Vigorous Exercises of Free Speech, and So Forth

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)?

Dumb Justice

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.

They’re Getting Downright PISSy at the Houston Chronicle

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

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.

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

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.

Portrait of Hunger, With Bluetooth

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.

Calling It In

We were intrigued by the headline Some Houstonians 'calling in gay' on page B4 of Wednesday's Houston Chronicle and thus were moved to wade into the story beneath it, which reported that "gay men and women in Houston and across the country" would be taking part in a "Day Without a Gay" economic boycott in protest of California voters' recent rejection of gay marriage.

We began to peruse the story with a detached, clinical interest in finding out just how many "some Houstonians" might be, and we learned right off that Jerry Simoneaux, a lawyer, "is taking off today"* along with the 10 other people at his law firm (not all of whom, we presume, are gay). So Mr. Simoneaux himself technically was not "calling in gay," nor were the 10 employees who most certainly were encouraged by their boss to take the day off.

The story then moved on to Eric Weitzel, who was "already scheduled to be off from his retail job, but ... plans to call in anyway. "** So neither was Mr. Weitzel really "calling in gay." (There's no better way to demonstrate the courage of your convictions than by not showing up at your workplace on your day off.)

We were well down in the story and so far the Houston Chronicle had not found one living, breathing soul who planned to chomp down on the bullet and "call in gay." But we kept reading (we're that way).

Up next was Kris Banks, president of the Houston Stonewall Young Democrats, who proclaimed that California voters had "spit in the face" of gays but was not quoted as to whether he would be participating in the boycott by calling in ... etc.

At this point, the running total of "some Houstonians" was holding steady at ZERO.

There was a glimmer on the horizon, though: the Chronicle related that there was a "Day Without a Gay" Facebook site with nearly 200 members in Houston, about 80 of whom were saying "they might participate in today's boycott," but nothing confirmed, y'know (emphasis added).

Next up was "local activist" Meghan Baker. Our pulse quickened as we thought, "Perhaps Ms. Baker is the one who'll call in gay." But, no, Ms. Baker "isn't scheduled to work tomorrow," the Chronicle reported (with a straight face, which at this point would be very hard for a reader to keep) and like Messers. Simnoneaux and Weitzel planned to do some volunteer work in lieu of punching the clock. But this was a highly suspicious formulation: "Tomorrow" as used in the story meant Thursday, but according to the rest of the story the boycott was "today," meaning Wednesday and, uh ... whatever the case, we can safely assume that Ms. Baker did not call in gay.

Only five paragraphs remaining, and still no actual confirmation/corroboration of some Houstonians---or any Houstonian---calling in gay. But here came non-gay Peyton Davis, "proud daughter of a gay man" ... "who wants to call in today but can't."

Oh. See, she's an "hourly employee at a local real estate firm and can't afford to lose the income."

Story over. Grand total of Houstonians who planned to call in gay (planned to, never mind their actual doing it): zero, zilch, nada. Perhaps this story would have been more accurately headlined "Gay boycott fizzles in Houston" or, even more accurately if somewhat prosaically: "Gays all over Houston to show up for work Wednesday."

For the record we'll note that we do not oppose gay marriage, not at all ("No skin off my nose," as our daddy used to say), although this appears to be a minority opinion at this time in the United States. What we are against is this contorted, hackneyed, bending-of-reality brand of press-release journalism.

(So long, daily newspapers! Nice knowin' ya!)

*It strikes as as a good idea for all lawyers, gay or not, to close up shop for one, three or maybe five days each week.

*We imagine the following dialog between Mr. Weitzel and his employer:
Mr. Weitzel: "Hello, this is Eric---I'm gay."
Boss: "We know, Eric---enjoy your day off!"

That Wheezing, Groaning, Sputtering Sound

Most days we take no satisfaction in the steady rat-a-tat-tat of bad news regarding daily newspapers. After all, this sorry old world would be a much poorer place without them---and a far richer place if each large- and medium-sized American city had four or five (or 10 or 12!) competing daily papers, rather than one doddering, sclerotic and (above all and for the most part) BORING monopoly product.

Then there is the every-so-often day when we believe the world will mosey along just fine without the daily newspaper, and that the daily newspaper, although falling victim to many factors far beyond its control, may be getting just what it deserves. Today was one of those days, when we pulled our local daily from its prophylactic and discovered that El Chronicle de Houston had devoted well more than HALF of its front page to the hometown-hosted Latin Garmmys* (and chronicled this momentous event, it probably goes without saying, in typical tedium-inducing fashion). If you don't believe the previous hard-to-believe sentence, get out your ruler and take measure of the travesty.

This got us to thinking: How long before America’s daily newspapers begin trying to elbow their way into the lengthening bailout queue? How long

*By the way: Apparently the Site Selection Committee for the Latin Grammys, or whoever picked Houston, was unperturbed by those giant inflatable balloon animals that had our local scenic preservationists and nothing-better-to-do City Council up in arms. In fact, we’d bet those eye-catchers were a selling point.

Dr. Elyse to Hank Paulson: Defibrillate Us, Daddy, So We Can Feel Our Left Arm Again

The Houston Chronicle recently notified us that it would be raising its monthly subscription rate by a dollar. This news briefly led us to consider whether it was time to cancel. It wasn't the extra dollar itself---hell, the market's burned through so many of our retirement dollars* in the past two weeks that we're hardly going to miss a measly buck a month---but the principle of the thing. After all, here's a business asking for more of our money while visibly cutting back on what supposedly is its main product---news coverage**---by laying off or buying out veteran reporters. (And since much of the front page during the presidential campaign and ongoing financial crisis is being given over to dispatches from the New York Times, why not just skip the middle man and go straight to the Times while getting whatever local news we need from the electronic media or the paper's Web site? Huh, why not?)

Then we thought about what we'd be missing with our morning coffee---not just the predictable offerings of the paper's Teen Columnist and the meanderings of Rick "The Hurricane Was But a Mere Electrical Storm" Casey but the much-appreciated relationship advice of working girl "Whit" and the entire page of valuable newsprint the Chronicle devotes to TMI (a painfully tone-deaf gesture in this day and time, we'd say). Most of all, we'd miss the reportage of doughty society correspondent Shelby Hodge on the comings and goings and chowing-downs of the rich and fatuous. (Close readers with long memories will recall that the newspaper, in another strangely tone-deaf gesture, dispatched Mlle. Hodge to cover the big fund-raiser that compact socialite Rebecca Cason Thrash tossed for the Louvre in Paris some months ago. We believe this trip fell between rounds of layoffs and buyouts, so that was OK.)

If we had let our Chronicle subscription lapse we most likely would have missed out on Hodge's Tuesday column, which launched off with a chatty nod to reality

The economy might be tanking and most of us have given up on retirement,*** but some fortunate Houstonians are still eating high on the hog ...

before interrupting regular programming to deliver this important pronouncement from everybody's favorite port commissioner from the 70019 zip code:

Speaking in medical terms,Elyse Lanier offered her analogy for the current economic climate. "Our country is in ventricular fibrillation," she said Friday night at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Grand Gala Ball, which, by the way, brought in $1.3 million. "It needs a defibrillator to shock our system back into sinus rhythm."**** In layman's terms — a normal heartbeat.

If we remember correctly, Elyse's husband, the former Mayor Bob, has himself been defibrillated, perhaps on more than one occasion, and used to be in the banking and S&L rackets, so we're confident that the port commissioner knows of which she speaks.

If only our president could be so articulate.


*We know---it's only paper losses.

**Oh, we're not really that naive.

***Except for her colleagues who were forced to take the buyouts, of course.

****Would a $250 billion semi-nationalization of the banks qualify?

Latent Obamaism Detected in America's Newsrooms---Again!

The Chronicle's reader representative (again, the Slampo's Place Stylebook dictates that we lower-case this job title) has raised the question of whether the newspaper's policy on identifying crime suspects by race (and ethnicity, we presume) is outmoded, given the alternate sources of information now readily available---sources whose producers (including the cops and readers who append comments to online stories) aren't as squeamish as the daily newspaper's brain trust about including the world's recognized No. 1 identification marker in its descriptions of Our Town's wanted men and women. This amounts to another astute admission by Re-Rep II that the daily newspaper is no longer the be-all and end-all of all things newsy. The policy in question, he reports, is as follows:

Race should not be used in a police description that is too skimpy to identify a suspect, such as "a black man in his 20s." But a complete description (several
elements, such as height, weight and personal characteristics) should always
include race.

(Which makes sense, except in any given week the paper seems to be all over the place in its application.)

We're not sure whether this marks a recent or long-past change of policy at the Chronicle. We do recall that the paper's previous ombuds-fellow---Re-Rep I---explained that the paper generally avoided fingering crime suspects by race because that amounted to "racial scorekeeping," a sentiment that we believe he once attributed to the paper's exceutive editor, although we can no longer find evidence of that in the Chronicle archives (maybe we imagined it). This stank to us of something that we lacked the vocabulary to name at the time but which we will henceforth call Obamaism*---the keen ability to discern the true motive/cause behind the failings of your social inferiors, coupled with the overwhelming compulsion to lecture them on how they might cure themselves of their frailties. We believe that what was meant by the dismissive "racial scorekeeping" was this: We are trained professionals with college degrees and many years of experience in our field and it is our duty to protect our feeble-minded readers from themselves. You may cling to your racial scorekeeping, most likely because you are bitter, about something, but there will be no racial scorekeeping** on our watch (except, of course, when it comes to filling newsroom jobs).

The current Re-Rep---who we know to be a smart guy with probably the best news sense/judgment of any higher-up at that newspaper***---explained that the "theory" behind the current policy is that

the limited description of "a black man in his 20s" is so vague as to be meaningless. At the same time, it tends to promote the stereotype that young black men are likely to be involved in criminal activity.

We're down with the "so vague to be meaningless" explanation, if the result is that no published description at all is offered beyond "a man," although a "black man in his 20s" does narrow the possible pool of all suspects down a notch or two (it eliminates us, for instance and most importantly). But we have to wonder about the notion that such a description "tends to promote a stereotype." Is it the task of a supposedly objective, even-handed newspaper to do whatever is the opposite of promoting stereotypes (debunking stereotypes?) any more than it is to promote stereotypes?

We think this explanation, like that of editor's deployment of the racial scorekeeping pejorative, reflects an overinflated notion of the power and influence of the media to direct the thinking of their customers. Humans were stereotyping other humans, both inside and outside their tribes, centuries before there were any media, mass or otherwise, and have continued to do right up until 11:39 this evening, despite the local newspaper's circumspection with racial IDs. Stereotyping---or profiling, if you will---used to be a survival mechanism, now it's material for 1001 bad Comedy Central comedians, as well as a survival mechanism. Everyone does it (including you). It's part of the complex calculus of existence. (Our recent favorite episode of flagrant public stereotyping came courtesy of light heavyweight champ/chump Bernard Hopkins, who prior to his bout with Caucasian [a limey to boot!] Joe Calzaghe repeatedly proclaimed that he would "never lose to a white boy," then proceeded to have his ass royally kicked by the whitey.) Intelligent people of all hues recognize their prejudices and learn to work around them, usually by simply taking people as they come and without censorious moral instruction from the media.

Still, we think the Chronicle should hold off on any change in policy and simply await the glorious post-racial, post-ethnic and possibly post-gender future to be ushered in by President Obama.

*An exlcusive coinage of Slampo's Place Ltd., copyright 2008, unauhtorized use prohibited.

**"Racial Scorekeeping"---a great title/subject for a new blog: "Jews continued to hold a commanding lead today in the number of theoretical physicists, while Eastern Europeans made further inroads into NBA line-ups and African Americans stayed away from bowling alleys in droves ... "

***If favorable comment from this quarter might cause this individual any problems with his superiors, please substitute "roaring asshole" for "smart guy with best new sense, etc."

The Great Days Are Over, But the Love Remains

We were surprised to learn of the fancy-pants journalism award recently bestowed upon the executive editor of our hometown newspaper until we recalled that under his leadership the daily implemented one of the most exciting innovations on today’s media landscape, one that has stanched the loss of subscribers and advertising and reinvigorated the entire enterprise.

As you probably guessed we’re speaking of the paper’s “Relationships With Whit” column, which debuted to much fanfare back in [whenever it was] but which has since been relegated to a small, anonymous corner of the butt-end of the paper’s generally substance-free Star section. We confess that we haven’t been a faithful reader since … well, since the first column … but on Sunday past we arose way too early (the time change must discombobulate our internal rhythms) and drank too much coffee and therefore were able to spend more than the usual 12 to 14 minutes (not including coupon-clipping) that we devote to being reminded how uninteresting the Sunday edition of a major metropolitan newspaper can be. Thus did our lonely eye turn to Whit, whose mug shot accompanying her column projects the sort of predatorily feral look that we seek when pursuing structured transactions under the alias Client No. 9.

Headlined ”The Real Star of the Show,” Whit’s column seemed to be a valedictory for her recently ended two-year tenure as host of a show on Channel 11 called Great Day Houston. We’re sorry to relate that we never had the opportunity to watch Whit on Great Day Houston, an omission we deeply regret after reading her tribute to her TV co-workers:

For the past two years, there has been a small group of remarkable people who work on changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of you right here in Houston.

Let’s see: there’s 4 million or so TV-ready souls in the Channel 11 viewing area, and the audience for Great Day Houston is but a teensy-tiny percentage of that number, and … hell, we’re too drunk to do the math, but needless to say those are Osteen-like stats when it comes changing lives. How did Whit & Co. do this? What were the good works? Is it enough to get them into heaven when it’s time to go knock-knock-knockin’ on the door? Let’s see:

To start, they've happily married off a couple of couples, given away two half-million-dollar homes, a new car, a Rolex watch, diamond necklaces and rings, plus trips to Hawaii, Mexico and Vegas … helped droves of women lose hundreds of pounds while teaching them how to live healthy and happy lives … made over throngs of moms, dads, teens and 'tweens in need. … worked tirelessly to raise money and awareness to help fight the battles of breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, diabetes, lupus and autism…. joined with community groups to help save children from sexual predators and gave parents the tools, knowledge and resources to help their children live safe, alcohol- and drug-free futures …

And

… sent dozens of young girls to prom as if they were rock stars, with new dresses, shoes, hair, makeup and limo rides … introduced Houston to all types of music and taught the two-step, salsa, square and ballroom dancing … showing Houstonians how to sing, skate, ski, sew, golf, garden and grill … roped in all sorts of animals from horses, cows and goats to snakes, lemurs, lizards, ferrets and frogs … From supermodels and superstars to super-moms, hundreds of Houstonians have strutted their stuff after this group got hold of them.

And so on.

If only we’d known, we would have been watching Great Day Houston and strutting our stuff against autism and tween obesity instead of being so goddamn down all the time. But now it’s too late: Whit is gone, at least from the tube (hopefully the newspaper gig’s not ending, too), and we never felt the love:

When I walked through those doors to a studio overflowing with the people whom I have grown to love and peered into those cameras to say goodbye to the people who have grown to love me, it was both exhilarating and excruciating. Moving on and saying goodbye always is.

But as the saying goes, "The show must go on." And it will, no matter who walks through those doors as your new host, looks into those cameras, works with those wonderful people or wishes you a great day, Houston. It's apparent to all who the real star of the show is: It's you, Houston.

Thank you.

No, thank you, babe. And remember: our door is always open, and you won’t need a key.

Houston Demands It: Chronicle’s Teen Columnist MUST Stop Her Shameless Huckstering on Behalf of Charles Bacarisse

Yes, this is “olds” as the funsters over at blogHouston call anything that’s been hanging around longer than 15 minutes, but then again we’re “old” and our reflexes are diminished and we’ve been beset by persistent problems in accessing the Internet since our 13-year-old went to the site screwupyourcomputerforever.com. Besides, as we told our wife about this “repainting the kitchen” project we were to finish over the holidays, we get around to things in our own time.

What has us looking back to those long-forgotten days of last week is yet another vexing work from the Houston Chronicle’s stable of Metro columnists (a smallish stable, housing two, we believe). We’re not referring to the Rick Casey column of Jan. 8, 2008, wherein he reported that Texas Democrats were “giddy” over the prospect of Barack Obama becoming their presidential nominee. This column read as if were written based on pollsters’ forecast of an Obama victory in the New Hampshire primary, and it appeared on the same day that the paper’s front page carried news (or “olds”) of Hillary Clinton’s unexpected besting of the Illinois senator in that contest. According to unreliable sources, Mr. Casey had tucked himself in early on Monday evening and could not be roused to adjust his work when things didn’t pan out as predicted. Another explanation, one we’ll attribute to “observers,” is that the old boy "just doesn’t care." Whatever the case, we certainly don’t hold this column against him: As noted above, we’re not really into “timeliness” our self.

So, no, it isn’t Casey’s “Dewey Beats Truman” moment that has us in a nostalgic mood, but rather the following day’s offering from Chronicle stablemate Lisa Falkenberg, who seems to be brazenly using her column to promote the candidacy of District Clerk Charles Bacarisse in the Republican primary for Harris County judge. How else to explain Falkenberg’s reporting that Bacarisse has been calling on the Harris County Hospital District to press “sponsors” (that is, family members) of documented (that is, legal) immigrants for payment of delinquent bills that the immigrants have run up with the district. (Imagine that: a politician who wants people to pay their bills to a government agency! Outrageous!) As Falkenberg notes

… a decade-old federal law allows the hospital district to hit up [a legal immigrant’s] sponsor for the money, under certain circumstances.

And

… it is true that each sponsor signs an "affidavit of support" promising to take financial responsibility for immigrant family members in an attempt to keep them off the dole, so to speak.

So to speak. But Falkenberg is a wily sort. Employing the craft and cunning she honed as the star columnist of the newspaper’s Yo! page (we think that's right), she brilliantly disguises her shameless promotion of Bacarisse as criticism. We’ll turn it over to Falkenberg here (’cause we’re up for no further paraphrasing, due to the fact that we’re actually lazier than Rick Casey). Referring to an earlier column she had written "attacking" Bacarisse for, as she put it, “attacking documented immigrants,” Falkenberg writes

After a few months of reflection, and recent developments on the issue, I have determined that I erred — not in my criticism of Bacarisse, but in not kicking him more swiftly in the rear the first time I took him to task.

It still seems that his focus on this issue has more to do with polls, political hot buttons and winning over a group of voters whose blood boils at the mere mention of the word "immigrant," than it does with his concern for taxpayers and good public policy.

Turning to the supposed matter at hand---sponsors’ failure to keep their commitment to support family members---she continues

Bacarisse has accused these "deadbeat sponsors" of shirking their duties and has taken aim at the county for not beating down the doors of these sponsors to recoup the money. Months ago, when I queried county officials about the problems Bacarisse had cited, they had no idea what he was talking about.

But Bacarisse's campaign asked the hospital district to tally the net cost of care provided to documented immigrants since 2005. The grand total — about $263 million, a substantial sum, though much less than the cost for illegal immigrants and only a fraction of the cost for citizens, who received more than $1 billion in free care over the same period.

Last month, Bacarisse issued a news release, touting those statistics and singing his own praises for getting results.

"Hospital District starts process for recovering funds and enforcing the law," read part of a headline.

Indeed, because of Bacarisse's inquiry, the hospital district has requested from immigration officials a database of sponsors so they can begin hunting down the sponsors to collect the money. They're just now beginning this process. So, it turns out the "deadbeat sponsors" probably weren't even asked to help pay the doctor bills before they were deemed to be shirking their duties.

This is terrible … the guy’s getting results and he hasn’t been elected yet.

As for Falkenberg, we have determined that she is more than qualified to flaunt her make-believe moral hauteur by virtue of the fact that, according to appraisal district records, she owns no property in Harris County, at least under the name that she affixes to her columns, and thus pays no taxes to support the Harris County Hospital District (NOT ONE GODDAMN DIME). It also appears she is not registered to vote in the county, although there’s still time for her to get her name on the rolls so she can vote for Bacarisse (assuming she hasn’t gone giddy for Obama, and is actually a legal resident of the jurisdiction). Talk about commitment.

We’re pretty sure Bacarisse isn’t paying Falkenberg to write these columns, but we hope he’ll be listing them as in-kind contributions on his next campaign finance disclosure (estimated value: $3.73).

Product Placement

A while back our local daily newspaper began running advertisements on its previously sacrosanct section fronts. That was fine by us, because we understand the challenges faced by hugely profitable monopolies in today’s complex and competitive media and information environment. We fully expect to awake one morning in the near future and find the front page plastered with ads. That, too, will be OK. After all, the reader who can’t tell the difference between an advertisement and a news story---or even an advertisement masquerading as a news story---probably has more pressing matters to attend to than scanning the daily paper.

Yet we must acknowledge being somewhat nonplussed by a recent development in the Houston Chronicle: that of advertisements literally jutting into adjacent news stories. We first noticed this phenomenon several months ago on a page inside the front section of a Saturday edition. The ad was a two-column page-length strip for the 2007 line of Jeeps and depicted three models whose front bumpers protruded in a most unfortunate manner into a half-column of the adjacent news copy. Two of the three vehicles were nosed right into a reprint of a New York Times dispatch on an acknowledged but never-convicted pedophile whose “exhibitionistic blogging about his thoughts on little girls” had riled parents in Los Angeles and raised vexatious free-speech questions.

We tried to finish reading this most interesting story but just couldn’t get past the blithe blurring of the line (the literal line!) between news and advertising. Then there was the slogan that had involuntarily arisen in our mind: “Jeep Commander Limited: The Ride Preferred by the Blogging Pedophile of L.A.!” Perhaps this was just a one-shot experiment, we thought, but as usual we were wrong: Just this Friday the front ends of a whole ’nother line of Chrysler products were parked in a news story, this one about a Holocaust survivor from Belarus who was orphaned at 7 but managed to hang on until the end of the war as a "mascot” of pro-Nazi Latvian troops. Those protruding Chryslers sort of cheapened the story for us, if you dig where we’re coming from.

This must be a fairly effective advertising technique, though, because on Saturday Jeeps were poking out into stories all over the front section (“MySpace hoax called reason for suicide,” “Japan, U.S., tout common ground”* and “North, South Korea make multiple deals”**).

We wonder whether the Chronicle has considered the possibilities this layout style holds for those “Super Sex pill” advertisements.

*Future Pulitzer finalist for "Most Scintillating Headline in a Daily Newspaper with Circulation of 500,000 or Above."

**Runner-up to Pulitzer finalist.

A Slampo’s Place Exclusive Endorsement: Bill White for Mayor (’Cause He Lays off the Grass)

After a long and careful review of the candidates and the issues while waiting for a bus at the corner of Fondren and Beechnut, the editorial board has voted unanimously to again throw the full heft of Slampo’s Place behind Mayor Bill White in his bid for a third and final term.

That means, of course, the election is all but over, unless one of the other candidates---aren’t there one or two?---would like to send some cash money to us in an envelope (no return address necessary). Fifty ($50) could swing it (having spent our formative years in the "Gret Stet" to the east, we’re not only corrupt but come cheap). Contact us at the email address above, and remember when you leave a message to specify which candidate we are to endorse. Be quick about it.

We, of course, have had our differences with Whi … ah, scratch that. We accidentally hit the “insert editorial writing cliché here” button. Here’s what we meant to say: We agree with many things The Guv’nuh has done, disagree or are puzzled by others, consider his “tax cuts” a silly joke but overall think he’s been a good mayor, better than his immediate predecessor for sure (small, small praise) and probably better than his immediate three or four predecessors (at least). We don’t even hold against him---not too much, anyway---the mess made of our neighborhood for a year and a half by the public works department and the soon-to-go-bankrupt contractor the city council picked for a major water pipe replacement project (now fading fast into pained memory).

We’re occasionally tickled by our brethren and sisteren or whoever-en in the blogosphere who attribute every action or pronouncement of White’s to base political motive in advance of his putative run for governor. (We also have to laugh at the mayor’s protestations that his political future doesn’t factor into his decisions---the muddled truth most likely is somewhere in between.) If White were a calculating Clinton-esque triangulator (which he is) but nothing more, then you’d have to say he’s an inept one. Take the attempted eviction of the mentally retarded from their longtime home near River Oaks: What percentage was there for White in that maneuver? It’s not like a donation or two from a developer, if he even were to get them, is going to get him elected governor. From a political standpoint, it was dumb---which nine out of ten people on the street could have told him, if he had asked---so we can only conclude the mayor truly believed he was pursuing the fiscally responsible course, even if it was politically dumb and (if you please) morally wrong. (As age teaches, there are certain arrangements in the world that, upon close inspection, are that way for a good reason and should remain undisturbed by the improver’s hand.)

So White strikes us as a serious person, with a tendency to list toward self-righteousness and sanctimony (and how). That was brought home to us by something called Living Green that appeared inside the Oct. 25 Houston Chronicle. Living Green is the latest in an apparently endless parade of niche publications the Chronicle is trotting out. Perhaps you’ve seen them: There’s Glop, or Gloop, and Health (can Wealth by far behind, or did it come and go and we missed it?), and Sexy Boxing Latinas (“The Chronicle niche publication for dudes who like to watch hot chicks fight”) and Frenchette (“The Chronicle niche publication for Houstonians who pretend to know something about wine”) and our favorite, Sweat ("The Chronicle niche publication for Houstonians who perspire in large and unsightly amounts”). The Lil’ General (5 years=no Pulitzer=hari-kari … oh, he’s not Japanese) who rouses the troops at 801 Texas recently declared that the niche publication is one of the key fronts on which the Hearst Corp. is battling the mysterious “all comers” (some come fast ... some come real slow) in the war against falling circulation and revenue.

And what’s this got to do with Bill White? Hold on, we’re getting to that. Right now we’re building momentum, kinda like the Dead in the 8th or 9th minute of Tennessee Jed at Hofheinz back in November of ’72.

Anyway, regarding Living Green: We won’t waste much time here pointing out the irony of a newspaper whose existence depends on the clear-cutting of acres of forests and the burning of copious amounts of fossil fuels presuming to offer instruction, or even “tips,” on environmental correctness. We’ll just open up Living Green and note that the first item to offend the sensitive reader is deep reportage on the “green habits” of various celebrities such as Demi Moore and Martha Stewart, which appeared right next to a full-page Gallery Furniture ad for an expensive German mattress made only of "natural materials." (And for this, we guess, the newspaper laid off or fired veteran reporters and editors.)

Yucky!

Deeper into the section is a double-truck feature in which some consigned-to-hell Chronicle minion was forced to ask various local personages---a well-known restaurateur, the head of maintenance at Metro, etc.---to rate Houston’s “greenness” on a scale of 1 to 10. That wasn’t the only thing that was asked of them---apparently each of these experts was asked to be photographed holding a FUCKING PLUG OF GRASS, which you would presume is the logo or symbol or whathaveyou of Living Green. It’s unclear and unspecified whether this was a flat of common St. Augustine, as it appears, or some native grass, or perhaps a slab of wheat grass, the kind that is pressed into the juice we drink only when Councilman Peter Brown is buying shots for the house at Whole Foods. Whatever it is and whatever its visual "point," all the participants are pictured holding a FUCKING PLUG OF GRASS---the pained expression on the restaurateur’s face suggests she’s extending a paper plate of DOG POO---all, that is, except for el alcade. The mayor is pictured wearing a goofy green golf shirt, most likely left over from St. Paddy’s Day, and bizarrely gives Houston an 8 of 10 for greenness (ah, it’s a joke anyway, so why not give the city an 11?), but he IS NOT HOLDING A FUCKING PLUG OF GRASS. Maybe he thought, “I’m not participating in this stupid gimmick that somebody thinks will burnish the bottom line of the Hearst Corp., no matter how many back massages and foot rubs I’ve been given by Rick Casey and the Chronicle editorial board,” or maybe he wasn’t thinking that at all, but whatever the case the FUCKING PLUG OF GRASS ended up still in the picture but well behind the mayor on a window frame.

So, um, as far as we’re concerned he's got that going for him, and he’s deftly denied his Republican opponent in the 2010 gubernatorial race the chance to run a negative ad featuring a picture of Bill White looking like a mope with a wad of grass in hand.

Casey Limps Again

Gunfire---the ritualized, celebratory kind---erupted all across southwest Houston early Sunday morning as tens, if not dozens, of the Houston Chronicle’s remaining English-language subscribers unsheathed their newspapers and beheld the news bannered in the above-the-fold “reefer” box: “Rick Casey Rides Again.”

It wasn’t too long, however, before a low collective grumble could be heard metastasizing across the concrete-covered coastal prairie, from inside the Loop to far beyond the Beltway, as the same newspaper subscribers concluded that the writer of the front-page blurb was being wickedly, if not maliciously, ironic.

After a five months-plus “sabbatical,” Casey “rode” back into town (on what sort of conveyance the paper did not reveal, although we now believe that it may have been Casey whom we spotted chugging up the roadway the other day) with a timely column on prospects for the 2009 mayoral race (a subject, by the way, that the paper’s local political columnist could and probably will address with a sharper and better-reported take, at the appropriate time and not as a mere space filler).

If Casey charged his employer for more than the hour (hour and 15 minutes tops) it took to “report” and “write” this blowsy comeback column---or dictate it to a flunky while driving between San Antonio and Houston---then advertisers should immediately demand that the Hearst Corp. slash its ad rates, because that operation obviously has way too much disposable income in its purse. The discerning reader too may have noticed that Casey apparently did not devote any of his down time to learning how to craft a memorable sentence, paragraph, etc.

Oh well. We thnk it was Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, a full century prior to the advent of the blog, who observed: “It’s all asswipe in the end.”

A F**kload of Bling, Whether You’re Ready for Today or Not

El Chronicle de Houston went long Sunday on local rapper-payaso Chingo Bling, who rated not only the cover of the once-fusty Zest section (“Chingo Bling Gets His Shine On”---some hep talk, that) but also was accorded a blurb that ran higher on the front page than that recurring one with the odd full-body shot of the paper’s nebbishy SciGuy (who may indeed have the “sharpest” eye on all things hurricane but lacks the true mad gleam necessary to whip up a genuine panic).

The Chingo Bling profile took the typically happy-ass and unquestioning approach the newspaper takes to almost all its profile subjects, including Death Row inmates. Nevertheless, there were some interesting facts in the story (we assume they were facts---if that turns out not to be the case, please disregard this posting), which was occasioned by last week’s release of Mr. Bling’s big-label debut, They Can't Deport Us All, on Asylum Records/Warner Music Group (the “Asylum” label apparently having changed a bit since it was home to Jackson Browne).

One would assume that the use of the first-person plural in the CD’s title means that Mr. Bling is residing in the United States illegally and thus subject to deportation (uh huh, right) by the “they” to which he vaguely refers, although the subject of his citizenship or lack thereof is skirted throughout the entire longish newspaper article (not that it would be relevant, of course, when you call your CD They Can't Deport Us All). That’s par for the course at El Chronicle, where the question of a person’s standing as legal or illegal, which is at least occasionally relevant to whatever proceedings are at hand, is almost always avoided, unless he or she has gotten shit-faced and killed three people in a car wreck.

But another item hints that Mr. Bling, whose real name is Pedro Herrera III and whose parents, according to El Chronicle, “Came to the U.S. from Valle Hermosa, Mexico,” is probably a citizen in good standing: The newspaper relates that Pedro III is a graduate of Trinity University* in San Antonio “with a degree in business administration and a concentration in marketing.” So much for the street cred.

Whatever his status, this revelation strongly suggests that Mr. Bling’s us-vs.-them La Raza bullshit is simply a clever marketing ploy designed to relieve the gullible of their $18.95 or however much a CD runs these days, in advance of Pedro III’s eventual move to West University Place or River Oaks, depending on sales (parking on the lawn is prohibited in both locations, however).

One important matter regarding Pedro III went unaddressed by El Chronicle, that being the meaning of his nom de rap. As all Leon Hale readers know, bling is the gaudy jewelry and other shiny consumer items associated with the hip-hop lifestyle, while chingo, as any schoolboy in Houston can tell you, is a bad word, a form of the verb chingar, to fuck, although chingar has so may uses and variations and meanings and shades of meanings that Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz---no relation to future Nobel winner Chingo Bling---actually undertook to address that subject in his exploration of the Mexican mind, Labyrinth of Solitude.

Since “I fuck bling” makes no sense, at least to us, we turned to the authoritative Urban Dictionary (hell, it’s as authoritative as anything else these days), which defines chingo as a “large amount” or, similarly, a “fuckload.”

OK, that’s better: A fuckload of bling.

*Awarded the No. 1 ranking by U.S. News & World Report in the category of institutions that offer undergraduate and select master’s programs in the Western part of the United States.

Related: Local blogger fills in the blanks for the daily paper's new teen columnist.

Passages: Lauck Slings Jacket Over Shoulder and Strolls into Fog; Cultural Coach Hangs Up Cleats; New Master of Irony Debuts at the Chronicle

“Short appreciation of Dan Lauck” was near the top of our blogging to-do list for many months, but something or other---our real-life to-do list, chronic lassitude, forgetfulness … forgetfulness … something---always intruded. Now we learn that Lauck has Parkinson’s and filed his last story as a regular for Channel 11 on Friday (as first reported here), so we best get it on. In honor of Lauck, we’ll keep it terse: The guy was one of the only (if not the only) local TV newshounds with an actual voice, a distinctive style of presentation (understated, laconic, ironic … Hemingwayesque!) that set him far above most of his peers. He could write---we weren’t surprised to learn upon his departure that he had reported at Newsday and The Washington Post before coming to Houston---and his stories were invariably interesting, usually telling us something about Our Town that we didn’t know. We always paid attention when he was on-screen.

Good luck to him.

Now for the happy news: next Friday apparently will mark the last appearance of the “Cultural Coach” in the Houston’s Chronicle’s baleful Star section (formerly “the women’s section”). The coach, whose column, best we can tell, appeared only in the Chronicle and the Fort Wayne Star-Sentinel (Houston=Fort Wayne w/good restaurants), opened her penultimate offering (not available from the newspaper's Web site, for some reason) by claiming to be on some “conservatives’ hit list” (an “uncomfortable and scary place to be,” she solemnly relates, sans adult editorial supervision) and then recounted the story of a “self-described conservative” named Lance Somebody or Other from Fort Wayne (natch) who, through sustained and respectful dialogue with the Coach, came to a greater understanding of other cultures and peoples. The Coach reported that she and Lance “are learning how to create an American family” (hmmm … there’s books you can buy with pictures, if you need a shortcut) before announcing that she was pulling the plug and moving her column to the Web “so I can provide in-depth answers and offer guest commentaries.” No explanation of whether the plug-pulling was voluntary.

The Coach’s columns were a perfectly realized expression of the diversity racket---almost everything she counseled boiled down to common sense and good manners, the stuff a reasonably well-raised 10-year-old could tell you but for which corporations pay $5,000 so self-styled diversity consultants can torture their employees for a half-day.

We especially enjoyed the letters the Coach allegedly received seeking counsel, usually attributed to some well-meaning but benighted white person in “Fort Wayne” or “Houston” who wondered why, for example, the black people at the Cineplex are always talking so loud and ruining the picture show for everybody else, or why the illegal Mexicans are always parking their 6 cars in the front yard and ruining the neighborhood for everybody else (oh, maybe we haven’t sent that one yet). A casual textual analysis of these letters suggested a striking stylistic resemblance to the Coach’s own prose … anyway, good luck to her.

But if you think the Coach’s departure signals the reassertion of some intelligence by the Chronicle brain trust, as our friend Banjo calls it, forget it. No sooner had the Coach announced her bowing-out than the newspaper, as part of its ceaseless effort to make customers out of people who can’t or won’t read, hustled a brand-new columnist into the Star section, a person named Whitney Casey (no relation to sabbaticzing Rick, we presume) who hosts a local TV show we have not seen called Great Day Houston. Casey’s charge, apparently, will be to give advice about relationships. Her debut was accompanied by a front-page plug and a typically gooey Star section profile, wherein “Whit” allowed that she counts Maureen Dowd and Peggy Noonan as her favorite columnists.

Whit’s first effort was devoted to the news that there are Web sites that young people can frequent in search of relationships, or maybe just to get laid (who knew!). You can read it here, if they have Internet access in the Texas prison system, but we feel duty-bound to call attention to this choice paragraph:

You won't find any BBWs or SSBBWs on the Web site DarwinDating.com. The site accepts only thin, fit, good-looking members and promises "no ugly, unattractive, desperate fatsos." It also notes: "Charles Darwin was a genius, but unfortunately very ugly." It is ironic that he wouldn't be able to join DarwinDating.com! Snap!

So whadaya think: Dowd or Noonan?

Proposed Garbage Fee, Once Front-Page News, Hardly Noticed as Its Corpse is Dragged Off Public Stage Under Cover of Night

As predicted a while back in this very space, the monthly fee for garbage pick-up (or waste reduction, if you will) proposed a few months back by Mayor White’s Solid Waste Task Force has come to naught, at least for the time being (and forever, too), getting the heave-ho from city council before it adopted the budget for the upcoming year.

We believe we may have been apprised of this possibility a week or so ago by Channel 11 (although weren’t paying attention at the time, having been distracted by our Spanish-language translation of Critique of Pure Reason, and if we’re wrong we apologize to anyone who would care), but we learned of its official demise from a one-paragraph obituary tucked deep down in a story on the new budget that appeared in Thursday’s Houston Chronicle. This was quite a comedown from the newspaper’s first big report on the proposal, which appeared on page one as that day’s play story and was followed by a ringing endorsement from the mayor’s Auxiliary Pep Squad on the Chronicle’s editorial board (the paper should now promptly re-endorse the garbage fee, just to show it has the courage of its supposed convictions).

Although the reasons for the rejection were left unexplained in the Chronicle, we can safely surmise that council members heard not one approving word about the proposal, unless it hailed from a Solid Waste Department minion or Chronicle editorialist. We suppose its disappearance in the middle of the night will accrue to White’s benefit, although come to think of it the ever-cautious mayor didn’t exactly hop up and grab the task force’s report in a smothering embrace.

Then again, it was his task force.

The rejected garbage pick-up tax also rated late mention in a notable column on Friday by Kristen Mack, the daily's political writer---notable because it was the rare instance of a Chronicle tastemaker not falling all over his or her self to plant a big wet one on the mayor’s hind cheeks. Although the column started out in less-than-promising fashion, quoting once and probably future mayoral candidate Chris Bell to the effect that a budget is a “moral document” (a statement we find objectionable on several levels, starting with the unearned hauteur it betrays; we’d expound further but supper’s on the stove), Mack goes on to posit that White is in Chapter 7 when it comes to new ideas and his “unambitious” budget lacks an “overriding mission.”

It’s a trenchant analysis of White’s last years in office, although we personally are averse to overriding missions (Five-Year Plans, Great Leap Forwards, rail systems to nowhere, false-premised preemptive invasions of sovereign Middle Eastern nations, false-premised “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc.). All we ask from municipal government is prudent taxation and spending and effective delivery of basic services. So if the mayor indeed has no other “overriding mission,” we’re down with that.

Almost as interesting as Mack’s analysis was the comment affixed to the online version of her column by one D. Jones (hmmm … name sounds familiar), who writes, sans caps

well, i'm just amazed. kristin mack has actually written truth about mayor white. your insight clear, analysis solid and presentation unhedged. he has run out of ideas. he is a mean little micro-manager of the kathy whitmire variety and he is totally media-driven in his ill-conceived run for statewide office. this man who viciously savages employees in meetings is a timid little mouse before any public criticism. mark that down: houstons' only newspaper has one person who is man enough(??!!!) to tell the truth.

Funny, we’ve heard a couple of similar critiques of the mayor, although their presentation lacked the tang of D. Jones’s. It’s clear the Chronicle ought to make this guy one of its 16,141 bloggers: We detect potentially high reader interest in what he’s got to say.

Missing Rick Casey (Almost)

One of the columnists Houston’s leading daily newspaper has filling the space of the sabbaticizing* Rick Casey revealed this week that the area is home to many people who speak and understand only Spanish (!) and, in what was surely a coincidental act of product placement on behalf of a major advertiser that shares or shared a PR agency with the newspaper, there exist commercial establishments---well, at least one commercial establishment---that cater solely to these non-English speakers.

Needless to say this startling news blew what was left of our mind.

Now we know this columnist is a sharp writer who will one day tell us many interesting and incisive things we didn’t know about Our Town---perhaps without resorting to quoting Professor Nestor Rodriguez---and make us forget that we never knew Rick Casey. But not this week.

* Sabbaticizing: The act of taking off on a sabbatical. An exclusive coinage of Slampo’s Place Ltd. Copyright 2007. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

No Wanking on Your Ranking Today: Chronicle Circulation Falls, A Little, But Voluble Publisher Remains Strangely Silent

Not much news here: Circulation continues to roll steadily downhill at the Houston Chronicle and most other big-city newspapers, as measured by the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report. The Chronicle, however, suffered a drop of just 2 percent in its daily paid circulation, a mere shaving nick (compared to the 14 percent gut-shot sustained by the Dallas Morning News) that we expected would somehow be processed into almost-good news by the unrivaled verbal dexterity of Chronicle publisher Jack Sweeney.

But we found no word of the latest figures in Tuesday’s Chronicle, the day after the ABC report was released---not even the perfunctory “Circulation falls but Chronicle retains ranking as 7th largest metropolitan newspaper” that’s usually hidden way back in the paper’s business section. That means discerning Houston readers were denied a fresh serving of long, declamatory quotes from Sweeney explaining away the declines and forecasting better times ahead in “today’s media landscape.” (Perhaps he, like us, has not fully recovered from that shower scene in Sunday night’s Sopranos.)

So let us step into the breach in Sweeney’s absence and discern the half-fullness of the cup: By our calculation the Chronicle’s weekday circulation has fallen by just about 50,000 over the past two years. At that rate, the Hearst Corp. can wring about 20 more years of columns from Leon Hale before it converts 801 Texas into high-rise lofts.

UPDATE: We wrote too soon, as Wednesday’s business section reports that---ta da!---“Chronicle steady in newspaper rankings.” The story quotes (so to speak) Sweeney saying the paper “had its second straight gain on Sunday,” although the lede reports “Sunday circulation declined 2.2 percent.” Well, whatever. As Sweeney puts it, “There’s still plenty of demand for a compelling local newspaper delivered to your door every day.”

Who could argue?