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

... 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.

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

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.

"Pimp" Was Here (And the Words of the Prophets are Written ...

on the bamboo at the Japanese Garden, Hermann Park, Houston, TX 77030)

For Whom the Cock Crows (It's You, Bub)

It was back in April that our civic club newsletter, ordinarily one of the biggest wastes of paper in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, carried a peculiar but highly informative front-page item (the newsletter has a front and back page—dig it!) warning neighborhood dwellers THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO KEEP A GODDMAN CHICKEN IN YOUR YARD IN THE CITY OF HOUSTON! Actually, it’s not exactly illegal, as the fine print explained: according to city ordinance so-and-so, it’s against the law to “possess or maintain” chickens, turkeys, geese, etc. in a pen or other enclosure “within 100 feet of any actual residence or habitation of human beings …” So if your domicile sits on one of those huge lots in River Oaks or Memorial it’s likely you can keep enough hens and roosters to satisfy all the egg and fried-chicken needs of a medium-sized Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. But in our neighborhood you must live outside the law when it comes to chicken-keeping. (This strikes us as patently unfair—a for-sure “disparate impact,” if you will—and as soon as we get a minute we’re gonna email Obama and see if he can fix it. We know he'll hop right on it.)

As we suspected this notice of city law was not a random newsletter space-filler (curbside recycling is on the 28^th of this month, by the way) but was aimed at neighbors of ours who for several years brazenly keep a lil’ red rooster in their garage IN VIOLATION OF THE CITY ORDINANCE. These folks are not your average urban chicken-keepers, being neither a hard-working family from the hills outside of Zacatecas (if there are no hills outside of Zacatecas, let’s move along) nor the kind of SWPL white folks you find up in the Heights. They are indeed Anglos—no, let’s scratch that; it’s an insult, as the paterfamilias is a hard-shelled little Irishman from upstate New York who, in fact, answers to the name of “Mick”*--but like heavy-metal music and as far as we know had no previous experience in animal husbandry aside from keeping many and various cats around their place.

It seems they acquired the rooster when their son’s girlfriend--at the time he and she were students at the public high school for artsy kids--purchased a baby chick to star in some movie she was making for a visual arts class** (we believe it was a remake of the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, with the chick playing the Brando part), and after the chick had fulfilled its cinematic duties the son and his family took a liking to it and lodged it in a roomy pen in the dark recesses of their garage (why, we don’t know). The chick grew up to be a full-bodied braying Chanticleer, and as we learned many years ago when we briefly lived way out in the sticks between Slim's Y-Ki-Ki Club and Lawtell, La. (you know it as the home of the Lawtell Playboys, of course), roosters don’t just crow at the crack of dawn but are liable to let it rip at all hours of the day. This one did raise his hue & cry just before daybreak—we’d hear it crowing, faintly, from its garage perch when we’d go out for the morning papers—but otherwise seemed to follow no natural clockwork and could be heard cutting loose at 9 a.m., 9:23 a.m., 12 p.m. (when the hand is on the prick of noon), 2:57 p.m., 3:10 p.m., 5:30 p.m., etc.--but never too loudly or after dark.

We grew accustomed to the sound, imagining that it somehow put us in touch with the ancient rhythms of a more pastoral life, perhaps like the one our grand-père Slampeaux lived in the Old Country before he hopped a boat and washed up in East Texas. But we were amazed that the rooster was allowed to do his natural thing for a couple of years, maybe longer, unmolested by the constabulary or one of the neighborhood busybodies. Someone, though, finally took offense to the rooster’s presence and instead of speaking with the owners took the weasel’s path by complaining to the ordinarily toothless civic club, which further took the weasel’s path by printing up the blind newsletter notice. Our neighbors, not wanting to upset the commonweal, hastily returned the rooster to from whence he came, the feed and seed store up on Washington Avenue, and as of this writing know not of his fate.

It’s been a couple of months since his departure, but the other day we realized how much we missed the cock’s crowing when we saw one of those trippy Ambien CR commercials on TV, the one where the bleary-eyed white woman finds herself awake at 3 a.m. with a rooster crowing at the foot of her bed but then she wrangles a script for the sleep medicine and the stalking rooster is banished, last seen wandering off at dawn down the street of some godforesaken outlying suburb (side effects now include becoming “more outgoing or aggressive”) in search of other sleep patterns to disturb.

This modern life: It ain’t no good life, but it’s the life we choose.

*We don't make up the news--we just report it.
**We don't make up the ... etc.

When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears

From "Freeing a Mentor from His Mythology," on the relationship between still-breathing Steve Earle and long-gone Townes Van Zandt, by Anthony DeCurtis, in the Sunday New York Times:

To all but a handful of his closest friends Van Zandt was a remote, elusive figure, apt to disappear and turn up with equal unpredictability. As mentor to Mr. Earle he was hardly a steady, guiding hand, and he was much too stoic to dispense sage advice about songwriting or anything else. The premise of their relationship was something like, if I didn’t think you were good enough to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. He did, however, recommend that Mr. Earle always put the top back on the bottle so that the alcohol wouldn’t spill when it inevitably got kicked over and, when injecting drugs, to use clean needles every time.

He also instructed Mr. Earle to read “War and Peace,” though Van Zandt had not read the book himself, as Mr. Earle discovered to his surprise when he dutifully returned with questions about it. “I just thought you should,” Van Zandt idly told him.

This Just In: There’s No Such Thing as a Miracle Cure. Especially for Public Education. (Especially for Public Education!)

We’re not sure what the world needs at this particular point in history, but we’re almost certain what it doesn’t need is another story in the media extolling the KIPP program as the savior of public education (the examples are many so we’ll not single out any particular one). You’re probably familiar with the formula: a journalist drops in at a KIPP school (or at KIPP’s cousin in Houston, YES Prep) for a few hours, consults the voluminous clips on the Houston-born-and-raised charter schools, then knocks off a quick piece on the supposed wonders that KIPP has wrought with allegedly hard-to-educate “minority” and “inner city” students. It’s an easy space- or time-filler, and the kind of tale the media digs: a pre-scripted feel-good story with a foregone happy ending and nary a hint of ambivalence.

One journalist who’s actually probed beyond the conventional story line is Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s respected and knowledgeable education reporter, whose stories and blog entries, at least the ones we’ve read, still come down very (very) favorably for KIPP. Mathews has new book out on KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice. (the KIPP slogan---it beats “Down With Ossified and Dogmatic Thought,” but just barely), which this week received a thorough going-over in Slate from Sarah Mosle, who casts a hard but not wholly critical eye at both the book and KIPP itself. (Yeah, we’re approaching this subject at a second-hand remove, at least, not having read Mathews’ book, but we’re invoking Blogger’s Prerogative, whatever that is.)

One thing that’s always bugged us a little about all these KIPP success stories, whether based on statistic or anecdote, is that the media invariably fail to acknowledge the obvious built-in advantages that charters have over their non-magnet public-school counterparts. We’re talking about two things: The fact that parents who seek to place their kids in charter schools, even if admittance itself is “random,” obviously have more wherewithal (mental, for sure, if not financial and moral) than parents who are unable or can’t be bothered to try to get theirs out of low-performing neighborhood schools (the ones trying to raise their rankings from “hellish” to “nightmarish”), or aren’t aware of the alternatives (or can’t get out of bed to fill out the application). The second advantage is that the charters contractually obligate students and parents to meet standards of behavior, effort and involvement---something that public schools generally can’t do (outside of grade requirements that must be met at magnets, or most magnets). If the charter’s imposed standards of time and effort aren’t met, the kid gets a one-way ticket back to his zoned school.

The danger in all this is that it risks turning many public schools into default holding pens for the discipline problems and chronic low-performers. You can see this happening in Houston at the middle-school level, where savvy working- and lower-middle-class Hispanic parents scramble to get their kids into KIPP or YES or anywhere but their sorry, gangsta-incubating zoned schools---where, just like at home, they have to take you in.

This doesn’t mean that KIPP’s success isn’t real, but it does means that it merits at least a small asterisk, and raises questions about whether that success can translate on a wider scale. Slate’s Mosle, a former Teach for America teacher, has the goods, and we’re going to break with tradition here and quote at length from her piece, the thesis of which she states at the outset, declaring that KIPP

… is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.

After voicing that sobering heresy, Mosle points out that

… Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird robes." But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date, no one—including such mighty players as the Gates Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and make it the predominant religion within any urban system.

Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle. It's true that perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom qualify for reduced or free lunches. At the moment, like every other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted, comparing students from different schools, even within the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the self-selecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn. (Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP students come from families that are better off, or better educated, than their regular public school or special-education counterparts.)

What is more, KIPP's approach is implicitly, but obviously, not designed to suit all students—or, for that matter, all parents or teachers. For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged children could succeed if only they received the same education as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy the same?

But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor, with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help them read), need something significantly more than—and different from—kids who grow up with every economic and educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m.until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday.

... Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families. While KIPP does have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most determined parents are likely to respond to such overtures and sign KIPP's demanding contract. This dedication suggests a higher value on education within these families, and thus kids better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP's schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worst-performing kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the schools' grade-to-grade improvement.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, or just admire the stripping away of an artfully arranged veneer, you should read Mosle’s entire piece. It’s another reminder that if something’s sold as too good to be true it most certainly is, as Sir R. Allen Stanford may have remarked (in private).

Pynchon at the Ship Channel: Another Unsolved Houston Mystery

Some weeks back, before we were forced to temporarily suspend blogurbatin’ here at Slampo’s Place due to a, um, conflict with the tax-collecting agency (and other crazy-making but passing vexations), we posted, in conjunction with the publication of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, a choice passage from an appreciation of Barthelme penned in the early 1990s by Sr. Thomas Pynchon. The Pynchon essay appeared as an introduction to a posthumous collection of Barthelme’s works and spoke rather poignantly, we thought, to what Pynchon described as his fellow scribbler’s long “love-hate affair” with Houston, where he was reared, grew to adulthood (a ’hood that included a stint as a critic on the long-since-expired newspaper out on the freeway, before it was out the freeway, the same publication whose other illustrious alumni include seminal local blogger Banjo Jones) and to which he returned, at least part time, before his death in 1989. We discerned a larger truth in Pynchon’s take on Barthelme’s “affair” with Houston, because we don’t know anyone with at least half a brain (arbitrary percentage) who’s lived here longer than, say, 5 years (arbitrary length of residency) who isn’t at least deeply ambivalent about the place (that is to say, has come to the realization that Houston has its charms, aside from the cheap cost of living [which, of course, stems from the town’s historical reliance on cheap labor], although these things are usually unadvertised and make themselves known over time, while also recognizing that Houston can be a colossal pain in the rear, not only on a grand damning metaphysical scale but in the mere day-to-day gettin’-along sense).

Anyhoo, it had occurred to us when we first read the Pynchon essay many years ago that Pynchon possessed more than a cursory knowledge of Houston, like he had spent some time here in the ’60s, visiting a girlfriend, perhaps, or maybe he had used Baghdad-on-the-Bayou as a port of call on his way down to Mexico, where he reportedly was known to hang. Whatever the case, his essay on Barthelme exhibited a pronounced knowingness about the town. Shortly after the above-mentioned post we received an email from our pal Il Pinguino, one of the city’s most accomplished belle letterists, mentioning that he had been told by a professor acquaintance that Pynchon had actually lived for a spell in Houston back in the ’60s. On further questioning, Il determined that the notion was set in proximate motion by Larry McMurtry and was mentioned in his recent non-fiction book, Books, a run-through of McMurtry’s days as a book dealer in Houston, the Bay Area, D.C. and now Archer City. (The prof also pointed out to Il that Buffalo Bayou is mentioned in one of the sing-alongs that punctuate Gravity’s Rainbow; this would have meant nothing to us when we read the book 35 years ago during the many slack hours in our seafaring days with Arthur Levy Boat Co. of Morgan City, La.)

We checked out Books from our fine Houston Public Library System---it is, by the way, an oddly flat and joyless tome, but perhaps only in light of our stereotyped expectations of the eccentrics who trade in the antiquarian book racket---and sure enough, the Pynchon-in-Houston tale is told therein by McMurtry, albeit in a curious, tossed-off manner. We have returned the book, not wishing to fall into arrears with another public agency, but if we remember correctly the highly inconclusive story went something like this: McMurtry writes he "may" missed his chance to meet the publicity-shy (which is a whole different thing than “reclusive,” the usual adjective applied to Pynchon) writer, who was "said" to be living "somewhere near the Ship Channel" when McMurtry was teaching at Rice in the mid-'60s (McMurtry’s Rice-area residence being the site of an infamous 1964 visit by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they wended their way to the New York World’s Fair on their psychedelic bus, a visit immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during which an acid-addled Prankster whom Wolfe called “Stark Naked” streaked nude from the bus and maternally pressed her “skinny breast” to McMurtry’s young son, future distinguished singer-songwriter James, whom Ms. Naked had mistaken for her own spawn*).

So where were we? Yeah, this story of McMurtry’s: He also relates that that Pynchon was "said" to need work and that he had sent Pynchon a "note" mentioning that he might be able to arrange something for him in the local grove of academia, but Pynchon replied with a "note" of his own declining the offer (and thank Baby Jesus for that). Why they didn’t get together for aperitifs is left unexplained, but it couldn’t have been that difficult, since the distance between West U and the Ship Channel is not that great, at least miles-wise. McMurtry apparently did not keep the note from Pynchon, the auction of which today might finance the purchase of a sizable lot of used books. Then again, McMurtry rounds out the story by saying it's possible that neither note was actually sent. Hmmm. Maybe it was all a dream, or he misremembers.

That was pretty much it---no explanation of why Pynchon might have been living by the Ship Channel, or where, or what year(s) specifically this might have been. If it was in ’64 or ’65, then Pynchon wouldn’t exactly have been a struggling unknown, as V. had been published in 1963 and won that year’s Faulkner Prize. Next up, in 1966, would be The Crying of Lot 49---is it possible that Pynchon wrote some of the small classic American treatise on paranoia while holed up in some sailor-man’s boarding house on Navigation?

We are a Pynchon fan, not a Pynchon obsessive (we plan to get around to reading the 1,000-plus-page Against the Day one day, most certainly if we find our self with a lot of time on our hands while pulling a prison stretch for tax evasion), so it’s possible that the Pynchon-in-Houston story has been well-hashed over on the Pynchon mailing list, or elsewhere that obsessives electronically gather to obsess, and we simply were unaware of it. The only other mention we can find of a Pynchon-Houston connection, and it’s a fleeting and obscure one, is in this tongue-in-cheek (we think it is, anyway) essay that appeared in Harper’s in 2001 and links Barthelme to the bizarre “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack on his fellow former Houstonian, Dan Rather, on a New York City street in 1986.** This mention predates the McMurtry book but appeared long after Pynchon’s essay on Barthelme, so who knows:

Donald Barthelme is one of my literary heroes. Thomas Pynchon—no stranger to Houston, I might add—described Barthelme, lovingly, as “perhaps a species of anarchist curse.”

(The author of this piece, Paul Limbert Allman, appears not to have written much else in the way of paranoiac literary/crime theory but seems to be or was a writer of books for young adults, including one whose description sounds downright Pynchonesque. Hmmm.)

Other wispy emanations suggest that Pynchon is “no stranger” to Houston: the epigraph from 1990's Vineland comes from a song by the late Houston bluesman Johnny “Clyde” Copeland (“Every dog has its day, and a good dog just might have two”) and, as the authoritative PynchonWiki puts it, the author is “known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.” Maybe Pynchon saw ’em both, back in the day. The mind reels with possibility … it do!

Our own theory is that Pynchon, a Navy veteran who has always seemed deeply knowledgeable in the ways of the water, may have hung his hat here briefly while working as a deckhand or as a crew member of some vessel, perhaps an ocean-going one or one that plied the Ship Channel (as the late Sterling Morrison*** did some 20 years later), possibly to get away from the encroaching fame his first novel was bringing, or possibly to woodshed and write (and what better place to hide away than the east side of Houston in the 1960s!). We wonder whether Pynchon, who supposedly underwent orthodontic work in the 1960s, may have visited our Uncle Ansley the dentist, who made a modest living for many years fixing the teeth of longshoremen and seafarers out of his small office on Broadway.****

True or not, the Pynchon-in-Houston mystery nicely reflects the elusive nature of both the man and his work, and if he even lived here for just one cold, lonely month, that seals the deal: This is one World Class city! (We expect the first 3-day “Pynchon Festival” to get under way at Discovery Green by 2012, at the latest. BYOB.)


*"Everything connects," or so declares this Pynchon obsessive, whom we knew slightly back in '70 or '71 before he got a high lottery number, joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he pulled duty in a typing pool, we believe.

**Everything connects!

***Everything etc!

****Everyth ...

Modern Protest, Houston-Style

So black and Hispanic leader types want their respective peoples to boycott the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo on the night that Caucasian country singer Clint Black is scheduled to perform.

That should be wildly successful, but isn't it a little like calling in sick on your day off?

A Few Questions (and Sundry Points) about the Bellaire Police Shooting of Robert Tolan

These come from a sidebar to a comprehensive story headlined “Bellaire police under fire after shooting” by Charlotte Aguilar in the Jan. 7 edition of the weekly Bellaire Examiner. We’ve annotated them a bit and shuffled their order:

1. What was the origin of the stolen vehicle report that led police to Tolan? As we’ve noted, the Examiner’s competitor, the weekly Village News, reported this week that a Bellaire officer “mistyped one numeral” when entering into his laptop the license plate of the Nissan Xtera in which Tolan and a companion were riding. This miscue, according to the Village News, resulted in a “return” showing that the plate was for “a black Nissan that was stolen.” The newspaper offered no attribution for this explanation and characterized the officer’s mistake as “defying the law of probability,” although we believe it just meant to say that the odds against such a coincidence---alleged coincidence---would be extremely high.

2. What was the substantiation procedure for vehicle ownership? It took the Examiner 48 seconds to run the plate and determine it was the Tolans’ SUV on an online data search that requires a log-in and password. See No. 1.

3. Had Tolan and his companion been searched? Did all officers know they were unarmed? Perhaps the most important question of all, if the explanation offered for No. 1 by the Village News turns out to be true and the sequence that led to Tolan and his cousin lying face-down under police gun in the Tolan family driveway actually was triggered by a bizarre 1-in-1000 (or whatever) miscue. It leads to the following question:

4. Why was deadly force used instead of a Taser, which is standard Bellaire police issue? (Maybe they’re a little gun-shy about pulling the Taser because off all the bad publicity, but a Tasering and subsequent hectoring of the cops by Quanell X certainly would have been preferable to the bullet in the liver that Robert Tolan received.)

5. Were police following procedure in how they allegedly handled Mrs. Tolan’s protest about the ownership of the vehicle? To break it down further, why did Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, who according to police was responding as backup to a call on a stolen vehicle, push Marian Tolan against the family’s garage door after she tried to tell the officers that the residence was the family’s home and the Nissan indeed belonged to her son? We haven’t seen any report of exactly what Mrs. Tolan said or did but wasn’t it apparent to the cops that the woman had emerged from the house, belonged there, and might have had some important information about what was happening in her front yard? (Cotton’s handling of Mrs. Tolan caused Robert Tolan to attempt to rise up from the driveway, leading the officer to fire his gun at least three times, striking Tolan once. In its public statement the Bellaire Police Department described this sequence like this: “An altercation ensued as officers attempted to detain and question these suspects [Tolan and his cousin]."

6. What was the content of the call for backup, and how many officers were at the scene at the time of the shooting?

We have a couple of questions we'd like to add:

7. Were Bellaire police under pressure because of a perceived holiday crime wave in the general area? Both weekly papers carry stories on local crime (as community papers should) and routinely identify suspects by race, a practice that we favor (journalisticaly speaking). In fact, the play story in the Examiner’s Dec. 24 issue was headlined “Be merry but wary: crime on the increase.” The paper reported that “Bellaire recorded three armed robberies last week alone” (it did not identify the suspects in these crimes by race) and quoted Bellaire police community relations officer Joe Quimby saying “crime is definitely up.” Which in a roundabout way brings us to the final question:

8. Was Tolan a victim of racial profiling, as his family and its lawyers claim? More precisely, why, as the Village News reported, did officer J.W. Edwards see fit to employ “a tactic used frequently by police,” that is, checking the plate of Tolan’s vehicle, after he spotted the 23 year old and his cousin leaving a Jack-in-the-box near the Tolan’s family home? From out here in the grandstand it looks bad for Bellaire, but whatever the answer isn’t it likely that a benign form of racial profiling might have worked to the advantage of all concerned? If we may: According to the 2000 Census, there were 131 black residents of Bellaire, or 0.8 percent of the 15,600 or so population (the number probably hasn’t changed much since the Census). We’ll buy you a six-pack if there are more than 25 African-American homeowners in the 90-percent-white city-within-a-city. The Tolans have lived in their house since 1994. Sneer at community policing if you must, but wouldn’t a longtime cop who had patrolled the streets for years and knew the community at least have it in the back of his mind that---oh yeah---a black family lives on this block, and might have taken Mrs. Tolan more seriously (or respectfully)?

Just asking. We await the answers that should be provided by an unbiased entity with subpoena power.

Near-Fatal Typo?

One of the many puzzling aspects of the Bellaire police’s highly suspicious shooting of Robert Tolan in the 23-year-old man’s front yard is how the cops allegedly came to believe (wrongly, it turned out) that the car Tolan and a cousin were riding in was stolen.*

Now we have an answer, of sorts, from the 23^rd paragraph of a story found on Page 9 (talk about burying the news!) of the Jan. 6 Village News, a weekly giveaway that apparently is still not available on-line (so you’ll have to take our word on it---we’re good for it).

The foul-up is being attributed to Bellaire officer J.W. Edwards, who had followed Tolan’s 2004 Nissan Xtera to the Tolan family’s driveway after, as the Village News recounts in the 6^th and 7^th paragraphs of its story, “he tapped Tolan’s license plate into his laptop computer [and] … got a hit. The vehicle came back as stolen.” A full sixteen paragraphs later the News completes the sequence (with no attribution, although the entire story is heavily slanted toward the Bellaire Police Department’s version of events):

After the incident [Tolan’s shooting], the officers learned the vehicle was, indeed, not stolen [as Tolan’s mother had informed them].

Edwards had mistyped one numeral, and in a mistake that defies the laws of probability, the return came back a black Nissan that was stolen. [emphasis added]

Defies the laws of probability? We’re pretty sure the young Village News scribe did not mean to say that such an explanation was impossible (didn't he?), yet you don’t have to open your nostrils very wide to detect a bad odor coming off this entire incident.

We’re not passing judgment---we weren’t there, and so far we’ve got very few facts to base a judgment on---but we do hope the newly installed district attorney gets cracking and pursues the truth with more diligence than her immediate predecessors might have.

*Also puzzling, but inconsequential in the scheme of things, is why the Houston Chronicle, after correctly running the Tolan shooting as its front-page play story on New Year's Day, let four days elapse before it got around to again reporting on the shooting. Talk about a long weekend!

Good News: Houston Advances to 54th Place from 55th in "Literate Cities" Rankings; Boosters Cite Jump as More Evidence of "World Class" Stature

Yep, you read that right: Houston climbed an entire notch this year in the "Most Literate Cities" rankings issued annually by Central Connecticut State University, that storied academic powerhouse of New Britain, Conn. (women's lacrosse team mascot: the "Slammin' Poochies"). The bad news is that Our Town still hasn't overtaken Riverside, Calif. ("County Seat of Riverside County") and Newark, N.J. ("A Real Fine Place to Carry a Gun") in the ratings.

How'd we pull it off? Hard to say, given that the CCSU researchers base the rankings of 70 cities (with populations of at least 250,000) on an index of six "key indicators" of a burg's literacy. As one of Houston's paragons of literacy, Ken Hoffman, might put it, here's how we stacked up against other major metropolises across the land, from our best to our worst category (for some reason the researchers did not link to their findings in the 6th category, bookstores per capita):

25th in Internet resources

Tied with Fort Worth for 48th in publications

Tied for 52nd with San Diego for newspaper circulation

53rd in education attainment of its citizenry

Tied for No. 68 with Stockton, Ca. in library resources

The rankings were topped by the usual suspects, with Minneapolis (too cold to do anything but read) and Seattle (lots of coffee-sipping goatee-strokers with computers) knotted-up at No. 1, followed by No. 3 Washington D.C. (somebody's gotta read and write all those federal regs), No. 4 St. Paul (doughty "twin city" of No. 1 Minneapolis) and No. 5 San Francisco (figures).

The discerning reader---assuming you've been able to read this far---will note that the above cities are all horribly expensive places to live when compared to Houston ('cause they got unions and land-use regs and workable mass transit and so forth) and, except for D.C., all have negligible populations of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Also---and we believe S. Palin would second the motion---they're all gay, as the kids say.*

Anyway, so what if we (us Houstonians) aren't big on the readin' and writin' thing. We (me) haven't done any research on this, but we'd wager that Our Town has far and away more Wing Stop locations than any of these fancy-pants cities. Plus: We got the Art Car Parade!

They can rank all day and all the night, but we's No. 1!

*Not "gay" as in homosexual, because of the above cities we believe Houston would be second only to S.F. in both total number of gay men and women and gays per capita, but "gay" as defined by the authoritative Urban Dictionary: "Often used to describe something stupid or unfortunate. Originating from homophobia; quite preferable among many teenage males in order to buff up their 'masculinity.' " Hotcha!

Proper Nouns

The other day our wife was showing us a list of kids from her school who'd received scholarships, or grants---some kind of monetary reward---from the Dell Foundation, or maybe the Gates Foundation (we were not fully present in the conversational moment, alas). She proudly singled out one recipient, a Hispanic lad whose Christian name---'scuse us, his given name---was the stoutly Germanic Gessner (the 13,286th most popular first name in the U.S., just ahead of Chikezie, according to this authoritative Web site). Gessner was headed to or already up at A&M and would be using his windfall to buy an Apple laptop.

That was all well and good but we're the scholarly type and had pressing questions: "So was he named after the street?* Does he have siblings named 'Fondren' and 'Wilcrest' and so forth?"

"I dunno," said she, "I never asked him."

Just a few days earlier, however, she had voluntarily related her ferreting out of the story behind the handle of another unusually named student. This one was christened DeNiro and upon inquiry it turned out that his mother or grandmother or aunt or whoever was in charge of naming him was from Brooklyn or the Bronx and wanted the boy to walk the semi-mean streets of Houston equipped with the name of the film actor most identified with New York City.

It probably goes without saying that this DeNiro is African American. Black folks are taking all the good names---regardless of race!

*To our readers in France: This is a long north-south thoroughfare in southwest Houston that is sort of like the Champs-Elysées, if the Champs-Elysées were lined with block after block of apartment complexes and dowdy commercial "strip" centers.

Comcast Enhances Its Rep for Excellent Customer Service While Desecrating the Memory of Our Town's Namesake

When the grades are passed out for post-Ike performance---we’re sure the Chronicle will get around to this, once it finishes reporting on how the storm brought together and/or renewed the faith of each and every ethno-religious sub-category in town*---we hope that Comcast, the city’s cable TV monopoly and our own erstwhile Internet provider, gets a big, fat, red F.

Something like this: F.

Yes, we know, it’s unseemly to be grousing about our lack of Internet access and Cable TV when so many people went without electricity for so long**, or still don’t have it---like many of our blacked-out neighbors, some of whom took to the streets a couple of days ago for a sign-waving protest against CenterPoint that drew Jeff McShan and his Channel 11 camera (had we been apprised of the gathering we would have wandered over with our guitar and serenaded the protesters with a couple of verses of Ohio). But as of this writing it’s been more than 2 weeks, and what has us riled is not so much that we’re missing Project Runway and can’t stay up-to-the-minute on the imminent collapse of the U.S. financial system, but that Comcast has done such a dreadful job of explaining itself to its customers (namely us, for starters). On top of that, since the hurricane passed the company has been airing an appallingly insulting commercial angling for new customers---while it can’t even service many of its existing ones!---that desecrates the memory of Sam Houston, our town’s namesake and the greatest Texan of all (greater than Willie Nelson, Darrell Royal and your grandma combined).

Just this Saturday morning we rang up Comcast and after being on hold for 25 minutes (we were in a hurry to leave the house and our patience was thin) a harried-sounding woman told us that our area indeed had service and the problem must lie solely at our house. We said this could not be so, because everything looked OK on our drop line and none of our neighbors had their Comcast services, but she said, no, we were wrong and the earliest she could send a technician would be Tuesday. It was then we lost our shit and began asking for the apocryphal “supervisor,” but the woman resolutely refused to transfer us to a higher-up, explaining, “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s lots of customers in your position right now” (meaning, apparently, on the verge of coronary thrombosis). The woman’s explanation was entirely different from the one we’d been given during our previous four calls: that services were out in our area and Comcast couldn’t say when they would be restored. Sure enough, 20 minutes later our neighbor, who had been on the horn to Comcast at the same time we were, related that she had been told that services were out in the "entire area," wherever that encompasses, and it was not known when they would be back up, etc.

It was like that the whole time. On the Monday after the storm we called to report the outage and after the obligatory 25-minute wait we asked whether we would be charged for our non-services and and the woman said “that has not been decided.” The next day we read in the Chronicle that a Comcast spokesman or woman had assured customers they would be credited for the outages. Then we ran into an old guy we know at our YMCA who was using its wi-fi and who said he had called Comcast earlier that day and been told there there would be no credits … Then the next day we read in the Chronicle (again) that yes, customers would be credited, but they had to call or email to request that they not be charged.

And so on Sunday morning we saw a Comcast technician, an affable African dude as it turned out, pull up to a house around the corner from ours.“You here to get us our service back?” we asked after rushing over. “No, I’m disconnecting these people, “ he said, explaining that the residents were tired of waiting for the Great Comcast Resotoration and were switching providers (an option we considered and rejected, since we've found that any switching around with technology usually ends up costing us money or some other grief).

“We're connecting and disconnecting," he went on. "But you’re not restoring service to your customers?” we asked. “Oh yes, we’re doing that too," he replied. "But shouldn't y'all be busy getting service back to the people who've paid for it, making that a priority?" we asked. "Exactly!" said the Comcast man, in a very delightful post-colonial English accent. "You need to call them and tell them that," he added helpfully. "Naw, man," said we, "we're tired of calling Comcast---we're gonna go home and finish reading the Bible." "Excellent!" said he.

WHOA … HOLD ON---sure enough, just as we were winding up this tirade with a blast of fact-based invective that was sure to send Comcast stock plummeting by half when the markets open, our neighbor rushed over to announce that her CABLE WAS BACK ON. And so is ours, and our Internet, too. We have been made whole again. But Comcast is still a wretched outfit ... and that Sam Houston commercial, especially that phony Hollywood-cracker accent they put in his mouth, is unforgivable.

*We're wondering when the paper is gonna get around to reporting how the Jews have fared, post-Ike, 'cause we've been worried. Naw, scratch that, maybe a report on how all white people are doing would be better ...

**We were among the blessed who had electricity throughout the storm and afterward, thus allowing us to watch Neil Frank repeatedly liken a hurricane to a "figure skater" while the very winds he was pointing to on the radar representation howled outside. The reason we had electricity is because God looked down and saw that we were among the righteous and deserving. You who went so long without power should take it as a warning to mend your ungodly ways.

Constitutional Scholar

Rick Noriega, the Democrat who’s trying to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the November election, was the subject of a “Sunday Conversation” Q&A in the Houston Chronicle (no link available for some reason, but it was in the paper newspaper---honest!) and offered a curious response when asked by reporter R. G. Ratcliffe whether the Constitution should be amended to “deny automatic citizenship status” to children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. Noriega’s published reply, in its entirety:

And no, we should not be amending our most important founding document.

So we shouldn’t be amending the Constitution, and therefore should have no right to free speech (Amendment No. 1), no right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures (No. 4), wouldn’t have banned the sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors (Numero XVIII), would still be denying women the right to vote (19), wouldn’t have repealed the prohibition on the sale and transport of intoxicating liquors (XXI) and might still be requiring blacks in the South to pay to vote (the 24^th)?

We didn’t always pay attention in school, but we believe we were taught that the Constitution is a living document subject to amendment. This non-answer from Noriega---and we’ll acknowledge the possibility that the interview was edited for brevity, although his reply hardly needs further context---makes the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee sound … not too bright.

Surely Noriega knows that the section of the Constitution that is assumed to bestow citizenship on the spawn of any border-jumping mamacita from Zacatecas who can make her way to a public hospital was not part of the original “founding document” but was added as an amendment (XIV) by the Reconstruction-era Congress specifically to guarantee citizenship and its attendant rights to recently freed African-American slaves. No one back then envisioned massive illegal immigration, or even the concept of illegal immigration---or a public-hospital maternity ward, for that matter.

He does know that, right?

Something Spooky About The Spaghetti Warehouse, and It Ain’t the “Garlic Bread,” Apparently

That’s according to “Sandra” (we believe), who seems to have some position of the authority at the downtown restaurant, 901 Commerce at Travis, and who related the startling news to “Pat” (we think)*, hostess of the mellifluously titled Vibes: Mind, Body and Spirit on KPFT-FM, 90.1: The joint is haunted by ghosts! But they’re friendly ghosts!

Apparently everyone in town except us has been informed of this paranormality, we having missed this eight-year-old expose in the city’s leading daily newspaper (although we can’t find evidence that the once-in-a-century blockbuster has broken itself on to the paper’s front page---a shameful omission, given that the world headquarters of the Hearst Corporation’s local franchise [which we notice is looking these days like a giant, tattered, used-up prophylactic] is but a few blocks away from The Spaghetti Warehouse, and there would seem to be plenty of room for such a tale, given the paper’s unused page-one newshole reserved for that war over there in whatchamacallit). Hostess Pat said that while she was relatively new to town she had heard of the haunting from a nephew, who had learned of it from a teacher at his private school (one you can’t hang on HISD there).

Man, did we feel so out of it---us, the Mike Royko, or perhaps the Henry Timrod, of the Greater Fondren Southwest Super Neighborhood.

Anyhoo, Sandra---who according to Pat had to depart the show early to attend to a “medical crisis” that had befallen her father (and we hope he’s OK)---explained that she and the other Spaghetti Warehouse functionaries have a splendid relationship with the ghosts, who are of course the spirits of the deceased who frequented the premises when still tethered to their mortal coil (and have been photographed in their period costume, sez Pat). In fact, Sandra said she often “thanks” the ghosts for the good vibes they send forth and is careful to “give them their space” while fulfilling her restauranterly duties. Pat, whose post-Sandra guest was a guy with about 9 degrees and a delightful Irish brogue, opined that the ghosts actually added to the family ambiance of the restaurant---that is, no harm would come to you or your penne pasta---and fit nicely with The Spaghetti Warehouse motto, which, as Sandra helpfully noted, is “Great Food, All American Fun!”***

Hmmm. It’s been a long, long time since we patronized The Spaghetti Warehouse---much, much longer than it’s been since we actually sat still to listen to KPFT****---but perhaps we’ll go soon. We’d like to commune with these spirits of Olde Houston, ask ’em what they think of today’s developments: Should Metro not be bound by the supposed confines of the English language and run the University rail line down Richmond, or stick it on the Westpark Corridor, or where the sun don't shine? What of Sr. Chingo Bling? Do they enjoy his modern rhymes? Did Phil Garner deserve his fate? And what of Phil Garner’s father, or the guy who introduced himself to us as Phil Garner’s father, a Foxy Grandpa type who buttonholed us and our associate Il Pinguino***** several years ago while we were dining at The New York Bagel Shop, 9724 Hillcroft (not haunted, as far as we know), and opened the conversational gambit by inquiring whether Il and yours truly were “doctors.”******

And finally, we’d like to ask these ghosts for the straight-from-the-afterlife lowdown on the question that has all of Houston in its grip: Whither Rick Casey?

*We were driving at the time---right near, in fact, where we spotted this fellow traveler---and were unable to take notes, thus our somewhat suspect memory may be confusing Sandra with Pat and Pat with Sandra.


**Although the structure does not rate an entry that we could find in Stephen Fox’s Houston Architectural Guide, from what we could gather in a full 2-3 minutes of deep research of authoritative sources, the warehouse was built in 1912, originally was called the Desel-Bottecher (figures) building, and once housed a pharmaceutical company, during which time and use an employee plummeted to an early death down an elevator shaft, thus accounting for the haunting. Sounds real to us.


***Or something like that.


****Listening to KPFT for more than a minute or two is like being cooped-up in a stalled elevator with this guy.


*****Not affiliated with Slampo’s Place.


******Answer was "no."

Mid-Summer Minuet, In Which We Pay Tribute to the Anonymous Civil Servant Who Helped Us Along Life’s Tollway

We were handing our payment over to the Beltway toll taker the other morning when most of the $1.25 in coins of various denominations somehow eluded our grasp and plummeted to the concrete beside our car. As we opened the door to retrieve our toll (while inwardly cussing our self and wondering if we’d ever again enjoy a morning free from some spillage or another), the lady in the booth smiled soothingly and said, “Don’t worry---I’ll get it.” Although her cheeriness at that hour of the morning was confounding, we gratefully thanked her and drove on when she lifted the arm.

It then occurred to us that in all our years of plying the toll roads of Harris County we had never crossed paths with a surly toll taker. Most, in fact, seem to be unfailingly pleasant if not jovial, or at least to possess a natural’s ability for faking these facades (we’ll take it)---making change with a smile or politely asking if we’d like a receipt or wishing us a blessed day as we shove off into the either (we’ll take that, too). Surely this is an anomaly, a bizarre quirk of chance, and there are plenty of teeth-grinding sourballs manning the toll booths hereabouts, for toll taking would seem to be the most mind-numbing of professions, its practitioners prone to not only Carpal Tunnel of the wrist but Carpal Tunnel of the mind. But, as we said, we’ve never transacted with one.

For all we know the toll taker was only following the policy of the Harris County Toll Road Authority, yet we were so moved by her kindness that we resolved to refrain from being a churlish prick for the rest of the day. The resolution was not kept, but we tried.

This is all we wish to report today. We will return shortly with another bellowing narcissistic shriek.

That’s a Relief …

We’ve been away from the city for most of the past week so we have no idea what this is all about (and don’t really want to know), but we still found our self comforted by this correction that appeared on page A2 of Tuesday’s Houston Chronicle:

Houston Independent School District Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra was not among those who visited Pugh Elementary last week to see a baking sheet that some believe bears the image of the Virgin Mary. A story on Page B1 of Saturday’s City & State section reported incorrect information.

Nobody Ever Moved to Houston to Read No Damn Book

Back in another lifetime, when we drew a meager (very) paycheck from a since-discontinued publication that operated out of a building at Highway 59 and the West Loop in southwest Houston, we were summoned to attend a news conference early one morning at a hotel near Hobby Airport. The holder of the news conference was John Tower. We’ve long forgotten the topic, and we can’t remember if Tower was then still the lone Republican U.S. senator from Texas or had taken leave of that office and was on his way to the public humiliation that capped his career. We do remember one thing he said, though.

Tower was way late to his own event---we’re probably embellishing this faint memory, but we seem to recall that from close-up he still reeked of the previous evening’s consumption---and when he finally tottered up to the dais, he spread his arms, grinned broadly and declared, “Well, it’s good to be back in this very erudite city once again.” *

That was the first time we had heard Houston referred to as a “very erudite city.” And it remains the only time.

We weren’t sure what Tower intended by that throwaway remark, and we didn’t have the opportunity to ask that morning, as there were notes to be taken and supposedly more pressing questions to be posed. We figured that he probably was just kidding, giving a hung-over wink to his pals in the small audience, but we also considered the possibility that he was being wickedly sarcastic. After all, he was something of an erudite fellow himself, or had pretensions thereof (with his Savile Row suits and detachable collars, etc.), having attended the London School of Economics and Politics and been a professor of political science for a long spell. And although Tower was born in and raised a bit in Houston and graduated from high school in Beaumont, he chose to base himself in Dallas, where to this day the locals look down their long thin noses at the yokels in Baghdad on the Bayou, as newspaper columnists of days past called our town (how come nobody calls it that no mo’?).

Or maybe he was being sincere, in a chummy and early-morning woozy way, and through his long years of public service had recognized something in our town that had escaped the attention of less discerning observers.

We had occasion recently to again ponder Tower’s salutation when we learned of Houston’s showing in the annual literacy rankings of cities with populations larger than 250,000 as compiled by John J. Miller, the president of Central Connecticut State University (“the Harvard of central Connecticut,” as Jon Stewart called it). The survey weighed several factors to formulate what Miller calls “one critical index of our nation’s health” (don’t ask us how a university president has time to compile a study).

Baghdad on the Bayou was ranked 53rd, sandwiched between No. 52 Mesa, Az. (“The Little Phoenix of Maricopa County”) and No. 54 Phoenix (“The Big Mesa of Maricopa County”) out of 69 U.S. cities (in 2004 Houston came in 63rd among 79 cities ranked).

This year’s Top 10 was populated by the usual suspects associated with books and computers and other manifestations of “literacy”---Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington and San Francisco---but also included Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, smallish tank towns that usually call to our mind “National League,” not “literate.”

In Texas, Austin was tops at No 16, followed by Fort Worth (tied w/ Las Vegas for 44th) and Dallas at 48th.

Houston ranked behind Jacksonville, Fla. (“The Birthplace of Hooters”), but ahead of No. 63 Arlington (“The City With Plenty of Parking Spaces”), No 64 San Antonio (“The Heavy Metal Music Capital of North America”), No. 67 Corpus Christi (“We’ve Got a Nice Beach”) and No. 68 El Paso (“Welcome to the End of Earth”), which barely escaped its last place finish of 2004, thanks to Stockton, Cal.

Most of the cities in the lower third of the rankings are in California or Texas and have large immigrant populations, which we would surmise accounts for their poor showings (Los Angeles clocked in at No. 60). Survey compiler Miller did not see fit to include “a large supply of cheap labor” as a criterion.

What he did consider were the number of a city’s bookstores per capita, the educational attainment of its residents, its Internet and library resources, the newspaper circulation in the metropolis and the number of magazines and journals published there.

We’re generally suspicious of these type of ginned-up surveys (“Fattest City,” etc.), especially one that proposes to quantify something as seemingly intangible as a city’s literacy, so we thought we’d take a closer look at the categories and how Houston fared:

Bookstores, based on both retail outlets and rare and used bookstores, as well as the number of members of the American Booksellers Association per 10,000 population: Houston managed a tie at 39th with Nashville, ahead of Dallas but behind Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. According to Miller, “The presence of retail book stores is positively associated with quality of libraries. So, it is not a question of whether people buy books or check them out: they do both or neither.”

Education level, based on the percentage of adult residents with an educational level of 8th grade or less, the percentage of adults with a high school diploma or higher and the percentage with a bachelor’s degree or higher: Houston showed up, barely, in 51st place. No. 1 was Colorado Springs.

Internet resources, based on the availability of library Internet connections and commercial and public wireless Internet access, the number of Internet book orders per capita and the percentage of adults who have read a newspaper on the Internet: Here Houston scored best, tied for No. 24 with very erudite Colorado Springs.

Library resources, based on the per-capita number of branch libraries, volumes held in libraries, circulation of material, library and school media professionals: Houston again nailed down the No. 51 slot; St. Louis (!) and Cleveland (?!) were ranked Nos.1 and 2.

Newspaper circulation, weekday and Sunday, divided by total city population: No. 50, alhtough the Houston Chronicle has retained its ranking, as you may have read.

Periodical publishers, based on number of magazine publishers with circulations over 2,500 and the number of journals published with circulations over 500 per 100,000 population: We’re No. 49!

Hmmm … there does seem to be a pronounced consistency to Houston's place in the pecking orders.

We must now conclude that in all likelihood our man Tower was poking fun at us.

Or else he thought he was in Fort Worth.

*Writing this led us to muse on how unlikely it would be for someone like Tower to be elected to a statewide office in Texas today.

Six Questions, No Answers

1. Why did someone with a flair for penmanship spray-paint POOP! in black letters---with the exclamation point---on the front of the spanking-new John P. McGovern-Stella Link Branch Library on Stella Link Boulevard in southwest Houston?

2. Why did the Y we’ve belonged to for 17 years suddenly install mirrors on the walls of the area housing the weight machines? Is there no escape from Self (or even Not-Self) anymore?

3. Why did the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd recently write (in a column we read in the Houston Chronicle) that Iraq could turn into a haven for terrorists “that will make the old Afghanistan look like Cipriani’s”? And what or who is Cipriani’s? And why should we have to go to Google to decipher a column in a general-interest newspaper? Is this Cipriani’s the chain of swank restaurants with outposts in New York and London (most likely), or the pizza parlor by the same name in Chicago (highly unlikely), or maybe it’s the home of the kid (now old person, if still extant) who lived up the street from us on North Arlington Drive in the early 1960s (probably not; come to think of it, his name was Cypriano). And doesn’t equating a “terrorist haven” with something called “Cipriani’s” reveal the columnist to be strangely tone-deaf (to be polite)?

4. How come the Houston Chronicle sells the cover of its weekly TV guide to advertisers, but doesn’t provide a disclaimer noting that those covers are indeed advertisements, although it does provide such a disclaimer over the inside “stories” that these covers promote, technically making these “stories” advertisements and not stories in the traditionally accepted journalistic sense of the word “story,” although they are indeed referred to as “stories” in the indexes on the covers? And why are the shows that are so promoted usually not really “shows” in the traditionally accepted television sense of the word “shows,” but rather infomercials for local health care providers that employ present and past local TV news personalities to give them a veneer of journalistic credibility?

5. Tryin’ to make it real: Compared to what?

6. RE: Question 5, When will Dave Chappelle return to TV? We were a little late to the Comedy Central phenomenon that had 12-year-old boys across the country growling “I’m Rick James, bitch” a couple of years ago, but we became quick converts to The Way of Chappelle. Yes, some of it was dumb, unfunny and in atrociously bad taste (even to us), but the man was definitely willing to take a risk, unlike most everybody else on TV (outside of those responsible for The Sopranos, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, South Park and The Simpsons, still, on occasion …. That’s it). Much of it, though, was just too damn funny, and some of it bordered on brilliant: Where else could you see anything smarter, including on the above five parenthetically mentioned shows, as Chappelle’s “When Keepin' It Real Goes Wrong” routine (“Keepin' It Real” no longer being an exclusively African-American priority, if it ever was---in fact, we’ve read that Thomas Sowell has detected a pronounced hereditary strain of keeping-it-real-ism in the early Scots-Irish settlers to this country) or those bits with Eddie Murphy’s brother, especially the one about playing basketball at Prince’s house? Being introduced to Chappelle while monitoring our teenager’s viewing habits was like randomly stumbling across SNL back in ’75: Where did that come from? Of course, it made perfect sense when we learned that Chappelle is a professor’s son who has a farm in Ohio or someplace like that and is a convert to Islam. So Dave, come back---we know you’ve got a lot to live up to, but even second-rate Chappelle is better than no Chappelle.

Correction Corner: In the August 10, 2005 posting on Slampo’s Place, or maybe it was August 11, we misstated the model year of a vehicle in which a group of teenagers we referred to as “Slampo & Co.” traveled in the summer of 1972 in an unsuccessful effort to see the Rolling Stones at Hofheinz Pavillion in Houston. The vehicle that made this trip was a 1960 Ford Falcon, not a 1964 Ford Falcon. Slampo’s Place regrets the error.