Movie mule

I got a lesson in cultural evolution last night when I took my teenage daughter and her friend to a multiplex theater to see an R-rated movie. The rating was for language only, which does not trouble me with respect to my own child, and the other girl's parent had given his permission for her to see it.  But because of "heightened security" at the theater, last night for the first time I had to actually buy a ticket and do exactly what this famous sign says:

That is, I had to physically accompany them into the theater. And of course it's every teenager's dream to have a grey-haired old woman along for the ride on a Friday night.  

See, in the Olden Days, which was all of two weeks ago, what teens would do is figure out which movies were down which multiplex hallway, and they'd buy a ticket to a PG movie down that same hallway.  And then they'd simply slip into the theater showing the R-rated movie they wanted to see in the first place.

It's a small, harmless act of rebellion.  If the worst thing your teen does is sneak into an R-rated movie, count yourself among the truly blessed.  

But now there are gestapo movie police who patrol the multiplex hallways to thwart exactly this type of subversive activity.  Which meant that I had to hustle my girls into a movie that I had no intention of participating in, which makes me a modern-day analog to a drug mule or something.  The poster says that I have to "accompany" them - it doesn't say that I have to actually sit through an entire frat house flick myself, right??  It's not my deal!!! I'm just muling these kids over the movieland border!!

If nothing else, this kind of enforcement represents a shrewd money-making effort on the part of the cinema, because it means that they're making an extra ten bucks without having a geriatric like myself proceed to actually occupy the seat I paid for.

Because, of course, they don't make enough money already.  Sigh.  

Buc-ee's bonanza

Given that commercial news outlets such as Houston Chronicle and GCDN (paywalled) have already covered the general story of the unprecedentedly-massive Texas City Buc-ee's opening a few days ago, I thought I'd provide you with sides of the story less reported.

And that would include an expound on the curb-your-dog signs, which are unprecedented in their own right.  Perhaps League City can take a few pointers from this photo series for their proposed dog park, assuming it moves forward into development.  

Poochy peer pressure is positively punishing in this regard.

BTW, note that long line of cars to the left.  The next thing that has to happen here is that TxDOT needs to get on the ball (the small ball) and revise the IH-45 interchange, which is now frightfully under-capacitied for serving both Buc-ees and Tanger Outlet Mall.  

Fear not in the face of fierce peer pressure - the infrastructure is in place for dealing with the demands.  

Even more different types of signs, humorous but pointed.    

Obviously they're very serious about this directive.  With 701 parking spots and in view of the fact that about half of all American households include at least one dog, can you imagine what conditions would be like if they were not serious about it?!  Do the math!!

I took pics of folks taking pics of their kids with the now-famous bronze beaver.  

As for the store itself, it's a Buc-ee's monolithic classic.  Every time I walk into one of these, I can't help but think, "How the hell did you people manage to build this thing with such a long unsupported span?!" 

The store is marvelous, thematically similar to the other mega-stores such as the one in Gonzales and the one in Waller, but this one does have "more stuff" (referencing a quote from several years ago by co-owner Beaver Aplin when Chron asked him, "What are you going to put in such a large store?!").

There is need for EVEN MORE stuff, however:  I was disappointed to find that the wall-sized collection of spices and sauces did not include any Mexican blends.  There's Texan, BBQ, and Cajun in abundance, but no Mexican (other than fajita spices which, to me, fall into the BBQ category).  Beaver please take note - we have a lot of TexMex and MexMex going on around here.  We could really use a good Mexican spices vendor, especially since The Spice Lady of Kemah decided to discontinue her artisanal efforts in order to pursue a different career focus (reportedly).  

Another mild disappointment:  I was hoping that they had produced a T-shirt to commemorate the Texas City grand opening.  Perhaps they did, but sold out.  I bought my Dad a non-commemorative T-shirt because I figure he'll wear it as a conversation piece.  My Dad lives thousands of miles away in another country, but that won't matter.  Seeing the shirt, someone will, indeed, walk up to him in the street and ask him where his favorite Buc-ee's is located.

And they'll also ask him, "What's your favorite billboard slogan?"

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia.

Did Arcade Fire's art sample a house on Ramada Drive?

Back in 2010 when I first saw the album cover for Arcade Fire's critically-acclaimed album The Suburbs, my jaw hit the floor.

It took only a fraction of a second for me to realize that I'd seen that house somewhere before, but it took me about two painful weeks to zero in on its location.  It was one of those mysteries that nagged in the back of my mind until I finally figured it out.   

It's on Ramada Drive in Clear Lake, although for the privacy of the owners, I won't give the address.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps. 

It's not necessarily that the house literally looks like the album cover feature for feature, but moreso that it feels the same.  Of course, it's convenient that both are shown as painted the exact same unusual shade of "rancher red", but back when I first saw that house in the mid-1980's, I believe there might have indeed been a boat-sized sedan parked in its side yard (the house is unusual for Clear Lake in having lateral access to an integrated garage).  The art work doesn't show a garage, but it shows a sedan in an otherwise-unlikely position.  

It's a provocative suggestion that the two might be related because Clear Lake City was Houston's first master-planned suburban community, so there's a certain nexus of precedent between Clear Lake and the album.

Boat-sized sedan (or perhaps a station wagon) parked in front of a brand spanking new rancher as shown in a promotional brochure reported to have been produced in 1965.  Every once in a while this eerie thing circulates anew on the internet (e.g., this HAIF reference), but I can't find a live reference for it right now.  I believe photo credit should go to Friendswood Development Company (as it was owned in its original incarnation by Exxon), but I'm not certain.  

More purely-speculative forensics:  The Suburbs was inspired by band members Win and William Butlers' upbringing in The Woodlands, but that palm tree on the album cover does not scream "Woodlands" to me.  I've been to that mysterious, far-off place called The Woodlands and they do indeed prefer a lofty forest canopy feel there, just as the name suggests.  But in coastal Clear Lake, palm trees have historically been de rigueur, especially during the era referenced by the art.  Drive around "old Clear Lake" and you'll see classic examples of palms that seemed like a good suburban planting idea at the time (i.e., several decades ago), but which have since morphed into rather shaggy imposing behemoths quite similar to the one depicted in the art work.

We'll probably never know whether art has intentionally or just accidentally imitated life here, but one thing we do know for sure is that The Suburbs is unmatched in its artistic achievement.  This particular passage neatly sums up why.

Screengrabbed from this review by The Hipster Conservative. 

The Suburbs won Grammy Album of the Year on February 13, 2011.  I started this blog about a month before that.  My tag line references the same realizations that are explored by the album's concept.  We spend the majority of our time and most of our money on our suburban lifestyles.  Shouldn't our experiences here be just as deep as the pockets needed to fund them?  They are - but only if we are smart enough to consciously realize it instead of falling victim to shallow surface messages.   

The suburbs - not as lame and formulaic as often depicted.

Screengrabbed from the 1965 Friendswood Development Company brochure (I think).  

Why 'Murder Mansion' obsession is so persistent

Seabrook's former List Mansion property was back in the news last week, with stories about a disgruntled tenant who was allegedly unaware of the property's shocking past prior to renting a tract subdivided from it, stories that made their way all the way to publications in New York the United Kingdom (correction per reader observation).

The Houston Chronicle ran this teaser photo, but it showed photos of the present-day mansion, which is not the mansion with which local people are still firmly if not increasingly obsessed.

Photo screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle article.  

That would be this mansion, the original as built by murdered owner Bill List.  To make a long story short, List was a wealthy business owner who was shot to death by a few of the young men he had recruited to stay with him and whom he had allegedly molested sexually.

Photo screengrabbed from this Travelers Today article.  

Here's what I find most remarkable about this bit of local history:  Thirty years after the murder that defined it, the interest in the long-demolished mansion is growing rather than fading.  About 10 years ago as I was sitting around with friends doing the typical beer-and-banter thing on a Friday evening, the subject of "the haunted house on Todville Road" came up, and we searched the internet for information regarding it.  At that time, there were a few references to the fact that it had existed, but nothing in the way of substantive content.  We had only our own memories to go on as we compared notes.  Each of us had independently been inside the thing because, back in the mid-1980's, it was a rite of passage that any consummate Clear Laker had to find a trespassive route into the massive abandoned structure for their own personal look-see.

I took this Flickr photo and attempted to photo process it to make it look more like I personally remember the mansion.  There's not enough dynamic range remaining in the faded photo for me to do it justice, but I remember the brick having stronger orange tones and contrast than the Flickr photos and most of the other historical photos show.  

By 2014, however, you can find all kinds of information regarding the place - it's remarkable how that information base has grown.  There's even a closed Facebook group called "Todville Murder Mansion" with almost 2,100 members!  And other online references to the place abound.

There's even this YouTube video which is a snippet from an obscure indie film shot (pun intended) within the mansion.  The movie does have an IMDB listing.

Image screengrabbed from the YouTube snippet.

So what does it all mean??  I'm not entirely sure, but I have a few ideas.  On its face, a wealthy eccentric builds a one-of-a-kind residential structure and gets murdered there.  This in itself is not radical by American standards - that kind of thing has happened before.  But what was radical was the structure itself.  The fact that it has been emphatically denounced as "a grotesque monument" and "a supremely depressing, tacky, hideous place" belies a deeper truth.

Tell me that there are not now a bunch of inner-loop residential lofts selling for $400,000 that bear a certain curious resemblance to this facade.

Screengrabbed from this site. 

That's right.  Bill List, as reviled as he is, was quite possibly the first person to ever attempt that residential design aesthetic which we now refer to using the phrase "industrial chic" or a similar term.  He certainly did not hit that ball out of the park, but if you delete the obvious dated and incongruent elements in his construction, there's a certain resonant familiarity to the residuum that people are just not ready to admit, but which preoccupies them subconsciously nonetheless.   When I stood in the middle of that mansion in 1986 or 1987, that was my dominant realization:  This place is way, way, WAY ahead of its time.  My fateful day of trespass, almost 30 years ago but I remember it like it was yesterday, had an enormous and lasting impact on my own residential design aesthetic.

If you doubt me on that point, here is your head-slapping "HOLY SH****TTT!!!" moment of truth.
:-)
Stacked stone landscaping photo from this post.  

What's happening when people describe the List Mansion as "grotesque" is that they are combining their visceral reaction to the murderous events that happened there with their awareness of its obvious design flaws, and they are projecting the resulting emotional amalgamation onto the mansion as a whole.  They are consciously missing its corresponding strengths in the process, but the subconscious misses nothing, and so this tantalizing fragment of cognitive dissonance twigs at them, contributing to the persistence of the thing in their awareness.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.  Thirty years after he was murdered, Bill List is still way, way, WAY ahead of his time.  But with the internet and social evolution being what they are, that may very well change.  I hope so because, criminal elements notwithstanding, he deserves more visionary credit in death than he ever received in life.

Name that Clear Lake grocery store

Did you watch Nat Geo's "Live From Space" special last night?  If so, you may have caught a glimpse of this:

Photograph of my TV set as the unusual show was being broadcast live.  

The line at the top of that wall undoubtedly reads "Thank you for shopping your Clear Lake..." but then the name of the original store appears to have been pulled off the wall, probably because the store changed hands and the new chain never bothered to add their name.  So which store is this, and where is it located??

I was extremely surprised by the show's suggestion that ISS astronauts are fed regular grocery store food (albeit prepared via a complex process usually involving freeze-drying).  I've known a few people who have worked at McMurdo in Antarctica, and they explained to me that the food there was exceptionally good quality (e.g., this post, although I don't know that particular person).  The reason behind this was very simple:  it costs so much to transport the food to the station that the cost of food itself becomes negligible in comparison.  Therefore, it might as well be the best possible quality.

I was assuming that the same is generally true of the Space Station.  Do they really eat mainstream Clear Lake grocery store food?!  If so, maybe they should be getting extra hazard pay.

Houstonia's hilarious home run

Oh, please, Houstonia, please forgive me for re-posting this without even the slightest attempt at value-add.  It's just perfect the way it is, and it has to be shared!!  Bravo!!  Encore!!  Encore!!

:-)

Sam

I am reminded of the line from the old Jesus Jones song "Right Here, Right Now":

A woman on the radio talked about revolution
when it's already passed her by.

There's an extraordinary young man from a little town 13 miles south of here and I believe he has already changed the world.

I think we've hit a tipping point with this one, even if we can't yet articulate exactly what it comprises.  But the signs are there.  There is a little gas baggery on the internet, but given the magnitude of what was represented by the young man's recent announcement, gas baggery is almost completely conspicuous by its absence.

Similarly, there are no negative or even neutral reader comments appended to any of the local news stories on his announcement - I keep checking and they haven't appeared, a development which flies in the face of our well-deserved reputation for hosting a large and vocal fraction of right-wing religious fundamentalists (I use that noun loosely).

Perhaps most tellingly, no critical or derogatory memes appear to have been spawned in response to this young man.  You have to remember that the vast internet community, with all of its wing-nut extremism, makes memes out of defenseless people disabled by conditions such as Downs Syndrome, for crying out loud.  The wing-nuts will stop at nothing to defile and ridicule every person and public interest story that makes the news.  But Michael Sam?  Not a single image out there.  It's as if the entire world is holding its collective breath, and holding its tongue, waiting to see what happens next.

But it has already happened.  Regardless of what becomes of Mr. Sam from this point forward, the thing - whatever it really is - has already passed us by.  We'll only be able to really understand it at some unknown future moment of 20/20 hindsight.

As we wait for that point on the time continuum to intersect with us, please consider devoting two of your minutes to contemplating this unusually powerful video below.  If you don't watch a single other commentary on the Michael Sam situation, watch this one. Good ol' WFAA knocked it way, way out of the park (yeah, I know - wrong sport, but you get the picture).  Here's the URL if you're reading this on mobile device, and the embed to follow.

Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olc5C4SXAYM

Please consider blogging or tweeting

We've got a snow day in greater Houston and no snow to show for it.  As soon as the public school districts began announcing closures yesterday, the domino effect began in earnest.  Commercial cancellation announcements began pouring into my email box and visual voice mail account.

If you're wondering what to do with a bit of unanticipated free time today (or any other day), please consider starting your own blog or Twitter feed, especially if you might be able to see yourself participating in some kind of a community connective role.

There are 300,000 people in Galveston County, and very little community-oriented citizen journalism that I can find.

There are 200,000 people in "greater Clear Lake", which overlaps with north Galveston County, and the same observation applies.

We have a couple of notable exceptions, the most prominent of them being Island Drumz, which is the Clear Lake Shores blog.

Clear Lake Shores is about the size of a postage stamp.  Seriously, about 1,000 people live there, which is probably less than the population of Centerpointe subdivision with its 438 single family homes, most of which contain multiple-person families.  And yet Island Drumz has 68 subscribers and usually receives over 1,000 hits per week.  Do the math.  

If you do the math on that one, what you find is that Island Drumz is an effective mechanism of local social connection and information-sharing.  It represents a phenomenon that is rare in our area.

Bay Area Houston Today is another local example, but many of its posts promote ideological positions to a degree in which neither Island Drumz nor Centerpointe Communicator engage.  I do my share of editorializing - that's one of the perks of being a blogger - but it's not my primary focus.  And if I want political information, I tend to cut to the chase and go straight to The Texas Tribune rather than any given blog.

Our area's original blog was The League City Blog, which once again had a political focus, but at least it contained some hard information about what was going on around here.  Real Scary League City Politics was a similarly-themed progeny, but as of this writing, both have been dormant since 2012.

In sooth, the local blogging field is wide open.  Ditto with Twitter, from what I've seen so far.  Seven days ago when I announced that I was going to supplement blogging with tweeting, I made the statement "I was reluctant to begin this initiative" (Google Chrome has a sense of humor with cut and paste formatting, apparently).  Three days ago, a New York Times blogger neatly explained the reason for my reluctance in a piece titled "Valley of the Blahs:  How Justin Bieber's Troubles Exposed Twitter's Achilles Heel".  Simply put, Twitter is degenerating into a forum where people are trying to be noticed more than they are trying to be useful, which was Twitter's original purpose.   And in fact, much of what I've found in perusing Twitter fits into that category.  Nevertheless, it's still one of the best connective options we've got right now.

There is a HUGE latent demand for local information and connection with the other people who surround us.  We know this with absolute certainty.  Humans of New York recently proved it to us in spades.  HONY is essentially a forum through which local people communicate their individual stories.  They do it anonymously but viscerally, and they do it in a way which is less self-promotional and navel-staring and more in the style of sharing their wisdom and life lessons learned.  And people can't get enough of it, because that is exactly what is so missing from our social universe.   The blog has two million followers and the book that followed the blog was an instant #1 best seller.

When I conceived of this blog in 2011, I added a tab called "Neighbors" and I foresaw including content that was very similar to what HONY has since invented (this post from November 2011 best reflected my original intent for that post category).  But I didn't develop it because the idea was such a different paradigm that I was afraid it would creep people out.  I saw an acute social need for that kind of content, but as a small-scale contributor to the communicative universe, I wasn't sure that I would be a suitable person to try to re-set that precedent.  HONY has now smashed the old paradigm on behalf of us all.

Particularly if you are an older person, what are you planning to do - die with all your empirical wisdom still trapped inside your own head??  What would be the sense in that?  What if you were to share some of in an accessible format such as a blog, within the context of your life here in our local area?  I'm not talking about the navel-staring and self-promotion that characterizes so many individual private blogs.  I'm talking about sharing useful information.

Useful sharing benefits everyone, including the sharer.  A few months ago, a senior member of my scientific profession lamented in a public editorial that he had lost his enthusiasm for his career.  After about thirty years of doing essentially the same things, it had become stale to him, and he wondered what in the hell he could possibly do to keep himself engaged in the gap that he now dreaded, the ten-year gap between the onset of staleness and the final relief of retirement.  He hit upon an increased focus on mentoring junior members of our field, and suddenly he found himself filled with joy and renewed drive.

His story of typical of how life works.  Connection is good.  Sharing is good.  Mentoring is good.  Transmitting accumulated wisdom is good.  So, yeah, there are a lot of people out there who absolutely do not want to know about toilets that don't function properly.  Fine - they can enthusiastically skip that particular blog post.  But rest(room) assured, there's someone else out there who is looking for some guidance on that and literally a million of life's other small challenges.

Think about it.

Extreme mystery solved

Ask and ye shall receive.  On December 18, I raised the issue of the now-for-sale local Extreme Makeover house, a question which seemed pertinent given that League City is once again poised to embark on another "free house" promotional event, one that is not without ongoing controversy (link paywalled).

Screengrab from that post. 

Eight days after I asked, Chron has answered:

Screengrabbed from this article, which explains that the family was done in by a number of factors, chief among them high carrying costs, especially the five-figure annual property taxes triggered by a dream home built on this vast scale. 

Chron also linked to this article which explains how and why so many "free house" winners ultimately lose their windfalls.  Hopefully as these cases accumulate, they will serve as a lesson for groups trying to balance public relations and private practicality:  Is their primary goal to actually help these families, or are they just trying to make a big splash for TV?  Because packing up and moving is Extreme-ly disruptive, especially for children who need more situational stability than adults do.  If high carrying costs force many winners to quickly sell their "free" houses, the purely-human benefits of this practice certainly become debatable. 

Anyway, best of luck to the Kemah family as they move into the next less-grandiose, more human-scale phase of their lives. 

The memory tree

Here's a creative and potentially meaningful idea for those of you, especially you younger people just starting out in your lives, who would like to develop a Christmas tree tradition that's a little deeper than the typical practice of simply buying a chopped-down tree and tossing a bunch of generic plastic and glass ornaments on it. 

It looks pretty and it's very traditional, but does a thing like this have any personal significance whatsoever??  Christmas is supposed to be a time of reflection, humble gratitude, and goodwill.  What do these brand new $2.99 fabric bows have to do with that? 

Screengrabbed from Wikimedia Commons. 

When I was a young woman beginning my post-graduate-school adult life in the early 1990's, I decided that my Christmas tree would be a memory tree, and that I would build it incrementally, year by year, just as I was building my life. 

There would be no cheap garlands and made-in-China shiny tinsel.  There would only be symbols of important rites of passage.  I myself would acquire only one new ornament each year, plus I would add gifts from other people that held personal significance. 

Once I settled on this idea, the obvious thought hit me:  Maybe I would live long enough to see my tree achieve decorative completion, or maybe I would not.  There was only one way to find out. 


A carved cat ornament, hand-made folk art from the deep American rural south, which I received as a gift.  This was my very first Christmas ornament. 

The other decision I made was that I would not kill a tree each year.  I bought a small Norfolk Island Pine, so that it could grow with me and the family I created.  By this time, we have cycled through a few of them, as they outgrew our house!!  One of those is now planted just outside our front window. 

That first Christmas, only that cat hung on my tree.  He was all alone there with his wide-eyed stare.  How could there be anything else on the tree??  I had not built my life yet.  To have a fleshed-out Christmas tree at that point would have felt false to me. 

But then came the relentless passage of time, with all of its extraordinary events.  Here's a small sample from the years that followed. 

From a year when Enron passed out hundred-dollar Swarovski ornaments as if they were candy canes.  And I went to one of those legendary Enron Christmas parties and I wandered around feeling completely helpless, wondering how on earth I would ever be capable of comprehending the essential mechanics of business, because money seemed to be raining down from the sky, and I couldn't for the life of me identify the source of it. 

And the rest, as they say, is history - not just mine, but every Houstonian's.  I stare at this ornament today and I am transported back to those moments of helplessness in the face of hollow grandeur.  And even now, I become as breathless as the now-lifeless corporation whence this expensive bit of glitter derived.     

A sterling silver ornament that was attached with a bow to the outside of one of the many baby shower gifts I received.  It is now tarnished, but to remove the tarnish would be to strip away some of the authenticity, because it's been a long time since I gave birth to that baby. 

A gift from a family member in 1999, because elephants never forget, and I am known for having a very good memory. 

More gifted folk art:  Santa on the half shell.  My extended family likes to support local microbusinesses just as I do. 

As my baby grew, so did the collection of ornamental art projects that she produced. 

A S'mores ornament which we selected to commemorate 2005, because we did a heck of a lot of camping that year!

From more than a decade ago, a twin ornament commemorating the last Christmas visit we had with a close friend's family before she died of cancer.  There's an inscription in the center (redacted here) and the other family has an identical ornament with the same inscription. 

Our chosen ornament for 2010, the year we brought our dog home!!  We had a heck of a time finding this one, and then we had to take a fine-point Sharpie marker to it in order to simulate her brindle coat.  But it's a pretty good resemblance, wouldn't you say? 

The answer for me was yes, I did, in fact, live long enough to see my tree completed - and completed with a richness that exceeded my wildest early-90's dreams. 

May your holiday be deeply meaningful to you according to whatever your personal traditions comprise.

The dialect dynamic

Within the past week, I have addressed people using phrases of speech delivered in American English, Texan English, Spanish, Hindi (at two unrelated settings 45 miles apart), Ebonics, what I call East Harris Urban (a local industrial sub-dialect very different from Ebonics), Amharic, and Mandarin (with the last two instances occurring just 15 minutes apart). 

What he said, in whichever language he was using at the time. 

Hillcroft at US 59.

I also cussed my broken clothes iron (no steam) in the hybrid English dialect of my birthplace, the unusually intricate linguistic variant that I was forced to completely disguise before I could get anything whatsoever accomplished as an independent businessperson in this neck of our southern American woods. 

I started speaking about our dog using some French while in her presence because she now comprehends far too much English for anybody’s good.  But it wasn’t the perfect Parisian French in which I was fluent so many years before I came to America, because that tongue has been influenced in the intervening time by the folks I’ve met from southwestern Louisiana. 

By far the most captivating of this week’s exchanges was a three-way earlier today that included myself, a black couple in a store checkout line in front of me, and the proprietor.  The distinguished-looking professional black woman, a would-be wheedler, was abruptly cut off by the proprietor as she attempted to negotiate the terms of the sale.  “Girl, WUSH yo’ NAME!” the native Mandarin speaker demanded authoritatively in flawless Ebonics.  As the black woman reverberated in silent shock, I looked at her husband and muttered in high amusement, “Y’all can attempt to debate with a Chinese shopkeeper if you want, but I can tell you right now who’s going to win.”  The man nodded slowly, the whites of his eyes saying all that needed to be said.

As I approached the counter to complete my own transaction, the proprietor grumbled mildly about customers and their unreasonable demands.  “It’s OK,” I said softly.  “The problem is that there are now so many different cultures here that nobody can remember when we’re supposed to haggle the price and when we’re not.  The only thing we know for sure is that we all have to do it at La Pulga!”  She smiled impishly as she completed my transaction, at which point I bowed slightly and said, “Xie xie!”  “You’re welcome!” she replied in the crispest possible English, throwing back her head and laughing with delight at my near-perfect rendition of a phrase that many attempt but few deliver accurately. 

What I wouldn’t give to see and hear this remarkable place a hundred years from today, because none of this diversity is going to fade away – it’s only going to become more and more intimately melded and mutually enriching. 

In the meantime, may there be peace on Earth, as there is in Houston. 


The scene late this afternoon on FM 2351 in Clear Lake.  There’s no way that our local universe could continue to unfold as it should unless a bunch of suburban white people waited patiently for an hour in an outdoor line to get their Christmas Eve tamales.  As they have done since time immemorial, right?



Extreme mystery

Kemah's "Extreme Makeover" home has been for sale for months now without a peep as to why, or what will become of the approximately fourteen people, mostly children, who live(d?) there.

Remember this?  Just three short years ago, the project captured the attention of north Galveston County and League City, with then-mayor Toni Randall playing a visible role in its development.  Technically the home was in Kemah, but it was situated just a stone's throw from the League City municipal boundary, so League City residents were very much involved. 

Low resolution photo screengrabbed from the well-known Houston real estate blog Swamplot. 

Actually, I understate.  The project captured the attention of all of greater Houston.  Screengrabbed from this KTRK story. 

The circumstances of the sale seem a bit bizarre, if the information posted online is taken at face value.

The internet is positively littered with re-posts of the real estate listing.  It apparently began its life as a sale offering at around $800,000...

...only to see its price slashed to $575,000 a few months later.

Screengrabs from a Google search. 

But here's the weird thing:  the widespread use of the word "infamous" in these listings.  Infamous?!  If you were trying to market a valuable commodity in a positive light, would you refer to it as "infamous"??  Maybe if you were trying to sell a pirate ship or Jimmy Hoffa's Rolex.  But a family home??

I'm not a realtor so I cannot look this up, but some sources suggest that the sale is a foreclosure.

Another Google screengrab, although the active Houston Association of Realtors listing makes no mention of foreclosure or short sale. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way that a "free" house can be foreclosed upon is if it were effectively re-mortgaged by way of a cash-out refinance or home equity loan of some type. 

Anyway, this mystery has come to my attention because of a recent attack of foot-in-mouth disease on the part of Councilman Todd Kinsey, and by that I mean the idiom rather than the virus of similar name. 

The story goes like this.  Another organization is now seeking to raise funds to build another "free" home in League City, this time for a military veteran's family rather than for a family devoted to domestic public service, as the Kemah family unquestionably was.  League City is reportedly contemplating whether or not to kick in about $20,000 to that organization's upcoming fundraising effort. 

During the course of this, Galveston County Daily News quoted Kinsey as referring to "[his own] legacy", which arguably sounds like he's trying to allocate other peoples' money (i.e., our taxpayer dollars) in a way that primarily makes himself look good.  Public response on GCDN has been neither kind nor forgiving. 

The issue raises the obvious slate of questions: 

• Should so many tax dollars be devoted to the benefit of just one family who hasn't even been identified yet?? 
• What about every other needy person and family?? 
• What makes one family more incrementally deserving than any of the next hundred others who might be considered for a similar benefit?? 
• And do these "free home" schemes even accomplish their purported goals in the first place?  Who really benefits in the long run? 

In parsing that final question, we might look to the last "free" home that got built near League City, and what happened with it.  Although that story may very well remain a mystery, the verdict is that what happened was almost certainly not good, if the house is now being lost.  I've mentioned in many other posts that I'm a home improvement junkie - real estate porn is my recreational indulgence.  Like thousands of other League City residents, I watched the growth of the project on the Extreme Makeover TV show.  Which makes watching this follow-up video all the more surreal:

Window into La Porte

My work travels took me through the City of La Porte yesterday and so I did my usual bucket-list thing:  I dropped in on some local specialty shops that I had driven past twenty times previously without stopping. 

La Porte has attempted to buck the trend of small town Main Street decline (OK, outright death) by repurposing its original general shopping district into a targeted specialty market. 

Incidentally, I like La Porte's municipal logo much better than League City's controversial logo.  By representing Galveston Bay dynamically but generically, La Porte leaves open to the imagination what a person might achieve there on a variety of personal levels.  This logo conjures up a sense of freedom, energy, and delight without being locked into a specific narrowly-defined and hellaciously-expensive recreational pursuit.  When I look at La Porte's logo, I think to myself, "Immediately they're communicating to me that they're artistic, so I wonder what there is to discover here?"  In contrast, when I look at League City's logo, I think to myself, "I'm S.O.L. in this town unless I own a sailboat and can afford a berth plus insurance for it." 

Remember the idea of "open to the imagination"??  Or as Anne of Green Gables would say, "There's plenty of scope for imagination in it."  "Open to the imagination" is the antithesis of "We spend our money here according to well-established stereotypical formulae from which we do not deviate". 

Screengrabbed from the City of La Porte website. 

Tap to expand.  Amen, sister. 

Screengrabbed from Goodreads. 

OK, enough horse-beating digression.  Now onto Main Street, La Porte.

They've created a really cozy atmosphere for shopping. 

There are historical markers here...

...and there.  Somewhere in my dim and distant memory, I remember reading about that famous children's train. 

I'm a sucker for pretty but unconventional building colors... 

...and meticulously-maintained thoroughfares.  Main Street in itself has become a piece of art.  This store (Mike's Antique Station) was my favorite of the ones I saw, for the sheer diversity of goods it contained.  To get a feel for the interior, search for it on Facebook. 

Two things struck me about this shopping-slash-cultural experience:

(1) The word "antiques" in the La Porte context really means "small antique items".  There wasn't much furniture in any store.  Mostly they were dominated by glassware and ceramics, except for Mike's, which had a mind-boggling collection of just about every item you could name that was smaller than a breadbox.

(2) The high prices blew my mind.  I come from an age when new products were expensive and most used goods were sold at bargain basement prices.  With the recent influx of cheap goods from China and other overseas markets, that paradigm has basically been turned upside down.  "Old" and "used" are now expensive (even if they are nowhere near old enough to qualify as antiques) whereas "new" is dirt cheap.

Let me give you an example.  Three months ago when we installed our first stacked stone garden, I had to cut down a fairly large tree to accommodate it.  Not wanting to be wasteful, I wondered if I could turn it into one of the deep south's folk artistic staples - a bottle tree. 

Here's an example screengrabbed from this site.  They come in many forms but I'm partial to the classic all-cobalt-blue renditions. 

Austin landscape designer Pam Penick actually has the coolest-looking modern bottle tree I've ever seen, but I don't reproduce her imagery so you'd have to click the link to see it. 

This bottle tree project is not a high priority on my list of life chores, but given that I was driving through La Porte anyway, one of my motivations for stopping was to see if I could pick up some blue bottles to get me started, again with the idea of recycling plus also supporting local small businesses by purchasing from them instead of feeding the ravenous maw of cheap crap that continuously spews forth from China. 

What I found in La Porte blew my mind.  Blue bottles that weren't that old were consistently priced in the range of $8 to $50.  Apiece!! 

Compared with what you can get on the internet for a bit more than one dollar apiece.  The very same item, except it's new instead of slightly used. 

Screengrabbed from the Label Peelers retail site which, in turn, references the LD Carson site. 

I have no problem supporting local businesses by paying a little more or in some cases even significantly more for goods.  But not eight times as much!

With respect to some items in the La Porte stores, I was amazed to see that the prices did, in fact, reflect prevailing market values.  Here's an example of where the brick-and-mortar pricing was right on the money: 

Back in the 1970's, every household in every Commonwealth country had a collection of Red Rose tea figurines on the kitchen windowsill.  Seriously, these things were everywhere.  And they were freebies included in every box of tea, except the older ones are now priced at five to eight bucks apiece.  Plus shipping if you buy them on eBay.  If I'd known this value appreciation was going to happen, I could have saved my family's collection and used it to finance my child's college education three years from now. 

Screengrabbed from Google's thumbnail of this listing. 

Anyway, if you're looking for unique décor items, La Porte might be a good place to shop.  But don't expect to experience the flea market economics of yesteryear.  The goods may be older, but the prices are very much a modern phenomenon.