We all know that the Cowboys are having horrible season. But it’s really a bad turn of events when the NY Times runs an article about all of the problems that Dallas is having, not the least of which is that San Antonio has overtaken it to become Texas’ second largest city behind Houston:

The losing Cowboys are fixing to defect again, the police chief and city manager were shown the door, a 350-pound gorilla made his own grand exit, and the hometown daily, former employer of the ex-reporter now ensconced in City Hall, is pinning Pulitzer Prize hopes on a pitiless exposÈ of everything gone wrong.
It has been that kind of year for Big D, Texas’s second biggest – oops, third biggest – city; San Antonio gained a 6,000-person edge to slip in with just over 1.2 million, behind Dallas’s longtime archrival, Houston.

The city was humbled in other ways as well, watching sourly as conventioneers thronged Houston’s budding entertainment district while Dallas struggled to begin a master plan study and select a flagship hotel for its own convention hopes, which it did at its final City Council meeting of the year on Wednesday, giving a provisional go-ahead to a developer for a 1,000-room Marriott. (In fairness, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau may have been distracted, some of its executives having been found earlier wooing clients at topless bars.)
Based largely on a wave of property crimes, Dallas once again leads the F.B.I.’s list of high-crime big cities this year. Efforts to cope with a growing homeless population by making it illegal to take a shopping cart off the property of the store it belongs to did not solve the problem, but instead produced bizarre fleets of cannibalized baby strollers and shopping carts. The dramatically slanted City Hall that attracted architectural plaudits when it was completed in 1978 has become a magnet for derelicts.
Dallas officials also spent part of the year trying to figure out how a handful of police narcotics informants were able to plant some 330 kilograms of gypsum and other harmless substances on 30 innocents, mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants, to frame them on drug charges in 2001.

Not to mention that the 6-8 Texans are on course to finish with a better record this season than that 5-9 Cowboys.

Christopher Soloman, the NY Times’ Frugal Traveler, noticed an earlier Times article referred to in this post on the unusual “Houston. It’s Worth It” public relations campaign. As a result, he decided to travel to Houston for the first time and, in a first for the Times, actually gives Houston a favorable review.

This post from Anne Linehan of blogHouston.net shows what happens when the Chronicle bases its investigative reporting regarding the new Houston Independent School District superintendent on the school district’s press release.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development took the extraordinary step yesterday of freezing $48 million of federal funds allocated to the City of Houston until the City corrects over two dozen serious problems in its administration of a program to assist low income families to purchase homes.
The City’s administration of HUD funds has been scandalous for as long as I can remember. Rather than encouraging responsible persons in the private sector to become involved in providing quality low income housing to Houston’s citizens, multiple City administrations have traditionally allowed the HUD funds to be misused in lining the pockets of political hacks and flighty businessmen interested only in making a quick buck. It is going to take more than Mayor Bill White‘s platitudes to clean up this mess, which has now become firmly engrained in the fabric of the City of Houston government.
Houston is home to dozens of superb and creative and developers of income-producing residential real estate. Mayor White should tap that civic resource and create an advisory committee to oversee a complete overhaul of this den of corruption. Until that occurs, expect that the federal funds that could be used to subsidize well conceived and constructed low-income housing will continue to be used in Houston to line the pockets of the swindlers who would leach off of those who can least afford it.

Joseph A. Jachimczyk, Harris County’s medical examiner from 1960 to 1995, died Tuesday in Houston. Dr. Jachimczyk had battled hypertension and Parkinson’s Disease for a number of years.
Dr. Jachimczyk was Harris County’s first medical examiner and really built the medical examiner’s office from scratch. He was generally well-regarded among law enforcement officials, although medical examiners are invariably remembered more for their mistakes than their achievements. That was certainly true for Dr. Jachimczyk, who badly blew two sets of autopsies six years apart in the late 1970’s and early 80’s in the Diana Wanstrath case that investigators eventually ignored in solving several murders involved in that case.
A vigil service will be held for Dr. Jachimczyk at 7 PM this evening in the chapel of The Settegast-Kopf Co., 3320 Kirby Drive. A funeral mass will be held at 10 AM Thursday at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, at the corner of Buffalo Speedway and Bellaire.

Calvin Murphy was acquitted of sexual assault charges late this afternoon by a Houston jury that deliberated for only about two hours.
Final arguments were completed earlier today in the sexual assault criminal trial of the former Basketball Hall of Famer and Houston Rocket.
If he had been convicted, Murphy would have faced a sentence of anywhere between probation to what would amount to a life prison sentence. Even though acquitted, Murphy still faces an uncertain future in Houston, where his public persona has basically been trashed by this trial. From revelations about his fathering 14 children with nine different women to living out of his automobile while working his job as a color man on Rocket broadcasts, suffice it to say that not many Houston businesses are lining up to hire Murph as a spokesperson these days.
Rusty Hardin — one of Houston’s many fine criminal defense lawyers — represented Murphy in the trial.

Cafe Annie is one of Houston’s finest restaurants. Gourmet magazine named Cafe Annie one of “America’s Top Tables” in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000, while Food & Wine named it the “Best Restaurant in Houston” in 1999. Zagat rated it the “Top Restaurant in Houston” each year from 2000 to 2003. And Cafe Annie received the DiRoNa Award as one of the Distinguished Restaurants of North America in 1997.
In this Houston Press article, Rob Walsh reports on the life and times of Cafe Annie’s owner and chef, Robert Del Grande, as he turns 50. It’s an interesting update on the originator of the modern “Southwestern cuisine” of Cafe Annie and the “fast-casual” restaurant concept that he originated in the Cafe Express restaurants. The article is an interesting read about yet another of the creative people that makes Houston a special place.

You know that the defense attorneys in the Calvin Murphy criminal trial are running out of witnesses when the owner of the tatoo parlor takes the stand.
Murphy is expected to take the stand this afternoon, and he will likely be the final defense witness. The prosecution will probably not offer much in terms of rebuttal, so expect the case to go to the jury by the middle part of next week.
Whatever the outcome of this sad affair, Murphy is through as a local celebrity.

The St. Regis Hotel near the Galleria better watch out — the TigerHawk is not pleased.
TigerHawk and other business travelers, next time that you need to stay in that area of Houston, I recommend either The Omni Hotel off of Woodway (which has high speed internet access in all of its rooms) or The Houstonian, but note that the Houstonian has high speed internet access in only their third and fourth floor rooms. Both are better bets than the St. Regis.

When I moved to Houston over 33 years ago as a young college student, 101.1 KLOL-FM was the rock station to listen to “heavy” rock music as opposed to the “bubblegum” rock music that my little sisters enjoyed. KLOL was the rebel station — it played Jimi Hendrix while other rock stations were playing the Bee Gees. Cameron Crowe captured this rebel nature of rock and roll wonderfully in his 2000 film, Almost Famous.
My first exposure to an obscure rocker from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen came from KLOL. Back in the early 1970’s, KLOL played some bootleg tapes of Springsteen performing his song “The Fever” at the old downtown bar, Liberty Hall, which was located on Chevenert near where Minute Maid Park stands now.
Over the years, as Baby Boom rockers aged, KLOL became more mainstream, but still retained its heavy metal and “reasonable rebel” format. Thus, as my sons reached their rebellious teenage years, they would switch the car radio to KLOL whenever they wanted to make the point that they were now listening to heavy rock music rather than say, Huey Lewis and the News. It’s fair to say that longtime Houston residents who listen to rock music considered KLOL a local institution.
Well, that all changed yesterday, as this Chronicle article reports:

In a clear signal of the growing media clout of Houston-area Hispanics, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications has yanked legendary rock station KLOL-FM (101.1) off the air and replaced it with a format that radio insiders call “Spanglish Top 40.”
The switch took place Friday morning when the new station ? now called Mega 101 FM (with the tag line “Latino and Proud”) ? began playing 10,101 songs in a row.
The new format is a mixture of Spanish hip-hop, reggaeton and pop/dance music aimed at listeners between 18 and 34 years old. Music in Spanish by artists ranging from the rapper Pitbull to pop star Shakira will be accompanied by DJs using a combination of English and Spanish.

Shakira rather than Johnny Winter? Longtime KLOL listeners are not taking the change well:

The move caught longtime KLOL listeners by surprise.
“There was no warning at all,” said Chris Beck, a 32-year-old cook.
“I’m 35 and it’s been on the air as long as I can remember,” said a real estate salesman who did not want to be identified. “It’s quite a shocker.”
He called Clear Channel headquarters in San Antonio to complain and is encouraging his friends to do the same.

When I informed my 16 year old son of the change this morning, his response probably reflects that of thousands of other KLOL listeners from around the Houston area:

“Spanglish? — I don’t think that means we’ll be hearing Led Zeppelin in Spanish on KLOL.”

Houston’s younger bloggers are already all over this format change. Charles Kuffner reacts here, and Kevin Whited’s response is here.
As one of KLOL’s most played singers would say — “These times are a’changin.”