Grackles giving us the side-eye and other Houston gripes
On the first Monday of the month, man-about-town Craig Hlavaty and I meet “Houston Matters” radio-show host Craig Cohen to discuss Houston gripes: the little stuff that drives us bonkers. This time, before the mics were on, Hlavaty mentioned that he’d had to psych himself up. Beneath his forbidding tattooed exterior, he was suffering a gooey hearts-and-flowers mood, a gushy look-at-that-flower sunniness that, he worried, could wreck his grumbling game.
I laughed. With me, it’s the opposite. Depression and rage come easy. The hard part — the game — is to find a way out: A joke, a solution or at least the camaraderie of a shared eye roll.
Here are some of my favorite gripes this month — including a bunch, submitted via Facebook and Twitter, that didn’t make it to the air but should have. Maybe you need them as much as I do.
Daniel Reyes: Rules of the road should apply to store aisles: If you need to slow down or stop, pull over and get your cart out of way. You’re not the only person in the store!
Cort McMurray: In his introductory press conference, Dusty Baker described the Astros roster as “the bluecollar guys who go out there and work in the shop (on the) ground floor.”
The lowest-paid player on the roster made $566,600 last year. The highest-paid, Justin Verlander, made $28 million. The median wage for American workers is $47,000 a year. That’s the median. Half of America makes less than that. Justin Verlander makes the same as 595 median-wage earners, and Justin only works every fourth or fifth day, for seven months a year. Can sports guys please stop pretending to be working stiffs?
Jenni Rebecca Stephenson: Speaking of the Astros, can we add the “but everyone cheats” refrain to our Houston gripes list?
Deborah Quinn Hensel: If I see one more person throwing fast-food wrappers or soda cans out of a moving car, I’m going to raise road rage to a whole new level.
Ronnie DeVries: I know that not everyone can do this, but if I’m at a light and I see someone littering, I’ll knock on their window and say, “You dropped this.” We don’t shame people for wrongdoing enough these days.
Amy Dinn: You can report a litterer on the new Don’t Mess with Texas app. They’ll send a letter to the litterer based on the address the car is registered to.
Deborah Quinn Hensel: And then the litterer wads up the letter and tosses it out the car window?
Christina Solis: The Mecom Fountain circle should be permit access only. The permits should be issued only to people who pass a written and on-the-field exam. The concept of “yield” will require a 250-word written response, and anyone caught stopping to “let that car in” will automatically have their permit revoked. (To the people about to complain that it’s not a proper roundabout: I know. You know. We all know. It is what it is, and we have to deal with it, not some fantasy roundabout in some more sophisticated realm.)
Dwight Silverman: Houston restaurants aren’t required to post health-department grades like every other major city in the state.
Marlo Saucedo: My gripe: Valet cones in all the good spots at restaurants where I could park myself.
Stephen Klimas: Valet services are a way to work around the requirements of Houston’s parking ordinance. Most restaurants have no choice in urban areas of town (likewise, the sea of parking around suburban buildings is what the ordinance wants) … So, if you want my pet peeve, it’s not having market-based parking throughout the city.
Charlie Burrus: We should have less parking downtown rather than more. The very limited parking for the baseball stadium encouraged us to get on the train to go to a ballgame, and then grab a beer afterwards at a nearby bar on the way back to the train. Since the stadium was built, downtown nightlife around the area has blossomed.
James Glassman: High-rise construction that begins before 8 a.m.
Robert Searcy: House flippers who take architecturally interesting homes with great vintage features and flip-and-Chip them into beige madness, sucking all the life and personality out of them. Everything doesn’t need to look like a Perry townhome inside.
William Dylan Powell: Grackles. They roam in packs of a hundred, always giving you the side eye. I was at H-E-B, and one was right on my truck, saying he “wished I would,” whatever that means. He was smoking a menthol and had a wallet with a chain. And a flat-brimmed TAPOUT hat. Squawking to his friends all sarcastic-like.
You know, ornithologists haven’t defined a single phrase for what to call a colony of grackles, like “a murder of crows” or “a flock of seagulls.” I'm thinking, “an omen.” An omen of grackles. Because seeing 300 of them in a parking lot blocking out the sun does not seem like a portent of joy. It seems like a portent of getting rolled for your #$%&!*$ french fries.
Louis Vest: Having dinner with a group of people in a restaurant and the servers whisking plates away while the rest of the party is still eating. At first, one person sits there awkwardly with an empty place, and it ends with the last diner with a full setting in front of him/her at an otherwise cleared table. Why do we do this? Did your grandmother clear everyone’s dishes as they emptied at Thanksgiving? Did someone see one of those elaborate state dinners where they did that? No and no.
MT Filley: Candy-flavored beers, like Shiner’s candiedpecan porter. They taste like cough syrup. Next thing you know, Russell Stover will open a brewery.
If you missed this month’s “Houston Peeves” on KUHF-88.7 FM, you can stream it on KUHF’s website or find it on the “Houston Matters” podcast. To get in on next month’s griping, follow Lisa Gray on Facebook.