Thumbs up, down
We’ll start with a 21-thumbs salute to outgoing editor and Thumbs author Jeff Cohen.
We start off our thumbs column with a 21-thumbs salute to our outgoing editorial board editor, Jeff Cohen, who created this column when he took the job. Jeff is retiring after a 40-plus-year career in the newspaper business that started at the Daily Texan and San Antonio Light before taking him to Albany, NY. Jeff joined the Houston Chronicle in 2002 as editor in chief, and he ran the paper until taking over the single most important job in the building — deciding what news deserves the enviable thumbs up and what merits the shameful thumbs down. Now his thumbs will spend their days wrapped around a sand wedge or gripping the handles of a mountain bike. Thumbs up to you, Jeff!
Maybe Jeff will take his bike on an outer Beltway adventure along Greens Bayou, where this week the Houston Parks Board held the first Bayou Greenways groundbreaking of the year. This linear park will be the first Bayou Greenways 2020 investment in the north Houston bayou. Hike-and-bike paths and verdant public spaces were never meant to be the exclusive domain of downtown-adjacent Buffalo Bayou. Everyone in Houston deserves to see the brackish waterways that line their neighborhoods transformed into usable parks.
Help us, John Culberson; you’re our only hope. A leaked budget proposal shows that the Trump administration wants to shut down the International Space Station by 2025, according to a report by The Verge. Ever since Barack Obama shuttered the shuttle program, the Johnson Space Center’s remaining duties involve serving as Mission Control for the ISS. If that space station loses funding, then say goodbye to Space City. Luckily, the final decision for government funding rests with the congressional appropriations committees.
Call it the Night The Lights Went Out in Houston. Those technicolor decorations on the bridges spanning the Southwest Freeway have turned to black because the Montrose Management District lost a lawsuit brought by property owners who say the district illegally collects taxes. Now they can’t pay the electric bill and upkeep costs. Until the problem is resolved, denizens desperate for a nightly laserlight show can make their way to another Montrose-area attraction — the South Beach nightclub.