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Water line break ruins HISD’s Go Texan Day; Crenshaw is a stand-up guy in Davidson spat.
Of all the days to cancel school. Houston’s bus-size water main break that affected water pressure and service to thousands drowned out one of the most popular dress-up days in Houston ISD: Go Texan Day. It’s that glorious hattip to Texas’ cowboy culture when parents raid the shelves at Cavender’s to buy their little city-slickers fancy boots and hats they will wear exactly once. Maybe this unfortunate disruption of tradition should give way to a new, more practical tradition: Go H2Ouston Day, an equally festive ordeal when our city slickers don actual slickers, umbrellas and rain boots that will be used many, many times. The day would pay homage to the only city in America that needn’t the permission of a single storm cloud to flood in the streets. What would you do with Tilman Fertitta’s billions? It’s a question posed to 27-year-old Stephanie Hunter when officials say she succeeded in stealing the Houston mogul’s Social Security number on the dark web. She chose to open lines of credit at a furniture store, police say, and now faces criminal charges. Thumbs up to identity monitor LifeLock for alerting Fertitta, owner of Landry’s and the Houston Rockets. Sorry, Steph, no overstuffed couches or Tempur-Pedic mattresses in the pokey. But furniture, really? What a waste of a good hack. We don’t condone theft, but there were better uses for Fertitta’s fortune. We’d start with four oneway tickets to a wildlife sanctuary for the white tigers at Fertitta’s downtown aquarium. We’d bankroll the Ike Dike, reinvent the Eighth Wonder into an indoor Hermann Park and rebuild Astroworld with Travis Scott. Finally, we’d give Michael Bloomberg a run for his money on the billionaire presidential circuit.
The death of a beloved spouse is always a profound loss. But for Lori Judd, the loss of her husband seemed to put her billions in the red. The Missouri City widow logged onto the bank account of her late husband, Brian, and discovered an overdrawn balance of $99 billion. “My eyes, my jaw, the whole thing just dropped right to the floor,” Judd told KPRC Channel 2. She says attempts to get answers from Chase Bank were initially unsuccessful. Finally, though, the TV station reached a spokesperson who explained that the account wasn’t overdrawn; the bank had just placed a hold on it along with the debt — standard practice after a death to protect against unauthorized withdrawals. There’s got to be a better way that doesn’t compound a family member’s grief with increased likelihood of a massive heart attack. Meanwhile, comedian Pete Davidson appears to be overdrawn on material. In a new Netflix standup special, he drudges up the episode where he mocked thencandidate Dan Crenshaw’s eye patch in a 2018 “Saturday Night Live” skit, saying that he was forced to apologize to the former Navy SEAL and that the national uproar helped Crenshaw win his Houston-area congressional race. Kudos to Crenshaw for not taking the new joke too seriously. He chuckled that Davidson couldn’t get him out of his head and his jokes don’t always land. But he refused to let a “Fox & Friends” host goad him into a cultural skirmish about the left’s supposed disrespect for military sacrifice — Crenshaw lost his eye in Afghanistan — and instead said he preferred to remember the Pete Davidson he met on the SNL who brought him back a lighter on a cigarette run that said “Never Forget.” “We had a really good moment, you know, at that time in 2018,” Crenshaw said on Fox. “America liked it. The left and right liked it. So, you know, we don’t really want to ruin that.” Now there’s a stand-up guy.