Thumbs up, down
The Bean attracts critical review, while an NFL player gets likewise from HPD chief.
Houston, the Bean has landed. The lovely legume that shines with final, unmitigated proof that Houston is a World Class City was installed outside the Glassell School of Art this week. Finally, we’ve made it. The obloidal statue, technically titled “Cloud Column” by Anish Kapoor, prompted a throwdown from Chicago Tribune columnist Kim Janssen who spent a couple hundred words feebly attempting to dismiss the clear superiority of a Bean belonging to the most diverse city in the nation (and the World’s Energy Capital) over Chicago’s own Kapoor statue, Cloud Gate. Well bless his heart. The Bean will be our beacon. The Bean will be our flotation device in the next Harvey. The Bean will grant us permission to use every single annoying Houston cliché as if it were crafted anew. Houston, we’ve had a problem. But now, thanks to the Bean, our problems are no more.
You’ve got to wonder how they’ll keep the Bean clean of pollen when NASA can’t even keep its sterile rooms free from fungus. The so-called “clean rooms” that house meteorite samples at the Johnson Space Center are apparently teeming with earthly microbes that threaten to contaminate space rocks, the journal Science reported this week. JSC is preparing to house samples from the asteroid Bennu in 2023, and maybe even rocks from Mars shortly after. Time to invest in Lysol, but first maybe NASA needs to rethink the room names. How about “clean-ish rooms”?
Have a double-Holy weekend with Passover seders on Friday and Saturday nights and Easter on Sunday. We wish the best of luck to kids in mixed households struggling to find a chocolate bunny that’s kosher for Passover.
Here’s a special prayer worth uttering during the weekend’s religious festivities: “Please Lord, don’t let me be crushed by an abandoned Chinese space station.” China’s mission control lost contact with Tiangong-1 in March 2016 and the 8.5ton spacecraft has been in a steady descent ever since. Experts expect the bus-sized vehicle will come to a firey end sometime soon — maybe this weekend — when it breaks up in the atmosphere and pieces smash into the planet at 17,000 miles per hour. Where will they land? Estimates include literally anywhere south of South Dakota and north of New Zealand. Odds of someone being hit are supposedly less than one in a trillion.
We were a bit perplexed why Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo called a news conference this week to announce charges against NFL player Michael Bennett, who allegedly pushed an elderly, paraplegic security worker at Super Bowl LI in Houston 13 months earlier. And we wonder why the police chief felt the need to call Bennett, a Houston native and nominee for the NFL’s annual award for volunteerism and charity, “morally bankrupt.” We like that Acevedo is vocal about a number of issues in law enforcement, such as SB4. But Bennett has yet to be tried, and if he is not convicted, Acevedo will have maligned an innocent man.
Top managers at Schlitterbahn landed in deep schnitzel and now face an 18-count indictment after a 10-year-old boy was decapitated at the water park chain’s Kansas location. According to allegations, the Verrückt water slide — once the world’s tallest water slide — was built with little consideration for safety, and the park manager had instructed employees to cover up injury reports leading up to the death. Maybe this summer we’ll just stick to dipping our thumbs in the pool.