After all the hype of the past week leading up to Black Friday, we decided to venture out into the world of massive sales and astronomical blowouts and deeply discounted electronics.
But where'd you all go? Did we miss all of you? Did you already head home to make Turkey Helper?
We drove over to Rice Village this afternoon. Nothing doing. Parking spots were relatively plentiful, meaning you didn't have to stalk some poor lady drinking a latte as she walked out to her SUV. The stores looked just as busy as they would be on a typical Saturday. Even all the usual suspects along the way seemed just ho-hum.
If there's one day when putting out a paper version of the newspaper is really important, it's Thanksgiving. Over at the Houston Chronicle, customer service rep Cathy Elizondo tells Hair Balls that the paper sells more advertising for that edition than any other day of the year.
Readers call the paper weeks in advance, Elizondo says, to make sure they'll be delivered an issue stuffed full of all those ads needed to gear up for Black Friday. In fact, Thanksgiving is such a big day for the Chronicle that deliveries are made to customers not scheduled to get a paper on Thursdays.
So when the deliveries were several hours late yesterday and readers started calling to complain, Elizondo says it was expected.
You can make Black Friday more meaningful by putting your shopping dollars to good use at local non-profits and independent stores.
Freak out your drunk friends with a set of Ghost Goblets. These hand-blown tumblers feature a wineglass inside. Get these, along with other arty presents, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston gift shop. 1001 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-639-7300 or visit www.mfah.org.
Support an independent bookstore when you shop at Brazos Books. You'll find all the titles currently on top of the Indie Bestseller list (sort of a poor man's New York Times Best Seller list), including Toni Morrison's A Mercy and P.D. James's The Private Patient. 2421 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-523-0701 or visit www.brazosbookstore.com.
Five months after a Goodyear employee died following an explosion at a tire and rubber chemical plant in southeast Houston, the feds have issued a rash of citations to the factory for failing to safeguard its workers. But when it's all said and done, the fines would cost the company less than $70,000.
The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began its investigation in June after a piece of equipment fatally struck a worker. A valve was improperly closed, preventing a device from releasing pressure as it built up.
I understand that yesterday was Thanksgiving, and that we're supposed to be all thankful and everything. But seriously, did any of you watch those football games? How can a person be thankful after being subjected to nearly 11 hours of blow-out football? So in that spirit, I've put together a list of nine things for which I'm not thankful, along with one item for which I am thankful.
9. The very special holiday-themed network NFL pregame shows.
If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that The Man wants to control every aspect of American culture - including how we celebrate Christmas. The Man made Jesus white, even though J.C. was born in the mid-east. The three wise men? White, white, and white. Frosty the Snowman? Yup, you guessed it. But Jeffery Bradley, owner of Dallas-based NetNia Publishing, has drawn the line at Santa Claus. So he created Black Santa.
As Bradley writes on blacksantamagicletters.com, "One day I was searching the Internet and came across websites offering letters from Santa Claus you can personalize yourself....One problem: I wanted to send letters that reflect my culture. I spent hours searching for letters with an African-American Santa Claus with no avail. But, I did find a solution to my problem. Here's what I did. I downloaded images of white Santa Claus to my computer and using a simple Windows graphics program, I meticulously change the white Santa Claus to a black Santa Claus, including the elves [sic]. Then I opened my word processor and wrote my own letter. I added Santa and the elves."
Low-riders, art cars, SpongeBob, Santa Claus, D-list celebs, marching bands, stick-fighting Sikhs and plump Shriners in souped-up go-carts -- where else could it be but the HEB Thanksgiving Day Parade? And although we lack quality photographic proof -- amazingly, even Sheila Jackson Lee was there. Seriously!
So, the boss made you come in the day after Thanksgiving, huh? Yeah, and we're guessing there isn't a whole lot to do seeing as how everyone else's boss gave them the day off. (Luckily for us, the news never rests! ... or something.)
Well, nod off not, Internet friends. Hair Balls is here with links to Web sites to help pass (read: waste) time until your boss says "Hey, since you came in the day after Thanksgiving, why don't you leave an hour early." Really, a whole hour? You shouldn't have. (WARNING: Remember to keep a second window open to something work-related, so when the boss comes up, you can just click over.) Happy surfing ... pending you're not blocked by firewalls.
Thanksgiving isn't just about federally subsidized gluttony and a spike in domestic disturbance calls, it's about slipping into a tryptophan-induced coma while watching TV. This year, instead of
enduring another slapstick performance by the Detroit Lions, how about checking out a few Turkey Day themed movies?
5. The Ice Storm (1997)
For the record, this is the second time (see also Addams Family Values) that Christina Ricci has stood up for Native Americans. Who knew "Ricci" was an Iroquois name?
If you're a cop, you know what kind of call you don't want to get?
Well, obviously, there's plenty of them, come to think of it. But take away all the death and dismemberment, the ones involving kids and buddies getting hit, and you know what must suck?
Answering a domestic-disturbance call at the police chief's house.
That has to be one delicate investigation.
Bryan police chief Ty Morrow called his department early Sunday morning to say that he and his wife had had a fight, it had gotten physical, and he....ummm...had handcuffed her.
Verbal abuse, silly string sprayed in the mouth, being shoved into a pool while bound and blindfolded - if it's between consenting adults, that's what some of us at Hair Balls consider a smooth second date. When it's less than welcome and serves as an initiation ritual, though, it's referred to as illegal hazing.
Or maybe "bad judgment", if you're the defense attorneys for the seven former Morton Ranch High School cheerleaders who were indicted on misdemeanor charges for their role in the incident.
Two of the victims and their mothers also spoke up today, giving a press conference with their lawyers Randall Sorrels and Chelsea Garza. Both lawyers represented the family of Jack Phoummarath, a UT student who in 2005 died of alcohol poisoning related to hazing, in a case against Phoummarath's fraternity and some of its members that resulted in a $4.2 million settlement.
President-Elect Barack Obama is piecing his cabinet together among a flurry of rumors and trial balloons about who's getting what. One name that's been prominently mentioned is Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano for director of Homeland Security.
In a piece for our sister publication New Times, in Phoenix, Michael Lacey argues that naming Napolitano would be a terrible, awful, not-very-good idea.
Lacey argues that the job she's done protecting Arizona's borders can be described as "a cocktail of medocrity" -- "Consorting with anti-immigrant enforcers, indulging rank opportunism,
and adhering to failed policies seem an unlikely recipe for change we
can believe in," he writes.
Sometimes it seems like organizations that want to protect Americans from terrorism end up doing all the terrorists' research for them. The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank headed by John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, has compiled a handy guide to the nation's most vulnerable chemical facilities, complete with how many millions of lives could be taken were the terrorists to win.
And guess what? Twenty-seven of the 101 "most dangerous" chemical facilities are right here in Texas, with "one in Wylie, one in Sunnyvale, one in Grand Prairie, two in Dallas, one in Euless, nine in Houston, one in Channelview, four in Pasadena, one in Baytown, two in Deer Park, and four in La Porte."
There's beeen plenty of drug talk when it comes to Houston schools lately, but what about some good news?
Well, how about the fact that school districts are bitching that teachers down here are just getting paid too damn well?
It's true. (We'll pause to give the teachers reading this a chance to stop rolling their eyes.)
One school official complained to his school board:
"The problem we are running into with this is when you go to a teacher fair...nobody would even stop and look or talk to them because the base salary was the first thing they looked at. They don't look at the whole salary schedule, just the base salary, and it wasn't high enough to have them even stop and talk," said Ellis.
Jacobsen added, "At that time, we had around $32,000 as a base salary and right across the aisle from us was a place out of Houston, TX that was starting at $49,000."
Over the past few weeks, we've seen the National, Usher, Baby Bash, Metallica, Madonna and Willie Nelson, not to mention voting, posing, drawing, partying, bikinis and face paint. And now you can see it all in one place. Yep, it's that time of the month.
Two years ago, in the grand tradition of Harris County officials' thoughtful e-mails, misdemeanor court Judge Larry Standley e-mailed colleagues a missive that included references to a movie called Gayniggers From Outer Space, followed by another with a really dumb joke involving wordplay on "Cinco de Mayo."
Judge Mike Fields was apparently the only jurist who took offense, although when we wrote about this in aught-six, he stopped short of saying he filed a formal complaint with the Judicial Conduct Commission.
Hair Balls also had trouble finding others willing to speak on the record, and then before we knew it, the whole thing disappeared, much like the women on planet Anus, the homebase for the titular homosexuals in the Danish short film (which, we should point out, was written and directed by terrestrial gays).
It's been about a month since I've seen the Houston Aeros play a game - they've been on the road and I've been on vacation. So I'm not really sure about what's going on with this team.
They leapt out to a 5-0-0-0 start, which was the second best in team history. The 2008-09 Aeros were looking to be an entirely different club than the 2007-08 Aeros in that they were a high-scoring, poor defense club. When last I wrote about the Aeros, their record was 7-7-0-0 and they were coming to an end of a disastrous five game road trip.
Tomorrow brings the 59th Annual Thanksgiving Day Parade in Houston.
As always, it brings with it the traditional question Houstonians ask about the event each year: Who are these so-called "celebrities" that we're supposed to be so excited about?
There's C-list celebs. There's D-list losers. And then there's the level of fame that sees you standing on a shaky float in the middle of godforsaken Houston on a Thanksgiving Day when you could be home with your family, or at least your posse.
It's a call an agent never really wants to make to a client: "Hey, babe, guess what? I got you the Thanksgiving Day Parade!!"
"Really? I'll get to see the Underdog balloon and perform in Herald Square?! That's great!! God, to tell you the honest truth, I thought you were going to try and stick me in Houston or someplace like that!"
The latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story (not online for non-subscibers) about troubles at the American University of Afghanistan, a high-profile Bush Administration project in Kabul.
Development there has been slow, and the blame goes mostly on the school's president, who recently resigned, the paper said.
[Faculty] describe him as an absent administrator, detached from the realities on
the ground and uninterested in soliciting advice from the staff.
And
although one of his main responsibilities was to raise money for the
university, it is unclear whether he brought in much of anything,
faculty members say.
The complaints might sound familiar to some Houston educators. The ousted president is Thomas Stauffer, who was essentially ousted from the top job at UH-Clear Lake in 1991.
A couple of local art non-profits have teamed up with the Warhol Foundation Initiative in San Francisco to give Houston artists a little bit of help in the wallet department. The Idea Fund (also supported by the Aurora Picture Show, DiverseWorks and Project Row Houses) is offering money to artists, curators, collectives, galleries or organizations that don't fit into the normal guidelines for most grants.
"One example [given] was a man in San Francisco who would curate garage sales," Tracey Morton, Administrative Manager for DiverseWorks, tells Hair Balls. "We're using terms like 'guerilla' and 'conceptual.'"
Morton says a committee will choose 10 winners who will each receive a $3,500 cash grant.
Hair Balls made a tour of downtown and some inner-city neighborhoods and found that evidence of Hurricane Ike's destruction is still very much evident. It's nothing like what Galveston and other beach-front communities are facing, of course, but plenty of Houston businesses and homes are still being repaired.
So, in case you were having trouble thinking of something to be thankful about for Thanksgiving, remember this: It isn't September 13th, and we aren't waiting for a giant-ass storm to make landfall. (Puts having to sit next to your weird cousin at Thanksgiving dinner in perspective, doesn't it?)
We've seen the devastation first-hand, read the gloom and doom reports. Bolivar has been erased. UTMB's cutbacks threaten terminal meltdown for the Galveston economy. The schools are in peril. The beaches are ravaged.
What is to be done?
Predictably, there is a call for casino gambling on the island. In an October 24 letter to Galveston city officials, Allen Flores, a bigwig Strand merchant had this to say: "Casino gambling would provide jobs, middle-income housing needs, increased tax base and a plan for beach restoration funding."
Indeed, many of the more conspiracy-minded among us have long believed that Landry's honcho and Galveston native Tilman Fertitta has been angling for gambling on the island long before the city got Iked. And that is a horrific prospect: imagine the smugness that would radiate from Fertitta, lord of Texas gaming, if you gave him a line of casinos in his hometown.
That would never do. Luckily, Hair Balls has a better idea.
Houston has never really been known for its healthy eating, what with all the "Fattest City" this and the "Most Fast Food" that.
But it appears there's one area where we are not totally in the grip of the fried-food cabal: The airport.
Bush Intercontinental Airport came in fourth in a nationwide survey of healthy airport food offerings done by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which certainly sounds like a very important committee.
Bank robberies are sprouting up like bankruptcies all over the Houston area, and the FBI and Crime Stoppers has decided to do something about it -- break out the nicknames.
The two organizations officially announced today a list of the "Dirty Dozen" bank robbers in the Houston area, including "The Note Passer" and the "Point Blank Bandit."
Unfortunately, the 10 other suspects are identified only by such labels as "Female Robber" or "Black Man w/Acne" or (gasp!) their actual names.
It needs a good farm. An algae farm, in fact. That's the thinking of a Nevada company, which has announced plans to build a 20-acre algae farm near the Channel if it can get some financing from the federal governement.
Everyone is breathlessly following the latest space mission to see if astronauts will one day successfully be able to drink urine (NASA -- the kinkiest space agency evah!!)
It's a bit of a comedown from the moon days.
As it turns out, at this time in 1969 NASA was just getting ready to launch Apollo 12 -- which, sandwiched between the adrenaline-filled missions of Apollo 11 and 13, may just be the least remembered space mission of all time (Unless you count Apollos 14-17, inclusive).
There won't be a lot of 40th anniversary celebrations of the second-ever moon mission next year, we're guessing. But Apollo 12 doesn't deserve to be forgotten.
After all the hype of the past week leading up to Black Friday, we decided to venture out into the world of massive sales and astronomical blowouts and deeply discounted electronics. 
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If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that The Man wants to control every aspect of American culture - including how we celebrate Christmas. The Man made Jesus white, even though J.C. was born in the mid-east. The three wise men? White, white, and white. Frosty the Snowman? Yup, you guessed it. But Jeffery Bradley, owner of Dallas-based NetNia Publishing, has drawn the line at Santa Claus. So he created Black Santa. 
