Worst of Houston — Free Press Houston Annual Archive

This goes beyond simply being bad; this is worthy of contempt! Even at first glance Downtown Magazine stinks of a publisher with infinite monetary resources and an inversely proportional amount of brains and taste to go with it. Just look at it - a thick cardstock cover, thick glossy pages, and even thin metallic red lettering; we’re talking big bucks here. There’s nothing wrong with having money behind your publication but, unfortunately, you open up this rag and it’s devoid of any worthwhile content or personality. It reads with less charm than a Greensheet except that, instead of trying to sell you a 1972 Chevy that’s naturally air conditioned, the brain trust at the Houston Downtown Management District and the Houston Downtown Alliance are trying to sell you on the idea that Downtown is the land of the wealthy, hip, and cultured. The only problem with this charade is the writing and the layout have the same sanitized and soulless plastic smile as someone greeting you in a visitor center and all readers can do is to cringe, shake it’s hand, then find the nearest bathroom to wash-off the ickyness. My suggestion to HDMD and HDA - stop wasting your member’s money on this fiasco and take up another less embarrassing hobby.

There are 1.1 million uninsured residents of Harris County. Considering there are 40 million uninsured nationwide, we have one of the highest rates and more than our fair share. That’s basically one in four people. The huge number of uninsured residents here means that health officials must make tough decisions every day about who gets treated and when. That equals rationing. As for Texas, it Sadly rates 1st in the amount of uninsured children in the state which is a staggering 24.1 percent according to the Census Bureau. According to USA today, “The state has forfeited more than $900 million in federal money under the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) during the past six years because it wouldn't put up 28 cents for each 72 cents in federal aid. Restrictions put in place in 2026 cut about 200,000 children from the program in a state with the highest percentage of uninsured children, nearly twice the national average.” Let’s face it, the system is broken.

Now I’m not saying this place is a “worst”, they just may be the best, but, their balance of fry to burger ratio is balanced like the Harris County Crime Lab. Come on guys, we know you have bags of those things in the little back area by the Dart Board, BUST EM OUT! I don’t understand the logic in providing the best Veggie Burger IN TOWN right next to the most meager portion of potato sidekicks IN LIFE. Several Houstonians have even suggested drawing a comic detailing the lives of the M.I.A. Rudyard’s Fries --- Are they out at the Seawall tryin to catch waves before the sun comes up? Have they found a more comfortable plate to rest their burnt ends? Please Rudz, please, for the love of all things Montrosian, find the fries and schedule them to work doubles.

Ken Petty. an ex-evangelist out of Spring, TX tried to ‘re-launch’ the old beloved Public News this last year. PN was the standard bearer for underground music, art, and feature papers in this town before it was gobbled up by the parent company of the Houston Press. Well, the DBA that Houston Press acquired expired leaving the brand un-owned. Seeing this ‘golden’ opportunity, Petty paid the 10 bux for the DBA and tried his darndest to publish the shittiest piece of shit shit he could muster called Public News. He stole the original logo whch is now ostensibly intellectual property owner by Houston Press, went and downloaded a 10 year old version of Pagemaker, and got right to work. Managing only enough gumption to defraud enough advertisers and bamboozle staffers to publish 1 issue, the new version of what was the voice of the Montrose became rife with advertorials, articles about crap bands, and rants against the Montrose. It shortly thereafter folded and the internet is littered with complaints from staff members and advertisers who Petty owes money or lied to. Anyways, fuck you Ken Petty for trashing the good name of Public News (who many FPH staffers previously worked for.)

Okay so Houston may not have the greatest music scene in the world but, at the very least, everyone involved should practice some kind solidarity to strengthen our growing musical nest. When I hear about local bands “beefing” I want to throw all parties involved in the trunk of an 88’ Olds’, drive them to Trinity Gardens and let anyone named “Tre” show them what real beef is. For one thing, what would Houston bands have to beef about? “That” girl in “that” band has the same streak in her hair as “that” girl from “that” band? Oh, “so and so” didn’t let you use their amp after they were done playing? Come on guys, none of this bullshit necessitates a “beef”. A beef is necessitated by the following: When rappers aren't good enough lyricists to have fans or just want some publicity, they will copy Tupac and Biggie and set up a beef with another rapper.

Their audience of mainly wannabe, gangsta-rich, white folk love this because if they meet another wannabe gangsta who listens to a rival of their favourite rapper, they are allowed to exchange poorly thought-up insults such as 'yo mama'.

Get it right or pay the price : MORE HOUSTON PRESS ARTICLES TALKING ABOUT “LACK OF SCENE”.

In 1997, Houston Texans and Stonerside Stables owner, Bob McNair, asked the National Hockey League about bringing a hockey expansion team to Houston. The NHL replied, “The Compaq Center is a shit hole and no one in Texas watches hockey,” (I’m sure the phrasing was slightly different). Clearly, Bob didn’t want to own a football franchise from the “get-go.” So then, why did he buy one?

The answer is: Let’s look at some statistics from those bat shit crazy analysts at Forbes Magazine:

The Houston Texans have the second highest operating income.

The Houston Texans have the fourth highest revenue.

The $300 million naming-rights deal for the stadium is the richest in the NFL.

The McNair Doctrine: if your team sucks every year then expectations are low- but people will still buy merchandise because people also have hope. He he he- ha ha ha. Cha- Ching!

Honorable Mention: Whoever owned the Houston Comets

Houston was rightfully labeled as the nation's worst recycling city this year in a waste survey encompassing the country's 30 largest cities. Though we are the energy capital of the world and the fourth largest city in the nation, we came in last place compared to over 26 cities with a smaller population, with only 2.6% of our waste being recycled. That pales in comparison to San Francisco, who ranked first with an impressive 69% of their trash being recycled. Just one more thing to add to the 'Why Houston Sucks' box.

It seems like every year this award goes to The Houston Chronicle, but this year a small alt-weekly from the suburbs is much more deserving. The Montgomery County Bulletin was investigated by the Washington Post's online magazine Slate in August for plagiarism. Since almost every article in the Bulletin was stolen, Jody Rosen, the reporter who broke the story, wondered if "in purely statistical terms, do the articles in the Montgomery County Bulletin amount to the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism?"

After the Slate article went live on August 6 the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the largest academic journals in the country devoted to the study of journalism, openly mocked the Bulletin for obviously stealing from such obscure sources as USA Today, Rolling Stone, Salon, Boston Globe, Dallas Observer and the Houston Press.

Honorable Mention: Houston Chronicle (for tradition's sake).

It was bad enough having to camp out in your own home in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It was worse having to deal with the insufferable insult of being told you could not leave the aforementioned home after dark, for fear of being treated like a looter.

But the absolute shit icing on the cake was the sight of what looked like HPD-logo'd armored personnel carriers roaming the streets, and having to listen to some asshole cop over a loudspeaker reminding you that you were locked down like the inhabitant of some wretched 3rd world banana republic that can't spend a dime on infrastructure, but has tons of cash for paramilitary toys....

Houston isn't really a city; it's just a big machine for administering the interests of petroleum conglomerates...in the aftermath of Ike, that became all too painfully apparent.

Will someone please tell me what that funny yet not at all delicious smell is that emanates from the Kroger's bakery? I've tried many of their made in-store breads and even the pastries have an odd taste and odor reminiscent of institutional floor wax and warmed over feet. I just can't quite place it.

He works at the House of Blues now, but before that he just recently got fired from The Meridian. Before that he was fired from The Engine Room. Both places are synonymous in the music community as having the worst possible sound and it's been because of him. I bet House of Blues starts giving locals and nationals the same shoddy treatment he gave to everyone at his old venues.

He is, hands down, the worst sound guy in town.

I speak specifically of soccer moms and corporate dads. You people are fucking crazy. Flying past me on the freeway at 90mph+ risking my and my children's lives just so you can gain a few minutes off your daily soul sucking commute. I get the fact that you are used to high speeds and that from your oversized house-on-wheels vehicles, it doesn't feel that fast. But I drive the speed limit in the slow lane just to stay out of your suicidal way and still you ride my ass, passing around me so close that your side tires don't even leave my lane. I used to make that drive myself but I realized that time is more precious than saving a few bucks on a shittily built home that looks like every other future tear down within 10 miles in exchange for the joie de vie being sucked out of me with every rotation of my wheels. Either move closer to where you work/shop/drink or slow the fuck down. Attention Soccer Moms: We built you an eighteen lane wide freeway to try and thwart the congestion you cause each day because you insist on barreling around town in your Suburbans while your 3.2 children are not even in the vehicle. I wonder how many lives would be saved if just cut to the chase and built you a Saks Fifth Avenue out at Katy Mills.

Every friend, neighbor, foe, and Lost Boy, experienced an extended loss of all things electrical during the weeks following Hurricane Ike. However, a few of us had power and were morally obligated to cater to anyone who needed anything from charging cell phones to just sitting in the air conditioning. I was one of the “chosen” and did not realize the severity of the power shortage most of Houston was enduring. During the first few hours of all power being out – I returned to my well-lit home, proceeded to set up a 150w Flood Light, and attempted to burn a screen for a concert poster that was due the next day, for a show that ended up not happening due to the weather. While my friends were scrambling to find ANYWHERE to charge their cell phones, I managed to short out my breaker box three times (that I just went and flipped back on), cooked 3-course meals, and caught up on any Adult Swim cartoons I may have missed. I just want to say sorry to everyone for being ungrateful, I should have actually made myself into a “worst of”….oh well, maybe next year.

Take the money and run. That's the motto behind the City of Houston's stance on the sex trade in Houston. Never mind the studies that show how the majority of sex workers are victims of bad circumstance or worse yet, slaves via the human trafficking circuit, there's money to be made, people! Play along and you'll reap the rewards too. Hundreds of local businesses pay annual fees for sexually oriented business licenses to operate store front brothels posing as 'massage parlors' et al. Also consider the cash generated by task squads during raids and prostitution stings, where not only are fines issued, but all cash and valuables on the person or property that is busted are seized and auctioned off for a sweet commission.

Comcast Cable plays good cop, bad cop with their customers. They will send you a notice that they are raising the rates of their Internet service for instance. When I called they told me my rate would be the same, yet when the bill came it was double the previous month's bill. When you call, of course, you have to go through the usual phone menu. The billing department just refers you to a supervisor. They give you a number that nobody ever answers and when you get to the beep to leave a message the mailbox is full.

As fate would have it I ran into an old friend who works for Satan, er I mean Comcast. He told me what to do, and now dear reader I will reveal the secret to you. Call Comcast, go through the menu but instead of pushing the number for billing, push the number for Technical. Tell tech that you want to drop your service. Tech will immediately switch you to a covert department called Save. The save department will make everything right, reduce your payment amount or whatever it takes to keep you from dropping your service. Ta-da.

Wow, can we say weather machine any louder? Local news stations had field reporters scouring the Seawall for any sign of cataclysmic fear tactic they could instill in the Houston public. For what was very obviously just a government test to see if New Orleans could withstand another storm, and a reason to implement Military Police at every corner of any metropolitan area on the Gulf Coast, the newscasters really made “Hurricane” Eduardo seem as if our only saviors would be our beautiful boys in blue and not asking any questions. I saw newscasters standing at 33 degree angles(wink wink) with NO WIND EVEN BLOWING to show Houstonians “how crazy it really was out there”. It makes one wonder what goes through the head of someone who is knowingly lying to all of their neighbors and loved ones about potential catastrophe for ratings that are only dropping because YouTube exists. Maybe the local news stations should send their field reporters into cyber space to create mock tragedies affecting all potential YouTube views for two weeks. Whatever you do, next time they feed us bullshit, don’t be afraid to ask why it smells funny.

We have all waited patiently and hoped that it would gradually diminish but to our olafactorial dismay, it has only gotten worse. Somewhere betwixt the realms of pickle-relish and red wine vinaigrette, lies the odor that has been left behind in the bars after the smoke has long cleared. Regular barflies may have grown accustomed to their watering hole's signature fragrance, but for those of us who bar hop, each establishment is distinguished by its own eau de funk.

Local Wiki editor ‘PostOak’ has a beef with FPH. After we truthfully and accurately adding the 2026 Worst of Houston accolade to socialite-philanthropist Carolyn Farb’s entry, this friend of Farb removed our addition. After we reposted it, he again removed it and subsequently removed the Free Press Houston Wiki-profile by citing it as a ‘non-notable’ publication. This was clearly a vindictive act not befitting an editor. If you know who this piss-ant is and let us know, we will buy you a steak and lobster dinner.

If you had not read our 2026 feature on this park, then let me give you the skinny on Discovery Green. This city spent 122 million dollars on this park that is basically a green top to an overpriced parking garage. Think Kemah Boardwalk meets Sugarland Mall. There ain’t much green about it. It’s basically a couple fields, a playground, and a murky brown ‘pond’ that serve to facilitate traffic into the 2 restaraunts located in the ‘park’. Also, this is a public-private partnership so you can’t do the things you do at other parks such as barbecue, serve food to the homeless, etc. Considering the exceedingly high amount of neighborhood parks in Houston that are in disrepair, it’s a abomination to spend 122 million+ dollars on this plastic ‘park’.

Sharon Lauder, publisher of the Houston Tribune, has appeared before City Council numerous times attesting to the unfairness of the ordinance which requires all sidewalk newsracks to be within specific parameters in size and weight, set atop a 95 pound concrete base, made of metal, and "fir green" in color.

According to Ms. Lauder, only a small percent of newspaper publishers were invited to the pre-planning of the ordinance, none of whom use the plastic newsracks. Most of the publishers of smaller, free papers use the plastic racks because they do not rust. Because they are free, these publications don't need coin operated boxes (i.e. metal boxes) which are more cost prohibitive.

She also asserts that the ordinance was twice altered to accomodate the Houston Press.

Ms. Lauder asserts that the practical effect of this ordinance is to make it impossible for small papers to distribute using newsracks and thereby limits the freedom of the press. Being unable to make any progress with City Council, Ms. Lauder filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court.

Do the people fear eminent domain powers run amock? Does the street flood?

Will they rob the property owners? What do you think.

With the current eco impacts, we may see Metro only build a rail line, but someday we will see the fruit of the seed planted by Metro's authority to take 162 acres of land around each rail station, or stop as it were. And the idiots I know say, "Oh I'll just go to the mayor and stop that." Sure thing. Who do think set this up with the local power dealers?

Pastor Steve Riggle of Grace has proposed a daisy of an idea to build a 150 ft. high cross at both the north and south extremes of Houston where the two campuses of his church are. I am all for freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom in general. But some things are just done in bad taste and are inflammatory. Considering the city just put the kibosh on the giant inflatable promo animals that car lots use, why not this symbol of genocide, oppression, and capitalism as well?

“So maybe someday cavemen trying to frighten traffic on Allen Parkway or a girl making nice with a Dr. Pepper bottle will sort of be like a Picasso.” –Wayne Dolcefino

The face of the Channel 13 Undercover Team, aka “Dolcefinko” aka “WD-400” aka “I Said No”, is sneering his way to infamy. No further evidence is needed than his constantly revised Wikipedia page, where spirited but spurious allegations like “Wayne rapes Asian babies” keep popping up. Dolcefino spent November digging up dirt on the Houston Arts Alliance, and devoted the opening segment on the seven o’clock news for a week and a half to convincing viewers they were being fleeced by the only public arts program in Houston. Ignoring the fact that a hotel occupancy tax that funds HAA is actually paid for by visitors to the city, WD-400 pounded away at HAA Director Jonathan Glus like a sweaty impotent drunk in the broom closet with his cousin. He asked Glus to read a sentence, which he shouldn’t have agreed to. It’s funny when people say “I’m not gay but I want someone to fuck me in the ass as soon as possible” on TV, but its not recommended for those who hold a decent job.

Five chin-wagging reports later Dolcefinko decided to take on glasstire.com, which is partially funded by the Houston Arts Alliance. I really don’t want to imagine his drooly delight when he watched a piece posted on B.S. Houston Artblog by the Performance Art Lab called “Dr. Pepper.” I would like to know the randy jokes he made up the next day when he brought the video into work and showed his co-workers (who probably don’t like him very much) the satiric advertisement where a woman fellates, ahem, deep throats, a bottle of good ‘ol DP. Oh yeah, he put it on the tube. He played two seconds of the beginning and then blurred the image, launching into a whole ‘too hot for TV’ routine. “Should YOU be paying for this smut?” The artist in a collective posted it on Youtube, the blogger picked it up and posted a link, the non-profit who employed the blogger received a grant from the organization that funds art with money received from the tourist tax, and the reporter who was too bored to find a real scandal says that you shouldn’t pay for it. God this is all so stupid. In his farewell, Dolcefino made a short aside, which qualified him as the Worst Art Appreciator of the Year: “Just so you will know, one viewer argued the Dr. Pepper video is art, because it's really mocking the use of sex to market beverages. Go figure.”

2008 was a shitty year for Houston live music venues. Proletariat closed. Engine Room closed. Super Happy Fun Land closed temporarily. Notsuoh maybe sold. Fuck.

Great American Insurance refused to pay $25 million in liability for a 2026 office fire that killed three people.

The basics: In 2026 Vocational Nurse Misty Ann Weaver started a fire to cover the fact that she had missed a paperwork deadline. The fire raged out of control and three people died from smoke inhalation. Since the people died from smoke inhalation instead of flames, Great American is trying to use a "pollution exclusion" to avoid paying for the deaths. Apparently in the mind of Great American a fire produces light, heat and smog.

The Pimp is gone. What a waste. Sizzurp, along with the rest of opiates, fucking suck.

"My man RoRo jus lost his baby in a house fire And then when I got on my knees that night to pray I asked God why he let these killas live and take my homeboy's son away Man if you got kids show em you love em cuz God jus might call em home Cuz one day you here but baby the next day you gone "

Pimp C from One Day

I ate so much Luby's when I was a kid that it has permanently mutated into my DNA. I have great memories their of fried fish, mash potatoes, and green beans. Unfortunately, the homegrown cafeteria was bought out by the Pappas company and has evolved into a middle school cafeteria. My first gripe is that now just about every single vegetable has bacon in it. I mean, a motherfucker says 'I wanna eat vegetables'. Let him eat vegetables without the ass of swine. Both kinds of green beans they offer have bacon. Even more annoying, despite the cafeteria setting, Luby's now has waiters come to your table after you have purchased and paid for your food. They want tips for bringing you napkins and straws. Their prices have gone up as everyone else's has yet the quality has taken the plunge. I now got to Cleburnes.

That's right fuckers. You won't find me. I am the one that put boogers in your cheeseburger. Go fucking catch a burglar instead of harrassing me for my music being too loud. I know some of you guys are good, but the lion's share of you screw it up for the 3 or 4 nice cops.

Former Harris County Tax-Assessor Collector Paul Bettencourt was without a doubt the sleaziest resignation in a year dominated by sleazy resignations. Bettencourt resigned a month after being re-elected in order to "pursue a career in the private sector." By resigning almost as soon as he was re-elected he screwed the voters by giving the county commissioners a chance to handpick the county's Tax-Assessor Collector. Many Texas politicos think that Bettencourt's resignation was either planned months ahead of time or enacted after he'd been named in a Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit. The Harris County Democratic Party is suing Bettencourt over allegations that he disenfranchised voters. For those that didn't pay attention in government class, in Texas the county Tax-Assessor Collector is also the county vote registrar. Bettencourt is accused of failing to process 13,000 voter registration cards before election day as well as unfairly and unjustly disqualifying many of the cards his office did process for "mistakes."

He sent his secretary an e-mail about 'toys' from his work address? Come on man, what were you thinking? Everyone knows that if you set up an anonymous e-mail account, make sure it isn't named [email protected] . Jesus, didn't you learn anything from prosecuting all those criminals?

Wall to wall coverage of a winter freeze. 24-hour-news coverage of falling temperatures. Reporters watching ice melt. It was 30 degrees and TV news treated it like it was the end of the world.

I feel really sorry for the bands that bust their asses to come up with great tunes to rock your bod while you just stand there with hands in too tight jean pockets and look miserable. That's what I look like when I'm waiting to get my registration renewed. If the band sucks that's one thing, but if I like them I'm going to dance and you will join me or I will call you out on it. Like I just did. Resolution for 2026: To make Houston known for it's booty shakin' grin'in', whinin', live show audiences...now is that too much to ask? It's not like I'm asking you to recycle.

-Commandrea Worst/Scariest local commercial: Brown Hand Center It's not enough that the owner of the Hand Center left his wife to remarry a younger faker wife, but he had to edit the commercial to show this new family. The worst part though is the final line of the commercial delivered by his daughter in a voice that sounds like it was ripped from an old seventies horror film "Daddy's ba-by giiiiirrl"...freaky shit.

My first inclination upon seeing hipsters wearing the symbol of Arab, and notably Palestinian, resistance was to rip them off their necks and replace them with the Vulcan death grip. But after thinking about it for awhile I decided, maybe us Arab folk should allow it under one condition: We may one day call on you to ‘do us a favor’ and help us in our next big attack. What a small price to pay for a little ‘terrorist chic’ accessorizing? So listen up college aged white people who are not familiar with the Palestinian plight: If your not willing to strap plastique to your chest for the cause or can’t spell P-L-O, then don’t wear the keffiyeh.

The existing plan to convert the Crawford Elysian Viaduct into a so called parkway on the ground like Memorial Drive-- yeah, sure! No really, the plan is pushing for a worst result-- to rebuild a bridge that is not used much and make that a connection for the Hardy Toll Road even though the Toll roadway extension into the near I-10 area already has a ramp connecting to US59...so let's waste some money. Why rebuild an old funky mile long viaduct which already functions fine as an elevated? It carries one via a lovely ride over the old industrial Fifth Ward and part of Second Ward and descends into town with a cool view of the bayou and skyline.

TxDot: You guys suck and you're way out of money. Try something new like preservation and conservation. Perhaps an honest respect for archeology would be a good new program for you guys. What a waste of our real resources.

“Look man, My car is outta gas. My wife and kids are stuck down the block. I just need 5 bucks to get to Texas City. If you write down your address I will send you the money back”

Ungodly amounts of hair gel/product, expensive bottle service and bouncers helping them feel important marks the territory of the worst kind of Houston resident- the Douche Bag. They are most often male these Douche Bags, but the girls that consider them cool or attractive are just as depraved.

Douche Bags are merely weekend warriors when it comes to drinking. They save up all of their money during the week so they can spend it on one giant bottle of Grey Goose at one bar on Friday or Saturday night. So naturally, Douche Bags are shitty drinkers. They get drunk fast but due to the fact that their vocabulary is infinitesimal (a word not included in the Douche Bag dictionary) you really can’t tell how drunk they are. They just keep yelling things like: “Jager Bomb” and “Pomade” and “Oh my God! My collar!” At the end of the night they drive (drunk) themselves and the rest of their Douche Baggage back to their apartment or house located safely (for us) outside the Beltway.

My assumption is that Douche Baggery started somewhere in the vain city of Los Angeles. The lifestyle was somehow popularized on television and began to drift eastward. The entire city of Dallas is a Douche Bag. So, if you are from Dallas then you are a Douche Bag. You can never be too explanatory about these things.

Douche Bags do not live lavishly in their day to day life. Not at all. We’re talking about a hybrid of the $30k Millionaire. Douche Bags spend their days in Accounts Payable or putting up aluminum siding on something. Sometimes they peddle insurance or real estate. But by all accounts, they are average people (in fact, they’re the reason why we have the word “average”), which is why they have an undying need to feel important or elevated. Enter the reason why we have Douche Bag Bars.

Mostly located in Midtown and Washington Ave, these bars have the easiest job in the world: make the Idiot feel like a Jedi. This is accomplished by having long lines of Douche Bags waiting outside to get in. Once the Douche Bag gets in the bar, a resounding whisper in their head says, “You made it. You’re cool now.” Couple that with the VIP feeling that bottle service provides and you’ve got yourself a bar full of morons. Like I said, it’s the easiest business in the world. The Douche Bag ego is constantly treading on thin ice, so any little bit helps. For example, when the bouncer at the door says, “Hey man, cool shirt with a dragon on it,” he’s not saying that your shirt is cool. He’s merely suggesting that he has the same poor taste in clothes.

The Douche Bag is why we used to be the nation leading in the advancement of technology but now work on mastering ways to give you a suntan. The Douche Bag lives well beyond his means and is a direct contributor to inflation and the credit crunch. The Douche Bag goes to Rockets games and, instead of cheering in their seat, hangs out in the Lexus Lounge and watches the game on TV. They are poor in the brain. They are poor in the pocket. And if they had one, they’d be poor in the soul.

That’s right. I said it. Douche Bags have no soul. Their life is in pursuit of what’s popular on television. You know what should be popular on television? Suicide. Cheers.

Honorable Mention: the Katy Transplant- aka the Illiterate Douche Bag

It wasn't always like this. I remember mornings spent mixing and matching the same three suits to make my wardrobe appear more extensive, avoiding coffee stains in transit to my office, cleaning coffee stains with the back of my tie on the elevator up my floor. Times were good. I had a job.

I moved to Houston this August in hopes of finding gainful employment in the city in which I grew up. The job well had all but dried in New York City and it was time to take my attentions elsewhere. In an article released this summer by BusinessWeek's Proshant Gopal analyzing the top job markets for major cities across the United States, Houston invariably topped most lists of highest average income (cost of living adjusted) for a multitude of skill positions. My metropolis built on mud and magnolia was purported to be relatively insulated from the disastrous economy and subsequent horrendous job market affecting the rest of the country. I gave up pretzels on the subways for tacos on the corner. Surely my triumphant homecoming would result in a work place of my choosing. Call it youthful naivety, but at twenty-six and walking on the sunshine of my recent foray into the working world, I considered my new, swampy world my oyster.

In the last two months I have applied to over twenty jobs, ranging everywhere from assistant curator of a speaking forum to assistant editor of the very periodical you're reading. Keep in mind the word "assistant;" I have no illusions of grandeur and, having little experience in the realm of publishing, know I must start from the bottom. To provide some background, I am a fairly recent college graduate (3.79 GPA in English in case any of the faceless multitudes of human resource workers are reading- always network!) and am fairly adept with the written word. While I have worked in a law office, the hospitality industry, a surgery center, etc. I have no real practice in the literary business. The horrible catch-22 of finding employment in an industry like publishing, though this obviously applies to many other markets, is that you need experience to gain experience. While nothing new, this paradox certainly does make itself more apparent every time the dreaded "2-3 Years Experience Preferred" demand rears its ugly head in the majority of employment posts I've stomached every day for eight weeks. I apply anyway, though I feel like I'm auditioning to be a crewman on the Titanic.

I've heard more than one mention of my generation as having been brought up in "The Age of Entitlement." Those mentioning this ubiquitous line are usually of Baby Boomer ilk, murmuring admonitions about the current state of spoiled youth and our inability to earn a living. However, I'd like to point out in deference to my generation this can only be a distant echo of what our parents' parents must have thought about an age characterized by droves of longhaired flower children, sit-ins, and free love. Also, we are only the product of our environment. One can't help but hate the parents, the enablers of entitlement, on shows like MTV's "Sweet Sixteen." There is no surer sign of the apocalypse than a girl with braces crying that her convertible is the wrong color.

But I digress. Rather than dealing with the "why?" behind America's current state of affairs in the job market sector, I'm more concerned with the "what's next?" Two of my closest friends were recently laid off. One is now addicted to youtube and the other spends his nights out so the days can be slept away (there is no small connection between the current hiring environment and the recent stock surge in Anheuser-Busch). Trying to find a new job leaves one with a lot of time on his hands and finding filler can be difficult, especially when the temperature drops below t-shirt weather. I suggest joining a gym. A new, healthy body can counter the insecurities of moving back into your parents' house.

It wouldn't be so bad if I at least heard back from these potential employers. Even a simple response, a modicum of civility acknowledging the application process, would be acceptable. I could even handle an "LOL" reply to my resume from the Human Resource department of X Periodical. Hey, they recognized I tried.

And is there anything more miserable, more humiliating, than writing the dreaded Cover Letter? The rhetoric of these letters lies somewhere in the gray area between used car salesman and pompous bore. I find myself again and again pandering hopelessly to a faceless but omnipotent entity. Headhunting organizations and job search firms across the country teach applicants to use "buzz" words and phrases like "enthusiasm" and "ideal skill set." How mind-bogglingly tedious it must be for workers in the hiring department to sit through page after page of the same self-aggrandizing tripe. This process is made even more daunting by the fact that the competition for employment has never been fiercer. It's like I'm being interviewed, along with around one hundred other potential and much better looking suitors, by a new girlfriend's parents and they have a portfolio of all my previous relationships. Oh, and I'm naked.

On the other hand, perhaps there has never been a better time to be unemployed. For starters, people don't seem that baffled when you explain why you're wearing pajamas in Central Market at four in the afternoon. Everywhere you look companies are tightening up and cutting jobs. Even the company Christmas party, that time honored tradition of uncomfortable speeches and attempting to appear sober, is on the decline. Who wouldn't prefer a day off rather than experience the awkwardness of ludicrous small talk with coworkers in a fabricated social environment? Also when your friends lose their jobs you'll have someone to commiserate with over a round of golf. And when you can't afford that, you can make a fort with your resume rewrites.

But I'll keep plugging away. My savings are all but gone and I haven't eaten this much Ramen since college, but my will is strong. I want to work and haven't given up hope yet. I'm not sure exactly how much longer I will be able to maintain a lifestyle of no income and exorbitant Kinko's fees, but there are always other options on the table. In the words of my grandfather, "The world needs ditch diggers too." I just hope they're hiring.

On July 18th of 2026 Pasadena Police arrested Pedro Gonzales for Public Intoxication. At 1 am on July 21st, Gonzales was released. At 2am, Gonzales was arrested by Pasadena officers Jason Buckaloo and Christopher Jones. By morning Gonzales was dead. Buckaloo and Jones reported that he was drunk and had fallen, which must have explained how one of 8 fractured ribs had punctured his lung. The officers had not turned on their dashboard camera to substantiate their claim yet a passerby who called 911 in an attempt to report 2 police officers beating and jumping on a Gonzales provided a very different story. Buckaloo had previously avoided a conviction in 2026 for slamming a South Houston High School Student into the wall. The officers were tried for criminally negligent Homicide and found not guilty in July of 2026. The case came down to the prosecutions case that Gonzales had died from a punctured lung filling with blood, and the defense arguing that Gonzales had died from alcohol withdrawal. So, Cops who beat a 51-year-old man to death, and lied about it, won their case by attacking the eyewitness and blaming the death on alcohol withdrawal.

Moral of the story: don’t go to Pasadena. Ever.

Hurricane Ike is estimated to have done more than 25 Billions Dollars of damage to property along the Texas Gulf Coast. Timberwood Carpentry (10422 Telephone Rd) contracted workers from as far away as Florida and the Carolinas, as well as Louisiana and Texas to work in Port Arthur, Galveston and Houston to do clean up work. Workers were promised transportation, lodging, food, and jobs. Timber wood carpentry provided no safety equipment for the workers cleaning buildings and provided no care

to the their health needs which included skin infections, eye infections, and kidney infections acquired while working in contaminated buildings. They also refused to pay workers the wages owed for the labor provided to around a thousand workers. While protest by workers and supporters, like the Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center, got many of these problems partially resolved, it reminds you we have bunch or crappy thieving neighbors.

Sedition Books is the worst anarchist bookstore in the city of Houston and quite possibly the worst on the gulf coast east of New Orleans. Odds are that if you go to their store at 901 Richmond Ave. you will find some punk sleeping on a couch and have to wake them to explain the library system and that you actually have to pay 5 buck to take out books. It’s enough to make you want to shoplift. It's the smallest anarchist bookstore in Houston and if you go to one of their events they host they can barely squeeze in 40 people to watch films, participate in workshops or hear a presentation which is usually for free or a donation. Their beverage options are

disgustingly limited. While you can get sangria soda, they do not have daiquiris, hot chocolate, or pineapple juice.

Who does this guy think he is? Roger Clemens? At $20.3 million, Tradey McGrady is the 9th highest paid player in NBA. He plays when he wants, he sits when he wants, he owns dogs that try to eat people. A diva and a charlatan, Tradey suffers from a hero complex brought on by the lack of an attempt at a college degree. He’s broken. Sell him for parts- or futures in oil.

Honorable Mention: Steve Francis

This guy is the worst “homer” and yet he’s from Massachusetts. A bloody yank is the voice of the Texans. I miss the days when you could hear the ice in Bum Phillips’ rocks glass that was chock full of whiskey. Vandermeer’s morning show on Sportsradio 610 is akin to Sesame Street. And his play by play as the voice of the Houston Texans is almost exactly like a young boy reaching puberty. Get this- his tag line is “Rock and Roll!” Creative genius.

Honorable Mention: John Granato and Lance Zerline

Houston’s Worst Taxidermist: Jimmy Sparks, taxidermist

I murdered a bear in cold blood and took the carcass to Jimmy. My Lord, he fixed it right up so good that when I set the bear in my livin’ room; he done come back to life and ate my kids. I’m just kidding, I don’t have kids. The other thang’s wrong with Jimmy is that he ain’t got no air conditionin’ in there. Damn it man! How you ‘bout to start thinkin’ ‘bout stuffin’ a pig in heat?

Honorable Mention: Danno’s Taxidermy- Boy, I got some stories ‘bout him too!

The Worst Thing About Houston Traffic: Cheap Gas

Not a one of you is a good or even semi-decent driver; and now that gas is “cheap” again, you can “afford” to continue driving poorly. When the price of a gallon of gas was $3- you still bought it. Now that it’s around $1.50- you’re buying it more. It is my sound and wise opinion as a prick and an asshole that the price of gas should be near $10. You would change how you live if that were the situation. For the sake of me, the environment and others around you that could get in my way, please carpool, walk, ride a bike, give me a bike or stay home.

Honorable Mention: Pedestrians

A number of years ago a brilliant comedian named Lewis Black once referred to the Starbucks situation at the corner of West Gray and Shepherd as “The End of the Universe.” The situation was that there were two- across the street from each other. You can see why there was some cause for alarm.

But now there is only one. The one with the drive thru. So maybe Lewis Black was right and Starbucks was simply off by a few years ( 2026).

Honorable Mention: The Starbucks in Midtown- nothing wrong with the Starbucks, just the clientele.

While Houston voters went to the polls and rejected red light cameras November 2nd, the city of Houston was quietly continuing with the installation of some 250-300 outdoor video surveillance cameras throughout the downtown area. This money for this project, costing upwards of 14 million dollars, came from The Urban Area Security Initiative funds doled out annually by Homeland Security. Is there really that much going on downtown that we need 300 cameras to watch it? Are there even 300 intersections downtown? Responding to public concerns that these cameras constitute an invasion of privacy, Dennis Storemski, the city’s director of the Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security said all the cameras are in public spaces where people should be aware that their actions are not private. “We live in an age right now where there’s really no expectation that there

would be no video in a public space.” Thanks Dennis Storemski for letting me know privacy is dead, I almost missed the memo! It’s a good thing for the City of Houston that Homeland Security expenditures aren’t up for pu blic vote; I think we know how Houstonians would side on this issue.

Some basil-y, gin and fruit crap one of the guys from Anvil made me drink.

Who do you think you are? If everyone was as selfish as you holidays wouldn’t even exist. Or in the fall during football season. Nothing says romantic wedding like forcing your friends and loved ones to feign interest in something they’ve seen a hundred times and then to spend their time at the reception watching the game with the waiters on the ballroom kitchen TV.

Also, black tie weddings. What are we, in the Great Gatsby? Your butler called. He thinks you’re a douche.

Mike Sullivan, the City Council Member for District E, is the kind of guy that waits until the last minute to call his Mayor informing her that he is switching his vote on the matter of an unpaid seat on the seven-member Port of Houston Authority. He’s the kind of guy that thinks preserving historic buildings violates property owner’s rights. He’s the kind of guy that looks out for taxicab companies because the Green Initiative reminds him of a sinus infection from his childhood. He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t really know what he’s doing; but he knows if he votes against HPD budget cuts then people will like him… but he doesn’t know that those are the stupid people. Mike Sullivan has a unique condition called Spineless Cowardism and basically his mouth is a butthole.

The reason why this is a screw-up isn’t about whether or not red light cameras do anything but raise money for HPD, nor is it about who bankrolled which campaign. It’s about the fact that the vote was completely unnecessary. The contract with American Traffic Solutions was going to expire in 2026 and all Houston City Council had to do was not renew it and the cameras would have come down. Instead a proposition was placed on the ballot and now the city is involved in a lawsuit to determine whether a contract supersedes the will of the people and whether the city will have to pay money it doesn’t have to get out of a contract the citizens didn’t think it should have entered into in the first place.

I love my little Fiesta. I get 2 or 3 bunches of cilantro for a buck, beautiful Persian cucumbers for $1.89 a pound, gorgeous juicy pears at three for a dollar. The last time I went to Kroger limes were 4 for a dollar, lemons nearly a buck a pound, and they didn’t even have cilantro. H-E-B laughably asks nearly double the cost for all of their produce and Central Market is for people who seek status elevation for paying more for less.

Even though the photo in the Chron of Tom DeLay-snapped moments after being found guilty- was almost worth putting up with the man for 30 years (oh, that stricken, pissed-off look…visions of prison showers, like sugar plums, a-dance in his head), it was no where near enough, and no where soon enough. Even discounting the possibility of a pardon from Governor for Life, Secessionist, and hair model Rick Perry, the odds of “The Hammer” getting hammered up his jammer in the slammer are pretty remote-he’ll likely get the minimum sentence, do token time in the Oil Executive wing of one of Texas’s many fine prisons, and then begin a new career as either a televangelist or a ballroom dance instructor. And in any case, with the Citizens United Decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has made DeLay’s little money laundering scheme irrelevant and unnecessary anyway.

C’mon Holmes, I sent you questions like 4 months ago and you promised to send over the answers. I thought we were friends?

As a multinational company with operations in more than 180 countries, Chevron hosted their shareholders meeting here in Houston this year. People from Ecuador, Nigeria, Colombia, Indonesia, Angola, Burma, Australia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Canada, Texas, California, Alaska, Wyoming came to talk about the impacts that Chevron has had on their communities. Impacts like probing up dictatorships, contaminating water and air, displacing people to build pipelines and causing terrible impacts on human health. Chevron showed their hospitality by not letting any of these people in. They barred more than 30 people, many who came from other continents, from attending this shareholders meetings, where they had stock, and came from communities who are impacted by Chevron’s operations. If you look at the Chevron website you might believe their public relations about how “Oil companies should support communities they are part of.” But judging them by their actions makes it clear that they would be happy to grind up the bones of children if they could sell it to you to power your car.

Every year of my life I’ve heard the same questions this time of year: When is going to get cold? What is up with this weather? Clip this out and give it to a newcomer to our town, or save it before you ask yet again next year: Houston weather is fucked up because it revolves around our wardrobes. As soon as you dig out your jacket and scarves, it gets hot again. And just when you think it’s safe to wear that mini-skirt on a balmy November eve, BAM! Icy cold fingers of air be stroking your thighs. Verdict: Thread smartly and carry a light cardigan.

I’m pretty sure it’s still illegal to be a WHORE in Houston, which is why I was stunned this year to find my Invite Box on Facebook brimming with pathetic invitations from musicians beseeching me to vote for them in the wildly prestigious Houston Press Music Awards. How falsely pretentious can you be, “inviting me” to vote for you? For shame. But as much as this is intended to be a complaint, it’s really a “thank you” to all of the artists and bands that carried out this atrocious act. Thank you for making it the easiest decision in the world NOT TO VOTE FOR YOU. Stop social networking your music and spend time crafting it, please. Don’t choose to achieve cheap success in art. That ruins the point.

Most high thanks and praise be to President David Leebron of Rice University, the Board of Governors, VP for Public Affairs Linda Thrane, and all the unknown little people for all their efforts to destroy the vital cultural asset that is KTRU 91.7 FM. Kudos on using secrecy and deception to educate your students on Rice'”unconventional” values. Houston has really gotten way too “interesting”, what with all that non-commercial student-run locally produced eclectic radio programming available. KTRU dangerously gives a voice to local artists & bands, music venues & art spaces, helping “the scene”, and playing the music of Houston’s shifty ethnic minorities. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a place where the music and information I heard on the radio wasn’t pre-approved by someone in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. And heck, Rice students don’t need all that responsibility and all those leadership opportunities anyway! Isn’t it just as good if they tweet their mixtapes to all their Facebook friends?

Also, big thanks to the University of Houston for valuing “Tier One” status so much higher than its regard by the Houston community, even though having two FM radio stations has nothing to do with attaining that status. Also, good job on reducing broadcast coverage for all those rich classical music loving donors from 100,000 watts to a mere 50,000. That should make getting $10 million of additional donations to pay off that taxpayer-backed bond easy as pie, even though apparently KUHF has had enough trouble meeting its existing targets lately. Great team effort, Rice & UH; bring on the blandness!

savektru.org

Look, I am no puritan. Also, I have some close friends at Houston Press and respect what they do. Yet, the last portion of the paper that features the ‘Massage and Spa ads’ is rife with young Asian girls who are here against their will and working often to pay their way. But their work ultimately involves getting raped several times a day. No one knows more than me how hard it is for print publications to make revenue these days in this digital age but there must be some code of ethics here, guys. And ignorance is no excuse. It is no secret what happens at these places and what the conditions are. HPD simply does not have all the resources to bust the endless amount of ‘Massage Parlors’ and the laws are not adequately set up to prosecute the pimps as opposed to the prostitutes. Two years ago, three ad reps at the Orlando Weekly were arrested and charged with Racketeering for knowingly profiting from prostitution. They have since cut such ads from the paper. Not a bad idea.

Grass Fed Beef and “Natural” Turkey, Buffalo, Chicken and Pork may sound natural and healthy, but unfortunately for anyone who really wants to help the environment and avoid toxins, commercially produced meat and dairy can’t go very far. As for the “Gulf Coast Crab,” and

the “Wild-Caught Shrimp,” for me, the only green image that comes to mind is BP’s logo. It’s good that they use sustainable furnishings, but the problems caused by the meat on their menu far outweigh any benefits. Meat production, even so-called “natural” meat production,

is contributing about 70% of climate destroying gases according to the latest study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If you want a green lunch, there are some veggie options at Ruggles Green, but as for the meat options on the menu, Ruggles is greenwashing dirty food.

I always take visitors to Houston to see our worst piece of public art (The George Bush monument) directly across from our best piece of public art (Big Bubble by Dean Ruck) on opposite sides of the Preston Avenue bridge downtown. “The Commons” in Sesquicentennial Park also

became the site of a new 1.2 million dollar piece of public art unveiled just before Halloween this year, The James A. Baker III monument. (Incidentally, North Carolina sculptor Chas Fagan created both the Bush statue and the new Baker addition. Buy local anyone?) Placed directly across Buffalo Bayou from George, the two larger than life bronze statues gaze longingly at each other across the slow moving waters.

Welcome to Houston’s art scene, James “The government shouldn’t overreact to corporate scandals” Baker. You who watched the September 11 attacks at the Ritz-Carlton with the Bin Laden family. You who is defending the Saudi’s against a trillion-dollar lawsuit brought forth by the September 11 families. You who led the campaigns of the last four Republican presidents, Bush’s personal envoy in charge of restructuring Iraq’s $132 billion in debt, senior counsel for the Carlyle Group, violator of the Geneva Convention by destroying the civilian infrastructure of Iraq in Gulf War I, spokesperson for the Bush administration in its successful attempt to halt the vote recount in Florida, who as Counsel for Intelligence Policy prepared all applications for electronic surveillance and physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and advised the CIA, the FBI,

and the Defense and State Departments.

What is the message of these works, that our children should aspire to grow up to oversee wars waged across the world against people poorer, browner and less consumer driven then ourselves? That they should grow up to fight injustice perpetrated against giant corporations by

the lowly workers? Given its proximity to Allen’s landing, I propose a statue in honor of José Campos Torres be erected in “The Commons”. Or any number of other worthy Houstonians such as: Mickey Leland, Barbara Jordan, Carl Hampton, Lightening Hopkins, Ray Hill, The Camp

Logan Rioters, or what about Beyoncé?

Pick one- Texans, ‘Stros, Rockets, Dynamos, the fucking Aeros, Longhorns, Cougars, the Sharts (my softball team), etc. The list goes on and on. This has probably been the worst year of sports in Greater Houston’s much maligned history. It’s like God is paying us back for Enron and Tom Delay. At this point our emotions are more fragile than… Yao Mings foot? Drayton McLane’s ego? Our nonexistent defensive secondary? Really, the fact there are so many ways to rip on our city’s athletic organizations pretty much sums it up.

Side note- are the Dynamo even bad? I just assumed they were because they’re a Houston team in 2026 but as of press time I couldn’t give two shits to look them up.

Fuck you. You still suck. I mean, have you still not gotten the point yet?

I don’t know about you guys, but nothing pisses me off more than there not being a Walmart downtown. Seriously, come on. At 4:30 in the morning, when I need avocados, condoms and a hammer, I don’t want to have to drive 30 minutes to the nearest Walmart to acquire my consumer needs. Yeah, they’re opening one in the Heights, but why don’t they just seal the deal and slap one downtown? Summer Fest would look mighty fine with the Walmart logo right there in skyline.

Recently, Jason Nodler of Catastrophic Theater helped me realize something critical. Our arts coverage is sorely lacking. For God’s sake, we only have one page to work with in a 36 page paper! With all the great art and performance happening in this city there is now way we could fit it all on one page. That is why come our February issue we will be expanding the arts section to 2 ENTIRE PAGES! Put that in your pipe and smoke it Nodler! But seriously, thanks Jason.

If by some horrible misstep you find yourself on a date with a Kardashian and she wants to go to a sports bar then head directly to 360 Sports Lounge. While there are many giant TV’s to watch the game on, the Kardashian can also enjoy one of the TV’s screening the season finale of “Project Runway” or some such other travesty not pertaining to sports at all. If being a douchebag is a competition then 360 Sports Lounge is waving the championship trophy over its head like an idiot. A proper sports bar consists of gritty fans, greasy food and ungodly amounts of alcohol. Oddly colored drinks served in triangle glasses instead of a tumbler have no business in a sports bar; and neither do people afflicted with Ed Hardy.

I understand that there are millions of people out of work, but for it to take a month to process an unemployment claim and six weeks to receive the first payment is ridiculous. People can lose their homes and in the amount of time it takes a faceless clerk to “investigate” whether or not they lost their job for a legitimate reason. The appeal process is even worse, no documents are allowed to be presented its all done over a conference call which makes it difficult to tell if your former employer is being honest with the Commission’s chosen representative. However, the worst part of the TWC isn’t how they handle people who have applied for assistance but how they spin actual unemployment statistics. As the financial crisis has continued the TWC has kept putting out cheery upbeat news releases touting how many jobs were created in sectors like leisure and hospitality without stating whether those jobs pay a salary that will allow people to be able to afford to purchase anything more than the bare necessities.

I don’t think I really need to elaborate on this. To start, the nearest navigable body of water is at least 30 miles away and… Wait, that’s it. I’m not entirely sure who exactly their target market is… Does anyone else think it’s a drug cover up? Bad ‘sales’ ahoy.

If this applies to you then you should be aware of the easiest solution in the world: don’t allow readers to comment on your blog, you ridiculous pansy. I’ve never understood why there is always some shock and surprise when a reader vehemently disagrees with an article or blog post. Were you planning on everyone agreeing with you? Did you think having an opinion was the same as a bubblebath? You cannot possibly expect to delve into the ancient and vulnerable art of writing without encountering some friction. And you should be ashamed of yourself if you take this drama to Twitter or Facebook in an underhanded attempt to create factions. Or actually, go right ahead and do that… eat yourselves alive.

One of life’s little ironies is that Global Climate change is pretty much an accepted scientific fact in places like San Francisco or Seattle-where the evidence of change is frequently obscured by clouds, fog, and cold drizzles of rain- but widely debated or dismissed as “liberal conspiracy” in places like Houston… where the facts of the matter are as evident as last month’s exorbitant and air-conditioning fuel ransom note from CenterPoint Energy (once better known to long-time residents as “Houston Looting & Plunder”). Although the record temperature of 108 degrees (set in September of 2026) was never broken, the number of days described by the National Weather Service as “feeling like” over one hundred degrees exceeded any sane person’s desire to count… and August 2026 is now officially on record as the hottest month ever .

Olivia is such a bad bartender people have started to refer to her as ‘Oblivia’. She is a self-proclaimed ‘ borderline autistic bartender’ who lacks the social skills, cocktail knowledge, speed, or any desire whatsoever to perform to at least a sub-par level of bartending. But, this is the charm that makes Super Happy Fun Land the place that it is. We would have it not have it any other way.

Company executives listened politely as their prospective future customers explained how much they had wanted H.E.B’s proposed new “Montrose Location” to be turned into a park (or perhaps had been perfectly happy when the property was Wilshire Village), but were willing to settle for having part of the property turned into green space. H.E.B. had earlier leaked several possible designs for the new store, including one that featured a park, a farmer’s market, an outdoor concert space…and two million dollars that local residents needed to raise if they wanted it. Pure corporate bait and switch at it’s finest. Even in these troubled times, two million dollars is relative chump change for a corporation as large as H.E.B. Had the city raised concerns that raised construction costs, the money would’ve been found. The Montrose Land Defense Coalition did, in fact find comments for as much as 1.2 $M. Not surprisingly, it was not enough-certainly not in Houston, where the principle use for trees is to send them to a paper mill that makes dollars.

Someone explain to me why every bar and club in Houston (and every city in the world for that matter) continues to play Michael Jackson songs? Yo DJ, kick that mad pedophile’s music, son! What kind of world do we live in where the Dixie Chicks say one negative comment about our President and still can’t get played in this city nearly a decade later, yet Michael Jackson can molest kids and get celebrated anytime a DJ wants bodies on the dance floor? Before anyone comes to the defense of this “white woman pork face,” as Katt Williams so eloquently put it, and tells me he was never found guilty of molesting a child, explain to me how in one case he settled out of court with a child for $20 million? I don’t know about you, but if I was not guilty of something I would fight to the death to defend and protect my innocence. However, if I was guilty as sin and had the financial ends to buy my innocence….well $20 million sounds about right.

I understand that we sacrifice a lot sometimes to take the path of least resistance, and in this case playing Beat It is that path to get bodies moving. I just urge all bar owners to consider what is celebrated by playing this Freakshow’s songs. He prayed on innocent children. He built an amusement park to woo them like love interests. He had a freaking “adult alarm” in his bedroom. If you really love children, you build hospitals. You pay all the medical bills for 1,000 kids with cancer. You build schools.

Let 2026 be the year we finally boycott all music recorded by pedophiles. Is that so much to ask? I would rather Macarena a thousand times over than be forced to listen to one more song by a person who took advantage of children incapable of protecting themselves.

Tax the Wolf

Outer Heaven

Skeptycynic

The Manichean

DJ Ipod Ammo

Chase Hamblin

Thelastplaceyoulook

Caddywhompus

Juz Coz

The Ton Tons

Have I bitched about this before? Well let me ride again. Nothing makes me more angry than when some American thinks he can trump a millennia worth of trial and error, slow perfection, and tradition by merging 2 disparate cultures in his/her own ‘unique’ creation. We are talking Thai Tacos, Curried Buffalo Wings, Asian Chicken Salad, Bratwurst and Queso, Falafel Burger, you name it. Just quit trying to be original and just be good.

It’s sickening for a candidate of any political party to suggest we need to prohibit people from voting, but this year saw Tea Party backed candidates and Tea Party organizers espouse ideas that were straight from the darkest days of Jim Crow. In February Tom Tancredo the Constitution Party candidate for the Governor of Colorado, who came in second, told audiences that he believed that people need to “pass a civics test before voting.” Judson Phillips the founder of Tea Party Nation went even further when he said on his organization’s radio show that “it makes a lot of sense” to limit voting only to property owners.

For those who are not familiar with the history of voting rights in this country, here’s a selection from the Department of Justice’s website: “In the 1890s, [the former confederate states] began to amend their constitutions and to enact a series of laws intended to re-establish and entrench white political supremacy. Such disfranchising laws included poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of “good character,” and disqualification for “crimes of moral turpitude.” These laws were “color-blind” on their face, but were designed to exclude black citizens disproportionately by allowing white election officials to apply the procedures selectively.”

Even in the darkest days of WWII the white political elite’s desire to keep everyone else down could not be stopped and led to a Supreme Court case, Smith v. Allwright, where Texas tried to defend the practice of a “white primary” which allowed ostensibly “private” political parties, like the Democrats and the Republicans, to conduct elections and establish qualifications for their members. The painful history of voter disenfranchisement in Texas aside, the reason why suggesting putting limits on voting rights is so heinous is that it means that the people who suffered for equality, the men, women and children who marched, were beaten and died, did so for nothing.

The right for every man and woman to vote is not a right that was enshrined in the Constitution by the founding fathers, it was a right that was won in the street and in the court room. The fear that all men would be equal led reactionaries to blow up churches, kill children and execute young men. To suggest that some people aren’t fit to vote because they don’t own their own home or because, as one commentator on GOPUSA.com suggested, they don’t know how many constitutional conventions the United States has had is disgusting.

Everybody’s got that friend. You know who I’m talking about. That “frugal,” “thrifty,” “penny pincher” who will burn half a day and a tank of gas to save fifty cents on toilet paper because it was advertised in a Sunday sale circular.

The City of Houston (METRO) received $900 million in grants this year from the Federal Transit Administration to help build the much needed light rail. So METRO shopped around for a good deal and signed a contract with a Spanish company to build the rail cars. Problem was, the grants from the FTA required METRO to buy American…so it looked like we were going to lose that federal money-and we’re talking close to a billion dollars.

Just this week METRO announced that they reached a settlement with the Spanish company. They’re going to let us out of the contract, and they’re only going to keep $26 million of the $40 million we already paid them. That’s right, the double-coupon waving geniuses at METRO are telling us we should be happy that we got $14 million back. METRO, it’s going places.

You are like that friend everyone hates, but can’t get rid of. You suck at life. See you tomorrow.

For the 27th straight year of my life, white people. Haha, but not really. Just a little. Did you know that Czechs don’t consider themselves white? Weird, huh?

Mostly I hate the dudes I see around town at bars with Kennedy hair, usually off Washington Avenue when I am doing bar reviews, and now more than ever at Grand Prize Bar and out and about most weekends in the Montrose. John Hughes Movie Rich Kid Hair. I’m bald, so maybe it’s partially jealousy. They took away the darts and the beanbag toss, so maybe they will go back to their home planet.

Also, guys that stare at my gym shorts at the Downtown YMCA get my goat. I’m flattered, but can you please get out of my shower stall?

Okay Creator, Allah, Yahweh, whatever you’re tagging on dumpsters these days…all we’re trying to do is give the people of Houston TWO DAYS to separate from the monotony of their 9-5 jobs and the tide of economic desperation. TWO DAYS. Out of 365. I know we here at Free Press probably don’t give you a shout out as often as some people who might ask for less but shit, you’re practically handing out good weather to the White House. Sure, Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips LOVED the rain and volunteered with most of us in the mud to help make our job smoother last year at The Summer Fest but that was only one year, and if I remember correctly, you didn’t encourage the Of Montreal folks whatsoever to even come close to the mud, much less us. I know Of Montreal wrote “Satanic Panic in the Attack” and they might lose points with you for that one, but at Summer Fest 08, they fucking covered Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” uniting a crowd of 20,000 vapid humans into a mass of positive vibrations.

I know you saw that. I guess I understand if Houston is “awash with sin” or whatever and you’ve still got a lot of work to do here before we get any kind of celestial kick-backs but, seriously, we have some AWESOME SHIT lined up for Summer Fest 2026 and I’m gonna go ahead and ask for your blessings early on behalf of all the future Staffers and Volunteers of the festival. Shukran Allah!

Waking up Saturday morning at 2 pm, there is but one thing on my mind: tacos. After looking for my shoes from the night before and finding I slept in them, I putter on down to El Rey in the hopes that the cure to what ails me lies in the greasy, simple embrace of their fare. Even from a hundred yards away it’s evident my hangover remedy won’t be available any time soon.

The drive thru at El Rey depresses me more than Tyler Perry’s career success. Expect at least seven cars to be clogging the order lane in front of you and expect all seven cars to be filled with people ordering more than Kirstie Alley with a raging case of late night munchies. Their drive thru needs a drive thru. It takes forever to move forward and by the time you realize you could have just walked inside and picked up, you’re already committed. Once you’re back home with your bag of goodness you’ll wonder if it was really all worth it and why it’s now dark outside.

Of all the days to close the library, Saturday makes the least sense. Due to budget shortfalls, weekly operation times were decreased by 20 hours, leaving most libraries to close 2 hours earlier each day at 6pm and all but the McGovern location to close on the weekends. This leaves working folks with little or no time to go to the library which will ultimately decrease the budget further for next year, and the next and the next, until one day when we’ll be told that we no longer can afford a public library, yet look at all the pretty stadiums!

This month I received an email from a buddy that our old high school was going to be in the newspaper for a fairly controversial new initiative they’re going to enforce on their students. I’m not going to tell you the name of the school as I am a loyal alumnae, but suffice it to say it’s in Bellaire and rhymes with Shmisshmiscopal. As of next month, all students enrolled at my old high school will be given random drug tests throughout the year. That’s right, a high school is drug screening its students. The person behind this initiative must either be the most naïve nerd in America or a descendant of some high ranking member of the Gestapo. Have they never seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High? The stoner crowd is a bedrock clique in any high school! Who else is going to make fun of the jocks while greenhousing the 3 rd floor supply closet? Who else is going to stare vacantly out the window during calculus and attend pep rallies only to be ironic? And this initiative affects not only the wannabe hippies with Widespread Panic stickers in their BMWs, but also those who are just trying out new things. Whether you like it or not, high school is a time of experimentation. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s kinda necessary- it’s much better to discover how awesome beer makes you feel while you’re still at home under the protection of your parents than off at college where you can fail out and get VD. Kids mess around and screw up, it’s part of life. Also, if my high school is still anything like it was 10 years ago, roughly half the students will be expelled before lunch. All this Patriot Act paranoia doesn’t solve anything- let the parents test their kids if they stumble upon a connection between little Johnny’s newfound love of Mom’s lasagna and the Bob Marley poster recently tacked up in his wall. John Lithgow from Footloose called. He wants his bullshit back.

And are they testing the teachers? Because we had this one guy, Mr. Wilson, who taught French History, and I’m relatively certain he ripped the bong before class. To this day I can’t tell you one fact about the French but I can tell you some awesome stories of growing up in Montana in the 70s. And I’ll never forget the one and only time I ever went to a rave and ran smack into my Physics teacher, Mr. Casares, only he had a tongue ring and was covered in glow paint. What followed was perhaps one of the most awkward encounters of my life, with him refusing to acknowledge me despite my repeated requests for an extension on a project due date. I think I asked more to freak him out, but then again I was kind of a dick in high school. Thank god they didn’t test for that.

There was a bad cat. He made a bad smell. Bad,,bad cat.

Quantity over quality is the culprit here and it’s about high time some of our local “graffiti” artists took themselves more seriously. The “writing” craze is not new by any means but, it seems lately every one is considering themselves to be valid graffiti artists based on the fact that they scribble the equivalent to a cave drawing on the side of dumpsters and business establishments around town. The sad part about all of this is the fact that most of these kids can actually create some of the most visually stunning artwork we’ve never seen. It reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Bart gets the label maker and puts his name on everything in the house, even Homer’s beer, thwarting Homer from not taking the last beer because “it’s Bart’s”. I believe that if these talented artists actually wanted to be considered for opportunities that would make them large sums of money, ushering most of them out of what could probably compared to squalor, they would focus their efforts more into the quality of their work rather than the quantity. I will probably never find myself looking for someone to commission for my next project on the wall in the bathroom at Rudz. If the artists actually began focusing their efforts into the massive colorful beautifications they are perfectly capable of, the city might actually start putting funds into the art community providing these very artists with paying gigs, doing THEIR VERY OWN thing, to objectively make the city a more interesting and inspiring place to live in. There are some amazing artists however that are already “on this tip”, and I would like to give them a shout out here for doing it right: Ack!, WEAH, DUAL, and Give Up (even though they write, it’s actually balanced with an equal amount of content heavy related artwork that is creating a unique identity for themselves as artists).

How come Delaware gets all the good witch candidates? What’s that? Sheila Jackson Lee won again? Never mind.

What’s with this trend of naming business establishments with cheesy one-word names (usually a meaningful noun reproduced in some minimalist font)? I’m talking about overpriced diners with down-home names like “Chow.” I’m talking about men’s boutiques that try to obscure the fact that they’re a frou-frou men’s BOUTIQUE with a rough-sounding noun like “Mortar.” I’m talking about goofy clubs with names like “Status” where bro’s go to max out their credit cards and sniff each other’s cologne. The one that takes the cake is the Midtown dentists’ office called FLOSS, and I’m not just saying that because they annoy me with their DAILY, glossy, half-page cardstock mailers. (What a waste of resources…and don’t they know that such desperation does not inspire confidence in their dental skills?)

When I am shopping for a dentist, I want her to have a generic, boring name with the suffix DDS, something like “Rachel Wilfred, DDS,” or if she’s feeling inspired, feeling poetic, I’m willing to settle for “Wilfred Dental Associates.” Actually, since I am Sikh, I would probably look for a “Singh” in the name, like “Upinder Singh Chandi, DDS.” Yeah, that’s a plug for my brother-in-law, but he lives in Maryland. Sue me. And when you sue me, know that I will not be hiring a lawyer with a practice called “Gavel” or “Deposition” or “Brief,” even if she’s the best in town. I will go with somebody who works at a firm whose name is a string of WASPy blue-blood names, preferably with a “Singh” thrown in for good measure.

I don’t need my dentist to be trendy; I need my dentist to be a competent professional. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but for some reason, I don’t imagine that a dentist can be both.

I was driving from my office to Rudyard’s for the monthly My Houston 2026 meeting where we were going to listen to Zakcq Lockrem talk about how complete streets can make Houston safer and healthier in 2026 and Houston City Council Member Stephen Costello talk about what is going to happen next with Prop 1: Renew Houston. I’m in the right lane on Waugh, a one way street with a bike lane on the right side and realized that a man on crutches was traveling half in my lane and half in the bike lane, with cars driving 35 miles an hour past him. I slowed down to a stop to let cars pass on the left, so I could get over to the next lane hoping that the four cars behind me also saw this man, so I had a little time to think about this situation. This man had chosen to travel there because the sidewalks along Waugh are not wide enough to accommodate his manner of walking on crutches and are inconsistent, broken, and occasionally marred with a utility pole.

How ironic to encounter this man on my way to a meeting to discuss a new funding mechanism for improvements to the public realm and a discussion of the failure of City of Houston code and funding priorities to account for the safety of all road users. After Zakcq’s presentation, CM Costello began his discussion of how Prop 1 might be applied differently depending on the needs of the diverse neighborhoods of Houston, noting that he did not believe that the City of Houston Public Works Department had the “tools” (wide sidewalk standards) in its “toolbox” (City codes) - to begin to address these concerns. For too long the predominant question that our engineers in Houston have been asked to solve is how to move a box truck as fast as possible over a long distance. The City needs to begin asking its engineers to answer a greater diversity of questions to fairly and efficiently meet s the many needs of a diverse and growing population:

-How can we connect as many people and jobs as possible through safe and efficient transportation?

-If we redesign our streets to be safe and comfortable for the most vulnerable - those with physical disabilities as well as young children and the elderly - won’t we be making them safer and more comfortable for all to choose walking in the process?

-In what areas of town could we most quickly and efficiently invest in wide sidewalks and ADA compliant intersections to greatly increase the walkable parts of our City?

-Where is it appropriate to take measures to slow down automobile traffic to provide priority for safe bike and pedestrian streets, like the City of Portland’s hugely successful and cheap Neighborhood Greenways program?

-How many wide sidewalks and safe bikeways can we build for the price of 1 mile of new freeway?

I haven’t seen people like that since I found that guy living under my car. If a bus ever crashed into one of their “restaurants” when an MMA bout was on primetime, Houston’s median IQ level would increase 32 points.

If said bus was filled with dudes thinking their Affliction shirts make them look hard, make that 38.

You may not know this, but you own the broadcast spectrum. You know, those frequencies that TV, radio, and cell phone signals are transmitted through. Companies like TV stations and cell phone providers lease them from you and me (i.e. the government) for a fee. In addition to the money they pay us, there is always language in the contracts that specifies that they are required to do stuff in the “public interest.” This is why you get those Emergency Broadcast System alerts and those oh-so-helpful and hilarious anti-drug public service announcements that always remind you to pack a bowl before the Simpsons comes on.

Recently, a group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) produced a well-made, stylish ad that links heart disease to fast food (specifically McDonald’s) and promotes occasional vegetarianism. It shows a dead man on a gurney, still clutching a McCrap burger. (You know that stuff won’t ever even rot, don’t you? That’s right, even mold and bacteria are smarter than McDonald’s customers.) PCRM is based in Washington, but they pitched their ad to four Houston TV station-NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox-because Houston is a well-known market for fat asses. All four stations turned it down. Their reasoning? They say it doesn’t meet their “standards and practices” guidelines-whatever that means. We all know the real reason you can’t even BUY free speech is because they love that Mickey D’s cheese.

Incidentally, the Vancouver-based media critic non-profit ADBUSTERS produces some great ads for their annual “TV Turn Off Week” and “Buy Nothing Day” campaigns, which are, surprise!, turned down by all the major networks year after year. They produce stylish commercials and offer the going rates, but our “free press” know who their real masters are-and it ain’t us or “freedom.”

Lenin (Vladimir, not John) said “the capitalists will sell us the rope we’ll use to hang them.” Lenin was wrong.

Look for the PCRM ad online. It’s called “Consequences.”

When the administrators of Rice University and the University of Houston were plotting the conversion of a Houston institution, KTRU, into the classical music arm of Houston’s NPR empire, they had a problem. They were worried that the public (and particularly the KTRU listening audience) might get wind of their plan and convince the UH Board of Trustees that closing down KTRU was a dodgy move from both a public relations or a financial management perspective. Luckily for them, they had a friend in Jeannie Kever at the Houston Chronicle. Kever agreed to “embargo” the story of KTRU’s sale until the day of the Board of Regents meeting, thereby preventing the public at large (and KTRU supporters in particular) from organizing to oppose the sale before the UH Trustees granted their approval. For Rice and UH, the embargo strategy was a success. KTRU supporters were kept in the dark until the last minute, and the UH Trustees narrowly approved the purchase. Since the announcement of the sale, opposition to the demise of KTRU has been fierce and organized. But because Rice and UH were able to delay public disclosure of the deal, the two universities were able to gain an early advantage over opponents among Rice students, alumni, and the Houston community at large. So much the better for Rice and UH; so much the worse for Houston and the Chronicle’s reputation.

Traditionally this list looks back on the last 12 months, but with the Republicans securing a supermajority in the Texas Legislature it seems time to discuss what that means for the future of the Christian Republic of Texas. The phrase “Christian Republic of Texas” is not a joke, Texas is moving closer and closer to a theocracy each year. There is already a campaign underway by some State Republican activists to remove the current Speaker of the House, John Strauss, because he’s Jewish. Texas State Republican Executive Committee member John Cook wrote in a November 30 e-mail that, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it. This is not about Straus, this is about getting what the people want.” Cook’s letter came out before Representatives Aaron Pena and Allan Ritter jumped ships to the GOP to give Republicans 101 votes to the Democrats 49. With over 100 votes in the Texas House, and a newly appointed Christian conservative speaker, we can expect Texas to be come very hostile to viewpoints that aren’t those of rich white people.

Don’t be surprised when the new state legislature begins mining the same vein of right wing, race baiting rhetoric that swept the GOP into power. One of the key pieces of legislation that will help solidify the nativist agenda will be the voter ID bill. This legislation was introduced in 2026 and 2026 and neither time did it have the votes to make it to the Governor’s desk. However, this time it’s expected to sail through committee and the House. There might be something of a fight in the State Senate, but it won’t really matter.

Another piece of legislation that will most likely pass will be some variation of Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. Three versions of the bill have already been filed and the Republican leadership has said that they will give state and local law enforcement the tools to “combat the invasion” coming from Mexico. A third proposed bill would make English the official language of Texas. And that doesn’t even deal with the proposed bills requiring drug testing for people who receive unemployment or any other financial assistance as well as the bill that would allow the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

I know I am probably wasting my time there, but after reading the news online I can’t help but delve into the sordid depths of the comments left by other Houstonians in an effort to get to know my neighbors better. I find for the most part that they are racist, bloodthirsty savages with a penchance for spouting vitriol and violence. They despise Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, Obama, gays, and welfare, yet harbor great adulation for nukes, the death penalty, ICE, Walmart, the WOT, and vigilante grannies who shoot illegals in Walmart parking lots.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who purchased an iPhone in the last year, you’re aware that the device’s reputation as a time squanderer is fully warranted. Case in point- many of you are probably reading these words on one right now. But it’s not incredibly witty and intellectual social commentary that wastes most of your day. Applications, or “Apps” as Webster’s will soon be forced to introduce into the English lexicon, have transplanted both hangovers and supply closet masturbation as the biggest detriment to work place production. Two apps in particular, Angry Birds and Words with Friends, are the biggest culprits.

Angry Birds is a mindless game where you shoot birds out of a slingshot to kill monsters hiding in the dumb little buildings. It was rumored there once was a man who understood the plot of the game but he was killed right before he could pass his wisdom on. It’s ability to drain time out of your life is legendary and a lot of that’s probably due to the fact you can play it anywhere. Here’s a haiku I composed about it:

Words With Friends, or Scrabble for Retards, at least requires some modicum of intelligence. Unfortunately, it’s also as addictive as its avian counterpart. In the last few weeks I’ve played so many games of Words With Friends I’m starting to score the very words people use in conversations with me throughout the day. For example, iPhonedouche is worth at least 40 points, depending on tile placement.

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Yeah yeah Houston traffic is terrible, blah blah blah. Nothing original here, though I am still somehow amazed by the transformation that takes place every single year on our city’s streets during the weeks before Christmas. It’s like living in New Delhi; only replace rickshaws with cars driven by fat moms from the suburbs. Houston’s holiday traffic has officially supplanted my grandparents’ soft toilet seat as the thing on earth I find most disgusting. Who the fuck are you people? My work commute has gotten so bad I’m now listing Planned Parenthood as the sole beneficiary in my Last Will & Testament.

Side observation- I wonder if up north an actual reindeer has ever been caught humping a car with those fake little reindeer horns.

Judging by the content of its website and Twitterfeed, CultureMap wants to transform the city of Houston into the snobby whore of Dallas. Someone should check to make sure CultureMap isn’t on the Houstonian’s payroll because the only way a country club locker room robbery gets “breaking news” status is if the country club is paying for it. Also, when did Facebook status updates become the cornerstone to journalistic research? CultureMap, with all of its River Oaks money, could be force for good in this city but instead it’s a force for wealthy landowners. Shame on you Top2%Map.com. Shame on you.

Whether Houston just wants to remain an oversized suburb, the Planning Commission has been huffing nitrous or City Council is letting big corporations like Target and Pappas write their laws, the new off-street parking requirements proposed this year are detrimental to this city’s growth, entrepreneurship, and community cohesion. Increasing minimum parking standards will negatively impact the use of mass transit and urban density, exacerbate drainage problems and possibly increase DUI-related deaths.

Parking ratios are based on pseudo-science handed down from one community to another without any consideration for market-based solutions. The Greater Houston Restaurant Association (GHRA), which represents large restaurants and chains, supports the new requirements, while independent restaurant owners have formed their own group, Organized Koalition on Restaurant Affairs (OKRA) to combat the new regulations. Help support an urbanized Houston by showing up to random City Council meetings and shouting or emailing them repeatedly at houstontx.gov/council.

This isn’t even a contest. In August Perry was the rising star of the GOP, his much ballyhooed prayer rally at Reliant Stadium attracted so many conservatives and media types that it felt like a Republican convention. Oh, to go back to the heady days of late summer when Perry was seen as the great white hope, a dyed in the wool conservative who could unite the base and the establishment. Ah, to remember when the GOP primary was seen as a race solely between Perry and Romney. Now flash forward just four months and no one seriously thinks Perry has a chance of winning any state besides Texas. The only thing that Perry’s continued collapse does is show exactly why he was smart not to debate Bill White in 2026; White would have eaten him alive. And now to make matters worse, word has come out that since Perry took early “retirement” he’s pulling down $200,000 a year. Apparently he gets to keep his governor’s salary and gets his pension while campaigning. And to make matters worse we’re stuck with him for at least another three years. Thanks Rick.

So the Mayor and City Council got together and formed a committee to explore revising the already ambiguous and inefficient Sound Ordinance. City officials, restaurant and resident associations, and other were invited to participate in the dialogue. Yet City officials failed to invite one musician, music venue operator, or anyone even closely related to the music community. So what we got was an ordinance that ignores the science of sound, the concerns of the music community, and common logic.

It is actually surprising how many people eligible for Harris County’s indigent care program have no idea that it exists or that they are eligible. For those unfamiliar Harris County actually has a single payer health insurance plan for people with little to no income that takes care of things like emergency room visits and going to the doctor. It’s easy and free to apply and because the County doesn’t plaster the program on billboards all across town few people know about it. All the information and application forms are a simple Google search away.

When Bin Laden was allegedly killed, we tweeted ‘One down, 40 million to go.’ Though we thought it was hilarious and were trying to shed light on the fact that US foreign policy was killing Arab men daily, folks did not quite seem to catch the sarcasm. They also did not know we are A-rab owned and operated. We caused quite the kerfuffle.

Yeah, we’ve prolly all done dumb stuff on Facebook-it’s kind of made for that. I know I have-we’ve had to dedicate whole FPH podcasts to address the stupid shit I’ve posted. But when a teller at a bank that had recently been robbed and her boyfriend/accomplice started bragging about being rich and wiping their teeth with hundreds, they brought down themselves and two other accomplices-including another teller at the same bank.

If it were as easy to get a good turkey and Swiss on rye as it is to grab a torta or a cheeseburger, I wouldn’t be writing this “Worst Of.” I don’t want to pay $8 for it, I don’t want to buy it from a chain. I don’t need fancy bread or twelve different meats. I just want it made fresh and close to home. I’m lazy. Quit making me do all the work.

Back in 2026, I viewed my opportunity to vote for Annise Parker in the Mayoral Election as a godsend. To me, voting for Annise Parker meant I was voting progressively. Now, I must admit that the fact that Annise Parker is gay played a huge role in my decision. Was that a narrow-minded view of her sexual orientation- probably; and you can bet I’ll never make the same mistake again. In her first term as mayor, Annise Parker brought the hammer of Thor down on small businesses with the fury of the entire GOP. She introduced a sound ordinance that serves mostly as fiendish money grab and empowered police officers beyond their stated responsibility. She introduced a parking ordinance that encourages drunk driving and forces bars & restaurants to increase parking spots while alleviating the same burden on strip centers. Clearly, her mission as mayor is to send Houston back a decade in time.

President of HEB Scott McClelland is listed as one of the campaign contributors to former candidate for city council David Robinson. Mr. Robinson happens to be the president of the super-neighborhood Neartown Association, which encompasses most of the neighborhoods in Montrose, including Lancaster Place, whose residents were appalled at his blatant advocacy for the new HEB despite his fellow neighbors’ protests. Robinson lost his run for the at large position, which is a win for Montrosians with a penchant for restoration, not gentrification.

The lack of style and pride in their appearance displayed by many Houstonians is well known. You know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t, go to any Super Walmart after 10 pm, or any time of day for that matter, and count the number of people in sweatpants, house shoes, and spaghetti-stained puffy paint unicorn t-shirts. Go ahead, I dare you. So it’s no surprise, I suppose, that on October 27, a woman walked into Lonestar Bank wearing a purple shower cap and pajamas, brandishing a gun, and robbed the bank. Our bank robbers don’t even have any style. Think back now to the time of Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. The latter couple was so frickin’ stylish that a flippin’ Frenchman-a man held up as a paragon of style by even snooty French standards, Serge Gainsbourg-immortalized them in a song.

As HEB waits for the beer and wine license for their new Montrose location, held up because of their proximity to the St. Stephens Episcopal Church and School, they have made good use of the shelf space they’d allotted for fun juice by filling it with their overstock of douche bags. Douche sales have been so brisk that they are considering making the change permanent, and are considering serving douche bags, exclusively, at their still unused in-store bar. For those who want the real stuff-check the cough syrup aisle…or walk across the street to the neighborhood Fiesta.

Torchy’s serves ‘anglo’ style tacos that are composed of way too many cutesy ingredients, have silly names like ‘The Dirty Sanchez’, and cost upwards of 4 bux a piece. Hipsters with tattoo sleeves peddle vogue tacos with mango compotes, fried avocado, and jerk chicken. All I need is a great tortilla, good cuts of meat, fresh cilantro, and a killer salsa verde. Torchy’s piles so many trendy foodie relishes on their tacos I can’t tell what I am eating. A tip for Torchy’s: less is more.

Whether it’s Channel 2 identifying the intersection of Fannin and Tuam as “Southeast Houston”, Channel 11 describing the Texans playoff berth as “The Run to the Super Bowl” or Channel 26 deciding to turn its 5 and 9 p.m. newscasts into conservative debates about such important issues as “is TV too gay” and the “War on Christmas”, local TV news sucks. Even Channel 39’s NewsFix could be fixed; more actual reporting and less TMZ voiceovers would be a good place to start. For one day, just one day, I would like to see a TV news cast focus on issues that aren’t discussed on a regular basis-like the area’s water shortage-instead of reporting gun crimes and traffic accidents. And yes murders, bank robberies and fatal accidents are important but isn’t it also important to know when we’re going to have rolling blackouts and more broken water pipes next summer?

Don’t look at me like I’m crazy when I ask you what Irish whiskey’s you carry besides Jameson’s or Bushmill’s. I don’t want your rainbow-puke inducing, eight-ingredient panty-droppers. Charge my ass more. It’s a one- pour drink, neat. If you shelve it, they will come.

If you think Rick Perry is the worst Texas has to offer, think again! While Perry is a fucking homophobic moron whose low IQ makes George Bush look good, it is easier to critique his ultra-conservative ass than the so-called progressive politicians in Houston. In fact, our very own Mayor is making Perry look good by working hard to make Houston the worst city not just in Texas, but in the entire United States. For starters, what the fuck was the deal with the huge creepy red tent with which the Houston Police covered the Occupy Houston protesters?! Hiding violence against the protesters behind creepy closed tents is perhaps something Parker has learned from her mentors in Israel.

Parker, the Israeli sympathizer, is using the exact method that the state of Israel has used for decades: covering up its violence against the Palestinians with lies about being “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Not too long ago, Parker led a delegation of U.S. mayors on their trip to Israel. The American Jewish Committee, an Israeli propaganda machine that takes policymakers to Israel for “intensive learning and travel”, sponsored her November 14th to 20th trip to Israel.

Parker, who is working on building partnerships with Israeli companies, has not only learned from the Israeli apartheid regime to “successfully” manage dissent, but is eager about the way that the Israeli state has exploited natural resources stolen from Palestinians. She is fascinated by Israel’s fucking “aggressive expansion of its desalination plants” that provide Israel with most of its water. What Parker calls “reclaimed seawater” is really stolen seawater. At the same time that you are stopped at the Galleria by annoying aggressive sales people (former Israeli soldiers who have completed their military stint and had likely been murdering Palestinians) who insist on selling you stolen salt from the Dead Sea, packaged as fucking expensive skin products, the desalinated water is used to quench Israel’s greed. This is when Palestinians in Gaza do not have drinking water. And when the Dead Sea is being destroyed by Israel’s exploitation – yes folks, Israel is even killing the Dead Sea.

To make matters worse, Parker proudly announces that the Jerusalem Mayor, Nir Barkat, “wants to increase tourism to Israel’s capital city by improving ease of access and by creating destination events, like the Jerusalem Marathon.” Parker is happy to send tourists to Israel with easy access, when Palestinians’ access to their homeland is blocked at the fucking checkpoints, and when the only marathon Palestinians know is to run from the fucking Israeli “Defense” Force.

In the City of Houston press release, Parker states, “This is an opportunity to learn how we might be able to apply Israel’s model back in Houston.”

Exactly what type of Israeli model is she bringing back to Houston? What makes her think we would want anything remotely Israel-ish in our city? Did she see how Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as third class citizens in the so-called democratic state of Israel? Did she see Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank treated like animals, caged in by a massive apartheid wall, checkpoints and roadblocks? Did she see Palestinian homes demolished, olive trees uprooted, and land continuously grabbed by Israel? Never mind the thousands of Palestinians killed and injured by Israeli air strikes, the thousands more in Israeli dungeons (many held without charge), and the racist Israeli policies that prevent millions of Palestinian refugees from returning to their rightful homes and villages, all courtesy of our tax dollars.

Of course she did not see these things. She, like any other person who tours Israel, would see a version that censors Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. But we expected her to know better. As a progressive mayor in a city that embraces diversity and equal opportunities for all, rubbing elbows with Zionists (aka racists) in the State of Israel – the most belligerent state in the region – is an outrage.

Oh and get this: Mayor Parker refused to meet with concern Houstonians and the Palestinian community to hear our concerns. She is only willing to give her time (which is on our clock, she is our mayor, serving us) to Israel. How Shameful.

So, congratulations, Mayor Parker! You fucking win our vote for the worst of Houston! That is the only vote you will be getting from many Houstonians, Ms. Mayor!

In a year filled with boneheaded moves from HPD-from officers showing up to work tanked to the highly touted Blood Alcohol Content vans not working to covering up name tags and badge numbers at Occupy protests-perhaps the single stupidest move HPD could make was arresting a 71-year-old gay man. Arresting Ray Hill, one of the most outspoken and media savvy activists in Houston, on trumped up charges is a fast way to find yourself on the business end of a lawsuit. It seems like the arresting officer skipped the day at the academy when they mentioned that A: Security cameras are everywhere and B: Ray Hill is one stubborn SOB who has no problems fighting it out in court for years to come. So as a public service announcement I offer this word of advice to any of Houston’s finest: unless you see Ray Hill really breaking the law, and I mean like murdering someone, don’t try and arrest him it’s only going to blow up in your face.

Call your mother. She misses you. She cooked just for you. And now you let the food go bad and do not come to pick it up. Pick up the phone. Call your mother. Does she not have a son? Does she deserve this?

For the average out-of-pocket upstart business, it can take over a year of inspections and re-inspections and fees and trips back and forth from the permitting office before they get their doors open to start making money and hiring employees. The city is nose deep in our business, literally. Use the wrong kind of screw, lose that round of inspections, wait for the next round, pay for another visit from an inspector. Want to put up a sign to advertise your location, at your location? Bend over and say ‘ah’ because that’s what it feels like dealing with the petty bullshit doled out to those who are attempting to better our local economy.

Across the world, movements are winning important battles to condemn the apartheid policies of Israel, which has maintains a military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights, denies equal rights to Arab citizens of Israel, and denies the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their home in Israel. Houston is not one of these places where the Palestine Solidarity movement is winning much of anything. Twelve Texas House members have taken expenses paid trips to Israel including Gene Green (5 times), Sheila Jackson Lee (twice) and Pete Olson (twice), and Al Green (once). State Rep Debbie Riddle went to Israel and got a dog which she named after an elite Israel Defense Force infantry brigade. Annise Parker went to Israel and talked about how we can “apply Israel’s model in Houston.”

Even Radio for Peace Station KPFT gave a radio program to the Israeli consulate, and while a fight was made by many programmers, members, and community activists to get the station to condemn this decision and support the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions made by Palestinian Civil Society, the majority of KPFT’s board chose to remain ‘neutral’ in time of great moral conflict. The Palestine Solidarity Movement in Houston was unable to get a radio station founded by pacifists and run by hippies to support Palestinian rights.

While there are commendable cultural activities related to Palestine, including the award winning Houston Palestine Film Festival, the movement to politically support Palestine in Houston of late, is primarily dedicated to protesting in front of the Galleria Starbucks.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that someone 10 feet away from a building didn’t fall out a second story window, but when Nathan Fischer’s lawyer presented her case in early December she thought jurors were really far from geniuses. I mean really, really far from geniuses. Donna Roth, Fischer’s attorney, tried to sue Pirtle for $12 million and 47 cents claiming that it was his fault her client ‘fell out of a window’ and, apparently, drifted all the way across the sidewalk. Roth didn’t even try and explain how this miracle of physics could have happened; instead she beat up on Pirtle and tried to build sympathy with the jury by playing up Fischer’s injuries. Perhaps the most egregious part of the lawsuit was the statement that nothing Fischer did or didn’t do contributed to him ‘falling out of a window,’ or more likely jumping off the roof. When he was brought in to the ER Fischer tested positive for cocaine and marijuana and had a blood alcohol content over three-times-the-legal-limit. In other words, he had enough to drink to be suffering severe motor impairment and a loss of consciousness and then decided to either go hang around a glassless third-floor window or go climb up on a roof, and Roth said it wasn’t his fault. That’s some mighty fine lawyer work. Fortunately, the jury thought the case was bullshit and dismissed it.

This guy shows up to Occupy Houston around 5 pm on a Monday, wearing a suit and waving a rifle, fires a couple shots into the air, fires a shot into the pond, waves the gun around at the hapless hippies occupying, points his gun at the cops who arrive on the scene, then points it at his own head before the cops take him down. He is expected to make a full recovery…in some local mental institution. (This one “Worst Of,” we are happy to award-it’s a good thing this fool didn’t have better aim.)

Trust me, you are not the only one who tires of our constant over-promotion of this festival ( www.freepresssummerfest.com). After 5 months of pushing this event online, handing out hundreds of thousands of flyers, hanging posters, and telling people on the streets, we can’t bear to look at our own materials. Our cars become mobile storage sheds for these materials and we often wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats proclaiming the date and web url (www.freepresssummerfest.com). BTW, our next event is June 2 nd and 3 rd and is gonna be great. Get your passes now! (www.freepresssummerfest.com).

I was told once that the difference between the police officers union and all other unions is that real unions tell their members; “We will support you in whatever you need as long as you don’t break the law” while police unions exist primarily to protect police members when they commit crimes and hurt people.

Most recently the police officers union has come out refusing to endorse republican District Attorney Pat Lykos, in opposition to her policy of bringing misdemeanor charges (instead of felony) in cases where there is less than 1/100 of a gram of drug residue. To quote the blog Grits for Breakfast; “In other words, they want more tax dollars spent on police and jail staff to arrest and house more people on penny-ante paraphernalia charges. Of course they do. They are police unions.”

This policy was changed from the days when Chuck Rosenthal was District Attorney, and the Harris County Jail was sanctioned for violating inmates’ constitutional rights due to overcrowding, and we were paying astronomical fees to send inmates to Louisiana jails. That’s the kind of justice system that the police union wants- unethical, unconstitutional, and fiscally irresponsible.

We are glad that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords continues to recover from her gunshot wound, and we are proud that local Houston doctors have been part of her remarkable recovery, but we hope she’ll come back and visit under more auspicious circumstances some time, too.

Drive down any Houston street on recycling day and you’ll see that maybe one out of five homes have utilized their green bins. Despite its downfalls of low frequency removal (twice a month doesn’t suffice for a family of four when you’re recycling correctly), low percentage of homes serviced, and refusal to pick up glass, all plastics, and Styrofoam, we’re lucky that our city provides this service. My old street once received a notice from the city threatening to have the recycling service revoked if more homes didn’t participate. Luckily people stepped up their game and no changes were made. One neighbor even puts a sign out ever other Monday to remind others that ‘Tuesday’ is recycling day.

Not to brag, but I have two green bins that are overflowing with recyclables bi-monthly, our main trash container is rarely more than halfway full. I plan to call 311 to ask for another. It’s that easy. Just call, give your address, and they’ll drop one off in a matter of days. I envy those streets that are part of the green polly-cart program, as I’d love to have one extra large container instead of dragging two or three smaller bins out to the street, spilling over with trash, but I called in to ask if the program was expanding and the answer at the time was ‘no.’

My new street has a dreadfully low participation rate in the recycling program. I plan on coming up with a creative way to encourage and inform my neighbors about taking advantage of this service. Maybe simply knowing others have noticed they aren’t recycling will prompt them to add it to their list of priorities. If they cared half as much about recycling as they do about not letting one damn stray leaf fall on their lawn, we’d be in business.

I understand that people are busy and if they aren’t accustomed to recycling, it’s simply too easy to forget. But it’s also easy if you try.

The signage that recently appeared surrounding the shopping center containing Dunlavy Fiesta announcing that an exception was being sought to prevent the creation of cul-de-sacs at the current dead-ends of Sul Ross and Branard behind the shopping center. The same exception was required during the development of the bloated and quasi-suburban HEB that currently blights the property across the street, and this would seem to confirm recent rumors published on Swamplot.com that Fiesta will soon go the way of Wilshire village, to be replaced by a ‘mixed use development’ comparable to the combination of yuppie hives and generic boutiques that currently disfigure much of mid-town. Despite assurances from Fiesta store manager Barry Reichstein that the store lease extends well past the 2026 end date cited in the Swamplot piece, it seems that it is only a matter of time before most of Montrose is virtually indistinguishable from Kingwood, Pearland, or any other part of Houston’s cookie-cutter exurbs…

THE WORST PODCAST THAT I LOVE: Free Press Podcast

When on the road, I live on podcasts. The Free Press Houston podcast is a low-fi piece of shit, one-microphone in the middle of a room full of guys (well, mostly guys) talking over one another, often in silly, cynical, sarcastic tones podcast - AND I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT! No place else can I stick a disc in my car, or hit a button on my computer, and hear more quality news, info, opinion and insight into my home town of Houston, Texas, USA - presented with the humor and irreverence I’ve come to expect from these homies.

I left you a message. I texted you. I even tweeted. But you did not respond. Then I see you at Grand Prize hamming it up with everybody. I felt slighted. I tried my best to join in on the conversation but still felt inadequate. I bought everyone shots and you did not even say thank you. And then you ask for a ride home?

“Free Speech does not include the right to interfere with the expressions and ideas with which you disagree. You will be escorted away from this forum for not respecting the fundamental principle of free speech within the university.”

— Rice President David Leebron, on November 10th, 2026, when Occupy Houston ‘mic-checked’ House Majority Leader Eric Cantor

As a former law professor, Leebron should aspire to correctly explain legal concepts. Instead, addressing a room full of Rice students, he used an incorrect definition of the concept of freedom of speech to justify silencing people who came to speak out.

Yes, that’s the same guy who silenced KTRU on the FM dial.

Cantor had permission to speak because the university invited him. Knowing this, the protesters could do little more, non-violently, than to use their voices to delay his speech. They bravely did so, were escorted out, and some were arrested. The whole incident was edited out of the video provided by the University and subsequently used in the Houston Chronicle blog coverage.

Leebron asserted, as the president of the university that owns the room, the privilege of deciding which speakers do and don’t have rights there. This wasn’t about any right to freedom of speech; it was simply about property rights. However, “we own this school and get to decide who speaks here” would have seemed a bit crude, so instead, he opted for some eloquent doublespeak.

Legally, of course, Cantor and those who interrupted him, have the exact same rights to free speech. However, Rice’s President, with a police department, and a well-funded team of lawyers at his disposal, doesn’t have to worry about getting the law right. He has the power to ignore it, or even twist it around backwards if he likes.

Similarly, Eric Cantor doesn’t have to worry that his positions on Israel violate international law — the United States has the power to issue exemptions. Israel’s confirmed nuclear weapons won’t ever be discussed in the UN Security Council, but suspicions about Iran will. Perhaps Leebron’s definition of freedom of speech is being used there as well.

At 9:30 am on October 3, a woman walked into a Chase Bank branch with her hand in her purse, claimed she had a gun, and demanded money. The teller handed her some cash, which she then dropped as she turned to walk out, so she cursed, picked it up, and went on her merry way, earning herself the moniker “Butterfinger Bandit” from the FBI. Three days later, Occupy Houston kicked off with a polite, well-mannered, hapless demonstration outside the Chase Bank building downtown. All traffic laws were obeyed, the polite bunch kept to the sidewalk and refrained from using curse words.

Little Big’s, Five Guys, SmashBurger, Beck’s, Sparkle Burger, Itty Bitty Burger Barn, Bubba’s, Lucky Burger, Someburger … it goes on and on. Some of them reasonably priced and good and some of them overpriced over-hyped chains, but one thing is for sure, there is just a hell of a lot of them. Google a map of Hamburgers in Houston and it looks like a city with Chicken Pox. Honestly! I like a hamburger as much as anyone but do we really need that many places that serve ground beef on a bun? Are we really that uncreative?

The extensive coverage on Houston Chronicle’s mobile app (and website) dedicated to the flawed and farcical vanity candidacy of governor Rick ‘Goodhair’ Perry for the GOP presidential nomination.

There are at least three good reasons why this is nothing more than a pointless piece of suck-uppery to the benighted Teabaggers that make up a significant percentage of the Chron’s readership-unfortunately, I can’t currently remember what they are…

It seems like it’s been going on for years. Houston restaurant owners treat their waiters and kitchen staff like little-more-than slaves and the response has always been “if you don’t like it, leave.” The list of alleged perpetrators includes some of the biggest names in Houston food circles. The first to make the news was Bruce Molzan, owner of Ruggles, who had his entire staff walk out because he allegedly owed them about $15,000 in back pay. Then it was Bombay Pizza, Blue Water Seafood, Hunan Chef on FM 1960 and Brasserie 19 for failing to pay overtime. And now Houston food icon, and Iron Chef contestant, Bryan Caswell has been sued. The suit alleges that Caswell and his business partners failed to pay overtime, incorrectly calculated hours worked and forced employees to participate in an invalid tip pool.

We all know it’s hard being a small business owner. That making payroll is tough and you’d rather give a person some money instead of firing them, but the problem is if you’re paying them by the hour and you’ve legally employed them you have to pay them everything they’re supposed to get. We’ve heard it all before: waiters and bartenders work for tips, it doesn’t matter how many hours they put in they are primarily paid by the customer. Sorry it doesn’t work like that. Once they sign employment documents they are legally an employee, not an independent contractor. And when a non-salaried employee goes over 40 hours in a workweek they are supposed to get time-and-a-half. Why is it so hard for independent restaurant owners to understand such a simple concept: pay your employees for the time they work. Hell, McDonald’s understands it. And when McDonald’s makes you look bad it’s time to start fixing your shit.

The decision by Weingarten Realty to fill in the old inclined floor and destroy the old theater fixtures in the former Bookstop and one-time Alabama Theater on S. Shepherd, after steadfastly refusing for months to even consider the possibility of leasing to Alamo Drafthouse or anyone else who might consider using the space for a film or theatrical venue.

Given the steady decline of venue-ready properties in inner city Houston and the evident glut of conventional retail space, there’s really nothing good that can be said about this. It was briefly rumored that the space might be taken over by a local installment of Pacific Northwest alt grocery institution Trader Joe’s, but it now seems that suburban moms in The Woodlands will have the opportunity to pick up a bottle of Two Buck Chuck (which now cost three bucks-I know) long before the far more deserving residents of the ‘Trose.

It’s already hard to try and get people in Houston to give up their cars and take the bus and it only becomes harder when the Chronicle runs a story that a recent study found riders on certain Metro bus routes-the Chron didn’t say which ones-were being exposed to tuberculosis, most likely from other bus riders. TB can lead to a month long hospital stay and the need for four pills a day for six months, and it doesn’t seem like Metro is going to absorb those costs. With all the talk about reducing air pollution and creating public spaces it’s worth remembering that with the public comes public health risks.

Moving towards vinyl made perfect sense. It is a format of high audio quality, folks still own record players, and suddenly artwork was big again. But cassettes have none of these qualities. The only thing they have is kitsch. I hate kitsch.

OH MY GOD, apostasy! How dare you attack local and independent music in favor of secretive deals by unhip bureaucrats? How could you defend the decision to replace decades old affordable housing with a giant mega-lo mart? When KUHF switched over to an all NPR station and sent the classical over to KUHA it became something that Houston has needed for years: a reliable, non-biased news source that broadcasts verified, and verifiable, information to people stuck in traffic. And it’s become even more relevant since 740 KTRH, formerly the city’s flagship news radio station, decided to become solely right wing talk. Yes we lost a station that played alternative and underground music but we gained one that covers national and international issues without sounding like World Net Daily or a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh. Also the Wilshire Village Apartments that were torn down to make way for HEB may have been cheap but they certainly didn’t qualify as affordable housing primarily because they weren’t available. It’s hard to defend the destruction of a series of buildings that were in a constant state of disrepair and were being mismanaged by a man who clearly had psychological problems. Conversely, it’s pretty easy to support the opening of a grocery store that has already forced competitors to improve their selection and shopping experience and lower their prices. Competition benefits consumers; more choices equal low prices and laws of supply and demand win out over nostalgia and fetishization of familiarity.

There is a simple equation that explains why it is not safer to drive slowly: less time in car = less likely to be involved in a car accident. Inversely, more time spent inside car = more likely to be involved in a car accident. I don’t understand, in a city defined by sprawl, why all of you insist on driving under the posted speed limit on freeways (US 59, I-10, I-45, US 290, etc.) and on major city streets. WHY? Don’t you want to arrive at your destination? Isn’t that the point of driving in the first place? I don’t even need to be racist about this issue because every fucking one of you is super guilty of this. Bottom line: Just go.

Needless to say it’s not surprising that the Chronicle doesn’t really get what’s important to Montrose and uses the Ultimate Montrose blog to report about how Yates High School basketball is doing. For the record, most Montrosians don’t care about high school sports and Yates is in Third Ward by TSU, not in Montrose.

It’s also no surprise that the Chronicle thinks people in Montrose care about marriage announcements, charity donations or where the League of Women Voters will be holding their holiday reception. Spend a few nights in Montrose and you’ll see what we care about, and it isn’t the society page bullshit that makes it on Ultimate Montrose. How about reporting which bars got raided by the TABC or when city crews will be out fixing broken pipes? How about letting us know when a job fair is going to be held or what scholarships are available to people over the age of 21? Hell, how about telling us where we can find a social worker to help us navigate the complex maze of government assistance so we can see a dentist and get a Lone Star card. You know, stuff that matters on the street.

Houston is a city that is fueled by individualism and entrepreneurial spirit. What this frequently means in practice is people not knowing or working with their neighbors, and an attitude that celebrates the rich and accomplished has no sympathy for the suffering of the poor.

A noble experiment, Sedition Books challenged this for a number of years in Houston. Sedition’s third and most successful location on Richmond Ave. near Montrose lasted for more than 3 years as a completely volunteer run bookstore and event space for anarchist and radical politics. They hosted films, speakers, and bands from across Houston, the country, and often other countries as well. Sedition advocated a different model of organizing society; horizontal instead of hierarchical, directly democratic and attempting to be inclusive. It was a place where many people were introduced to new ideas, and saw new typ

es of projects emerge, like the Anarchist Book Fair that took place at MECA in sixth ward in April of this year.

A variety of factors including high rent, and the lack of volunteers led to the closing of the Richmond location at the end of November. The lending library has migrated to the Dragon Valley Free School in Third Ward, and the Sedition crew continues to bring books to events and is looking for a new place.

Seriously, protestors can’t have shelter but people queuing up for a discounted Xbox can? That’s possibly the most egregious example of bullshit to come forward in at least the last two months. And before anyone jumps on the private property versus public property band wagon it’s worth pointing out that many of the parks in Houston were donated to the city with caveats, and in at least one case the land was placed in to a situation that basically amounts to a trust and the city is simply the executor of the trust. So there is an argument that could be made that the surviving members of the families that donated or entrusted the land to the city should be consulted before policies preventing tents are enacted. Oh sure there’s ‘public health concerns’, that could be easily addressed by allowing port-a-lets in the park, but somehow those concerns don’t come up when people are camped in front of a Best Buy for a week to score a cheap TV.

I recently donated platelets for my aunt at MD Anderson. She is really sick and requires several blood transfusions a week. Luckily, she’s related to a virtual vital fluid Superman, as I learned when my platelets tested as a match for hers. According to the doctors, the viability of my platelets was “off the charts,” something I took to mean I possessed a sort of life saving super power, and not at all what they tell every donor so they’ll come back.

My only concern is what’s going to happen now that I am part of her! My cells are living and growing within her body! We are one and the same!

What’s going to happen when all she wants to talk about in her Mah Jong group are boobs and college football?

A friend of mine said that the 34, which runs along Montrose between the Heights and the Museum District, exists in no useful dimension. When you wait it never comes and when you walk it comes right away. The idiosyncrasies of Schrodinger’s bus aside, the 34 has the worst schedule of any bus route inside the loop. It only operates Monday-Friday until 7 p.m. and it doesn’t run on weekends. Metro seriously doesn’t think anyone in the Heights wants to come into or out of Montrose on a weeknight or that anyone in Montrose needs to go to the Heights on Saturday or Sunday? It’s a classic chicken and the egg problem: Metro says there isn’t enough ridership to warrant expanded hours but without expanded hours how can you estimate ridership? Hey Metro, I’m sure the cabbies running people from the Heights to Montrose and vice versa appreciate the business, it’s just a shame you don’t.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to visit one of those ostentatious Montrose loft townhomes? Wonder no more! Now you can go to Bacchus and experience the “high life” for yourself! As if the imposing white exterior with primary color accents wasn’t enough to make it stick out in this neighborhood of traditionally humbler bungalows and cottages, if you miss the views of the sky that this monstrosity has choked out, step inside for a view of “Mediterranean” cloud frescoes that look like a third grader painted them. Treat yourself to some of the Illy brand coffee that they brag about on their website-I understand it’s the Nescafe of Europe. Word on the street is they’re about to sign a contract with a select winery that’s going to make them your only local connection for some of that fine fine Sutter Home vintage wine, too.

Holy shit it was hot this past summer! I went though 5 bottles of medicated powder!

While Rick Perry and his buddy’s from IHOP (no shit, they call themselves the International House of Prayer) led 30,000, yes, 30,000 clueless gun totin’ Bible thumpin’ diabetes patients in seven hours of fasting and prayer at the Reliant Stadium, praying for stuff like rain to help put out the wildfires that were swallowing swaths of central Texas where Perry had cut volunteer fire department budgets by 75%-at the same time that those measly 30,000 people were gathered for our collective deliverance (not counting Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, atheists, etc), no less than ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND people who’ve been shafted by the economy and school budget cuts showed up just a few miles away at the George R. Brown Convention Center for Houston Independent School District’s first annual Back to School Fest for free backpacks, school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations and fresh produce. So many people showed up to the Back to School Fest that they ran out of supplies and had to send people away by 10 am, after having opened less than two hours before. Perry’s rain never came, and the drought and budget woes continue…

Mezban serves great food. This is no indictment of their food quality but rather an illustration of my over-indulgence. How much lamb curry, chicken korma, daal, and haleem can one man eat in a day? Only my colon knows.

This little-known event occurs at Buffalo Bayou Park every October and has, as it’s title sponsor, Kellogg, Brown & Root or KBR. Apparently no one at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership thinks letting a company with as questionable a history as KBR sponsor a day for kids is a bad idea. Sure the event looks like fun for the whole family, as long you don’t think about the Iraqi children who died so KBR could provide you and your kids a nice day in the park.

WE have been trying to get it right for a long time. But when a small staff is faced with editing literally hundreds of thousands of words in such a short time period, we fuck up. We fuck up often. Either way, we feel we sometimes have substance and thank you for your patience with our editing. We are considering hiring someone a sophomore in high school to help us get better.

Houston Press aids and abets human sex trafficking

EDITORS NOTE: This was obviously a hard decision to make as to whether or not to go ahead with publishing this story. First and foremost, it is hard to appear objective when writing about another newspaper that folks would perceive as a ‘competitor’. Secondly, I have many long-time friends who work over at Houston Press that I admire and respect and this article has no bearing on the great work they do. I am also a customer of Houston Press where I regularly advertise Fitz shows, Free Press Summer Fest, Houston Palestine Film Festival, etc. I can further illustrate my own hypocrisy by telling you that I have spent tens of thousands of dollars with them all the while having a moral qualm with the issue described here in the following article. Because in 100 years I am sure that when historians describe the worst of injustices that flourished in Houston Texas, human trafficking and its link to the sex trade will top the list. This story is the 500 pound gorilla in the room. And Houston Press and other media organizations complicity comprises but one component in this 3 dimensional clusterfuck. But we have no illusions that such complicity is based on some dark, malevolent plan orchestrated by the illuminati but rather a failure to examine the status quo for what it is. So I would ask that readers open their hearts and minds to the plight of these trafficked women.

For years now, I have ignored a rather disturbing reality that exists within our community. I, like most people, would pick up the Houston Press every Thursday and read up on what was going down that week. And every week I would do the same thing, reach a certain page in the paper and refuse to look any further for fear of having to face the reality that exist within the back pages of the Houston Press. It was as if my decision to refuse to flip any further somehow resolved me of any guilt or responsibility. So instead of browsing the pages that were lined with stock photos of women that are for sale, I would stop after I had reached the end of the music section. It was just easier this way. Then earlier this year, I attended a human trafficking education summit and was forced to analyze the ways in which my community and I perpetuate the trafficking and sale of women and their bodies. The Houston Press was brought up in the discussion and the wall I had created that separated me from reality was quickly dismantled. I went home that night and forced myself to begin the process of exploring human trafficking and how it is directly linked to Houston and specifically the Houston Press.

I started my research with the most obvious of offenses: massage parlors. Many of the women who are serving time in these facilities were brought from overseas here under false pretenses ( many from poverty-stricken South Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand ) and are forced into prostitution through physical and mental abuse. Their families are threatened, their identities are stripped and they all lack vital resources that keep them perpetually held in this vicious cycle. The women accrue an inflated debt due to travel expenses and room and board that they proceed to pay off by working 12 to 24 hour days in the parlors. Their captors move them every few weeks (while adding to their debt for each move) to keep them disoriented with their surroundings and each other. After their debt is repaid and their time is served, they are “set free.” If you were one of these women and at 2 AM you were locked out with no money, a limited knowledge of the native language and not even the basic knowledge of what fucking city you are in, what would you do? One could hope that they find some help or, better yet, burn the building down. But that is not how the sex industry world works, and the reality is these women end up begging their captors to let them back in. These same women are being advertised every week in the backpages of the Houston Press. While I understand that times are tough and the Houston Press and their parent company, Village Voice Media, are doing what they have to do so they can get by, I have to ask them, and myself, “Is it worth it?”

It is no secret that Village Voice Media and the Houston Press make some serious cash through ad space bought by the sex industry. Village Voice Media owns and operates the website Backpage.com and since Craigslist closed their adult service section in September of 2026, Backpage.com has picked up where they left off. According to James Rainey of the LA Times, “A Village Voice executive, who asked not to be named for revealing confidential information, said that Backpage.com, where online escort ads and the like go for about $10 each, produces at least one-seventh of the company’s revenue.” This is a million dollar industry that is making its earning off the backs and twats of women. Village Voice has stated that they are protected under the first amendment and while they sort of acknowledge the terrible shit their ad space is used for, their stance is that they cannot be held accountable for it. In that same LA Times article. Steven Suskin, Village Voice’s Lawyer, is quoted as saying, “Criminals send drugs through Federal Express but we don’t eliminate FedEx just because a few criminals do that.” ( Eds note: This is a bullshit defense and parallel because FedEX does not knowingly accept packages with drugs in them whereas papers like HP are very well aware of the services offered at massage parlors and the conditions the women are in. ) Oh well Mr. Suskin, I totally see your logic in comparing mailing drugs through the mail and the sell of women and children on the internet. Thank you for clearing all the confusion up for me. You are safe in the eyes of the law but I have to ask, isn’t there some sense of morality that you seem to be lacking? If you know that the money you are taking from massage parlors is the same money that holds those women captive, wouldn’t your moral compass send a fucking bat signal telling you this is beyond fucked up? And massage parlors are just one aspect to this enigma. That does not include the “prostitutes” and “escorts” that are also being trafficked through your pages and let us not forget the underage girls that seem to be popping up periodically with accusations that you knowingly allowed their pimps to take out ads on them. And while I agree that the pimps and traffickers are really at fault for their disgusting behavior, you need to take responsibility for making money off of the sales. I mean, you can’t actually think that you in no way are a part of this whole underworld. You are the link between the supply and demand. And let’s just be honest with each other, you can claim you are protecting first amendment rights all you want but what it really comes down to is money. I understand that you are a business and you do need money to exist but I would hope that you would rather cease to exist than to make your millions off of ads that sell human beings.

Every week, ads like this are featured in Houston Press that contain subtle language which indicate sexual services are offered. Stock photos of Asian women are re-used for different ‘massage parlors’.

Village Voice over the last year began their own human trafficking investigative series entitled “The Truth Behind Sex Trafficking,” in which multiple lengthy articles were printed in an attempt to debunk sex trafficking. Their main concern was the trafficking of minors and they went all FOX news on our ass and even created an interactive map. But, of course, this was all an attempt to shed light on sex trafficking and had absolutely nothing to do with the money they stand to make off of convincing people that sex trafficking is not really happening. It started with a ridiculous fight between Village Voice and Ashton Kutcher. Yep, you read that right. Village Voice posted a five page article directed at fucking Ashton Kutcher. I love that this was indeed their jumping off point in regards to such an intense subject. But either way, the article proceeded to debunk a claim that Kutcher made on CNN in July. “It’s between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today,” Kutcher said. The only problem with their attempt to debunk Kutchers claim is that they themselves used faulty “junk science” to do so. While I agree that the numbers that Kutcher touted were misconstrued, it does not mean that a good solution is to in turn do the exact same thing in an attempt to make a point. What VVM proceeded to do was spend a few months combing through arrest records in 37 cities looking for juvenile prostitution arrest. Once they pulled their own numbers (826 arrest per year) they then compared them to the numbers Kutcher claimed and from there attempted to downplay a very real problem that exist not just within the states but particularly in Houston. There are so many things wrong with this attempt to figure out the magnitude that is under age trafficking. For starters, VVM only looked at actual arrests. I can’t even begin to fathom why they would think that looking at arrests would somehow give them the magical number.

As if only people who are arrested and charged with marijuana possession are the only ones smoking weed. Come on now, you have to have a better schematic than that. Not only that, but one would also have to assume the underage girls that were processed in no way lied about their age. Because we all know that if a 16 year old is picked up by the police for fucking prostitution the first thing she is going to do is tell them her real name and age. Also, it is well known that in many cases these girls are not actually charged with prostitution but with something more along the lines of drug possession, running away or petty larceny, which means they were not entered into the system under the title of teen prostitute. There is also the factor that in some cases the girls are properly identified from the beginning and are never entered into the criminal system at all and are instead taken to a facility that will help locate their parents or find other sources of help for them. Once again, not ending in an arrest that could have been cataloged by the geniuses at VVM who came up with this ridiculous calculation. In the article VVM also makes the claim that police departments seem to have the issue under control. This is beyond laughable when you understand how the system really works. In Houston there are a handful (and by “handful” I mean 5) of officers who are dedicated to human trafficking. Not only does the city not have a handle on human trafficking, they don’t have the manpower or the money to even properly train officers on how to identify and handle such cases. The gist of the article claims that non profits are misleading people with these numbers (100,000 – 300,000) in an attempt to receive federal funding to keep their nonprofits going. It is interesting that the same company that stands to make millions off of this industry is calling out non profits for using misleading numbers in an attempt to gain financial security. What is that saying about a pot calling a kettle black?

I will say that I do believe that religious zealots are on a witch hunt and they want VVM dissected and on a platter. They are calling for VVM to close down the entirety of the adult advertisements. While I might have an issue with the massage parlors’ sale of minors and women who have been forced into prostitution being sold on their site, I do think there has to be a better way to solve the issue without closing the ad space completely. For starters, massage parlor ads have got to go. There is no debating that this shit is just fucked up. VVM has got to do more in regards to filtering through their ads and making sure to remove and pull all ads that are soliciting the sale of minors. If you are going to make the decision to profit from it you need to also invest in the proper precautions to keep the ad space as safe as possible. Writing articles about how human trafficking is really just a “boogey man” and not a real threat or reality is not only bad journalism but just makes you shitty human beings and this is why you are at the top of my Worst of Houston list.

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Aside from running straight through the Katy Prairie, an endangered grassland that acts as a giant natural sponge to reduce downstream flooding in the asphalt-concrete covered City of Houston and habitat for tons of indigenous flora and fauna, TxDOT managed to create the alignment for Segment E over an ancient 9,000-year old burial site of a Paleo-Indian group (one of only five handfuls like it in the Americas) and the campsite of a group that lived there 2,000 years ago just to build a 400-ft wide highway that connects The Woodlands to Katy. The location of the burial site has been known about for over 15 years. Who cares that a state district judge originally told TxDOT that they could move the bones in the site without following the federally-mandated Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act’s requirement of getting existing tribes involved in the planning process several years ago?

Urbanization has already caused the endangered Attwater’s Prairie Chicken to be reduced to numbers in the hundreds whereas we killed off its related subspecies, the Katy Prairie Chicken, by covering its habitat with the Katy Mills Mall. Because what we really need is to create a third loop to attract more strip malls and mega churches and more sprawl. It’s cool, though. Even though urban developers have already discovered that economic growth, productivity, and development are correlated to urban density, why would we want to do such things in Houston? While other cities have a bustling metropolitan public transportation system keeping more cars off the road and thus more greenhouse gases out of the air, we can proudly proclaim that we have the country’s longest beltway, you know, to match the length of our belts.

Sorry little Houstonians, you’re most likely going to grow up to be robots. The HISD library system is deteriorating, despite the allocation of $10 million to HISD libraries over the last three years. Houston Independent School District data reports 20 percent of the district’s 289 schools don’t have a functioning library, and more than 80 percent of HISD libraries don’t meet the state guidelines for staffing and book collections.

Just this year, HISD reduced its number of librarians from 157 to 118, which means there are librarians on less than half of its campuses. Three elementary school library collections are more than 34 years old, and most libraries are generally becoming more and more outdated.

The money allocated to buy books was used to compensate for other areas of underfunding. While not all schools chose to undercut their library investment, they are regrettably the minority. Maybe the saddest fact of all is that out of the 10 schools with the lowest collection sizes, eight are elementary schools. If anyone needs to be encouraged to read, it’s our little kids.

Learning new perspectives, developing analytical skills, building vocabulary, improving self-expression, using their imaginations-these are all reasons why kids need books. HISD is doing Houston a disservice by not providing an adequate amount of literature to schoolchildren. Especially when technology-based communication is largely abbreviated ideas and symbols. So when Houston parents start getting birthday cards with the inscription “U R doubleplus good. 😉 !” we’ll wish we would have spent the money on books.

Dan Patrick was appointed to chair of the Senate Education Committee this past year and boy does he have some great ideas to really move this state forward. He plans on basically privatizing our public schools through implementing school vouchers. Ask your teacher friends how they feel about Mr. Patrick and his plans. They will be more than willing to give you an earful about what his evil schemes will do to our education system. Then ask them how you can help. Trust me, they are going to need our help to stop this sort of asinine legislation from barreling through this next legislative cycle.

When it comes to your politics, I generally like to believe it doesn’t matter who you vote for but why you vote for them. In this respect, the Houston Chronicle fails miserably. In their endorsement for the U.S. Senate seat left open by Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Chron started off promising by listing all the admirable qualifications of Democratic candidate and former State House Rep. Paul Sadler. Said the Chron , “There’s a lot we admire about Sadler, particularly his demonstrated ability to reach across the aisle and work productively with his political opponents for the good of Texas.” Great! They recognize the need for sensible, committed leadership in the federal government today, looking to experience over campaign sound bites for their evidence. But, oh wait, they continue: “Sadler’s candidacy is well-meaning, but an exercise in futility.” So, to wit, they’re fans of Sadler, but won’t endorse him simply because they know he won’t win in the general election.

While the logic of this is clear, the problem is it entirely defeats the point of a newspaper endorsement. Editorial boards across the state should ignore the politics of the campaign and instead focus on who would be better for the state and the nation, and then attempt to persuade readers to that point of view. In fact, the other four major Texas newspapers did do this and endorsed the Don Quixote-esque endeavor of Sadler’s candidacy.

Adding insult to injury, the Chron goes on to describe why they are endorsing firebrand Ted Cruz. Or rather, in the absence of any qualifications to consider of Cruz’s, they were forced to justify their endorsement by highlighting the effective tenure of Hutchison’s, and then implore Cruz to hopefully, maybe, please be somewhat similar. Reading between the lines, the Chron is addressing Cruz head-on saying, “Hey! Be more like Sadler!” Thanks Chronicle editors, you’ve gone from being Houston’s paper of record to that drunk friend on a Saturday night who you want to punch in the face for going on and on about the “realities” of power structures in America, and why it’s all pointless, man.

Do you understand the concept of ecology? We ask, not to insult your intelligence, but because so many Houstonians seem oblivious to the idea. We are enraptured with on-screen spectacles, obsessed with hierarchies of social status, and anxious about sports teams, celebrities, and our own self-centered desires. Meanwhile, a bunch of super-rich oil and gas men are plotting to get even richer by destroying life on the planet Earth. These are the investors, board members, and executives of corporations such as Enbridge, TransCanada, Exxon, and Valero. These companies are planning to build and make use of pipelines for the dirtiest fuel known-oil derived from the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada. They say it will be good for the economy. Slavery and war are good for the economy, too-that doesn’t make them acceptable. A myopic focus on narrowly defined economic benefits is a perennial characteristic of ruling class ideology. We should all recognize that, in this instance at least, the short-term interests of the monied elite are directly opposed to our interests as creatures who enjoy things like breathing and living. Climate change is real. If we don’t get this right-if we fail to stop this pipeline (and others)-we face catastrophic extinction on a massive scale. That’s not good for anybody, not even Russ Girling, President and CEO of the TransCanada Corporation. Nobody gets rich if everybody’s dead.

Not to sound like a broken record, but where do I begin with this thing? As readers of FPH know (“When No Means Yes,” Free Press Houston, Nov. 2026), this deceptively worded, shadily negotiated, and just plain bad ballot item not only set Houston light rail back more than a decade, but did so by intentionally confusing voters who thought they were voting for MORE public transit. Unfortunately, most voters did not realize they were actually voting to divert 25 percent of transit sales tax in the Metro service area to roads and “related projects” to improve transit – money that could have, and should have, been used for light rail.

Despite a scrappy, grassroots pro-transit campaign by Houston Tomorrow and the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, many Houstonians learned, after the fact, that they’d voted to send their tax money to projects like repaving cul-de-sacs in unincorporated Harris County miles from any bus lines. The carnival of nonsense that was the pro-referendum campaign even included a television commercial featuring a woman driving alone in an SUV, headed down an empty highway, her smiling GPS informing her the fastest route to town was by voting “Yes” on the Metro prop. You just can’t make this stuff up

So, in 2026, when our sprawl and congestion has reached unbearable levels, and other cities are on to hover-buses and gondolas, maybe even public teleportation by that point, considering how far ahead of us they already are-we will finally be moving along on that University Line!

The story doesn’t end there, though. After the FPH article went viral, outrage spread across social networks, blogs, and other outlets. The chorus of voices expressed anger at feeling tricked into throwing away their votes. Individuals, business owners, media personalities, and even the Houston Texans’ Connor Barwin took it upon themselves to spread the word before Election Day. While that didn’t happen in enough time to change the vote, it’s clear that if a Metro item shows up on the ballot again, Houstonians are going to be examining it very carefully.

Houston Police can always be trusted to gin up controversy and put Houston on the map of generally outlandish behavior. So when we say Officer Matthew Marin is years ahead of the rest of the force in terms of innovating despicableness, you know shit’s getting real. This past September, Marin and his partner were called to the East End Healing Hands personal care home to subdue wheelchair-bound, double amputee Brian Claunch who was apparently causing a ruckus because he wanted a soda and a cigarette. This story gets absurd pretty quickly, so bear with us. Marin was apparently trapped into a corner by the amputee, (how it’s even possible to get trapped by a man with one arm and one leg is beyond us), who was wielding a pen threateningly. God forbid, a ballpoint pen . Marin, fearful for his life, unholstered his weapon and shot and killed Claunch, a schizophrenic, in what can be said to be one of the biggest WTF moments of the year. Marin was subsequently put on a three-day administrative leave and the FBI was brought in to investigate what happened. The real kicker? Marin was one of the three officers who were investigated for the assault of Marvin Driver Jr., the father of Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver, for which they were later cleared by an internal HPD investigation.

This is officially the third year running that we have called out the Houston Press for the trafficking and sale of women in their Backpage advertisements. Not much has changed and it does not appear that the Houston Press or Village Voice Media have any future plans to stop businesses and pimps from selling women in the back of their paper or website. Thanks to them, you can order a woman and have her delivered to your home faster than you could a pizza. Village Voice Media recently announced new stipulations in regards to their ad space guidelines just this month. It is debatable whether these new safeguards will actually do anything to stop the sale of women through their paper. Frankly, I appreciate that they cover so many events taking place in our community but would prefer that they find another means of profit that does not include selling the women in our community. Can’t they just sell ad space for drug detox cleanses like a normal alternative paper? Sure it’s not as lucrative but at least you won’t spend all of eternity burning in a lake of fire.

Remember when Sarah Palin was all gung-ho about shooting helpless wolves from helicopters so there would be more moose for people to hunt? Well, on October 25 Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens (i.e., officers whose job is to protect wildlife) were chasing a pickup truck they suspected was carrying drugs near the U.S./Mexico border. Why were game wardens doing the job of border patrol? Who knows.

In any case, when the truck didn’t stop, they called in a DPS helicopter for backup. The helicopter was equipped with a thermal imaging device and an AR-10 sniper rifle. The thermal device should have made clear that the truck was carrying nine people, not drugs, but, in any case, the tarp that covered the illegal immigrants in back of the truck had flown off, exposing them to plain sight.

The truck, driven by a 14-year-old, still didn’t stop, so the patrolman in the helicopter did what studies have repeatedly found most effective-ended the pursuit and watched the fugitives stop their vehicle and make a run for it on foot. No, wait, that’s not what the trooper did-he fired at the moving vehicle from his helicopter to try to blow its tires out-which is really dangerous and hard to do, and ended up shooting three people. Two of them died-Guatemalan nationals Jose Leonardo Coj Cumar, 32, a father of three, and Marcos Antonio Castro Estrada, 29, a father of two with a third on the way.

Some of you will say, “Yeah, but they were breaking the law and the truck should have stopped.” Of course, you are right, but at the moment they were shot, they were only suspects in a civil, not even a criminal, offense. That is no reason to shoot a human being.

No drugs were found in the vehicle, but the game wardens apparently had a good day hunting.

It would surprise some to realize that Houston, home to the Johnson Space Center, countless NASA scientists, and the famous “Houston, we have a problem,” line, does not have an actual space shuttle to show off to envious residents of Dallas and Austin. This all could have changed earlier this year, when it was announced that the last remaining shuttles would be retired to museums across the country, with Texas and Florida as prime candidates to house them. Instead, the space shuttle Endeavour was strapped onto the back of a Boeing 747 and flown to L.A. to spend the rest of its days at the California Science Center. Why L.A.? The closest connection we could find, according to the Los Angeles Times , was that “Shuttle components were manufactured in Downey and assembled in Palmdale. That’s not to mention that Southern California has been occasionally jarred by sonic booms from desert shuttle landings at Edwards Air Force Base.” Fuck that. If California was the birthplace of the shuttle, Houston was the brain, the nerve center. Plus, after countless visiting relatives have forced Houstonians to undertake the hourlong drive to the Space Center, we’ve earned the reward of gawking at some sort of space debris.

Some of us went to St. John’s School. Until 2026, we were known as the Rebels. Taken out of context, that sounds pretty good. As a general rule, we like rebels and support rebellion against oppressive social norms. This particular case, however, refers to the rebels of the Southern Confederacy-that is, the soldiers of a white supremacist, capitalist elite. In a nutshell, fuck that shit. Now, students of St. John’s are called the Mavericks, which is an improvement, despite the kitschy, Go-Texan associations conjured up by that word. Across the street, we have another case to consider: the Redskins of Lamar High School. Mirabeau B. Lamar was an unapologetic racist whose first priority as president of the Texan Republic was the destruction of First Nations of this land. He waged relentless campaigns of ethnic cleansing against the Comanche and Cherokee. Isn’t it about time for a gesture of reconciliation for this colossal offense against human dignity? Let’s rename Lamar High School. How about Freedom Fighters of Crazy Horse High? Better, right?

When the City passed a law against sharing food with more than five people in public without prior written permission from the city, it was widely reported that the Mayor had softened the penalties. The Chronicle , KUHF, KPRC, and dozens of other news sources and blogs reported that the maximum fine of $2,000 had been lowered to $500.

The only problem is that the maximum fine is still $2,000. The new set of rules can be found in Chapters 20-251 to 20-257 of the City of Houston Code of Ordinances. It’s true that the specified fine of $2,000 found in an earlier draft was edited out. However, no new maximum fine was put in. With no fine indicated, lawyers agree that the maximum fine would be determined by the general provisions of Chapter 20, found in Chapter 20-19, which specifies, “Any person who violates any provision of this article, or rule or regulation promulgated by the health officer, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not less than $50.00 nor more than $2,000.00. Each day a violation of this article continues shall constitute a separate offense.”

No one is telling us where the misinformation originated. Maybe the Mayor sent out a press release, maybe she said something off the record; maybe she transmits misinformation to her obedient media telepathically. None of these media providers have corrected the error, and The Chronicle has continues to repeat it.

At a city council meeting several months ago, dozens of local food truck vendors, supporters, activists, and even Bun B came out in support of proposed changes to existing food truck legislation. Many individuals made impassioned speeches in favor of changes such as allowing food trucks to enter into downtown and the Medical Center areas, eliminating the current space requirement between each truck, and allowing food trucks to provide seating for their clientele. No big deal, right?

Well, according to many of your city council members, these proposed changes are a huge deal because food trucks are apparently all the rage for drug trafficking and terrorist plots. Yep.

At-Large City Council Member Andrew Burks was particularly concerned about the potential harm the 20-40 pound propane tanks that trucks are allowed to keep on board would pose to U.S. embassies. Why he’s harping on this particular scenario, I have no idea. And apparently some of our dear council members, many of whom do great things for their respective districts, are opting to use scare tactics versus cold, hard facts to try to make decisions about the things that impact our local economy and small businesses.

I’ll leave you with Burks’s actual words as quoted in a Houston Press blog post. They really say it all:

“Anything catastrophic like that could be a real hard damage and hard time for Houston, Texas or anywhere,” commented Burks. “And you know that in the times which we live in, I think this is totally outrageous. I’m outraged by that. Because the reason is that in these times when people get bombed in embassy attacks and we put this type of bomb directly here in front of us and we know we could be causing trouble…”

What happened Houston? We used to have blocks and blocks of affordable housing a few years back. Recently, however, there seems to be a housing boom that consists of demolishing cute bungalows or fourplexes and replacing them with some rather hideous condominiums. Look, I understand that rich people do not enjoy living next to people like me and the feeling is mutual but they aren’t just removing our homes, they are chucking out the character of our neighborhoods as well. Houston has a bizarre obsession with knocking down historic buildings and replacing them with stucco townhomes. It feels as though nothing in this city is more than a decade old. This was confirmed last month when I came across a historic Heights home tour brochure. The “historic” homes on the list to be viewed that month were cute bungalows that appeared to be built in the ‘20s and ‘30s but when you looked closer at the dates many of the homes had been built in 2026. They were on the list because they had been built to mimic the homes that would have been prevalent in the Heights eight decades ago. Hey developers, it’s okay to repurpose a building to fit your client’s needs. Update the shit out of it. But stop razing every fucking building in sight. And stop replacing it with tacky shit

I’ll go ahead and blame everything on HEB. I was living a joyous life, doing my grocery shopping at Fiesta. Dancing down the canned goods aisles, rocking out to the best songs from the ‘60s, and buying Persian cucumbers (that they don’t have at HEB) were some of my best memories of Fiesta. When they built HEB and Fiesta closed down, I didn’t know how to react. Yet, I went ahead and started shopping at HEB. I believed that the HEB workers understood that many people were scarred when Fiesta disappeared so they began playing those same songs from the ‘60s. IT JUST WASN’T THE SAME. My rebellious and hurtful feelings led me to steal jelly beans and not pay for refills. And now, just a couple of months ago, HEB began playing their usual elevator music and they expect me to not notice that? How am I supposed to do my grocery shopping? I am done.

It’s like that dude… Columbus… right? Montrose is the New World, and HEB is Columbus, and Fiesta is the Native Americans that all died off in the end. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just witnessed history - the modern version.

Why would I pick this as the city’s worst vegetarian restaurant when according to Yelp, Houston Press, and Alison Cook this is the best thing to happen to Houston vegetarians since pre-sliced tempeh? Because I am not impressed. Tonight, I had a frozen Amy’s meal I bought from Kroger and it was good. I enjoyed it. At first I thought I would actually put the food I had from Radical Eats on the same level as that Amy’s meal, but after thinking about it I liked that frozen meal better. I can get Mexican food just about anywhere in this town. With the amount of bean tacos I have eaten since I went meat-free I should be glad that I don’t weigh about 500 pounds. Mexican restaurants are one of the easiest places to go to when dining with your meat-eating friends. Throw some rice, beans, and guac into a tortilla and you have an easy vegan meal at just about any taco truck or Tex-Mex joint in the city, WHY MAKE A VEGAN MEXICAN RESTAURANT? Give me something I haven’t had in 13 years, not something I can get on every street corner in Texas. Give me something I never get to eat: vegan meatball subs, vegan milkshakes or a vegan chicken fried steak. Can someone please step up and give Houston vegetarians a little choice in this city? Don’t even bother going to their website to check out their menu because that alone will make you want to punch someone.

I’ve always subscribed to the maxim: ANYTHING + BOOBS > ANYTHING. Any bit of marketing hinting that breasts might be involved immediately captures my attention as a surefire chance for a good time. The concept is flawless. If my dentist advertised that there was a possibility of cleavage during a visit, I’d currently be a model for Colgate. That’s why I thought Twin Peaks, a Hooters knock-off franchise, was going to be such a great deal. I was sorely disappointed after my experience dining there.

The aptly named Twin Peaks franchise was started in Dallas in 2026. It has grown to over 24 locations in 10 states. It likes to market itself as a new “Hot Concept” dining experience, but really the “let’s dress soon-to-be single moms in revealing garb and have them sling loaded baked potatoes to guys over thirty who still wear sports jerseys” shtick is hardly an original idea. Twin Peaks was hyped as having better food and bigger boobs than Hooters. It has neither. My waitress had braces. I’d grade this restaurant at a D, but I didn’t see any.

As long as I can remember, there stood an adult bookstore just next door to Numbers Nightclub on Westheimer. Ahem. From what a fellow FPH staffer has told me, inside there were arcade jerk-off stalls armed with videos where men could ‘take a jizz’ when needed, like on their downtown lunch break or whatever. Eventually the Internet revolution rendered many of these thriving spots obsolete and this ‘adult bookstore’ took the plunge like so many others. After going out of business, the building sat vacant for years and the landlords tried their best to get someone to move in. But most people’s memories of this location are ‘stained’ with visions of middle-aged men blowing their load in semi-privacy. Hence, finding tenants was surely a tough job. But who would ever have believed that a French restaurant would dare inhabit such an infamous spot? Considering cream, butter, and cheese are integral to French cuisine, you would think no self-respecting French restaurant would open up shop there. Then the fine folks of L’Olivier Restaurant and Bar opened their doors and we are luckily armed with a good jizz joke every time we drive by. Vous ne savez jamais vraiment ce qu’ils entendent par «crème fraîche».

Wurst Gourmet Wild Game Hot Dogs on the Wurst Pretzel Buns with the Wurst Craft Beer Selection: The Moon Tower Inn

Dear Moon Tower Inn: I hate you. Don’t you know how much I love you? I’ll fucking kill you. Won’t you please come back to me, please? It’s been long enough. Come back… SO I CAN KILL YOU for making me wait for so long.

Sure, you had your “Meat Wagon” food truck for a while there. But you can’t gather around a bonfire at a food truck. You can’t strike up a random conversation on the first of the month with a hobo who just cashed his SSI check at a food truck. You can’t soak up some suds and dish the dirt with your favorite bartenders at a food truck. And then you took that away, too!

I particularly hate your sambal mayo. I want to kill it by pouring it down my throat. I want to slurp it through a straw. Then I’ll kill your Cheech & Chong burger. Then I’ll kill your Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik burger. Then I’ll kill all your beer. So hurry back. We have a score to settle. Just you wait, Moon Tower Inn. If and when you ever come back, Imma eat yo lunch!

So, I will warn you now that once you identify Heritage Plaza, you will not be able to unsee it. It will follow you no matter where you are in Houston. You’ll look up and out of nowhere there it will be, just creepin’. It’s particularly intrusive on Allen Parkway. Take a quick look back through your FPSF photos. Trust me, you’ll see it. It was the last building shat out during the skyscraper boom in the ‘80s and you really can tell. One has to assume that Heritage Plaza is what you get when you let cowboys on cocaine in the ‘80s design a city. What makes Heritage Plaza so “distinct” is the design at the very top of the 53-story skyscraper. The Houston architects that designed the building created it to resemble a Mayan temple AND an eagle spreading its wings. Never under any circumstance should you combine a Mayan temple with an eagle. Ever. It just isn’t necessary. Also, what the hell does a Mayan temple or an eagle have to do with each other or Houston? Like I said, I blame the cocaine. And the ‘80s.

Let me count the ways: gravel, glass, tire-eating potholes, low-hanging branches, large cracks, cars, busses, large puddles, piles of leaves, shopping carts…

When driving past BJ Oldies on Westheimer, I am, admittedly, usually on my way to work, fighting the clock to make it to the office on time because I underestimated how long it would take me to get through my daily wake up-coffee-run-shower routine. The combination of Houston’s notoriously dangerous drivers coupled with Westheimer’s narrow lanes can create a rather stressful morning drive. Not to mention the sharp curve that the road makes directly in front of the store. With all these things in mind, I have to ask: must we really have a hundred small, metal sculptures in the shape of flying pigs strategically placed six inches or so from the street? These little guys don’t make it any easier for me to maneuver down this narrow road when there are multicolored barn animals practically sticking their noses out into my lane. I am one little crushed piggy away from a panic attack and a popped tire. I mean, come on, BJ Oldies-can’t you just move the pigs back, say, two feet? Let’s not hog what little driving space we have here.

I asked multiple people around town about what their worst complaint of Houston in 2026 would be and boy did I get a resounding response in regards to how shitty our roads are. Busted tires and bent rims seem to just be a part of what makes living in a city that was built on a swamp so glorious. But let’s be honest, we bitch about the road construction just as much as we bitch about the sorry state of the roads.

I know what you are thinking: He is gonna call out Menil security for not catching Uriel Landros defacing a precious Picasso. Nope. Not the case. I think the HPD who guard the Menil area from the outside think they are above simple traffic laws. Living rather close and driving by every day, I constantly see these guys run the stop signs, stop their vehicles in the middle of a public street to make phone calls, and drive at whatever speed they please. Sure, the Menil owns much of the property in the area but that does not make them above regarding the safety of others and acting as good neighbors.

2012 has been a huge year for our fair city’s street art movement. Many of us caught a glimpse into the lives of some of Houston’s hard hitters via Alex Luster’s Stick ‘Em Up documentary. However, inspiration comes in many forms and sprouts one of two things: a good or a bad. In this instance of bad, tags of GOAT and AGUA have tied for first on my list of worst graffiti in Houston. I mean, honestly, there are many, MANY more names that pop out but these two have a special place in my heart. First, we have GOAT who seems to have disappeared over the past few months or perhaps I’ve learned to subconsciously divert my attention to something more aesthetically appealing. From scrawls on street posts to damages made to thriving local businesses, this person’s attempt at graffiti art is just the worst. A simple Google search already has the Houston Press crowning this person’s “work” as “World’s Lamest Tag.” Take that fact in for a second. Also, man, if your identity can be mentioned in an article that is comparing you to an LL Cool J or Eminem song you’re doing something really, really, really fucking wrong. As for AGUA, I’ve just seen this written all over Montrose and even on traffic barrels and road hazard signs and I just think it’s lame.

If you like your art easy (both in execution and in content), decorative, vapid, and shallow, then this is the place for you. Nothing here will challenge you-nothing will make you think or feel in ways you’d never expected to; nothing will make you feel uncomfortable; nothing will challenge your preconceived notions. This is where beautiful people go to pose beside paintings of beautiful people. Sure, they put on shows to support charities sometimes, but I prefer the maxim “If there was justice there would be no need for charity.” So rather than evoking pity in their audiences, I would encourage War’Hous and its artists to aim to inspire ACTION rather than a condescending pity in its patrons.

“Art is not a mirror to reflect reality,” said Bertolt Brecht, “but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Dandee Warhol, the gallery’s proprietor, whose name is a rip-off of a lame ‘90s band whose name is a play on the name of a truly great conceptual artist, was voted “Houston’s Best Artist” by readers of Houston Press in 2026. All that proves is the lameness of Houston Press readers (if there was ever any doubt). Still, if you have a penchant for oversized, two-dimensional, paint-by-numbers cartoon cels that some guy traced using an overhead projector, this is your place. Just be sure to wear your faux-hawk and your duck face. 29-95 recently ran a “review” of a War’Hous art opening that features 22 photographs of people posing but not one single image of art from the show. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself: http://www.29-95.com/gallery/love-sick-or-sick-love-art-show

The worst part of this “Worst of” is that the nihilists at War’Hous, who are prone to repeat phrases such as “Haters make us famous,” are going to love it. Some people have so little soul, they don’t even know there’s such a thing. Oh well.

I just recently found out that the tunnel system is real. For the longest time I just thought that people were being smart asses or metaphorical or something when they would talk about the tunnel system. I am confused by this weird under layer of Houston that I am just not privy to. And then I went down there. Jesus Christ, what a mess. It was confusing and disorienting. Is it me or does the tunnel system just not seem very user-friendly? I am confused as to why we can have a tunnel system underground but not a subway system? It seems like such a waste of underground space.

This guy, Josh Innes, talks about himself, Josh Innes, incessantly on his rush hour radio show. Allegedly, it’s supposed to be a talk show on the topic of sports. This is evidenced only by Josh Innes’s co-host on the show, Rich Lord, longtime sports radio personality in Houston. Beyond the presence of Rich Lord, there’s no content relating to sports. In fact, Lord spends the bulk of his time on the show apologizing to the listeners for Innes’s outrageous narcissism. For a guy who praised the repossession of his own car by creditors, Innes should shut up… maybe watch a Texans game.

At 84, Harry Sheppard has been convincing audiences for decades that it is possible to remain young forever. Harry has played his vibraphones with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Coleman Hawkins. Unlike all of them, he didn’t die a long time ago.

In fact, so far, he’s been so good at not dying or slowing down that some were beginning to speculate that Harry must have beat the devil in a vibes versus violin showdown.

In addition to playing faster than musicians a quarter his age, Harry also believes he has discovered the cure for cancer and has been promoting it to cancer patients for years. It is a daily dosage of mini-lozenges made from ume plum and wild Japanese mountain yam (aka Jinenjo).

In December, when Harry received a diagnosis of cancer, his doctors insisted that he begin radiation and chemotherapy, but Harry is willing to put his faith in ume to the test. If he’s right, we will have not only the cure for cancer, but also Harry Sheppard and his full head of hair to entertain Houstonians for years to come.

As for his two strokes? Harry gets over his temporary partial paralysis and is back at his instrument within weeks. But just in case, go see him play ASAP!

I’m sure there is a perfectly sound business case for changing the annual Houston Heart Walk from a pleasant stroll up and down Allen Parkway into a death march-like circumambulation of the Reliant Stadium parking lot, but I am equally certain that I do not care. Granted, most Houstonians never walk any farther than the distance from couch to fridge and therefore would not know a pleasant walk from a blowjob or a hole in the ground…and therefore it does not matter. But it would still be nice to be able to WALK someplace for a bevvie and a bit of brunch after doing my part to encourage cardiovascular health.

Last year’s drought left area trees with no other choice than to produce the most impressive crop of nuts these eyes have seen. They steadily rained from overhead for months, ricocheting off the roofs of cars and homes and into some poor fool’s unsuspecting forehead. My back patio was covered in a dangerous layer of smooth brown acorns just waiting for a cartoon moment. Squirrels have enlisted other animals to help with the cleanup, like my dogs who gradually have developed a palate for the crunchy, sweet, and slightly astringent acorn meat. If you have a pecan tree on your property, you are probably suffering from PTSD. Godspeed.

Thanks Mayor Parker. I truly appreciate your part in helping to reduce my quality of life by a few pegs during this year. Let me tell you all the wonderful things I experience now that I have to live by a Walmart. For starters, the traffic congestion on Yale and Heights Blvd. has been nothing but pleasurable since your big box store opened its doors. Getting trapped at the light for 40 minutes really just puts a spring in my step every time it happens. The complete development of those few blocks has just been so beneficial to the Heights. I mean, how did we ever survive without a Starbucks and Chipotle on every block? I completely agree with the idea that what the community in the Heights needed more than anything was more fucking concrete everywhere. It sure does wonders for drainage every time it rains. We all know how well concrete soaks up water and all. I agree; grass is so overrated. I’m sure all the local businesses in the Heights adore having a big box shop right around the corner. Especially one that makes everything in factories overseas and pays people in our community an unlivable wage to keep them entrapped in programs like welfare and food assistance. Oh, and are you waiting on the Yale St. Bridge to collapse before you fix it? You can only reroute the 18-wheelers around it for so long.

The classic, classy garden apartment complex at 1300 Richmond, along with a handful of sketchier complexes in the immediate vicinity, was recently demolished. For fans of gentrification, this is great news. For anyone capable of connecting the dots between affordable housing, an indigenous artist/musician/general bohemian population, and what’s left of Montrose’s dwindling cultural cache, it’s just the latest of many “there goes the neighborhood” moments.

In June, This American Life reported that The Houston Chronicle was outsourcing local news reporting to Journatic, a company that data mines sheriff’s reports, obituaries, marriage licenses, school enrollment, sports scores, real estate transfers, and even holiday trash pickup schedules to generate stories. People and even computer algorithms edit the collected data, as potential stories begin to coalesce. Writers in the U.S. get $12 to $14 per story to fix up first drafts by Filipinos receiving $0.35 to $0.40 per story. The finished draft is attributed to an American-sounding alias.

Journatic is used extensively by some of the largest media providers in the U.S. including The Hearst Corporation that owns the Houston Chronicle and 16 other papers, and the Tribune Company that owns the Chicago Tribune and eight or more other papers.

Jesus Christ. I traveled down Independence Highway to the monument last month because I hadn’t been since I was a kid. Holy crap, what an awful, awful place. I don’t know what I was expecting from a monument located in Pasadena but I couldn’t believe my eyes when I arrived. It is noted as being the location of the world’s largest monument column but what they don’t tell you is that it might also be the world’s most polluted park. Even the trees (which there were very few of) were deformed; deformed in a way that caused them to tilt away from the five area chemical plants that surround the park. Even the reflective pool has been gated off with heavy chain-link fences so as to keep people from getting near the water. Just this year, the state was forced to put up warning signs instructing patrons that wading, swimming, fishing, crabbing, or collecting oysters was not allowed. This is due to the extremely high levels of dioxin and furan found in the San Jacinto River. I’m bothered by the 40,000 area school children that visit there each year. If I was a parent, that is one field trip permission slip I would not sign.

The bright side is FPSF had a record turnout, the shows were fantastic, and people came from all around the state and country to enjoy a festival in Houston. As a result, the shit side meant that we were underprepared to ensure that folks were getting through the gates quickly enough on that Saturday. We have resolved this issue and are going above and beyond to avoid this pain in the ass for the future.

The formerly Houston-based oil and gas services corporation Halliburton lost a 7-inch radioactive rod they use in natural gas “fracking” operations. The 7-inch radioactive rod apparently fell off the back of a truck and was missing for one full month before it was found on the side of a road in West Texas. If Halliburton is having such a hard time hanging on to its 7-inch radioactive rod, I have a suggestion for where they can stick it for safekeeping (and no, I’m not thinking of BP’s Macondo oil well where Halliburton used faulty cement which might have caused its explosion).

Regardless of how the mayor tries to spin this, the reality is that this move is bad news bears, my friends. We do not want businesses abandoning office space downtown and moving their headquarters to the ‘burbs. They aren’t just taking their headquarters elsewhere, they are also taking their employees and our tax base with them. No one is going to commute from downtown to the Woodlands. ExxonMobil is expected to have 3.9 million square feet of office space built in the Woodlands by 2026. And sure they are planning to move employees from Virginia and Ohio along with a mass amount of workers from Houston, but this does nothing for our in-the-loop economy. Currently 90 percent of new office development in Houston is happening in the Woodlands or in Western submarkets. If you want a blueprint for ways to cause the collapse of a major American city, this is fucking it. Don’t believe me? Ask Detroit.

Why is it that the people who claim to be the most rebellious are always the most authoritarian? This is a direct quote from page 20 of the official 2026 Texas Republican Party Platform, “We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills…critical thinking skills and similar programs that…have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” Nuff said.

I recently did some traveling and on my journey I was repeatedly met with a laugh or roll of the eyes when I told people I was from Texas. Apparently, people either hate us or find us amusing in a non-cute sort of way. We really should lay off the state pride thing for a bit. I mean, it’s cool to be proud of where you came from but we have been known to take things a bit too far. Very intelligent people have told me that they think the Texas flag is the only state flag allowed to be flown at the same height as the American flag. Nothing about that statement is true. Did you know that every day our children in school pledge allegiance to the Texas flag at the end of their morning announcements? This is not the case in other states. Also, Republicans, just to be clear, you do not, in fact, have to wear the Texas flag on your person when you travel beyond state lines. It is not a requirement to get back in. Feel free to retire your shirts made out of Texas flags or your Texas flag mud flaps. It’s cool. We get it. You love Texas. So do I. But I show it by trying to make my community a better place. Not by adorning my yard with seven Texas flags and a pool built in the shape of Texas.

On October 29, when Mayor Parker appeared on the KPFT program Growing Up In America, several people called in to complain about her law punishing those who share food with the homeless. Instead of allowing them to ask their questions directly, or accurately summarizing their concerns, host Dr, Robert Sanborn asked Parker, “Mayor, I don’t want to bang this question to death, but we’re getting a lot of people calling in on this. The whole feeding of homeless children. I mean, what is that all about? I mean, why are people giving you so much grief around that issue?”

The Mayor responded with her usual talking points about the new law. Dr. Sanborn responded: “Mayor, and I think if people knew you like some of us know you, the commitment you have to children and the commitment you have to making the city better for children… I mean… it would be pretty hard to have a bigger commitment than you have, I think. That’s such an important thing.”

The Mayor, and now her buddy Bob Sanborn, seem to categorize any criticism of this terrible law as a personal attack. Dr. Sanborn let Houstonians down by dismissing the legitimate concerns of his listeners.

Seriously, fuck that place. You know something evil is brewing up there but with no real way to prove it. There is just something terrifying about a place that was a master plan community created and built by the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation. Anadarko literally built a community around their headquarters. I am also a little weirded out by the 91 percent of white people that make up the demographics of the Woodlands. I don’t know why, but a mass collective of rich white people in one place makes me really anxious. I know in the past scientists have considered building a dome around Houston but I think the Woodlands might be where this plan could actually be implemented in our lifetime. It’s only a matter of time before they decide to build a border to keep us out.

These abbrevs (abbreviations) have reached a cray’ (crazy) peak of prev’ (prevalence) in our lex (lexicon) this year. Have we become so lay (lazy) that we have forced ourselves to shorten two syl (syllable) words? Many people would attr ( attribute ) the demise of our langy lang (language) to the digi’ (digital) rev (revolution). This shit is simply det-y (detrimental) to our ability to comsy (communicate). Oh well, HTSWENY (Hopefully this shit will end next year).

That is the stupidest, most vapid, most shallow, most nihilistic cliché anybody could think to adopt. I blame the likes of Jerry Springer and “reality” TV, which has convinced idiots that all kinds of attention-from admiration to jeering-are equal. This is the kind of thinking that has given rise to the idiot who spray painted the Picasso at the Menil, the opportunistic jackass who gave that idiot his own art show, and, when taken to its extreme, the kinds of losers who go on mass shooting sprees.

While I am the first to agree that if you never inspire controversy, you are probably not challenging yourself or anybody around you-but is fame really something to strive for? And if it is, is “hate” the way to achieve it? What happened to achieving fame through consistent, humble hard work and positive contributions to your community? Actually, what am I talking about? Fuck fame.

She dressed down and slept in the streets in a cardboard box to learn what it was like to be homeless. She declared that helping the homeless was a personal and key issue for her. She even wrote in an editorial, “We must never seek to criminalize, or penalize, efforts that in their most basic forms are a response to a widespread human need.” However, when it came time for her to vote on doing just that, Adams caved in to pressure from the Mayor. We can speculate about why, but it’s probably safe to conclude that power corrupts.

Ahhhh, the childhood memories. Has anyone been in there lately? She really has let herself go in her later years. For being affectionately labeled the eighth wonder of the world at one point, it now looks like an apocalyptic mess. One has to ask why do we keep her around? A reminder of better times? Or a reminder of what is to come? I vote we turn her into a gigantic community garden. Or a dog park. Astroturf is totally pet friendly. I think no one in city government wants to be labeled the person who destroyed the Astrodome. That’s fair. I wouldn’t want that title either. However, how great would it be if instead we could label one of our elected officials as the person who turned the dome into a tomato garden? Surely someone in this city would give a grant to write that proposal. Here’s looking at you, Urban Harvest.

I don’t get it. The same people who said stuff like “Love it or leave it!” when some of us criticized Bush are, now that their guy lost again , neither loving nor leaving, but…attempting to leave whilst taking it with them? Confused yet? Me too. Just remember, you can’t spell “patriot” without “riot.”

My two rescue dogs, Annie and Najis, (the Arabic word for ‘ritually impure’) have earned the prestigious title of Houston’s worst dogs. Despite saving both of them from a miserable existence and showing them nothing but affection, these two dogs hate me. They will not come within three feet of me unless I lie on the ground as if I am dying. And even then they only seem like they are rejoicing in my demise. They sleep, eat, shit, and piss wherever they like. They run away once every 48 hours. They look at me with disdainful glares and talk shit about me when I leave the room. Despite all this, I still adore them, sing songs to them, and cater to their every need. What must I do to gain their love?

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Houstonians do not have a sense of preservation. Instead, we just tear down and put up something else. The past fades into oblivion. This is what we have done in the past with places like the Sam Houston Coliseum, Music Hall, etc. This is sad because there is a lot of history buried within those walls of the Astrodome; from the “battle of the sexes” tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, to when Madonna performed there during her “Who’s That Girl” tour in 1987.

The Astrodome has a rich history. For many kids, such as myself, going to or even seeing the Astrodome was akin to a rite of passage in ranking with going to Astroworld next door. Now, we will never be able to see a homerun hit one of the stadium lights above, or show the future where Nolan Ryan pitched a no-hitter.

In a way, the Astrodome was a sort-of identity for those of us who don’t want to be thought of as “cowboys” or “cowgirls.” But now, thanks to low voter turnout, that identity of “the eighth wonder of the world” will be no more.

What happened to Houston? Last year the beloved Texans were cruising along the glorious, gold-studded road to the playoffs-no issues in sight. Fans were high off of the pure joy of not being “that team” for once. But two playoff runs seems to be enough for the Bulls, as what was supposed to be “our year” has become a harsh contest to get into the Houston record books for a losing streak. I mean c’mon, you know there is a problem when the die-hard fans are treating the starting quarterback since ’07 like the living embodiment of Satan. Even the fans over in Washington at least like their own team enough to not heckle them to the point that they probably have learned to cherish their road games. Many teams face injuries and I understand, but the Texans have the tolerance of an angry TSA screener with 11 straight losses and counting. Ouch. I like to compare the Texans to that crush you had in high school: The most beautiful girl you had ever seen. The most flawless human being in the whole world, right? Wrong. You come back to see that after a grueling freshman year at college, she has returned with a hunched back, an extra 50 pounds, and the face of a bridge troll. All you can think is: “What…” As a casual football fan, I don’t expect too much, but I really am getting tired of bursting into tears every time I turn on CBS on a Sunday.

Since the reopening I have only been here twice and both times were a very lackluster experience. I mean really guys, you were closed for over a year, then when you finally open you basically changed two things, how many beers you serve, and your prices. What happened to all those pictures of indoor eating? I know a lot of people that still go eat there, but for me Houston is either too hot or too cold outside. That’s why “indoors” was invented. Not to mention your eating area is more or less a mosquito-filled yard. For anybody reading, go to Sammy’s Wild Game Grill: Same prices, same food, and they offer indoor seating and french fries-no foodie coleslaw bullshit. Oh, and they have a real website, in case you’re not one of the cool kids who memorized the menu and hours.

Up tha punx, right guys?

What makes a worse voter, apathy or fraud?

Trick question. The worst voter is the one who doesn’t take two seconds to Google their chosen candidate. Take, for example, the 5,961 people in Houston who voted for a man because they thought he was black.

Dave Wilson, a candidate in the Houston Community College System District II Trustee race, basically trolled his voters. Wilson essentially won with an online ad and some mailbox flyers (showing black families probably from Google images) that said, “Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.”

According to the news outlets, Wilson beat the 24-year incumbent candidate by only 26 votes. I love how local politics is the single confirmation to the “every vote counts” fodder they shoved down our throats in public school. Blame Wilson because he’s a white Republican who campaigned for a seat in a district consisting of black Democrats. Blame Wilson because none of his promotional material showed his dastardly melanin-poor mug.

Blame the voters who couldn’t give a damn to notice.

The reason this piece isn’t titled “Worst politician tactics in Houston” is because politicians are evil by default. Voters should know better. Hell, Wilson told KHOU 11 News he didn’t expect to win. He used old-school mailbox ads and put disclaimers under the endorsement from his cousin Ron, who, if it isn’t obvious, is NOT the Democrat state representative Ron Wilson. Wilson taught everyone a lesson: This is what you get.

This is what you get when you treat politics like a popularity contest. This is what you get when you choose the presidential hopeful whom you could have a beer with, even though his hobbies include defecating on the US Constitution.This is what you get when you want to make a difference, but do not do your homework.

Look, I get it. Some of you think codeine cough syrup, otherwise known as ‘lean’, ‘drank’, or ‘sizzurp’, is part of our local cultural heritage. With so many references made to it by H-Town rappers for 20+ years now, you would think that we manufacture the shit right here in Houston. But we don’t. This drug is one that makes people dissociative, is known to cause male impotence, and kills people everyday. Often, the dead are the rapper’s who so affectionately promote it. Also the way people display their use of it on social media just stinks of poser-dom. Did I mention it causes male impotence? Maybe if we changed the slogan from ‘City of Sizzurp’ to ‘City of Limp Dick’ then it would not be so popular?

Listen, I dont give a fuck if your sign says “Fags R Dumb,” “Will Rap 4 Weed” or the latest “You’re PERFECT,” anybody who feels they HAVE to stand on a street corner for hours with a tacky sign needs to reevaluate their existence. You could literally be doing almost anything and it would be a better use of your time. The people who feel the need to do this obviously have some dire need to be the center of attention NO MATTER WHAT. You are basically the equivalent of every 16-year-old, Hot Topic atheist goth, rocking a pentagram necklace, just waiting for someone to pay attention and be shocked by your shitty white boy dreads. Put down the poster board, go home, call your parents, tell them what you did for 3 hours today, and beg for forgiveness.

A lot of people I know would pick the untimely gentrification of Montrose as being one the worst things happening in Houston right now. Yeah it sucks, businesses are tearing down the cheap apartments and old houses and forcing a bunch of 20-something-year-olds to either move to the east side or get jobs that aren’t at Agora or Buffalo Exchange to pay rent. However to me, Bellaire is a much sadder tale. For years, friends and I would go over to places like Fit and FuFu Cafe and be the only white kids. Not saying we were cool because we were the only white people there, but when I want really good Chinese food I want the full experience. I want the waitress to treat me like the dumb white kid I am. I want them to make fun of me in Chinese for ordering the “…General..So’s (?) chicken..” I want them to turn their nose up at me for ordering water and still not really knowing all what’s in Sake. I want to not understand the menu and have no fucking clue what’s going on on the TV. I fear those days are lost. Now populating the once-sacred area is slues of early 30-year-old bankers and soccer moms looking for “Hello Kitty” bullshit for their nieces. I see it slowly turning into Clear Lake. Of course, like good businesses, these shops are attempting to accommodate all of us white gluttons and its depressing. Fuck, last time I was in there, there was a guy asking if the steamed pork dumplings were organic, after loudly talking about the last time he saw Judge Reinhold in a movie.

GUESS FUCKING WHAT — We here who are pretty damn proud of the strides our city has made towards providing creative opportunities to ungrateful assholes like yourself, COULD NOT BE MORE EXCITED TO SEE YOU (MAYBE) LEAVE. Oh please, threaten us with something we want! I don’t know how Houston will ever make it without your incessant complaining or phantom threats to leave. This city was nothing before you and definitely will landslide once you, who has been an armchair observer to the progress of our community, actually fly away to whatever fairy tale land you seem to believe things are actually different in.

If you are doing nothing here, what makes you think that somehow the world is going to start rewarding you with the benefits of someone that has, just because you relocated. You’re basically spreading the suck. You are a reflection of the environment and people you surround yourself with so, if your life here is THAT terrible, maybe stop going to Boondocks every day at 5.

It seems like the only people who complain about gentrification are white people who are complaining about the wrong kind of white people moving into their neighborhood. Nary a word is spoken about diversifying a neighborhood such as the Montrose. You never hear an utterance like ” We need more South Asians or Jews or Gays or Irish.” No. The only demographic complaint is from white people who wear Converse complaining about white people who wear Colehan’s moving into the neighborhood. ” Oh no! Yuppies are moving into the neighborhood!” Guess what asshole? Just because you have a neck tattoo, listen to the Replacements, and eat artisanal doughnuts does not preclude you from being a douchebag yuppie. On the contrary, those are the reasons you are one.

Let me correct myself first and state that there is a possibility that this dude ISN’T solely responsible for the shit-stucco townhomes and high rises replacing historic homes within the inner loop, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t make sure to put his Professor-X-lookin’ ass on 8-foot tall signs in front of everyone, advertising to “contact Mike Spear for information on the property.”

Maybe it’s just me but, I probably would NOT want to be the face of gentrification in any particular area. More than likely, neither he, nor any of the other realtors raping the history our of our downtown area, even live remotely close by. That’s okay! The inner loop has never needed the silver spoon frat kids that currently fist pump the night away on the tops of african american slave burial grounds (Washington Ave.) more than we need them now. I’m curious what the selling points are for Montrose-like, when you sit down with the realtor and they explain to you all the perks of moving to the area. I’m guessing it goes something like this:

Realtor: “…yes ma’am, the Montrose area is growing both culturally and economically, and in the next 5 years, we’re expecting it to be the new (___insert trendy community elsewhere___). Have you read the Forbes report on Houston?”

The irony is that the building you’re looking at moving into was more than likely built to replace something “cultural” that already existed and/or defined the area. I’m not one to condone arson, but a quote from the book Lords of Chaos comes to mind — when Varg Vikernes (Burzum) was asked about the church burnings in Norway his response was, “They desecrated our graves, our burial mounds, so it’s revenge.”

True, we haven’t had this problem for all of 2026, but since mid-autumn, this intersection has been the bane of my existence every time I come back to Montrose from my home on the northwest side of town. As with most Houston construction projects, I still feel like I have no idea what the hell they’re trying to accomplish with said rigamarole, but no matter what that is, I feel like they’re doing a horrible job. There’s nothing cute or funny about this one. It’s no kneeslapper-but it needs to be said. It sucks. Bad. Hopefully it won’t be on the 2026 list as well.

It very well may have been a confluence of factors which caused this nightmare of a bowel situation. Perhaps it was the dehydration brought on by too much Tequila? Or maybe it was the 2 bowls of Chana Masala I ate before drinking said Tequila? Or maybe it was a ‘gift’ form the same wrathful angel of God that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah? Either way, that shit was so crunk that I woke up with a flooded upstairs bathroom and a kitchen on bottom floor that was raining toilet water. This one was for the history books.

In terms of potholes, bumps and other road imperfections, in Houston. All of them. Seriously. I have not driven on a road in this city that hasn’t had me swerving and weaving to avoid potholes and deceptively huge bumps that bitch slap your tire into submission, in… say… 15 years! Heck! Before I even started driving, I remember putting my hands up and yelling ‘Weeeeeeeee’ as my parents swerved and slowed to miss all the road imperfections this city chooses to ignore in lieu of… what are they spending their money on? Do something, Houston. I’m tired of the flat tires and side swipes.

I couldn’t decide between two colossal fuckups. One being the election of Dave Wilson, that asshole who used the voters’ laziness against them by tricking them into thinking he was black. Well, I’m not sure which is worse, the fact that he did that or the fact that people fell for it and voted for someone they didn’t know anything about. In some ways you have to respect this man’s genius: he knows the weakness of the people. We are all sheep and tend to follow what others do and believe what we are told. “Ain’t nobody got time to research. I’m just going to vote so I can say I voted.” This makes Houston voters look like a bunch of idiots. Thanks, as there aren’t enough reasons to look down on our city.

The second being the vote against the referendum to turn the Astrodome into a convention center. I will not go further on this, as someone has already expressed their disgust on this subject.

Poor people across the country get evicted from their homes. Those in the ownership class eventually profit from whoever buys the place next, while the evicted tenants suffer. In response, sometimes dedicated individuals try to hold onto property, occupying it, to force banks to re-negotiate. In the U.S., “Occupy Homes” and other movements have used such tactics. All across the world, housing occupations have been used to defend the territories of the poor from absentee landlords who have done nothing whatsoever to contribute to the value of a property.

As Occupy Houston started to wind down, people who had been involved began looking for new projects. Protesting is important, but folks wanted to build. Occupying a public park is cool, but the idea of occupying houses that bailed-out banks might foreclose on, well, that seemed even cooler. Jamin Stocker and buddy Taylor Bloom were two of the activists in Houston that decided to work on an urban occupation. They got involved in a squat in the Third Ward, not just to occupy a house, but also to fix it up and add value to it.

After a few months, Fannie Mae wanted the activists out of the house. Jamin was accused of the crime of criminal trespass. Sadly, his former buddy Taylor Bloom turned state witness against him. Ostensibly in an attempt to save his own butt, Bloom sold out his friend and all for nothing: Jamin was eventually found not guilty.

Quick rule of thumb: If you start off doing a civil disobedience for a good cause, and you end up testifying against your friend for that same act of civil disobedience, you will lose the respect of everyone: other activists, your friends, your local newspaper, and even the deputies and prosecutors you thought you were helping.

Side Note: On the subpoena against Stocker appear two candidates for the category of Funkiest Names of Harris County Deputies on a Subpoena Against an Alleged Trespasser: Andre McCall, Blythe Minneweather, and Willie Winfree.

When it comes to food, I like interesting touches. Not interesting concepts. Add creativity and flair to classic, time tested recipes. I walked through a ‘food truck park’ just the other day because I was hungry and all I could find was trucks with silly, fusion-esque concepts which were seemingly devised by Satan himself. It seems as though the only tacos you can find at taco trucks now are Korean tacos or Thai tacos or Ugandan Philly Cheese Steak tacos. Get with the program people, you are not that fucking creative.

Early in the election season, 2026 mayoral candidate Ben Hall filled out a questionnaire indicating he would support a an ordinance in Houston against LGBT discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Then a few days before the election, he went on the KUHF radio program “Houston Matters,” and either forgot his previous statements or spontaneously changed his mind.

When an anti-gay-rights caller named Mark expressed concerns about transgender people in public bathrooms, Hall chimed in in agreement. He said he would he rescind Mayor Parker’s executive order giving transgendered people the right to use the bathroom of their chosen gender. Hall explained that he isn’t prejudiced, but he worried about police officers’ ability to protect public bathrooms. He went further, expressing opposition to laws providing legal protections for LGBT individuals from discrimination in employment and housing. Hall also alienated listeners by referring to homsexuality as a lifestyle choice.

When asked to explain his opposition to a non-discrimination ordinance, Hall said that under such a law, preachers could be found to have acted discriminatorily if they read biblical passages against homosexuality. Also, Hall thought that under the law, individuals who spoke out publicly against homosexuality “would not be able to be hired.” This analysis was particularly absurd, especially coming from a lawyer. Anti-race-discrimination laws have existed for decades, and those laws don’t prevent racist speeches or interfere in the hiring of those who give them.

In April, when the new pope had been chosen, I wrote an article about the history of Vatican collaborations with Nazis, Latin American right-wing governments, and torturers. Though I quoted a nun who had high hopes for the new Pope, my cynicism won out, and I concluded: “… in addition to inheriting a legacy of Jesus, the Catholic Church also inherited the legacy of the Roman Empire. Pontius Pilate, who authorized Jesus’ crucifixion, did so to defend the interests of an oppressive government. There is always hope that a new pope may more closely emulate Jesus, but when collaborating with governments that arrest, torture, and kill civilians, popes more closely resemble Pilate.”

Fortunately, my prediction was way off. From saying he was in no place to judge gay people to decrying the wickedness of unbridled capitalism, Pope Francis has been defying my expectations. Before becoming pope, Jorge Bergoglio gave many indications that he supported a conservative oppressive Vatican. He called gay marriage “a dire anthropological throwback,” and said, “Let’s not be naïve. We’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

However, once elected pope, he quickly began preaching tolerance. Instead of denouncing homosexuality, he denounced greed, saying, “Not paying a fair wage, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking to make a profit, that goes against God.” He decried Vatican riches, saying, “Ah, how I would like a poor Church, for the poor.” He denounced judgmental priests, “In our ecclesiastical region there are priests who don’t baptize the children of single mothers because they weren’t conceived in the sanctity of marriage. These are today’s hypocrites.” Lastly, he called out capitalism itself, “Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.”

At 76, Francis seems to have laid low enough for an entire lifetime to be able to get into a position of power, earning him the new honorific, “The Sleeper Pope.” Mandela had mellowed when he became President at the same age, but Francis seems ready for new battles. I now look forward to the rest of his papacy, and hope he isn’t killed by some crazed capitalist cardinal.

I polled all the people on my Facebook (only about 10 responded), asking them what they thought was the worst thing about Houston. Several people said traffic, and I couldn’t agree more. At any given time of day, 610 is a clusterfuck. During rush hours, all the freeways and tollways and some streets, including, but not limited to Richmond, Westheimer, Memorial and Montrose, are backed up so badly that it takes about 5 minutes to move one block.

I know there is no one magical solution for this dilemma, but-and I have been saying this for years (since they started work on Westpark Tollway)-a good public transit system would greatly benefit this city. Especially now, since there are hundreds of people a day moving to our great city. Whether they live inside the loop or not, they most likely travel for work and would probably appreciate a stress-free commute, a commute where they can read a book or the newspaper or listen to the new Beyonce album that came out, or watch an episode of their favorite show. Imagine that!

Here is my solution: Get a train from the ‘burbs to the city. Give us proper sidewalks for walking and bike lanes for biking. We have a bus system, let’s make it more appealing to commuters, get more bus routes and more buses. Build it, and they will come. I know Houstonians like their big obnoxious trucks and SUVs, and I am sure those people will still prefer to drive those honkin’ pieces of shit, but some people, such as myself, will make use of a good public transit system.

I’ve been mulling over this for weeks and I am no writer, as you are about to see, and to make this even more difficult, I love Houston. To me it’s a vibrant, warm, and inclusive place where there’s always something to do, some organization to get involved with, or some opportunity at your fingertips. So what would I change, if I was forced to choose (and I am), about Houston?

I only have one answer. Walkability. I do not know of one pedestrianized area, in all of Houston. You might say, “No Shadi you’re wrong. What about the River Oaks Shopping Center?” No. That is a fancy strip mall with a parking lot in the front. Just because they string lights in the trees for 6 months out of the year and station police officers on the road at the weekend (because who can expect busy shoppers to observe crosswalk signs?) does not mean an area is pedestrianized. Well then you might implore me to consider St. Martin’s Square downtown, or even Rice Village. Okay, I smell what you’re cookin’, but it’s still a no. Pedestrians in these areas are confined to a space surrounded by roads focused on vehicle access.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the development of downtown Houston. The light rail is the closest thing we have to public transportation next to businesses, residential homes, restaurants and bars (for the people who can afford it), but it’s still not quite what I’m looking for.

This is my utopia: a place where I wake up on Saturday morning, roll out of bed, and walk to the local coffee shop. I can choose to sit, in the middle of the street, and watch as the people who live in my community walk past me, shopping, eating, drinking, working, or whatever, because there are NO CARS ALLOWED.

This simple act of pedestrianizing an area does the following:

1. It forces us out of our bubbles and into the opportunity to meet new people. Let’s face it, we all live in bubbles. We have a bubble at work, at school, even at our favorite bars and coffee shops. We navigate from our homes, to our cars, to our destination, back to our cars, back to our homes. When do we have time to meet new people? Sure, we go to bars after work for happy hour, with our coworkers. We see the same people we see every time we go there: people with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, but we almost never interact with them. When we give ourselves the opportunity to interact with a larger percentage of the population, it opens doors, engenders creativity, music, art, empathy….le sigh.

2. It stops us from being so damn fat. When you have to walk further than from your car to the entrance of Target, it’s called exercise. Houston is a fat city, and has been for years. I am not saying this is solely because we do not have decent pedestrianized areas, but it is a contributing factor.

3. It’s good for the economy. When you have to walk past business after business, you’re more likely to go inside it, albeit to buy some shit you probably really don’t need, but that’s besides the point!

4. Less cars = less pollution. Look, I know where I live. I know the only reason Houston is what it is today is because of oil. But I have this crazy idea that, even if we had three or four (or hey, let’s go crazy and say ten) city blocks that had NO vehicle access, somehow the oil companies would survive. Maybe I’m wrong?

5. Less drunk driving.

6. It’s cheaper. Imagine if we didn’t need cars? Imagine if having a car was actually more hassle than not having a car. Imagine not having to pay for oil changes, gas, tires, insurance…just imagine how much money you could spend on vacations, or clothes, or whatever it is that makes you happy.

Stands for East Downtown, and chosen over names like the Warehouse District. It’s like calling Montrose MoRo. EaDo-the triangle sliced by the Gulf Freeway and a railroad-was once known for Houston’s first Chinatown and for the warehouses that still dot the area. However, it is now mostly known for white people calmly wandering back into the pricey new apartments and condos replacing Old Chinatown, due to its prime proximity to increasingly-trendy spots. The air is flavored with the heady smell from the Maxwell-turned-Maximus Coffee Plant, but new EaDo residents don’t work there or drink it.

Houston’s in the midst of a fairly revitalizing makeover, and it should extend to neighborhoods falling to the wayside like East Downtown. The BBVA Compass Stadium is badass, too. But EaDo is like an arm of Midtown’s elite, awkwardly pushing between several of Houston’s homeless shelters and the just-now improving top of Houston’s East End. Instead of building with EaDo’s original warehouse and Chinatown history (as the city is doing just just next door on Navigation) EaDo is simply jumping on current trends-Little Woodrow’s in EaDo, anyone?-and pushing out what’s left. Smacking a cutesy nickname on top of it is like adding insult to injury.

On July 23rd, a week after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, Hitaji Aziz was taking calls on her KPFT radio program, Earth 101, and heard from a man named Joe…

Hitaji: Joe, you’re on the line.

Joe: Hey, just wanted to call and give you my perspective in the interest of being all-inclusive. I’ve lived here all my life in Houston, and these days the only racism I’ve seen is from blacks against whites. I have yet to see a white person get away with a racist act in the last 20 or 30 years. Yet, I see white people as the victims of blacks all the time. So, in my view the only racists around, or the majority of the racists around, are blacks.

Hitaji: Can you give me some examples?

Joe: … (4 seconds pass)

Hitaji: Hello?

Joe: Yeah, let me think… (5 seconds pass) My mind’s a blank right now.

Hitaji: If it’s that critical, if you’re surrounded by racist black people for the last twenty-something years, and they do it all the time, I know you got about five or six examples you can teach us about. We’re here and we need for you to teach.

Joe: … (4 seconds)…. Well. let’s see.

Hitaji: Give me the examples, and then give me some remedies…

Joe: If I come up with some examples in the future, I’ll write them down, I can call back….

Hitaji handled him like a pro. Instead of responding to his initial assertion, or decrying his stance, she gave him the space to take himself out.

Landry Thompson is a white 13 year old dancer from Tulsa whose mom sent her on a trip to Houston to Planet Funk Dance Academy to study hip-hop with Chachi Gonzales. Landry was in the custody of her black instructor, Emmanuel Hurd, and another black dancer joined them. At 3 am on December 3rd, after practice, they were at a gas station when they were surrounded by HPD. Despite having a notarized letter from Thompson’s mother granting guardianship to Hurd and extensive other documents, they were handcuffed and Thompson was turned over to Child Protective Services.

According to Thompson’s mother Destiny, an HPD officer called and asked her, “Are you aware your daughter is in Houston, Texas with two black men?” Destiny Thompson informed the officer that she was, and that she had been long-time friends with Hurd and his wife.

Hurd was also convinced of discrimination, claiming that one of the cops told him, “Sir, you’ve got to understand, you two men are black and she’s white.” The men weren’t charged with anything, but Landry was taken to a CPS facility.

At first, HPD told Thompson’s mother she would have to come herself to Houston to get her daughter out of CPS custody, but after a whole morning of negotiations, they finally agreed to turn over the badly shaken up girl to her legal guardian, Emmanuel Hurd.

If the cops said the things that the dancers and Landry’s mom quote them saying, these innocent dancers had their weekend ruined by HPD racial profiling.

For those of you who are too young to remember, Jim Pruett once went by the moniker, “Radio God,” on his buddy show, Stevens and Pruett. But, since Clear Channel switched the Rock 101 format from rock to, well whatever it is now, Pruett has gotten into the gun business. A gun shop owner, Jim has a vested interest in promoting gun culture. Whether it’s recommending an AR-15 similar to what was used at Sandy Hook Elementary, or almost falling over from shooting a fully automatic rifle, Pruett’s “Bullet Points” segments are ridiculous. You could give Pruett a little bit of positive credit for promoting responsible gun ownership and gun safety, if he was selling only shotguns. I have to wonder what the powers that be at CW 39 are thinking with Pruett’s segments, as his lead in for NewsFix is Maury Povich.

It was billed as “good for the city,” as are most things that are hard to swallow. So when the city allowed the NRA to host a Youth Day event at The NRA Annual Meeting, kids were allowed to play with firepower. Free six-month memberships and gun safety events were toted alongside, allowing kids to handle pretty much any gun on the floor. While gun safety is extremely important, especially with children, it’s a lesson that most kids should learn from their parents. The act of allowing children to handle semi-automatic rifles and an airsoft gun shooting event have very little to do with safety, and the act of such an event is a promotion of violence, while it allows the NRA to market to minors. It was easily the most shameful use of tax dollars by the city in a long time.

I promise that there’s a lot more profit in a $1200 AR-15 then there is in a $300 shotgun. We all know deep down, that there’s no plausible reason to own an assault rifle. Hopefully in 2026, the city, the media and the gun shop owners will start looking deep down, and not deep in their pockets.

While Texas citizens have progressed in their acceptance of gay marriage and human rights in general, the Harris County GOP is blocking Mayor Parker’s recent approval of city employees’ health and insurance benefits for their same-sex partners. Family District Court Republican Judge Lisa Millard issued a temporary restraining order on the decision to extend these benefits to couples with matching genitalia, due to a lawsuit filed by local haters Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks. The lawsuit is being led by Harris County GOP chairman Jared Woodfill, while plaintiff Larry Hicks is Woodfill’s campaign treasurer, and Pidgeon is a pastor at West Houston Christian Center. HAPC’s executive director is David “I enthusiastically endorse Jared Woodfill for reelection as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party” Welch.

Woodfill—no jokes about his name, y’all—had the audacity to say, “This is one of the most egregious acts by an elected official I’ve ever seen. They just decided to, unilaterally, as a lame duck, thumb their nose at the will of the people and just spit on the U.S. Constitution.”

According to an Equality Texas statewide survey, not only do the majority of Texans believe in same-sex partners’ rights to hospital visits and end of life medical decisions, but they also support the extension of domestic partnership benefits to government workers 62.3% to 30.8%.

When genitalia is the deciding factor in the extension of health benefits, I’d say that’s pure discrimination. And when progress is blocked by self-serving campaign stunts like this, I’d say that’s purely dangerous to all of our rights.

You charged me over a dollar for less than a quarter’s worth of cilantro that should have already been included in my taco. It’s not about the money. It’s about taco integrity.

I’ve always been a fan of the unmarked bar. There’s something almost magical about walking into one. If it is your first time, you have no idea what to expect of a place you have likely stumbled across; if you are a return visitor, you are someone “in the know.” Since 1976, tucked behind the River Oaks Theater, an unassuming blue door beneath a fire escape opened to a well-appointed den of iniquity. Marfreless, in business in two locations for more than 40 years, was an infamous spot for a secret rendezvous: A lounge of love. A finely stocked bar, dim lighting, quiet music and discreet staff made this bar comfortable and welcoming; but it was the upstairs sofas and small rooms that made it Houston’s most notorious make out spot. Another great business pushed out by sky rocketing rents (the River Oaks Shopping Center is owned by Weingarten Realty), Houston woke up April Fool’s Day, 2026 with nowhere cozy to meet its secret lover.

During the closing weekend of the 46th annual WorldFest Houston (a Houston-based film festival), on Saturday, April 20th, a fire alarm went off at the Westchase Marriott where festival events were being held. After everyone reentered the room, Festival Director Hunter Todd, demanded to search the bag of a person attending the “master class” in session. The person in question was a woman, a festival VIP gold pass holder and a U of H student. She was also wearing a hijab and niqab, and was singled out by Todd for searching while no other people in the room where searched. Another UH attendee, Mike Rudd, stood up for the woman asking Todd why only her bag was being searched, to which Todd replied, “Because she is a Muslim and a suspicious character, now sit down.” When Rudd continued to object to this blatant incident of racial profiling, Todd, according to Rudd, said, “You’re the kind of person I hate the most-an obnoxious little bastard. Now sit down or I’ll have you thrown out.” At this point, a scuffle unfolded, Todd trying to take Rudd’s phone away, Rudd trying to keep it. Finally, Rudd left the conference room to make phone calls as the class got underway.

Did Todd racially profile the guest? He wrote his own response to media allegations over the incident-in his own words:

“As I returned to the meeting room, I noticed an individual sitting down in the front of the room, by themselves. Clad in a full Hijab, with only eye-slits. The individual was carrying a heavy, dark backpack. Frankly, with this-coupled with the false alarm, I called my contact with the police and was told to ask for her ID and search the backpack. In reviewing this situation afterwards with the FBI, Constables and the Police, I was told that I did exactly what they would have done in the total interest in the safety of our 200+ guests in the room. They said this was especially important due to the recent terror attacks in Boston. The officers also told me ‘How did I know it was a female in the Hijab’, as this is a typical terrorist ploy.”

Um, yes. Todd makes it super clear, he singled out one attendee to search and only because she was wearing a “full Hijab”-and might not have even been a woman! Typical terrorist ploy!

I agree with Minister Robert Muhammad, who was quoted in the Houston Chronicle at the time as saying, “If he (Todd) is going to have the behavior where he doesn’t treat all the citizens in this great, diverse city equally, then he needs to take his festival elsewhere.” Minister Muhammad might not know however, that Todd brought his festival to Houston after financial disasters, scandals and accusations plagued his Atlanta and Miami Film Festivals. I’m not sure how many more bridges that guy has left to burn.

One chilly December morning, I decided to indulge in a pricey holiday latte (yes I am that girl) from Starbucks. I give my slightly complex order for myself and my fellow office buddy, paid and waited at the designated drink dispensing area. Within a few minutes, I had both drinks, carrying tray and an excited smile on my face. I couldn’t wait to sip on the deliciously hot beverage. That day, Starbucks was out of their little drink toppers and so I drove cautiously to the office. As I am walking up the stairs to my desk, a little bit of my drink spills through the top. I notice, but don’t think twice about how the liquid looks a bit pale. I hand my office mate her drink, place mine on my desk and proceed to set up for the day. After settling in, I take a huge, long-awaited gulp of my latte, only to discover that they sent me away with a venti cup of warm, sweet milk. Yes folks, there was no espresso in my drink! Thankfully, when I called to point out this little mishap, they kindly offered me a drink on them. My next drink was extra tasty!

The next day, one of our interns walks into the office and tells us her story of how the Starbucks she goes to forgot to put the espresso her drink. It must have been one of those weeks for the Starbucks of Houston.

Someone in charge of the RNC’s twitter account sent out a tweet on the 58th anniversary of Rosa Parks’s arrest reading “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” and the internet erupted in irreverent laughter.

Joe Barton is worried about climate change (a.k.a. “global warming”). He’s so worried about it, that he wants to ban carbon-neutral wind power, saying, “Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up?”

Yes he did. He actually said that. This man is represents one of the largest and richest states in the legislature of the most powerful country in the history of the world. Yay Texas schools!

While the overwhelming majority of abortions in the US take place during the first trimester (12 weeks after the woman’s last period), there may be reasons requiring a later-term abortion. Most people agree that there must be some point at which an unborn fetus achieves what we call “consciousness,” at which point a woman’s healthcare choice starts tilting in the direction of murder, and people generally agree that they don’t want the fetus to feel pain. But what about pleasure?

Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) says he has personally watched sonograms of 15-week-old male fetuses with their hands between their legs, which means that they are sentient enough to feel pleasure, which must mean they are sentient enough to feel pain, which must also mean that Michael Burgess is a pervert watching unborn kiddie-porn. For shame!

I mean, did you see Miss Kansas? She’s blonde, she hunts with a bow, she’s got tattoos and she’s an Army National Gaurdswoman who looks great in fatigues, who wouldn’t want to tap that-I mean hold her up as a shining beacon of an example to American girls?! How did this dark-skinned nobody from New York even get on the ballot? She’s like, so dark-skinned that she couldn’t even win Miss India, how did she win Miss America?! I demand a recount!

It all started last summer when Forbes, in an unprecedented move, named

Houston number one on the list of “America’s Coolest Cities.” On the

heels of that press came more nods our way, inclusion in CNN Money’s

“Best Places to Live” and the ultimate slap to our beloved capital,

Houston as THE travel destination alternative to overrated Austin by

Huffington Post. I know what you are thinking, how could there possibly

be anything wrong with Houston finally getting the recognition it

deserves?

It is known fact that we Houstonians love and appreciate our fair city in

ways that visitors often cannot understand. In the past, I’ve analogized

my hometown to that worse-for-ware recliner in your living room that

you keep coming back to; guests will never opt to sit in it, though it is

arguably the comfiest in the room. Indeed, the fourth-largest city in

the USA has remained snubbed by outsiders until this past year. Despite

the good press, we still get a bad rap, yet this Houstonian is more

than okay with it.

Take this cautionary tale for example. A little city we all used to love:

Austin, Texas. The small place we escaped to for Hill Country getaways

and a dip in the cool waters of Barton Springs began getting a lot of

positive attention from the rest of the country a couple years back.

This changed our friend Austin: Its ego exploded tangential to its

population. What once was an endearing destination of offbeat Texas

spirit, changed face into a California outpost too big for its

infrastructure and too self-absorbed to notice. Mopac and I-35 have been

parking lots for sometime now. All-embracing hippies have been largely

replaced by liberals as staunch in their close-mindedness of other

viewpoints that they might as well be Republicans. Not to mention, for a city

that has added a couple hundred thousand people over the last few

years, it has not encouraged diversity. That guy in the denim vest with a

full mustache does not think you are cool enough to be on South

Congress, and he doesn’t give a shit about concealing that attitude.

Weirdness is a contradiction and Austinites’ new mantra is, “Thanks for

visiting, please don’t move here.”

If you ask me, I’d be alright not touting Houston’s awesomeness quite that

loud. I love that our freeways, even at their worst, aren’t as bad as

some, and that we are a city full of as many kinds of people as

political ideologies, religions, food and opinions. I love that there

are no two pockets of this city that are alike, and that we are a place

that is unexpected. I love that Houston doesn’t have to try to be

anything other than itself, and that Houstonians on the whole do not have

pretenses towards each other and visitors. It is a city that is

welcoming and non-judgemental, and we are always eager to offer up the

denim-clad friend from Austin.

I’m not saying I won’t be the first to knowingly smile the next time

Houston is appropriately recognized by the national media for any number

of its wonderful attributes, but I might not rush to repost the article

or tell everyone I know.

Texas Monthly decided to give it’s “ Bum Steer of the Year Award ” to Wendy Davis and her campaign to become Texas Governor. They even portrayed her on the cover stepping in cow patties in her famous pink sneakers.

But, as uninspiring and ambivalent as Davis’s campaign may have been, it didn’t cause any particular suffering. Contending that “nothing, and we mean nothing, could match the train wreck that was Wendy Davis, Battleground Texas, and the Democrats,” Texas Monthly must not have noticed the more train-wrecky things that happened in Texas this year.

For example… Texas’s new history, social studies and government textbooks will be used for a decade, and they will apparently treat Moses and Reagan like founding fathers, stress the influence of the Old Testament on the Constitution, include some new Islamophobic edits, and play down the importance of slavery in the Civil War. Or what about the Oklahoma / Texas leg of the Keystone XL pipeline ? Of course, Rick Perry was indicted too, but he’ll probably just run for President, or do like Tom DeLay and go on Dancing with the Stars and walk free.

Look, I know that gentrification and displacement of long-time residents is a real problem, not to mention the uprooting of whole communities and their associated networks. These things matter — community is a real, human need. Sadly, we live in a city whose aversion to planning defies all logic, whose policies favor haphazard, half-baked, piecemeal development and shoddy construction that pumps a lot of cash into the hands of developers in the short-term, while leaving us all holding a bag of turds in the long-term. All that said, however, I still wonder if the most vocal critics of “gentrification” have thought through all the implications of their simplistic, knee-jerk critiques.

Are neighborhoods required to remain frozen in time? Are people not allowed to move in and out? If only black people can move into the Third and Fifth Wards, and only Latinos are supposed to move into the East End, and only gay people are supposed to live in Montrose…are these champions of the dispossessed not, in effect, supporting segregation ? How is that different from saying that only WASPs can live in River Oaks?

And rather than blaming people who seek cheap rent in rapidly “gentrifying” neighborhoods after being priced out of other rapidly “gentrifying” neighborhoods, can we take a moment to evaluate how we got here? Houston experienced a big economic boom/bust cycle in the early 1980s. During the boom, a great deal of housing stock (mostly apartment complexes) were built on Houston’s southwest side in neighborhoods like Gulfton, Sharpstown, and Alief. When the boom went bust, developers lowered rents to attract tenants and a big exodus of black and brown people left the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Wards for “greener pastures.” You still see a lot of these former residents showing up for church in the hood on Sundays in their fancy cars and stylish gear.

Those who could move, who had the means to move, moved. They abandoned their neighborhoods to blight rather than staying put and building infrastructure. If you want to say that banks weren’t lending money to buy homes or start businesses in the hood, I will say that they could have started their own credit unions.

I understand that something like $100 million leaves the Third Ward every year because residents have nowhere to spend it, not even on essentials like food and clothing. Are the people who abandoned their neighborhoods rather than forming co-ops and credit unions to purchase property and make improvements that would lift up the many — providing jobs at locally-owned, minority-owned businesses — without blame for the current spat of “gentrification?” Is the displacement of long-term residents and established communities the sole fault of white artists, students, and service workers who are east and north because they’ve been priced out of the Heights and Montrose?

Give me a break! Shit’s more complicated than “White people shouldn’t move to certain areas.” If now-prosperous former residents of these “underdeveloped” neighborhoods had stayed put, purchased property, and built up prospects for themselves and their communities rather than fleeing to the suburbs 30 years ago, we could have thriving independent communities of color ringing downtown Houston rather than crumbling shotgun shacks and empty, overgrown lots and the ugly, isolating townhomes that are popping up all over.

Gentrification is a phenomenon that is ripping apart many Houston neighborhoods. This is something about which many diatribes should be written, however, one that made a big splash with national online outlets but makes a weak case for Houstonians is Anis Shivani’s “How Oligarchs Destroyed a Major American City” which was originally published on Alternet, and has subsequently been picked up by Salon.com and Billmoyers.com.

It is a long article, well-intentioned, and addresses an urgent issue, however, it is jumbled, has a limited understanding of the city’s history, makes confusing and possibly harmful recommendations, and holds up the Upper Kirby Neighborhood as the center of the struggle against gentrification.

A line by line rebuttal would fill half of this paper, Some of the biggest things that make this the worst:

● Shivani argues that Houston has been “transmogrified by a brutal strain of neoliberalism.” Houston has pretty much always been organized the principles of brutal neoliberal capitalism. We are a city where the monied elites have just about always gotten what they want, and where zoning was never created, allowing private developers to make the city as they wanted.

● The history of gentrification in Houston is long and there have been notable struggles against it. This has mostly taken place in low income communities of color, like Fourth Ward/Freedman’s town, where activists have struggled to preserve Houston’s first Black neighborhood and have lost battle after battle to brutal neoliberalism.

● Centering a neighborhood like Upper Kirby is strange, in a city that is more than two thirds people of color and has a median household income a little over $40,000, Upper Kirby is 70%+ anglo and a median household income of $70,000 (per COH Planning Dept stats on Upper Kirby/Greenway Plaza Super Neighborhood).

● It has a bizarre allegation that the city killed trees in Memorial Park to allow for redevelopment, when these trees died during the 2026 drought.

● The recommendations are structured around what could have preserved the author’s apartment complex, rather than what is likely to stop gentrification. They include the idea “neighborhoods should be equalized rather than pitted against each other.” While not very clear, it sounds like NIMBYism. “Don’t gentrify Upper Kirby, go gentrify somewhere underdeveloped, like the Wards.”

Shivani spoke to the Houston Matters radio program and he touched on many issues, but some of his focus framed the value of preserving housing for middle income people at the expense of the poor:

“The residents that are being removed, now we are talking about middle-income people. It’s a misapprehension to think that it’s just low-income people, people who could easily live somewhere else. People who own property, people who are contributing members of the community to displace all of them — then you’ve lost the character of the community.”

Shivani is right that Houston has historically been affordable because we have lots of land and not as much demand to live here. That has changed, housing costs are skyrocketing and there is basically no plan from the public sector to create the amount of affordable housing that is needed in a city where a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. He is also right that displacement of residents is a form of violence, and one of the stronger parts of his article profiles neighbors who are being displaced by brutal neoliberalism.

One good this about this diatribe is that it has inspired others to write better diatribes. Google Raj Mankand’s article on the OffCite blog “Nine Ways to Make Houston Affordable (Again)” for a good one. One thing that this should inspire is a movement that pushes for Houstonians of all economic and cultural backgrounds to have the right to fair housing and not be displaced from their communities. That will take a huge amount of effort, as it runs against the grain of this property rights and brutally capitalist city.

Annise, anytime I, of the people, have a suggestion or ask for a ReTweet on-line regarding something that would be rad for the city, you ignore me with the cold wind of silence. My tweets have ranged from “@AnniseParker let’s build a rail from the inner loop to Chinatown in Bellaire so we can all eat that food more often” to “@AnniseParker, Children of Pop are playing a free show at House of Creeps tonight! Can I get a RT?”, all of which have gone unheard.

While I cannot directly blame your lack of response to my tweet as the sole reason these things aren’t happening, I can say the ReTweet button doesn’t take very long to hit and as long as it’s not anything deprecating to your platform, I don’t see what it would hurt for some of the people whose votes you’ll eventually want (20-30 year olds, the smallest voter turnout demographic), to see you as one of their own. Keep on keepin’ on Annise.

If a tree falls on Ello and there’s…never mind.

hmu on google+.

The Greek philosopher Aristophanes wrote that the characteristics of every popular politician are “a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.” While I cannot attest to Dan Patrick’s lineage (his pre-bankruptcy surname was Goeb), I do believe he might be the most dangerous politico in Texas today. Jumping on the wave of mid-term anti-Obama hysteria, the Senator from Cypress rode into the Lieutenant Governor’s seat after the incumbent torpedoed his own campaign.

*Note to David Dewhurst: Don’t get involved in a mud-slinging match with a former radio shock jock.

If Tea Party sycophants were mountains, Patrick would be Everest. He has spent the last eight years in office spreading an agenda so far removed from rational thought one wonders if the residents of Tomball (where he receives most of his support) are stuck in a dimensional vortex where time cannot move past 1950. Patrick’s public gaffes are too numerous to mention but suffice it to say that his political philosophy is reminiscent of John Lithgow’s character in Footloose . Anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-immigrant (one of the few politicians who still supports Arizona’s insane SB 1070 Act), Patrick would also like to establish creationism into the public school curriculum. When he is not attempting to boycott the Houston Chronicle, Patrick can be found squabbling with other politicians. John Carona, a State Senator from Patrick’s own party, referred to him as “a snake oil salesman, a narcissist that would say anything to draw attention to himself.”

It is this level of self-aggrandizement that Dan Patrick truly separates himself from the pack. Like his counterpart Sheila Jackson Lee, Patrick uses pop culture to further his own devices by exploiting controversial issues. It was at this time last year that our new Lieutenant Governor commended Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson for his anti-gay remarks (Robertson equated same-sex relationships with bestiality). Patrick said that God was speaking through the bearded reality star. Does anyone else not see the writing on the wall here? If history serves as any sort of indicator on these things, it is just a matter of time before Patrick calls a press conference to explain that he was simply lost when he was arrested at Austin’s Oil Can Harry’s. Those poppers found on his person were obviously planted by the godless liberals/ Texas Monthly liars/ Kenyan Obama.

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

Get him out.

Consider this: The fastest internet service provider in Houston is Comcast, yet as I type this at noon on a Saturday, while listening to the shrillest, most obnoxious hold music ever produced (Tim Carleton & Darrick Deel’s “Opus No. 1”— according to Shazam), there is a city-wide outage that isn’t going to be resolved until 10pm. What does this cost someone who relies on the internet to make money? Much more than the $2 credit Comcast offers if you call in and demand a refund for a day’s outage.

Comcast suuucks. For years, they have won first place as Worst Company in America in countless polls. Even their own employees have a hard time not expressing this sentiment. I’ve been to hell and back with Comcast over the last few years and would need several hours to write a full report of my experience, but as quick recap, since January 2026, I’ve spent over 30 hours on the phone troubleshooting my connection and removing unapproved charges from my bill.

Last year, I was told by Comcast that I needed a second modem in my home if I wanted good wireless reception, but I would have to set up and pay for a second account. So I tried that. But when a tech discovered that the primary modem was faulty and sent out a new one, it turned out that the secondary account was never necessary and we paid over a thousand bucks for a year of service for no reason. When reiterating this scenario to the wireless gateway team (the only reps worth talking to at Comcast) they were sincerely dismayed that I had been offered such an expensive and complicated ‘solution’ to a problem that came back to a well-documented issue with the model of modem they shipped to me. But really, what can we expect from a company whose own employees are embarrassed by the subpar service they represent?

I learned that the best sources of information for what equipment not to buy and what worked best came from the mouths of Comcast’s tech support babes. I bought my own modem, a model one of the reps had in their own home, and not one provided by Comcast, of course. Why pay $10 a month (a price increase of $3/month in the last 2 years) for junk equipment that Comcast’s own reps directly stated was notorious for not working?

The billing statements are ridiculously complicated, intentionally so, I believe. I started hacking away at every extraneous billing item possible to simplify the statement. I cancelled the secondary internet account. I cancelled our cable package. All I wanted was decent steady internet access. After 86ing these other services, my bills still showed all kinds of extra charges for rented equipment I had returned and TV/Cable fees I no longer used, like a $4.99 TV protection plan that stayed on the bill for 4 months after I’d cancelled our cable, and $12 for ‘Blast!’ to bump up my internet speed when a rep told me this didn’t benefit me since the modem I had wasn’t configured to be affected by Blast!

For anyone who has had a costly and difficult experience with this ISP, it’s incredibly frustrating to know that the only other ‘competition’ is AT&T, who offers a whopping 18MBPS compared to Comcast’s 50MBPS (which is just a number they advertise — I’ve never experienced this speed, though I’ve been regularly billed for the fastest speed they offer). For those of us who rely on the internet for our incomes, it’s terrifying to even entertain the thought of Comcast merging with another major company while not being able provide reliable, quality internet access to their current customers. The FCC has ignored/deleted/tossed hundreds of thousands of comments against Net Neutrality that Comcast is pushing for so they can force customers to opt-in to a ‘fast-lane’ at a greater cost.

This is a very small portion of the bullshit I’ve dealt with as a Comcast customer. Repressed memories are surfacing as I write this, so I have to stop now and do some breathing exercises, maybe burn some sage. This ISP giant is already too big. It will ultimately fail. It is failing right now. But please, examine your bill for charges you didn’t approve, and always call 1800-Comcast and demand a refund every time your service goes down. Tweet about it. Be even louder and more obnoxious than their torturous hold music, because we really don’t have any choice right now other than to force those fuckers to be an ISP we can depend on.

Nah, we have no idea who we should get for FPSF. More often than not, we usually get next year who we wanted this year so, basically what the means is, whatever you’re about to suggest, we already thought of and for some reason or another it won’t work out. To debunk the “punk-rock” myth that seems to plague every suggestion we hear is that, honestly, EVERY SINGLE BAND WANTS A SHIT TON OF MONEY. Especially the really broke punk bands and lesser known acts that we’d rather have play than most of the headliners. The reason we do or don’t get who we get is almost 100% due to money, or Primavera, and fuck, who WOULDN’T rather be in Spain that time of year?

We all know what “whitewashing” means — to cover up wrongdoings or other ugly things with a thin, superficial coat of BS. In this era of post-industrial environmental crises, you might even have heard of “greenwashing,” or cheap public relations stunts that big companies like British Petroleum are wont to pull, like rebranding themselves “Beyond Petroleum.” But “pinkwashing?”

According to Think Before You Pink, a “ pinkwasher” is “A company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease.”

In a recent stunt, local oilfield services company Baker Hughes announced that they are donating $100,000 to the questionable Susan G. Komen Foundation and painting 1,000 of their drill bits pink. Ironically, the Center for Disease Control reports that breast cancer is on the rise in communities near fracking sites, despite its decrease everywhere else, and the breast cancer rate in six Texas counties near fracking sites is 20% higher than it is in the general population.

Don’t believe the hype. If you want to wear pink, wear pink. If you want to help fight breast cancer, support Breast Cancer Action.

Seriously — what was that? The only one I liked is the photo with a black dress and a broom and pointy witch’s hat in a heap on the floor with the caption, “ Ann Coulter’s Ice Bucket Challenge .” Blondie done melted, ha! Now remind me what that had to do with funding ALS research.

SagaCity Media began publishing Houstonia Magazine in April of 2026. Their previous work has been with magazines in Seattle, Portland and Park City, Utah. It is understandable that they are used to having overwhelmingly White publications in these overwhelmingly White cities. However, according to the City of Houston planning department, Houston is scarcely 25% Anglo. Still, SagaCity Media has put together a magazine in Houston whose editorial staff appears to be 100% White. Things like that don’t just happen by random chance in Houston — it takes effort to arrive at such a homogenous group in this diverse city.

Houstonia describes its target audience when it talks to its advertisers about their readership: their readership is majority female, and the majority work in Executive, Professional or Managerial professions (20% hold executive titles). The average household income of a Houstonia reader is $189,889. The average household income for Houston ranges from $42,000 in the city to $58,000 in the greater metropolitan area. Whichever way you slice it, Houstonia serves a wealthy upper crust of the city, which it’s safe to assume, is overwhelmingly white.

The actual City of Houston is one of the most international and diverse cities in the country, and one with rampant inequality. That Houstonia does not seem to care about those with lower incomes and the people of color who make up most of our city is a structural feature of their business model. It also seems to mean that they don’t need any people of color on their editorial staff, and that they don’t need to consult residents of low-income neighborhoods about what nicknames they use for their communities because they will soon all be gentrified out.

Houstonia ’s Houston is a whitewashed utopia straight out of the movie Elysium, not the diverse and polyphonic dystopia that Houston represents to most of us.

“We’ll drink their milkshake!” shouted the Board of the Midtown Redevelopment Authority as they schemed to annex select portions of Montrose into their tax increment reinvestment zone… Or maybe no mention of milkshakes was made, but the effect would be just the same, with the Midtown TIRZ slant drilling past Montrose’s historic districts and other residential neighborhoods to tap areas slated for massive new construction projects. Doing so would have allowed the Midtown TIRZ to siphon off the increased property tax dollars resulting from the new developments while ignoring the desperate infrastructure needs of the majority of Montrose.

And they would’ve gotten away with it too, if not for former City Council Member Sue Lovell and other civic leaders, who demanded that the annexation be pulled from the City’s agenda to allow for a public meeting in Montrose on the issue. Soon enough, Lovell and over 200 of her Montrose neighbors were face-to-face with the Midtown schemers, who quickly dropped their cherry-picking property tax grab, trashing a plan that was months in the making and only a few days away from becoming law.

Montrose definitely needs new streets and sidewalks, and maybe a TIRZ is the way to accomplish that, but not one that has been gerrymandered by and for Midtown. It’s okay to love thy neighbor, but don’t covet our shit man.

How is it that Texans love their bow-legged, swashbuckling, chest-puffed-out, rugged individualist, “go it alone,” rebel tough guy image so much? It makes absolutely zero fucking sense. It just does not comport with reality. Any time you hear something about a person putting up the slightest bit of resistance to an out of control bully cop or boss, Texans want to blame the victim.

“Well, he should have just bowed down and kowtowed to the cop,” say most Texans. “Me, I always call cops ‘sir,’ say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ because, you know, they’re special and they are superior to the rest of us so we should just take whatever they dish out.”

Seriously, Texans? I mean, you can be a bunch of spineless, blame the victim, beat down, submissive punk apologists for illegitimate authority if you want…but you can’t be that way AND keep your rebel tough guy self-image.

And Texans betray the same attitude whenever someone stands up to a big immoral company that’s poisoning our beloved land, air, and water, too. I mean, just look at Free Press Houston’s own Worst of Houston issues over the years — how much do Texans regularly hate “protesters?” But who are the real maverick rebel lonewolves standing up for what they believe in the face of such hostility — the protestors or the ones saying “Love it or leave it,” just like the Founding Fathers once said. (Wait, no, the “Founding Fathers” told their rulers to shove it — starting with the very act of property destruction from which the Tea Party derives its name, ironically enough.)

Despite its image, Texas is more like the Deep South than the Wild West. You people have a plantation mentality — in your colonized mind state, any slave who demands to be treated with dignity is just asking for it. Texans need to either grow a backbone and stand up to illegitimate authority, or just admit that they’re a bunch of beat down, submissive chumps fighting each other for whatever scraps the powerful will toss at them.

Because I live in Houston, I can only comment on Houstonians on this; but the reaction I heard to the North Korea/Sony Pictures hack was almost as funny as it was disgusting. I heard more people up in arms over how this action was “a threat to our national security” and how we “shouldn’t let Commies dictate what films we see.” Let’s get this straight, people are super pissed because another Seth Rogen stinker wasn’t released, but they are on the fence about the abuse of power from police and questionable actions by grand juries in Harris County and across the nation?

Sony is a giant corporation first and foremost, and this is their problem, not of any citizen who isn’t tied to that company. I mean, Sony was set to make a “21 Jump Street” & “Men In Black” crossover film; and we are actually holding them in high regard? Secondly, North Korea is about as threatening as a four-year-old with one of those foam Minecraft swords. They have trouble launching missiles and they don’t have the money or the infrastructure to be a real threat to anyone here.

We live in a country that tortures innocent people, where we help giant companies before we help each other with our many problems including inequality, scofflaw bankers and cops, and expensive but inadequate health care. How about we get angry over these things first — then we can get upset over what happened to a company?

Surely you’ve heard of butt-chugging by now — there was a rash of college students going to the hospital a couple years ago for alcohol poisoning from wine and vodka enemas. Well, this year we learned that the CIA has been “rectal hydrating” terror suspects (1/5 of whom were falsely accused) by lying them on their stomachs with their feet higher than their heads and then sticking tubes up their butts to pump in filled with pureed hummus and and pasta and raisins.

“No need to squeeze the bag,” reads the CIA’s torture manual, “let gravity do it’s work.”

Yeah, gravity, because it’s all downhill from here. (More like let depravity do its work.)

Dickheads like War Criminal Dick Cheney try to deflect attention from their crimes by pointing to 9/11, except the Senate report that detailing this torture says that these were useless exercises — they gleaned no new actionable intelligence. And on top of that, let me repeat that 20% — one out of five — of the people we tortured did nothing wrong, they just got picked up because they had the same name as a terror suspect or were in the wrong place at the wrong time or got falsely accused by someone who had a personal beef with them.

Dear Central Intelligence Agency: We get that you and the former frat boys who comprise your workforce get off on hazing and rape and coercively sticking things up each other’s butts, but if you really must seek novel ways to ingest hummus, could you just chop it up and snort it like the rest of us? And stop torturing people, you sick fucks, you make us all look bad. And let’s prosecute these sadistic cretins, can we, please, America?

Despite passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), I didn’t buy private health insurance for a few different reasons: I don’t like the federal government mandating that buy a product from a private company; I don’t like the protections given to insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and corporate chain hospital conglomerates; I don’t think that a profit-driven health system is good public policy; I don’t like being denied a “public option;” and I hate that our spineless president entered negotiations by saying that “single-payer” was off the table rather than using “single payer” as leverage to argue for a “public option.”

But the main reason I chose to be fined rather than be coerced into buying private insurance is that all the plans available to me on the Texas Exchange is totally impractical — I’d be paying a steep ass monthly premium only to have a steep ass annual deductible. It just doesn’t make sense.

The reason the Texas exchange sucks so bad is because our Governor Goodhair refused federal money to help expand Medicaid in Texas. He thinks it makes him look fiscally conservative, i.e. good with money, but it’s actually costing Texas tons of money — something like $10 BILLION (with a b).

If Perry wasn’t such a douchebag, Texas could insure 1.2 million more people than it already does, which would have created 55,000 jobs between 2026 and 2026 and brought in $13.7 billion in federal spending while increasing our state GDP by $3.1 billion just in 2026 and $10.42 billion over the next three years.

Way to go, Perry. It’s no wonder you and your school board want to dumb down education standards in our fair state, too. A sick, overworked, under-educated population totally serves the needs of your ilk, even if it is bad for democracy.

On December 6, protesters took their protest inside the Galleria, and according to ABC13, they even caused several stores to close temporarily, including Neiman Marcus, Microsoft and Macys! So, that’s kinda cool, if you’re down with the whole “black lives matter” movement, but there are some folks who more dearly value shopping rights.

Also according to ABC13, shopper Ian Hamer said “I think everyone has a right to protest what they believe in, but coming inside of a shopping mall and disrupting everyone else’s normal lives is uncalled for… They’re talking [sic] away the police force that needs to be out on the streets protecting us.”

The implication here seems to be that protesting is ok, as long as it is done in a deserted alley. At any rate, the idea that shopping should be held as a sacred act that should never be interrupted even when people are dying, is an odious one, but it’s somehow also very All-American.

Time to get your glitter and glue someplace else, crafters, this for-profit corporate chain is owned by some right-wing Christian fundamentalists who don’t want to pay for their employees’ birth control…even though they invest in a “wide variety of companies producing abortion and contraception related products.” Too bad their “Christian values” don’t preclude them from selling products made by veritable slaves in sweatshops, too. They should stop huffing their own glue.

Not since the days of George Foreman slinging grills on infomercials has such a media blitzkrieg taken place by a professional athlete. While JJ Watt might be the most dominant defensive player of his generation, his perpetual appearance hamming it up on Houston televisions in HEB, Papa Johns, and Ford commercials has gotten completely out of hand. It is nonstop. I invented a drinking game for Texans games where you take a sip of beer each time Watt appears during a commercial break but had to quit after three of my friends died of alcohol poisoning. Before halftime. And Watt looks the exact same in every single advertisement: Texans jersey with rolled up sleeves, Costco brand jeans, and the corniest bunch of bullshit lines you’ve ever heard. To call his acting “forced” would be an insult to middle school improv troupes everywhere. His dancing in that ubiquitous Verizon commercial induces nerd hypothermia even in a 70 degree winter. Stick to opposing teams’ quarterbacks, JJ, unless you can get me a discount on flowers at HEB for the three funerals I now have to attend.

I am not sure which instance of appropriation is worse — Wendy’s attempting to mass-produce BBQ with their pulled pork cheeseburger, or the commercial they made to promote it — which appropriates the language used to critique and discuss injustices in order to sell diarrhea on a bun.

BBQ privilege can distort your worldview …says wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Although I grapple with justifying cultural appropriation and globalized society , and although tender BBQed pulled pork atop a juicy cheeseburger on a soft brioche bun isn’t authentic Texas, it is authentically delicious. So go to Wendy’s and experience your new right to BBQ pulled pork… [Emphasis added.]

By exercising its privilege not just to appropriate but to capitalize on this language,

Wendy’s trivializes the very concepts of race/gender/class privilege, a globalized monoculture (i.e. cookie-cutter corporate chains like Wendy’s), authenticity, and even universal human rights.

So, to whom does this commercial actually appeal? The educated liberal class most likely to know these words is probably least likely to buy a pulled pork cheeseburger from Wendy’s — less likely than Jews and Muslims, even. If you read between the lines, though, the ad reveals it’s true brilliance as an appeal to “working-class culture” against “elite culture” — it’s real message is, “Show those liberals that you’re a real American by eating subsidized diarrhea that will give you heart disease and colon cancer.” The rebel sell.

Houston gained nationwide notoriety over the HERO litigation back and forth which included portions of local pastor’s statements in regard to that case. So fucking what? I don’t hold religious officials in some unwarranted high esteem where they are not subject to the same lawyering the rest of us are subject to. You see, we have wonderful laws in this country to keep churches out of politics and government out of houses of worship. Since 1954, federal law has prohibited religious organizations from intervening in political campaigns or they would otherwise lose their IRS non-profit status and be forced to pay taxes like the rest of us. Sadly, these laws have been flouted over the last several years and churches are beginning to outright endorse candidates. My message to these butthurt churches: stay out of politics if you don’t want to be subpoenaed.

Ooh, step back, girl, I’m about to throw some shade! Apparently, Houston’s beers, steers, and queers are definitely worthy of national attention, but only as a grotesque caricature of predatory hornballs in the background of a hipster music video. The Wild Moccasins’ “Eye Makeup” music video is follows the same easy boring “straight person in shady gay subculture” theme that we’ve seen a million times just short of a dropping the soap gag.

Gay guy hits on presumably straight guy at a urinal? CHECK! Shocking and offensive? Hardly. Uncomfortable to watch? Absolutely…in a constant eye roll and UGH sort of way. The most cringe worthy moment wasn’t the wig snatch, but the suggestion that all it takes for little miss lead singer to be a drag queen is for her to paint sunglasses on her lady face in a few minutes with a paper plate full of glitter (no doubt bought at Hobby Lobby).

The red headed dude’s ONLY purpose in the video is to piss the whole time so he can serve as set-up for a joke that goes something like, “One time, I was at a gay bar, and this gay dude hit on me while I was at the urinal!” That’s all he does in the whole video. He’s the set-up for a dumb, predictable joke.

I’m sure Wild Moccasins will say the song lyrics are artsy and meaningful, tell you that the music video is art and open to interpretation, feed you some word candy about how it was filmed at Robert’s LaFitte in Galveston and how historic it is and how the queens from Robert’s LaFitte are in the video (as if marginalized people never appeared in a minstrel show promoting problematic stereotypes). Yawn. Please just tell me why everyone looks so damn bored at this drag show!

And these aren’t candid shots from a wild night out on the town — the band and video director talked about this and wrote it out and made storyboards and shot multiple takes and then edited it all together. None of this is accidental or random. All of it was done for a reason.

Everyone seems to be doing this drag queens and tgirls are cool when it comes to our style, and we are such a current event that they just gotta feature us as wallpaper in their music video to make it relevant, but NPR did a story on this video without noting its problems because the Wild Moccasins are supposedly one of Houston’s best local bands? Bitch, please.

[Ed. Note: For really sexy rendition of what I think the Wild Moccasins were aiming for in this video, check out The Kills’ “Baby Says” video. Yowza!]

One day in November, a few of us were approached by a good friend in reference to Pride Houston’s event being moved to the weekend of Juneteenth festivities. I knew of the move and how many in the GLBTQ felt about it. I was not ready to be in a place to choose between being Black and Gay. In general, I feel attacked by the predominantly religious Black community, and then struggle to fit in with my Caucasian counterparts in certain settings of the mainstream GLBTQ community. With all of that in mind, a group of us met with three people from Pride Houston, behind closed doors, to explain and make a case for the date to be moved.

One of the biggest elephants in the room was the fact that during the fight to get the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) passed, a majority of the Black and Latino communities stood against its passage. Which meant that a move of the prominent Gay Pride event to a historically significant weekend to Blacks in Texas essentially looked like punishment for the lack of support for HERO. While I and many of the other persons of color who attended this meeting with Pride Houston supported HERO in its entirety, we knew that having a Pride event the same weekend as Juneteenth would damage relations between the Black and GLBTQ communities.

We met, we talked, and we were told “We will get back to you in two weeks.” About a week later, we got a letter stating that the board of Pride Houston will not be moving Pride back to its original weekend, which coincides with Stonewall history. Blog posts were made, phone calls were placed, letters were sent, and anyone who is anyone got involved in the Houston community.

Now I could talk about and quote many of the things that were said by members of the Pride Houston board, but at this point that would be petty. Let’s just say that situation highlighted what has come to be called “intersectionality,” or struggles between different marginalized communities (and even within individuals) to value or devalue each other when, in fact, we should be working together in spite of any differences. There is work that needs to be done, and it goes much deeper than the issue that arose with Pride Houston.

After months of strong opposition from parents, students, teachers, administrators, community leaders, and education experts, the HISD school board voted on two potential school closings in March of 2026. With over 80 individuals slated to comment and an overflow room where the meeting was being screened on closed-circuit television, the community was desperate to be heard. As the meeting progressed, the audience became increasingly frustrated while board members fidgeted, avoided eye contact, and sat unmoved by their constituents’ pleas. Two hours into the meeting, the audience could no longer tolerate the injustice and began chanting against the superintendent “Fire Terry Grier,” at which point the board members retreated to a back room and police officers surrounded the attendees.

Despite the community’s clear disapproval of the action, the school board decided to close a gem of an elementary school in the Lost Ward, Dodson Elementary, under the pretense of using the space for students whose schools are under construction. It will be interesting to see how much money HISD makes from the sale of this valuable little property, instead. The second school, Jones, “survived” the closure and was re-opened as a career readiness academy students normally zoned to Jones now need to apply to attend.

Thanks for everything, HISD, once again you have stayed true to your mission of “ providing a high-quality education for every child, regardless of where they live or what school they choose to attend.”

Houston’s artistic community needs public art, and public art requires funding. Unfortunately for artists and arts organizations alike, much of this funding (as well as other critical grants) come from the Houston Arts Alliance (HAA). Over the past few years, HAA has seen a lot of change, both in terms of its leadership and its direction as an organization. Some people are okay with it, many are not. This year, the arts community has seen a lot of turmoil connected to HAA, and it’s not likely to get much better in 2026.

Many credit (or blame) HAA’s CEO Jonathan Glus for these changes, and that holds fairly true. He’s the guy at the top, but as anyone who works in an arts non-profit knows, the board also needs to be held responsible. When you look at HAA’s board of directors, as well as the Advisory Council and let’s just throw in the Civic Art Committee, too, you have to wonder where the artists are. There are a lot of respectable people in these groups, but they aren’t people who have the same knowledge of the Houston community that artists or even arts professionals have. That’s more of a general issue and not 2026-specific, though, so let’s stick to what’s been going on this year.

“Recently 19 mid and smaller sized arts organizations met with the CEO to protest the Grants Program and the haphazard and unprofessional way that program was being run,” Michael Peranteau of Art League Houston commented on a Glasstire post. He’s referring to issues within (what should be) HAA’s main if not sole responsibility: the distribution of the Hotel Occupancy Tax to Houston artists and arts organizations. From the organization of the grants themselves to the lack of certain opportunities for artists to awarding grants late, HAA dropped the ball and provided little to no explanation, which leads to another issue: transparency within the organization.

For a major funder of the Houston arts, HAA lacks transparency, and this year seems to highlight that it’s because they’re looking to protect themselves. This past fall, HAA’s civic art department was contracted by the George R Brown Convention Center to choose an artist within a certain budget and see his/her project through to its fruition. What should have been a relatively simple task (as large-scale public art installations go) has been complicated and shrouded in a cloud of mystery that leaves little more than rumors to go on, so here are the (probably true) rumors:

The Civic Art Committee (CAC) met with now former Director Matthew Lennon. A process was laid out that was typical to the structure of the Civic Art Department. A list of artists was provided to the CAC, and they agreed to the artists but left the process to the department. Artist Ed Wilson’s installation was chosen by (those who chose to) vote. A CAC member wanted them to choose a different artist, one whose work happens to be in his personal collection, and they pulled Wilson’s contract. In protest, Lennon resigned, stating “Ed Wilson, and the other artists, followed the procedures provided. A professional panel with stakeholder representation was formed. Ed was selected unanimously by a blind vote. Derailing that process is naïve and insults everyone engaged. Depriving Ed Wilson of his commission is unethical.”

Through and through, there are a wide variety of problems within the Houston Arts Alliance - some mentioned here, some not. Here’s hoping a new year means a new start.

Dogs don’t need much to be happy. Give them some affection, a soggy old tennis ball, and a wide open place to run, and they’re perfectly content. That’s why I’m having so much trouble comprehending the need for the new $1.5 MILLION dog park being constructed at the corner of Montrose and Allen Parkway. For years this area was used as an “un-official” park for dogs to run and frolic amongst themselves or their peers. There was plenty of room to play frisbee and roll in the lush grassy field, a nice green oasis in the middle of a dense, monster condo sprawl. Now, after being closed for over a year, the park is starting to take shape as a hodgepodge of lakes, gates and a bunch of other unnecessary bullshit.

According to buffalobayoupark.org, a group of friends (several rich old white people who most likely have/will never set foot there) got together to donate money for the butt fucking revitalization of the park, in honor of their pal Johnny Steele. Johnny is a landscape design artist(?) who has scaped (I’m making this word up for all the hipster landscape artists out there, you’re welcome) some pretty high profile locations in Houston and around the country. Some of his clients include River Oaks Country Club, Rice Music School Courtyard, New Process Steel and loads of private residences belonging to a much higher income tax bracket than you or I. But I digress.

The park is now equipped with a lot more cement and a lot less grass. It promises to be an overcrowded clusterfuck. A place where people can bring their pooch to be crammed into one of the gated areas, where there isn’t much room to do anything except take a shit and look at each other. GLAD WE GOT OUT OF THE HOUSE FOR THIS! The opening of the park is set for January 2026, and it’s sure to be the next hot spot for dudes with calf implants and girls with vodka soaked tampons.

Maybe, I‘m being a bit too rash. Perhaps I have some displaced anger issues and the park will be the greatest of great successes. Or maybe I’m sick and tired of seeing our city, which was perfectly fine before the mass influx of money hungry oil tycoons, being gutted of any semblance of originality in exchange for cheaply constructed, overpriced, new modern crap castles. Either way, I can’t help but think that this new dog park is the perfect metaphor for what Houston is becoming. An expensive, highly stylized place to shit on.

For once, Houston was ahead of the curve! But no. This is a trend that most everyone wants to forget.

For me, I might call it the Worst Unfulfilled Promise, because I thought #normcore, with its imperative to blend in rather than stand out, signalled an end to what you might call “individual exceptionalism,” which I had hope portended an end to “American Exceptionalism.”

Who knows — maybe the final chapter in #normcore is yet to be written. All I know is I am keeping my fanny pack for the next time skinny jeans make a comeback because cramped, bulging pockets suck, tell you what.

EaDo needs a grocery store!

In 2026, The Aga Khan Foundation purchased the massive swath of land at the Southeast corner of Allen Parkway and Montrose. This sprawling piece of property is centrally located, is adjacent to some of Houston’s most beautiful natural landscapes, and could serve so many important purposes.

For nearly 10 years, there have been rumors that this property would be developed into one of the largest mosques in Texas, and I am excited for the controversy that will most definitely ensue once that begins to happen. But that said, having such a huge property with huge potential stay dormant and fenced off in the interim is a missed opportunity.

If I had my way, folks would be allowed to play soccer there, a massive urban garden could be temporarily installed, and the space could serve as a rad destination along the Art Car parade route.

If you’re one of those Inner Loopers that’s scared as hell about transplants and gentrificwhatever and real estate development, then you’re too late. Being scared is not enough. The evils of change and money shift are here and there’s no going back.

Yes, it’s a sad truth. One of the strong contributors to this change is “The Rise of the Transplants.” Everyday more arrive. Everyday. New people from Dallas and Denver and Ohio and New England and Arizona and Portland (maybe, I don’t know) arrive everyday to start their new life here in Clutch City, TX. With these transplants comes also their hometown culture which has woven itself into their lives just as Houston’s culture has to us native Houstonians. Many Houstonians fear that these transplants will dilute our common bonds and remove our shared grit. To those fearful many, I say… Shut up! Houston is inside of you, like a pervy old man. And soon that pervy old man will be inside the Transplants and they, too, will come to accept that cowboy hats and banh mi sandwiches exist in perfect harmony here in Houston.

As someone who has only lived inside of Houston city limits for about five years, I think I’m almost at the point of understanding hometown pride and becoming a person who can say that Houston is my hometown. It is a place that still fascinates me and annoys the living fuck out of me all in the same breath. It’s a place truly impossible to fully uncover. Whether it’s new businesses opening every day or old relics being torn down for condos, it’s a home I believe I’ve earned, which is the main point of what I’m getting at. I know I’m not a life-long resident, but I think I’ve earned the right to call out my suburban peers with this message.

I know it sounds whiny, but whenever I see someone whose mail gets addressed to Clear Lake or Texas City and they are captioning a photo they took on the outskirts of 610 on their way to Boondocks with the words “I love my city!” it’s a special kind of annoyance that pings through my head. This isn’t your city. You haven’t earned it.

You haven’t put in the work of suffering through River Oaks traffic or getting lost trying to figure out if the shitty art show is at Summer street, or Silver, oh wait it’s Spring Street and there’s no parking, then you haven’t earned this ugly city of ours. If the coolest place you’ve been to is “This really AMAZE-BALLS cafe called Agora,” or you’ve said the phrase “Oh Bra-zils, that’s by Shaws right?” then really dude, just enjoy the pizza and go back to Bay Area.

If you get upset by this and your argument is that “H-Town is state of mind,” then you’ve already proven my point. You don’t get to fix your moms iPhone and call yourself an Apple employee or scroll through reddit news comments and call yourself an expert on foreign policy. In conclusion as aggressive as this comes off, you don’t have to fuck off or pass some stupid Montrosean citizenship test, just admit you’re a weekender and stop taking up all the parking.

Jailed on a probation violation for possessing marijuana, Terry Goodwin was left locked in his cell for weeks in disgusting conditions. His cell’s drains were clogged with feces, toilet paper, and also orange rinds in an apparent attempt to mask the smell. A sign attached to the door instructed jailers never to open it. Styrofoam food containers were passed in through a slit in the door and jailers never came back to collect the trash, resulting in massive piles of trash. His mother and his lawyer attempted to visit him and were told that he didn’t want to see them. As Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia mulls a run for Mayor, it’s important to remember this modern-day Bastille that is being operated in Downtown Houston.

In March 2026, it came out that back in 2026, during Occupy Houston’s camping protest, the FBI uncovered plots that involved the execution of members of Occupy Houston through coordinated sniper fire. The plotters’ names, let alone any investigation or arrests, were never announced, and the FBI denied the vast majority of a Freedom of Information request for documents by claiming that they had already given the information to local law enforcement, who were helping them to determine if Occupy Houston was planning to overthrow the US government. The documents that were eventually released were heavily redacted.

Folks from Occupy Houston were never charged with sedition but wondered why they weren’t even informed that they were in danger. To this day, none of the endangered Occupiers have been told who the alleged assassination plotters were

For a venue that is constantly hosting nationally respected artists, it is BULLSHIT.

First and foremost, it’s NOT HOUSTON. The Woodlands is a hell of a trip to make. Not to mention the dreadful traffic you have to endure on I-45 to get there. It’s a fucking journey. Might as well hit up Austin for a REAL concert experience.

At the pavilion, theoretically, you get more buck for your money in that you get closer to the stage the more money you pay. Well guess what? No one fucking sits at shows anymore. The seats are smelly and uncomfortable anyways. Want a better view? You can pay an even pricier ticket to experience the world’s lamest 10-person mosh pit at the very front of the stage. Or, you pay 25 dollars and you sit at the lawn. And at that point, you would have a better view from the comfort of your own home on your TV screen. Sitting at the lawn guarantees you a shit view of the stage and a half-shit view of the TV monitors.

It is a venue that shamelessly wastes great talent and opportunity for incredible performances. This venue creates a huge barrier between artist and audience. It has absolutely no sense of community and lacks performance-intimacy. You go to a concert in the attempts of making a connection with the music and the performance. The environment and ambiance of a concert is well over half of the actual concert experience. You get none of that at the Woodlands.

Save yourself the money and aggravation and check out some venues actually located in Houston. You shoulda come to FPSF, Lana.

I go to a lot of live shows, so I’ve gotten used to being at a concert where there are no less than twenty cell phones in the air at any given time, and that’s not so bad. But whether it’s a concert or a comedy show, it seems like a lot of people went to the show to have a conversation, and not watch the talent everyone else paid to see. The worst part of this behavior is that it’s a crappy and self-involved way to interrupt the artists and those around you. If you’re in the back of a room, or near the bar, it’s a little easier to forgive. But when I’m in rooms as small as Mangos, Rudyards, or downstairs at Fitzgerald’s, and you’re talking, then you’re a jerk who should have either stayed home or gone outside. This also includes people who yell out at a comedy show, people who take a phone call, and people who keep the flash on their phone and blind an entertainer by taking a blurry pic.

It’s not just lay audiences who exhibit this behavior either. I’ve watched people I know are performers talk three feet from a stage. I mean, I get the fact that you feel important because that kitten video you posted off of reddit got 43 Facebook likes, but please; on behalf of everyone else at the show…shut the hell up and have a shred of respect for those around you.

There’s a cliche in the legal world that speaks to the ease a District Attorney actually has in obtaining an indictment from a grand jury — “You could indict a ham sandwich.” Grand juries pretty much just do whatever the DA tells them. An indictment is not a conviction, though, so the burden of proof is much lower than in an actual trial. A grand jury indictment just means that there is enough of a case to take it to trial, to investigate the question of guilt or innocence a little further.

But here’s the rub: district attorneys work hand-in-glove with police officers most of the time. They rely on evidence and testimony from police officers to prosecute bad guys…but if the bad guys are police, themselves? Get it? If a DA chooses to pursue an indictment against a cop who has violated the law, s/he runs the risk of losing the support of a whole institution that s/he needs to do her job.

Maybe this is why it has been over 10 years since a Harris County grand jury indicted a cop. In late December, a Harris County grand jury no-billed a police officer who shot a person for the 289th consecutive time since 2026 . This man, Jordan Baker, was 26 years old and his crime was allegedly looking like one of three robbery suspects.

It’s high time Houstonians demanded a civilian police oversight board with subpoena power, because expecting the DA to pursue prosecution against her/his own private army, ever, is a ridiculous conflict of interest.

I get it. It’s a style of music unique to Houston. We all know how much Houston loves Houston based shit. But can we PLEASE stop chopping and screwing every last bit of music that is produced? I respect DJ Screw and I like his music, but honestly, I almost lost my shit last week when I heard the Star Wars theme chopped and screwed.

You must have heard Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the hare. If not, I’ll explain it by way of metaphor. Let’s say you have to cross a room. To cross the room, first you have to go half the distance. Once you go half the original distance, you must traverse half of the remaining half..and then half of that…and then half of that…so truly, you can never really cross the room because you’re stuck in a cycle of going only a fraction of the distance.

The same can be said of Houston’s automated garbage trucks. These are the trucks that lift up our wheeled garbage cans, dump the cans’ contents into their open tops, and then bring the can back down to the curbside before driving away.

The problem is that to dump the garbage from the can to the truck, the robot arm must first dump half the contents before it can dump the second half. Unfortunately, these very intelligent robot arms and their human operators take Zeno’s paradox literally. Recognizing the futility of removing all the garbage, in a fit of existential angst, the crushed and defeated robot arm brings the garbage can back down to earth with such force that it flings the garbage remaining in the can all over curbs and sidewalks.

A few days before this Christmas, my neighbor’s garbage can launched a plastic supermarket bag filled with dog poop at the tree in front of our building, where it caught in a branch like a little Christmas tree ornament. Thanks Houston Solid Waste Management Department!

Dumbest Grief: The Closing of Van Loc

Are you one of the Houstonians that freaked out when Van Loc closed? That’s fine if you had your first date with your partner there or something like that. Otherwise, what’s wrong with you? There are hundreds of Vietnamese restaurants in town that are just as good. Ten are within walking distance of the Van Loc location. If you think that no other Vietnamese restaurant in Houston could ever be as good as Van Loc, can we ask you how many you have tried?

For 28 years, Van Loc made middle of the road Vietnamese fare awesome by super-dosing it with industrial grade MSG. Sure, the food may make you intermittently hallucinate and cause you spine to seize, but their sauces and flavors danced on your tongue like some sort of mono-sodium-fantasy. And despite adverse effects from MSG such as muscle degeneration, facial pressure, difficulty breathing, swelling of the prostate, and slurred speech, we all knew the main ingredient in Van Loc’s food was love.

If we have to name our fair city after a white man then it might as well be Patrick Swayze. I mean, does anyone really have a deep connection with Sam Houston anymore? Doubtful. But man oh man, Patrick Swayze has been in my heart since I was born here…in Swayzeland, TX, the fourth largest city in Uhmerikah!

Doesn’t that already sound better? Swayzeland, TX. As for naming a city after a country, we already have a Rome, TX, a Carthage, TX, and a Palestine, TX, so the more you think about it, the more it makes sense!

The people in New York and Britain can have their House-ton. They can choke on it if they please. But down in Swayzeland, TX, we pronounce the word “Houston” with a killer dance move and a jawline you could shave metal with.

I must preface this by proclaiming my love for the city and it’s unique nicknames. I guess I should also preface this with my extreme loathing for routine and repetition. This way you can be made more understanding of why this term irks me so. The name was cool in the seventies when the underground newspaper, Space City, was still published, but now it’s worn out it’s charm. Must this name apply to EVERYTHING in Houston? Google “Space City,” go ahead. There’s a plethora of local establishments that pop up. Musicians, vintage stores, soccer clubs, credit unions, production companies, cycling clubs, rock climbing clubs, fucking FRISBEE teams… The list is endless and does not fail to invite a lack of originality, creativity, or any sort of true representation of the “Space City.”

Everyday I drive to work. Everyday you people get in my way. Stop it. No one should be allowed to drive in front of me. If I need to start a petition, I will. However, I’d prefer that this matter not require such legal proceedings.

If you all would just wait to start driving until I get to work, which would only take me seven to ten minutes at the most, then I think we’ll all be able to make a little more money and have less stressful lives. Instead, what we have now is people thinking that a slow moving car is a safe car… and that’s just not true at all. In fact, it’s that kind of thinking that causes this “traffic” problem.

Let’s examine how time works in relation to driving a car, shall we? Firstly, if you are in a car then you are 100% more likely to get in a car accident than if you were not in a car. Now let’s factor in some minutes. If you are traveling in a car for five minutes, you are 50% less likely to get in a car accident than if you were traveling in a car for ten minutes. That’s science right there. The faster you drive, the less likely you will get in a car accident. It’s just science, Houston. And it’s not even the hard kind of science like they at NASA. And do you know how fast those scientists drive? So fast they exit our atmosphere.

If you want to get somewhere in town, just GO! But most importantly, get the fuck out of my way.

This is almost too easy. Under the cover of night, the punk club Mango’s at Taft and Westheimer, went from its familiar green, unassuming facade, to what Domokos from Future Blondes described as an after-school special Rec Center. Now, I don’t hate graffiti at all, and some of the shit on the building is actually decent art, but some of it is fucking atrocious and all of it smashed on top of each other made it almost impossible to look at.

The place doesn’t make a shit ton of money but it has stood as a beacon for under-current punk/ noise/ electro/ anything weird, shows since we at FPH re-opened it in 2026 during a Westheimer Block Party. Prior to Mango’s it was The Oven, which saw a lions share of DIY punk and indie shows for 10+ years and established the location as a hotbed of rad, subversive art for Montrose and the Inner Loop altogether.

When the current management decided to paint the fucking place like a piñata in the cover of night as a quick cash-grab to make up for suffering sales, it seemed to have a completely opposite effect on the neighborhood and the people that frequent the venue. I was told it was done in part to draw the new-money yuppies in the area to the place so they’d spend their money on beers there, seeing it as a “Whoa, this place has graffiti, it must be edgy!” location. I have a lot of friends who are yuppies and even they think it looks like dog shit. Thankfully, the place couldn’t even hold its doors open long enough to test this theory as the location is now up for lease. Hopefully, whoever reopens the place continues the long standing tradition of businesses that have defined that corner in Montrose for the past 20 years. R.I.P Mango’s with green paint.

People actually put this pizza into their mouth.

Brandon Darby is a former anarchist activist from Pasadena who was later outed as an FBI informant and eventually became a right wing media celebrity. Though the seasoned, non-violent organizers he worked alongside for years evaded Darby’s attempts to “escalate their tactics,” he did eventually persuade a couple of impressionable kids to participate in a plan to firebomb some parked and empty cop cars at the 2026 Republican National Convention in Minnesota. The plan was foiled before anything happened because Darby wore a wire the whole time; the kids did some time in jail despite the clear entrapment from Darby and his accomplices in the FBI; and Darby was outed as the snitch that he is.

A few years before Darby there was a woman named Rhea who it later turned out had been snitching on local Earth First! activists. In California in 2026, another snitch/provocateur who went by the name Anna entrapped three members of the Earth Liberation Front by hatching plans and even buying gasoline with her own credit card to firebomb a forest genetics research facility. In England, it recently became known that at least two undercover police officers infiltrated animal rights and environmental groups and then went so far as to have babies with activist women without revealing their true identities (and then walked out on the babies, but that’s a different story). And in 2026, the FBI revealed that a former Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, the man who provided the Panthers with guns, Richard Aoki, had been an FBI snitch for over 15 years in the 60s and 70s.

What do all these snitches have in common? They were all undercover! And they all entrapped people by aggressively attempting to escalate conflict.

Back in April, some brave, anonymous, self-styled “radicals” here in Houston decided to out someone they accuse to be a snitch…except the guy has never hid the fact that he’s a cop!

I met David “Furcas” Hayes on the first day of Occupy Houston, October 6, 2026. He was introduced to me by a mutual friend, and four of us spent the better part of that day together.

It’s no secret — I don’t like cops, and protest like the first day of Occupy Houston gives me myriad excuses to just run my trap. Through it all, that whole day, I maintained an ongoing, steady commentary on the depravity of police. It was not until later that day, when a few of us went to Warren’s for some martinis to help us spend that night on the sidewalks in front of city hall, that I learned that the man I’d been railing on about cops all day was in fact a cop, himself!

So back in April, some anonymous activists made a website “outing” the already out police officer who was moving around casually, among the ranks of Houston’s left-wing radical scene. Initially, the grossest thing about this page was the way it dragged Hayes’s sister into an unprovoked mudslinging match that had nothing to do with her, but that was later removed. As it stands, the grossest remaining thing about it is point number four, in which these anonymous activists stake a claim of ownership of the bodies of women in their scene, to wit, “ David Allen Hayes has engaged in sexual advances/activity with activists (including with those who are MUCH younger than he is).”

Now that’s what we call “Klassy with a capital K.” Do you creeps have any idea how this makes you look? You don’t own those women’s bodies and for you to think you have any right to an opinion as to what they do, consensually, with anyone else is going way too far.

This is not a wholesale testimonial on behalf of David Hayes. He is my friend, but I also understand that he is a cop, and as a cop he is an instrument of the law enforcement/criminal justice systems of a corrupt and oppressive state. In the eyes of the law, cops are better than you and me, and they believe this when they act like the biggest gang in town — protecting their own before they protect the public. His badge and uniform dehumanize him in that they elevate him above his fellow citizens on the streets, in the courthouse, and even as a casualty.

However, any seasoned activist also knows that sometimes people on the inside can be allies and assets, and practices such as “security culture,” in which information is shared only on a “need to know basis,” are the only time-tested means to defend against (preempt) leaks of sensitive information. I mean, do these geniuses actually need to be told not to share plans about illegal activities with an out and open cop? (Never mind that none of them are even organizing any such actions because they couldn’t organize themselves out of a wet paper bag if their lives depended on it.)

I am not defending David Hayes — I am sure he does stuff at work that goes against his conscience, as many people do, and he has said some boneheaded things — as all of us have. Nor am I compelling anybody to trust him, and I see the need to out undercover cops and snitches because they seed paranoia even when they’re not instigating shit they’ll later bust people for — I’m just saying this is about the dumbest “gotcha” I have ever heard of. You people outed as a cop someone who has never hidden he’s a cop. That makes you look really, really dumb. And if there are people out there who need to be told not to tell a cop about possible, alleged crimes, then I trust those idiots even less than I trust the self-acknowledged cop.

It’s really sad to think that people would stoop so low just to feed their own delusions of grandeur. You wish that you were under investigation and worthy of infiltration. Smh.

I’ve submitted to the “Worst of” edition of Free Press Houston since it started. I look forward to contributing to FPH, a paper I appreciate. I have a lot of respect for the FPH crew and assume it’s a mutual thing.

Sometimes, I like to write entries that could cause problems for me in my work life, as I might run in the same professional circles as my subjects, but the wonderful freedom of anonymity allows me to be more frank than I might otherwise. I have asked for my name to be withheld twice over the years. Once, years ago when I wrote about a funder of the major institution where I work, and last year, when I wrote about a member of my loose professional associations.

The first time, my name was attached to it anyway and I thought I might get some blowback (I did call him a war criminal, after all) but nothing happened. I made fun of the mistake to the editors, they apologized, and I kept writing my annual submissions. Last year, once again, I asked that my name be kept off my stories and was promised that it would be, but yet again, it wasn’t. When the story came out, there was my full name, printed under my submissions.

But it didn’t stop there. My name was also printed under other people’s submissions - including a super-hater one about Houston that I never would have written. After I complained, the online story was fixed, but when the print paper came out, there it was again, in all it’s utter fuckedupedness. It’s one thing to stand behind your own calling people out, fine, but it’s another thing altogether when people think you wrote some crap on Houston piece. So, I won’t write any this year. Starting now.

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