Houston News Blog

​Do you remember The Alamo? Of course you don't. It was a terrible movie.

But boy, did it get a lot of hype here in Texas. Papers did stories, Texas Monthly gave it a cover, and the American public gave it the finger.

Which led to its inclusion as a 2004 Turkey of the Year, one in a string of years that saw a lot of competition for the spot.

Who won the grand-prize Turkey of the Year award that time?

Come one, you know......think nipple, and Justin Timberlake....Yep, it was Miss Jackson (if you're nasty).

She and The Alamo joined a very august group, including the comically named State Rep. Talmadge Heflin. We think every state legislature south of the Mason-Dixon line should include someone named Talmadge Heflin.

​We're about a week away from the always highly anticipated Turkey of the Year award issue. There's absolutely no telling who will walk away with the coveted honor this year, because for the love of Christ there have been a ton of worthy nominees.

It's our seventh annual list; in the days leading up to it we'll go on a bit of a nostalgic trip to days of yore.

Today: 2003!! The first list of all!!

We could put in a link to it, but we want to see if you can remember that glorious year's picks without clicking or Googling. Prize: None.

1. This overall winner has gone on to be the most-honored person ever. What Edith Head was to the Oscars, he/she is to the Turkeys.
a) Tom DeLay
b) Tom DeLay
c) Tom DeLay
d) Anyone other than Tom DeLay

​The Los Angeles Times published a lengthy story this weekend about unintended acceleration in Toyotas, something the Houston Press and Hair Balls have written about from time to time, starting with a cover story in April.

​The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a statement yesterday indicating that problems of unintended acceleration in Toyotas might be caused by something more than faulty floor mats.

The statement from the federal agency was a response to Toyota's claims, released on Tuesday, that "no defect exists in vehicles in which the driver's floor mat is compatible with the vehicle and properly secured."

The NHTSA release said that Toyota "inaccurately stated NHTSA had reached a conclusion," adding:

Safety is the number one priority for NHTSA and this is why officials are working with Toyota to find the right way to fix this very dangerous problem. The matter is not closed until Toyota has effectively addressed the defect by providing a suitable vehicle based solution.

Photos by Mike Giglio

​Beneath an almost full moon on Halloween night the (probably) drunk man tried to follow the tip of the officer's pen with his eyes.

Behind him a parade of costumed yuppies shuffled between Washington Avenue's trendy bars: sexy school girls, sexy devils, mobsters, Facebook.

Officer Don Egdorf waved his pen from side to side. Egdorf is one of 14 members of a local task force dedicated to finding and arresting drunk drivers. And he had a Halloween-worthy persona of his own: what DWI attorneys call a "vampire cop."

"Because they're out there looking for blood," says Tyler Flood, the flashy defense attorney who brags about getting drunk drivers off the hook and is the subject of this week's upcoming cover story out on the web this Wednesday.

​President Obama and his new administration were going to be so tough on the corporate villains who had such a large role in fostering the recession that has upended the finances of so many.

But as author James Lieber points out in this week's cover story "No Justice," that just hasn't happened.

As it stands now, there's only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration's Justice Department in June 2008.

Turns out, most of Obama's crew were in on the ground floor of the factors leading up to the collapse, and did nothing to stop it.

If you're satisfied with what's been done so far to hold someone, anyone accountable, this story might upend your beliefs.

​In the court of law, it never really mattered whether Roland Carnaby was a spy, as he claimed just before police gunned him down along the highway following a high-speed chase. After all, his widow, Susan, was suing the City of Houston and a pair of its police officers in federal court for excessive force and other civil rights violations.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison chucked Susan CarNaby's lawsuit out of court before a jury ever got the chance to hear testimony or see the video tape of the shooting. Ellison had previously dismissed the two officers from the lawsuit, finding that they reasonably feared for their lives when they shot Carnaby, and closed the book on the case Wednesday when he dismissed the city.

However, says Susan Carnaby's lawyer, Randall Kallinen, the fight is not over. He plans to appeal the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He says his strongest weapon is the videotape of the shooting.

Legendary Houston lawyer John O'quinn and an unidentified man were killed this morning when their SUV slammed into a tree off Allen Parkway. Police have not said who was driving.

O'Quinn, 68, won huge settlements in mass-tort cases dealing with deadly breast implants and Big Tobacco. Recently, he represented Anna Nicole Smith's mother, where in a February 2007 hearing he managed to nab headlines not for the circus-act duel over what would become of Smith's corpse, but by collapsing. (O'Quinn was diabetic).

But he also earned a larger-than-life reputation outside the courtroom -- he became almost as well known for being the target of numerous failed State Bar disciplinary attempts, including "running cases," where employees were dispatched to sign clients in the wake of airplane crashes and oil-rig explosions.

We'll keep you updated as officials release more information.

​Most of Houston seems blissfully unaware that there's a mayor's race going on. This year is supposed to be one of the the years with a hot election -- the incumbent is term-limited, so it's an open seat likely to lead to six years in office -- but, for reasons we lay out in this week's cover story, the thing is instead a run for the top job in Dullsville.

Still, it's your civic duty to vote, or America will slide into the abyss and all that. The three candidates with any chance of winning are current city councilman Peter Brown, former city attorney Gene Locke and current city controller Annise Parker.

You're going to need some help telling them apart. Luckily, it's Wednesday, when we turn complex questions into easy decisions by judicious use of charts. Check the jump for our analysis of this year's mayoral "race."

Photo by Mike Giglio

​A crowd of Burmese refugees gathered in the parking lot Sunday afternoon at the Sun Blossom Mountain apartment complex on Ranchester Drive -- which was the subject of our recent cover story on Houston's refugees -- and waited for John Glenn to shout their names.

A local company, Roguescene Houston, had the previous weekend hosted a charity event on behalf of the 150 Burmese families who live there in order to raise enough money to buy each of them a rice cooker. And a truck full of them, along with a small team of volunteers in black shirts, had just arrived.

Glenn, a former activist in Burma (or Myanmar) who has helped to organize his fellow refugees since arriving here in January, spent much of the last week putting together a list of names and spreading the word. He says people were initially hesitant to cooperate, because they didn't believe the cookers would actually show up.

​When the Houston Press first wrote about the ManKind Project, a secretive so-called men's-help group, following the suicide of a man who had attended the organization's initiation weekend, MKP's leadership declined to comment. Now, more than two years later, the group finally decided to speak up in the form of a letter on its website titled, "A Response to the Houston Press Article."

In the letter, MKP Executive Director Carl Griesser highlights several criticisms made by people interviewed in the story and tries to explain them away.

It appears, however, that Griesser does not deny many of the points he chooses to highlight and in some instances even admits that they are true.

Here are just a few examples:

Greisser takes issue with what some people claimed in the original story, that MKP recruits men involved in 12-step recovery programs. However, Griesser does not deny this, and in fact admits that "many men who have participated in the [initiation] have backgrounds in recovery."

Critics of MKP have said that the group does not adequately screen applicants who may be too fragile to face the emotional rigors of the program, despite a medical and psychological questionnaire which applicants are required to fill out. Without directly saying so, Griesser essentially admits this is true when he writes, "This year we have added additional questions to the form [to] improve our ability to identify men with emotional instability, mental illness, and suicidal ideation."

If the old screening method was effective and adequate, there is certainly an argument that there would be no need to "improve" it.

Photo courtesy of SEARCH

​Want to experience the joys of homelessness -- sleeping under the stars, free dinner -- without any of the risk (or just support the cause of trying to end the problem)?

On November 14 local non-profit SEARCH Homeless Services will host its second annual "SleepOut" event, in which participants organize teams and solicit donations as in a charity marathon. Only instead of working up a sweat, "Sleepers" earn money by spending the night in Sesquicentennial Park.

Sleepers show up at 5 p.m. to collect wristbands, ID badges and sleeping assignments. They can then grab dinner from one of the food tents before the start of the night's entertainment, which will include Clutch, the Rockets' mascot, music and some speakers.

Cops won't kick you awake in the morning, but they'll be around to provide security.

Last year's event drew about 200 people and raised more than $50,000. It was inspired by SEARCH volunteer Noah Rattler, who hoofed it from Houston to Los Angeles over four months to raise homeless awareness by "walking in their shoes".

​These days, there are a lot of misconceptions about what constitutes a dive bar. Going by lists on sites like Yelp and Citysearch, and especially this laughable list from the Houston Chronicle, apparently any drinking establishment that does not sport bottle service, valet parking and a velvet rope is a dive.

How else can you explain the presence of places like Under the Volcano and Kenneally's on such lists? Kenneally's is just an Irish pub, and at Volcano, they squeeze fresh fruit in the cocktails. Unless you are talking limes and limes only, that is not a dive bar. And the more we think of that Chron list, the more we wonder what in the name of Sam Houston is going on in this city when the town's alleged Leading Information Source dares with a straight face to say that Catbird's, The Mink, Dean's, The Harp, McElroy's, Komodo, Woodrow's, and Boondocks are dive bars. That's eight of what they are calling the top 20 in the city, and they've listed two Irish pubs, a chain bar, and a couple of hipster joints. That list sucks.

Sorry.

At any rate, we even recently talked to a twentysomething guy who liked carousing in Midtown and on Washington who was scared to go inside Griff's, because it was a such a rough and tough dive bar.

Brad Moore, current co-owner of Big Star Bar and former co-founding owner of Pearl Bar, thinks the velvet rope/valet parking litmus test is crazy. "By that standard, 95 percent of the bars in the world are dives," he says. "I've even seen people call Pearl Bar a dive. It's just not the case."

You also often see the Continental Club listed as a dive bar. It's not. With very few exceptions, places that are first and foremost music venues, especially ones that are less than ten years old, are not dive bars. Not that dive bars can't offer live music. It's just that live music is not usually the focus at a dive bar. Drinking is the focus, and often dive-bar clienteles like to pick their own soundtrack to cry in their beers to.

​When Lorenzo Timmons was hurt and out of work last summer, and finally ran out of money to pay the rent, he had little choice but the unthinkable: to gather his wife, daughter and whatever he could carry and move his family into a homeless shelter. The Houston Press reported in a cover story early this year (People Like Us, March 19) that the specter of previously stable, working families falling into homelessness was becoming increasingly common in Houston -- and that there were few options for help.

A block of stimulus money was allocated in February to address the problem. Since then, the under-equipped charities that shoulder the burden in Houston have been anxiously waiting for the funds to arrive. And the wait has been a nervous one.

Gerald Eckert, the social services manager at the Salvation Army who in March called the economic crisis a "double whammy" -- increasing the demand for homeless services while driving down the donations that largely support them -- says need has snowballed since March.

"The shelters are always full," Eckert tells Hair Balls. "This is the chronic problem for Houston -- we don't have enough beds to go around. And especially with families."

Last month the stimulus money finally arrived.

​Yesterday Hair Balls wrote about a Toyota recall of 3.8 million vehicles, including all Priuses made since 2005, because the cars' floor mats are being blamed for unintended acceleration after a crash killed four people last month, including the driver, an off-duty California highway patrolman.

Not everyone, including loyal Prius owners, buys the floor-mat excuse. From our friends at priuschat.com:

I read this with disbelief. My 2006 Prius had the unintended acceleration problem. Even the dealer agreed that the mat could not be blamed. Toyota has consistently refused to admit there may be an ECU issue...I traded my 2006 in July for a 2010. I feel much safer.

But at least one Prius owner doesn't think Toyota should be blamed at all:

If he couldn't figure out what was causing his trouble, shift to Neutral, or otherwise disable his vehicle, then yes, the officer [who died in the crash] was from the shallow end of the gene pool.

Classy.

​Toyota announced today a recall of 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles, including all Priuses made from 2005 to 2010, because it says the cars have floor mats that can catch the accelerator and cause a crash.

It's the largest recall from Toyota and the first real knock from the company against the Prius. Two years ago Toyota issued a similar recall, but Prius owners were simply cautioned to make sure the floor mats were properly installed.

The recall was prompted by an August 28 crash in California that killed four people in a Lexus, including a California Highway Patrol officer and a 13-year-old girl. A 911 made from someone inside the car revealed that the Lexus sped up and wouldn't stop, eventually hitting another car and crashing.

The Houston Press wrote about unintended acceleration in an April cover story, "Wild Rides." In almost all the incidents we covered, none of the drivers believed the floor mat was the cause of the problem. But some Pruis fans claim that unintended acceleration is not physically possible without driver error.

For example, one Prius owner wrote in response to the story, "There is not a car today that you can not stop with the brake system that it was built with."

Image courtesy of Lian Nguyen

​The Burmese refugees pouring into Houston face a number of challenges. As detailed in our September 3 cover story (The Burmese Come to Houston), they have precious little time to adapt and find jobs in a sinking economy, and they're increasingly left to do much of it on their own. But Lian Nguyen has decided to hone in on one problem in particular: Newly arrived refugees are also having a hard time cooking their rice.

Nguyen is co-founder of Roguescene Houston, a promotion company that also holds charity events for the local Asian-American community. On October 9, Roguescene will host "Project Burmese" at the Blue Label lounge on Washington Avenue. The proceeds will buy rice cookers for each of the 150 Burmese families at the Sun Blossom apartments in southwest Houston, which were the focus of our feature story.

Nguyen got the idea from a brief mention in the story -- which she read while eating dinner at a Thai restaurant -- that refugees were struggling with frying pans to cook their all-important rice.

"They don't know how to use a lot of the [kitchen] stuff here. Rice cookers are simple," Nguyen says, adding that they can also be used to cook vegetables. "I have a tendency that if we can buy something tangible to give, that's what we really want to do."

Reporters with Al-Jazeera were in Houston earlier this month filming around the city and in the Harris County Jail -- getting some people riled up -- to "examine the criminalization of the mentally ill." The 22-minute news story was released last week, and while it was well-made and informative, the story doesn't offer much new information to anyone that follows the criminal justice system in Texas. Basically, the Harris County Jail is a bad place, especially if you're mentally ill.

But the Al-Jazeera reporters also hit on something ironic about Houston, something the Houston Press wrote about in "How to Save a Life," a cover story from December of last year. The city is home to a jail that is one of the worst places for the mentally ill in the nation, but the police department has the largest and one of the most progressive programs in the country that deals with that same population.

"We are much more professional in our response, in that we realize jail is not the answer," Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt told Al-Jazeera.

Photo courtesy of Dario Lipovac

Nahlah Qasim Radhi got the call this afternoon. For at least the next six months, she'll be able to stay in Houston with her ailing son, who lies in a coma at Memorial Hermann hospital.

Radhi hadn't seen him since he fled Iraq more than a year ago. When he was critically injured in a car accident here on August 26, she thought she might never see him again.

Marwan Hamza, 22, resettled in Houston in January after his work as a translator for U.S. troops forced him from Iraq as a refugee. As Hair Balls first reported two days after the crash, Hamza's friends here -- led by his resettlement agency, YMCA International, and its refugee director Dario Lipovac -- scrambled to win his mother a temporary visa to be at his side.

With help from the hospital and Congressman Al Green's office, the unlikely task was completed in about a week, and Radhi arrived in Houston on September 11. Since then she has remained almost constantly at Hamza's side.

"To be with my son is the best thing for me," Radhi told Hair Balls through a translator. "I wish I had a room at the hospital, so I could stay with him 24/7."

Just having a place to stay at all quickly became a problem. Radhi and her family paid for her visa, flight and first week at a hotel. But the money was quickly running out. So Lipovac and others hit the phones once again.

Photo courtesy runtofthelitter.com

​Eight years ago, we wrote of former Houston Oiler safety Bo Eason, who was premiering at Stages Theatre a searing autobiographical one-man play about his life and career.

Runt of the Litter was a fascinating, well-written, nicely acted look at the dark forces that drove Eason to the NFL, and the sometimes twisted relationships he had with his parents and his brother Tony, an intensely private Super Bowl quarterback for the New England Patriots.

Since then, the play went to Off-Broadway, where it got strong reviews from The New York Times and other papers.

Tonight Eason opens a 30-city tour of the play in Seattle.

His spokesperson, Breanne Davis, tells Hair Balls Eason will be doing 100 performances across America. So far Houston's not on the list; in fact most of the stops are in smaller cities.

​The Houston Police Department announced today the bust of an identity-theft business that sold fake driver's licenses and counterfeit checks to almost 200 clients, operating out of an office near Greenspoint Mall. 

The "ring leader," 65-year-old Robert Lyles, allegedly purchased information to make the counterfeit checks. For example, police found a large stack of documents at Lyles's office from Ace Cash Express, according to Lieutenant Robert Manzo, who heads the department's financial crimes unit.

Lyles then got a driver's license number using the Web site publicdata.com, Manzo said, and used that number with a client's real photograph to make a fake Texas driver's license to match the name on the counterfeit checks.

"He was just a good businessman," Manzo said. "He had an office, he drove nice cars."

Illustration courtesy drinktap.org

​A little more than a year ago, the Houston Press brought you a story about a growing movement aimed at ditching those store-bought plastic bottles of water for the stuff that flows from the tap. After all, advocates claimed, tap water is safe, cheap and environmentally friendly.

Then The New York Times dropped a bomb Sunday when it published its investigation claiming that tap water is anything but safe. Among the paper's findings, 40 percent of the country's public water systems have at one point been in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and one in 10 Americans has been exposed to drinking water containing dangerous chemicals.

Not good news for the pro-tap water crowd. Or at least you'd think.

But leave it to the good folks at the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, based in Boston, to try to turn potentially crippling news into a positive.

Marie Creasy is the manager of the Poop Deck on Galveston's Seawall, so she's been at Ground Zero for the past year's efforts to recover from Ike.

As far as she can tell, things are back: "Everybody seems to be putting their lives back together, and those that aren't putting their lives back together are leaving, they're going somewhere else."

Take a look at Galveston and its surroundings, one year after Ike the Bastard, in this week's feature story by John Nova Lomax.

Photos by Mike Giglio

​Victor Win knew Burma's secret police were coming for him. All he could do was wait.

It was the spring of 1965, two years after Burma's military toppled its elected government and jailed its leaders. Win, who fled the country in 1971 and eventually settled in Houston, was a 27-year-old architect with a wife and two young kids. And he had been involved in a plot to overthrow the junta.

The city of Rangoon was a picture of fear in those days. Each night at 7 p.m., nervous residents waited by radios for the latest decree -- the state would take over all private businesses without compensation; bills of 100 kyats and larger (most Burmese stashed their savings at home) were no longer valid.

The decrees went into effect immediately. When frantic people rushed out to spend their large bills, for instance, they were arrested on the spot.

And people would constantly disappear off the street.

Colonel Kyi Maung kept his power immediately following the coup but soon became disillusioned with the new regime. He was forced to resign in 1963, and he took his opposition underground. Maung was a friend of the family, so Win was there to help, arranging meetings with the Colonel and putting him up in his home. But spies were everywhere.

"Even among ourselves," Win says. "You never know who's your real friend."

​A new stream of refugees began flowing out of Burma (or Myanmar) last month. Burmese troops broke a 20-year cease-fire with ethnic groups in the country's northeastern Shan region, causing an estimated 30,000 to flee across the border and into China.

The fighting is part of a trend toward more violence that will see yet another uptick in Burmese refugees, according to Jeremy Woodrum, director of the advocacy group U.S. Campaign for Burma.

"We could be looking at major conflict and refugee flows," Woodrum says.

In June, the Burmese military launched yet another attack against the Karen, which have been the most persecuted of the country's ethnic groups, causing 5,000 new refugees to flee into Thailand. As noted in this week's feature, the Karen are a large part of Houston's growing community of refugees from Burma.

Photos by Mike Giglio

​I remember his nose. Thick gray hair spouted from each nostril, all the way down to the old monk's lip, like smoke from the snout of a dragon. He sat on some steps inside the gold and glittering Sule Pagoda in central Rangoon.

The monk was bald and missing teeth, and a cinnamon robe hung around his tiny frame. His eyebrows perfectly matched the hair in his nose. He raised them toward the sun and motioned for me to sit beside him in the shade.

This was December of 2006, well before I moved to Houston and found that the city is home to a rapidly growing community of Burmese refugees, the subject of this week's feature.

It was less than a year before the ubiquitous monks in Burma (or Myanmar) would lead a peaceful uprising that its military dictatorship would quickly and violently crush. I had been in Rangoon (or Yangon) about an hour and was already sweating through my shirt. I sat, and the monk began to speak with me in confident English.

A man from the crowd of people milling about the temple suddenly forced his way between us, shoving me to the side. He was dressed like anyone else, and I guessed I had offended some local custom. But the monk became angry. He pushed himself up and pulled me with him, and we began to circle the temple together, his arm around mine.

"We must be very careful," he whispered. "Now come with me."

Photo by Mike Giglio

​I threw a football at a refugee and demanded to know where she lived.

Her voice wavered, and her answer was hard to hear. So I leaned over and cupped my hand to my ear, waving the hand in a circle first, like Hulk Hogan trying to rile a crowd. Apartment 1212, I finally made out.

I made the class repeat after me: "I live in apartment 1-2-1-2."

On a July night in an apartment complex in southwest Houston, the makeshift classroom was full of Burmese. It was the first of a new adult class organized by a man named Scott Poteet. I was there to help with a lesson on numbers, and mainly to introduce myself as someone who wanted to pry into their new lives. (For this week's feature story.)

Poteet teaches the evening English classes on his own time to complement the ones he runs for a local refugee-resettlement agency. The Burmese have an especially hard time with the language. This was part of my story, and also my problem.

​After years of stewing in a mix of controversy and mystery, The ManKind Project is finally going to give the world an official glimpse into its secret world of male rites, rituals and so-called "training" programs.

At least according to an MKP memo obtained by Warren Throckmorton, Associate Professor of Psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who blogs about the organization. He says he first became interested in MKP two years ago after the Houston Press wrote a story about how Michael Scinto killed himself following an initiation weekend at the group's Houston chapter. Scinto's family then sued MKP for wrongful death and then settled out of court.

The nonprofit organization, which has chapters all across the globe, describes its training as "a traditional masculine initiation, but geared toward the modern-day man." Its avowed goal is to create caring and trusting relationships among men and to help them overcome their emotional wounds.

Among the many criticisms of MKP is the fact that members have been required to keep its weekend rituals a secret, even making those who participate sign a confidentiality agreement. The reason why, MKP officials have said, is to keep the integrity of the group's programs and to ensure that each initiate gets the most out of the experience. But no more. According to Throckmorton, MKP leaders have decided to go transparent and are making several major changes to the way they do business.

​Our cover story this week is on the Houston Texans, and their seemingly unquenchable urge to toy with the hearts of local football fans.

Alas, we could not bring ourselves to feel optimistic about the coming season, and presented a history of the team to demonstrate why.

Instead, according to one astute observer, we merely demonstrated that we are a homosexual.

We won't print the guy's name, because we haven't had a chance to see if it's not a case of someone trying to make the guy look like an idiot, but here's his e-mail, annotated.

Rich;

That has to be one of the worst written articles I've read in my entire 30 years. Now, I certainly don't proclaim to be a journalistic genius, but come on! It's a little easier to read knowing your publication is based on live music and flamboyant dick suckers finding true love, so a piece on sports makes about as much sense as.....oh I don't know, you writing for The Chronicle!! [Wait -- flamboyant dick-suckers don't read the Chron?]

The animal world equivalent of Klem's punishment

​Little-girl-lovin' Beaumont cardiologist Jeffrey Klem has entered into a 15-year "agreed order of public reprimand" with the Texas Medical Board, according to a Board release issued this morning.

If you'll recall, Klem was the guy who showed that, in Jefferson and Harris counties, you can get a slap on the wrist for pleading guilty to fondling young girls as long as you're a doctor with enough dough to hire a good attorney. Klem was sentenced to six months in jail for his Jefferson County conviction -- but they were kind enough to let him serve his time on the weekends.

The Board on August 21 stayed a suspension of Klem's license, and Klem agreed to the following conditions (amond others):

• No "direct or indirect contact" with patients under 21
• When treating patients 21 and older, a chaperone must be present
• He must practice in a group or institutional setting
• Must see a Board-approved psychiatrist and follow that psychiatrist's recommendations
• Must take and pass the Texas Medical Jurisprudence Examination within one year
• Must pay a $5,000 administrative penalty within 90 days