Blogs

Yo, Dwayne. You still searching for that wallet you lost in the mid-1970s? Looks like Patricia Calhoun, the editor for our sister paper up in Denver, has finally tracked it down. Talk about service journalism.

While doing yard work yesterday in Conifer, Colorado, Calhoun’s brother happened upon an old wallet containing a driver’s license, a Kroger card and a student ID (sorry, no cash). The address listed was in Houston, which has us wondering if the Dwayne Wright in question is the same guy Steve McVicker interviewed back in 1996 for this story.

Anyway, Dwayne, your search is over. Hop over here and reclaim your lost property. Better be quick, since we hear Denver might start profiling all the Dwayne Wrights they can find, and it looks like you might have some competition. -- Keith Plocek

Looks like David Beebe and my expose on the epidemic of stray shopping carts is bearing fruit. Here’s what the Chronicle says H.P.D. is doing about the problem:

“’There are more shopping carts than bushes out there,’ said Lt. Richard Zajac of the Houston Police Department's South Central Patrol Division, which this year launched a special detail to curb cart theft in hopes of stopping more serious crime.

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This quintessentially Houston event deserved tons of coverage, and we like to think we delivered. Here’s a roundup of images from this weekend (and weekends past).

First up, we have a big fat slideshow of art car images from Saturday.

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Check out photos from the first parade.

In honor of this weekend's Art Car Parade, we've loaded up a bunch of photos from 1988, back when the Fruitmobile was fresh and the event was but a small part of iFest. -- Keith Plocek

Eight a.m. to noon, The trip out, and in from Mission Bend to Westchase: David Beebe and I like to think we are great urban adventurers, veterans of what is now over 130 miles of walking the city streets, and many hundreds more miles logged on the city buses. In other words, this shit ain’t exactly new to us. But in our most recent installment of the Sole of Houston, we acted like a couple of noobs.

The plan was to meet at my house near the Palace Lanes on Bellaire and walk down to Stella Link, catch the southbound #68 bus and head out to the West Loop Transit Center near Meyerland, and then transfer to the #33 South Post Oak bus, which would deliver us out to Hiram Clarke Park and Ride. We would walk back in from there all the way to Allen’s Landing and our customary two Martini celebration at Warren’s.

Beebe arrived at the house about eight a.m., clutching a hilarious campaign poster for his bid for Marfa City Council. It was a very nice day, absolutely the best weather we’ve had for one of these walks – mid-60s, low humidity, not a hint of rain.

We decided to walk down to the West Loop Transit Center, so we headed down Academy to Brays Bayou and followed it as it wound its way southwest.

The #33 bus arrived almost immediately after we made it to the George R. Brown-looking transit center. “Perfect timing,” Beebe said. We lined up to get on and Beebe’s face sank. “Man, I can’t believe I did this,” he said. “I’ve got like $90, but the smallest I have is a ten. I’m gonna have to pay ten bucks for the bus.”

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This week, David Beebe and I tackled Richmond, from the Mission Bend Park and Ride to the Wheeler Station on the light rail.

I’ll have the full story up in a few minutes, but here’s a little something to whet your appetite.

Richmond Ave, by the numbers

Bars stopped in: 6

Dangerous wild animals seen: 1 (Well, we think we saw a cottonmouth in a drainage ditch.)

Stray shopping carts: about 30 (an all-time record, we believe)

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It took a long, long time, but the firefighters at Station No. 8, the downtown station, finally have a permanent home.

They’ve been housed for seven years in temporary digs, as one delay or another has blocked the effort to build a new facility.

Station 8 actually combines firefighters who had been at two different firehouses. Station No. 1’s historic headquarters was given to Tilman Fertitta in a sweetheart deal for his new restaurant The Aquarium, a deal that will see him paying only $12,500 a month for rent in the year 2040. (With inflation, those 2040 dollars might be the equivalent of paying 30 bucks a month for the location.) Station No. 8 was razed to make way for Toyota Center.

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To celebrate Pope Benedict XVI’s historic U.S. visit, KHOU on Saturday reran its documentary on the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, “Building on Faith.” Doubling as a public relations agency, KHOU gave the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston what seminary student Juan Carlos Patino-Arango gave a few of the Archdiocese’s boys before church authorities facilitated his return to Colombia in 1996 – a big, fat, sloppy blowjob.

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As we mention in passing in this week’s Hair Balls column, brand-new $122-million downtown park Discovery Green comes with just about every square inch of space named after one donor or another. (Real estate blog Swamplot has the list here.)

We talked to Susanne Theis about all this. Theis has a certain expertise in the area; before taking the job of program director at Discovery Green, she was at the Orange Show. There she spent the last few years answering complaints that the Art Car Parade had become an over-commercialized festival of huge corporations selling themselves.

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Several organizations took advantage of the tax day rush at the downtown post office to promote their causes – anti-government sentiment and beer.

Members of HoustonTruth.org and RiotUSA.org gathered outside the post office to pass out pamphlets and DVDs, and to denounce taxes, the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

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I hate these things. They say hatred is a negative emotion that stems from fear. They say you need to face your fear. I have looked my fear in the face and have emerged unscathed. Now get rid of these damn eyesores! -- Daniel Kramer

As this week's Hair Balls column explains, we had a helluva time finding out who was on the Board of Directors for the Memorial Hermann Hospital System. But we persevered and now proudly present the list:

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We've loaded up a slideshow of select images from Chuy Benitez's show at Lawndale Art Center. The images present panoramic views of local Latinos, and they're a tad too wide (ahem, the images, not the locals) for our slideshow tool to do them justice. All the more reason to see the show in person. -- Keith Plocek

The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Georgia have filed a class action suit against the Community Education Partners alternative school there saying that CEP (which has two locations in Houston) “Does not function as a school at all, but rather as a warehouse for poor children of color.”

“Academics at the school are virtually non-existent and students are inadequately supervised. Violence is rampant,” the lawsuit says.

The Houston Press has written several stories over the years reporting the same findings about CEP’s two facilities here. Some other districts such as the Dallas ISD and Pasadena have dropped the private program which takes in students sent there after running into trouble at their home schools. But the Houston ISD continues to support CEP, through a succession of superintendents and school boards, saying it makes the home schools safer and rescues the kids sent to CEP from expulsion and life on the streets. And cash-strapped HISD has spent millions doing so.

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Just a quick note to steer Sole readers over to David Beebe’s belated if totally awesome write-ups of the Broadway / Harrisburg jaunt here and here. – John Nova Lomax