14 October 2004
Weekend music roundup (10-14-2004 edition)
Smart readers of blogHOUSTON already know that David Cobb provides a great roundup of local rock music each week.
This week's installment was posted yesterday.
I like to supplement his list with the alt-country/Americana/Texas music shows that I favor. Here are the shows that have caught my eye this week:
Thursday (October 14)
Geoff Spahr, Firehouse Saloon
Shawn Nelson, Continental Club
Tracie Lynn, Mucky Duck
Friday (October 15)
The Flametrick Subs (Los Skarnales open), Continental Club
Matt Powell Band (F-Co opens), Firehouse Saloon
Lucy Kaplansky, Mucky Duck
Mandy Smith Group, Live Sports Cafe (Happy Hour)
Saturday (October 16)
Tom Russell, Mucky Duck
Mark Miller, Firehouse Saloon
Hacienda Brothers (Mary McBride opens), Continental Club
Mandy Smith Group, Stag's Head Pub
Montrose Beer and Gun Club Event (click Read More link), West Alabama Icehouse
I'm sure Blanco's probably has some fine acts playing, but they don't have a web presence and they don't seem to care. Give 'em a call if you like the kind of music you see above, and as always, doublecheck with the venue before heading out to a show. Schedules do change, rapidly.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/14/04 06:58 PM |
12 October 2004
Houston Metblogs reviews Onion Creek
Karen over at Houston Metblogs writes a great review of Onion Creek coffeehouse/cafe/bar in the Heights:
Onion Creek, located at 3106 White Oak Boulevard in the Heights, has become a local favourite – the camaraderie! The food! The refreshing pints of beer! The selection is extensive, and my husband has thankfully stopped whining, since he’s able to have a “proper” roast-beef sandwich and a tall pint of Boddington’s. The wine-list is impressive for a neighbourhood bar, and as for food – the sandwiches and individual pizzas are delicious – and the Country-Ass Reuben is so good, you’ll slap your mama.
Onion Creek sounds like an excellent place, aside from potentially grouchy neighbors like the first commenter.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/12/04 09:30 PM |
11 October 2004
Hold the patty
Once again, PETA is doing its part to place Houston in the ranks of world class-dom. It seems we've made the top-ten list for vegetarian-friendly cities:
Houston has some of the best vegetarian restaurants around… especially if you're really hungry! From all you can eat buffets that make a vegetarians drool, vegans swoon, and carnivores reconsider their position, to exotic vegetarian In-House dining, there is something for everyone.
Posted by Callie Markantonis @ 10/11/04 08:36 PM |
08 October 2004
Dallas recruits Houston for police officers
KHOU-11's Jason Whitely reports that the Dallas Police Department is aggressively recruiting Houston for new officers:
Houston and surrounding counties could be losing more police officers and potential new recruits because of an aggressive effort to lure our law enforcement officers to Dallas.
It was a billboard that first caught our attention. Dallas Police recruiting in Houston? It's true.
"We want to have a real diverse police department. I've gone to New York a couple times. I've gone to Phoenix, El Paso, McAllen," said Detective Buu Nguyen, Dallas Police Department.
Two Dallas detectives are in town all week, going to job fairs, schools, even at the Houston Community College looking for new recruits.
"We see a lot of interested people here. They're walking around. They treat us very well here. They've accommodated us very well here. All we're trying to let them know is that we're hiring," said Detective Eddie Lopez, Dallas Police Department.
They plan on hiring 220 new officers over the next year.
Out of town recruiting is nothing new for large departments, but Houston Police said it recently had to cut all of these out of its budget to save money. Dallas has done the opposite; spending more in the last few weeks than it has in the last few years.
Dallas City Council is spending $22,500 buying billboards across the state, 10 of which are in Houston.
One attraction Dallas offers is pay. First year salary there is $38,640, compared to Houston's $27,097.
Dallas recruiters said they've already found 40 or so Houstonians interested.
But their visit here comes at a time when the Houston Police Department is facing a personnel crisis itself.
A large number of officers here are retiring over what they consider a poor pension plan, among other things.
It's unclear whether any will take Dallas up on its offer or whether Houston will have a harder time finding new cadets.
Emphasis has been supplied to make the point that Whitely doesn't: HPD is facing a looming manpower shortage, because City Council under Mayor White's leadership has not funded cadet classes sufficient to replace personnel lost to retirement and attrition.
KHOU-11 recently reported that manpower is being shifted from city parks to more basic police services, indicating that personnel shortages are already affecting everyday life in Houston. Meanwhile, the Mayor and Council have apparently placed a higher priority on smoking bans and a $2 million African-American museum giveaway, judging from time spent on those issues.
At least Dallas should find Houston fertile recruiting ground for their police department, since there's not really local competion at the moment! That should give our friends at Y'allBlog one more thing to like about Houston.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/08/04 12:55 PM |
07 October 2004
Food and drink (10-07-2004 roundup)
The Chronicle's online food/drink section is a little thin this week, with nothing new posted from critic Alison Cook.
Dai Huynh interviews Jeff Armstrong, executive chef for 17 restaurant in the Sam Houston Hotel.
And Gracie Ochoa checks in on the Bambu Lounge at the Rickshaw.
As mentioned above, the offerings seem a little thin this week. Maybe the dead-tree version had more content. Or maybe the problem is something else.
Over at the Houston Press, Robb Walsh also seems to have taken the week off.
However, Paul Galvani found plenty of problems at the The Burning Pear in the Sugar Land Marriott.
This reader of the Houston Press hopes Walsh returns to review a Houston restaurant or two next week.
Those are pretty slim pickings on the reviews this week. Surely that's another niche to be filled by enterprising bloggers, eventually.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/07/04 11:08 PM |
06 October 2004
Opa!
Although the other Greek Orthodox church in town also puts on a festival, this one is still the biggest and the best.
Indeed, it's consistently one of the better ethnic festivals put on in this city.
Parking is always difficult near the festival. If you're not familiar with Montrose, your best bet is to park at Lamar High School and take the free Metro shuttle (details here).
Go enjoy some (bad) Greek wine, excellent spanokopita, and beautiful bozouki music.
Opa!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/06/04 11:43 PM |
This week in Houston music
David Cobb posts his invaluable roundup of this weekend's upcoming live music in town.
Cobb focuses mainly on rock, so here is a supplement of Texas/alt-country/Americana music going on around town.
Thursday, October 7
David Joseph, Firehouse Saloon
Friday, October 8
Django Walker, Firehouse Saloon (Eli Young opens)
The Weary Boys, Continental Club
Jimmy LaFave, Mucky Duck
Shake Russell, Anderson Fair
Mandy Smith Group, Fitzgerald's
Saturday, October 9
Cooder Graw, Firehouse Saloon (Jody Booth opens)
Hadden Sayers, Continental Club (King Coal opens)
Paul Thorn, Mucky Duck
Jon Dee Graham, Sidecar Pub
That list isn't exhaustive, but those are shows that caught my eye. Also, Blanco's usually has good Texas country acts on the weekends, but since they don't have a website, they don't get as much publicity as they might.
Always check the venue before heading out, as bookings can change rapidly.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/06/04 11:30 PM |
03 October 2004
Bad air in Houston
By all accounts, ozone levels in Houston last week reached unhealthy levels that should please nobody.
However, it's interesting to compare the headlines that different news outlets applied to the news:
Groups disagree on severity of Houston's smog last week (Victoria Advocate/AP)
Group says smog particularly bad this week in Houston (Denton Record-Chronicle/AP)
Houston tops for bad air (Houston Chronicle)
In Houston, record pollution (Dallas Morning News)
The Victoria Advocate's headline is probably most accurate, since an environmental group and a Texas agency did disagree on how to interpret the data. The Denton Record-Chronicle headline if somewhat misleading in that ozone and smog are not synonymous (the story itself is the full version of the AP story run by the Victoria newspaper). The Houston Chronicle headline is somewhat misleading, since bad air and bad ozone readings are not synonymous (although neither is desirable). The DMN headline is true to an extent, but somewhat misleading outside of the context that there are now more data gathering points in Houston, so claiming that a record number of points collected data of some occurrence isn't really a useful method of comparing the data over time (and "pollutions" sounds much more ominous than ozone levels).
Houston air certainly has its problems, but the biggest problem tends to be ozone (and the main reason Houston is exceeding Los Angeles in "bad" ozone days this year is attributed to atmospheric conditions in LA). It doesn't help the public debate on the issue when the media seizes on Houston "beating" LA for "bad air" or "pollution" (not synonymous with ozone) and burying the details well below somewhat misleading headlines.
(Update) The headline for Janice Williamson's report for KHOU-11 is probably the most accurate of all: Houston smog hits danger zone.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/03/04 01:28 PM |
30 September 2004
Food and drink (9-30-2004 edition)
As the weekend approaches, here's a quick roundup of various food and drink reviews this week:
Robb Walsh gives a big thumbs up to Denis' Seafood in West Houston. In a town where too many seafood houses are dishonest about their fish, Walsh says Denis' tells the truth about their offerings. And when you have some of best offerings in town, why not? Personally, I love this restaurant.
Alison Cook gets little joy from her experiences at The Grille at Clear Lake. That's fair enough, but readers may find little joy in her review, which has plenty of fine details, but never coalesces into a satisfying whole (not unlike her judgment of the restaurant). At least for this reader. But we link. You decide.
Dai Huynh updates us on various food news around town.
And Joey Guerra says The Belmar club "is the perfect place to grab a drink and gab the night away." One might suspect that a dance club might actually be better suited for... dancing? But again, we link, you decide.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/30/04 11:35 PM |
29 September 2004
HPD manpower issues begin to affect public parks
The Houston Police Department has looming manpower issues that are now starting to be felt.
Carolyn Campbell reports for KHOU-11 that HPD is being forced to cut down patrols at area parks in order to maintain manpower in areas deemed more critical:
With more Houston police officers retiring, the department is trying do the same job with fewer people to make sure Houstonians are protected.
One idea is to take some patrol officers from Memorial and Hermann Parks and put them on the streets.
What will this mean for police protection in the park?
Joggers like to see them no matter what time of day it is. Police patrols make the thousands of runners in Memorial Park feel safe.
Next week, there will be fewer patrols assigned there from the Special Operations Division.
[snip]
But Capt. Lentschke says there's no need for joggers to change their plans.
"The numbers may change, but we will have police visibility out here every single day. The difference will be in the type of allocation. We will add mounted, we will add some bike officers, and so we'll have a little bit more visibility in those aspects, rather than just the patrol cars," she says.
Capt. Lentschke is losing about 50 of her 200 officers to retirement, but that's happening throughout the police department. As hundreds of officers retire, they have to shift manpower.
Police say that this is all to make sure that officers are there when citizens call.
The problem is going to get much worse before it gets better, because the city has not budgeted for cadet classes to compensate for retirements that are looming, let alone normal attrition.
Public safety is the most basic function of any municipality. Mayor White and City Council have completely abdicated their responsibility to ensure that HPD has adequate manpower to keep citizens safe. Local media are just now reporting on the problem. In two or three years, it will be much worse, and crime will skyrocket as a result.
It is beyond comprehension that a giveaway of $2 million for an African-American museum is a higher priority for Mayor White than public safety.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/29/04 09:38 PM |
The relevance of Marvin
Kudos to Eileen Faxas of KHOU's Defenders for her story about making health department inspections public.
This week, 11 News Defenders revealed how City Hall quashed plans to publicize health inspections by putting them online.
The Health Department wanted to post them online, but the Houston Restaurant Association is against it.
Consumer Reporter Eileen Faxas paid a visit to the Association, and got some interesting answers.
Houston Restaurant Association Director Juli Salvagio is quoted throughout the story.
When asked if these were public records that the public should be able to see, Salvagio agreed that they were public, and said she felt like the public already had access to them.
The city couldn't agree more.
"Call the health department and you can get the information you need," says Trahan.
The reality is that if you want to see an actual health inspection, you have to fax a request to the Health Department, wait about a week, go pick it up and pay 12.5 cents a page.
Talk about cumbersome. The spokesperson seems to think the system is fine as it is, and maybe it is. One could argue city inspectors do all this for us. We don't have to peek behind kitchen doors because they get paid to do it for us. They inspect, they check, they fine, they close. These threats should suffice. It isn't the point though. I wonder if restaurants would be more interested in compliance if a more public accounting took place. A real financial consequence (fewer customers) to serving off-temp food, ill-stored food, not being careful about separating food prep areas, or not keeping things clean might serve compliance more than the threat of a ticket here and there. It's something anyone who's gotten up at three in the morning with more than a little tummy ache should be interested in seeing.
"We have a great, great dining out city," she says.
What does this mean exactly? Isn't it nonsensical for the spokesperson of the local restaurant association to respond to a serious inquiry like this with this sentence? And if all she's interested in doing is glossing and trumpeting, how much more could we trumpet the restaurant industry in this city if the restaurants didn't mind opening their kitchen doors and letting us take a look inside? How about: we have a great, great dining out city...with restaurants that really care about the food they serve their customers. Has a little better punch to it.
Sadly, the easiest way consumers get any information about inspections is the local news station that puts up weekly restaurant reports. It's easy (too easy) to knock the goofiness of some of these news crusaders and their restaurant reports, but without these reports and token clean-restaurant certificates, we would know nothing about restaurants that have issues and ones that don't. They're sensational and ridiculous, but it's all consumers have right now.
BlogHOUSTON.net contributor and foodie, Anne Linehan, sent along the following website in an earlier private discussion. It can be done. Other cities are making the inspections public. A website would have to be clear as to what was being cited and then be clear if the violation had been fixed or not. And there would have to be some guard against abuse such as occurred here. Repeat, frivolous complaints would have to be stricken or kept from records somehow. Regardless, it is being done elsewhere.
The city health department seems to have no problem doing a website like this. It's disheartening that City Hall and a local business group found the effort to be a waste.
(Update) Eileen Faxas has more on the topic.
Posted by Callie Markantonis @ 09/29/04 12:39 PM |
28 September 2004
David Cobb interviews The Methods
David Cobb runs the best local music site in Houston (even though it's a little light on my beloved alt-country/American stuff).
It's the best local music site in Houston because he regularly interviews local bands, in addition to posting all sorts of information on who's playing where and what's happening.
His latest interview is with The Methods, whose sound he describes as "not unlike early Radiohead or Coldplay."
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/28/04 09:47 PM |
26 September 2004
Houston IS worth it
A little over a week ago, the Houston Business Journal ran an editorial by Doug Williams that attacked the unorthodox "Houston: It's worth it" campaign masterminded by local advertising firm ttweak.
Williams, who is a principal at a local advertising firm that presumably competes with ttweak, writes that he's not amused that people are laughing about Houston as a result of the ttweak campaign, and spills way too much ink on what he thinks should be done to boost Houston. *yawn* *SNORE*
So, we've now heard a typically unimaginative establishment advertising type complain about an advertising campaign that's actually captured national attention. We've heard Jordy Tollett, the president of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, criticize the ads and then refuse to talk to national reporters. And we've heard Elyse Lanier, whose "Expect the Unexpected" campaign was a monumental flop, weigh in on the matter from her summer vacation spot in Malibu -- Houston being too hot for the former mayoral first lady in the summertime.
I can sympathize with the establishment to some extent. In the case of Tollett and Lanier, the millions and millions they've spent seem to have had minimal impact. And Williams surely is a bit upset that a couple of upstarts with an office in Midtown/Montrose have the gumption to upstage his firm and garner national attention -- and to do it without bilking the taxpayers out of millions of dollars.
Houston can't be an easy city to market. As I've written elsewhere, I like the fact that ttweak takes on its drawbacks head on. While Houston is not a city that can be marketed in the same way as, say, San Antonio, it is a great city with plenty to offer. Playing on people's negative images of Houston -- and then showing them why it's great despite those things -- makes sense to me.
But then, I came here for grad school despite hearing all those negative things, and immediately began discovering all of those positives that FAR outweigh the negative.
I emailed the ttweak people for a reaction to the Williams piece, but they never responded. One suspects they were too busy promoting the city to respond to negative (maybe envious?) establishment types.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/26/04 11:16 PM |
19 September 2004
The Quest for Houston's Best Burger
The Chronicle's Dai Huynh sings the praises of Christian's Tailgate Grill and Bar on Washington near I-10. His is as much a story of the place as a food review.
That's also the style of Robb Walsh, who reviewed the place for the Houston Press in January:
"This is the best burger in Houston," Bebout whispers devoutly.
Finally, I'm allowed to eat. And I have to say, it's absolutely awesome. The hand-formed patty is made from a half-pound of never-frozen, freshly ground beef that cooks up into a very juicy burger. The french fries are average, but the onion rings are excellent. I would have liked the meat a little closer to medium rare, but that's my only quibble.
"Well?" Bebout demands a verdict. I reply by mentioning my usual favorite burger joints. Bebout allows that Adrian's Burger Bar in the Fifth Ward is outstanding. But Adrian puts a whole pound of meat on every burger, and that's too much for average folks to eat at lunch. And yes, he says, the cheeseburger at Rudyard's is indeed psychedelic. But Rudz isn't open for lunch. He goes on to say that the barbecue burger at Guy's is tasty but very well done. And however good the burgers at Tookie's and Gilhooley's may be, these restaurants are inconveniently located way the hell down there on Galveston Bay.
I'm forced to concede. At lunchtime, within the city limits, for hand-formed burger enthusiasts who don't want a whole pound of ground meat, Christian's Totem has the best burger in town.
Rudyard's would get my vote for best burger, but I've never tried the one at Christian's. Perhaps a blogHOUSTON.net field trip will be in order shortly.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/19/04 09:02 PM |
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