You know, I really DID miss the sorts of storms that we’ve been enjoying the last week or so, but I really don’t need them to be so dramatic as to zap my power.
On the other hand, this is the first power outage of measurable length — 35 minutes and counting — that I remember since Ike back in 2008. Let’s hope this one doesn’t go for 4 day.
Also? All hail iPads with keyboards and 3G.
Go see American Falls by Miki Johnson, over at DiverseWorks.
Mrs Heathen and I have just come from opening night, and I’m still processing it, but I can say this: It’s one of the most affecting, beautiful, amazing things I’ve seen on stage. It’s truly remarkable. I see lots and lots of plays. I see lots of plays with these people in them. I don’t see many plays that leave a lump in my throat or my eyes wet. This one did.
I’m going back tomorrow, because that’s the only time I can. Show runs through June 9. Don’t miss this. When people talk about what’s amazing about Houston’s arts community, it’s work like this that they mean.
Trust me. I know things.
Local shutterbug and tech guru Jay Lee cuts a relatively wide path in Houston between his column at the Chronicle and his radio show over at KPFT. He’s also been investigating just how often his (quite good) photography is being used illegally by other sites.
This story of what happened when GoDaddy (correctly) shut down one offending site is pretty amazing. tl;dr? The site owner — some local lawyer named Candice Schwager — went full crazybats on him, accusing him of being in cahoots with her political enemies, threatening to sue, and the whole nine yards. Seriously wackdoodle stuff.
For maximum lulz, read her account and compare it to Jay’s. We’re not friends, but we have lots of friends in common; he’s a nice, friendly guy who would just prefer folks not view his Flickr stream as a stock photo catalog, and he’s within his rights to feel that way.
Well, Candy, welcome to Google.
Update: Jay had to take down the post, but there’s a mirror here, which happened after the post made it to Slashdot. Meanwhile, the attorney bullying him still has her one-sided rant about it over on her blog. What a tool.
Longtime Heathen THP, Esq., makes an appearance in this clip over at KPRC, as he’s representing a woman the now-resigning Galveston county district clerk illegally fired. Go Tom!
More at the Galveston Daily News.
When I went out for the mail, four women dressed as flappers, purporting to be on a “Beer Hunt,” asked if they could (a) pretend my front yard was a public park and (b) photograph me leapfrogging them. Note that whether or not I was willing to leapfrog was never, apparently, at issue.
Sadly, this did not come to pass, as one of the flappers was insistent that my yard was in no way a public park, and that any resulting photograph would be unable to hide that fact, and that it was cheating besides.
So that happened.
STOP THIS. No, I do not want your app. I do not need to see this information-obstructing hyperobnoxious ad every. single. time. I visit chron.com on my iPad.
On this day in 1861, Sam Houston was forced to resign as Governor of Texas for refusing to secede and swear allegiance to the Confederacy:
Fellow-Citizens, in the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by the Convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of my own conscience and manhood, which this Convention would degrade by dragging me before it, to pander to the malice of my enemies, I refuse to take this oath. I deny the power of this Convention to speak for Texas . . . I protest . . . against all the acts and doings of this convention and I declare them null and void.
Houston retired to Huntsville, and was dead by 1863. To say he’d had an interesting life is to understate things rather dramatically. Immigrants to Texas like myself would do well to review that Wikipedia article, since we missed the no-doubt otherwise inescapable “History of Texas” classes in middle school.
I guess the folks out at Grace Church in the Woodlands got tired of being the other Houston megachurch, so they’ve decided to make a play for being Houston’s most homophobic megachurch by calling out Mayor Parker for her stance on gay marriage.
Local columnist Charles Kuffner may have the best take:
Unless Pastor Riggle believes Mayor Parker is going to take over the County Clerk’s office and give out marriage licenses as she sees fit, and also take over the Attorney General’s office to prevent any consequences for that, I’m puzzled as to what exactly he thinks she is doing that is wrong. Well, except for the fact that he thinks being gay is icky, because it forces him to spend so much time thinking about what gay people do so he can always be in a state of disapproval about it. You really should be more considerate to the gay-obsessed pastors of the world, Mayor Parker.
The current “beer board” is not what Kevin Floyd wanted to begin with:
Although it may seem like no expense was spared, there is one focal point of the bar that didn’t make the budget. The chalkboard beer list, which takes constant updating as Floyd switches out the 80-odd taps, was envisioned originally as an old-fashioned split-flat board like the ones found displaying train schedules in old European stations. Unfortunately, only two companies in the world still make the analog boards, and they’re located in Japan and Italy.
Citing a move toward the digital model, they quoted the board Floyd envisioned at $150,000. He politely declined.
Shit-beer vendor Anheuser-Busch whined to Hay Merchant about their practice of using Bud and Bud Light 40-oz bottles for water service, so they’ve had to switch to Cobra malt liquor.
One again, Heathen Nation, join me in a hearty “fuck you” to AB and all their ilk.
Local jackass Michael Berry has apparently been involved in a hit-and-run when leaving a Montrose gay bar.
The drought in Houston (and Texas) in 2011 came up in conversation with a co-worker today, which set me wondering what the hard numbers were.
First, let’s figure out what “normal” rainfall looks like. Wikipedia says we usually get something like 54 inches of rain a year; NOAA says it’s more like 49.77″.
NOAA also has per-year values. We got less than 25 inches of rain in 2011. That’s less than half normal, which is a lot for a place that typically gets more than four feet a rain a year.
NOAA’s figures since 2000 are below; note that no other year in the list is even close to 2011.
So, yeah. Pretty dry.
Houston millionaire, polo patron, and drunk-driving enthusiast John Goodman has legally adopted his girlfriend, presumably to give himself access to the trust he set up for his children.
Goodman, you may recall, has been charged with vehicular homicide for killing 23-year-old Scott Wilson with his Bentley two years ago, and is predictably also being sued for wrongful death by Wilson’s family; in that matter, he is also seeking to hide the fact that he now has unfettered access to 1/3 of the trust from the jury.
I don’t often say nice things about the Chron, but this story about Houston’s first underground reservoir is fascinating, as are the accompanying photos.
Also cool: It’s like 2 miles from Heathen World HQ.
Certain longtime Heathen will recognize certain names in this story about bad workplace behavior in this month’s Forbes.
Way to go, THP, a gentleman I’ve know for literally years as “someone with his finger to the pulse of reprehensible workplace behavior.”
Holy CRAP this band sucks.
My friend @GunsAndTacos lives One Block Off Washington, and has both a Q-Beam and a web site. He combines these elements with the near-constant stream of douchebros drunkenly stumbling around his neighborhood around closing time to delightful effect. Enjoy.
When we’re looking at excerpts from a book of photography entitled Chicks with Guns, and discover Lynn Wyatt is one of the subjects. Nice .308, Lynn.
Check this out.
(There’s lots of them, from the likes of Lyle Lovett, Billy Gibbons, etc., but Jim’s is my favorite.)
Pretty much anything he writes is pure gold, but this time around Joe Mathlete knocks it out of the park with 29 Things My Grandpa Is Still Unable To Get His Head Around.
And anyone else with a soft spot in their hearts for air hockey, that is.
As it turns out, like Tang and dehydrated ice cream, we have NASA to thank for the tables.
Our buddy GunsAndTacos breaks down the Houston taco truck scene for you. You’re welcome.
Galveston: now with free cocaine.
The Chron is reporting that the city’s contract with the red-light camera people had an “out” they could have exercised within 4 months of the vote last November that would have saved millions.
The city of Houston might have been able to shut off its red-light cameras within four months of voters demanding it in last November’s elections, but the Parker administration opted not to use an escape clause that would have meant more than $3 million in continuing costs while the clock ran out.
Instead, the city took another path that has them “arguing” in court for a side nobody believes they actually support (i.e., the removal of the cameras). They just happened to get a ruling they like, too. I smell a rat.
The people voted on this, and rejected the cameras. That should have been the end of it, but apparently referendums repealing city ordinances must happen within 30 days of the passage of the ordinance in question (WTF, right? Almost like they don’t want such repeal efforts to be possible…). The Federal judge’s ruling, though, doesn’t free Parker’s administration from their moral obligation to honor the will of the people.
Turning the cameras back on and pretending to litigate it out — a process that I’m sure will take plenty of time, during which the cameras will remain on — fools nobody.
I supported Parker two years ago, but the apparently cavalier way she’s handled this point gives me serious pause about doing so again. I’m disinclined to reward this kind of behavior with my vote even if she does well on other issues.
Broke our longstanding boycott of the hypercorporate House of Blues to see Steve Earle. Verdict: Worth it, but it’ll take someone as good as Earle to get us back in there. Something about that venue just attracts old drunk jackasses from the suburbs. Even so, Earle and his band — which includes Mrs Earle Allison Moorer (who sounds more like her sister than I remember) as well as another entire band in The Mastersons — positively cooked for nearly 3 hours; we definitely got our money’s worth as long as you leave out the $8 beers.
We left mildly vexed that fellow New West artist Robert Ellis was having his Houston album release party over at Fitzgerald’s at exactly the same time; in truth it was probably still going on after we left HoB, but 11:30 is too late to go to a second bar on a schoolnight. Fortunately, Cactus was kind enough to reserve one of the limited edition vinyl copies of Ellis’ record for us, so bully for them.
From our new acquaintance Alexander, who wrote this review of the New York Dolls/Poison/Motley Crue show, which blessedly included this bit in the voice of SNL’s Stefon:
Houston’s hottest night club is Püé. Impressario Pamela Tranderson Lee, back from touring with Cirque de Sogay, has done it again. Located at the edge of EaDo, this club has it all: explosions, pyrotechnics, a two-story stripper pole, a kick drum bigger than Vince Neil’s waistline, a drum kit mounted on a 40′ ring that straps the drummer in upside down, two albino cat-women, and a Ben Afflict. That’s that thing where you pretend you earned it on merit, show up to political rallies uninvited and wear Affliction shirts to fit in…
How about you stop not surprising us?
Stay the hell out of the Houston waterways.
Note: This is probably true of ANY urban waterway.
Jalopnik agrees with us, Gawker be damned:
Washington was not the first word spoken on the moon. When a situation turns bad no one says “Los Angeles, we have a problem” because no wants help from Charlie Sheen. Houston is Space City, the birthplace of the shuttle program, and the rightful home of one of the retired shuttles.
I’m not saying any of the cities who did receive a shuttle (New York, LA, and Washington D.C.) didn’t each deserve a space shuttle. I’m just saying none of them deserved one more than Houston, a city that would give the spacecraft the attention and reverence it deserves.
LA, Chuckie? Really? Not Houston? Are you shitting me? And the old Enterprise goes to fucking New York?
Christ. I get that Texas gets to reap what it has sown, what with our statewide pols regularly flipping off Washington at every turn, but leaving Houston off the list of final Shuttle berths is just absurd. It’s even worse than putting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame somewhere like, oh, I dunno, Cleveland.
I’ve been sitting on this list for months, but it deserves to be posted. I’ve only been a Houstonian for 16 years, but I definitely miss #96, the excellent burgers and green chili stew at Cosmos Cafe (#91), #84 (where I saw Sling Blade), the divey awesomeness of #69, and Charlie Watkins’ wine list at Sierra (#64).
Being at least tangentially connected to Rice, I know that #60 is just “tending at a higher bar.” It will always be Transco to me (#94). I hate we lost the Proletariat (#39), and still have no rail on Richmond. I definitely miss the Book Stop (#35). And my feelings about pre-United Continental (#9) are well documented here.
The loss of #8 (the Ale House) is partly soothed by the Stag’s Head, but it lacks the same rambling charm of the old house-turned-pub. Where’s Allen Hill going to leap from a balcony in the new place, I ask you?
The new Cactus is just fine by me, with a nicer staff and a more sustainable business model, so I’m not sure I miss the old store any more.
I don’t miss #100 at all, and the Daily Grind (#59) has no place on the list. What I miss in the “Heights breakfast and coffee” category is Kaldi, dammit.
Burger meh. Fries awesome.
Never Said About Restaurants. Example:
“You know, it’s a real blessing that I can’t read the menu on my mobile phone. Because I ought to just go back home and fire up my desktop to see whether I want to eat there. That would be best.”
From the Galveston Daily News:
GALVESTON — The name of a web-footed woman who is the last unidentified victim of Hurricane Ike remains a mystery after a DNA sample turned up no link with a California prison inmate.
There’s so much weird there, I think I’m gonna have to sit down.
Esquire rates Houston as one of its top ten restaurant cities, but do so without mentioning some of the jewels in the crown (e.g., Feast). At least Hugo’s gets a nod.
The following tweet from our Democratic mayor:
Today I visited our SWAT facility. Great layout. Spent my lunch with my pistols on the academy shooting range.-a
Said mayor is also of note for being the first (out) gay mayor of a US city over a million residents. That’s our Houston: confounding stereotypes every chance we get.
Today’s winner of the “worst web site evar” award is the Blue Moose Lodge, which is of course up on Washington.
On second thought, Ecclesia’s coffee-roasting experiments may not be so bad after all.
For a long time, I’ve belonged to a place called The Well. It’s an old-school Internet discussion forum pleasantly (mostly) bereft of the noise and spam that most online discussions have descended into.
Two years and two days ago, I wrote this post there, in an area set aside for sharing terrible news. I actually assumed I’d posted it here, too, but apparently not.
My friend Cary died on Tuesday. He’d been fighting cancer for a while but his most recent and dire prognosis wasn’t common knowledge. He was locally famous in Houston and Austin, partly for being in a band called Horseshoe, and partly for his years of association with Houston’s Infernal Bridegroom Productions. IBP was, until its own unfortunate and premature death in 2007, a tremendous and inventive local theater company devoted to doing the weird, the underperformed, the new, the avant garde, and doing it very, very well. Most (all?) of Cary’s acting was with them, but his roles just got stronger and better with time. He started with their very first production in 1993, but was best known for star turns in productions of the Kinks’ “Soap Opera” (2002) and, in 2006, something called “Speeding Motorcycle.”
If you asked Cary the most important, biggest, best thing he ever did on stage, I’ll bet he’d answer quickly that this show, based on the songs of Daniel Johnston, and done partly in collaboration with Johnston himself, was his pinnacle. Already sick by the time the show went to Austin this summer, he cut his chemo short so he could reprise his role (all three “Joe the Boxer” actors made the move).
Ike’s made it a rough week or so to be a Houstonian. You still can’t go to the grocery store, mostly, or buy gas like a normal person. More than half the city doesn’t even have power yet, which is astounding. Galveston is still flat, and will stay that way for a while. We got lucky in that we had no damage, little to clean up, and good friends a mile away who never lost power and opened their home to Erin and I as well as to some others from our social group. We called it Camp Ike, and tried to make the best of it — but even in a largish house, that many adults is tight, so we were very happy on Tuesday when we got word our block had power at around 8pm. In the midst of dinner when we got word, we didn’t end up coming home until nearly midnight. Sitting on the bed in our delightfully re-lit and re-cooled house, waiting for my wife to join me, I idly checked my email on my phone, and the four-hour everything-is-fine holiday we’d been enjoying evaporated. Cary’d had a seizure Tuesday morning, and was in Ben Taub. I should call for more details.
I think I knew what the details were before I clicked Jason’s number. Cary’d never regained consciousness, and passed away around 1130pm. Erin and I didn’t go to sleep for a long time, watching video I had on my laptop from a still-unfinished and unreleased DVD version of SM. Also on YouTube was this performance of Cary doing a cover of a Johnston song that didn’t make the final show. Cary liked it well enough to work it up for a post-show performance one night, after his much-loved singalong of “Brainwash”.
Cary Winscott was 38.
Igor arrives:
Comment promptly, and I won’t tell anyone the band I just heard you win tickets to see on the radio.
So Rice sold the parts of KTRU that make it a “radio station” (transmitter, tower) to UH so that, ostensibly, UH can have two public radio outlets: One for full-time classical music, and one for full-time NPR news programming — all for the low, low price of $9.5 million.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I didn’t go to either school, and I’ve never been a real fan of KTRU beyond just sort of appreciating it existed — there’s just so much amateur, narrow-cast radio I have time for in my life. Plus, my own radio time has pretty much been “in the car only” for twenty years; at home, there are just way better options than radio.
All that said, the shitsplosion around this development seems to miss some points, and I am of course just egotistical enough to think I have something to add by enumerating them.
Draft 1: This is one of those times I’m sure I’m going to edit this later.
And it was just as awesome as Rocks Off says it was.
The good news in the Houston food world is that uber-food-writer Robb Walsh is a partner in a new Tex-Mex joint opening in the old Tower Theater location in the heart of Montrose.
Imagine my disappointment to discover his partners, which means I’ll never eat there. I had one of the worst customer service experiences of my life at Caswell’s Reef, when his valets wrecked my pal’s brand-new car and then refused to own up or pressure the valet firm to properly repair it. I’ll be damned if I spend a single dime at any restaurant he’s a part of despite how much I’d like to partake of Mr Walsh’s venture.
Apparently, there’s an adorable baby elephant at the Houston Zoo. Why was I not informed?
The Press has a list of 10 places to take out-of-towners, and #1 is a personal fave.
How call must you be to have your obit headlined “Cantankerous Hellfighter”? Coots Matthews was that cool, which comes as no surprise since he was one of Red Adair‘s folks before going out on his own.
Also, the obit starts with this joke:
A joke has it that St. Peter was showing a Texan around heaven, with the Texan claiming that everything he saw was better in Texas. St. Peter tired of the routine and pointed to the fire of hell. “Do you have anything like that in Texas?” he asked. The Texan said no, then added, “But there are a couple good old boys in Houston who can put it out for you.”
The next show, Wallace Shawn’s “Our Late Night,” opens on March 19 (special opening night performance, $50) and continues Wednesdays through Saturdays through April 3. All tickets after March 19 are pay-what-you-can.
The Catastrophic Gala is April 24, with special guest Jim Parsons. See you there.