited Hofstadter-ian notions of American history.

**Which speaks to nothing more than Perry's taste, or lack thereof.

Photo above: Shami Does Brooklyn; photo lifted from some Web site about hair care in Brooklyn and used without permission (so sue me).

Just One Book, But a "Huge Upwelling" (Updated)

2010-01-29T12:00:00.015-06:00

We were primed to throw down a hasty appreciation of J.D. Salinger but felt inadequate to the task after reading the insight from Tony Hoagland of the UH writing program that someone from the Houston Chronicle artfully inserted into its pick-up of the L.A. Times' obituary of Salinger (Hoagland, by the way, is a fearsomely good poet whose "Lucky" can break your heart, if you have one):

"Salinger broke through so many walls. He articulated the internal life, with all
its moods and contradictions and ironies. When Holden is seeking refuge in his
teacher's apartment and suddenly the teacher is rubbing his head and that feels
strange to Holden, the moment is real. … The book was a huge upwelling of: ‘This
is life that has not been described before but that we all recognize.' You feel
the generosity Salinger has towards human nature and you really feel included in
it.”

To that we can only add that the other genius of Catcher in the Rye is the way it speaks so directly to the sensitive or at least half-sensitive 15 year old (of all ages), which we suppose is the reason they assign it in the high schools these days. Our own 15 year old informed us of Salinger's passing and expressed wonder at the eerie "coincidence" of his death, the coincidence being that her English class had just started reading Catcher.

We mentioned that she's 15, right?

Update: We initially found a truncated version of the above-mentioned story on the Chronicle's Web site late Friday afternoon in the "Celebrity Buzz" section. We can't channel the dead, just yet, but we're pretty sure this isn't where Salinger pictured himself, post-mortem. Meanwhile, our 20-year-old, who tells us that, surprisingly, he's never read Catcher in the Rye but seems to have a deep and learned knowledge of Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, which we drew on to refresh our faded memories of those tales, informed us of a too-perfect headline he saw (from The Onion, it appears): "Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger."

The Aloysius Chronicles, Part V: In Which We Catch the Doofus Houston Councilman from Pearland in Another String of, Um, Fabrications, All Documented.

2010-01-27T17:28:00.013-06:00

Please read closely, for context and meaning, in case the State Board of Education one day mandates that Texas schoolchildren study the inspiring story of Aloysius D. Hoang:

More from the public record regarding the new city councilman from District F, Al Hoang, a man of many names and many addresses, who, as reported here back on Dec. 13, was not even eligible to vote in the district he now “represents” until Oct. 16, less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 general election, in which Hoang advanced to a runoff that he won on Dec. 12. Here’s how Hoang, who now claims to reside in a dwelling at 4403 Bugle in District F (which he acquired in March 2009 from a person who was listed as a campaign staffer) tried to explain away this nagging fact to the Houston Chronicle in a story published on Dec. 28:

In his e-mail [to the Chronicle] Monday, [Hoang] said he sent the Harris County voter registrar a form with his new address in May 2008 and went to the office in person to change it after learning his prior address, in Council District G, was still listed as his voting address.

“Maybe it got lost in the mail,” Hoang said.

Maybe it got lost in the mail. That appears to be the Hoang M.O.––blame somebody else when you get ensnared in your own tangled web of deceit. In this case, Hoang would be blaming either the U.S. Postal Service--a screw-up by that entity is certainly not out of the realm of possibility––or, should the mail service have come through, the office of the Harris County tax assessor-collector, which we believe is rated much higher in competence and customer satisfaction than the post office.

But neither is actually to blame, because on this matter Al Hoang is lying, if we could be so blunt. Hoang did indeed apply to change his voter-registration address in May 2008, but the application did not get lost in the mail. As you can see here, records of the Harris County Tax Office show that in May 2008 Hoang switched his registration address to 10001 Westpark, Apt. 83, in city council District G, where he remained registered to vote until he finally got around to changing it to 4403 Bugle, deep into his campaign and just before the election. Prior to this 2008 switch, Hoang’s voting-purpose address was 9527 Almeda Bent Ct. in Houston. At the time he was registered to vote there, he also was a homestead-exmeption-claiming owner of record of a home at 2702 Sunfish in Pearland in Brazoria County. The switch in voter-registration address in May 2008 came after Hoang lost a March 4 Republican primary race for a Harris County district judgeship* (at a time he was a homestead-exemption-claiming homeowner in Brazoria County, etc.). Hoang transferred full ownership of the Pearland home to his wife on March 5, 2008.

Hoang was also a homestead-exemption-claiming Brazoria County homeowner of record when he ran for and lost a race for an at-large Houston City Council position in 2003. On his campaign finance reports for that effort––which, curiously, did list dates for his contributions and expenditures, unlike his 2009 reports––he claimed an address of 1900 North Loop West #500, a businesss address of Hoang’s.**

So how did Hoang “learn” that he was still registered in District G when he was running for the Distrct F seat? We can’t say definitively, but he question of Hoang’s residency was already being raised when he applied for the change on Sept. 16, 2009. In fact, on Sept. 28 another candidate in the District F race, Robert Kane, filed a complaint with the city’s Chapter 18 Ethics Committee (not the council’s Ethics Committee) challenging the residency bona fides of Hoang, Hoang’s fellow campaign-finance scofflaw Khalid Khan, and another candidate, Joe Chow (whom Kane later removed from his complaint after Chow made a correction in appraisal district property records). As shown here, the Ethics Committee did not rule on the merits of Kane’s complaint but concluded on Oct. 29 that it was "without jurisdiction” to consider his claims and that “the City Council shall be the judge of the elections and qualifications of council members.”

We're pretty confident that neither of the city's ethics committees would be moved to do much about Hoang should someone complain at this late date (after all, the voters in District F--the people, yes!--have spoken, few as they were). However, as noted on the applications we all must complete and sign to take part in the democratic process, it is perjruy under both federal and state law to procure voter registration by giving false information. So if some eager young assistant district attorney or assistant U.S. attorney is looking for the easily-removable scalp of an elected official, we’d say: Look no further than City Councilman Aloysius D. Hoang!

*Not only did Hoang illegally seek this position, he also got in trouble with the Texas Ethics Commission for failing to file timely campaign finance reports. He was assessed a $500 fine for missing the report due Feb. 4, 2008, although the commission staff recommended waiver of that penalty, and another $1,500 for missing the report due on Feb. 25, a penalty reduced to $600 by recommendation of the oh-so-tough staff.

**In between making his illegal bids for Houston city council and a state district judgeship, Hoang dug into is pocket to to contribute $220 to the Republican National Committee on Jan. 26, 2006––using the Pearland address where he actually lived/lives. Despite this show of loyalty to the Republican Party, Hoang did not bother to vote for John McCain in the 2008 general election, or anybody else, according to the sign-in book of Precinct 566, after he went to the trouble of changing his voting address to the condo he owns in City Council District G.

Photo above: Hoang does Sinatra: “Yes, there were times/I’m sure you knew/When I bit off more than I could chew.” Photo ripped off from somewhere on the Internet and used without permission.

Things We Never Knew about ... Catholicism

2010-01-25T19:29:00.008-06:00

Although we spent our formative years in one of the most (if not the most) heavily Catholic regions in the United States, we have managed to remain blissfully ignorant of many of the rituals and much of the dogma of the Holy Roman Church. What little knowledge we have acquired was usually through the deeply cynical filters of wise-guys and wise-gals who as youths were subjected to instruction in the Catechism and would later best describe their Catholicism as “lapsed.”

It was not too long ago, for instance, that we learned, via the New York Times, that the Church, as it was known in the Middle Ages, is back to dispensing indulgences, the selling of which once so torqued the German theologian and noted anti-Semite Martin Luther that he launched a revolution that altered the religious predilection of much of Northern Europe. More recently we were apprised by someone whom we believe is in a position to know that there still are priests, even some in Houston, who are licensed or credentialed (we’re sure neither is the appropriate term) to perform exorcisms. (We have no names and phone numbers, so please don’t contact us if you feel in need of a casting-out, unless your name used to be Aloysius Gonzaga Hoang, in which case we’ll try to arrange an exorcism by the Texas Ethics Commission.)

And our knowledge of the Catholic Church continues to expand, once again thanks to the New York Times (some newspapers remain your best education value), which on Saturday, Jan. 24, reported on the Saints fever gripping New Orleans and how that damaged city was hoping, even praying, for municipal-salvation-through-Super-Bowl-victory:

Peggy Scott Laborde, a producer and host for the local public television station, said: “I’m Catholic. We live in a very saintly town.”

She has in her office a statue of St. Clare of Assisi, the patron saint of television. Laborde said that the city’s NFL franchise was awarded on All Saints’ Day in 1966 and that the team’s nickname was not approved until the archbishop declared it was not sacrilegious.

Yes, it’s true, as confirmed by many authoritative sources on the Web––the redoubtable Claire is indeed the patron saint of television (what a thankless saint-task), so designated by none other than Pope Pius XII, a/k/a Eugenio Pacelli, better known for his Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany and general lingering silence on Hitler's atrocities. Fortunately, Pius XII went to his reward in 1958, many years before the debut of Jersey Shore and its exploration of the mores, manners and mating habits of young Italian-American Catholics.

A patron saint of television! What a religion!

All we can say is: Geaux Saints!

Kay Bailey Hutchison and the Twilight of the Dinosaurs

2010-01-23T19:27:00.010-06:00

It’s been pathetic––even poignant, if you’re the sensitive sort––watching Kay Bailey Hutchison trundle out her endorsements by these antediluvian, establishmentarian Republicans––Bush Senior (now sadly looking his age), James Baker, and, most curiously, at least to us, Dick Cheney. Surely Brent Scowcroft also has thrown one her way and we missed it.

The elder Bush put his button finger right on Hutchison’s current dilemma, most certainly unwittingly, when he observed that the state’s senior U.S. senator was “a Lone Star Republican before it was cool to be a Republican." Yes, those were the days, my friend, back when “country club Republican” was not a dismissive pejorative but instead summed-up the essence of Texas Republicanism, when Tory Democrats, even after the McGovern debacle, still rode tall though perhaps not-so-securely in the saddle and Republican strength, such as it was outside of John Tower’s reliable re-elections, was confined mostly to places like Highland Park and Midland and River Oaks-Tanglewood-Memorial, domain of Bush Senior. Back then, an ambitious young single gal from LaMarque who secured her public profile as a reporter for Channel 2 could run as a Republican and win a state legislative seat representing West University Place and environs without sacrificing her principles (or many of them).

Now, of course, it is cool, even chic, to be a Republican in Texas. Everybody’s doing it. A couple of weeks ago, up in the East Texas county where our mother and father were raised and all of our known kin are buried, the weekly newspaper reported that several Republicans were vying for the top county jobs in their party’s March primary, among a long list of GOP hopefuls. Just two lonely Democrats were on their party’s ballot for district offices, both unopposed. This in what was once one of the most reliably Democratic-voting regions in the nation, outside, perhaps, of precincts in Berkeley, Calif. and parts of Chicago, Ill.

Yes, times and fashions change, and in this day of Tea Parties and Palin a GOP trailblazer such as Hutchison gets repaid by running second in the polls to a guy who up until 20 years ago was a Democrat and who won re-election with a just a little over a third of the vote. Like a River Oaks dowager who tries to run with the younger ponies by tarting herself up with Botox and Collagen, Hutchison has tried to make herself over to keep up with the times, but the results have been similarly unappetizing. This most painfully manifested itself during the first televised debate among the GOP gubernatorial candidates when Hutchison, pressed by an inquisitor as to whether she favors maintaining Roe v. Wade, offered up a novel reason for not overturning that Supreme Court decision, if we can take the liberty of interpreting her: Should Roe v. Wade be deemed unconstitutional, decisions on abortion would revert to state legislatures––which, in our humble opinion, would be one of the more salutary recent developments for Democrats, even in Texas––and, according to Hutchison, that would result in some states––here she’s probably thinking, or pretending to think, of Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, etc,––would move to allow the wholesale yanking of full-term fetuses from their mothers’ wombs. That’s one way to look at it, and it certainly beats saying what’s no longer cool to say in the Texas Republican Party, “I believe a woman should have the right to choose an abortion,” ... because times and fashions change. (We would never presume to speak for the dead, but after Hutchison had concluded her tortured and dodgy explanation that evening we thought we heard a faint, ghostly cry of “M-----f---k!” off in the ether, followed by the hard snapping of a kitchen match being lit. Surely that was Jane Ely, once a pal and supporter of such disparate personages as Slampo and Kay Bailey Hutchison, issuing a damning judgment from the beyond.)

Now Hutchison is reduced to touting her support from the ancients of the Texas GOP––would even half of potential Republican primary voters be able to accurately identify James Baker, if forced to do so at gunpoint?––while her opponent prepares for his big endorsement by the GOP’s slightly tarnished but still almost-shiny-new although occasionally near-comatose Flamin‘ Creature of the Month.

As for the Cheney endorsement: We’re sure that the Hutchison campaign wouldn’t be airing that commercial with the picture of her and the skulking ex-vice president together if there wasn’t a poll somewhere that showed Cheney is still popular in Texas, at least among likely GOP primary voters, which puzzles us no end, given that about all Cheney has done for Texas is 1.) accidentally shoot a man in the face and 2.) help nearly run a once-sound oilfield-services company into the ground before floating off to high office in his Golden ’Chute,* both testaments to the man's gross incompetence.

*Disclosure: Our father was a Halliburton retiree who before his death held Cheney in about the same regard as he did Hitler and Tojo when he was freezing his behind off in the Ardennes back in ’45.

You Big Dummy

2010-01-22T16:41:00.010-06:00

A couple of weeks back, while on the Upper East Side of Texas,* we were leaving the largest and finest Wal-Mart in Wood County just as an intense-looking, muscled-up 30ish black man was heading into the store, pushing an empty shopping cart. As we drew closer, we noticed the guy, who had a faint resemblance to the actor Tim Reid in his younger days, was wearing only a T-shirt (in addition to pants and shoes, of course, and possibly socks), even though it was, literally, 23 degrees F outside. Then his T-shirt registered: On it was emblazoned a picture of Red Foxx-as-Fred Sanford, and underneath Red/Fred’s familiar mug was one of Fred G.’s signature epithets/catchphrases, either “Dummy” or “You Dummy” or “You Big Dummy” (we forgot our notebook and memory subsequently has failed us). We drew down on our storehouse of stereotypes––it is quicker, as George Clooney said in that movie––and a couple of quick orienting thoughts sped through our mind: “This guy must spend all his free time pumping weight––he’s gotta be a fireman,” and, ““This guy’s too young to remember seeing Sanford and Son, except in reruns.” As we passed into the man’s proximate space, the sheer frontal absurdity and classical timeliness of the message caused us to smile a friendly smile and let loose with an audible snort of a laugh, but the guy just shifted his eyes ever so slightly and shot us a look that we interpreted, probably wrongly, to say, “Not up for any BS today, my man” or, “I’d just as soon stab you in the heart as contemplate your continued existence.”**

We doubtless were way off-base, and it’s possible, even likely, that this hardy dude wasn’t aware of our presence and was actually looking off into space, yet the cognitive dissonance brought on by the guy’s hard look and the fun-stering T-shirt message caused us to immediately abandon plans to politely inquire about what we were dying to know: “Where can we get a shirt like that?”***

Instead, we kept on pushing out into the cold, bearing our White Man's Burden.

*A coinage we have ripped off, wholesale, from County Line Magazine.

**Come to think of it, Foxx’s schtick-in-trade, before TV rounded off his rough edges and transformed him into the lovable but irascible junkman, was full-frontal hostility, as we learned from brief but sustained exposure to his pre-Sanford “party records” while in high school. These were then deemed “adult” or “off-color,” although they more aptly were referred to as “dirty” and might even still be “dirty” by today’s lapsed standards. It’s unlikely, though, that Foxx’s Sanford banter with the comedienne La Wanda Page would be permitted these days, since it was premised on dark-skinned and extremely unattractive Page’s Aunt Esther being hectored and insulted (“You belong in the zoo!”) by Foxx, who of course was light enough to be known as “Red.” Who says humankind has made no progress?

***As we suspected, it is available on the Internet. Where else?

The Aloysius Chronicles, Part IV: Carpetbagging Houston Councilman from Pearland Finally Updates His Bad-Joke Campaign Finance Reports

2010-01-20T16:37:00.014-06:00

WARNING: The following is more extreme hyper-local, finely graded whatsis of limited reader interest. More to come.

We continue our ongoing exploration of the public record regrading our new city councilman from Houston’s District F, Aloysius Dayhung Hoang. As regular readers of longish attention spans will recall, Hoang had––and perhaps still has––only the sketchiest residential connection to the district he now represents, and the campaign finance reports he filed with the city during his campaign made, as we put it in a turn of phrase so felicitous we’ll pompuously repeat it here, a “mockery of the notion of ‘disclosure’ and hardly conform[ed] to the spirit of the law, much less the letter.”* Even before taking office Hoang made news, and not the good kind, when it was discovered his biography posted on the city of Houston Web site web contained this declaration of belief:

"While some of his opponents might advocate for gays and liberals rights, Al is defending Christian and family values."

As we noted back on Jan. 2, that is the same somewhat non-sequiturious declaration of belief that Hoang kept posted for several months on his campaign Web site––which, like the above-referenced biography, is ALL GONE, DISAPPEARED, VAMOOSED from the Web. (The city Web sites says Hoang’s page there is “under construction.”) This statement struck as especially hypocritical coming from Hoang, since the public record suggests that he himself practices what one of his minions derisively called an “alternative lifestyle” and not the “traditional family values” he purports to “defend.” In what appears to be the typical Al Hoang blame-someone-else reaction, the councilman’s mouthpiece told Channel 11

the biography was unauthorized and no one in Hoang's office gave the city's Webmaster permission to publish it. [Mouthpiece] said he didn't know where the text came from but an archived copy of Hoang's campaign Web site showed the same language in a biography published there...

Gay activists rightly took offense to this show of bigotry on a taxpayer-supported Web site, and some of Our Town’s liberal blogger types of course threw up their hands in mock chagrin. For our part, we think it’s always good for the public to have an idea of where elected officials are actually coming from, although Hoang’s miscue betrays his total lack of political skills and suggests that he, as we heard one of our uncles once say of a neighbor, is dumber than a telephone poll. (Hoang or any of his minions are as always welcome to rebut this or any other assertion made here.) It also suggests that Al Hoang is having difficulty transitioning from being a Big Man in the local Vietnamese community, where the internecine politics seem to still revolve around who hates Ho Chin Minh more, to representing a very diverse and very urban-suburban district.

To the record:

On Jan. 12, one moth after his election, Hoang posted what appears to be an updated campaign finance report covering his entire campaign. As we reported earlier, the previous four 1.) did not include a single date for a single expense or contribution, as required by law, and 2) did not confine themselves to expenses and contributions in the specific reporting periods preceding the filings , as required by law, and 3.) did not include the occupations of donors of more than $500 in a single reporting period, as required by law, and 4.) were a general mucked-up mess that, as we noted a few weeks back––stop us if you’ve heard this one before–– “made a mockery of the notion of ‘disclosure’ and hardly conform[ed] to the spirit of the law, much less the letter.”**

When these violations came to the attention of the Houston Chronicle, Hoang, a lawyer and graduate of UH and the TSU law school, maintained to the newspaper on two occasions that there was nothing at all wrong with his reports (the telephone-pole factor at work). But Hoang's latest report, which dates back to the earliest contributions he claims on Oct. 1 and continues through Jan. 7, includes dates of the contributions as well as the occupations of donors who gave more than $500. Thus far, AL HOANG HAS NOT WRITTEN, CALLED, EMAILED OR POSTED A COMMENT HERE TO THANK US FOR BRINGING THESE MATTERS TO HIS ATTENTION. (Actually, the only thank-you we need is acknowledgment of a job well done.)

We are happy to report that our own quick-check shows the line-item campaign expenses Hoang listed actually approximately add up to the $106,000 in total that he reported (this being a volunteer operation, we don't have time to do the contributions side of the ledger). We are saddened to report, however, that many problems persist with Al Hoang’s ideas of "disclosure,” including:

A.) Many, many contributions––too many to count––with no address or even a zip code for I.D. purposes

B.) A $200 contribution from the mysteriously one-named “Son” of Sugar Land, on 10-20-09 (full names are required by law).

C.) A $4,400 contribution from equally one-named “Pete” of Fort Bend Mechanical, which according to its web site does heavy-duty electrical service and repair work. (Hmmm....)

D.) “Exchanges of value”––we know of no other term to use here––with local businesses, mostly Vietnamese-language media, that Hoang listed as both contributions and expenditures. (Can they legally be both?) For instance, there was an old favorite of ours from his previous reports, a $9,910 something-or-other from the Ocean Place restaurant on Bellaire, which as both donation and expense was accompanied by the notation “5K in food, contributed by owner, remainder collected in cash at the event for the rest of the food/event” That’s clear as mud. (Under the Texas Election Code, it is, by the way, illegal to accept more than $100 in cash from any single donor, on the off-chance that restriction might apply here.) Similar contributions/expenses were reported from Ma Khanh-Little Saigon Radio and Saigon Houston 900 AM for $5,000 each, among others.

E.) A listing of a payment to Thai Spice restaurant on Dec. 14 of no dollar amount (that is, none listed).

You can accuse us of nitpicking here, but these laws exist for a reason, a good reason, and failure to follow them reveals both incompetence and contempt for the public.

As we previously noted, almost all of Hoang's donors were fellow Vietnamese-Americans (we could find but two names that weren't Vietnamese among his 100 or so pages of contributors), which suggests that Hoang's victory wasn't exactly the triumph of diversity that some of Our Town's Leading Diversicrats might be inclined to view it as (it was the opposite, obviously). And Hoang, at least as of mid-month, hadn't much broadened his funding base. So far, the late-train spigot for Hoang looks to be about as frozen as our water pipes were recently, result of a Hoang-like ommission when we forgot to wrap 'em or leave the water running and fell alseep on the couch. Hoang did report three early-January contributions from the usual non-Vietnamese suspects: $5,000 from the Houston Police Officer’s [sic] Union PAC, $1,000 from the Continental Airlines Fund, and another $1,000 from James Dannebaum, the engineer and UT regent who famously, or infamously, helped bankroll the anti-gay mailer from Hotze the Herb Doctor's organization targeting Annise Parker (Hoang was one of two Hotze-backed candidates who won election).

We’re glad the new mayor isn’t the vindictive sort. :)

*We understand that it's OK, even encouraged, to quote yourself in the grove of academia, but in the outside world it's just lame, right?

**Ditto.

Portrait of Hunger, With Bluetooth

2010-01-18T12:44:00.007-06:00

Last week an undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture came to Texas and declared that the state has, according to a report in the Jan. 13 Houston Chronicle, “the worst performing food stamp program in the nation.” What he meant, basically, was that Texas should eliminate its requirements that food-stamp applicants undergo fingerprinting and fill out what the newspaper described as a “time consuming and complicated assets test” so that applications can be processed faster and more people can be eligible for government-subsidized victuals. “If I were a native son sitting down here, I would be very upset that my state was not the leader it is capable of being,” said the undersecretary, who obviously is not a native son sitting down here.

Upon reading this our first thought was, “This undersecretary must be an undercover operative for Rick Perry’s re-election campaign.” Our second thought was, “If I were a Republican, and I’m not, I’d make sure this undersecretary’s statement was stapled to the behinds of Bill White (or, maybe, Farouk Shami) and Ronnie Earle (or, maybe, whoever) to see how far they can run with it.” (By the way, does White have a position on this? We searched high and low on his Web site and even his Facebook page and can find none. Perhaps his position is too, too nuanced and complicated to be explained in a coherent and logical fashion––like Kay Bailey Hutchison’s position on maintaining Roe v. Wade.* Personally, we have no problem with expanding food-stamp availability, temporarily and if necessary, although we see nothing whatsoever wrong with requiring applicants to undergo some semi-foolproof methods of identification confirmation and means-testing.)

Sure as the hack tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley were once moved to reflexively rhyme “moon” with “June” came the Whole Foods shoppers-cum-hunger artists (or artiste), of the Chronicle editorial page, who on Sunday past once again ascended to that Upper West Side of the mind to look down their long, thin noses at Texas and declare “Shame on us: Texas is the worst state in the nation providing food assistance to the hungry.” The hungry? Since when is not being able to immediately acquire food stamps synonymous with “hunger”? (That groaning noise was Orwell, rolling over in his grave while trying to light a cigarette.) The editorial predictably called for doing away with the fingerprinting and means-testing procedures, requirements designed to hold down, if not fully eliminate fraud. “To have so many Texans going hungry should be unacceptable in this proud and walthy state of ours,” harrumphed the editorial, which for some reason did not include the usual routine mention of Children at Risk, the Bob Stein of local social-service lobbyist organizations.

But some Chronicle readers reside in the real world, having no doubt stood in line at the grocery check-out behind overweight shoppers who used their Lone Star cards to buy all manner of unhealthy edibles and then whipped out a wad of cash to pay for the beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets. (It happens, although we personally have never seen it at Whole Foods or Central Market). Next to the Sunday editorial the newspaper published a letter from one of those readers, a Sarah Gonzales, who, when it came to insight, logic and pith, had it all over the writer of the editorial:

I would like to suggest that if the Chronicle was attempting to garner sympathy for those who are facing challenges receiving food stamps, perhaps a better picture could have been chosen to accompany the story. Of the three people pictured standing in line to receive food stamps, two of them are wearing Bluetooth devices. If I was having difficulty feeding my family or myself, the latest in cell phone technology would not be a priority for my discretionary income.

We went back to examine the picture Ms. Gonzales cited, and, sure enough, two of the three (that’s 66 percent) visible would-be food-stamp applicants had those noisome little phone devices in their ears. Perhaps Ms. Gonzales was too polite to mention it, but we’re not: None of the three looked to have missed too many meals lately. You could, in fact, politely describe them as overfed.

On the same day the paper ran its editorial its front page carried a striking Associated Press picture from Haiti that illustrated what real hunger looks like. It did not look like fat people standing leisurely in line while chatting on their Bluetooths (or Blueteeth?).

So tell us: Where should the “shame” really lie?

*In the interest of disclosure, we, like Hutchison, favor maintaining Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to an abortion. We also favor maintaining the death penalty. You might say that we are, in the currently degraded political parlance, pro-death.

Shami Time! (Updated With the Latest)

2010-01-13T15:47:00.013-06:00

Like most Texans––you could safely round the percent up to 99.9––we have devoted little of our short span of attention to the gubernatorial candidacy of Farouk Shami. But everything changes, as the venerable Shunryu Suzuki once observed, and so it was that last week, during a pilgrimage of several days to the unusually frigid ancestral hunting grounds in deep East Texas, we were forced to consider, at least in passing, the man who as of this moment could be the best-known Democratic candidate for governor from Houston. From Woodville far north to the near-Arcitc climes of Wood County, from whence we were forced to flee after being apprised of the mercury’s impending drop to 11 degrees F or thereabouts, Shami’s radio commercials––or commercial, as it seemed to be the same one, over and over––were in heavy rotation. As we punched the dial (or whatever it is you do with a digital radio) to and fro, searching for a tune to set our toes a tappin’ and slap a happy-ass smile on our sour and cold-benumbed puss, there seemed to be no escape from that friendly announcer’s voice touting the wonders of the Palestinian hairdresser-turned-manufacturer-of-hair-care-products––even on one of our favorite radio stations in the whole of Texas, which plays nothing but country music, mostly from the 1970s, that originally appealed to white men of our approximate age. Pushing north, heater roaring and radio blasting, singing loudly along to Kiss an Angel Good Morning or some other classic, we rode with Shami. (We usually ride with Jesus, but he had informed us it was too cold for him to make the journey.)

After the 5th or 6th hearing of his commercial, one small matter about the wonders of Shami began to bug us, a little, and that was his claim to have “brought,” past tense, 1,200 jobs to Texas by moving “his factories here from China.” Which naturally gives rise to several questions, at least in our mind: Why were these jobs in China in the first place, Sr. Shami? And have all of these alleged 1,200 jobs actually been filled with paycheck-drawing Texans, as of, say, last week? Does he actually have "thousands" of Texans on his payroll? And does Farouk Systems Inc. still have overseas manufacturing locations, and if so could Shami also bring those back to Texas? These are about the only questions we would have for Shami, should we ever be in a position to interrogate him, because the job-creation bit seems to be the end-all and be-all of his campaign––that and the success one can achieve smoothing-down even the unruliest of locks with the CHI Flat Iron.

Now we know these questions may never be plumbed or even asked, since the Texas political press, such as it is these days, most likely considers Shami a trifling annoyance, a fool and his money rapidly being departed, a mere sideshow to the big Perry-Hutchison Preliminary and the much-anticipated showdown between Bill White and The Winner of Perry-Hutchison Preliminary. That’s understandable. We don’t have to ring up Rice University’s Bob Stein to state the obvious: At the present time, Texans are not disposed to electing a Palestinian-American Muslim ex-hairdresser named Farouk as their governor, even if he promises each and every one of them a lifetime $40,000-a-year job with full benefits manufacturing CHI Keratin Hair Mist. As Shunryu Suzuki might observe, were he alive, things are changing, even in small-town Texas, where the jovial Middle Eastern owner-operator of the gas station-convenience store is now a stock figure, even a beloved character, on the social-commercial landscape. But they’re not changing that fast. Some day Texans may be ready to choose as their governor a Palestinian hair-care products manufacturer, even a gay Palestinian hair-care products manufacturer. But not this day.

However, since Shami is spending so much of his CHI-derived wealth on TV and radio commercials, money that might otherwise be invested in refining new hair-care products or upping the pay and benefits of his supposed 1,200 Texas-based employees, we believe the political press has the obligation to pursue these matters of public interest. At the very least, answers to these questions would provide fodder for Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News to lob an incendiary "gotcha” inquiry at Shami should he, Shami that is, be allowed access to the public airwaves for a debate with the other Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Houston and whoever else is on the primary ballot.

We also hope someone in the political press will clear up a recently arisen question regrading the pronunciation of the candidate’s last name. On his commercials and elsewhere we’ve only heard it pronounced to rhyme with “Mammy!”, as in the Shamwow! Super Shammy® (made in Germany--they make good stuff in Germany!). The other night, though, we saw a Channel 11 report on some big money-back guarantee Shami is about to offer voters (WARNING: REPORT INCLUDES BRIEF APPEARANCE BY RICE UNIVERSITY’S BOB STEIN) and heard Shern-Min Chow, whom we think is a graduate of Yale or some other Ivy League institution, repeatedly pronounce it sha-ME. Now “SHAM-me” is a name Texans can relate to, since so many take a shammy to their pick-ups after a good Turtle-Waxing, but sha-ME sounds too effeminate, even Frenchified, for a Texas governor.

It may be too late for this, but Shami should follow the lead of another Palestinian-Texan trailblazer, perriennial Houston office-seeker Sam Fayed, who changed his name to (something like) “Texas Sam Houston Fayed” for ballot purposes. We like the sound of Farouk “Sam Houston Lamar Tom Landry Earl Campbell Jose Texas” Shami. That should do it.

UPDATE: We learn from today's column by the Chronicle's Rick Casey that Shami has forsaken Islam to embrace all religions, or most all religions, or no religion. Shami has issued a statement. Stand by for further developments.

on facebook, no one can hear you scream ('specially if you’re running for governor)

2010-01-11T16:33:00.009-06:00

Due to personal circumstance entailing potential conflict and so forth, we have kept our lip buttoned regarding Yates High School’s 170-35 victory over the Lee High School basketball team, despite the almost overwhelming temptation to weigh in with some predictable het-up outrage. (And besides: Who cares what we think about it? Or what you think about it, for that matter.) However, as Houston’s handsomest and strongest blogger (so voted 4 years running in the annual Slampo’s Place “Best Of Houston” competition), we are duty-bound to call your attention to some recent postings on the Facebook page of our own ex-alcalde and gubernatorial hopeful-turned-U.S. Senate candidate-turned-back-to-gubernatorial candidate. (Why Bill White is wasting time on Facebook when he should be out getting on TV while clearing brush with a chainsaw is a question we shall not address here; however, we must acknowledge that White’s online noodlings are mildly interesting––in one he relates that he’s reading state budget papers while watching a Band of Brothers rerun on HBO*, a perhaps too-honest admission of an attention deficit–– and are not something you’d catch many other, if any, candidates for high statewide office doing, if only because they appear to have been written in a spirit of spontaneity, or at least as much in the spirit of spontanety as the public expression of a politician’s normally tightly edited thoughts can get.**)

The posting to which we direct your attention went up on Saturday afternoon, when White, who must fancy himself as a sort of grey eminence or mayor emeritus or some such for Houston, wrote:

Much talk re Yates/Lee basketball score, 170-35. Some students work hard in Yates' great BB program. Lee's a champ on another scoreboard: college entrance up, 25% to over 40% in 5 yrs.; city's fastest growing AP program; "school within a school" with flexible hours, for those who must work; 100 plus mentors; a health clinic; and much more, for a big school with students who speak over 40 languages at home.

Now that’s a nice sentiment, expressed without great drama or fanfare as a keep-your-chin-up pat-on-the-back for Lee (and one we understand was much appreciated in the school’s community). Not the sort of thing you’d imagine anyone objecting to, or that would create any controversy at all. But in politics, there apparently is no such thing as an innocuous statement, no matter how mild and/or heartfelt, and so not long after White’s shout-out to Lee came one Jeanine Robertson, who responded:

Not understanding how someone running for office can only highlight Yates BB program and overshadow their success by praising Lee. This school is located in a poor area of town, therefore, my question is why can't these kids have the option of a flexible schedule so that they can work and assist their families as well? Instead of putting Yates down because they won a game against Lee, how about making all Texas schools equal so that all kids in the state have the same opportunities. The staff at Yates is doing an awesome job with what they have available.

A Nathan Jones added his two cents:

This statement is dumb and coming from someone who put his face between Dr.King and President Obama you didnt leave a mark in history in no way Im a proud Yates grad and we offer more than athletics ..we learned common sense and how to be successful people in this world!!! So u lost my vote and support!!

... as did David Anthony Wakat:

Yates is a great bb program let them boys play.

Then came Nia Billy, addressing Nathan Jones and sticking up for White by rewriting the ex-mayor's personal history***:

Nathan ... I think you took the comment the wrong way. I think that Bill White is a little biased because he went to Lee. Hopefully you won't truly support the other candidates cuz they TRULLY mean harm!

The unexpected blowback set off a string of faintly hilarious name-dropping rejoinders by White, seeking understanding and/or exculpation:

My comment wasn't against Yates, which has made strides academically. I know two of Yates senior players and they will be productive citizens. I've also attended ceremonies recognizing Yates' many honor students. My point: innovative academic programs should be a source of renown and pride. I was last at Lee with Bill and Melinda Gates, who wanted to see a model high school. That is worth a highlight film.

And:

To one commenter below, I don't choose sides between these schools. I have been on Yates campus many times for many reasons, including basketball. Can't we acknowledge Lee without criticizing Yates?

And:

I encourage readers to go to my post earlier today about Lee. Those are facts worth knowing. To some who think praising Lee shows lack of respect for Yates and its team: I logged many hours in the stands. My son started on the same Houston Hoops team with some Yates players. When I took Dkembe to the Yates gym a few years ago to watch, he told the players: keep your eye on the academics.

That was it for Saturday, but White was back at it again early Sunday, at 5:21 a.m. to be exact (up and at ‘em!), wading even deeper into controversy with a declarative sentence that’s sure to catch the attention of GOP opposition researchers:

It is nice to be reading the paper by a fire this cold Sunday am.

Addendum: Things Bill White Has Learned Thus Far from His Facebook Page, Although He Probably Already Knew Them:

1 Many Texans have difficulty with basic reading comprehension.
2. Some Texans have difficulty spelling words such as “truly.”
3. Some Texans have difficulty with proper subject-verb agreement.
4. No good deed goes unpunished.

*Personally, we'd go with Band of Brothers.

**For instance, we're pretty sure that merely drawing breath is not a spontaneous act for Kay Bailey Hutchison.

***White grew up in San Antonio, where he may have attended a school called "Robert E. Lee," if there is one so named in San Antonio––we believe there are Lee High Schools about every 100 or so miles in Texas––but the one in Houston would have required him to undertake a very long daily commute.

Problema Grande, Solución Obvia

2010-01-10T12:35:00.007-06:00

The Sunday, January 10 edition of the Houston Chronicle brought front-page, banner-headline news of a “problem” in Our Town. (For some reason we don't care to know, we could find no evidence of this story anywhere on or in the paper's online edition as of 12:30 p..m. Sunday.) As with most “problems” “exposed” by formulaic journalism (that’s the set-‘em-up, knock-‘em-down kind that doesn’t tell you anything new or revealing about particular people with real names and addresses), this problem apparently can only be remedied by greater effort, and increased expenditures of taxpayers’ money, on the part of government.

This particular problem––the problem de jour, if you will––rests on the shocking “news” that many people in Houston, far too many people in fact, do not speak English. This state of affairs “adds burdens to police and public,” as the ungainly banner headline screeched, in a “city of global dialects.” (Dialects? Do they still use dictionaries at newspapers, or is that another archaic tradition that’s fallen victim to budget cuts?) That apparently results in situations in which officers who speak only English rely on “wrecker drivers, bystanders or victims’ children to act as translators if bilingual [read: Spanish-speaking] officers are not available.” This despite a Houston Police Department program that "pays $1.9 million annually in extra pay to 1,046 bilingual-certified officers,” among whose number are “904 officers certified as fluent in Spanish” and an unspecified (by the Chronicle) lot “who can speak Vietnamese, two dialects of Chinese and Korean.” (We’d hazard a guesstimate that the number of the latter two rounds up to about 3 or 4.)

To illustrate the pressing nature of this problem, the Chronicle notes that the Houston school district “has identified about 100 languages spoken in students’ home.” What that means, we suppose, is that the ideal HPD officer would be able to investigate and thwart crime in, oh, about 50 different tongues, although such skills would probably price an applicant far out of the police academy. But such deft linguists certainly would be an improvement over all these dumbass native-English-speaking officers who obviously aren’t cut out for police work due to their monolingualism. Their ineptitude contributes to the following tear-extracting vignettes, and “often,” supposedly:

The lack of bilingual officers often forces victims to recount intimate details of a sexual attack to a neighbor acting as translator for an officer, said one veteran HPD investigator....

Not to sound unfeeling or unsympathetic to crime victims, but isn’t the obvious and most cost-effective “solution” to this “problem” to have people who come to this country, legally or illegally but in either case out of their own free will, get cracking and LEARN SOME GODDAMN ENGLISH?

We suppose that would just be too much to ask.

Small Town, Global Village

2010-01-07T19:47:00.003-06:00

From "Mineola Police Report," the Mineola Monitor, Jan. 6 edition:

Dec. 23 - A person reported that they bought an Ipod off the internet and sent their money to China and received some shoes in return. The matter was turned over to the FBI.

The Aloysius Chronicles, Part III: Does the Incoming Houston Councilman from Pearland Practice an “Alternative Lifestyle,” and If So What Sort?

2010-01-02T16:48:00.017-06:00

More from the public record regarding Al Hoang (a/k/a Hoang Duy Hung), who’s to be sworn-in Monday as the new Houston councilman from District F, thus continuing what apparently has become a tradition of the district being represented by people who don’t live there:

1. Hoang, after first refusing to speak with the Houston Chronicle about residency issues raised by the public record, and in fact after hanging up the phone on reporter Mike Snyder (an auspicious start in media relations for a rookie officeholder), on Dec. 28 emailed the Chronicle informing it that the homestead exemption claimed on his property at 4403 Bugle in District F was carried over from the previous owner in Harris County Appraisal District records. This was confirmed by HCAD. This bit of late-breaking information eliminated “any concern that Hoang and his wife had wrongly claimed exemptions on separate properties,” as the Chronicle cautiously parsed it in story posted on Dec. 28. But it did not, as we’ll incautiously add, eliminate concern that DISTRICT F WILL AGAIN BE REPRESENTED BY A CARPETBAGGER WHO DIDN’T MEET THE RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT TO RUN FOR THE OFFICE (either the legal requirement or the non-legal requirement––that is, the real-world one in which decent, honorable people know and generally agree on what words such as “residency” mean). And while it appears to be technically wrong to report, as we did, that Hoang “claimed” the exemption, he didn’t exactly disclaim it, either, and according to what HCAD told the Chronicle he can still benefit from the break on his tax bill due Jan. 31, even though he’s been listed as owning the house for most of last year.

2. This late-breaking information does not eliminate the fact that Hoang’s wife, or his wife-of-record, claims a homestead exemption on a house at 2702 Sunfish Dr. in Pearland in Brazoria County (that’s far out of District F, for the record). The deed on the house was transferred from Hoang to his wife in March 2008, according to Brazoria County Appraisal District records. But his homestead exemption-claiming wife, or maybe it’s just someone with a name identical to hers, is registered to vote at 4403 Bugle in District F (that’s far outside of Pearland, for the record), along with Al Hoang and three other full-size adults (that’s 5 in total). So his wife lives in Pearland––Texas law allows the homestead exemption only on the owner’s “primary place of residence”––but is registered to vote in District F in Houston.

3. One of the five adults listing their voter-registration address as 4403 Bugle is a Duyen K. Trinh. A Duyen Kim Trinh is listed on Hoang’s campaign Web site as having been on Hoang’s campaign staff in some unspecified “voter outreach” capacity. According to Harris County appraisal district records, Hoang took ownership of the residence at 4403 Bugle on March 3 of this year from a Duyen K. Trinh. Of course, residency does not mean “home ownership,” so it’s possible that Hoang was bunking down at 4403 Bugle prior to acquiring the property. Perhaps his wife and the the three young children they appear to have (judging by the photos on his Web site) were also bunking there, along with the three other adults registered there to vote. It’s possible, as the structure encloses about 1,900 square feet and contains 3 bedrooms, according to HCAD, but it’d be a tight fit for all.

4. In his exchange with the Chronicle of Dec. 28 Hoang also “provided a Texas Department of Public Safety document showing the Bugle address was applied to his driver's license in May 2008,” according to the paper, a fact that was confirmed by the DPS. As one astute comment affixed to the Chronicle story noted, this came shortly after Hoang’s candidacy for a Harris County district judgeship in the March 4, 2008 Republican primary (he finished third in a field of three). The following day, Hoang was recorded as deeding the Pearland property to his wife, meaning he was a Brazoria County homeowner when he ran for a Harris County judgeship.

5. While the driver’s license change-of-address suggests that Hoang at least was crossing his legal i’s in preparation for running in District F, he did not cross his t’s, because, as the Chronicle previously reported, Al Hoang was listed at the 2702 Sunfish address in Pearland for 2009 taxing purposes on property he owns in Galveston County. He's also still listed as having a residential phone at 2702 Sunfish, in addition to one at 4403 Bugle.

6. From the available public record, and in lieu of some explanation from Al Hoang (supplied by doing something apparently totally out of character, like speaking by phone or in-person to a reporter or other interested party), one can only conclude that Al Hoang is involved in one of those “alternative lifestyles” that one of his supporters sniggeringly mentioned in a comment left on this blog after the Dec. 12 runoff election. Now we don’t really care what alternative lifestyle Al Hoang may be pursuing––we’re fairly libertarian in these matters and it’s OK by us whichever way he may swing, as long as it’s with a two-legged adult(s) somewhere above the age of consent––but Al Hoang claims to care a great deal about such personal proclivities, as evidenced by this statement on his Web site:

“While some of his opponents might advocate for gays and liberals’ rights, Al is defending Christian and family values.”*

Yes, Mr. Family Values Who Claims Not to Live With His Wife, let’s not be concerned with the rights of gay people, especially those of the new mayor and veteran at-large councilwoman you’ll supposedly be working with to secure those infrastructure improvements you’ve promised to District F.

7. We’ll not belabor this point at present, but Hoang, at least as of Dec. 31, had made no move to amend the bad-joke campaign finance reports he filed, which are devoid of dates of even one contribution or expense and or otherwise so messed-up we wouldn’t even begin to try to describe them. We suspect that even an entity with subpoena power, such as the district attorney or the Texas Ethics Commission, would have a hard time getting to the bottom of Al Hoang’s campaign finances, but we do hope someone gives it a shot.

8. Al Hoang as councilman promises great City Hall entertainment for the coming two years. We just wish he wasn’t going to be our councilman (in a democracy, of course, one gets the government one deserves).

*Hoang seems to have had an interesting life, if the bio posted on his campaign Web site is anywhere near the truth (and we certainly wouldn’t take it at face value): After graduating from high school “Al became a Christian religious brother spending his 4 years in fasting, prayers, and meditations,” it says. This explains the “Aloysius”––a fine Irish-Catholic name, redolent of fish sticks on Friday and stiff-necked Jesuits stalking the hallways with yardsticks––and may also explain Al’s rather unyielding Augustinian/Manichaean worldview: “A Vote for Conservative vs. Liberal is a Vote for Right vs. Wrong.” Hoang ‘s site also says that after he graduated from UH he “came back to Vietnam voicing for human rights and freedom. In 1992, the Communist Regime imprisoned him 15 months in solitary confinement for his belief in Democracy. The U.S Department of States intervened and he was released back to the U.S in 1993.” OK, that would also explain the Manichaean worldview (if true).

To be continued (sorry) as developments warrant.

Stein Watch: The Holiday Week in Stein

2009-12-31T14:00:00.007-06:00

Shortly after launching our much-ballyhooed and universally applauded Bob Stein Watch we realized that we may have gnawed off more than our occasionally tetchy tummy is capable of digesting. It would take a battalion (or two) of researchers, working night and day, to keep abreast of the many Bartlett’s-ready quotations and public appearances/pronouncements of the noted Rice University political scientist. We are but a one-man, close-to-the-ground, volunteer operation and most likely will prove woefully inadequate for the task. But in for a dime, in for dollar, as the saying goes, so without further ado we present what we hope will be a full and complete Stein Watch for the week of 12-27-09 through 01-02-10 (barring any surprise guest commentaries by Bob Stein at half times of upcoming bowl games):

Dec. 29: The professor, identified as “Bob Stein, Channel 11 political expert,” makes a brief appearance––we’re talking all of 10 seconds––in the middle of a report on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s “new transportation plan.” Stein apparently was on hand for English-language translation, saying something close to this:

“I think that what Senator Hutchison was saying is that if you don't like transportation, blame TxDOT, and if you’re gonna blame TxDOT, blame the man who made all the appointments to that commission.”

(As Channel 11 reporter Lee McGuire noted, although not in these exact words, a major plank of the Hutchison plan is to stomp on the dessicated carcass of the Trans-Texas Corridor.)

Dec. 29: Outgoing Mayor Bill White announces a new commission to study the city’s term limit provisions, with appointees to include, among the other usual suspects, the husband of the mayor's agenda director, Robert M. Stein of Rice Univeristy. (Appointments to such august bodies apparently rate the formal “Robert,” while Channel 11 must prefer the folksier, TV-friendly "Bob" for its political commentary.)

Stein fans across the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area were moved to wonder whether this appointment will pose a conflict that will prevent Our Man Bob from publicly declaiming on the term-limits issue.

Time, as always, will tell.

One for the Home Team!

2009-12-30T12:26:00.012-06:00

After reading the Dec. 22 dispatch in the Houston Chronicle by Bernardo Fallas, the reporter who covers the Houston Dynamo for the daily newspaper, our first thought was, “This Bernardo Fallas must have a sister who works for the Dynamo organization.”

No, no. We’re the ingenuous, naive sort, and such a connection wouldn’t naturally occur to us, at least during our waking hours. We just thought Fallas’s story was overly generous in detailing the arguments of the Dynamo management and Major League Soccer as to why “soccer-specific” stadiums and the necessity of the franchises “controlling revenue streams” are the keys to growing the domestic MLS to “compete with the best leagues in Europe and South America.” But that’s just our opinion, and opinions are like ... well, you know what they say.

The timing of the story also struck us as a bit suspicious, coming just 10 days after a mayoral election in which Dynamo president Oliver Luck and the team ownership, in the individual and corporate persons of California billionaire Philip Anshutz, Brener Sports and Entertainment of Beverly Hills and ex-boxing champ Oscar de la Hoya, put their money on the wrong pony. As Fallas himself put it:

...the Dynamo — whose move to Houston in late 2005 was due, in large part, to local government’s receptiveness to the idea of a public-private partnership for a soccer stadium in the Bayou City — wait for negotiations with the city of Houston and Harris County to resume after the recent mayoral election brought them to a standstill.

A cynical sort––not us, though––might believe that a little prodding in the daily paper would help move matters along.

As it turns out, of course, Fallas does have a sister who works for the Dynamo, a connection first brought to our attention by eagle-eyed Anne Linehan of blogHouston, who pointed to the similarity in the last names of the Chronicle reporter and Ana B. Fallas-Scarborough, listed as the Dynamo’s executive assistant/HR rep (true, not a high-level, policy-making position). Benardo Fallas confirmed the relationship for us, assured us it had no bearing on the story in question or his coverage in general, and told us it that “to insinuate otherwise would be both imprudent and an insult to my professionalism as a journalist.”

OK, imprudent is our middle name (actually, our middle initial is M. and our last name is Prudent, which is German, so heavy accent on the first syllable), but since Mr. Fallas promptly and graciously responded to our inquiry, thus freeing us to get on with the business of returning ill-fitting Christmas gifts, we’ll turn this space over to him for extended elaboration:

I informed my superiors the moment I learned my sister was being considered for a job with the team. Since the decision was to keep me on the beat, we have strived to maintain a healthy professional distance.

I sense you (or some of your readers)* may have an issue (and understandably so) with MLS' and the team's argument that teams need to control revenue streams in order to "make it."

The argument that MLS teams need to control revenue streams to become financially viable enterprises is one made time and again by teams and league (as well as teams in other pro leagues). It is the first answer you would get if you called Oliver Luck or Don Garber and asked them why an MLS team needs a stadium.

What I did is I presented that argument while noting that there's opposition to the idea of the Dynamo having public help in their pursuit of a stadium.

I was asked by my superiors to write about the emergence of MLS stadiums and how that relates to the Dynamo, and I think I did just that.

Mr. Fallas strikes us as an earnest and thoughtful young man trying to make his way in the world, but these unnamed superiors of his are doing him and their newspaper a disservice if they are aware of the sibling connection and are still assigning him to do a story on what essentially is a political issue that arouses considerable hostility on both sides. (As we noted to Fallas, even his reporting of games, team personnel moves and other non-political matters might come into question if he and the daily newspaper actually had any competition and there was another reporter from another organization assigned as a Dynamo beat reporter. Fallas later informed us that he doubles-up at the Chronicle as both a copy editor and soccer reporter; we’d caution him against over-excelling at either of these jobs, lest he wind up also shouldering the paper’s transportation beat while passing his off-evenings as a part-time society columnist.)

On a semi-related note, since the negotiations over the new soccer-specific stadium appear to hinge on Harris County’s agreement to participate in a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, the Chronicle reported on Wednesday that the outgoing City Council voted expand the Midtown TIRZ by 8 acres to include “the Asia House, the Buffalo Soldiers Museum and the Museum of African-American culture.” Kind of an interesting farewell of sorts, since we were under the impression that the departing mayor was not exactly a fan of the TIRZ mechanism (one of the good things about him, in our inconsequential book) and the incoming one most pointedly made an issue of not expending tax dollars, or too many tax dollars, on “museums” and “stadiums” and the like in this time of, um, fiscal austerity.

The version of the story in our damp home-delivered edition was all of 3 paragraphs and unbylined, but the online version included this seen-it-comin’-a-mile-away graf:

Councilman James Rodriguez, while supporting the changes, said he wanted to see plans for development of a Latino heritage museum within the same zone in Midtown.

We only hope that we can raise the money, and find a suitable and affordable location within the Midtown TIRZ, to get our planned Museum for the Study and Furtherance of Peckerwood Culture up and running in time to take advantage of the “$5 million in improvements to cultural and public facilities.”

By the way, possibly because of some apparent oversight neither this story nor Mr. Fallas's Dec. 22 work included a quote from Bob Stein.

*Mr. Fallas here makes the probably unsupportable supposition that we have readers, plural.

Beaumont: What Houston Should Aspire to Be

2009-12-29T06:37:00.010-06:00

It may be some years before Beaumont elects a gay mayor. And while residents there can rightly take pride in the Babe Didrikson Zaharias* Park, they have no poopy-precious downtown development tool such as Discovery Green of which to boast. There appears to be but one standalone Starbucks in the entirety of Beaumont, and the city’s nightlife opportunities have been much diminished since the Red Carpet Inn burned down many years ago. Yet there is one place where Beaumont has it all over Houston. According to what is no doubt the handiwork of some internationally recognized advertising and marketing genius, Beaumont has the cleanest restrooms in Texas. That, anyway, is what a billboard somewhere west of Beaumont proclaims.

It is possible that this message has been greeting visitors for many months, if not years, and we had previously missed it. We usually keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel, but last week we were riding shotgun and happened to be wide awake as our jolly caravan approached Jefferson County. We were just sorry that we had no pressing need to avail our self of a public toilet at that particular point in our journey.

Our personal knowledge of Beaumont’s public facilities is scant and much dated––we’re better acquainted with those in Vidor––yet we have no reason at all to disbelieve the town’s haughty claim to superiority. It was, after all, on a billboard.

We ask: Can Houston offer the same assurances to the road-weary traveler?

*A real person of notable accomplishment––if you can't identify her and at least two of the sports at which she excelled, please pack your things and go back to whereever it is you came from ASAP.

¿Dónde Está Bob?

2009-12-27T20:05:00.008-06:00

Since hardly a day seems to go by when Bob Stein doesn’t show up in either the Houston Chronicle or on Channel 11 pontificating on some subject or another, we at Slampo’s Place are launching yet another invaluable public service by inaugurating our Bob Stein Watch so that fans of the Rice University political scientist can keep up with his many and varied utterances with a minimum of exertion. Our first installment finds Dr. Bob dispensing the conventional wisdom down in the middle of a Christmas Eve story by the Chronicle’s Stewart M. Powell, which relayed the startling news that one of our two Republican senators, John Cornyn, is turning into slightly less of a hypocrite because of his chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In this one, the regular-guy “Bob” is supplanted by the formal “Robert,” perhaps because the story was written out of Washington D.C. by a reporter who uses his middle initial in his byline or perhaps because a house style and uniform editing are two of the many fusty journalism traditions that have been jettisoned by the daily newspaper in this age of diminished resources and It Girl society columnists. Anyway, here’s Bob:

The senator is “caught in a terrible pickle,” says Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, co-author of Perpetuating the Pork Barrel. “Legislators’ support back home usually lies with their ability to take care of constituents. But Republicans’ anti-spending campaign puts that at risk.”

Ahh, that was so good we wanna play it again:

The senator is “caught in a terrible pickle,” says Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, co-author of Perpetuating the Pork Barrel. “Legislators’ support back home usually lies with their ability to take care of constituents. But Republicans’ anti-spending campaign puts that at risk.”

It is possible, even probable, that Doc Stein has made more recent appearances in the local media since Christmas Eve, but we have been in Louisiana for the past three days, well beyond the internationally recognized Bob Stein Zone.

Merry Christmas, Aloysius: The Newly Elected Houston City Councilman from Brazoria County Just Doesn't Want to Talk About It

2009-12-24T07:03:00.009-06:00

Thanks to the able reportage of the Chronicle's Mike Snyder, we now have a fuller portrait of Houston councilman-elect Al Hoang, who, as noted in this space recently, did not legally meet the residency requirement to run for the District F seat he won on Dec. 12 and whose campaign finance reports don't exactly fulfill the legal requirements demanded of these disclosures. The picture ain't that pretty at all. (Up high and for the record: Snyder contacted us before publication of his story and we requested that this humble blog be left out of it, based mostly on the timeless "What's in it for us?" calculation but also not to detract from the serious nature of the enterprise.*)

What's truly amazing about Snyder's story––aside from the pathetic defense of Hoang offered by county Republican chairman Jared Woodfill, in yet another manifestation of the tiresome partisanship that now infests local municipal politics**––was Hoang's refusal to even discuss the residency issue with the reporter. First, he apparently issued a Gary Hart-like challenge to Snyder to "prove it," then hung up the phone when the reporter contacted him later after meeting the challenge. Think about that: A newly elected public official flat-out refuses to discuss legitimate issues of concern raised by the public record with the city's leading daily newspaper. We know the power of the printed press is much diminished, but this is not a real politic way to begin a career as an elected officeholder (hopefully, one of very short duration).

Instead of trying to come up with some half-assed explanation, Hoang resorted to the first refuge of the scoundrel, telling the newspaper, "You're trying to pick on me." We can only surmise that the unstated reasoning was "Because I'm Vietnamese." This is the sort of matter that inevitably ends up with one set of white people calling another set of white people racists. Watch.

So what is to be done? Oh, the new Houston City Council could actually do something about it, but won't, for at least five reasons we can think of, starting with, "We don't want to be bothered with this." Perhaps another elected official with subpoena power wouldn't feel as constrained by political sensitivities. Or perhaps she would. At the very least, Hoang should be subjected to unceasing public embarrassment, as well as a stiff fine from the Texas Ethics Commission for his campaign finance reports (which he, a lawyer, weirdly insisted to the Chronicle met the requirements of the law, which they clearly don't).

In the meantime, we extend our sincerest wishes to Aloysius Hoang and family for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We just hope Santa Claus can sort through the confusion and alight at the correct address, whether it's 2702 Sunfish Dr. in Pearland, or 10001 Westpark Dr., Apt. 83, in Houston City Council District G, or 4403 Bugle Dr in Houston City Council District F, or....

To be continued.

*More for the record: While we did vote for Mike Laster, Hoang's runoff opponent, we have had no contact whatsoever with Laster or anyone connected with him, and he wouldn't know us if he ran over us with a shopping cart at the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market.

**Yes, Democrats have gotten much worse about this, but then again there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the city limits.

Hidden Houston: A City With A Long, Proud Though Heretofore Undocumented History of Electing Gay Mayors

2009-12-21T20:31:00.013-06:00

Slampo’s Place interrupts its ongoing Al Hoang coverage to bring you this exclusive interview with Hampton Hardish, adjunct professor of history at South Dairy Ashford Community College and author of the possibly soon-to-be-published Houston: City of Gay Mayors. “We” in Houston have been convulsed in an orgy of self-congratulation in the past week over the election of a lesbian as mayor––a historic development that has proved, beyond a doubt, that Houston is not the dusty cow-town full of yahoos they still believe us to be In New York City and Paris, France but rather the cosmopolitan, urbane and broad-minded place “we” have always known it to be. Hardish, however, claims that Annise Parker won’t be Houston’s first gay mayor, and that in fact the city has had many gay mayors, going back many years. Slampo’s Place under-assistant managing editor and executive vice-president Hidalgo Hidalgo caught up with Hardish yesterday for an interview that began at the Starbucks on Wilcrest and Highway 59 and concluded many hours later at a southwest Houston sports bar. Sr. Hidalgo asked only that we confirm, for the record, that he himself is not gay. “That would not be so good in my community,” he explained.

HH: So, man, you claiming that this Parker lady ain’t gonna be the first gay person to be mayor of this city. Is that right?

HH: Yes sir, that is correct.

HH: So who was the first gay mayor here?

HH: Actually, it all started with with Houston’s first mayor, James Sanders Holman. Back then “gay” simply meant “light-hearted or happy,” and the clinical term “homosexual” had not been coined. Most did not think of themselves as having one “sexual orientation” or the other but kind of played it as it laid. Many were straight, many were gay, some swung both ways. The bayou ran slow and lazy, the fish and wildlife were abundant.

HH. Nah, man. Go on, get outa here.

HH: It's true ... One of my graduate research assistants unearthed the diary of a French visitor to Houston in 1837 who wrote: “One of the charms of this fetid, mosquito-infested hellhole (perhaps the only charm) is seeing the mayor strolling the streets arm-in-arm with a strapping young rustic whom he calls ‘Carl,’ and whose wispy beard he gently strokes as the two wade through the thick chimney smoke and ankle-deep mud.”

HH: The fu....

HH: Yes, there it is.

HH: Okay, what about this guy, whatshisname, Oscar Holcombe?

HH: Not only was he Houston’s longest-serving mayor but Houston’s longest-serving gay mayor. He wasn’t called “the Old Gray Fox” because of his cunning and political acumen, but rather because he was considered, well, foxy. Back then, the city had only a couple off off-the-beaten-track “nelly” bars, and OGF, as he was known, frequented both of them.

HH: Aww, man––how you know that?

HH: I have it on good authority from Ray Hill, who as you know is either the MLK or the Robin Hood of the local gay-rights movement, and has been the mentor to any gay person of accomplishment in Houston for the past 35 years.

HH: So, he knew this Holcombe dude?

HH: Perhaps not. But he says he knows that Jesse Jones and others were uneasy about what they called the mayor’s “misadventures,” although Holcombe always made time for his “boys,” especially around the holidays.

HH: No way! What about your more modern mayors?

HH: Well, Kathy Whitmire was caught in a hot tub with Lily Tomilin ....

HH: Whoa––I thought that was that Ann Richards lady ....

HH: Well, possibly, her too. But Whitmire was unmarried, a widow. Draw your own conclusion.

HH: Who else?

HH: Well, Fred Hofheinz liked to dress in women’s clothes, and Jim MConn was known to “shake his bottom down to the ground” after-hours at many of the city’s gay disco clubs of the late‘70s and early ‘80s. Lee Brown, historians have now determined, was the model for the cop in the Village People ... and, oh yes, when Louie Welch suggested that we “shoot the queers,” this was well-understood in the gay community as meaning, “I’ll be down at the corner of Westheimer and Taft around 11:30 tonight, and I'll be needing a ride.” After his death, it was discovered that he had amassed a large, secret collection of antique patterned draperies.

HH: Aw, man. Next thing you’re gonna tell me is Bob Lanier was gay!

HH: Yes, that appears to be the case.

HH: Naw, man, he was a hoss! You ever check out his wife, that Elsie lady?

HH: I know this will be hard for many people to accept.

HH: Okay, professor, tell me: Has Houston ever had a mayor who wasn’t gay?

HH: Well, of course, Bill White is not gay,* and next year he has a good shot at becoming Texas’ first non-gay governor since Sam Houston.

HH: Beauford Jester was gay, too? Man, all this politics talk is makin’ my head hurt. You got any money?

HH: Some, yes.

HH: I know this bar, Bongo’s, we can get some beers, 2-for-1 at happy hour. Watch the fútbol.

HH: Yes, I’d like that. I enjoy experiencing other cultures.

HH: Uh, yeah. Listen, just don’t mention it to anybody there that you’re gay, okay?

HH: But I’m not gay.

HH: Yeah, whatevs. Gimme your keys. I’m drivin’.

*In the interest of disclosure, Prof. Hardish notes that his wife, two of his three children, his mother-in-law, a second cousin, and an “elderly aunt” all work for White in some capacity.

All Hail Aloysuis, Chapter II: District F Councilman-Elect Al Hoang Is a Big-Time Campaign Finance Scofflaw (No Doubt About It)

2009-12-18T05:46:00.006-06:00

More from the public record (with annotations) regarding the newly elected city councilman from District F (Alief-Sharpstown), who, as we pointed out in our previous installment of what we expect will be a long-running series, apparently did not meet the residency requirement to run in the district and may not live there as of this moment (or maybe he does––either way, we’ll find out, ’cause it’s the holiday season):

1. The four campaign finance reports Hoang filed with the city make a mockery of the notion of “disclosure” and hardly conform to the spirit of the law, much less the letter. Hoang does not list a single date for any contribution he received, nor does he list a single occupation of even one donor (his defeated runoff opponent, Mike Laster, appears to have been fairly meticulous in listing occupations when so required; other candidates for city offices, including one who ran for mayor, were of course not so scrupulous). The Texas Election Code requires that campaign finance reports include the full names of contributors who give more than $50 as well the dates of the contributions. Additionally, the city requires inclusion of the “occupation and employer of each person making one or more political contributions that in the aggregate exceed $500 in a reporting period.”

2. By law, campaign finance reports are to cover a specific time period. For instance, the report candidates were to file on Oct. 5 covered the July 1-Sept. 24 period, the Oct. 24 report was to cover Sept. 25 through Oct. 24, etc. Not one of Hoang’s reports specifies a time period for the reported contributions and expenses. We hesitate to try to explain or even make an educated guess on exactly what Hoang intended, because these documents are so far afield from what is required by law, but it appears he was reporting the same line-item donations and expenses on more than one report. Again, that’s a guess, because it’s difficult to reconcile Hoang’s figures. (On his Oct. 5 report, apparently the first he filed, Hoang reported raising $20,875, spending $8442 and having $8,572 on hand, but his line-item expenses amount to only about $3,450.) The other possibility is that Hoang and at least one of his contributors violated the city’s $5,000 ceiling on contributions from individuals, because Hoang listed the one $5K gift he reported, from a Dong (or Duong) Hai of the 77036 zip code, on his reports of Oct. 30, Nov. 14 and Dec. 8. We suppose the councilman-elect isn’t dopey enough to report $10,000 in illegal contributions, but we don’t know the man. He obviously isn’t smart enough to figure out the relatively simple legal requirements of campaign finance reporting.

3. Then there’s the somewhat unusual if apparently not unprecedented practice of inflating both sides of the disclosure ledger by reporting some contributions as expenditures, or vice-versa. For instance, Hoang’s Oct. 30 report lists a $9,910 contribution from Ocean Palace, a restaurant at 11215 Bellaire Blvd. (we presume he meant the owner, because businesses are prohibited from making direct contributions to candidates), along with the unusual notation “5K in food contributed by the owner, remainder collected in cash at the end if event, which paid for the rest of the food/event.” On the same report, Hoang lists $9,910 in expenditures to Ocean Palace, along with the same notation regarding “food contributed by owner.” Hoang did the same contribution/expenditure double-dip when listing his, ah, interactions with local media. (At the risk of exposing our self to charges of racism and bigotry from one of Hoang’s Caucasian campaign flunkies, we’ll note for the record that Hoang’s media expenses/contributions/whatever appear to have been almost exclusively with Vietnamese-language publications and radio. )

4. Hoang has no excuse for this. He’s a lawyer, and it wasn’t his first rodeo, as he’s previously run for an at-large council seat and a state district judgeship (resulting in at least one fine for a late campaign finance report to the Texas Ethics Commission, which apparently was waived). The mind boggles at two, four, six years of Al Hoang on the city council.

Photo, top right: "Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care ...."

All Hail Aloysuis: District F Residents Prepare to Welcome Their New Out-of-District Overlord

2009-12-15T20:12:00.010-06:00

But first, a few points about the residency, or non-residency, of Councilman-elect Al Hoang:

1. Hoang did not become eligible to vote in District F until Oct. 16 of this year––less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 general election.

2. Hoang lists his address for voting registration purposes as 4403 Bugle, near Boone Road in Alief. According to appraisal district records, Hoang took ownership of the residence at 4403 Bugle on March 3 of this year and claims a homestead exemption on it. The previous owner was a Duyen K. Trinh.

3. According to voter registration records, four other people in addition to Hoang are registered to vote at 4403 Bugle, including previous owner-of-record Duyen K. Trinh. The others are Thanh Thi Hoang, Hoanganh Thi Trinh and Hoang’s wife, Hang Bich Nguyen.

4. Prior to becoming eligible to vote in District F on Oct. 16, Hoang listed his address for voting purposes as 10001 Westpark Dr, Apt 83. That address is in Council District G. That was where Hoang was registered to vote when he filed to run for the District F seat. According to appraisal district records, Hoang owns a condo at that address.

5. According to Brazoria County appraisal district records, Hoang’s wife, Hang B. Nguyen, is the owner of a house at 2702 Sunfish Drive in Pearland and claims a homestead exemption on it. The house was acquired by Hoang and his wife in August of 2002. The deed was transferred from Hoang to his wife in March 2008.

6. Article V, Section 4 of the city charter states: "To file for office as a District Council Member, a person must be a qualified voter of the City who has resided in the territory encompassed by the City Council District to be served for 12 months immediately preceding the election day."

7. The law is a joke. But you knew that.

Photo, top right: "Here it is!" Found on the Al Hoang for District F website and used without permission (none at all).

Late Night-Early Morning Coffee-Fueled Post-Election Mash-Up

2009-12-13T07:52:00.005-06:00

We’ll leave to others the predictable analysis and sentimentalizing about what it all means and just say that the best candidate won. As Parker herself noted, her victory was historic in overcoming the long-standing stigma that has prevented Rice graduates from ascending to the city’s highest office. Our newly elected mayor has a sense of humor––it can be wicked, we’ve heard––and we’d imagine that will come in handy.

Locke never struck us a bad person, and in fact had the most interesting personal story of the entire field, but as we tried to point out in this space on a number of occasions, in a number of ways, there wasn’t much rationale to his campaign. Combining all that union support and promise-making with backing from the likes of Ned Holmes and Bob Perry made for one ungainly effort and a very muddled message. The current demographic equilibrium in the municipal electorate necessitates artful coalition-building–– that’s a good thing!––but welding the monolithic black vote to whatever anti-gay sentiment there is to be stirred-up apparently is not the ticket. (Rumors that Hotze the Herb Doctor and Dave Wilson were spotted loading up U-Hauls late Saturday night apparently were false.)

Locke was gracious in defeat, as was Parker in victory, and as a concerned citizen we would ask that Locke perform one more public service before he returns to the rigors of $640-an-hour public-agency lawyering: MAKE SURE SOMEBODY TAKES DOWN ALL THOSE GODDAMN SIGNS YOUR CAMPAIGN TACKED UP ALL OVER THE CITY ON FRIDAY AND SATURDAY. Yeah, that was overkill. Bizarre overkill. We plied the hustings a bit on Election Day and thought we even spied one tied to a fence outside a cemetery. Very unsightly.

Elsewhere on the ballot, we were pleased to see that Stephen Costello prevailed in the at-large Position 1 council race. He struck us as thoughtful and low-key, attributes that will be in demand on a council to which Jolanda Jones will be returning. We had no horse in the controller’s race––statutorily, we believe the controller’s main job is to lay the ground work for a future mayoral campaign––so once in the voting booth (or cubicle, whatever you call it now) we shrugged and spun the dial for our outgoing councilman, M. J. Khan, ’cause we figured it would be cool to have a lesbian as mayor and a Muslim as controller. Nah, not really. We just never heard Ronald Green offer a specific, detailed explanation of his troubles with the IRS. Lord knows we’re sympathetic with anyone who has problems with the tax collector, but the liens against Green, and the total he owes to the agency, suggest that he has a long-standing problem getting his own fiscal shit together. But apparently there are enough Democrats in the city playing Democrats-versus-Republican in supposedly non-partisan municipal politics to hoist Green to higher office (that includes Chris Bell, our former congressman [recently elevated, or demoted, to state senator by the error-ridden daily newspaper], who left an urgent message on our machine on behalf of Green). Now that he’s obtained a better-paying post at the public trough, we hope Councilman Green will be able to satisfactorily resolve this dispute (you can bet we’ll never hear back form the media on this particular matter, because winning cancels all debts, at least spiritually).

Now for the distressing news: We were stunned––okay, very surprised––by the results in our own humble District F, where lawyer Aloysius Hoang beat lawyer Mike Laster. The latter, a former assistant city attorney, had a long record of civic involvement in Sharpstown and apparently has lived for a number of years in a downscale, unfashionable neighborhood in the area, in a house that’s even smaller than ours and carries an even lesser appraisal for tax purposes. In other words, Laster was committed to the district. Hoang, by contrast, appears to have taken an address in District F for voting purposes, becoming eligible to cast his ballot there just prior to the November first-round election, and his wife claims a homestead exemption on an abode in Brazoria County. Almost every cent he raised came from fellow Vietnamese-Americans, many of them from outside of the district. (There’s nothing wrong with that, per se––that's how immigrant groups traditionally have gotten a leg-up in electoral politics, but it doesn’t exactly reflect support from the wider “community” you’ll pretend to represent.) Some benighted representatives of the media and academia will, of course, hail the election of a Vietnamese immigrant as some splendiferous triumph of “diversity,” but the actual story is infinitely more complex and, if we may stoop to rank sentimentality, sadder. The turnout for Saturday’s runoffs in District F was pathetic: Hoang won by about 500 votes of the 8,860 or so total cast. Aloysius found a convenient jurisdiction in which to pursue his ambition of becoming a macher in Viet-Am circles. We hope that from here on out he can be found laying his head on a goddamn pillow every night in District F (F is for “forewarned is forearmed”).

Okay, we were stunned. More on this as developments warrant.

Blues in the Bottle, at Tater Diggin’ Time: A Dead Voice Gathered, Just Barely

2009-12-06T20:34:00.011-06:00

Note: The following has nothing to do with politics or government ... or maybe it does.
–– Hidalgo Hidalgo, editor emeritus, Slampo’s Place

Late, late t’other night, while piddling on the Internet (is there any controlled substance as capable of sending the user on extended, pointless, insidiously time-wasting jags?), our meanderings brought us to a site called, somewhat unimaginatively, Old Weird America, the phrase the author-critic Greil Marcus formulated to describe the ethnographic emanations from Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, the Ur-text from which Dylan and hundreds of lesser mortals cribbed, and which was the real subject of Marcus’s book Invisible Republic (which ostensibly was about Dylan’s Basement Tapes). The site appears to be maintained by an obsessive, Middle Eastern-looking Frenchman who goes by the handle “Gadaya” and who, apparently as a selfless act of l-u-v, has devoted himself to profiling each and every musician or band who appeared on Smith’s anthology. It so happened that our eyes fell on the entry for Prince Albert Hunt’s Texas Ramblers, a Dallas-area "hot string" combo whose Wake Up Jacob appeared on the Smith anthology. Prince Albert––his full name was Archie Albert Hunt; apparently he assumed the royal title from the side of a tobacco tin––is believed to have recorded only eight songs for the storied Okeh recording company before a jealous husband drilled him in the heart with a .25 automatic as Hunt and his killer’s wife exited a joint called Confederate Hall in Dallas in 1931. Prince Albert’s best known contribution to the American songbook was Blues in the Bottle, a sprightly, careening number made known to future generations through the Lovin‘ Spoonful’s reworking on one of its mid-'60s LPs. (That version, as best we can remember, did not include the declaration by Hunt, a white man who performed in blackface at medicine shows, “This old black daddy, I can stand to see you die,” nor did it include that most sublime of extended metaphors regarding unresponsiveness: “Dig your taters/It’s tater diggin’ time, pretty mama ... [but] Ol’ Man Jack Frost/Done killed yo’ vine.”)

Any-a-ways, the Frenchman’s site linked us to folkstreams.net and this absolutely fascinating (to us––you may be bored to tears) 29-minute film about Hunt that a guy named Ken Harrison made in 1974 for Dallas public TV station KERA, before going on to bigger and better things. Harrison undertook his project in the true nick of time, as he was able to interview a number of people who remembered––sort of––Hunt, including the fiddler’s son, P.A. Hunt (who had a startling resemblance to our late Uncle Lefty), assorted cousins (a couple of whom identify themselves as “double cousins”) and a fellow musician named Harmon Clem, who try their best to fill in the blanks on Prince Albert’s mere 31 years on earth (mostly in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area).

The film doesn’t reveal a whole lot about Hunt. Forty three years after his death, memories were worn, sometimes contradictory: One ol’ boy (unfortunately, Harrison doesn’t identify his interviewees as they speak) recalls the younger Hunt as a “quiet” lad who liked to stick to himself; the other Stetson-wearing ol’ boy on the porch right next to him chimes in that Hunt was a “jolly” sort and a “comedian” who “always had somethin’ to say, doncha see?” Ah, yes.

But Harrison's film tells you a lot about what Texas, or at least a good part of it, was like in 1974––check out the shot-from-the-car-window footage of the rolling East Texas countryside, set to Prince Albert's Travelin' Man (was that farmer with the horse-drawn plow a set-up shot?)––which in turn suggests what Texas might have been like in 1931 and 1900, and, if you listen closely, something about why Texas is like it is today. If you’re of a certain age and station, the old-timers Harrison interviewed 35 years back seem intimately familiar. The two double cousins––both in cowboy hats, one with a plug in this cheek and the other with a butt hanging from his lip––are raw-boned tenders of a junkyard whose straightforward, unself–conscious presence before the camera hints at how much the race has diminished in the ensuing decades (although the dental care apparently is much improved). The fiddler Clem recalls how Dallas was when he first arrived there: “There was a bunch of poor people runnin’ up and down the street in 1928 up to ’33. And it was all gettin’ on relief so you couldn’t get a job for love or money. Well, we played them eating joints down in Deep Ellum, we were playing, making a little money in there.” And Hunt’s son, born in 1922, recalls how little his father was around when he was young––he doesn’t really have much good to say about his daddy––and how he and his family would often awake in a house with nothing to eat (which sounds like real hunger, as opposed to “food insecurity”).

Born in Terrell, east of Dallas, in 1900, son of a “full-blood” Irishman and “near-full-blood” Cherokee woman, Hunt apparently grew to be the rounder and rambler that Jimmie Rodgers only sang about. The subject of his assumed (or wished-for) negritude is touched on just briefly in Harrison’s film, when the wizened Clem relates, “He’d get that black on him, and there wadn’t a nigger that could imitate him at all, hardly.” The Inimitable White Man Who Sang Like a Black Man But Could Not in Turn Be Imitated by a Black Man! Ain't that America? In any case, Prince Albert seems to be the missing link between Bob Wills and Blind Lemon Jefferson, whose picture Harrison flashes briefly in his film, without explanation or identification.

Hunt’s story seems similar, save for its abrupt ending on the Dallas sidewalk, to that of Emmett Miller, a blackface singer-comedian of the same vintage whose elusive biographical particulars the writer Nick Tosches spent many years chasing until they effloresced into his brilliant Where Dead Voices Gather. Maybe Harrisons’s film, dressed up by modern editing techniques and supplemented with up-to-date research and documentation, could do for Prince Albert what Tosches did for Miller. Or maybe not. Meantime, you can download Hunt’s Blues in the Bottle, as well as other stuff from the Smith anthology and elsewhere, for free here. Hunt also cut a tune called Houston Slide, which (we think) can be had for nothing here.

Correction: In the original of this posting, whatever you call it, we erroneously referred to the maker of the film on Hunt as "Ken Hammond," which we believe to be the result of a devilish transposition of the names of a former local newspaper editor and the late producer John Hammond. Although we much prefer "Ken Hammond," the filmmaker's actual name is Ken Harrison. We regret the error.

What Your Global Corporate Masters Were Up To While You Slept, Possibly Under the Influence of Ambien

2009-12-05T22:39:00.008-06:00

From a story in Saturday's New York Times on "Ottomania," the widespread and growing nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire that's all the rage in Turkey, supposedly that most secularized and Western-leaning of Muslim countries, which the Times suggests has something to do with the European Union's reluctance to accept Turkey as a full-fledged member:

During Ramadan, Burger King offered a special sultan menu featuring dishes popular in the Ottoman years. In the television commercial promoting the meal, a turbaned Janissary — a member of an elite group of Ottoman soldiers — exhorts viewers not to “leave any burgers standing.”

Mayoral Candidate Takes Bold Stand, Declares "Race" Is Off the Table

2009-12-01T12:51:00.013-06:00

We see that Gene Locke, sporting very pimpalicious Stetson-like headgear he may have borrowed from the Bill White Collection (since both seem to have relatively large heads, and we mean this in a purely physical sense), has gone far, far out on a limb to declare that he will not be making an issue of race or sexuality in the coming days before his runoff with Annise Parker.

We were relieved to learn, and maybe you were too, that Locke has boldly deemed "race" to be a hands-off topic, because, y'know, it hasn't exactly been coming up a lot previously and because, y'know, at least a bare majority of the Houston electorate is still of the Caucasian persuasion (as am we). As for making an issue of sexuality (we believe he meant homosexuality) ... well, apparently he's leaving that to others.

By the way, we have to say that Jack Christie's rejection of the Hotze endorsement causes us to look with some renewed favor on the man. We have no idea what that move was all about, but it seems that Christie could probably use however many votes Hotze commands (we'd bet it's a lot [lot] fewer than the number of mailings he sends out) in his runoff with at-large council incumbent Jolanda Jones. (Although Jones' apparently insatiable need for attention and/or validation still gives us the skeevies, we found our self warming to her a bit after watching the municipal-access broadcast of the council meeting at which she went after the mayor's expensive BARC consultant*––particularly when she expressed mock incredulity at the fellow's charging the city for two hours of his time to speak with her, an elected rep of the people, which Jones suggested was in any event a gross miscounting of the minutes he actually "consulted" with her. )

So we may be throwing our vote Christie's way, if he can satisfy us that he, or somebody, has cleaned the algae from that pool at the in-town apartment he rented last time he ran for a council seat (scummy swimming pools being a serious liability for office-holders).

*An issue we otherwise care absolutely nothing about.

Attention Dave Wilson: Annise Parker Is Claiming to Be “Sensible,” and You Know What That Means! (Doncha?)

2009-11-28T23:16:00.007-06:00

We learned today that during our two-week hiatus from blogurbatin’ the Houston mayoral race has gotten downright meta-, with one of the two remaining candidates exploiting familiar stereotypes to win votes. That candidate is, of course, Annise Parker, who has sent the Slampo family a mailing –– we’re pretty sure ours was not the only household to have gotten it –– declaring, most proudly and unashamedly, although rather prosaically, “There’s Nothing Wrong with Sensible” (not even an excitement-inducing exclamation mark –– how sensible is that?!). Beneath that declaration for the ages is a full-color picture of a pair of scissors and a passel of clipped newspaper coupons, possibly the most unexciting visual accoutrement in the history of direct-mail political advertisements.

We presume this is the Parker campaign’s sly, tongue-in-check riposte to those (supposedly) 35,000 mailings that our old pal Dave Wilson sent out week before last warning Republicans of the plagues that will befall Houston should it elect a lesbian as mayor on Dec. 12. (Dave would have been better off doing something sensible with his money, like taking a book of numerology with him to the dog track.) Parker, in fact, seems to be touting her, ah, whatyacallit, sexual orientation, as proof that she'll be a trustworthy steward of the public purse.

As all of our wised-up cosmopolitan readers know, “being sensible” is a sure sign of lesbianism, perhaps the hallmark sign of lesbianism. You see it in their choice of comfortable footwear, in the low-maintenance, non-gas-guzzling ~~Saturns~~Subarus they drive to the softball field, in their cost-conscious, no-frills buzz-cut hairstyles, in their proficiency with hammers and screwdrivers and do-it-yourself projects, in their love of that godawful straight-ahead heartland rock ’n’ roll of Melissa Etheridge, in their ... and so on.

It’s a wild, crazy lifestyle, as Dave Wilson will tell you.

We personally find nothing wrong with “sensible,” having recently been forced to come to grips with our own inner lesbian. Not only do we clip coupons, often finding that experience the highlight of our minutes spent with the local Sunday newspaper, but for many years we, too, drove a low-maintenance, non-gas-guzzling Saturn. We like to keep our blades sharpened and our tools in order. We spend no more than $10 to have our remaining hairs cut, although we throw in a nice tip if the Vietnamese lady barber administers a brisk scalp massage, and we always wear the most comfortable and unfashionable shoes we can afford (although we don't wear our Crocs outside of the house, and wish you wouldn't, either). And, no, you can’t smoke on our porch. Go stand in the street. (We may have crossed the line from sensible to “stodgy.”)

It was not always thus. Many years ago, in a Hub City barroom near the break of day, we set our T-shirt on fire, not by accident, to impress a girl (she wasn’t, or maybe she was ...). But we have lived, and we have learned, belatedly, that there is nothing wrong with sensible.

Sins of Omission: As “Gay Panic” Hits Runoff, Still No 1040s From Locke, While Chronicle Soccer-Stadium Story Manages to Leave Out the Good Parts

2009-11-15T18:34:00.009-06:00

Following an interesting and informative Bradley Olson story on Saturday documenting a potential unholy alliance between Gene Locke and, as Olson describes it, "staunch social conservatives who are either actively planning on attacking [Annise] Parker's sexuality or strongly considering it,” the Chronicle on Sunday offered a look at the runoff candidates’ positions on the city’s contributions to a new soccer stadium that was notable for a glaring factual error as well as the germane context that it left out.

The paper erroneously described Locke as a former chairman of the Harris County Houston Sports Authority, which presumably has a hand, or would have a hand, in structuring and administering whatever financing arrangement emerges from the apparently stalled negotiations over the facility. Actually, the law firm in which Locke is a partner, Andrews Kurth, is the general counsel to the publicly funded authority, and Locke himself acted as its lawyer at least until April (if not beyond), when, as the doughty Texas Watchdog put it, he gave up “the $640-an-hour fees that went with the job” to run for mayor. And Locke, as far as can be discerned from the public record, is still listed as a partner in Andrews Kurth, meaning he’s still benefitting from whatever work the firm is doing for the authority (as well as other tax-funded local government entities). All this has been batted around fairly extensively in the ground-level media, most notably by Texas Watchdog but also occasionally in this space, when the Lord grants us the time to perform our important community work, and other places as well. Yet nowhere in the Chronicle story is the name “Andrews Kurth” mentioned, nor does the report point out that Locke, as of his last campaign finance disclosure to the city, had received a total of $7,500 in contributions from the Dynamo’s owners, including $3,000 from California billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, and another $2,000 from Dynamo president and former sports authority executive director Oliver Luck (who is identified in the Chronicle story as a fund-raiser for Locke). These contributions, of course, would be wholly irrelevant to the stadium question and were made simply because the donors are concerned about good government in Houston. (Sleepy Chronicle columnist Rick Casey –– hey, we were thinking the other day, what happened to his cuz and onetime Chronicle stablemate, Whitney Casey? –– did report that former welterweight champ Oscar De La Hoya had given $2,000 to Locke, but Casey cited this act of selfless generosity as a “celebrity” donation and failed to mention that the Golden Boy has been reported to have a minority ownership stake in the Dynamo).

(The Chronicle story did include –– you saw this coming, right? –– some contextual fluffery from none other than Bob “You-Need-A-Quote” Stein of Rice University, the yeoman journalist’s bestest friend, whose son-in-law, it is disclosed, works for the Locke campaign, a factoid that only gives rise again to perhaps the most pressing civic question facing Houston today: Is there nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, from Bob Stein? [Of course, we can’t argue with the CW that Stein dispenses to the paper, but the dude needs to start screenin’ his calls .])

All of this makes a nice set-up to the Locke campaign’s refusal to even respond to Texas Watchdog’s request that he and Parker make public their households’ IRS returns for the past three years (Parker has released returns for both herself and her partner).

As for the emerging gay-panic narrative –– and how predictable was that? –– we will for the time being forgo the temptation to pound out 2,000 or so choice words on the subject and instead direct all concerned citizens to the succinct deboning of the non-issue by blogHouston’s Kevin Whited.

Weird Timing: Nat'l Enquirer Touches the Shroud of O'Quinn, in Passing; Stand By for Further Deets

2009-11-11T20:54:00.008-06:00

We see that John O'Quinn has achieved a scale of world-class post-mortem notoriety that eluded him in life: He made the National Enquirer! Twice, if you count the follow-up with new "deets" –– that apparently means "details" in Enquirer-ese –– posted today on the paper's Web site. (It is, as they say in the news biz, "developing.")

Unfortunately for the late O'Quinn, he's the distant Second Banana in thee stories, whose aim and purpose appears to be the continued rending of the once-holy garment of his fellow plaintiffs' lawyer, the boy evangelist John Edwards, whose dallaince with and probable fathering of the child of a woman maned Rielle Hunter was so ably pursured and exposed by the Enquirer when the MSM willfiully (and wrongly, BTW) ignored what apparently was almost right in front of them.

The headline tells the tale: "Mystery Shrouds Death of Edwards Contributor" Oh, the ignominy, to be reduced in death to a mere "Edwards contributor." The "mystery shrouds" formulation would seem to to hint at nefarious and secret doings, possibly on the part of the former presidential candidate, but all that's delivered beneath is the news that O'Quiin was being "considered" for possible testimony to the grand jury investigating whether campaign funds were illegally funneed to Ms. Rielle to keep her quiet. Considered!

John O'Quinn was one of Edwards' biggest contributors and also a close friend of Fred Baron, who was Edwards' national finance chairman.

Baron allegedly paid hush money to Edwards' mistress Rielle Hunter and to Andrew Young, Edwards' former loyalist who took part in the cover-up surrounding the ex-senator's out-of-wedlock baby with Rielle.

Said the government source: "While there's no indication of wrongdoing in O'Quinn's death, it's weird timing that he was suddenly killed with the grand jury still investigating whether Edwards had broken any campaign finance laws when paying Rielle."

Edwards has denied paying hush money, but O'Quinn's violent death adds yet another strange twist to the incredible saga of the slick politician's rapid fall.

"There's absolutely no indication that Mr. O'Quinn did anything wrong - or knew about hush money or even knew John Edwards was having an affair," the DC insider said.

We noticed the Enquirer made no mention of such prosaic details as speeding on a winding, rain-slick road while wearing no seat belt and possibly text-messaging or speaking on a cell phone, or both, but there's not much in the way of enshrouding mystery there.

HOLD THE PHONE: The follow-up with the promised new "deets" revealed that O'Quinn, who died in a car crash, collected ... cars:

It's ironic that O'Quinn - a man who loved cars more than anything else -- would die ALONE in a one car crash. [Emphasis added; so much for the Enquirer's fact-check process.]

Now that O’Quinn has been formally ushered off to his final reward, to the strains of Danny Boy and under the able direction of the Rev. Ed Young, we suppose we wouldn't be breaching the bounds of good taste by pointing up the nature of the O’Quinn enterprise (and that of the boy evangelist as well): He was simply another practitioner, a very able and generous practitioner (as well we know), of the art of Victimology, that narrative mix of grievance and entitlement which holds that a woman who willfully chose to have a doctor sew wads of silicon in her chest –– something that just a half-century ago probably would have been considered evidence of mental illness –– was entitled to recompense when things didn’t go as planned, or that an ol’ boy who continued to smoke three packs a day, long after the dangers of such were writ on the sides of those very packs, was entitled to recompense after suffering the inevitable consequences.

This, of course, is the prevailing orthodoxy in most precincts of the academy, the media and the legal profession, and just how deeply and unconsciously entrenched it is could be gauged by the Houston Chronicle’s follow-up story to O’Quinn’s death by auto accident, which posed the question, apparently in all seriousness, “Was it the road’s fault?”

We await the Enquirer's possible revelation of new and tangy deets on the road-blame factor.

It's the White Lesbian Vs. the Formerly Angry Black Man. What'll the Neighbors Say?*

2009-11-04T07:22:00.020-06:00

Self-promotion is not our thing, either here at Slampo's Place or back in the real world, which is why we always turn promotional tasks over to Hidalgo Hidalgo & Associates LLP., whose namesake's rise from $6.40-an-hour illegal yardman to $640-an-hour world-class publicity-mongerer is the quintessential Houston story affirming Our Town's embrace of both "opportunity" and "diversity." So, in a Peter Brown-like effort to get our full money's worth, we'll turn our space over to this morning's press release from HH & Ass., which he promises will be winging its way to you soon "if I can figure out how to get this dang Fax deal workin'."

Of all the bloggers, joggers, bum-smackers, fact-checkers, booty-snatchers, sack-scratchers, dog-catchers and other "observers" of the 2009 Houston mayoral race, it appears that Slampo's Place was alone in correctly "calling" the results. As Sr. Slampo wrote back on Oct. 24, after viewing the final televised debate between the candidates and ingesting a large plate of Indian take-out that he says left him "a bit gassy" ... "We still think it’ll be Locke and Parker in a runoff, with the black vote (and what else?) breaking monolithically for Locke and Parker beating the bushes to get her diehards to the polls, but either of those two and Brown wouldn’t surprise, and in any case it’ll be close, 3-5 points separating the three but Morales doing better than expected ... "

Thank, you Hidalgo. We couldn't have said it better ourself. However, we must point out that we were a little (or a lot) off in setting the spread among the top three candidates, as the difference between top finisher Annise Parker and Out-of-the-Money Brown was a full 8 points (we figured that Farmer Brown would top out at about 25 percent), and, in truth, we thought Roy Morales would be lucky to crack 18 percent (rather than the 20.4 percent he got –– did the additional 2 or so come out Brown's instant "base" of not-so-committed TV watchers?).

OK, so we weren't that close. And we should also point out that most knowledgeable types whose forecasts came to our attention at least had Parker in a runoff, if not leading. That most knowledgeable of knowledgeable observers, the Bob Lanier Professor of Public Policy at the University of Houston, in his undercover guise as Prof 13, called the "advantage" for Parker and pretty much predicted that she would meet Locke in a second round.

So what happened to Farmer Brown? While we can't quite embrace Sr. Rick Casey's in-so-many-words assertion that Brown's finish proves money can't buy an election –– hell, this is America, you can buy any damn thing you want, at all hours, especially out on Harwin Drive –– it is true that there was much less than met the eye to Brown and his campaign, starting with the constant flurry of plans and proposals the Friends 'n' Family Candidate issued forth to project an aura of substantiality, if that's an actual word. The high point of his effort was the front-runner status he was accorded in late-breaking polls issued by the Chronicle and Channel 11/KUHF, both of whose "screen" of voters who claimed they would go to the polls for the very low-interest election seemed a bit suspect (you know how it is –– you catch some people-pleasing registered voter/respondent at home who's only vaguely aware there's an election and has no history of participating in past municipal election but has seen a PB commercial just recently so she's down for PB, at least for the moment). But PB gained no traction, no momentum from the attention delivered by these polls; instead, we suspect, they caused people who were unsure of their choices to look a little closer or go ahead and throw in with Morales, the other non-black, non-openly gay candidate (unless of course they were black themselves and had somehow been unaware that Locke's black, too, and upon having had that salient fact brought to their attention fell quickly in line so as to adhere to the rule laid out in the Unofficial Guide to Being an Authentic Black Person in America: that is, a black person can only vote for a black candidate, when given that choice). The general lack of widespread interest in the electoral doings basically brought the contest down to committed and informed voters, proving, again that low-turnout elections are to be preferred (the lower the turnout the better; our ideal neo-Platonic electorate would consist of just us –– me, myself y yo.) We believe, however, that PB might have fared better had he not come across in public as a Brooks Brothers-clad combination of Hee Haw's Grandpa Jones and Mr. Haney of Green Acres.**

But the dogs bark –– hear them baying, out in the abandoned graveyard, site of a future high-density loft-apartment development –– and the caravan moves on, although there appears to be some back-up on I-10 due to an overturned tractor-trailer blocking the left two lanes. As to that future, we suppose that either of the runoff choices would be OK and the election of neither would cause some great tragedy to befall the city, although we personally will be casting our second vote for Parker on Dec. 12. We believe that those who say there isn't much difference between the two are wrong, and that Parker will be willing to say "No" at least occasionally, or more often than Locke, although such ability is not one that translates easily into a snappy 30-second TV commercial. As usual, though, we're willing to be disappointed.

As charitable contribution to this great metropole of ours, we're waiving our customary $640-an-hour fee and offering the following advice, free of charge, to each candidate:

1. Locke: Get some white folks out at your next big party, so it doesn't appear to be the nearly all-black affair that the cameras revealed (perhaps falsely) when panning your victory celebration Tuesday night. Couldn't any of those honkified lawyers or engineers who gave you the maximum $10,000 husband-and-wife contribution show up and mill around for a while, for diversity's sake?

2. Parker: Get some males, guys, dudes to stand directly behind you next time you're on TV and up at the podium speechifying; the two gents you had behind you Tuesday night were placed way to far in the back to project on-camera. If need be, Hidalgo Hidalgo is available, for diversity's sake, to mill around behind you and smile, at his regular $640-an-hour rate (meal not included).

Next: M.J. Khan Shocks the World; Reveals Plans to Spend "Three Consecutive Nights" Inside City Limits!

AND: Chronicle to Resolve Runoff Dilemma by Endorsing Peter Brown and Roy Morales, Publisher Says

* Headline borrowed from the New York Times, which belatedly decided that it was "unfit" for even their on-line editions.

**Outdated Baby Boomer-vintage TV references, possibly not even accurate.

Late-Breaking Election News: Scooter Khan Nabs Key Endorsement, Is No Longer a Campaign Finance Scofflaw (Or at Least Not as Much of One)

2009-11-02T17:28:00.011-06:00

It had gotten so that every day for the past couple of months, after dragging our weary carcass back to the domicile we claim as a homestead for tax purposes, we'd pause at the mailbox and wonder, with a rise of no small expectation we found difficult to suppress, "Did Khalid Khan send us any mail today?" This semi-regular haunting of our mail receptacle by the District F council candidate was, for us, the high point of the current, rather drab municipal election season.

We were sad to realize that the mail loped to a stop last week after we were the recipient of a personal "Dear friend" missive from Mehreen Khan, who apparently is conjoined in holy matrimony to Khalid and who, if she's the same woman pictured on several of the many previous mailings we'd received from KK, is a looker, as we aging metrosexuals say (yes, we are the sort of superficial fellow who tends to think better of a guy if he's got a good-looking wife or girlfriend––shows initiative, among other things). Anyway, Ms. Khan wrote to inform us that her husband is not only a successful businessman but a great humanitarian, doting dad and all-around excellent role model. "I guarantee you will be pleased with his work performance," enthused Mrs. Khan, who appears to have affixed her personal signature to the letter.

You may snicker, but as far as we know we've gotten no similar endorsements from the spouses and/or significant others of any of the other six candidates vying in District F, a political jurisdiction that offers an almost too-perfect confirmation of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's theory regrading the deleterious effects of "diversity" on community. (Watch how low the turnout is in this one.) And we have received no similar letter, nary a one, from the wife of Peter Brown (whose full name, we believe, is Schlumberger heiress Anne Brown), or the wife of Gene Locke, or the partner of Annise Parker. Or even Roy Morales' significant other.

Certainly a letter from a candidate's wife urging a vote on his behalf is much preferred to a letter from a candidate's wife urging a vote against her husband, or a vote for another candidate (now that would get our attention).

In addition to the public support of his wife, last week brought more salutary tidings from Khalid Khan: He's finally gotten his campaign finance reports to comport with reality (or close enough), with his latest and yet another amended version of his earlier one now showing he had spent about $92,000 on direct mail through Oct. 24. (Khan, however, still hasn't listed the occupation of even one of his contributors, including one-named $1,000 donor "Nash" of LaPorte, who must be the guy who doles out political money from the convenience store parking lot.)

That strikes us as an absurdly high figure for a very low-interest election in a demographically inchoate city council district. We now belatedly realize that we had grievously underestimated Khalid Khan, who may in fact be the Peter "Farmer" Brown of our humble District F, layin' down the Astroturf and harvestin' the vote.

Enough of this micro-hyper-local palaver. Do we have a prediction on the mayoral race? Yes, we do. It's gonna be Parker and Locke, unless it's Brown and Locke or Parker and Brown. Personally, we're voting for Parker. You go with who you like, and let a hundred flowers bloom o'er this grand metropolis of ours, from the Ship Channel to Highway 6 and beyond, if the city limits stretch that far.

We forgot to vote early, so we may see you at the polls, unless we forget again (if we don't, please refrain from handing us any push cards, especially if they're for Khalid Khan).

The Illusionist

2009-10-29T16:54:00.005-05:00

We've finally realized what it is we've found subconsciously bothersome about mayoral candidate Peter Brown, and the revelation came via the hand of whichever artful contriver fashioned his plentiful television commercials. What Brown promises is magic, that with a stroke of his drafting pencil he can transform blueprints into reality, without the intercessionary messiness of politics, or the application of political skills (neither of which––politics or political skills––we're fully convinced he possesses).

His truly are some of the most honest political advertisements we've ever seen.

Final Wheeze-Off: The Tie Goes to ... Roy Morales!

2009-10-24T23:55:00.007-05:00

Our lightly edited card from the grand finale of mayoral debates, broadcast on Channel 11 Saturday night: We scored it a four-way tie, six-way if you count the two potted plants strategically positioned on-stage, nobody much gained or lost at all (at all), which means the big winner was Roy Morales, the least polished public presence and most un-mayoral looking and sounding of the quartet. But, if anyone was watching (and they probably weren’t), Morales did manage to cleanly and clearly cement his position as the distinct “none of the above” alternative to the other three. And he got on TV! Again! The question for Morales is not of course whether he can miraculously slide into a runoff but how high into the double digits he’ll place (there won’t be a kingmaker role in his future, though, because a sizable percentage of his voters won’t bother to return for an all-liberal Democrat runoff). So let’s see how it went down, by candidate:

Morales: Revealed that as a youngster he had been “beaten up” because, as he put it, “of the color of my skin.” Hmmm. Morales looked to be the second-lightest-complected candidate on the platform, after the overly made-up Annise Parker, so we’re wondering whether he meant other Mexicans were pummeling him because he looked too white, or what. Anyway, Morales obviously has sharpened his elbows since, as evidenced by the clean and relatively cogent poke he threw at Peter Brown over his council vote to assist a development in which his wife is an investor and the digs he took at Gene Locke over his Metro connections and (for instance) his pledge to create a new “flood plain manager” position for the city. Morales was the only one to clearly pledge to oppose extension of benefits to the same-sex partners of city workers (although Brown didn’t seem too enthusiastic over another voter referendum on the matter), a position not to be underestimated as a vote-getter in some limited quarters, and was most forthright in support of the city’s participation in the feds‘ 287(g) (although Parker crisply reiterated her standard no-BS position, the correct position as far as we’re concerned). He also got in a sweet and true plug for making English the dominant language in public schools (which it ain’t, at far too many). Morales’ big problem, aside from the fact that nobody’s given him any money to go on TV, is that he just doesn’t project in person. He did, however, manage to not look like a cute lil’ chipmunk with nut-stuffed cheeks––maybe it was the lighting.

Locke: No longer wants to “dehonkify” the University of Houston, or any other locale, for that matter. “In fact I love honkies ... I love all people, let me make that clear, but especially honkies,” Locke intoned. “Especially honkies who live in Kingwood, Clear Lake, River Oaks, Memorial, and west Houston and have a history of voting Republican. Sometimes I feel like a real crack-corn honky myself, like when I look at all the powerful, influential honkies who have given me money for this campaign, or when I’m up here with these other fine honkies––that includes you, too, Roy, mah honky.” Nah, he didn’t say that, not at all. We actually forgot most of what he said in a response to a panelist’s question about his call to “dehonkify” UH back in his long-past student firebrand days and whether a white candidate, having made a similar past comment about blacks in 1969, would have gotten off as easily as Locke appears to. But Locke basically shrugged it off, good naturedly, and acknowledged that at age 62 he’d learned to “measure my words.” (We know the dehonkifcation thing, if it ever got traction, would hurt Locke out in Kingwood and Clear Lake and so forth, although we personally hold to the LBJ dictum on such matters, pronounced by Johnson when [after being informed that someone or other, possibly a prospective appointee, had a wayward lefty past] he declared that anybody who wasn’t a commie or a fellow traveler back in the 1930s probably wasn’t worth a poo.) Locke’s deft swatting away of the pesky question underscored his real strength as a candidate: He looks and sounds more like a mayor than his opponents. (Yes, yes, this is a whatchamacallit, a phallocentric view, so discount it if you’d so prefer.) He gives off a little of the slick country lawyer––just enough, not too much––and Houstonians of all races and nationalities generally dig that schizz, in small doses. Scored solidly in the debate when he was closest on recalling the city’s current property-tax rate of .63875 and relating that his own tax bill was a “monster” and “in excess of $5000.” Big problem for Locke (aside from the really big one, that being that Anglo Dems who ordinarily could be counted on to back a black candidate are mostly with his two honky opponents) is that he has the least to say of all four––there’s “opportunity” and “diversity” surrounded by little puffs of vague rhetorical smoke––and his campaign seems to consist of retailing promises––or commitments, as he calls them––to all the various outfits that have endorsed him. Just today we read in the Pakistan Chronicle, our sixth- or seventh-favorite southwest Houston weekly publication, of Locke’s endorsement from the 80-20 PAC (Asian-American types) and his pledge to them: “This endorsement is like a contract with you all, to serve your needs and resolve your issues.” Jesus, he’s contracted. That one we didn't make up. (By the way, you know there’s one mighty nuke of a commercial waiting to drop on Locke if he makes it into a runoff––the one about his $640-an-hour fee charged to the Houston-Harris County Sports Authority.)

Peter Brown: He likes to speak Spanish. He’s passionate about recycling (said so twice, so maybe he’s super-passionate.) Didn’t sound as wheezy and raspy as he does around the council table or has at previous encounters. A nice tan. Looked hale and vigorous, as if he could pass for 65. Status as newly acclaimed poll front-runner certified by panelist's query about whether he’s “buying” support in the black community, theme of a recent Lockean radio ad tailored to African Americans. (Brown avoided answering the question but in the wrong way––he called attention to himself avoiding the question, so we had to strike him down 3-4 points). If he said the noisome word “blueprint” even once, we missed it, so we’re giving back the 3-4 deducted points. Hit back rather forcefully at Locke’s role as “dealmaler” and lawyer to the Sports Authority in structuring the now-stressed debt for our nice sorta-new stadiums. “I was a bad bond deal,” said PB. “When I’m mayor we’re not gonna have any of these, quote, ‘deals.' " (So we guess if Brown had been mayor back in ’97 or ’98 he would have employed his amazing powers of prognostication to foresee the subprime debacle and stand athwart these dealings, which means he’s way overqualified to be a mere big-city mayor.) Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job in masternig the art of being a veritable political Rorschach. Right where you need to be.

Parker: Likes to speak Spanish, too, but can’t reel it semi-trippingly off the tongue like PB (and shouldn’t try). Was way too smiley and squinty and sort of faded into the woodwork for the first half of the encounter. Relegated to a sidebar “response” in the Locke-Brown exchange over PB’s alleged purchase of black support, thus appearing to be reduced to a Morales-like irrelevancy. Rallied in the second half, though, with succinct and substantive (or appearing to be substantive––same thing) spiels on 287(g), air quality, flood control, the city’s use of borrowed money to satisfy pension obligations, etc. Parker’s a pro and managed to get off decent-sounding and thoughtful answers during the limited time allowed––not easy to do, as Morales and Brown proved. However, her "sincere," speaking-from-the-heart closing, recalling the old hard-workin' days in Spring Branch, etc., didn't work for us––sounded forced and tinny and definitely was not a deal-closer. Also lost points when she couldn’t recall how much she’d paid in city property taxes––come on, make a ballpark stab––and probably turned off considerable numbers of conservative voters, if there actually were any watching, with her generally favorable but still-cautious embrace of same-sex-partner benefits (although she has “no current plans” to seek a referendum on the question). We respect this as a heartfelt and honest position, probably honoring a commitment to core supporters and dancing with those that brung ya, touching close to home, etc., but there's something to be said for nuance.

So: We still think it’ll be Locke and Parker in a runoff, with the black vote (and what else?) breaking monolithically for Locke and Parker beating the bushes to get her diehards to the polls, but either of those two and Brown wouldn’t surprise, and in any case it’ll be close, 3-5 points separating the three but Morales doing better than expected (just think if he had the money and polish and telegenic good looks of a Rob Mosbacher––he’d be a cinch for a runoff he’d lose).

Scooter Khan Is Still a Campaign Finance Scofflaw (We’re Sorry to Report)

2009-10-22T18:31:00.008-05:00

Today we received our 10th piece of direct mail––that’s 10, count ‘em––from Khalid Khan, who appears to be spending a sizable amount of somebody’s money to win the seat representing the humble precincts of District F on the Houston City Council, even though he apparently does not reside in the humble district. Just how much he’s spent remains a mystery, because, as we and others have previously reported, Khan did not see fit to list any expenditures for the mailings on the odd campaign finance disclosure filed with the city earlier this month. (He also, as noted here and elsewhere, signed an affidavit attesting that he had not raised or spent more than $20,000, thus relieving himself of the legal duty to file his document electronically, then went on to list $34,000 in contributions on his hand-scribbled report.) By our not-too-precise but close-enough count, at least 6 or 7 of those mailings, and possibly more, fell into our mailbox during the Jul 1-Sept. 24 period covered by the early-October disclosure, and their costs should have been reflected in Sr. Khan’s filing. KK––we previously nicknamed him “Scooter,” for reasons that escape us, but it sounds fitting––did not respond to our humble entreaty for an explanation, but later told the Chronicle

... he filed the affidavit because he was unable to get a password to file his report electronically from the city secretary's office on the day it was due. He said the mailing expenses were not reported because he had not been billed for them yet, although the law requires that expenses be reported when they are incurred.

Yes, it does. Blogger Greg, of the humbly named Greg’s Opinion and another potential council constituent of KK’s, has called Khan’s assertion of non-billing “a flat-out lie” and suggested that if Khan were telling the truth the well-known local direct-mail outfit whose stampage Khan’s mailings bear might be required to file its own disclosure with the city reporting the costs as a coordinated campaign expense on Khan’s behalf.

Since the matter of KK's errant report received attention from the daily newspaper, the candidate has filed an affidavit explaining his professed inability to acquire an electronic password in time and resubmitting the same report he “filed manuly” [sic] earlier this month. In other words, he did not revise his report to disclose his actual spending, even though the law must be pretty clear to him by now.

KK’s latest mailing, by the way, is a doozy––an 11X28’’ accordion foldout whose cover features a mock Texas license plate (with the purple mountains, y’know) and the bizarre text-message imperative “Khan SAYNO2 Crime.”

Yes, Khan, do, and meantime say “yes” to campaign finance law.

A Weak, Meaningless Gesture By a Fading Institution Unsure of Its Footing on Today’s “Media Landscape”

2009-10-18T13:20:00.007-05:00

As we expected, the city’s leading daily newspaper had difficulty making up its institutional mind on the mayoral race. As we did not expect, the Chronicle resolved its internal confusion by issuing a non-endorsement endorsement Sunday of both Gene Locke and Annise Parker, complete with the candidates’ mug shots artfully arranged in alphabetical order amid the verbiage. The desultory nature of the entire enterprise could be detected in the less-than-vibrant prose (“Locke styles himself a consensus builder and dealmaker”) outlining the reasons for the paper’s dual recommendation (you the voter and resident of the real world will of course be limited to only one choice on Nov. 3), which read as if it could have been cut and pasted from the candidates’ campaign literature. Our first thought was that Peter Brown, by not squandering any of his wife’s inheritance on a series of full-page advertisements in the paper, may have screwed himself out of a coveted triple endorsement.

We have no inside information on the whys and wherefores of the process that led to this public profession of ineffectuality, but we’d wager that the Lockean portion of the double-nod was reached by a 1-0 vote of publisher Smilin’ Jack Sweeney, after a secret hooded ceremony that included a recitation of “The Song of the River,” that timeless bit of Hearstian poesy that wisely reminds us how fruitless it is to even wonder about “the mysteries/That only God may know” (and maybe [maybe] a friendly shoot-the-breeze discussion or two with Bob Lanier). Perhaps other, more earthbound placeholders on the masthead suggested that a full and unabashed nuzzling-up to Locke would be too much of a throwback to Ye Olde Chronicle, the Jones-owned and then Houston Endowment-ed one that was a serious downtown weight-thrower-around, famed for its inside wheelings and dealings, whose editorials, even into city’s the Early Modern Era, virtually seethed with contempt for the city’s first and thus far only female mayor. Perhaps the need to not solely embrace Locke was rendered more acute by the obvious fact that Parker is the better candidate of the entire lot, and we suspect that was borne out in the candidates’ meeting with the editorial board or janitorial staff or whoever supposedly makes these endorsement decisions. (As previously noted, we’re probably going to vote for Parker but are not yet fully in the bag, and in any case we’re not going to set our alarm to be first in line when the polls open.) A factor not to be underestimated in the paper's calculations is the extra pat-itself-on-the-back points it acquires through the dual nod: Look! We've endorsed a gay white woman and a straight black man! It's all about positioning. (You, the real world voter, will be unable to so widely embrace diversity.)

Meanwhile, the paper complemented its dual endorsement with a new Zogby poll confirming our previous prescient estimation of non-endorsee Brown’s mischief-wreaking potential (by the way, and apropos of nothing in particular, but outside of his commercials Brown has the public presence of a piece of rusty barb wire, doesn’t he?). While we suspect Brown may have reached his 52-week high, the Zogby numbers were in no way good news for double endorsees Parker and Locke. We were amused by the canned ham served up to the paper by somebody named Kim Devlin, a “senior adviser” to Locke (does he have “junior” advisers, too?), who opined that poll frontunner Brown is “learning an expensive lesson that Houstonians cannot be bought and leadership is more than just writing a check.” Well, as our coozan George Will has been known to exclaim upon awakening on the carpet after a long night of whiskey and Hank Jr.

Of these matters we shall soon say more, as sure as the mad river flows into the peaceful sea.

M.J. Khan Shows It’s Better to Give Than Receive, At Least When It Comes to One Particular Donor

2009-10-13T23:36:00.008-05:00

We noticed the largest expense our man on City Council, M. J. Khan, recently reported for his apparently not-too-happenin’ campaign for city controller was a $10,000 payment listed as “refund for contribution” (we think that should have been contributions, plural) to Mr. Haroon Shaikh on Aug. 16. That’s the day after the Chronicle revealed (or at least that’s where we first saw it) that Shaikh had resigned from the Houston-Harris County Sports Authority “amid questions,” as they say, over his apparent ownership of the local Foxx Video chain, which appeared to be sexually oriented businesses but were operating in the city without the required SOB permits (we’re mildly nonplussed when reminded that some consumers still go to the “video store” for their porn, which must be like keeping a rotary-dial phone at your house*).

That’s gratitude for you, huh? It was only two years that CPA Shaikh played host to a gala re-election fund-raising banquet for Councilman Khan at the “elegantly decorated Grand Ballroom of the Westin Galleria Hotel,” as this report on the Muslim Media Network described it, which featured none other than Mayor Bill White and which met the fund-raising “target of $250,000 for the night.” White roused the crowd––contrary to vicious rumor, many attendees did not doze off on their desert plates––by wheezing about the city’s “embracing diversity” through Khan’s election to council (BTW, its there anything you can do with or to diversity, individually or collectively, other than "embracing" it?) and saying that he

.. admired the support Councilman has received from his supporters and his family, especially from his wife, as M. J. preferred to be full-time councilperson as compared to others, which means leaving early in the morning and returning home everyday well past 9:00PM.

... which possibly led some in the crowd to wonder whether the mayor was referring to the
953-square-foot unit in the townhouse complex inside the city on Wilcrest where Khan is registered to vote, or the 10,000-square-foot mansion in the municipality of Piney Point listed under his wife's name. (In either case, 9 p.m. isn't that late, is it?)

In the interest of full transparency we must disclose here that we have no preference in the race for city controller; in fact, we don’t really care who’s elected city controller, as long as that individual doesn’t embezzle taxpayer funds––or at least isn’t caught on tape by the FBI doing it––and speaks passably good English. We most likely won’t be voting for Khan, however, as we’ve already voted for him two and possibly three times for city council and haven’t gotten a whole lot in return. We may flip a coin between the other two, or do something really drastic and follow the Chronicle’s recommendation.

As for Khan’s abrupt return of what he apparently believes is tainted money, consider us unimpressed. From a mere fiscal standpoint it appears that the would-be controller could use the dough, since the financial wellsprings of his campaign seem to have shriveled to fellow affiliates of the local Indo-Paki community (he did have a substantial amount of cash on hand as of last week, but most of it appears to have been carried over from his council campaign stash). More importantly, what does this say about his loyalty? We fully expect to soon see one of those big ugly plywood signs fastened to a fence out in the wilds of Wilcrest, proclaiming, “M.J. Khan: He Doesn’t Dance with Those That Brung 'im.”

*Except for truckers who need something to watch on those long hauls.

Who Is Khalid Khan, And why Does He Keep Sending Me These Slick Mailings That He’s NOT Reporting on His Campaign Finance Disclosure?

2009-10-11T23:22:00.008-05:00

Yeah: As of Saturday past the postman (or woman––we no longer have a “regular” postal carrier, apparently) has dropped into our mailbox eight (ocho) professionally produced mailings touting the many and variegated wonders of Khalid Khan, candidate for the District F city council seat being vacated by the non-related and term-limited M. J. Khan, who seeks greater glory and a larger paycheck as city controller. That’s more direct mail than we’ve received even from media-mad mayoral candidate Peter Brown. In fact, that’s more mail than we’ve received from all candidates for all city offices, combined, in the current campaign season.

But, as also noted this very day by Greg of Greg’s Opinion, another of the large stable of handsome and talented bloggers who call District F home, Khalid Khan appears not to list any expenditures for printing and postage on the campaign finance report he was was required to submit to the city last week. According to our still-decent but not wholly infallible memory, all but one and possibly two of these mailings arrived before Sept. 24, the cutoff date for reporting on city candidates‘ most recent disclosures. And some landed in our box before Aug. 26, the day that Khan for some reason listed as the starting date for his report (the concluding date is Oct. 24, suggesting KK possesses powers of prognostication that would be invaluable in an elected official, or market analyst), although the latest report required of fund-raising and spending candidates was supposed to cover the July 1-Sept. 24 period.

Khan’s report is a a masterwork in other aspects: He signed an affidavit attesting that he had not received or spent over $20,000, thus allowing him to avoid filing his disclosure electronically, then blithely went on to list a total of $34,010 in contributions (all of KK’s donors appear to be fellow Muslims, which does not faze us in the least, but we’re sure this baleful lack of diversity could be bothersome to some of Our Town’s leading Diversicrats, who of course avoid genuinely diverse areas such Alief or Sharpstown when they’re out and about celebrating their own hearty embrace of diversity). Among the $5,939 in expenses Khan listed for his fanciful reporting period were payments for photography, a Web site, voter data and signage, but nothing to the direct-mail company whose presorted postage-paid stamp his mailings bear. Interestingly––sort of––the address listed for Khan’s designated treasurer, one Ray Cunningham, is the same as that of Khan’s travel agency.

One of Khan’s mailings––they all highlight his 6-point “crime prevention plan”––laughably claims he’s “restoring integrity to District F.” That suggests Mr. Khan possesses not only a sense of humor but a certain sense of noblesse, since, as Greg, titular impresario of Greg’s Opinion, points out, KK doesn’t exactly reside in District F. We had noticed that in his mailings Khan has artfully skirted the issue of residency–-if we remember correctly, it arose four ~~two~~ years back when KK pressed an unsuccessful challenge against incumbent non-resident Councilman M.J. Khan–-by declaring that he’s “proud to call Houston home” and “has made District F his home for business for 22 years.” (Robert Kane, another candidate in the District F race, says he’s filed a complaint with the city’s Ethics Committee challenging whether Khan and two other opponents, Joe Chow and Al Hoang, meet the residency requirement to run for the office. While residency is a legally squishy issue and difficult to enforce [although it really shouldn’t be], Kane has compiled cross-checked documentation suggesting that maybe they shouldn’t be on the ballot.)

Yes, we know: Khalid Khan probably has a better chance of dunking a basketball from a standing position that being elected to the city council, but his blatant disregard of the rules is bothersome, rules being for everyone and all that business. Somebody oughta do something about it ...

Locke’s Entanglements Finally Get Some Scrutiny ... (UPDATED To Note $$ from Dynamo Owners)

2009-10-05T17:53:00.014-05:00

One of the unexplored issues of the Houston’s mayoral race––probably the great publicly unexplored issue, but that’s just our subjective and possibly unschooled opinion––is Gene Locke’s partnership in a wide-tentacled law firm that has had a close and highly lucrative relationship with many of the large public taxing authorities of Harris County, including the city of Houston. We’ve been around for a while and we can’t remember anyone with those sort of very stark entanglements previously standing for mayor without getting a serious scrub-down by the media. Come to think of it, we can’t remember anyone with those sort of very stark entanglements previously standing for mayor, period. The general lack of interest in the subject by the media has been puzzling, but into the breach has barreled Texas Watchdog, from the emerging non-profit public-service (and therefore, unfortunately, not widely noticed by the general populace) corner of the journalism food chain, with a report exploring Locke’s partnership at Andrews Kurth and the firm’s work as legal counsel for the Houston-Harris County Sports Authority, which was charged with building the fine professional sports venues we all enjoy and now apparently does some other stuff we’re not quite clear on. Texas Watchdog raises some solidly documented questions about Locke’s continued relationship with the Sports Authority, where he is said to have stepped down as general counsel when he announced his candidacy in April. The report does not mention that since declaring his candidacy Locke has made a rather forthright commitment to seeing a new stadium is built to accommodate the wealthy California-based owners of the Houston Dynamo, a project that presumably would fall under the purview of the Sports Authority, thus providing that entity with a pretext for its continued existence while bringing additional business to Andrews Kurth. (To be fair, odds are the soccer stadium is going to be built whoever gets elected mayor. Still ... )

In a follow-up blog posting, Texas Watchdog’s Steve Miller quoted what he described as Locke’s “boilerplate response” to questions the Web publication submitted for its story of last week:

When I am mayor every decision I make will be based solely on what is best for Houstonians. I am proud of the broad coalition of support I enjoy in this race, but when I am elected my only debt will be to the city of Houston.

Was that the entirety of his response? Not to be gratuitously crude, but that's some weak-ass shit, as the kids say.

Miller goes on to add

The city has some formidable power with regard to the authority, in that it appoints board members that shape its direction — which, in turn, affects taxpayers when a situation such as the possible use of public money to cover a bond-related shortfall arises. The story is a blue-skyer that we feel should be out there, akin to the items anyone should take into account before making a big decision. In this case, the voters can now add this to the list of “what ifs” before they make their final choice on Nov. 3.

Hear, hear. And there’s more to it than that: What exactly is Locke’s financial arrangement with Andrews Kurth as of this moment (a question we believe that only Locke can answer, although if we're not mistaken all candidates for city office are supposed to have filed some general personal financial disclosure that covers the previous calendar year). And what would be his relationship with the firm if he’s elected mayor? (We presume he’d sever all relations, but we shouldn’t be too presumptuous.) Under a Locke mayoralty, would Andrews Kurth continue as general counsel to the Sports and Metropolitan Transit authorities, over whose boards the mayor, by virtue of his appointments, has, as Texas Watchdog put it, formidable power? Would Andrews Kurth act as counsel for city of Houston bond issues? And finally, would Locke plan to return to the firm after he’s done being mayor?

These questions should have been pitched at Locke months ago, but they’re clearly fair game now in light of the candidate’s TV ad, wherein Locke is identified as a “businessman” who “helped revitalize our downtown communities, creating thousands of god-paying jobs,” a claim accompanied by video of Metro’s rail line and Minute Maid Park. You can ignore the fact that neither of these projects is what you would call a triumph of free enterprise, or even what you would ordinarily call "business," and you can look the other way from the dubious assertion that these and other projects have created “thousands of good-paying jobs” (must be the magical “multiplier effect”). But it’s hard to get past the cold fact that Gene Locke is a lawyer, not a businessman, and what he “creates” is billable hours.

As you were, and carry on.

ADDENDUM: For what it's worth, Locke's latest campaign finance disclosure lists a $3,000 donation from California billionaire Phillip F. Anschutz of Anschutz Entertainment Group, 50-percent owner of the Dynamo and would-be promoter of the now-canceled but once-upcoming Michael Jackson tour. Locke reported receiving another $2,500 from Dynamo co-owner Brener Sports & Entertainment of Beverly Hills (the corporate PAC, we assume, although it's not listed as such) and $2,000 more from Brener-associated Oscar De La Hoya, a "self-employed boxer" from Los Angeles (and one of our favorite fighters of the past couple of decades) who has been reported to have some ownership interest in the local major-league soccer franchise. We know these are wholly meaningless and random acts of generosity and that all of these California-based parties are simply interested in enabling GOOD GOVERNMENT in Houston, Texas.

A Fug-Ugly Monstrosity, As Observed by a Stranger to Our Town

2009-09-29T21:37:00.012-05:00

On Sunday the Times Book Review favorably eyeballed David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries, a book composed of journal entires the ex-Talking Head and cha-cha enthusiast made while touring various metropolises of the globe with his musical combo. A dedicated bicyclist in his hometown of NYC, Byrne totes a foldable bike on tour so he can get out and about and take in the local sight-age. As the Times reviewer put it, the book is “partly about cycling but also about whatever Byrne happens to have on his mind at the time.”

We assume (but we’re not spending $25.95 to find out for sure) that the book does not include what Byrne had on his mind regarding Houston, where he stopped for a concert this past summer at Jones Hall (whose sound quality he pronounced “possibly the best of any hall we’ve played in”––hey, that’s something if you’re keeping score), most probably after his book had gone to press. Just as well, because Byrne’s take on Houston––brought to our attention a few months ago by the infrequently active but excellently named Amnesia Houston blog––is painfully mundane. It’s the sort of routine surface-y observations an out-of-towner would commit to memory while pedaling around the downtown area for a couple of hours and then Googling around for another 20 minutes: Enron, no zoning, the lack of pedestrians on the streets, the proximity of old-black-guys-on-the-front-porch 4th Ward to the skyscrapers (complete with cliched photo of said from 4th Ward vantage, nowhere as striking as 25-30 years ago, what with the newish development in the far background), rumination on Jones Hall namesake Jesse, blah wheeze and so on. Byrne does, however, offer a ripe description of one off Our Town’s true monstrosities, one that certainly bears repeating:

A block or so past the run-down shacks — this is Houston where there is NO zoning — is the new Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a weird, almost surreal post-modern edifice.

The mind turns to Alan Greenspan, former head of the Fed, who helped via deregulation to get us into the mess we’re in today — the whole Goddamn world is fucked, Alan! This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator. Alan was recently quoted as saying “I made a mistake.”

Perhaps this snooty New Yorker was unaware that the cheesy, Lego-like structure was designed by none other than internationally renowned architect Michael Graves, notable for also designing “a line of household goods” for Target and more recently was in partnership with [yellow tail] wines. Perhaps Sr. Byrne did not recognize the true genius of Graves' design as a “playful” metaphor for the Target-like facade of our increasingly abstract post-post modern economy. Perhaps the globetrotting bicyclist didn’t “read” it the way we read it as we hurtle past, on our way to purchase Chinese-made goods at the "River Oaks" Target: as a rebuke, and a warning that we should get busy converting our remaining assets into hard metals and burying the hoard as deep in the backyard as the occasionally permeable clay will allow.

Here’s an interesting critique of the building, prompted by the same Byrne journal entry.

Diversity=An Ever-Widening Variety of Ethnic Restaurants at which White People Like Me Can Dine

2009-09-26T08:53:00.011-05:00

We can't let the week pass without calling attention to the almost too-perfect distillation of the mindless, happy-ass embrace of "diversity" for mere diversity's sake that was found in Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg's offering of this past Tuesday. The column was pegged to the news ... well, it wasn't really "news" ... a less-than-newsy Census update showing (again) that the white percentage of both Houston and Harris County's populations continues to decline. Here's how the Teen Columnist* found yet another way to let readers know what an all-around fine and sensitivie person she is:

Although the trend has been building for some time, it's easy for today's Houston, tomorrow's America, to have sneaked up on some folks.
But many of us experience the richness of Houston's diversity every day, at work, at Hermann Park, at the Galleria, and embrace it.

That's a mighty tepid embrace by the "many of us." We don't go to the Galleria too often, but we feel comfortable in pointing out that the overwhelming majority of the cell phone-mesmerized zombies gliding up and down its walkways are white, maybe seven out of 10 you'd corral at random. Not a place where an upscale shopper such as Falkenberg would be discomfited by a general lack of whiteness. Perhaps she meant to type "Sharpstown Mall," but then that's really no place to wrap diversity in a heartfelt abrazo, since white shoppers there are almost as hard to find as a black or Hispanic editorial writer at the Chronicle.

As for "at work," we also feel comfortable in pointing out that the particular workplace where the Teen Columnist slaps together her schizz also is overwhelming white, almost as white as the ice rink at the Galleria, and the higher you go in the hieirarchy the whiter it gets. Not only does the paper boast (maybe it doesn't really boast) a downsized all-white editorial board, but the particular racket in which Falkenberg is engaged is so damn white it's funny: of the 20 personages listed as columnists for the paper, 18 appear to be as white as Falkenberg. That's 90 percent. The other two are African American. Not a Hispanic in view, in a city where, as Falkneberg "reported" with a touch of undisguised glee, Hispanics constitute a plurality of almost 43 percent. Not a one--nada.

This can mean only one of two things: either the Chronicle is one racist institution, nowhere near as willing as its Teen Columnist to embrace diversity, or the newspaper hires and promotes based on merit (and who you know, of course), not on race/ethnicity. Falkenberg could partly remedy this imbalance by voluntarily stepping aide for a Hispanic Metro columnist. Maybe the paper could find one who's a conservative ideologue AND knows something about the city, thus correcting three imbalances with one wild shotgun blast. Falkenberg could then go work the paper's police beat for at least a few months to get a somewhat deeper perspective on the city than can be obtained dining at the Cheesecake Factory.

We will grant that Hermann Park, the third venue where Falkenberg and the "many of us" embrace diversity, does attract a fairly mixed crowd, but outside of the golf course there's really not much of an entry requirement at the park.

*We noticed in her subsequent column Falkenberg seemed to indicate that she is with child. Of this we know no more, not having read past the second paragraph, but we do offer a heartfelt "Congratulations" and wish her the best of luck in finagling the magnet school thing.

Is Houston Ready for a "Gay" Mayor?

2009-09-24T17:31:00.006-05:00

Since we asked: Sure, certainly, why not, etc.––with qualification. [Editor’s note: This posting does not advance too far beyond the previous sentence, so if you’ve got something in the oven or need to walk the dog by all means attend to those matters and don’t fritter away any more time here.]

By “qualification” we mean that if the leading candidate for mayor were a gay man, we suspect the issue/non-issue of the candidate’s homosexuality would have surfaced more prominently in the “public conversation” by now, although it’s unlikely it would have been raised there by any of our hypothetical gay-male mayoral candidate’s hypothetical opponents, because that would not only be tacky but most likely a vote-loser in the current climate. (In the interest of disclosure and so on we’ll note that we are leaning toward voting for the non-hypothetical gay female candidate, which certainly doesn’t give us pause in offering the following customary trenchant analysis that you’ll find only here and nowhere else.)

That’s just the way it is: At this stage of Western Civilization, the public is more accepting of lesbianism than it is of male homosexuality, at least when it comes to the sexual orientation of public figures. And while we’ve met many a lesbian in our day to whom we wouldn’t issue any smart lip, or even wish to face as a batter in a fast-pitch softball game, the public at large––males in particular but other women, too––is exponentially less threatened by gay females, especially the cute ’n’ cuddly type. Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, whose earnest, approachable, fresh-faced regular-gal-ness makes her rabid partisanship almost sugary-sweet. Or Ellen, who of course wouldn’t be the worldwide entertainment phenomenon she is if she were named Eddie ... or Elvis, whatever (particularly considering that Ellen’s not really funny).* Beyond mere temporal issues, Annise Parker has that Ellen-like appeal: wholesome good looks, not overbearing, doesn’t take herself too too seriously, etc. She’s the good daughter, and as a societal archetype the good daughter type has vast and still-virtually-untapped electoral appeal, no matter sexual orientation. It’s associated with “trustworthiness.” (Check it out.)

Some people won’t vote for Parker because she’s gay––”Su homosexulidad podria afectar al voto conservador,” as the Houston Chronicle’s "La Voz de Houston" insert recently put it––but it’s not like they’d vote for her anyway, either because she’s a woman, or is perceived to be too liberal (because she’s woman, although at bottom and on top too Parker’s probably the most conservative of the three money candidates) or, most especially in the present arrangement, because she’s not black. And, of course, some people will vote for her just because she’s gay (these would be mostly other gay people, and why wouldn’t they?). Certainly there are evangelical white voters and others in the city whose minds will be privately (most likely) set against Parker because of who she is, but the probable concentrations of opposition, perhaps vocal, are more likely to be found in the smaller black churches whose congregants already have Gene Locke signs in their yards and who consider homosexuality an abomination, except for the homosexuality of the choir director who can supply his own keyboard instrumentation. You’ll remember that the outpouring of black and Hispanic voters for Obama was credited with helping sink California’s gay-marriage referendum. Life’s funny that way.

It’s possible that Parker’s lesbianism could become an under-buzz issue, of sorts, or already is, particularly given the lack of any real staggering bright-line differences between the candidates. But it’s not like that’s going to swing many if any votes in a first-round election or a runoff, and most likely would lose votes for the opponent who publicly brings it up (or, in a more probable scenario, doesn’t or can’t stop his supporters from bringing it up). We’ll see. Parker’s won six citywide elections so you'd assume that anyone who’s going to bother to vote in November knows she’s gay, but we still get the sense that she and the others are relatively unknown quantities to people who don’t play politics or keep a close eye on City Hall. It’s interesting, though, that the race has gone this far without some nasty public eruption or another (and it’d be splendid if it stayed that way), considering that 25 years ago the Houston municipal election seemed to be about nothing but homosexuality––or gay-baiting, to be precise––with the “Straight Slate” of council candidates and Louie Welch’s “shoot the queers” quip** and Steve Hotze’s Il Duce impersonation and ... wasn’t there some half-baked proposal to make restaurant waiters wear plastic gloves, something like that, to prevent them from infecting a diner’s salad with HIV? That amounted to nothing but sound and fury, but my was it loud.

*Our personal opinion, not verifiable.

**He must have thought it was funny.

Another Question for the Mayoral Candidates (A Continuing Series)

2009-09-20T16:22:00.004-05:00

Q.: More than two years ago a “solid waste task force” co-chaired by Controller Annise Parker recommended to Mayor White that the city impose fees of $42 annually for residential garbage pick-up, which is now paid for out of general fund revenue. Other large cities already charge a higher rate for home-garbage retrieval. Although some changes in sold waste pick-up have been implemented, the residential garbage fee was never adopted. It still lurks, however, as a possible future source of revenue. Which of the following comes closet to your position?

I favor imposition of a monthly fee for single-family home garbage pick-up.
I favor imposition of a monthly fee for single-family home garbage pick-up, and any other revenue enhancement proposal that's brought to my attention. You got any?
I favor imposition of a garbage fee if it can be coupled with a corresponding reduction in property taxes.
I oppose--with no ifs, ands or buts--a garbage fee, and in fact you’ll see my own corpse mouldering in the landfill before the city implements one.
I think it's best to wait until after the election to say much of anything about this one.
Why would I want to address something as mundane as garbage pick-up when my consultants and advisers have crafted all these nifty PLANS and PROPOSALS and BLUEPRINTS to CREATE JOBS and IMPROVE EDUCATION and do all this ... stuff. Jesus!

Trippy Whacked-Out Cactus Flower, With Flies

2009-09-18T21:32:00.005-05:00

A few years back a friend gave up some cuttings from a non-spine-bearing cactus and told us that every once in a while they'd drop these bulbous pods that would explode into really interesting looking flowers. Only thing is, he cautioned, the flowers emitted a strong "dead meat" smell and would attract lots of flies. We've never been able to detect the putrid odor, but it must be there because the flies just can't keep their their nasty little shit-stained feet off 'em. In addition to being "hairy" the flowers have a rough, leathery texture, and we're thinking that when times get really tough we can string together a dozen or so and fashion a snug little codpiece.

Alone at Last, In the Cold Bunkhouse of Time

2009-09-17T15:33:00.007-05:00

Banjo Jones, Brazoria County’s strongest and handsomest blogger, has brought to our attention the news that Dennis Kucinich, in what appears to be an oblique attack on the Obama administration for not pushing hard enough on a public health-care option, has invoked the memory of long-dead cowboy star Roy Rogers and his faithful long-stuffed ride, Trigger (perhaps he’s metaphorically equating O to a dead horse, it’s hard to tell, although that would suggest a heretofore unseen level of wit on the congressman’s part).* Banjo, whose upbringing apparently was similar to ours, confesses that as a very small person RR was his hero--perhaps second only to Jesus in the pantheon?--and that he was so eaten up with the man that he demanded to be called “Roy” and wore a cowboy hat nearly ’round the clock.

We, too, were besotted with Roy, we presume through repeated exposure to the Roy Rogers Show, which we must have been consciously viewing even before it was in the rerun cycle. Roy looms large in one of our earliest childhood memories/traumas: We were vacationing with our family in Galveston--the Jack Tar Inn being the preferred vacation destination until the rising affluence of the 1960s swept us to more exotic locales, such as Destin, Fla.--and playing on the beach with a set of small plastic figures (We called them “Little Men,” as in, “We’re gonna make these Little Men the Japs and these Little Men over here are gonna kill ’em all.”) that included representations of Roy and Trigger and possibly second bananas such as wife Dale Evans and TV sidekick Pat Brady. We had positioned Roy and Trigger, who must have been our prized possessions, atop a sand castle when an unexpected wave broke over the beach and swept Roy and his plastic steed out to sea. Forever. We have a faint Kodochromatic visual memory of searching frantically in the waves for the disappeared Roy while a sub-set of older relatives, sunning their flaccid and pasty skin on the beach, chuckled at the spectacle. We positively recall crying inconsolably over our loss. When our kids were younger and hung up on some piece of molded plastic from Wal-Mart our parents delighted in telling them the story of Roy’s disappearance at sea, an incident which of course we have now transubstantiated into a Grand Metaphor of Loss of Innocence, or sump’in. Jimi Hendrix wrote a song about it.

Looking back, we can’t fathom Roy’s widespread appeal, except for the fact that he always kicked the bad guys’ arses. From this vantage point, he looks to be just a square-jawed puffball of puddin' and virtue, nothing much to distinguish him, except from certain angles now his face definitely projects an Asiatic quality (seriously--check it out!). He lacked any semblance of edge, as compared to, say, Gene Autry, who as a younger man aspired to Sing Like a Negro and performed passably well at it, and who in the episodes of his TV show we catch on the all-Western cable channel looks more distracted than earnest, like he’s got business elsewhere and needs to walk through the scene as quickly as possible so he can get on with becoming an incredibly rich guy/baseball magnate. Our late ‘50s worship of Roy soon gave way to maniacal adulation of Mickey Mantle (a damnable by-product of which was a devotion to reading the sports page, which we trace to the Mantle-Maris home race of the summer of ’61), which then gave way to sublimated man-love of Bob Cousey, allegiance to whom we eventually shifted to another Bob, Dylan, who soon had to make way for Faulkner, William ... which was about our last stop for the hero worship route.

Then there was the always touchy question of Roy’s relationship with his ineffectual comic sidekicks, that hoary literary trope dating to Sancho Panza and beyond. On TV that role was filled by the aforementioned Brady, who never had a chick (or gal, as they were sometimes called) and instead spent his days riding an old jeep he called Nelly Belle, which often wouldn’t start or sometimes broke down when the bad guys were on his tail, while Roy consorted with Dale and never failed to shoot off his 6-gun. Hmm ... (To this day we cannot hear the Stones’ Start Me Up on a commercial for credit cards or an erectile-dysfunction medicine, whatever they’re using it to sell, without a picture of Pat Brady, struggling to fire Nelly Belle’s ignition, passing through our mind.)

Earlier, in the movies, Roy’s sidekick was played by the wispy-bearded George “Gabby” Hayes, perhaps the quintessential sidekick, a true exemplar of the Olde Weird America, much more fly-specked and funkier and easier to imitate than the smooth-shaven and TV-ready Brady. Gabby apparently was quite promiscuous in his sidekick duties, performing them under not only Roy and Autry but also Hopalong Cassady as well as John Wayne and Randolph Scott. That boy got around! We were never clear on on the true nature of Gabby’s relationships with these Alpha types, but check out the potential Brokeback scenario in this video segment, wherein Gabby and Roy are bivouacked in a room by their lonesomes while just outside some non-gay callebreros and their ladies jounce on the dance floor. The song these two sequestered cowpokes are singing? It’s called We’re Not Comin‘ Out Tonight ...

*Say what you will about Kucinich, but he far and away has the best-looking wife of any perennial presidential candidate, perhaps in our nation’s history, and that would include the late Mrs. Harold Stassen.