Blogs

The Flagship Hotel, that iconic building on a pier in Galveston, seems to forever be endangered. It now looks like it's more endangered than ever.

The strange, twisty tale of the now semi-battered building might be coming to a conclusion, the Galveston County Daily News reports. Landry's Restaurants, Inc., which owns the building, is looking to sell it or demolish it, the paper says.

In its place would be....another Kemah Boardwalk-like "attraction," with restaurants and overpriced rides.

The company is in talks with a potential buyer, who they describe to the News as "serious." We're guessing that means it isn't Daniel Yeh, who owned the rights to manage the hotel for a long while and let it slide. Yeh was convicted of scamming FEMA after Katrina, even though his own attorney offered such sterling descriptions of him as "He can function. I mean, he's not like...a raving lunatic. He's not Anthony Hopkins. But he doesn't have the ability to discern things [and] can't make executive decisions."

The Scientist, a magazine that takes a skeptical look at goings-on in the medical industry, has a new report out on UTMB-Galveston's treatment of faculty in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

Color them unimpressed. (Free registration may be required.)

Or, maybe impressed -- just not in a good way. If you're tossing around terms like "show trials," it's generally not too positive a report.

Only a couple of the former University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) faculty members who challenged their terminations made in the aftermath of last year's Hurricane Ike have won their appeals in what some are calling "show trials," although some of the defeated professors have been rehired to the same or similar positions.

"The way that the whole thing was set up and executed, I think it was a farce," Roger Vertrees, a former non-tenure track associate professor of surgery who had his appeal denied, told The Scientist.

UTMB's layoff of thousands of its employees included about 120 professors; 30 appealed their pink slips, The Scientist reported. Of the 18 cases heard so far, only two professors have won.

Photo courtesy Historic Naval Ships Association

In April Galveston's popular World War II sub the USS Cavalla reopened after fixing damage caused by Hurricane Ike. Its companion ship, the USS Stewart -- a destroyer escort -- was still closed, however, due to the storm surge that lifted the boats and then settled them back down a little bent out of shape.

The Stewart is back in action as of today, though, and once again Seawolf Park has both its boats ready for tours.

The tours are highly recommended, by the way, for anyone with any interest in The Big One. It's an eye-opening look at how sailors lived and fought back in the day.

KUHT's big summer drive to make up its Ike-caused shortfall began a little over two weeks ago, and it's already a big success.

The station says it aimed to raise $550,000 (these figures always seem fluid) and they surpassed it, bringing in $632,867and adding 1,570 members to the current 39,000.

That's a lot of Far, Far More Doo-Wop Than You'll Ever Need DVDs. (Actually, we don't know what the big collectible was this time around.

"We're deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to the success of this drive-members, local businesses and foundations-over 80% of our $9 million dollar operating budget comes from community support. We simply could not do what we do here at Channel 8 without their help," says John Hesse, General Manager at HoustonPBS, in a release.

Good Morning America's Robin Roberts reported today on the first day of hurricane season from a fitting place -- Galveston. 

Standing amid the detritus left behind by Ike, and set to a soundtrack of plaintive acoustic slide guitar, Roberts expertly delivered the mandatory post-storm platitudes, such as "People here refuse to give up."

The broadcast of course included footage from Ike's first days, because as pleasant as Roberts is, there really wasn't anything exciting for her to do. After the footage, we suddenly saw Roberts talking to Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas, who offered the very mayoral "everybody's helping everybody."

We don't know if Thomas said it, or if GMA had to edit for time, but there was nothing along the lines of "Everybody's helping everybody, except the freakin' Galveston County Daily News," which Thomas blamed for single-handedly crushing her Hurricane Recovery Committee by pointing out that the head of the committee's son has a financial interest in the East End flats development. It's for that very reason -- pesky reporters -- that Thomas barred city employees from talking to the media. After all, what right did anyone except the mayor have to find out about how bad people's homes were hit?

NEWS FLASH!!!!!!!!! (MUST CREDIT HAIR BALLS!!!!!) Today is the beginning of the hurricane season.

While the rest of the so-called mainstream media will ignore this important milestone simply because writing or airing stuff about hurricanes in Houston results in cheap increases in ratings and clicks, you can depend on us to stoop that low.

This week will bring The Only Hurricane Guide You Will Ever Need. There's a lot of stuff about hurricanes that normally gets overlooked by such guides (Example: Stock up on batteries! Who knew?). We also offer tips on how best to deal with FEMA (Mostly, pray as hard as you can that no hurricane hits here.)

We couldn't cover everything, of course, so here are some questions (and answers!!) every Gulf Coast resident should know:

How many hurricanes will there be in the Gulf this year? What categories will they be rated at? And, just to follow up, where will landfall be?

In order: a) Four. b) 2, 3, 3, 2. c) Biloxi, Lake Charles, Brownsville, Mexico.

Hendley Market, Galveston's destination shopping place on The Strand for knick-knacks, sweets and other things you never knew you needed, is finally reopening after fixing its Ike damage.

"We are back in business after getting rid of that bad old Ike hangover," their announcement says.

They also note what Alanis Morisette would no doubt call ironic -- shortly before Ike hit, we here at the Houston Press cited them for being the place for "Best Hip, Fun or Nostalgic Gifts."

Here's what we said:

Hendley Market is the perfect place to buy '60s-era toys and wax lips for kids, knitted catnip-filled toys for cats, old coins for house-sitting neighbors and embroidered linens for co-workers. There are antique oddities such as medical instruments, quirky old books, gift items that hark back to the Victorian Age (in a good way, not a chastity-belt way) and Mexican retablos. It's a charming haven from the usual "sun 'n' sand" beach tourist claptrap predominant on an island.

As the reopening announcement noted, "we were forced to close before anyone could actually get to see for themselves how amazingly accurate was this designation."

For a few hours yesterday, the lead story at Chron.com gravely warned Houstonians on the dangers of mixing generators and video games. Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston evidently found that this happened often in the blacked-out weeks in the wake of Hurricane Ike, and issued a press release saying so, and the Chron's Cindy George ran with it.

"Many children treated for carbon monoxide poisoning in the powerless days after Hurricane Ike took ill while playing video games," intoned the article's lead sentence. Later, the article stated that of the children treated for monoxide poisoning who gave a specific reason for why they were using a generator, a full 75 percent said it was to power video games.

The very idea...

The article seemed tailor-made to stir up the "My lawn, get off of it" brigades, and it certainly did. Many of the 100-plus comments it elicited were along these lines: What kind of a society are we living in? What kind of parents would harness scarce resources to lavish such luxury on their spoiled brats? Video games? Back in my day, when we had a weeks-long post-hurricane power outage, we played cribbage, mumblety-peg, and shot marbles, and it was more fun than any of that violent mind-numbing balderdash. And instead of having good old-fashioned fun, these kids were literally killing themselves -- so it was averred in at least one comment -- to play their precious Xbox.

Not so much.

Photo by rhaaga

The Balinese Room, several months before Chris Jagger apparently enjoyed a drink there.

Has British tabloid the Daily Mail become the Daily Fail? It sure seemed like it when Hair Balls came across a Texas travelogue by Chris Jagger.

Jagger, the brother of Mick, gathered little moss as he rolled around the Lone Star State last month. (The story is listed as "last updated" on April 28, 2009.) He palled around with legendary 94-year-old blues piano-man Pinetop Perkins in Austin, tracked down a stray steer in the brush on a Bandera dude ranch, and promenaded along the River Walk and took in the Alamo in old San Antone.

And then Jagger headed to Galveston, where his account takes a turn for the surreal.  

"The one watering hole I got to --the Bali Room [sic] - is where the Margarita was invented (apparently it was made for singer Peggy Lee)," he writes. "It is also famous as one of the favourite haunts for Frank Sinatra and his mafia gambling chums during the Fifties. Duke Ellington's piano is still in the ballroom. In the end, the politicians got the better of the mafia and the place now wears a faded charm."

There are two ways to interpret this puzzling account. If we were feeling uncharitable, we could accuse Jagger of phoning in a rehash of some old articles about Galveston.

But since it is Friday, we will credit Jagger with engaging in the kind of droll British understatement by which "a faded charm" could mean "utterly annihilated by Hurricane Ike."

Pretty much no one ever goes to visit the modernistic white pavilion at Galveston's Seawolf Park.

Now they never will.

The building, which is mostly a kind of visual landmark seen by people cruising on the ferry, was heavily damaged by Ike. Since it was a bit of a white elephant, the city's Parks Board has voted not to repair it, the Galveston County Daily News reports.

Now the question is what, if anything, should replace it on the tip of Pelican Island. Suggestions include a hotel, a museum dedicated to the immigrants who entered the US there, an RV park or a restaurant.