Blogs

Willow River Farms, a private group home for the mentally retarded and physically disabled in Brookshire, turned into a place where "residents would gather in groups and have sex with multiple partners at the same time," and the atmosphere was described as "one big orgy" by a former employee, according to a lawsuit recently filed in Harris County.

The suit, filed by Houston attorney John Ramsey, focuses on the alleged sexual assault of a 42-year-old mentally retarded woman.

"The more the family told me about this, the angrier I got," Ramsey tells Hair Balls. "[Willow River Farms] helped create a predator who is preying on other residents at this facility."

Photo by superfem

David Hernandez of Harlingen may have been delivered by a midwife not far from the border with Mexico, but he always knew he was born in the United States. The trick was convincing the U.S. Department of State, which refused to issue him a passport based on a history of midwife fraud along the Texas-Mexico border.

The government was claiming that because Hernandez's midwife's name appeared on a list of midwives suspected of committing birth certificate fraud, Hernandez had to prove and document that he was in fact born in America. Yet no matter how much proof Hernandez submitted, the government still would not give Hernandez his passport. After a year of fighting, Hernandez must fight no more.

Hernandez was one of many Hispanic-Americans who filed a class-action lawsuit, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, against the U.S. State Department last year, claiming the government was unfairly burdening Hispanic-Americans delivered by midwives by making them provide an excess number of documents normally not required to get a passport. Earlier this week, it was announced that the lawsuit settled. Hernandez now his passport.

"I got it in the mail and it felt great," Hernandez tells Hair Balls. "It was a real sigh of relief. It was such a long process and it was very stressful."

The Dallas Cowboys will start the NFL season not only with a new stadium worth over a billion dollars, but with a new theme song we're betting will be worth decidedly less. We can only hope it is as offensively shitty as the team itself.

Forbes magazine reports that the team has contracted with a sports-jingle specialist -- a corporation, for crying out loud -- and the company has produced something tentatively titled "Swing It Around (Cowboy Town)."

Man, you can smell the crap from here.

No one's heard the thing yet, but the company (Banshee Music of Milwaukee, a city known for music) wrote the theme song the Green Bay Packers started using last year called "The G-Force Roar."

Yeah, we've never heard of it either, but if you listen here you see it's heavy-metal manque  that sounds like a Spinal Tap reject.

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."

How did cops in Fort Worth celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, that epic day when gays fought back against cops harassing them in a bar? By harassing gays in a bar. Allegedly.

Protests have sprung up in Cowtown over events at the Rainbow Lounge Sunday night.

The Dallas Voice reports:

Sources have said that seven people were arrested in the raid although witnesses at the scene said many more people were handcuffed with zip ties and taken out of the bar. One man, identified by his sister as Chad Gibson, was in the intensive care unit at Fort Worth's JPS Hospital with bleeding in his brain after officers threw him to the ground and used zip-ties to handcuff him.

FWPD put out a release saying, essentially, its officers were just too damn attractive for the gay guys in the bar.

Photos by Brittanie Shey

The canning process

Up until March of last year, there weren't a whole lot of good reasons to spend a Saturday afternoon in Conroe. But now there's at least one: The Southern Star Brewing Company.

Southern Star celebrated their one-year anniversary this spring with the release of their second canned beer, Bombshell Blonde. Perhaps you've seen the pleasantly phallic logo in your local grocery store -- a royal blue can featuring a cowgirl pin-up riding an A-bomb Slim Pickens-style. Their first canned beer, Pine Belt Pale Ale, has been available for about a year in grocery stores like Central Market, Whole Foods and Spec's, and unlike other Texas microbrews, in other states as well.

The brewing company was born from a partnership between friends who met playing Frisbee golf at a Woodlands course. Both men were homebrewers. One, Dave Fougeron, was a head brewer at St. Arnold's. Symbols of this meeting are displayed at their Montgomery County brewing warehouse -- four well-worn Frisbees hang above the tap wall.

Fougeron and co-founder Brian Hutchins have been giving Saturday brewery tours since the month after they opened the brewery. The building, a pre-fab with lettered instructions still visible in the rafters, is located on a farm road east of I-45, in a small patch of piney woods. It's remote even for Conroe, and it takes about an hour drive from Houston to get there.

Photo courtesy of Marina Castillo-Knuti

Keep the DREAM alive. That's what community activists in Houston are trying to do tomorrow at Mason Park when they hold a rally in support of the DREAM Act, a piece of federal legislation that would allow certain undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship.

Officially called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, (see our take on it here) the proposed law would let illegal immigrants who entered the United States before the age of 16 and have lived here for at least five years to earn permanent residency by either serving in the military for two years or by completing at least two years of college.

Sponsors of the tomorrow's rally, Immigrant Families and Students in the Struggle, ask that supporters don their cap and gown to symbolize all of the undocumented students' graduating from high school and college. The event in Houston coincides with the National DREAM Act Graduation Day in Washington, D.C.

Most Houstonians probably know Huntsville for the colossal Sam Houston statue, designed by Texas artist David Adickes, himself a graduate of Sam Houston State University and a Huntsville native. At 67 feet tall, "Big Sam" is dubbed The World's Tallest Statue of an American Hero.

Or maybe they know about Huntsville thanks to the news. The town is, after all, home to the Texas State Penitentiary, the oldest state prison in Texas, which provides our state with the dubious honor of performing the most executions in the country.

If you're into that kind of thing, you can check out the Texas Prison Museum. The museum proudly invites you to visit the adorably-titled electric chair "Old Sparky," the method of execution for 361 prisoners between 1924 and 1964. The chair was constructed by inmates of the prison.

The Jaguarundi

courtesy of blueskull611

Ever heard of the jaguarundi? Neither have we.

Perhaps that's because this unique type of cat that lives along the Texas border with Mexico is endangered. Perhaps it's because nobody really cares. We're guessing it's a bit of both, but that doesn't mean every animal shouldn't have some human in their corner pulling for them.

WildEarth Guardian, a non-profit environmental organization, recently waged war in the form of a lawsuit in Houston federal court against Ken Salazar, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, demanding that he put a conservation and survival plan together for the animal. After all, the organization argues, the cat has been listed as endangered since 1976, plenty of time to create such a plan as required under the Endangered Species Act.

Two types of the endangered species call south Texas their home, the Gulf Coast jaguarundi and the Sinaloan jaguarundi. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they are larger than a domestic cat and have small ears, long, narrow bodies with short legs and flattened heads and tails. They generally look more like an otter or a weasel than a cat. They make their homes, according to the lawsuit, in the "dense thorny mesquite, cacti and cat claw thickets of southern Texas."

A Bhutanese refugee has been holed up in his southwest Houston apartment for months, downing pain killers. This isn't the new life he had in mind.

Rubber sandals cover the mat outside the spare, dim apartment. The man is embedded in an easy chair. He periodically winces and grabs his stomach.

The man, who is 40 with a delicate frame and thin black hair, asked not to be named. He and his family are of Nepali origin. They fled Bhutan in the 1990s during unrest over assimilation and spent 18 years in a refugee camp in Nepal. The man was a guard at the hospital; his younger brother, who also lives in Houston, taught math.

In 2007 the United States and other countries agreed to resettle many of the refugees. About 60,000 were approved for a move to America.

It took the man some time to get settled. His first job was fixing coils at a manufacturing company a three-hour bus ride from home. The stomach pains started after a couple of weeks, so he took a job at a nearby carwash. He had been working there about a week when he collapsed and started vomiting. That was in March.