As is often the case with tales of intrigue from California, this LA Times article reports that the final straw in the Getty Trust board’s decision last week to require embattled Barry J. Munitz‘s resignation as Getty Trust president was the unauthorized $350,000 “severance payment” to his former chief of staff, Jill Murphy. As the LA Times story notes, Murphy became Munitz’s protege’ after Munitz hired her out of a Sacramento restaurant called Jammin’ Salmon in the early 1990’s when he was chancellor of the California State University system:

Munitz met Murphy while eating at the Jammin’ Salmon, a Sacramento restaurant where she worked in the mid-1990s. Soon after, he hired her to work for him when he served as chancellor of the California State University system.
He brought her to the Getty shortly after he arrived, creating the position of chief of staff, a title more common in political circles. As the gatekeeper for Munitz, Murphy quickly became a powerful and feared figure among staff.
In her early 30s and with no background in the arts, she was perceived to have the power to make or break people’s careers at the Getty. That power increased as Munitz spent more time away from Los Angeles on trust business.
Munitz has acknowledged Murphy has “sharp elbows” but defended her as brilliant and effective.
Three years ago on a board retreat in London, Getty trustees confronted Munitz about Murphy’s increasingly divisive presence, [Getty trustee Ramon] Cortines said. Munitz promised to do something about it, but little changed, the trustee added.
Murphy announced in August she would leave the trust by the end of the year, saying she had been inspired by a book she had read about ending world poverty by 2025. “It is an inspiring goal, and I hope to find some way to contribute toward making it a reality,” she said in a statement.

During far less glamorous times, Munitz was the president of the University of Houston.

Something tells me that this is not going to turn out well:

Texas Southern University President Priscilla Slade has reimbursed the university more than $138,000 for the cost of landscaping her new home, according to records released Wednesday.
Slade, who wrote the check Monday, is hoping to get back into the good graces of the university’s board of regents before they meet Friday to discuss her future. She is also under scrutiny for charging roughly $87,000 to TSU for household furnishings, according to a source familiar with the inquiry.
Slade has declined to comment publicly. Instead, she has asked Bill Miller, an Austin-based political consultant, to help her address concerns raised by regents. None of the nine current regents, who are appointed by the governor, were on the TSU board when Slade was hired in 1999.
Slade has told regents that the university paid the landscaping bill for her 17,675-square-foot property by mistake.

My sense is that President Slade has hired the wrong professional.
By the way, the Chronicle article also notes that President Slade has an accounting degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Art De Vany is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California – Irvine and maintains a fascinating blog on economics, nutrition, medicine, exercise, baseball and other matters. Over the past year, Art has become one of my favorite bloggers — not only do we share many common interests (previous post here), but it turns out that Art lived in Houston for a time during the early 1980’s while teaching at the University of Houston.
This past Sunday, Art’s beloved wife, Bonnie, died after a long illness. In an extraordinary series of posts over the past several months, Art has chronicled the experience he shared with his wife in dealing with her terminal illness. Art’s loving dedication to understanding the nature of Bonnie’s illness and his tireless efforts to comfort her in dealing with it have been a tremendous source of inspiration for my wife and me. So that you can also be touched by a couple of special people, I pass Art’s posts along to you:

Weepy Relatives and Depression June 7, 2005;
A New Year December 31, 2005;
It’s the Ice Cream January 13, 2006 (my favorite);
An Empty House January 16, 2006;
Permissions January 18, 2006;
Ella G. De Vany, February 7, 1916–January 21, 2006 (Art’s mother) January 22, 2006;
Bonnie De Vany, November 24, 1938–January 22, 2006 January 22, 2006.
Bonnie’s Bravery February 13, 2006

Hug a loved one and say a prayer for Bonnie and Art De Vany.

Following on this earlier post, the Chronicle’s Nancy Sarnoff reports on the expected announcement today by Houston Pavilions LP that House of Blues Entertainment Inc. will be its first anchor tenant in the $200 million, 700,000 square foot downtown project that hopes to transform three city blocks into an open-air shopping-and-entertainment mall with offices and condominiums. The House of Blues facility is expected to feature a performance hall, restaurant and retail shop covering about 43,000 square feet of the project, which also includes plans for a 134,000-square-foot condominium tower and 200,000 square feet of loft-office space.
The Houston Pavilions is located between the newly revitalized Main Street on one side and the George R. Brown Convention Center on the other near the downtown Foley’s and The Shops at Houston Center shopping mall, so it would appear that developers Geoffrey Jones and William Denton are banking on creating something of a retail district in the area (Mr. Denton developed a similar project in Denver that opened in 1998). To induce the private investment in the project, the City of Houston and Harris County have provided over $13 million in development grants and local officials redrew the boundaries of a tax increment reinvestment zone to include the project.
As is typical of such deals, the project is not without risks. For over a generation now, Houston’s retail and entertainment areas have gravitated away from the downtown area, perhaps best reflected by the Galleria area about seven miles west of downtown. The developers are also counting on notoriously air-conditioning-conditioned Houstonians to choose an outdoor urban experience rather than the indoor suburban outing that has become the norm over the past several decades. Nevertheless, the recent success of similar (albeit smaller) projects in the Houston area is probably making the developers and prospective tenants more bullish on the project.

This Wall Street Journal ($) article profiles Houston sculptor David Adickes, who specializes in huge works such as the sculpture of Sam Houston on I-45 just outside of Huntsville about 60 miles north of downtown Houston. In recent months, Adickes has been working on erecting a 60-foot-tall statue of Stephen F. Austin in Brazoria County, a project that Banjo Jones has been following closely (scroll down to 10.26.05 pictures), but the WSJ reports that Adickes is contemplating an even more ambitious project — a 280-foot-tall cowboy (equivalent to a 23 story building) that Adickes envisions standing next to one of the Texas’ busiest freeways.
Alas, the Journal reports that Adickes’ creations have not brought him much critical acclaim:

Mr. Adickes’s statues don’t bring him much approval in the world of serious art. The sculptor’s skillful, Titan-sized likenesses of historical figures may have a big “gee-whiz” factor, but they’re of “minimal aesthetic interest,” says University of Kansas professor of art history David Cateforis. He likens Mr. Adickes’s statues to such artifacts of roadside Americana as the 80-foot-high Uniroyal tire outside Detroit.

Nevertheless, that noted Houston art critic — heart surgeon Denton Cooley — defends Adickes’ creations:

Famed Houston heart surgeon Denton Cooley, who is the subject of one of Mr. Adickes’s more life-size (8-foot) statues in Houston’s Texas Medical Center, sees genius in Mr. Adickes’s enormous scale.

“Some of the great wonders of the world are big things like that,” he notes.

Two of Houston’s most prominent businessmen of the past generation — former Houston Chronicle publisher Richard V. Johnson and former Texas Commerce Bank chairman and CEO Ben Love — died over the weekend.
Love was Houston’s most well-known banker since Jesse H. Jones. He oversaw the building of Houston’s Texas Commerce Bank into a Texas banking powerhouse during the 1970’s and early 80’s, and then engineered Texas Commerce’s merger with Chemical Bank after the mid-1980’s economic downturn in Texas caused several major bank failures and near-failures. Love later authored a book about his life in banking, Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce (Texas A&M Press 2005).
After his retirement from banking in 1989, Love dedicated the remainder of his life to charitable and civic causes, particularly the University of Texas Health Science Center and M.D. Anderson Health Science Center in the Texas Medical Center. Love’s son Jeff is a prominent lawyer with the Houston office of Locke, Liddell and is well-known in Houston legal and business circles for his formidable vocabulary, which his father helped him develop by requiring Jeff and his sisters to learn and discuss a new word each evening at the family’s dinner.
Johnson oversaw the expansion of the Chronicle into Houston’s sole daily newspaper over most of a 20 year period from 1975-95, and was instrumental in the sale of the Chronicle by the Houston Endowment (created by Jesse Jones in the late 1930’s) to the Hearst Corporation in the late 1980’s. Johnson was also active in a wide array of charitable causes, including the Texas Medical Center Board of Trustees, the Houston Food Bank, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Houston Grand Opera, the Museum of Fine Arts and the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast.

My old friend Coach Mac is in town this week with his Iowa State Cyclone football team to play the TCU Horned Frogs tomorrow afternoon in the EV1.net Houston Bowl at Reliant Stadium. As a result, blogging will be a tad sparse this weekend as I participate in some of the bowl festivities, but I wanted to pass along the following pieces for you to peruse while watching the flurry of professional and college football games over the next several days:

Kerry Packer — the media tycoon who was one of the wealthiest Australians — died earlier in the week at the age of 68. Packer was an inveterate gambler in business, in the casinos (where he was known as a generous tipper) and on the golf course, where he frequently played on one of the world’s best and most exclusive courses — his own.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the late and legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes going haywire on the sidelines before a national television audience during a 1978 bowl game.
Banjo Jones detects a bit of editorial glee behind this Forbes article ($) about wealthy Houston plaintiffs’ lawyer John O’Quinn being scammed by a trusted employee.
Larry Ribstein is back from a month-long jaunt to Southeast Asia and is talking about why the U.S. government better quit acting like a monopolist in the market for regulating international companies.
Bill Hesson passes along author Michael Crichton‘s engaging speech to the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy entitled Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century in which he reminds us of the late David Brinkley‘s wise observation:

“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

Crichton’s speech includes his observations about Chernobyl, the “dead area” around which is the subject of this fascinating picture journal of a Russian woman’s motorcycle journey.
Ted Frank passes along this entertaining New Orleans Times-Picayune article about a different kind of flood spawned by Hurricane Katrina — the lawsuit flood. Among the more entertaining are the lawsuits against the Army Corps of Engineers for damages resulting from the the failed levees despite the fact that the 1927 statute that authorized the Corps to build levees in the first place specifically exempts the Corps from liability. And as between the Corps and private business, guess which is more effective in cleaning up the mess left from Katrina?
Edward Rothstein of the NY Times and Daniel Drezner provide interesting reviews of Speilberg’s new movie, Munich.
Finally, P J O’Rourke tells Christopher Bray that he’d rather clean the fridge than write, and also passes along this observation about his conversion from communist to capitalist:

“You see, the real reason I became a communist was to impress girls. Back then, all the pretty ones were revolutionaries. One of the things that’s gone wrong for the Left is that their girls just aren’t cute any more.”

Have a great weekend!

This U.S. Today article rates Houston’s Houstonian as the no. 1 hotel in the U.S. for fitness-conscious travelers. The article says the 125,000 sq. ft. fitness facility — which is just west of the West Loop near Memorial Park and the Galleria — is “like an amusement park for the fitness-minded.”
By the way, guests of the Houstonian also have access to two very good private golf courses that are affiliated with the facility, including the Tournament Players Course at Redstone Golf Club, as well as nearby Memorial Park Golf Course, which is one of the finest municipal golf courses in the U.S.

Don’t allow the publication on Christmas Day of this important Eric Berger/Chronicle story entitled “Rising Growth, Sinking Fortunes” about erosion on Galveston Island. Berger, who is the Chronicle’s SciGuy, consistently generates many of the local newspaper’s most insightful research articles:

GALVESTON – Geology has aligned its forces against this narrow strip of land, causing it to sink a few inches more every decade.
Though subsidence has caused much of the sinking in recent decades, it’s not the only culprit. If oceans continue to warm as expected, sea-level rise could cripple much of the island by century’s end. And as the waters rise, waves, tides and especially tropical storms will wash ever more sand away.
This might be little more than an academic exercise for geologists and conservationists but for one fact: Galveston Island, with 60,000 residents, is booming. It’s impossible to drive along the island’s West End without passing construction trucks. Six developers have planned or begun building residential communities.
Unfortunately, this low-lying West End, beyond the reach of the protective seawall, will feel the problems of subsidence, sea-level rise and coastal erosion soonest.

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You just never know who you are going to bump into during the holiday season at Houston’s famed Galleria shopping mall.
Robert Durst — the wealthy heir who was acquitted of murder after killing his neighbor, chopping up the body and throwing it into Galveston Bay — bumped into Galveston state district judge Susan Criss earlier this month at the Galleria. Judge Criss presided over Durst’s controversial trial, and ultimately had to be removed from the case by an appellate court after she refused to set a reasonable bond for Durst’s release under a plea bargain. Durst is currently back in Harris County jail awaiting a hearing on an alleged parole violation. The following is how Judge Criss characterized for the Chronicle her Galleria encounter with Durst:

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