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:

Sagging closer to home

Check this massive thing out:

Hwy 3 at Walker Street, passing by the library (no kidding) this evening around 6 p.m.  Sorry for the blur - we were both moving. 

You're not even seeing the full extent of this trailer here.  It continued on beyond the right hand side of the photo.  I've never seen any of these mega-vehicles outside of freeways and larger regional highways. 

Three days after I wrote a post about sagging traffic lights being lifted in a heavily-industrialized area near the Houston Ship Channel, I run into the very same process three quarters of a mile from my own house.  At least one bucket truck was playing hopscotch with this load, jacking up the traffic lights in succession so that it could pass safely beneath each intersection it encountered. 

It's weird how life is often like that - you don't see a phenomenon at all, right up until the point where you see it multiple unrelated times in rapid succession.

Anyway, I've no idea what that object is, or why it warranted such a complex haul through suburbia after dark on a Sunday night, but it sure must have been important to someone.   My husband and I looked at this photo and thought, "Wouldn't it have been cheaper to dismantle it and re-erect it on site??"  Apparently not. 

Best hard surface floor cleaner

Answer:  I haven't found one that's worth paying for.  Not a consumer-grade appliance, at least.  There may be professional equipment for sale out there that works, but that's not practical for a single family home. 

This is not a rigorous scientific study, but here are my latest test results:

On the right:  The mop pad removed from the most recent device I brought home from the store to try.  This photo shows the results after the device had "steam cleaned" approximately 100 square feet of ceramic tile in my kitchen.  A light coating of dirt is visible on the pad.
On the left:  A damp wash cloth that I then rubbed over approximately 16 square feet of the same floor area that I had just cleaned with the steam mop.

In other words, the hand print indicates the degree of dirt that the mop left behind in a small subset of the "cleaned" area.  I estimate that the fancy steam mop picked up about 10% of the total dirt on the floor.  The rest it just spread around, causing visible streaks.  The floor looked worse after steaming than it did before. 

And I did RTFM on this one.  I followed the manufacturer's directions carefully.

We have no wall-to-wall carpet.  Our entire house, all 2,500 square feet, is finished in ceramic tile, which I describe in this post.  I intentionally chose a tile with a smooth matte surface so that dirt would not stick to it. 

Here's a low-light photo showing the surface.  It's textured enough to be fairly non-slip, but not textured to the point where there are grooves and ridges that trap dirt. 

And it has, indeed, been an exceptionally low-maintenance floor to the point where most of the cleaning is taken care of using this robot vacuum.  But everything needs to be washed once in a while, and I would be willing to pay for a mop appliance that can help with that task, given that (a) I have so much square footage and (b) it's not heavily soiled, so even a mediocre appliance should be expected to pick up what limited dirt is usually present.  So I've recently been trying out different models because it seems to me like real advances in technology should rightfully have occurred by now.  Advances have certainly been realized for the cleaning of clothing - why not floors??  But I've been cleaning hard-surface floors the exact same way for more than forty years now - with my hands and with a conventional cotton wring mop.  Alas, it looks like I'll be continuing that way for a while longer, because none of the products I've tried actually got the job done.

But there's a silver lining to all of this.  Properly approached, a hand-done floor wash can provide a good yoga-style work-out, combining elements of Plank, Down Dog, Cat-and-Cow, as many Sun Salutations you want to add as you jump up repeatedly to rinse your cleaning cloths.  Unless you have physical disabilities that restrict your movement, the old way is certainly better for your health and it's absolutely better for your pocketbook, as many of those fairly useless steam mop gizmos cost one to two hundred dollars apiece (!!). 

Happy scrubbing!!

Picture this dude wearing rubber gloves and with a cleaning cloth in each hand. 

Image screengrabbed from this "Yoga For Healthy Aging" BlogSpot post. 

The hallowed hob

Following up on my October post titled "Best 30-inch gas cooktop", here's one additional picture to tell a thousand words:

Not staged, very messy, totally authentic:
Do the math - that's a 14-inch wok and a 13-inch frying pan on a 30-inch cooktop, with room to spare for a pot and I could even put a bigger pot there if I needed to. 

This space-defying feat brought to you by a great stove design which wastes not a single millimeter, and which allows a slight but critical overhang of cookware on each side, creating virtual cooking space.   

The other night for the first time, it dawned on me that I could cook dinner AND breakfast at the same time, like this.  The dinner is a stew and the breakfast is a protein-rich concoction of organic eggs scrambled with lean Canadian bacon, green onions from the garden, spinach, and Reggiano cheese.  There's no time in the morning to make anything fancy, so this goes into the fridge and individual family members can take portions and warm them in the microwave for breakfast. 

As I was taking this photo, I had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach:  Did I really live with an inefficient builder-grade cooktop for three and a half years??  How many hours did I waste in that time??  How many healthy options did I not prepare and shove into the refrigerator because the original cooktop only allowed serial food preparation when, in all practicality given time constraints, I really needed to prepare items in parallel if I were to prepare them at all?   

Of course I should have upgraded much sooner but there was the monumental issue of all that market research (at least 20 hours' worth) and the challenge of having to ship the thing sight-unseen from out of state. 

Moral of the story:  I think it's worth it.  Were I strapped for cash, I would gladly do without a lot of other consumer items in order to prioritize the purchase of a cooktop like this. 

Why traffic lights sometimes sag

Have you ever driven through an area where the traffic lights spanning each intersection are slung so low on their guide wires that they look like they're dangling from the bottom of a hammock?  And you wish you could say to the municipal authorities, "Bubbas, hitch up your signal lights - they're sloppy!" 

I'd show you what I mean, but every time I Google 'sagging traffic lights', I end up with a bunch of hits about sagging pants.  Butt it's a similar idea with traffic lights. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Well, it appears that there's actually a method to that madness, a fact I learned only yesterday when I encountered this bizarre scene on Clinton Drive in Houston:

The guy in the oversized Toyota was partially blocking my line of sight, but lo and behold, two guys in bucket trucks had jacked this particular set of loose lights up into the air for reasons that weren't immediately clear. 

But those reasons soon became clear, and so did the mystery of the sagging lights. 

Holy crap - look at the size of that thing!!  I have no idea what was inside Pandora's epic box, but it was headed into the Port of Houston. 

Jacking job done, the bucket trucks folded themselves back up again.  These particular lights are not slung as low as some that I've seen, but it's clear that, if the guide wires had been any more taut, there wouldn't have been enough slack in the system to raise them to a height sufficient to let this thing pass. 

Indeed. 

Before yesterday, it never occurred to me that those lines may have been left loose for a reason.  More than two decades after I started working in Houston's vast and fabulous industrial sector, I'm still learning new things on a daily basis. 

Epic racism

It really, really chaps my rear end when I have to get important and mainstream Houston news by way of the "Epic Sh*t" Facebook group instead of through what are supposed to be the conventional, respectable channels of journalism.

I read Houston Chronicle daily, including the paid subscriber portions, and I saw not one word on the story of Landry Thompson, who traveled to Houston with her dance instructors and was forcibly taken into CPS custody despite overwhelming evidence that her circumstances were proper.

Furthermore, when I search the Chronicle online edition, I find no hits involving her name.

Screengrabbed from www.chron.com's search engine.

I can, however, get the story from HuffPost.  I can get it from ABC's Good Morning America - but apparently not from the ABC affiliate KTRK (which dominates our local TV market, by the way). 

Silencio.  What's up with that, exactly??  ABC can't claim that they didn't possess the content, because they broadcast it nationally. 

Screengrabbed from KTRK. 

This was an incredibly important local story last week, and apparently only KHOU had the guts and the conscience to report it.

"Only on KHOU" indeed.  Screengrabbed from Facebook. 

This story was incredibly important for two reasons:

(1)  Because HPD really screwed up.  There is no excuse for what they did to these people.  And then they compounded their unbelievable screw-up by intentionally NOT issuing a proper apology!!

(2)  Because this could have been an excellent teaching moment for the public in more ways than one, instead of being something that the local news media seems to have buried  - why? - because they don't want Houston or HPD to look bad so maybe it's best to sweep it under the rug?  Or far worse, maybe because they think that there was really no story here?!

These young people did everything correctly, and their civil rights were still violated, in my opinion. 

Most importantly, they were traveling with a notarized custody document.  That's the big missed opportunity for public education here.  Properly-presented news coverage could have given the public more information on this vital tool which is designed to eliminate confusion and ambiguity on exactly this kind of situation. 

And on that subject, I myself can speak from experience.  I have a daughter whose last name is different from mine, who isn't the same color as I am, and who doesn't strongly resemble me.  Particularly when we travel abroad, we always travel with a notarized document from her other biological parent explaining that she's properly in the custody of me and/or whatever larger group she is with (I can't tell you what law or rule compels this practice, because I only learned to do it by word of mouth from other people with similar family complexities). 

Racial profiling does work both ways, eh?  Of course, it's absolutely nowhere near as common for a white woman to be profiled as a black man, but it does happen.   Over the years, I have been interrogated.  It always starts with the same suspicious question:  "What is the relationship of this child to you?!"  And it always proceeds with the same initial answer:  "I gave birth to her."  If I'm feeling a bit puckish that day, I might volunteer that I delivered her naturally after only 12 hours of labor, which is unusually short for a first pregnancy in an ass-less American white woman (translation: small pelvic structure), but I was very physically fit and so it was an efficient process. 

But it doesn't matter how much TMI I provide.  More than once, the historical result has been a furious glare as the "authority" mentally embraces his or her default belief:  That it's more likely that I'm one of those sinister rich bitches who trafficked the defenseless child of color out of the third world so that I could chain her to my toilet and use her for slave domestic labor for the next fifty years of her life.

Unlike the young people in last week's news story, I've never been pushed beyond the initial phase of interrogation.  Maybe its because of that expectant look on my face that always says, "Go ahead - make my day."

I do hope that the Thompson family decides to litigate in this situation.  I certainly would if I were in their position, but that's an individual decision and a tough call either way.  It probably wouldn't gain them that much personally, but it would do a tremendous favor for American society by publicly emphasizing that not all young black men are criminals.  And not all unusual child custodians are criminals, either. 

Major, major kudos to KHOU in stepping up to the plate on this one. Here's their initial coverage: