If it leads, it bleeds

*CURSE* the American commercial news media anew today as stories of an altercation between League City Councilmen Okeeffe and Becker spread widely on GCDN (paywalled), Chron, FOX, KHOU, a few out-of-state sites such as this one courtesy of the AP, and gosh knows where else. 

Obviously my post title is a punny play on words which acknowledge that, in this case, it was the leaders who ended up bleeding rather that a simple bleeder who ended up leading the evening news in what has come to be characteristic vacuous style. 

Screengrabbed from this NPR piece which explores some of the ethical issues. 

I say *CURSE* because this is yet another example of the media reporting superficial bullsh*t instead of the meaningful backstories that likely underpin that bullsh*t and which might have even prevented some of that bullsh*t had they been properly exposed in a timely manner as is the media's ethical function in society! 

Thomas Jefferson said it first and in general terms, and I've said it before, and I've said it very recently within the context of League City's affairs:  this municipal store is not being properly minded, and when that happens, all hell is guaranteed to break loose.  The only questions are when and in what specific forms. 

But rather than focusing on the non-minding, the news media focuses on the hell - in the race for meaningless HTML clicks, the meaningful investigation doesn't happen very much anymore.  An opportunity for presentation of actual content is superseded by a vacuous vignette of voyeurism.

And then to make matters even more ridiculous, they don't even do a proper job of investigating the hell breaking loose!!  So Okeeffe and Becker apparently decided to exchange blows, and based on current vacuous voyeuristic vignettes, the key word there is exchange, meaning, neither the news nor the police citations suggest that either man was disproportionately at fault.  OK, if that's the case, why wasn't this considered to be an incidence of mutual combat, which is legal as I understand it?  Maybe there were extenuating circumstances which warranted the police citations, but my profoundly important point is we'll never know under our present bottom-feeding news media reporting standards!!

The whole thing is disheartening, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: maybe this incident will now - FINALLY - push a real investigative journalist to take a closer look at what happens in League City.  Maybe someone can leverage this punch line as a hook that justifies closer examination. (Hint for any professional journalist who considers doing this: Lead your stories with anecdotal reference to Wednesday's fisticuffs which will then get you the clicks you need while at the same time having your supplemental content actually fulfill a supportable journalistic ethic).  And if that closer look does happen, maybe we'll then start seeing some of the real League City issues come to light where they can be hashed out and resolved, thereby lowering fist-clenching tensions for all involved. 

And oh - that "Hall of Shame" label that I placed on this blog post?  That's not intended to apply to Okeeffe and Becker, whose altercation appears to have been executed in fairness.  That's intended for the news media, whose execution was not. 

Capacity reached at Galveston County animal shelter

GCARC did a press release a few weeks ago announcing that they had max'd out their capacity with six hundred and forty five (!!) adoptable pets in residence.  I would have posted about this sooner had I been aware of it. 

Distinguished GCARC alumna:  our dog is a constant source of public admiration and people frequently ask us what breed she is and which breeder we ordered her from.  Her breed is that superior lineage known alternately as "mixed" or "Heinz 57", and the "breeder" (or at least the breeder recipient) was Galveston County Animal Resource Center (which is a euphemism for "animal shelter"). 

Yes, in most cases, it's goofy to put clothing on dogs.  However, because she's an inside dog, we have her shaved and groomed on a regular basis, so she is terribly vulnerable to cold weather (this pic was taken in December).  Without her insulating under-coat of fine fur, she'll shake like a leaf when taken outdoors in winter if we don't dress her up like this.   

GCARC is wonderful and I highly recommend it.  Their staff is very helpful with each stage of the adoption process, and we could not have gotten a better dog. 

But let me go one step further than that endorsement, and explain an animal shelter reality that nobody likes to talk about or ask about or even think about, given that it is an overwhelmingly emotional subject. 

Many people are afraid to adopt from an animal shelter because they're worried that they'll get stuck with an animal who was abused and who behaves neurotically and dysfunctionally as a result.  Or they're afraid that they'll get an animal who is set in his or her ways, who they later discover was not properly socialized, or whose temperament and energy level is simply not a good fit for their family.  To be "on the safe side", they would rather order a young animal from a breeder whom they trust to do a good temperament matching on their behalves.

Well, here are my observations on that stereotype.

First of all, the "safe side" isn't always so safe.  Breeders don't always make the right calls about the temperament of their stock.  I have a couple of friends who ended up with purebred dogs from hell because of this (I personally don't care if I ever see another Jack Russell again in my life, after seeing the likes of what a few acquaintances purchased). 

Second of all, most shelters will give you a chance to properly evaluate your animal.  Most have ownership grace periods of a few weeks to 30 days during which you can return an animal and you won't be judged if you do this.  You'll probably lose your adoption fee because that may have covered your candidate's shots and spay/neuter, but that's small potatoes compared to the overall costs of owning a pet, so who cares?

But this idea of returning an animal utterly horrifies many people.  Pets have become so personified in our culture that people feel as if returning a dog to a shelter is tantamount to abandoning a newborn baby to die in a ditch somewhere.  People get so acutely emotional about pets that they experience tunnel vision when presented with a potential reality like this. 

I know what of I speak, because this happened to us and I was very surprised at the ferocity of the response I received.  When I announced that we had to return our first canine candidate to the shelter whence she came, members of my own extended family positively snarled at me, "How could you simply kick that dog to the curb?!" as if the entire pet overpopulation problem was solely my personal fault.

This was the first beautiful dog we brought home from the League City Animal Shelter with the sincere hopes of integrating her into our family.  She was two to three years old and she obviously had been socialized prior to entering the shelter, but unfortunately, we came to understand that she had not been raised around children.  She absolutely refused to relate to our then-younger child, whose dreams of having a best-canine-friend relationship would have been crushed if we had decided to keep her.  In the few weeks that we had this dog in our home, mostly what our child did was cry and cry and cry because she felt so rejected by her. 

The folks who snarled at me were suffering from emotional tunnel vision and were only seeing one side of this equation.  The fact is, the rates of euthanasia are extremely high in our local shelters - some estimates put them as high as 85%.  We were only in a position to save one dog's life, and it had to be a dog that fit with our family.  When we took that original dog back, I was very careful to explain to the shelter that she had no behavioral problems but needed an adult owner.  I also made sure I had taken her to a supplemental vet visit and had wormed her and begun heartworm preventative, thus paying some of her bills in advance to maximize her appeal to a future adult owner.

The League City shelter is much smaller than the Galveston County shelter and, at the time, they did not have a large number of dogs to choose from, so we decided to try our luck at the County shelter.  And that is where we found the likes of this:

Little Red Riding Dog, the single most playful and foolish mutt on the planet.  An absolutely perfect companion for a child.  All the neighborhood kids just love her.  Even a few of our neighbors who dislike dogs are receptive to her. 

If we had kept that original yellow dog, chances are excellent that the totally lovable creature shown in the photo above would have been euthanized.  The week we went to GCARC to make our selection, the place was positively overflowing with dogs.  I spoke to a volunteer there and it was suggested to me that this dog had about 48 more hours before she would have been put down.  Given the volume of dogs, it is unlikely that another family would have come along to choose her in the intervening hours. 

There are three morals to this story. 

First, never underestimate the value that a public animal shelter can offer to you.  They do have good dogs, and you will find one if you take the time to vet them, as you are entitled to do.  Good shelter personnel will not scorn you the way my family scorned me.  They will instead be kind and understanding in helping you with every step of the selection process, which they will realize is an imperfect and difficult process at best.  The GCARC personnel treated us with complete understanding and respect - they know full well that the adopted animal has to be the right fit or it won't work for the family.  And that fit doesn't always happen on the first try.  That's just the imperfect reality of it. 

Second, don't be intimidated by anyone else's emotionalism as you do what's best for your own family.  If someone can't parse the bigger picture in a situation like I just described, that's their problem, not yours. 

Third, this story is a parable of life, and it has been one of my daughter's most important learning experiences growing up.  Life is not perfect and it sometimes requires us to make wrenching decisions.  One day, it's not going to be an unsuitable dog from whom she must decide to separate - it's going to be some immature boyfriend.  She was heartbroken at having to send that first dog back, but she also realized that we didn't have a real choice in the matter, because it just wasn't the right situation.  It takes guts to make a decision like that.  How many people do you know who persist in a relationship with the wrong person because they just can't muster the courage to move on and grow as healthy adults?  My daughter now has a powerful precedent.  She separated from her first canine candidate as compassionately as she could, and then went on to find the right permanent canine match for her ('til death do them part, without question).  May that extraordinary lesson stay firmly with her as she now begins to transition into her young womanhood. 

You almost certainly save a dog's life if you choose from a shelter.  If we had been emotionally unable to make the uncomfortable decisions I described above, this perfect foolish red-caped dog would have died.  Maybe we would have found a breeder able to get the temperament call correct on his or her first attempt, but knowing what we know about the euthanasia rates at animal shelters, that would have been a hollow victory for us.  Too hollow to accept as an option. 

Recent neighborhood scratch-a-thon from this post which was tweeted by a well-known journalist and read with amusement by folks all around the whole world. 

Building Galveston

Every time I go to Galveston, I get a little bit depressed by its latent capacity for redevelopment, capacity which remains unrealized decade after decade. 

One of an uncountable number of beautiful old buildings boarded up. 

It contains a row of carved faces near the top, but they all look very sad. 

When I ask people why this languishing perpetuates, I've consistently gotten the standard pat answer over the past twenty years: "Galveston is controlled by a small number of wealthy families, and they don't want to see increased development because that would dilute their power and they'd lose their ability to control it."  I have no way of knowing how much truth there is to this, but that's the urban legend that tends to serve as an explanation.  Maybe someday, someone will investigate this and publish a proper analysis (hint, hint). 

Whatever the real story is, not even billionaire BOI George Mitchell can seem to truly breach it despite his phenomenal contributions over the years.  He's often credited with the famous quote "Any fool can make money in Houston, but it takes a genius to do it in Galveston", but he himself actually attributes that gem of a summation to one of his brothers. 

Anyway, it's a shame that Galveston doesn't achieve its potential.  It's a shame in the larger social context but it's also a bummer specifically for the several hundred thousand of us who live at this node, the center point between Houston and Galveston. 

Our subdivision's developer didn't pull our name out of thin air.  Sometimes I joke that our personal center of everything is in the exact middle of nowhere, but we literally are at the center of gravity of these two cities.  This is the sign at eastbound FM 518 and IH-45.  Our freeway exit (League City Parkway) is about six thousand feet south of here, which quite literally puts us in the middle.

We Clear Lakers can go either north or south for some of our extra-territorial social recreation, but in the logistical sense, it's one hell of a lot easier to head south.  There are many non-working days where I just wish I could zip out for an hour or two without an epic traffic battle.  Unless there's a holiday or special event in Galveston, it's often easy to just fly down the road and be there quickly without wasting time and energy.  If instead I go to Houston, I'm usually exhausted by the freeway fight before I even get there. 

So I did this - I went to Galveston late Sunday afternoon after getting into a mood of ,"I just want to go for a simple walk and see some stuff". 

Following our recent underwhelming ArtWalk experience, I started off around Postoffice Street, which was quite literally deserted.  I was the only patron in almost all of the stores and galleries I entered.  Not unexpectedly, most of them closed up shop by 5 p.m. on a beautiful weekend afternoon (another Galveston bonus: summertime temperatures are much cooler than in Houston).  No sense staying open if there's no one around. 

I then ambled a few blocks north to The Strand, which is where the action was - but why, I'm not entirely sure, because much of what's there seems to consist of trinket shops and places that sell ice cream and unhealthy sugary drinks. 

And of course the trinket shops are full of cheap Made-in-China clothing which is suitably oversized for fitting folks who tend to overindulge in unhealthy sugary drinks. 

Nevertheless, I found some fun in one of my favorite facets of Galveston - the historical architecture - and so I thought I'd close this contemplative with some of that.  It might not be a good idea for a day laborer to set a single toe onto the public right of way in League City, but if you're a prosperous-looking middle-aged white woman carrying a gallery shopping bag, you can spend hours jay-walking like a disoriented stoner all though the City of Galveston and the only thing anyone will do in response to this is smile and nod.  I call this photo series below "Galveston buildings all taken from approximately the same street angle using a Lumia 928 cell phone", a title intended as a nerdy nod to "More songs about buildings and food".  I'm not even going to tell you what all of these buildings are, because sometimes it's better to simply shut up and look at the art without a lot of verbal details cluttering up the experience. 

Happy rambling, with or without an epic freeway battle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terrapin in trouble

I always keep a pair of leather gloves in my car for when I see the likes of this:

Sarah Deel looking south toward NASA Road 1.  Fortunately, there were almost no cars on the road at this hour of the morning. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you consider intervening on behalf of imperiled local wildlife:

• Safety first.  Call 911 if you perceive that an animal situation poses a risk to people (such as a large, violent, or erratic animal in a public place - see the remarkable video at end of this post).
• Watch yourself if you jump into the roadway (especially if you're a day laborer).  Watch both yourself and your car (if you're driving one). 
• Note that it might not strictly be legal to enter the roadway on foot for these purposes, particularly if you fail to yield the right of way to oncoming traffic. 
• Note that it's probably not legal in any of our local jurisdictions for a private citizen to take it upon themselves to direct traffic around an imperiled animal in a public right-of-way. 
• Be mindful of the potential for zoonotic diseases through contact with wild animals.  I would never pick up an animal without gloves even if I believed it posed no risk of physical injury.
• Animals can't comprehend your rescue intentions.  They can injure you through biting, scratching, and generally wreaking havoc, even small animals.
• Consult with professionals whenever possible.  If calling 911 is not warranted, you could call The Wildlife Center of Texas (formerly Wildlife Rehab and Education) at 713-861-9453 for advice on how to deal with your situation.  Either that or Texas Parks and Wildlife. 
• Many animals require permits to possess or even to handle.  Both of the sources in the bullet above have information on that. 

Screengrab of The Wildlife Center of Texas's homepage banner.  Note that they have several links designed to help people understand what to do in predicaments involving wildlife. 

Gosh, all that stuff above sounds pretty complicated for a five-second turtle dash-and-grab, doesn't it?  But sometimes people focus so narrowly on saving the wildlife that they endanger themselves or those around them without realizing it.  And we all live in a self-imposed hell of incomprehensible regulatory complexity, so the considerations listed above are just the nature of it. 

Oh yeah, with terrapins (turtles), one more piece of advice which I haven't verified but which seems to be true to my informal experience: 

When you put them back down again, point them in the same direction they were originally headed.  I think they use the sun to navigate, so if you take them back to the side of the road whence they came, they're more like to crawl into the roadway all over again. 

Here is this a pic of this shy girl pointed west (I'm assuming it's a girl because Texas Turtles says that many wandering turtles are females looking for a good place to lay their eggs).  She was covered in algae, which means that she crawled out of some really nice ditch or pond, of which there aren't many in proximity to Sarah Deel.  She may have trekked a considerable distance before embarking on her life-and-death roadway experience this morning.   

Peek-a-boo!!

She was on her way to a date with destiny.  I was on my way to a meeting and so I did not have time for good portraiture.  She got lucky.  I also saw a large snake on West Walker Street this morning but I was en route to meetings and didn't have time to rescue that guy. 

Speaking of immediate-risk large wildlife, here courtesy of Absolute Clear Lake is a humorous video of League City PD attempting to intimidate an alligator on FM 2094 (Marina Bay Drive) a few weeks ago.  As my teenager observed, "He's takin' no sh*t".  In more civilized language, this was a case of alligator 1, LCPD zero.

LC vs. the good ol' USA, Part 3

GCDN has done us a great favor today by uplinking the PDF of the recent day laborers' judgment, the PDF that I did not have access to when I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this post.  Having the corresponding filing information allowed me to search for this cleaner link to the judgment which should not be restricted by any commercial news media paywall.

As I noted before, I'm not an attorney and my comments on this matter are purely citizen-based and opinion-based.  But now that I get to read the judgment in its entirety, I find it to be even more damning and disturbing than I had initially realized.

If you wish to learn what really goes on in America and how America really works, don't read the news, don't read the history books, and don't listen to most of what is presented in educational settings.  Simply read Court judgments and see America through the remarkable lens that they hold aloft. 

The results are often shocking, as they are in this example.  League City was alleging that day laborers were posing a risk to public safety by interfering with traffic in the public roadways.  But the Court appears to have found that LCPD intentionally conspired to arrest day laborers on private property where they had the owner's permission to be physically present.  And they didn't just show up to arrest them - they deployed a pre-meditated set-up.  So said the Court in the paragraphs above, as I interpret it. 

I am not an attorney, but it is very difficult for me to imagine how League City could successfully appeal this decision with skeletons like this rattling fiercely in their collective closet.  I don't presume to understand the mind of the Court, but the inclusion of this passage looks like it could be a shot fired across League City's bow, as if to say "Yeah, we both know that you only got busted on the First Amendment portion of this deal, but we also both know that there's more going on here than anyone has fully fleshed out yet.  Watch yourselves." 

The judgment names certain other roadway-soliciting groups who were not targeted by the actions of LCPD, and in fact, my original intention for this Part 3 post was to spoof one of those other groups, just to overstate a point about enforcement selectivity which I personally find to be arbitrary at best and discriminatory at worst.

Uh-oh.  More solicitors on the hoof, and on FM 518 to boot. 

As Danny DeVito famously noted in The Big Kahuna, it doesn't matter whether you're selling industrial lubricants or salvation (or for that matter, day labor services) - selling is selling.  This is true regardless of whatever is alleged within that whacked-out (and unconstitutional) anti-solicitation passage in the Texas Transportation Code. 

But after reading the full judgment linked above, I've lost my appetite for a spoof.  This thing is so sobering that I no longer have the gumption to tell you just how much more acutely I've been injured by the group shown in the photo above, rather than by League City's day laborers (whose services I try my best not to personally engage, as I think I explained convincingly and quantitatively - ka-CHING! - in this post). 

Those other guys got an explicit hall pass, and explicitly for FM 518. 

Not only have the white-collared guys shown in the pic above solicited me from League City's rights-of-way, they have further encroached on my rights and my general sanity by repeatedly entering my private property without my permission.  I was going to demand that LCPD do something to "crack down" on this group which I find to be an affront to dignity, peace, and good order, not to mention traffic safety.

Of course, maybe I've got it all wrong.  This is quite possibly the only solicitation group in League City to repeatedly transit the notoriously-dangerous and congested Five Corners intersection on bicycles without getting themselves killed.  Maybe they really do have the inside track on God, because surely this otherwise-unexplainable survival is evidence that they have been granted His divine protection...?

OR perhaps their success is more a function of the fact that they tend to operate mechanized vehicles in pedestrian crosswalks against the lawful flow of traffic, as they are doing in this photo.  Maybe LCPD ought to crack down on them for that.   

Yeah, you can see that there was an hilarious spoof brewing in there somewhere.  But I've lost my appetite for a full blogging tour de force.  As I'm nursing my indigestion in the wake of the Jornaleros judgment, I guess we'll all wait to see whether League City is foolish enough to appeal this decision.


And foolish enough to waste even more of our taxpayer dollars on this case.  GCDN reported that they have so far spent $424,000 on it. Presumably the cost recoup award to which the day laborers are now entitled would be in addition to that figure. 

Perhaps this is the real reason why League City is now endeavoring to reduce its spending.  Maybe they need to divert some money to their legal bills. 

Sigh...

Initial review: Lumia 928 Windows phone

I decided to go against the consumer flow in choosing a Lumia 928 Windows phone as my next cellular "upgrade".  For me, the choice was mostly driven by professional considerations.  My phone is central to the operation of my small business, and I wanted zero games, apps, social media crap, or bloatware to be interfering with efficient operation of voice, text, calendar, email, and mass storage.  After two years of suffocating in Droid bloatware hell, I was more than ready for a much cleaner interface.

However, there was one other feature that cinched the deal on this choice. 

The camera.  Wow!!  That's a macro shot, a close-up of my kitchen sink where yesterday's dinner was looking positively forlorn. 

A macro shot, with a cell phone.  Look at that depth of field, contrast balance, and saturation.  My Nikon D3100 would not have done much better. 

Click on the picture to enlarge, but remember that this is significantly downsampled for blogging purposes.  The original looks even better than what you see here. 

Having a good camera is very important to me professionally and personally.  I had seen the 928's camera advertised as superior.  I do believe it lives up to the hype. 

Whence that dinner came: this is a phone shot of the interior of Rose's Seafood from a few months ago, taken with my Droid 3.  In my opinion, the Droid 3's camera has nowhere near the quality or use potential. 

A superior phone camera is not merely a self-indulgent choice in my case.  If this phone is physically robust enough to stand up to intensive use (and that's a big "if"), it will alleviate my need to carry yet another separate piece of equipment (namely a bulky DSLR) on certain professional job sites.  That would reduce my labor burden and it would also reduce wear and tear on my much more expensive DSLR. 

However, this Lumia is not a perfect design by any means.  I got rid of Android altogether in significant measure because the calendar feature on the Droid 3 absolutely sucked, in my opinion.  The Android OS just wasn't handling the interface with hosted Microsoft Exchange.  Annoyingly, I find that the Lumia's calendar is just as bad if not worse, which is exasperating and surprising given that Exchange is a MSFT product.  It has a very non-intuitive feel to it and, rather than being presented proactively with good summary of information, I have to hunt and peck to find the schedule details that I need. 

But the camera sure is fine.  And Rose's has excellent crawfish right now - best I've had in a couple of years. 

Bamboo privacy hedge, Part 1

For all of you who are lucky enough to build the suburban budget version of your dream home... I feel your pain when you see something like this developing in your hard-won field of view:

aaaaAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHH!!!

It was like Boardwalk Bullet's little brother or something!  A giant wooden structure towering above me and making me want to scream!!  The sight of it dominated our tiny back yard.  We had been hoping that the future buyers of this subdivision lot would choose a small one-story house plan like ours.  No such luck, obviously. 

For you out-of-towners who didn't get my Boardwalk Bullet joke, it's a giant wooden roller coaster that looms above our flat coastal plain environment. 

Screengrabbed from Wikipedia. 

Those neighbors of ours are great people.  They have a larger family and they need that big house, and of course they had every right to build it.  But my idyllic garden view and ambiance certainly got shot to hell with its construction, eh?  Here I am spending years of my free time building this one-of-a-kind back yard, aaaand someone else's windows look straight into it from just a few feet away. 

Sigh. 

So like every other predicament I face in life, I was determined to find a workaround for this jarring loss of privacy.  I needed a really, really tall and really narrow hedge to do it.  As in, I needed the thing to be at least eight times taller than it would be wide, because we have such microscopic yards and narrow setbacks that I can't afford to have a lot of width to any vegetation screen placed here. 

And what cultivar could possibly be trained to grow at least eight times taller than it is wide?


The right bamboo species would do the trick.  I can't find a photo on the internet of the type of screen I'm attempting to grow in this suburban setting, but this photo gives the impression of the effect I'm trying to create between these two narrowly-spaced houses. 

Screengrabbed from this DIY Life site. 

Whatever I grow here must be absolutely majestic.  Otherwise it will be visually overwhelmed by the massive house behind it.  This is definitely a case of "go big or go home" (pun intended). 

Nothing looks the least bit majestic here, eh?  This was taken in December 2011, on the day this bambusa malingensis (aka "Seabreeze bamboo") went into the ground. 

I mentioned previously having purchased these three small malingensis starts from CayDee Caldwell in Rosenberg.  She's the local expert on all things bamboo, and that was her recommendation for growing a medium-sized timber bamboo species in our area. 

But here's the thing: I can do the research, but malingensis is a rare choice and a relatively new cultivar (it doesn't even have its own Wiki page yet).  I don't know of anyone else who is growing it in Galveston County (as opposed to other bamboo species) so it's not like I can drive somewhere and look at an example of how it might turn out when planted in these soils and in this microclimate.  One never knows how well a given species will do until it is tested.

Here's the same view 18 months after planting.  Ignore the present shapeless mass - I will skinny that up into a very narrow groomed form once it starts to attain more height (right now, the shapeless bulk is supplying the energy it needs to get it established, and height gets enhanced as it out-competes itself for sunlight).  The important thing is that it is attaining good height, in just a year and a half.   

 Most of this year's culms are coming in a good four feet above last year's, which is encouraging.  If conditions are ideal, the thing can get up to 40 feet in height, but 25 feet is more common.  Even 15 feet would work well in this location. 

So my malingensis is indeed rising, and maybe I should make a betting pool on how high it will eventually go.  Once it gets to between fifteen and twenty feet, then I will be able to start grooming it into that sought-after majestic vertical privacy screen, so stay tuned for that.

Only the malingensis knows how tall it can get in these particular growing conditions, and it's not tellin'.

Something else I've noticed about this new growth: it's so dense that it significantly muffles the sound of my neighbor's A/C compressors, which are on the other side of our shared fence. 

Incidentally, for the sake of politeness, I did discuss my intentions with my next-door neighbors before planting the malingensis.  They had trouble visualizing what I was talking about, which is understandable because this kind of thing is unprecedented for our area.  But they weren't opposed to the idea, and I think they'll enjoy the screen, which will filter the western summer sun which currently beats relentlessly on the side of their house.