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Monday, June 27, 2005



Love (and Beds) for Sale


Come learn about a story bursting with all the seamy, sordid details of human existence: prostitution, human trafficking, gambling, guns, and Hammer pants.

Big local news in Houston is the arrest of [alleged!] prostitution king Evan Loewenstein. Loewenstein [allegedly!] owns/owned a number of "spas", which are [allegedly!] in actuality brothels. Several of these businesses are on Highway 6 in far west Houston, and we drive past them all the time on our way out to dinner or shopping. There were several of them in a row, which leads one to ask how many spas (legit or otherwise) one area can support in a mile-long strip.

Most of these businesses are now closed, although the Velvet Touch (its website -- google it up yourselves, pervs -- calls it a "stress clinic") is still open. Also closed is The Dam icehouse (an icehouse is the local name for a kind of bar), but there's a sign on it saying it's going to re-open as a bikini bar (used to be a biker bar; hope they weren't planning on putting the bikers in bikinis), and another place that used to advertise "lingerie modeling".

How many of these are/were/will be [allegedly!] owned by Loewenstein, I do not know.

Now a mile or so in the other direction are several more businesses -- including an all-night "newsstand", the Alohaa [sic, yes] Spa, and another "spa" -- that are still open. Presumably, since they are, these are not owned by Loewenstein.

You can see we live in a high-class area of town. These places, or others like them, have been in business since Niles came here ten years ago. (Niles says he always thought they were "spas" as installed by the place on the other side of the road, named something like "Deck, Pool, and Spa" -- a business littered with large plants, lumber, and mulch.) Apparently Houston has a new police chief and he's eager to clean up the town and make it a fit place fer wimmin 'n kids.

Here are some choice bits from above-linked Houston Chronicle article:

[When Loewenstein's home was raided] Police cars packed the street; helicopters circled overhead. As Loewenstein, 60, and his ex-wife, Vickie Lynn Hegar, 40, were arrested, he whispered for their 13-year-old son to call his attorney and bail bondsman, police said.
...
Just last year, Loewenstein was arrested when deputies found several guns in his BMW after a wreck on Texas 249. A loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol was in the car's center console. In the trunk were two pistols, a rifle, a fixed-blade knife with knuckles and five boxes of ammunition, Harris County sheriff's reports show.
...
He dresses only in white or black, usually wearing tight shirts and pants made popular in the 1980s by the rap artist MC Hammer -- baggy workout trousers that ride high on the hips and fit tightly around the ankles.

And lastly:

All of his bank accounts have been frozen by the courts. He is unable to buy groceries for his two sons, prompting him to sell his weight-lifting equipment and white baby grand piano for a few thousand dollars in emergency cash. He is driving a borrowed car and looking for a job, his attorney said.

It must be true, for as we drove past the closed Ocean Spa yesterday, we saw banners hanging from its awnings which proclaimed:

Everything must go! Beds $50


I swear I'm not making this up. I couldn't possibly.

Sunday, June 26, 2005



Mad Dogs and Englishmen


...you have no idea how cold is 84 degrees on the grass until you begin to pray for it...

-- Rudyard Kipling, "The Man Who Would Be King"


When I moved from California, and again from Sydney, most of the time packing was spent packing books and cataloging them. While poor Niles was packing and lugging boxes, I was sitting at the computer, entering titles into the catalog. It took forever (especially the first time) and I got very frustrated with it and several times stated that we should just dump the books in boxes and to hell with it.

"If it were up to you," said Niles, "you'd throw things in boxes randomly, and every box would be labelled 'Crap'."

"Yes," I admitted, "but we'd have been done in a day."

Cataloging them, however, does mean that I know exactly which box each and every book is in. What I don't know is where every box is in the storage compartment.

So the other day I decided I would need a few books from our storage space, and today we went to see to it. Some would call us rash, for it was 90 degrees when we set out---though only 50 percent humidity, which is quite dry. But it will be above 90 every damned day until late in September, so there was no use putting it off on that account.

So we started hauling boxes out of the space, looking for one (on the bottom, since it contained books and therefore heavy) marked "Storage 19". We found it without too much trouble, and without contracting heatstroke or screaming at one another, so the mission was accomplished without fuss. And the books were there, as advertised.

I dripped with sweat, but Niles -- the Englishman of my title, leaving me the Mad Dog, I suppose -- has something wrong with his cooling system, and merely turned a bright red.

Our storage space is not climate-controlled, but is in a metal building with only a few vents. When we found the books I took them to the car while Niles put the boxes back, and oh, the 90 degree heat outside felt so cool. And I thought of the Kipling quote above.

I apologize for the utterly trivial and pointless nature of this post.

Sunday, June 19, 2005



The Manolo, He Will Be Envious


A long time ago on a blog far, far away, Natalie Solent published an email I sent her about Barbie clothes. (I googled forever for this, not realizing it was on 'Nother Solent, rather than Natalie's Blogspot site, which is what I usually visit.)

To quote myself:

My grandmother had a fur coat--- some respectable fur, soft and silky. Muskrat, for all I know. Lord knows how she ended up with it, because as I've said we did not have much money. It was left to her by someone, but I can't imagine who. Anyway, no one in our family was ever going to have an occasion to wear a fur coat, and it had a very wide hem, so Mom cut away a bit of the inside of the hem to make "mink" stoles and hats for our Barbies.

Now, if we'd been a ranching family, there'd have been no shortage of Barbie hats:

"The branding part is the funnest," [12-year-old] Kindee [Wilson] said, recalling the roping and barbecues of branding days past.
...
As the flame did its work, Bart [Wilson, Kindee's father] sharpened his pocketknife -- his castration tool of choice...
...
Two quick shots of vaccine -- plus, in the case of a bull calf, a castration almost equally rapid -- and the bawling calf was released to rejoin its uneasy mother.
...
Kindee uses the furry ends of bull calves' nut sacks (that's approved terminology on the Wilson place) as Barbie hats.

Clever, eh? If only we'd lived in Idaho. Someone should write Heloise with this hint.

Now at Goode Company Barbecue, which is a local restaurant chain, they sell "bullie bags", which come from full grown bulls, and are purse-sized. Last time I was at a Goode Company, they had 'em hanging up over the cash register.

Fashion advice from noted dandy Festus McMudge at Huffington's Toast.

UPDATE: A mere two months on, I notice that I never linked to the ranching story.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005



Travesty Intentional


[Yeah, it's a lame title. Tough.]

Jkrank requests (in email) that I comment upon Amnesty International. I told him I didn't have anything to say, but that was before I saw Bill "Spells His Name Wrong" Schulz's post at the HuffPo.

I have been meaning to poke fun at the Huffers, but, really, that gives whole new meaning to "shooting fish in a barrel". More like using a thermonuclear device on a Filet-O-Fish. Also, I have no idea who half those people are, and that takes some of the fun out of it.

I know who Schulz is, though; he's the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. See, says so right there. Doesn't say anything else, so I'm guessing he must've sprung full-grown from the head of Kofi Annan sometime in the recent past.

And he's still defending his stupid Gitmo Equals Gulag assertion:

It's been a wild three weeks for Amnesty International and me, what with our international Secretary General, Irene Khan, having called Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times...We've taken a lot of heat for what we repeatedly said
[after they got called on it] was intended as a symbolic, not literal, analogy.

I would have thought it would have been physically impossible for an executive of a major NGO to be as tone deaf as this:

...the use of that one word "gulag" had a remarkable impact on the public debate. Amnesty got more media time to discuss US detention policies in the past three weeks than we have in the past three years.

In other words, We shot our credibility to shit, but it's OK 'cause it got us on TV. T! V! I can't spell it out more clearly than that, people!

So if, for example, I were to say that Amnesty International was actually a front organization for a shadowy group who are working on an army of Hitler clones -- and that furthermore the leadership of AI all drive their SUVs to the non-union market to pick up a load of whale filets and Palestinian children to take to their wild parties at the Neverland Ranch (and I mean that in a purely symbolic, not literal, way) -- then it would be OK as long as I was able to spark a debate on whether words mean things anymore.

So, when will Fox News be calling me?