A 29-year-old woman who lived at the FLDS ranch at the time of the CPS raid spoke to members of the Rotary Club of Houston earlier today. The woman spoke briefly and wouldn't reveal her name, but her attorney said she wanted the crowd to understand that the FLDS mothers were quite normal.
"I chose to [be married]," she said. "I know a lot of people say, 'Oh, they're supposed to say that,' but if I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't be here. If I didn't want to be a mother, I wouldn't be."
The woman said she was married when she was 20. She gave birth to her first child at 25. When Child Protective Services raided the ranch, she presented a Texas driver's license that stated her age. Still, she was held as a minor for about two months before being reunited with her children. She's living in San Antonio until CPS investigations are complete.
After years of dismal test scores and a demonstrated inability to get a grip on its finances, as well as months of high drama with the school board firing and un-firing its superintendent several times, the North Forest ISD was officially put on notice today that the state is going to run its business.
Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott announced that he’s going to put in a new three-member board of managers to replace the elected school board and a new superintendent as soon as the Justice Department gives its OK. The board of managers approach is the last step before shutting down a district.
“The district is expected to start the new school year with an $11.8 million budget deficit. The district will not be able to sustain itself financially at its current taxing rate,” Scott said in a statement.
Austin Studios is having a movie memorabilia sale tomorrow and Saturday. From noon to 5 PM tomorrow and 8 AM - 2 PM Saturday at 1901 E. 51st Street (in Austin, duh), you can pick through all manner of props and cinematic leftovers.
Debbie Haber at the studio balked at providing a complete manifest of what's going to be up for grabs (though she did describe a prop treasure chest from Spy Kids and set pieces from The Faculty and Varsity Blues.
So one is left to wonder what other tantalizing bits of Texas movie detritus could be lurking just behind that Paul Walker stand-up? Assuming other directors besides Robert Rodriguez will be represented, here are a few things I'd be keen on procuring my own self:
1. A production still from this scene set in the secret Galveston training camp from Uncommon Valor You know, the one that looked suspiciously like Yosemite National Park? Bonus points if it has Waltrip grad Patrick Swayze in it:
Yesterday Channel 13 Eyewitness News reporter Miya Shay reported that Discovery Green’s brand-new $21-million dollar parking garage leaks. Not major gushers, mind you, just some drip-drips.
The source for her story? An unidentified City Council member who wouldn’t speak on camera “because of the sensitive nature of this issue.” (What’s so “sensitive” about a couple of leaks?)
Anyway, we tried to talk with Discovery Green Park Director Guy Hagstatte but he was busy in meetings all morning, so we got hold of a representative for the park (who also wished not to be named – are we missing something here?). She assured us that the leaks, aside from the occasional plop-plop drip on the head of an unsuspecting visitor, are not a major concern for the garage and not an indication of structural damage.
That's according to AOL, which we were somewhat surprised to learn still exists.
But it does, and it has issued its fourth annual survey of e-mail habits in America.
The results -- only New York is more obsessed with e-mail than Houston. We beat Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and every other city that was involved.
An e-mail was circulating around the East End this week, urging residents and business owners come Wednesday night to "an explosive meeting that will change the course of light rail in Houston."
How "explosive" things got is a bit debatable, but East Enders let Metro know they are plenty pissed about the agency's plans for their neighborhood.
Metro is looking at putting in a six-lane bridge and a large bus-repair center in the East End; Julio del Carpio of the Harrisburg Merchant Association says 40 or so businesses would be eliminated by the plans.
The last of the three suspects in the shooting that left HPD's first Hispanic female officer paralyzed has been apprehended, thanks to a Crime Stoppers tip.
Police arrested Andrew Garcia at 1:30 this morning in a condo at 10912 Gulf Freeway after getting the tip.
“This capture shows once more the value of the Crime Stoppers partnership among citizens, law enforcement and the media, working together to bring the most violent offenders in our city to justice,” Crime Stoppers executive director Katherine Cabaniss said.
For a while there, we were wondering -- as a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review put it to us the other day -- "No offense, but why is it that the only reporter who has asked John Edwards the question [about infidelity rumors] is an editorial assistant from a Houston alt-weekly?"
We don't know.
What we do know, though, is now that the rest of the media seems finally open to asking the question, Edwards is ducking the press.
UH prof Jody Williams isn't the only Houstonian doing good deeds in Africa this summer.
David Chaney, an accountant, is taking part in a neat project out of the UK that lets tourists who are visiting Uganda (and some do, we guess) work for a week or so on rebuilding schools in that country.
"The nice thing about this organization is that you can spend one day working there or six months. That is why it gets promoted to travelers because they can spend part of a vacation volunteering whenever it fits into their schedule," says Chaney.
Much of the work is Habitat-for-Humanity type physical labor, but travelers involved for longer spells who have a special interest can end up teaching students. (Teaching accounting or pounding nails in the Ugandan sun? We know which choice we'd make.)
Mayor Bill White got some publicity recently when he told The New York Times the reason Houston really, really sucks at recycling is because "Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated." Or things that are "trendy or hyped-up."
Some Houstonians, it turns out, are skeptical of obviously lame excuses.
At any rate, we were intrigued by White's analysis that Houston refuses to do stuff just because other places are doing it, even if it might be all hype.
The record truly supports his theory, if by "supports" you mean "doesn't support."
Another of the six men who raped and killed Randy Ertman's daughter is scheduled to be executed soon.
And once again Andy Kahan won't be allowed to see it.
Kahan, the Crime Victim Advocate for the City of Houston, says he should be allowed to stand by the side of his friend Randy Ertman during the execution of Jose Medellin, convicted of raping and strangling Ertman’s daughter.
However, despite Ertman’s wishes to have Kahan present, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will not allow it.
According to prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons, TDCJ policy is not to allow victim advocates to witness executions.
Officials at LBJ Hospital are giving tours of a giant asshole.
Officially called "The Colossal Colon," the "8-foot-tall, 20-foot-long colon is designed to help hospital guests learn about colorectal disease," according to the Texas Medical Center.
Other names for the giant colon include "Dallas Cowboy Fan," "My Ex-Husband" and "That Cop With The Radar Gun."
Residents in the Rio Grande Valley are about to be hit with some stern lecturing, via the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms and the Southern District's U.S. Attorney's Office.
"Don't Lie For The Other Guy" is the catchy slogan for a campaign designed to stop "straw purchases" of guns -- when someone buys a gun for another person who wouldn't be allowed to buy one on his or her own.
The campaign will feature billboards, TV and radio ads, bus signs and everything. It's a full-blown effort.
Alleged bigot and Marshall Applewhite lookalike Ron Paul is co-sponsoring a bill to virtually eliminate federal marijuana possession penalties – a bill that’s getting a lot of play from those stoners over at CNN:
The bill, introduced by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank from Massachusetts, would abolish penalties for anyone carrying fewer than 100 grams of weed (3.75 ounces, or just slightly less than five viewings of the Sean Penn-Naomi Watts drama 21 Grams).
As they are wont to do, the crusaders at NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) pounced on the opportunity to hold this proposed legislation up as a sort of Holy Grail. Or Holy Bong. The organization interviewed Paul, in a two-part audio-only file on YouTube: and (Hint: it doesn’t exactly sync perfectly with The Wizard of Oz; it works much better with The Wiz, starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as Scarecrow).
Yes, we all know Budweiser is going to be purchased by some Belgian company.
And what do the Belgians know about beer? (Don't answer.)
But good news for Houston Bud drinkers!! If you were tempted to boycott the beer because it's un-American, think again: Drink it because it's pro-Earth, or Going Green, or whatever the phrase of the moment is when it comes to things ecological.
Your Bud plant in Houston, the behemoth out by 610 East, will now be powered -- via a six-mile pipeline -- with "biogas" from the McCarty Landfill. (If they just spelled "bio-gas" with a hyphen we wouldn't mispronounce it in our heads each time we read it, dammit.)
Say you’re the organizer of a children’s festival. Say one of your volunteers, um, volunteers that he is a registered sex offender. During the festival. What do you do? If you’re Community and Children’s Impact Center founder Brenda Myers, nothing.
“He said he had been in jail before, but it was not for anything serious. I guess I should have asked more about it,” Myers told the Cleveland Advocate.
“He told us he was not a pedophile but was a registered sex offender.” Actually, the man Myers allowed to remain at the fest had sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl.
That wasn’t the only incident at the Texas Children’s Music Festival July 19.
You're an undercover cop assigned to get the goods on an alleged prostitution ring. You get approval to have sex in the course of your investigation, approval from your supervisor and your wife, for crying out loud.
You do what you're told. You get blow jobs. You go all the way, once. Maybe.
As far as cinematic catastrophes go, Houston gets off pretty light. Other metropolises have a certain quality that invites destruction -- New York is full of New Yorkers, for example, and Tokyo sits on an archipelago teeming with monsters -- but we in the Paved Swamp seem to escape such attention. After all, we usually have our hands full with oppressive heat, fire ants, and the nigh-omnipresent threat of hurricanes, which we know to be a real problem thanks to Dr. Neil Frank freaking the fuck out whenever a stiff breeze blows through the Lesser Antilles.
But you'd be mistaken to think H-Town has come through a whole century of motion picture mayhem unscathed. Here now are the top five Houston Movie Disaster Moments:
5. I Come In Peace (1990)
The aliens are coming! And they want our endorphins! Okay, so it doesn't have the same "oomph" as full-scale planetary invasion, but I Come in Peace does feature Teutonic terror Matthias Hues draining our precious bodily brain fluids and Dolph Lundgren as Jack Caine, a Cop on the Edge Who Plays By His Own Set of Rules. In this version of Houston, drug lords rule the streets and vice cops like Caine are powerless to stop them, even though the bad guys always hang out in the same place with suitcases filled with heroin. I've elected to show you the climax as opposed to, say, the car chase around the downtown Park Shops, because it has the line. You know the one.
And because it shows you how big Dolph is...I mean, he's huge. I can't decide if his lack of Hollywood success was due to the Curse of Brigitte Nielsen or because Hollywood already reached its quota of Euro ESL action stars with Arnold and Jean Claude.
The San Antonio Express-News is reporting (through a Chron link) that the federal government has a new, exciting plan to deal with undocumented/illegal aliens.
Turn yourself in.
"Operation Scheduled Departure" will take away all the hassle of getting arrested and deported, says Julie Myers, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead of waiting around to be picked up in ICE raids at the workplace, aliens can step into an office, confess to their status, and get a few weeks before they have to leave.
We think this idea is terrific, and should be applied to many more areas of law enforcement.
The propriety of young men wearing baggy pants down to the middle of their buttocks has reached the halls of government in Baytown, the refinery town 30 miles east of Houston, where the City Council has been asked by a local radio personality with KWWJ-AM ("Keep Walking With Jesus") to put a stop to the butt-baring pants brigade.
It's a problem, says the Rev. Gregory Griffin, that can't be handled without government intervention.
"If you do talk to them you'll get a good cussing out," Griffin told the council.
Read the Houston Chronicle’s death notices long enough, and you’ll realize there are more than 1,000 ways to die. Not physical causes of death, mind you: we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of manners in which to euphemistically describe the act of dying.
While most are said to have simply “died,” “passed away,” “expired,” “departed,” or some variation of “went to be with the Lord,” others are magnificently grandiloquent.
Hair Balls scoured a month of them and came up with the following actual examples:
“Another WWII era B-24 warrior/pilot was released from his earthly bounds [sic]”
“Completed her marathon of life”
“Finished the race”
“God wrapped his loving arms around her and took her home”
“Graduated from this life and was called home to be with the Lord Jesus Christ”
Half Hispanic, half white, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, has spent most of her life being asked which she was.
“I had no answer to this. Both? Neither? Either?” she writes.
Griest grew up just south of Corpus Christi speaking very little Spanish, and admits she went from checking “white” on forms to “Hispanic” when a guidance counselor told her it might help her win college scholarships. (It did, she won a full-ride to UT Austin and later became a Hodder Fellow at Princeton.) Her first book, Around the Bloc, was her diary as a young American woman traveling alone through China, Russia and Cuba. Her latest book, Mexican Enough, is set a little closer to home.
Lura Groen wants to tell the good news, not spark a revolution, but she’s doing both as the first openly gay Lutheran pastor in Texas.
The Lutheran church normally requires gay and lesbian clergy to take a vow of celibacy, but Groen refused. “I find that it’s a discriminatory policy and in principle I’m opposed to it,” she says. After completing her religious studies and training, Groen was placed on the national roster of pastors, sort of a jobs listings for pastors. “Grace Lutheran Church [of Houston] made the brave decision that when they were looking for a pastor they would not discriminate on sexual orientation…I am honored and, tickled, they chose me actually.”
Despite being the first openly gay Lutheran pastor in the state, Groen says making history wasn’t her goal.
In the continued march to make all of Houston’s thoroughfares uniformly dull and uninteresting, the city of Bellaire demolished the replica trolley station that stood in the median of Bellaire Boulevard for decades.
It was the last remnant of Houston’s old city streetcar system, but according to KTRK, Bellaire officials deemed the building a safety hazard. (Recently it had been held up by a very shaky-looking set of supports.) And so it was hasta la vista…
With any luck, a nail or tanning salon, cell-phone shop or Wachovia bank will go up in its place. Lord knows “downtown” Bellaire doesn’t have enough of those.
You heard it here first: Always…Patsy Cline, originally slated to run at Stages Repertory Theatre through August, will now run through November 9. In fact, it could go even longer than that. As long as the people keep buying tickets, Stages will continue to mount the show. “We’re set up to run as long as it will,” says director Kenn McLaughlin.
Think of Always…Patsy Cline as Stages’s Nutcracker – it’s a cash cow that fills the theater’s coffers. In 1988, when Stages first put on the show, written by Stages founding artistic director Ted Swindley, it ran for around a year. It was revived in 1993, 2003 and now 2008. According to McLaughlin, the 2003 version held the record as the theater’s largest money-maker at $404,000, but 2006’s The Great American Trailer Park Musical beat it. Not to worry, though: “I think Patsy Cline is coming to get her crown back,” he says.
Richard Laminack, one of the more well-known mass-torts lawyers in town, is in a bit of legal trouble of his own.
Laminack once teamed with the legendary John O'Quinn on huge suits over things like breast implants and Vioxx.
Now a former employee is suing him, according to The American Lawyer, for -- among other things -- "demanding sexual favors from male and female employees."
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has released its annual report; as always it's a cornucopia of miscellaneous details describing just how our state is doing in putting people behind bars.
Grits for Breakfast will no doubt have the best analysis of the 152,661 guests of the state; the blog notes that "TDCJ received 73,525 new prisoners in FY 2007 and released 72,032, representing significant growth but a much slower rate than in recent years."
Jody Williams, a professor at UH's Graduate College of Social Work, is having quite the summer.
She's touring Thailand, Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad (one luxurious resort after the other!) as part of a Nobel Women's Initiative peace delegation.
Thanks to heavy support work by people at UH, the delegation -- which includes actress Mia Farrow -- is touring so that it "can hear and relay the messages of women’s groups on the ground, promoting messages and ideas about human rights and peace-building in the regions."
My wife and I happened to catch his final report under very weird circumstances. On a whim, we decided to take our daughter and check into the Hilton Americas downtown – do that tourist in your own hometown thing. (Hey, I Pricelined the room – it was about $60.)
Back before Discovery Green opened, there was absolutely nothing to do with your kids downtown on a Saturday evening, so after an early dinner at Josephine’s, we headed back to the room to watch the news. Dave introduced Marvin, who was flat on his back in M.D. Anderson, looking every bit like the man who would die that very night.
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