Reefmonkey

So far got the points for my, my wife's and my daughter's return flights redeposited, my stepson's full airfare refunded, plus 25,000 in goodwill points per person. Still waiting to hear back on ~$450 in expenses (extra night of hotel, one-way car rental, gas, extra day of parking, meals) I submitted.

Your first sentence starting off so far from the truth of what actually happened reminded me what a waste of time it was getting sucked into an argument with someone with such a glancing acquaintanceship with truthfulness or civility last Spring, so I didn't bother to read beyond that. Today you'll have to seek out Blue Dogs or Texasota or samagon or j_cuevas or one of your other usual targets to fill the hole picking online fights fills for you. Peace.

Hmmm 15 years ago? So they are definitely close to the end of their natural lives now, then. So they'll be coming down soon one way or another. Sucks, I hate paying to take down trees. When the time comes, get with Trees For Houston since they are along the city ROW like that, as a nonprofit they'll give a a good price on replacements, and good guidance on suitable ones. https://www.treesforhouston.org/trees

Ugh, Bradford pears. Unless they are sterile their flowers smell so bad, and they are terribly invasive (even the "sterile" ones can on occasion cross-pollinate). But your street has a potentially bigger problem now. Bradfords are already structurally very weak trees, with those deep v-notch branches breaking off the trunk very easily (and only live about 20 years anyway, then fall apart, literally). And they are especially suceptible to ice and wind. If those leaves all dropped at once a week after that deep freeze we had, I'd take that as a major warning sign those trees were very stressed. We have an ice storm, or even heavy wind gusts, those things could be coming down. I wouldn't park my car anywhere near them if I were you.

That used to be very true, and I continued to think it was true for years after it stopped being true. What started to erode it for me was when working on a project in northern Oklahoma in the mid 2010s, I regularly flew home from Tulsa on Friday afternoons, and I could count on the flight running at least 45 minutes late, every time. It wasn't uncommon at all for it to run as much as 2 hours late. When the same flight is chronically late, that's a clear indication you have a scheduling problem, but one Southwest never thought to fix, for the 2 years I was flying that route. Then this spring when Southwest was jacking around my scheduled flights almost every time I booked one with them. And I got tired of the cattle call. I used to be the biggest defender of the no assigned seats, first-come-first-served policy. I liked the egalitarian nature of it. Back when it still was egalitarian. But 24 hour in advance online checkin (which defeats the point of checking in for a flight IMO), coupled with A-listers getting bumped to the front of the line, and people being able to pay more to get an earlier boarding slot, negated the egalitarian nature. And as I started traveling more with my wife and daughter, wanting to use all the points I had racked up, getting to sit with my family became important. I got tired of checking in exactly when the clock rolled over to 24 hours before a flight, only to get a B47 boarding position. So between all these issues, I started looking at United more and more, and found that they had more flight options, and at lower prices, than Southwest. And they run on time far more often than Southwest does, and I can always reserve an aisle seat, or a row for my family, and know that I won't have to sit in a middle seat, separated from my family. Everything you said about Southwest was true when it was still a regional carrier, even into the the 2000s, but hasn't been true for several years now, it's not the low cost carrier to most destinations anymore, many other carriers like United are flying in and out of the close-in older, smaller airports like HOU and LUV that Southwest used to have the monopoly on, United Express, et al have filled the niche that Southwest used to be the only provider of, and Southwest has been among the 3 worst airlines for on-time arrivals for several years now, even preceding the pandemic. Southwest's only remaining "uniqueness" - the cattle call, the bus route - that used to work when it was a regional carrier, are making it a worse travel experience, not a better one, now that it has become a major carrier. Southwest was riding on its older reputation, people still remembering how it used to be, loyalty over that, but I think this debacle has disabused many of their rose colored glasses about Southwest. Especially since the debacle is still not over for Southwest: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-airlines-cancels-more-flights-monday-after-scheduling-meltdown/

It is not correct to say there is a "dearth of ideas" - there have been plenty of ideas advanced over the last 23 years, none of which proved feasible or well-supported. You don't see more ideas thrown out here in the last couple of years because we've heard and considered all of the ideas for repurposing the Astrodome in one or more iteration. That's a pretty good indicator that we've exhausted all alternatives, and it's time to stop beating our heads against the wall. "Agree to disagree" about demolishing a building vs restoring it to productive use ceases to be a reasonable stance when preservationism becomes stubborn obstructionism that allows an outmoded building to remain a vacant eyesore instead of letting the land it is on be repurposed to its highest and best use. That's neither fair to Houston nor whatever legacy the Astrodome deserves. It's like a pet owner refusing to euthanize a decrepit, suffering pet out of sentiment. And I think maybe we should look at sports history or events with a jaundiced eye if sentimentality about these events is what's keeping us from moving on. We've already dealt with the building's main purpose, housing the Astros, and then the Oilers, coinciding with those teams being wildly mediocre, so no storied legacy there. "The Game of the Century"? If that name isn't a perfect example of Sports' hyperbolic self-importance, I don't know what is. So it was the first televised regular season college basketball game - seems what is significant about it is not that it was played IN the Astrodome, but that it was played ON Television. "The Battle of the Sexes"? A gimmicky stunt that people had mostly forgotten about until Steve Carrell was in a movie about it a few years ago, a few years after he made another sports biopic about some Olympic wrestlers most people had forgotten about or never heard of to begin with. The game between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King wasn't even the first such stunt, Riggs had already beaten Margaret Court in Ramona, California a few months earlier. The Astrodome was chosen simply because King was already in Houston, having just played the Virginia Slims (not at the Astrodome). Even if you consider the event itself anything more than a sideshow, the Astrodome's involvement in the event was incidental. As for political conventions, it only held the 1992 RNC, where Bush/Quayle were predictably nominated to run again (and lost in the General), not particularly noteworthy, not like the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago's International Ampitheater (which was torn down in 1999). As far as being an architectural marvel, if anything, it's a monument to domed stadiums, and multi-purpose stadiums, being a failed experiment. It was never a particularly good stadium to see a baseball game in, or play one in (all the dead air and long outfield fences made it a bad stadium for hitters, and by the construction of Camden Yards, the people had spoken, they wanted to watch baseball outside), and it was a TERRIBLE concert venue, accoustics were horrible and the performers looked like ants out in the middle of the field. The fact that its architectural integrity had to be compromised by the ramps in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act shows what an outmoded design it was even by 1989.

I was one the the many thousands stranded by Southwest this week. I was lucky, after being told on Monday that they wouldn’t be able to get me home until Thursday (and now it appears that was a grossly optimistic promise on their part), I was able to find my family a hotel room Monday night (unlike many who have been sleeping on airport floors) and a rental car to drive us the 15 hours home to Houston the next day. While the other airlines were able to keep their cancellation percentages in the low teens, Southwest was canceling north of 70% of its flights. It became clear it wasn’t the weather, or people calling in sick, but Southwest’s woefully outdated systems crashing. And despite Southwest’s insistence that it was doing everything it could to get passengers home, Southwest pilots were sharing pictures of their ARCAS messages telling them the fleet would be parked for the next few days to “regroup.” It’s interesting, because this May I raised questions here about how airlines were handling their schedules, and I particularly called out Southwest, saying there was something else going on that wasn’t being shared with passengers, excuses for rescheduling that just weren’t adding up, and I was attacked for daring question the airlines’ competence/good faith. But now that Southwest’s long-term neglect of its systems has led to this unprecedented meltdown, I wonder how the airline could possibly recover? I certainly never plan to fly them again, and I have heard many people on the news say the same thing. How long before Southwest goes the way of Eastern, Braniff, National? Will they even make it to 2024?

It would be sad if a professional sports venue, and one that hosted a baseball team that never won a league pennant, let alone went to the World Series, while it played there, and a football team that never won a conference, let alone went to the Super Bowl, were the thing that represents Houston. How does the hollow shell that hosted losing sports teams represent Houston’s forward-thinking, innovative, can-do attitude as the Energy Capital of the World, home of the manned space program, most diverse city in the country? Houston isn’t a sports town like Boston or Chicago, Houstonians have always been fair weather sports fans at best, what we HAVE always been proud of is our association with the space program. Mission Control at JSC, whose metonym was the first word spoken on the moon, THAT’S a place that represents Houston, that reminds us where the “Astro” in “Astrodome” comes from. Buildings age. They sometimes outlive their usefulness. Sometimes they can be repurposed, sometimes their historical significance can be a compelling reason for finding a way to repurpose a building that would otherwise be torn down. In the case of the Astrodome, we’ve had 23 years to find a feasible way to repurpose it, multiple proposals that were all found lacking, with no better ideas emerging. It’s time to Let. It. Go. Hanging onto a building that has no practical purpose anymore out of nostalgia like a hoarder hangs onto stacks of old newspapers is anathema to the forward-thinking, always reinventing itself attitude that truly represents what Houston is. We were a cotton town. Then we were an oil town. Then we became Space City. We were proud of the Astrodome when it was shiny and new, the sports stadium of the future, but now closed dome stadiums are the stadiums of the past. That’s not Houston. As for tearing down Rice Stadium to move NRG there, despite the fact that NRG and the parking necessary for it wouldn’t fit there, the mostly residential street design surrounding the stadium would be a nightmare for the traffic that Texans games and other events that NRG hosts draw, I’d think that Rice University might have something to say about the Harris County Sports and Convention Authority trying to take over its property. And the citizens of Harris County might have something to say about NRG, which hasn’t beenpaid off yet, being torn down and an expensive new stadium being built again. And tearing down Rice Stadium, still considered the best stadium in Texas for watching football, still a viable building in active use, which also happens to be the site where JFK made his famous speech about going to the moon, which inaugurated Houston’s involvement in the space program - both a terrible idea for sustainability and building use, and respect for Houston’s actual important history (the space program, not mediocre sports).

On the other hand, the original Yankee Stadium (1923-2008) was a lot more storied than the Astrodome, one could say the same of Candlestick Park (1958-2014), the Miami Orange Bowl, and a lot of other historic stadiums that were torn down because they had outlived their usefulness. Even many stadiums that were closer in vintage to the Astrodome, like Three Rivers in Pittsburg and Texas Stadium in DFW, have been torn down. Houston is actually somewhat unique in NOT tearing down the Astrodome, stubbornly clinging to an old husk of a building that hasn't been used in TWENTY YEARS because Ed Emmett so didn't want to be associated with its teardown that he was willing to gaslight Harris County voters.

Problem is all those stadiums are open-air, with no ability to cover. Someone spending $500 a ticket for Taylor Swift concert isn't going to want to swelter outside in Houston's sometimes 9 month long hot humid summer.

I agree we don't need this stadium as a stadium, and that the only realistic thing to do with it is tear it down, but I disagree with paving it over for more parking. From what I've read, a large chunk of the cost of the demolition would be backfilling the bowl-shaped depression. So why do that? Why not leave it there, use it as much-needed stormwater retention pond, plant some habitat around it, and make it the central focus of the greenspace that has already been proposed?

I also remember Apple Tree as having been an employee-owned venture that was separate from Safeway (maybe some former Safeway employees/store managers) that moved into old Safeways. My father bought an old Safeway location on North Houston-Rosslyn Road just north of where it crosses White Oak Bayou back in the mid-90s, and converted it into a warehouse/shop for his industrial controls business, and built an office building in the parking lot. After he sold the business and retired, he kept the property and leased it back to the company he sold the business to, until just a few years ago he finally sold the property, and made a killing. It's now a welding school. I remember that Safeway had been derelict so long, people had just come to think of it as abandoned property; right after my father bought it, he and his business partner went to it to meet with the contractor, and found some dude cutting up the parking lot to demonstrate a concrete saw he had invented. They were always having to chase semi trucks off it who thought it was a nice place to park their rigs when not in use. The West Gray Kroger seemed nice when it opened circa 2000, but last time I was in it a year or two ago, it really seemed like it had not aged well for some reason.

Well, if it's Kroger buying Albertson's, I guess that makes me feel somewhat better about it.

I’ll be curious to see if this merger goes through how it will affect the market here in Houston. With Randall’s getting worse and worse, and Fiesta contracted and not expanding for years, Kroger’s is the only real local competition to HEB for a traditional grocery store. I know people love HEB, but between their terrible parking lots and their sheer size and deliberately labyrinthine layout (not to mention they’re always restocking, even during peak shopping hours, partially blocking aisles with large trolleys of merchandise to be shelved), they’re not ideal for a quick run to the grocery store, while Kroger’s especially the older ones, still are good for popping in and out of. The Safeway/Albertson’s saga in Houston always leaves me shaking my head. Safeway failed in the Houston market back in the 80s, and Albertson’s in the early 2000s, when Randall’s was still strong. So what does Safeway do, having failed in the Houston market because they were never nearly as good as Randall’s, they buy Randall’s and proceed to run it into the ground, with poorer service, reduced selection and always running out of things, but still keeping their prices high. Then Albertson’s who also failed in the Houston market because of their poor shopping experience and other issues, buys Safeway, getting access back to the Houston market they already failed in before, and then proceeds to further drive Randall’s into the ground and worsen its stocking situation by closing the Houston area distribution center, and more and more Randall’s locations shutter. Now Albertson’s will get to ruin all the Krogers in the area.

Annual Halloween bump.

I saw this pic of the Alabama Theatre showing Empire Strikes Back on one of those annoying clickbait listicles on Facebook, but had to share. I never got to know the Alabama Theatre as a movie theatre, just enjoyed it as a Bookstop starting in high school, was sad when the interior character that had been preserved when it was a book store was obliterated by Trader Joes.

The recent death of Paul Sorvino, coming closely on the heels of Ray Liotta's death, got me think of Goodfellas, a longtime favorite movie of mine. It came out my freshman year in high school, and spurred a fascination with the mafia that lasted the rest of high school (and a little into college, I made a point to eat at Campisi's my freshman year at SMU). One way I fed that fascination, once I got a car, was by eating at venerable old-school red sauce joints, the red-checkered tablecloth, candle in an old straw-covered chianti bottle Italian restaurants we all remember before Northern Italian grabbed American's attention in the late 80s. Several of the old-school places around Houston had a mafia joint vibe about them, places like Pino's on Westheimer at Hillcroft (c.1968-c.2005), Doyle's in Garden Oaks (1954-2019), Buon Appetito, in an old house on Holcombe (1975-c.2018). As you can see, it seems like all of these places closed within the last 15 years or so. Does anyone know of any long-standing venerable old southern Italian restaurant with the mafia hangout vibe I'm talking about that are still around?

There actually is such a law, under Section 1415(i)(3)(B)(i)(II) of IDEA 2004, which allows school districts to recover attorney's fees from parents who make frivolous or unreasonable die process claims. However, districts rarely resort to this except in especially egregious cases to avoid the bad publicity. I'm trying to find the article from a few years ago, I think it was written by Lisa Falkenberg, where a Houston-area district sued a parent over a frivolous claim, and won, but the article spun it to sound like Big Bad School uses legal system to further victimize Poor Parents of A Disabled Child.

One guess I'd make is that since I-10 West is a designated hurricane evacuation route they want to make sure it stays open even during the heavy rains from outer bands that can move into our area in advance of a hurricane.

Over the last 20 years, it hasn't been uncommon for annual homicides to fluctuate up or down by as much as 60 from year to year, so 5 fewer homicides in the first half of 2022 vs 2021 is meaningless. It's almost as meaningless as the "skyrocketing" homicide rate the local media was reporting earlier this year because January 2022 homicides were higher than January 2021 homicides. Trying to parse out a month or 3 or 6 months out of a year and compare it to the same months in the previous year to reach a conclusion about where the homicide rate is going is pointless. Show me a steady increase or decline over at least three full years, and then we'll talk.

I’m sorry, I’m sure you worked really hard to craft a litany of clever insults in that very long post, and I really tried to make a good faith effort to read it, but my eyes glazed over midway though the second sentence and I just lost interest. This gotten really tedious and I’ve lost interest. Bye bye

You definitely have a point that my original post was “letting off steam,” and I didn’t expect that anyone would react to it the way you did, and I was a bit taken aback by your condescension, and so I pushed back against it. And now I know that is where I erred; had I reviewed all the ongoing clashes you are currently having with so many people on the I-45 Rebuild thread, and the thread on Greg Abbott running for reelection, and the one on Lina Hidalgo’s aides being indicted, (and probably others I haven't even seen), I would have understood what I was dealing with. I would have seen you engaging in: Homophobia: Ableism in the form of mocking peoples’ disabilities: Misogyny and body shaming: and I definitely would have known then what kind of a person you are. (By the way, the way you use derogatory nicknames and focus on physical appearance is very similar to how Donald Trump talks). Seeing all the anger and hatred and need for conflict with people you have, I would have anticipated that me simply calling you “smart guy” and presenting you with a piece of information that challenged your self-satisfied conclusions would have triggered you and provoked such a disproportionate response as this torrent of insults: Obviously I made a huge mistake in not recognizing what kind of person you are, what kind of issues you’ve got going on earlier. I can tell you’re the kind of person it doesn’t pay to get crossways with, and someone with as much seething anger at so many people and classes of people is usually the kind to hold grudges for a long time, look for ways to needle a person long after an initial confrontation, and that probably wouldn’t make my use of this forum very enjoyable going forward. So mattyt36, I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to you. I apologize for triggering you by calling you “smart guy.” I apologize for not having immediately prostrated myself before your obviously vastly superior knowledge of both the airline industry and my own personal experiences. I hope my expression of contrition will be satisfactory to you and we can part ways with no lingering animosity.

Amtrak's stations are in convenient places for travelers, like downtown Houston, or over near the Alamodome in San Antonio. These are not good places to have the large fuel depots with high capacity tanks for rapid fueling of locomotives with 2-4,000 gallon fuel capacities. Those kinds of facilities are found in large railyards in industrial areas on the outskirts of town. But like I said, given that the fuel range of a train is at least a couple times the distance between the two termini of the Sunset line (Los Angeles and New Orleans), they shouldn't really need to make a fuel stop en route, it would seem to me that it would make more sense to refuel the locomotives during turnaround at the termini. If somehow I'm really off on their range, the other option would be to switch to refueled locomotives while they are sitting in San Antonio. It doesn't take that long, and they have plenty of time from the sound of it.

It speaks to the power of the tobacco lobby that cigarettes, with all their well-documented high health risks, continue to be legal for recreational use when the FDA has banned so many other products for even therapeutic use that had much lower risks. Ephedra, for instance, I'm not saying it shouldn't have been banned, but there were an estimated 12 million people using it at one point, and it was implicated in 155 deaths over a 13 year period. The CDC says cigarettes kill 480,000 people a year. They estimate 34,000 nonsmokers die from heart disease linked to secondary exposure a year. I don't think anyone died because their parent or spouse took ephedra. Over a 30 year period, something like 30 women who took phenylpropanolamine either as a decongestant or in Dexatrim for weight loss suffered an intracranial hemmorage, and data indicated that 1 woman might have a stroke out of every 107,000 to 3.3 million women who used PPA (normal stroke incidence rate is 0.6 per 1 million), and it was yanked off the market. How many smokers have heart attacks or strokes every year? If tobacco is such a dangerous product (which it is) why not just take it off the market?

I made a general statement so as not to call you out specifically, with the hope that a non confrontational appeal to decency and consideration for other disabled people not named Greg Abbott might appeal to your better angels. But yes, people who habitually fire off personal insults and derogatory comments usually do it because they have a lot of bruises; I’m trying to be compassionate about yours.