Piece of Cake

Posted on July 2, 2009 | 9 comments

This week, I’ve noticed that reality — the down side of being unemployed — is beginning to ooze through the veneer of my happy job-seeking world.

In my 14th or 15th week of being unemployed as of the Houston Chronicle’s massive layoffs in March AND with only one more month of unemployment compensation to go without a benefits extension AND with no job prospects in sight, I was still optimistic, mailing out my resume and news clippings packages to a world of hopeful prospects, when I got an interesting call from my career transition team counselor.

 This poor counselor is from the career transition company hired by the Chronicle’s parent company, Hearst Corporation, to help the estimated 200 people laid off from the Chronicle in March, many of us well over 45 years old.  They were to help us, the company’s downsized,  get jobs in this downsized economy, show us — even former reporters with 30-plus years of experience — how to do things like interview wth people and, most importantly, how to “network.”

 Networking is a major concern of career counselors these days. I took the advice, started this blog, signed up with Facebook, LinkedIn, JournalismJobs.com, and about 30 other job sites and social networks to at least be on the cutting edge of the job search as I face this depressed economy still in a state of depression.  I am well networked.

 The counselor was very upbeat, as usual, even perky.  She asked me how things were going, and she patiently listened to my littany of woes and horror stories from the job-search front.  Then she asked if I’d  come to the last day of the Hearst-sponsored training to say goodbye to her and to other team members, as well as other still-unemployed people in the group, while enjoying some refreshment, “a little party,” she said.”

 Just what are we celebrating? While I found it commendable that Hearst cared so much for its former employees, some with 10, 20 years of service or more, that it hired this company to come in with job tips to help us face prospective new employers and new advertures on the job horizons, I had to decline the counselor’s invitation. 

 I love party hats and noise makers and calorie-ladened cake as much as the next gal, but I just had to pass.

 Of the seven phases of grief, I’m still well locked into  shock and anger. I suspect Hearst is throwing the party for those who haven’t found jobs yet and the team that didn’t help me or anyone else I know find one for the same reason it spent the money to hire the career transition team in the first place — to mitigate its own guilt in firing — excuse me, laying off — so many of its most loyal, hard-working and talented employees.

I don’t want Hearst to lighten its guilt load that I suspect it doesn’t feel, but should.   I want that company to feel every bit of pain and gloom and despair and anxiety for its future that I do for mine.

 I told as much to the friendly counselor who obviously still sees the world as a glass half full.  She told me a couple of weeks ago that if I wasn’t getting any nibbles from prospective employers, perhaps it was time for me to “bring some money to bear in the situation.”

What money, I asked.  My source of money seemed to dry up along with my job.  I don’t have the big investment dollars that would help to set myself up in a new company.  I might as well send a resume to Buckingham Palace for the queen job.

What, excactly, are we supposed to be celebrating? The phones that don’t ring? The e-mails not received?  The employers who have shown no interest in hiring people well-versed in a dying industry? The ads on Google about how citizen journalists can make a fortune by writing key-word-ladened copy for less than 20 cents per article?

People were laid off from the Chronicle after Hearst spent the Houston Chronicle’s revenues in trying to prop up its flagging, sagging newspapers around the country, after the company paid lawyers for its legal battles over ownership of its Post Intelligencer, and after — and I’m not making this up — the study of window treatments for the multi-million makeover of the Hearst Building in New York that includes an executive gymnasium.

 I’m looking at having to sell my house before the bank gets the idea of repossessing it. I’m looking at a bank account that won’t cover bills I accrued when I thought my hard work would pay off in job security until I was able to retire. I’m looking at a family who suddenly acts as if I’m poison because they think this is my fault, that I must have done something wrong, even though the Chronicle human resources people  told me and others who were laid off that it was “just a matter of crunching the numbers, nothing personal, no reflection on your work.”

 Nothing personal.  It’s the economy, stupid.

 I wish someone would come up with a forumla that would prevent companies from laying off people near retirement age, and another law that would keep people from acting like hard-working people who suddenly lose their jobs are all rotten bums who are intent on picking their pockets. 

While we’re at it, maybe somebody would find a way to bail out the profession of  journalism and keep the news industry, well the “media moguls,” anyway, from succumbing to bad management practices that are helping, along with a fickle public, to drive the nails in its coffin..

Cake?   No, thank you, Hearst.

 Eat THIS.

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Posted in News Stuff

Michael, Farrah and Ed

Posted on June 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

I was getting a prescription filled when I was startled by a comment from a fellow patient who, like me, was watching the news as it cut between Iran riots and images of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon on the lobby’s wall-mounted TV screen.

“Why are the people in Iran doing this now?” she asked, apparently to anyone within ear-shot. ” Don’t they know that we just lost three icons in this country?  They should have more respect.”

I told her I didn’t think the Iranians knew — or cared very much — about Michael, Farrah or Ed.  And the small number of their Iranian fans probably didn’t choose Iran’s post-election turmoil as a platform for their grief.

“Well, that’s why they’re foreigners,” she said.

I didn’t have an answer for that one.   Not in small part because I had not been a true fan of any of the three who died within a day of one another last week.  That’s why I was surprised  to discover that I will miss them, for completely different reasons.

As one who dances like a chicken in the throes of death, I believe Disco should only be played on telephone recordings and in the elevators and grocery stores of Hell, so I was never a fan of  Michael Jackson’s music.   I was offended by his cratch-grabbing dance moves, his falsetto-orgasmic vocals, his lies about his race-denying pigmentation changes and refusal to be “black,” and finally, for the child-molestation charges that had been lodged against him.

I was too jealous of Farrah, the Angel with the smile and hair that I could never achieve if I had all the money in the world, to be in her fan club..  I also thought — and still do — that”Charlie’s Angel’s”was sexist,  no-substance giggle TV at its worst, the blueprint for Baywatch, etc..

Ed McMahon, I thought,  never had a real job. He made and lost a fortune for a single line introducing late-night king Johnny Carson, and spent the rest of the time sitting in a chair beside the Great One, or later, promising to show up with a Publishing Clearning House check that never seemed to arrive on my doorstep.

As one who had always prefrred John Lennon’s music,  grippingly dramatic acting from people with Brisish accents and the comedic stylings of Monty Python or Sasha Baron Cohen, I was at a loss as to why I should miss any one of them, much less all three.  It  puzzled me. 

I guess that once you see a glimpse or two  of a famous personality and the talent that lies beneath the TV tabloid veneer, you can’t turn away once that person and their talent are abruptly gone.

For Michael Jackson, who died while awaiting the launch of a come-back tour the Thriller was reportedly thrilled about, the tragedy of his life, his no-childhood slavery to a back-breaking, no-real-school schedule created by his reputedly abusive father, ARE mitigating factors in his own lack of parenting skills (i.e., dangling a baby out an upper window).

I  did admire his ability to excite his fans and win 13 Grammys..  And, in truth,  I got all misty-eyed at his ballad sung to a rat in the movie, “Ben.” I also thought that it was also impressive that Fred Astaire called him the world’s greatest dancer. Fred should know.

What could he have achieved without the weirdness?

My jelousy of Farrah’s blond locks in the late 1970s evaporated when my Navy public affairs officer spotted her at a tennis tournament in 1980, “her hair all stringy, dirty and straggly.” But  I didn’t get a single strand of joy or satisfaction from her hair’s condition after her chemo treatments, which she faced bravely, even as she faced her inevitable demise from annul cancer with grace and courage.

In between Poster Farrah and her death, she also became a good actress in complex roles such as “The Burning Bed,” an important film about spouse abuse, and her multi-layered portrayal of a real-life woman who murdered and attempted to kill her children to make herself more attractive to her married boyfriend.  As far as the substance of the plots she chose, Farrah went from male heart-throb in lighter-than-air, bubble-headed scripts to  air bubbles straight to the heart. 

I understand Farrah was a tough little girl from Corpus Christi who walked to school, as she later told Ryan O’Neal, stepping on scorpions along the way.

What a tough,  kind, spirited and beautiful woman, inside as well as outside,  she turned out to be.

And Ed. No, he never showed up with a check at my house, but he did keep his Budweiser pool clean and was reputed to be a really good family man, at least a good grandpa.  Late in life, he proved to be as bad a financial manager as I am, but he got to keep his mansion because of a a few truly good friends who came to his rescue.  Anyone who can generate friends that will pay off your mega-million manse has to have something going for him.

On the Carson show, he did his job, which was to make the audience clamor to see the star and to laugh at Johnny’s jokes, even the frequent ones that lampooned McMahon. According to Larry King, he was the greatest second banana in the world.

If there’s any justice in Heaven — and, of course there must be, since it’s Heaven — Johnny Carson is intoducing Ed to St. Peter about now.

“Heeeeeeeere’s Ed,” he’ll say before he and McMahon go into a really good Carnac routine even Iranians could appreciate..

.

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Posted in Our Country

Jacksonville or Bulgaria?

Posted on June 24, 2009 | 1 comment

Now in week 13 of unemployment during the Not-So-Great Recession, I can say with assurance that the idea of hiring this 60-year-old former reporter does not spark enthusiasm among the Houstonian elite doing the hiring.

As of last week, I decided to cast my net further afield. On Friday, I ventured as far as Jacksonville, Texas, in the heart of East Texas to see about the reporter opening at the town’s newspaper. I stopped for a great hamburger and milk shake in Madisonville on the way up. On the over-three-hour return trip, I moseyed into a tumbling-down joint known to have some of the best open-pit BBQ in the state.

In between, I re-discovered that small town newspapers must, by necessity, also think small when it comes to pay.  I learned that the job paid about the same salary as my first reporting job as a Journalist for the U.S. Navy.  In 1974.

My face must have registered my thoughts when I heard the figure; the editor didn’t bother making it an offer.

The rest of the town looked like it was either being boarded up or falling down, which made me sad, since my aunt, uncle and a few cousins still live there.  My dad, grandparents, great-grandparents and at least one great-great are all buried a stone’s throw down the road in Neches, an even smaller, blink-you-miss-it spot. 

Their graves all face the East so they’ll be facing the right direction on the Resurrection..  The morning my dad died, I remember that a cousin was pestering me about which way my mom had placed the grave marker stakes, in case my dad would rise on that Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’ facing the wrong way.  I told her that I didn’t know.

“But I do know that if my dad gets up and is facing away from all the beaming clouds and angels with trumpets, he had enough snap to damn well turn around,” I told her.

Half of my East Texas family– the Valley Baptists, not the Church of Christers — don’t speak to me to this day.

I decided to pay my graveside respects and drove past the old turn-of-the-century ghost town that “commercial” Neches once encompassed — about five narrow false-front storefronts that look like they came out of a TV Western, only without a saloon, of course. This is Bible country.

The town only has maybe 20 farmers who live off either of the former town’s two roads.  But although I’d been to my dad’s resting spot several times with my mom, I never did find the graveyard. Being the direction-challenged woman that I am, I managed to get lost in Neches.

Which brings me to Option 2 under the heading of My Future. If I continue to generate the excitement from prospective employers that my four to nine e-mails and snail-mail applications per week have elicited so far — read little to none — I’ve calculated that I will not be able to remain in my hometown of Houston. In a few months, according to my math skills, I’ll have to pack it in and go somewhere where the livin’ is cheaper, fish are jumpin’ and they’ve never seen cotton.

Bulgaria.

If I sell my condo and pay off the mortgage, I should have enough to buy a house and last a year and a half before early retirement kicks in at age 62 if I simply move to the Balkans.  I’ve gotten really red-eyed from staying up nights, looking at Bulgarian property on the Internet.  If you’re ever in Bulgaria, give a big Texas howdy to real estate agent Stanley Ivanov.  I’m not kidding.

Yep. I have located some beautiful homes in Bulgaria for $18,000 or less. Some look like mini-mansions, two stories amid orchards looking outward to majestic mountains or rolling hills. 

I was wondering why my daddy ever raised his family in Texas and not a domicille on the Danube until I started considering some drawbacks: 1)  I don’t speak a drop of Bulgarian, and 2) houses in that price range have no real indoor plumbing. Bulgarians seem to favor the outhouse approach, which my grandparents and other small dirt farmers did in Neches 30 years ago. 

I remember waking up in the night and getting my mom or dad, whoever would first acknowledge my pleas, to take me out along a moonless, country path past the barn to a small wooden shed with a crecent moon cut in the door and Sears & Roebuck catalog pages inside, just in case anyone should run out of toilet paper from the Jacksonville or Palestine Piggly-Wiggly stores.

Still, if labor is also inexpensive in Bulgaria, I might be able to have a toilet installed with enough money left over.

But drawback No. 3, I think, is the kicker:  If I fail to build that bathroom before winter, I will waking up, all sleepy  in the black of Bulgarian Nights out in the country, trying to naviage my direction-challenged self in the general direction of the outhouse — this time, in the snow.

I’ve recently started visiting sites listing distressed and tax-delinquent properties in Houston.

And I don’t feel a shred of guilt.

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Posted in Betty Lou Saves the World

Why I’m not getting a job

Posted on June 18, 2009 | 3 comments

Citizen journalism, a Google-spawned idea that everybody can do the job I’ve done during the past 35 years, is so very democratic. Just take a peek at my mail at internet jobsites for journalists looking for work:

“Talented writers for start up News website — Are you a good writer? Do topics like world events, business, cars, sports, entertainment, love, etc interest you? Ever wanted to voice your opinion on something you’re passionate about? If so, we have a great part time job for you!

“We are a small, start up website looking for talented, competent freelance writers to help us kick off. What we want to do is usher in a brand new era of journalism – citizen journalism. Articles that are written by the populace, by the people, on a vast variety of different topics pertinent to everyday life.

“Requirements: Be an active member of this news community, by publishing articles, and commenting on articles published.

“Qualifications: Able to create and write on poignant and creative topics. Unique writing style. Can write without error. No prior work experience needed.”

It’s that last bit — the qualifications — that gives me pause, or as a really Southern new journalist might say, gets my dander riled.

I went to school and learned libel laws, took every imaginable course for professional improvement and, as I mentioned, spent quite a few years at quite a few newspapers and magazines where I honed my skills.

At small newspapers, I was the reporter and also the photographer (including dark-room film and photo print processing), as well as the editor and the design/layout person), all for about $5.50 an hour in 1970’s-’80s dollars. I built a salary and a career, until the Houston Chronicle layoffs of March 24-25, and, yes, eventually I earned more.  But never, even in my best year, did I crack $50,000.

I was never sued, either, for being on the wrong side of a libel case or for getting the story so wrong that it prompted someone to take me to court — an important feat I’m not sure citizen journalists or their sponsors can appreciate just yet.

I’m guessing it will one day take the the court system to finally argue the legitimacy of the “citizen journalist” after they inadvertently and unknowingly libel someone.  It may be the courts that will decide if the citizen journalist or his/her sponsor site that is answerable for that mistake.

The people who went into real print journalism, and — by the way — pioneered the early online versions, didn’t do it for the money.  It was our job.  In some cases, an almost sacred duty to get the news out in a manner that was accurate and, yes, fair and balanced (before Fox News made those words a bad joke). 

The idea that the news had to also be entertaining came a lot later.

In my early years as a reporter, I traveled on my own dime or with some company mileage compensation, sometimes into territory most people wouldn’t enter on a bright, sunny day, to get the story, to cover or promote the event, to bring attention to a cause or individual or organization that deserved the credit or exposure.

Yes, we got paid enough money to live on, if we didn’t live too high on the hog.  We also got the reward of seeing our byline and, if we were good at this particular calling, in the knowledge we’d done a good job, that maybe we’d even helped somebody along the way.

Here’s the part I left out from that citizen-journalist job description:

“Compensation: $15 per article of at least 500 words long.”

And that posting on Elance represents the high end for the citizen journalist, who will doubtlessly have to hold down another day job and will only be a journalist as a lark or for pocket change. A side hobby.

Many of the sites offer substantially less than Elance. Examiner.com pays $10 per every 1,000 hits. Writers, copywriters and editors bidding for jobs on Helium and ODesk accept pennies, agreeing to do several hundred articles for less than a half-penny a word.

Of course, everything is more globalized and even experienced journalists on these sites are competing with people from Sri Lanka and other countries where people scramble over half a cent.

I just wish I’d known in 1974, when the U.S. Navy was at a loss as to where they could fit me in their Vietnam-era service, that this was going to happen.

Back then,  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had just cracked Watergate and had brought down a president, so being impressed with the power of the pen, I told the recruiter I wanted to be a journalist.

Had I known what my profession, vocation, great calling of my life would become — could I have foreseen that I would be thrown on my butt at age 60 during “downsizing” layoffs at legitimate but now-poor newspapers or have imagined the rise of the citizen journalist — I should have told them “Boatswain’s Mate.”

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Posted in News Stuff

It Came From… Home

Posted on June 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

We were wrong in the ’50s. It wouldn’t come from the Black Lagoon or Outer Space, although it would be coated in slime.

The menace taking over the world and terrifying the bejeezus out of everybody is the hate-monger with a gun. 

Lately, it seems like we have more than our share on our blue planet.

Not that our world wasn’t scary enough already,  just from its hate-mongering leaders.

But while we were waiting to see if Dear Leader Kim Jong Il will really set off his promised nukes, or if the Iranian guy will keep office for four more years, Abdulhakim Muhammad, a home-grown convert to Islam, shot up a stateside recruiting station on June 1.

Nine days later, James von Brunn, a senior citizen of 88 and a convicted felon who had already served time for hate crimes, declared open warfare at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

What I’d like to know  is where — when — why — how did these shooters certify to purchase and carry deadly weapons?  What gun salesman looked into the faces of these guys and said, Ok, I think we can simply skip the background check or waiting period here.

I’d like to know the same thing about Scott Roeder, who shot and killed Dr. George Tiller in a Lutheran church two weeks ago.  Or Richard Poplawski, 22, the guy with the high-powered rifle who shot three Pittsburgh police officers to death in April.

How did these guys get such weapons when they, like Brunn, were being watched for posting and spewing racial calls for murder on web sites for stupid white supremacists — people who, in my opinion, have good reason to lack self-esteem.

 The Anti-Defamation League has said that Poplawski believed Jews ran the world and that President Obama was going to enact stricter gun control — laws that would, heaven forbid, take the handguns, rifles and assault weaponry from the hands of the people like him.

His actions took the gun — and the life — away from 23-year-old William Andrew Long, an Army private who was visiting the recuiting station after just completing his basic training.

People may acknowledge the white supremacist crowd for the terrorists they are, just as many believe the more radical proponents of Islam are similar nut jobs.  Why, then, are we so blithely content with them that we keep giving these people guns?

We don’t need to wait for Dr. X, the Blob, the Invisible Man or other creature bearing warnings from six decades ago — films made after the atom bomb radiated Hiroshima.  Those celluloid warnings were a reaction against the consequences of playing with weapons we don’t understand, which seems to be everything from a .22 Saturday Night Special to the people-vaporizing, skin-shredding, city-nullifying mushroom cloud.

Were they alive to tell the tale, I’m sure the 16,000 Americans shot by other Americans each year would understand perfectly the need for more gun restrictions.  At least as far as keeping them out of the hands of hate-sliming crazy people.

We as a people in this country keep sending our quarters and dimes to what we’ve made into one of the biggest lobbies in the land, the National Rifle Association.

‘Cause after all,  we’re the good guys.

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Posted in Our Town

Does Houston need another museum?

Posted on June 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

In a city so rich in its own history, art, energy, technology and patchwork quilt of ethnic groups that it has its own Museum District, a steering committee organized by the Houston Institute for Culture is weighing whether our town needs another multimillion dollar museum.

The focus? To tout our town’s diverse cultural heritage, hence the proposed name: The Houston Museum of Culture.
Fundraising hasn’t begun yet and no site has been selected, but a small group of people under the institute’s guidance have begun to meet monthly to study the idea. This small group of about 30 people so far are also forming subcommittees for things like defining “culture.”

The most popular definition so far is that “culture” will in this case be a big enough tent to focus on the city’s history, media, religion, arts and entertainment, language, environment and economics — things that effect Houstonians’ way and quality of life.

Part of our local culture, for example,  is that we are already blessed with some fine museums. 

We have the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (with a budget of $81 million), Houston Museum of Natural Science ($23.5 million), Space Center Houston, Menil, Buffalo Soldiers, etc., plus the cultural kingpin of our fair town, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo ($77 million).

The exploratory committee for the culture museum is envisioning — at least they were at the one meeting I’ve attended a few weeks ago ago — a hub for academic, social, historical and technological organizations, as well as for artists, musicians, schools and community advocates that would benefit tourists (and possibly teach us a thing or two about our own hometown).

It is because of Houston’s richness of diversity, its languages and ethnic flavors that have given the city its destiny as a portal to the global marketplace.

Envisioned, should fundraising prove successful in these dire economic times, is no mere exhibit-and-artifact center, but a living, vital place with rehearsal and performance halls — possibly a midsize theater, research library and plaza, much like the Institute for Texian Culture, that would spotlight Houston as a Mecca for energy, transportation, rural music, immigration and globalization. It would do this through — again, potentially — permanent, rotating and touring and exhibits, collections, presentations shared with — and from — other organizations and institutions.

But even if the “preliminary-potential- possible-projected” stages are worked through and this thing jells into a real committee with a real capital fundraising campaign, don’t go looking for admission tickets to this museum anytime soon.

The first possible opening date would be sometime in the spring of 2019.
That will give you plenty of time to ponder the question I posed in the title of this blog:

Does Houston need another museum?

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Posted in Our Town

Sports Medicine with a Heart

Posted on May 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

Public healthcare providers and athletes have been under siege lately from just about everybody. 

The medical community has recently been painted as profiteers out of Charles Dickens’ pages, Uriah Heeps out to throw the middle classes into poverty so great they welcome the chance to freeze in the snow.  The move to reduce medical profit for the sake of equity comes at the same time as yet another sports figure, Michael Vick, has tarnished his professional league’s  image.

Vick, you may remember, recently completed his prison sentence and is out of the clink after sidelining himself into the dog house after his own barking mad behavior in staging public dog fights ending in bloody death or slaming dogs to their deaths for fun and profit.

So what could the health plans of managed healthcare people have in common with those in the Dog Killer’s profession, you wonder?

The maligning of these two groups — medical care planners and athletes — make this the perfect time to remember that there are real life heros — altruistic, life-saving physicians and hard-working athletes — who have big hearts.

 Their latest combined pool of fans are sixth graders who attend Houston middle schools in predominately low-income, ethically diverse neighborhoods, the kids docs and jocks have placed at the front of the line in a new heart-monitoring program that might help them live.

The hero list includes (1) Dr. John Higgins, assistant professor of medicine at University of Texas Medical School in Houston and the prime heart behind a new program to check 1,500 middle-school student athletes, and (2) the Houston Rockets, the study’s partner team with Memorial Medical School in Houston. 

 The program is estimated to raise and spend, between May and November, about $600,000 or more to check 1,500 student athletes in Houston-area middle schools to find out if they are at rist for a heart attack. Defibulators were being used for the same purpose in high schools, but Higgins thought that the diagnosis should come before high school, especially for children at risk of developing heart problems.

Houston Rockets are partnering with Memorial Hermann and UT Medical School in Houston to make the program happen within the next year or so, gathering letters of support and money to include as many students as possible.

Figuratively,  Higgins and his team are playing ball with the Rockets, and vice versa, in order to literallysave lives of Houston children. 

They are doing this  through proactively treating what has come to be known to them as the top killer among young athletes.  The program to discover any abnormal heart conditions, Houston Early Age Risk Testing and Screening, goes by the easy-to-remember trademarked acronym HEARTS.

In the first of four phases, Higgins and the Memorial Hermann’s medical team have scheduled visits with students at five Houston Independent School District middle schools thorugh May-December. Participating in what doctors say they hope will only be a first round of the program are:  Burbank, Hogg, Key,, Long and Fleming middle schools.

A Memorial Hermann news release to describe the program warns that results from a study last year in the HeartRhythm Journal showing that “less than one in 10 U.S. student-athletes who suffer sudden cardiac arrest survives.”  

One reason Higgins &  Co. are taking the tests seriously.  

“Sudden cardiac arrest is a condition in which the heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating,” Higgins stated in the news release. “When this happens, blood stops flowing to the bain and other vital organs. It usually causes death if it’s not treated within minutes.”

HEARTS ™ is free for volunteer students and includes a cardiovascular exam, a 12-lead electrocardiogram more commonly known as an EKG, echocardiogram (ultrasound), plus a self-administered quesionnaire during the four-step program currently being administered to sixth graders.

“It’s around sixth grade that kids become more active and often get into sports on a more serious level,” Higgins said in the news release. Higgins also is director of exercise physiology at the Memorial Hermann Sports Medicine Institute. If his program uncoveres an abnormal heart rate in his sixth-grade subjects, then they are sent to cardiologist Dr. Gurur Biliciler-Denktas., UT Medical School’s assistnant professor of pediatricts, for treatment at Chidlren’s Memorial Hospital.

So what does all this really mean for Houston’s kids once the study information has been collected?

There are a few predictions — that Houstonians might see mprovements in the screening process or an expansion of the program to test, that they will screen all sixth-grade children in the Houston area, a tentative future program known as HEARTS Over Houston that is now developing a state program.

A woman who is helping to coordinate the program said she believe the study could revolutionize sports medicine in schools, if the state will grant the funding for heart-testing equipment.  

THE HANG-UP with piloting this potentially life-saving program is — Guess.  Go ahead.  Who do you believe are our state’s Charles Dickens’ characters who, in that author’s day, would likely thank God that there are still workhouses where the poor can go, die “and be done with.”  Who could possibly be happy that illnesses were performing their work, reducing the surplus populatons?

Our State Senate, collectively, is that august body that is, collectively, having a heart attack at the idea of purchasing heart-assessing equipment — defibulators — for schools.  They say no, so the program is reaching out to private donors through its partners.

“They don’t get it,” said the coordinator, who asked to remain anonymous in this blog, about the senators. “What the conservative wing fails to understand is that even the lives of low-income children are precious — and may one day impact the country’s futures.”

Director Evelyn Henry of that agency expressed the program’s potential for Houston’s middle schoolers in a program that no longer waits for children to enter high school before they are tested.

“Students who participate will receive a free physical examination, specialized cardiac examinations and any follow-up that’s needed at no cost to students and families,” Henry said in the news release. “We want to provide early screening and help save lives.”

Higgins said he believes schools will see a drop in sudden cardiac death among student athletes,  especially as the pilot program spreads its message and its tests to LBJ Hospital and others.

“With this screening in place, the incidence of sudden cardiac death among Houston school children may be reduced,” Higgins said. “At the end of the pilot program, we will report our findings and work with Memorial Hermann and the Houston Rockets to grow the program and offer screenings to all children in the greater Houston area.”

Houston schools that would like to participate in the study should call Memorial Hermann at 713-222-CARE or visit <a href=”http://www.memorialhermann.org/”>www.memorialhermann.org.

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Posted in Our Town

Ask senators to restore full funding for textbooks

Posted on April 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

The mental image of Texas school children struggling to read outdated language arts textbooks while students in other states pass them by in tests and in finding careers in the future global marketplace is a frightening one, made noticeably less so by Texas senators’ support of Senate Bill 1, legislation that would  restore funding for new reading and language arts textbooks.

But while calling your senators to congratulate them on passing SB 1, consider asking them to also talk to lawmakers in the House Appropriations Committee, which proposes a 25 percent cut in new reading textooks and instructional materials under House Bill 4586.

Terry Abbott, chairman of Drive West Communications, a public relations firm with headquarters in Houston, formerly with the  Houston Independent School District Press Office and chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, recently issued a warning over the LinkedIn network about the proposed cuts in new reading and language arts textbooks, which he said will leave school districts far short of funds needed to pay for books and educational materials the state has already ordered.

It’s a story local Houston media has been reluctant to cover — and not because it lacks importance or urgency, Abbott said.

It’s been 10 years, at least, since new reading and language arts books have been purchased by the state.  New textbooks would have given approximately 4.5 milion of the state’s students at least seven years of equity in educational materials with students in other states.The Texas Constitution requires the state to use Available School Funds to provide free textbooks, but the Legislature has asked that money for instructional materials be provided only under contingency funding.  That means that that new English Language Arts and Reading instructional materials will be included ONLY IF the Available School Fund hits the $1.4 billion mark in stock market earnings, a formula State Rep.  Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) has publicly predicted will leave about 5 million Texas students short changed.

A statewide survey showed that 73 percent of respondents wanted the state to fully fund reading and asked about the $47 billion education budget, which includes instructional material funding but makes the money dependent on how the Permanent School Fund performs on the stock market.

The House Appropriations Committee has agreed to authorize $347 million, or the total amount needed to cover continuing contracts under Proclamation 2010, but at the same time, reduced the budget for new reading instructional materials by 25 percent from the amount sought by the Texas Education Agency, from $547 million to $411 million.

Brittany Fish at Texas Curriculum, sent out a message Tuesday urging people to contact their senators today, first to congradulate them for including $895 million for the textbooks and for continuing contracts  in their budget, but to also ask for their help in getting the House to include funding in its version of SB 1 and to bring its HB 4586 supplemental appropriations bill’s 25 percent reduction in funding for reading and language arts back up to the level requested by TEA under Proclamation 2010.

“As you know, Texas is facing its most important textbook purchase in nearly a decade and it is vital that our school children have access to these new materials that will be funded in this session of the Legislature,” Fish said.

To locate the number for your senator to thank for fully supporting HB I – and to ask them to restore funding in HB 4586 — contact:

Senator Kip Averitt                                 (512) 463-0122

Senator John Carona                               (512) 463-0116

Senator Wendy Davis                              (512) 463-0110

Senator Robert Deuell                            (512) 463-0102

Senator Robert Duncan                          (512) 463-0128

Senator Rodney Ellis                                (512) 463-0113

Senator Kevin Eltife                                  (512) 463-0101

Senator Craig Estes                                    (512) 463-0130

Senator Troy Fraser                                  (512) 463-0124

Senator Mario Gallegos                            (512) 463-0106

Senator Chris Harris                                  ( 512) 463-0109

Senator Glenn Hegar                                   (512) 463-0118

Senator Juan Hinojosa                               (512) 463-0120

Senator Joan Huffman                                (512) 463-0117

Senator Mike Jackson                                  (512) 463-0111

Senator Eddie Lucio                                     (512) 463-0127

Senator Jane Nelson                                     (512) 463-0112

Senator Robert Nichols                               (512) 463-0103

Senator Steve Ogden                                     (512) 463-0105

Senator Dan Patrick                                       (512) 463-0107

Senator Kel Seliger                                          (512) 463-0131

Senator Florence Shapiro                            (512) 463-0108

Senator Eliot Shapleigh                                 (512) 463-0129

Senator Carlos Uresti                                     (512) 463-0119

Senator Leticia Van de Putte                      (512) 463-0126

Senator Kirk Watson                                      (512) 463-0114

Senator Jeff Wentworth                                (512) 463-0125

Senator Royce West                                        (512) 463-0123

Senator John Whitmire                                  (512) 463-0115

Senator Tommy Williams                              (512) 463-0104

Senator Judith Zaffirini                                   (512) 463-0121

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Posted in Our Town

Blogging is harder than I thought

Posted on April 21, 2009 | 1 comment

Blogging is less rewarding and more difficult than I imagined it would be, more time-consuming and demanding, requiring more patience than I have available for it at the moment. I’m not sure I have anything at all to say to the world — or if I have the wish to say it in this form, even if I did.

I think my time might be better spent working to complete the Great American Novel I’ve been editing — still on chapter one — for the last half century, since age 10.

My plot line has changed a lot since then, at least in my mind, from a Houston adolescent girl’s idea of gothic English suspense (though I may keep the big barbecue jamboree outside the handsome village lord’s manner for another day). Now I lean toward writing Stuff I Actually Know Something About, which is journalism.

Maybe, instead of a novel, I’ll write a couple of short stories about life as a community news reporter, or jobs and life plans that have ended suddenly, such as Black Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle layoffs of March 24-25.

Or perhaps I’ll do what I should be doing — obtaining freelance contracts during days already nearly filled with e-mailing and snail-mailing resumes like little notes in bottles cast upon the sea.

With about, I think, as much chance of netting enthusiastic responses from addressees. (Being laid off at age 60 — despite it “not reflecting on the excellent quality of your work,” they said — doesn’t place me in the most sought-after bracket for editors).

My top day’s number of visitors so far on this blog has been about 35 since I began it about a week ago. That’s a great many less than read stories I wrote at Charles Milby High School in the Class of ’67.

I think I must revisit this whole idea of blogging, who should — and why they should — and who should not, and why.

In case I ultimately do decide to finally end this blog and this self-searching/analysis torture, I apologize in advance to my friend, an excellent blogger, photographer and friend who worked so hard to create this page for me, who shot this photo of me and who tried to inspire me to write and inform, educate, illuminate, entertain or perhaps inspire others.

But I am very much afraid that I’m in the latter “should not blog” category.

I am less than one month from my great shock at being dismissed in that great roundup at the Houston Chronicle, my job I loved in Neighborhood News abruptly gone after 35 years of covering “local” community news.

I am left with only profound dread for my future in particular, and for all of print journalism in general.

I’ve been steeped in objectivity too long. I have absolutely no “opinions” to share. I know how to report the news, not “star” in the news or provide my opinions about it.

When I try to write this blog, nothing important or witty or interesting comes to mind, not anything that I think would be of remote interest to anyone else on the planet.

I do not care if anyone finds my scribblings or reads my prose, likes or dislikes it, or as I do at the moment, hates it with the intensity of a zillion burning white-hot suns.

I cannot become part of the “new journalism.” I am still in mourning for the end of the old journalism.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, print journalism has long been pronounced all but dead.

Let’s say a requiem mass for the slow, nonpersonal mass media.

Long, I think, will live the Age of the Blogger. For a while, at least. Until something else comes along.

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Posted in Our Town

Boyle ‘shockwaves’ a shock

Posted on April 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

The wave started with a few laughs, eye-rolls and even jeers when Susan Boyle had the nerve to step to the center of the “Britain’s Got Talent” stage, the TV venue for acid-tongued critic Simon Cowell & Co., and said her dream was to be a professional singer.

Then she opened her mouth to sing —

And the shock continued after the audience was silenced, stunned by her drop-dead-gorgeous voice, in press accounts of how she, a 47-year-old “spinster,” a church volunteer from a small Scottish village, had “shocked” Cowell & crew and the world by actually having gifts.

Unsaid — but loud and clear in every account — is the phrase “despite her age and her looks.”

Boyle is no beauty.  She’s pie-faced, middle aged, far beyond the cookie-cutter “ideal” weight.  Her hair looks untouched by a professional or salon, and her clothing announces that she is the poster child for “frump.”

But that she turns out to have the voice of an angel — this sends shockwaves?

What’s shocking, I think, is the million-dollar industries built around no-talent, one-voice-fits-all Barbie dolls with perky, perfect bodies and technically augmented voices.  They all aspire to sound like young, but sexually active children gasping in the throes of orgasm.

They are legion, and given the conformity of their brand, I need not name them.

I can only be grateful that I — a middle-aged, far-beyond cookie-cutter “ideal” weight — grew up in an age when people recorded music because of their enormous vocal talent, not vivacious thigh movements.

Had Aretha Franklin started her career in this day when idolizing women adept at physical training — never mind vocal — is the rage, we’d never have heard from the Queen of Soul.  Also among the missing would’ve been Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, the Wilson sisters and almost every female opera singer who ever lived.

I applaud Ms. Boyle in my best, loudest shower singing voice.  I hope she will continue to shock the pants off the critics, and to point out our formula-fed media’s notions — especially that “form” overcomes “content” — to raise questions about the value we place on true talent.

And on well-packaged crap.

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Posted in Betty Lou Saves the World