Cottontail convention

Because my girlfriend's and my new house is so close to a large, clear right-of-way for a railroad and high-tension power lines, and because our new back yard is virtually devoid of trees itself, eastern cottontail rabbits are a daily visitor to our yard:

They usually appear one or two at a time to nibble on the grasses and weeds that are growing out there. Today was the first time that I saw three at the same time: 

We don't have anything planted in the back yard yet, and they don't seem to be destructive otherwise, so I'm just leaving them alone for now.

If I get a hankering for cottontail gumbo, however...

Joe Paterno's Legacy, Continued

Last January, shortly after his death, I wondered aloud what the legacy of iconic Penn State football coach Joe Paterno would turn out to be.

Well, after the events of the last few weeks - namely, the release of the Freeh Report which found that Paterno knew a lot more about and "concealed critical facts" about Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children than he had led the public to believe - I think that Houston Chronicle cartoonist Nick Anderson sums it up nicely:

Paterno, whose name was already tarnished prior to the release of the Freeh Report, has now become all but unmentionable. Penn State removed his statue from Beaver Stadium on Sunday. The NCAA, as part of a package of sanctions levied against Penn State's football program on Monday, vacated all of Paterno's victories from 1998 - the year he first heard about Sandusky's improper behavior with young boys - through last season. The elimination of 111 Penn State wins from the record books knocks Paterno down from first to twelfth on the list of winningest Division I college football coaches. Yahoo! Sports contributor Adam C. Biggers argues that this is a fate the late coach richly deserves:

A man who preached honor, respect, truth and dignity felt it was more important to retain the image of his football program rather than confront a monster who preyed on children. Paterno swept the incidents under the rug and, in essence, passed the buck to higher authorities who also did nothing. 

CNN contributor Roland Martin, who calls Paterno a "coward," agrees:

If Penn State officials or Pennsylvania politicians had any guts, they would strip the university bare of anything adorned with the name Joe Paterno. What his teams accomplished on the field is impressive, but no one can turn a blind eye to the failed leadership he exhibited off the field.

Forbes writer Monte Burke, on the other hand, thinks that vacating Paterno's victories is a meaningless gesture:

But vacating wins is just downright silly. What does it accomplish? The games are over, done, gone for good. Does vacating them wipe them from our consciousness? Will fans suddenly no longer be able to recall the 2005 11-1 team that won the Big Ten and the Orange Bowl?

Burke agrees that "Joe Paterno turned out to be a really bad person." But he also notes that "he won more games than any college coach in history. That’s a fact." And I can see his point, especially considering how the erasure of those 111 victories affects the players that earned them:

Others argue that the scars of their efforts still remain even if the win column looks different. Adam Taliaferro, a former player under Paterno, tweeted about a plate in his neck that is a lasting reminder of his spinal cord injury from playing at Penn State.

For them, the emotions and the sacrifices that they left on the field have been tainted. Former Penn State player Derek Moye says the vacating of victories ordered by the NCAA can't erase his memories of what he has been a part of. Former Penn State player A. Q. Shipley tweeted a picture of rings he won at Penn State. And former defensive end Devon Still tweeted a picture of a ring that was given out to players when Paterno passed the 400-win mark. No NCAA ruling will take that moment for him, he said.

Almost all of the former players note that their frustrations pale in comparison to those of the victims. But still, this sanction in particular stings deep for them. They believe they are paying the price for actions they did not commit.

But that's the way the NCAA works: they sanction entire institutions for the actions of a few individuals. These former players, through no fault of their own, end up paying for the sins of their coach and administration. And make no mistake about it: the elimination of these victories from the record book is all about Joe Paterno's sin.

The current and future Penn State program must pay as well. In addition to striking 111 of Paterno's victories from the record books, the association also levied a $60 million fine on the program, slapped the Nittany Lions with a four-year ban on post-season play (meaning that they will not even be eligible to compete for the Big Ten championship), reduced the number of scholarships the program can give out for the next four years (instead of signing 25 incoming student-athletes per year, they can only sign 15), and allowed current players to transfer to other programs without having to sit out for one year, as is normally the case. While the NCAA did not give Penn State the "death penalty" (something it has only done once, to SMU), and while the NCAA did not impose a television ban on Penn State (a once-common and truly debilitating sanction that seems to have been abandoned due to the complex nature of contracts between conference and networks), these sanctions are nevertheless crippling. For the next few years the program will struggle to attract recruits and will field a squad that, in terms of the number of players on scholarship, will be only slightly larger than that of an FCS school. Nittany Lion players and fans can expect a lot of losses over the coming seasons; it could be a decade, if not longer, before the program recovers.

Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel isn't particularly impressed with the NCAA's actions: "Justice has been served, assuming your idea of justice for rape victims is to deprive a school of its next four Outback Bowl invitations." Yahoo! Sportswriter Dan Wetzel, suggesting that the sanctions imposed are actually worse than the "death penalty," returns to Joe Paterno's legacy:

Penn State is now a pile of rubble, facing an uncertain future. That reality is part of the legacy of Paterno, who built the program to stratospheric heights only to leave it an unmitigated disaster. 

It's ironic, then, that the actions Paterno took (or, more accurately, didn't take) in order to build and protect his legacy ended up being the very things that destroyed it. Last January, I wrote of Paterno that "to belittle or to overlook all that he accomplished during his career simply because of the way it ended would be grossly unfair." Now that we know more, I've come to realize that it is, indeed, perfectly appropriate and fair to think of Joe Paterno as a man who enabled a child molester and failed to protect young boys first, and a college football coach second.

And that, for better or for worse, is likely how Paterno will be always remembered.

RIP, Houston's only decent radio station

In the corporate-playlist wasteland that is Houston radio, 103.7 was the one bright spot. That is, until yesterday:

At 5 p.m. Tuesday, 103.7 KHJK left the Houston airwaves, leaving "Houston's Adult Alternative" without a substitute. Christian alternative format Air 1 Radio has taken its place.

The changeover as a result of Cumulus Media's prepackaged bankruptcy buyout that included KHJK and sports-talk station KFNC (97.5 FM, "The Ticket"). KFNC was bought by GOW Communications and KHJK was bought by Educational Media Foundation, which owns nationwide Contemporary Christian network KLOVE and its Christian alternative-music cousin Air 1.

Good news if you're a fan of Christian contemporary music, I guess. But bad news for me (and, judging by the comments on this 29-95 post about the changeover, a lot of other people as well). I enjoyed 103.7's "adult alternative" format, which had a catalog reaching back to the early 80s and which featured artists that no other local radio station would touch, like Florence and the Machine, Death Cab for Cutie, The Airborne Toxic Event, The Black Keys, Snow Patrol, Wilco, and Grace Potter and the Noctournals, just to name a few.

I understand that 103.7's demise was a simple business decision: the station had a new owner due to the previous owner's bankruptcy and the station's weak signal (there were times when it was hard to pick up inside the loop) limited its appeal to advertisers. But it sucks, nevertheless.

Well, at least I can listen to my iPhone in the car and my satellite radio at home. Mike McGuff has more.

Turning Kirby into a traingeek

Yesterday, Kirby and I waited alongside the Union Pacific Terminal Subdivision which runs between Bellaire and West U. for the Amtrak Sunset Limited to pass by. I did this partly to show Kirby (who, like any seven-year-old, is really in to trains) what an actual passenger train looks like, and partly to see how videos taken on my iPhone would appear on YouTube:

I used the "train status" feature on Amtrak's website to determine when the train was expected at the station in downtown Houston, and we went out to the tracks about a half-hour beforehand. The "dining car" I pointed out to Kirby was actually the train's observation car; there were quite a few people sitting in there but the windows were so dark that they didn't show up on the video (which actually turned out nicely, if I do say so myself).

Frontier switches airports. Again.

Less than two years after moving from from Bush Intercontinental to Hobby, Frontier Airlines today made the move back to the big airport:

On Wednesday, if you're driving to Hobby, rushing to make your Frontier Airlines flight, you are in a world of hurt.

That's because you'll be headed to the wrong airport. Effective July 11 and moving forward (at least until it changes its mind again) Frontier and its planes will be going in and out of gates at George Bush Intercontinental, ditching the Hobby Airport to the south.

Frontier says going back to Bush makes it the only low-cost airplane flying out of there and comes complete with a lot of better networking.

That's probably true, but it's probably only part of the story. It's very likely that Frontier, which only flies to Denver from Houston, discovered that competing head-to-head with fellow low-cost carrier Southwest on that particular route was a lot harder than it seemed: Southwest aggressively matched Frontier's fares, and Frontier couldn't make much headway into Southwest's fiercely-loyal customer base. Although it has to compete with United on a hub-to-hub route at IAH, Frontier is simply choosing the lesser of two evils, as The Cranky Flier explains:

Intercontinental, on the other hand, looks like a low cost carrier’s paradise. It’s not insanely expensive to operate there, but more importantly, as Frontier notes in the second sentence of its press release, “Frontier will be the only domestic low-cost carrier at Bush Intercontinental.” It had to say “domestic” because VivaAerobus flies to Monterrey, Mexico. For the many people who think of Intercontinental first, those who maybe live on the north side or simply think northward, Frontier now has some real opportunity to go in and make some waves without Southwest creating problems.

Especially given United's rapidly-declining reputation among Houston's flying public.

Frontier, of course, won't be the only low-cost carrier at Bush Intercontinental for long. Spirit Airlines (an airline that I will never fly) will begin serving the airport in September.

A rigged election, or a sore loser?

Once again, the outcome of a presidential election in Mexico has generated controversy:

More than a week after Mexico's presidential election, the candidate who authorities describe as the runner-up said a partial recount was not enough to erase his doubts about the vote.

"We cannot accept these results," Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters Monday, vowing to file a formal complaint before a tribunal on Thursday, the legal deadline for challenging the election results.

Lopez Obrador asserted that presumptive president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto and his party bought millions of votes in the election -- an accusation party officials have denied.

Given the history of Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held its iron grip on power in Mexico for 71 years due to methods such as rampant voter fraud, one really can't argue with Lopez Obrador's concerns. While it would be nice to believe that the country's political process has moved past such chicanery in the dozen years that the PRI was turned out of power, the fact is that old habits tend to die hard in the realm of Latin American politics.

However, this is also the second time in a row that Lopez Obrador has come in second place in Mexico's presidential election. And it's the second time in a row that he's claimed that the election was rigged and that he was the rightful winner.

Lopez Obrador has criticized the election and refused to concede repeatedly over the past week, echoing comments he made in 2006 when election authorities said the leftist candidate narrowly lost the presidential vote to Felipe Calderon.

After that election, the former Mexico City mayor claimed election fraud and never conceded, referring to himself as "the legitimate president of Mexico." Lopez Obrador's supporters protested nationwide. In Mexico City, they organized sit-ins and blockades.

If any of this sounds familiar to long-time readers of my blog, it's because I wrote about this six years ago. Lopez Obrador, it would appear, is not a man who accepts defeat gracefully.

Officials have called this year's election the most transparent in Mexico's history. It was the first election in which scanned copies of district-by-district election returns were posted on the Internet.

But accusations have arisen of electoral manipulation by the PRI.

Opponents of the PRI said they have video and photo evidence of the party buying votes through thousands of cards that could be redeemed for products at a chain of supermarkets.

The PRI's spokesperson, naturally, has decried these claims as "a farce" and says the videos and photographs purporting to show vote-buying have been staged or faked by political opponents.

So was the election really rigged, is Lopez Obrador just a sore loser, or is it a little bit of both? And is this controversy a distraction that Mexico, as it grapples with bloody and debilitating drug-related violence, really needs right now?

Even after the partial recount, the election results remain unofficial. Mexico's electoral tribunal has until early September to investigate Lopez Obrador's complaints and officially ratify the outcome.

And the temper tantrum continues

United is suspending its non-stop flights between Houston and Paris. L'horreur!

United Airlines is cutting nonstop service from George Bush Intercontinental Airport to Paris and several other cities, as it begins to make good on its threat to cut service after the city approved Southwest Airlines' proposal to open Hobby Airport for international commercial flights.

Beginning in September when the Chicago-based carrier moves to its fall schedule, it will suspend the daily non-stop flight from Houston to Paris that Continental Airlines began offering in 1992. United became the world's largest airline when it merged with Houston-based Continental in 2010.

Earlier this year, United fought Southwest's Hobby proposal, arguing it would reduce connecting traffic at Bush Intercontinental and thus harm the big airport's growth as a hub.

Besides Paris, United will cut other destinations it now serves from IAH, its largest hub: Waco; Greensboro and Asheville, N.C.; Toluca, Mazatlán and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico; and Aruba. Service to those locations is a mixture of United and United Express regional service.

No more flights to scenic Waco or - wait for a moment while I try to find it on a map - Greensboro, North Carolina? Oh, United, you cruel bastards!

But seriously: United obviously plans to milk the "we have to cut service because City Council let Southwest fly internationally" excuse for as much as it is worth, even though the the money-losing airline is probably just cutting routes that have been unprofitable for awhile. As the Centre for Aviation notes:

United’s latest round of domestic cuts from Houston are unsurprising given those small markets do not bring a lot of connecting traffic to IAH. It is not clear whether those services were on the chopping block before the City of Houston ruled against United’s wishes in keeping international flights limited to IAH, but it is difficult to draw a connection in Southwest’s planned international service from Hobby, scheduled to begin three years from now, affecting the viability of markets that have likely been marginal performers in United’s network for quite some time.

As for the service to Paris, the United spokesperson in the Chronicle article says that the route hadn't been profitable for over two years. Which is probably true, considering that was about the time when what was then Continental Airlines left the SkyTeam alliance, which included Air France, to join United's Star Alliance. That meant no more code-shares on Air France flights connecting out of Paris, thus reducing the route's desirability for travelers out of Houston.

Air France will continue to fly nonstop service between Bush Intercontinental and Charles De Gaulle.

Jack Stelzer, a Houston-based independent airline consultant, said he believes United officials are "cutting off their nose to spite their face" by choosing to blame otherwise normal seasonal changes to their flight schedule on the Hobby project.

"Next spring, it'll be back," Stelzer said of the Paris route.

As will the Mazatlán and Aruba routes, perhaps. If not, maybe Southwest could consider flying to those destinations out of Hobby.

United has threatened to cut ten percent of their capacity at Bush, so their temper tantrum still may not be over. Their petulant behavior, however, might be one of the reasons they are the fifth-most-hated company in the United States. Seth at boardingarea.com has more.

My girlfriend the bug-eater

Here's my girlfriend Michelle, eating mealworm salsa and chocolate chip with cricket cookies at the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans earlier this month. While I don't think she'll ever become an enthusiastic insect eater, I give her credit for at least trying it out.

Michelle wasn't as impressed with the Insectarium as she was with the nearby Aquarium of the Americas. She's says she's more of a fish person than a bug person. With the aquarium featuring specimens like this lionfish, who can blame her?

As a history teacher, however, I think she was most impressed by the National World War II Museum. I hadn't been there since 2000 myself, when it was still known as the D-Day Museum. The museum has undergone quite a bit of expansion since then (and further expansions are underway as well). It's a very fascinating place; somewhat depressing, considering just how bloody and brutal WWII was, but is definitely worth a visit.

And of course, no trip to New Orleans would be complete without a muffaletta from Central Grocery in the French Quarter. For the record, Michelle said it was much better than she did the insects that she ate earlier.

As many times as I've traveled to New Orleans over the past couple of years, the trip we took a few weeks ago might be my last visit for awhile. The University of Houston is preparing to leave Conference USA, which means no more trips to see the Cougars play Tulane in the Superdome. And as of right now I'm still leaning against participating in Mardi Gras next spring.

How hot was it today, really?

This afternoon, the temperature here in Houston topped out at 109 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the weather app on my iPhone. Although there's no question that today was a brutally hot day, that number seemed sort of peculiar to me: was it really that hot for a day in June? And if so, had it ever been 109 degrees in Houston in June before? Fortunately, Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger already had an answer:

Is it really that warm? For Houston, that would be remarkable. Fortunately my iPhone, and your iPhone, is wrong.

A temperature of 108 degrees today would be historic, considering the warmest June day ever recorded in Houston is 105 degrees (it happened twice, last June). It would also be one degree below the warmest temperature ever recorded in Houston.

Fact is, through 1 p.m., today’s high temperature is 102 degrees as measured at the official Bush Intercontinental Airport station.

So why is the iPhone so much higher?

It’s a question Dwight Silverman and I dug into last August, and the answer is that the default iPhone weather data point for “Houston” is the Houston/Hermann Medical Center weather location. It’s the the helipad at Memorial-Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center, some 200 feet above the ground.

Berger says that "it makes no sense" for a weather station to be located there, as the temperature reading would clearly be affected by heat being radiated from the surrounding pavement and buildings as well as, perhaps, the exhaust from the Life-Flight helicopters that land there. In that regard, the Memorial-Hermann helipad temperature reading is probably about as accurate as the temperature display in your car, which registers engine heat and re-radiated pavement heat as well as the actual air temperature.

Perhaps the person who decided to put Houston's default weather data point at that location wanted a location that was as close to the city center as possible. Who knows? At any rate, today's official high was 105 degrees today, as recorded at Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Of course, I could also ask if it makes sense for the city's "official" weather data point to be located at an airport twenty miles from the city's center.

I could also ask if the difference between 105° and 109° is really that meaningful. Today was miserably hot, regardless of the actual number.

Turkish Airlines to begin nonstop flights to Istanbul next spring

Here we come, Constantinople!

Turkish Airlines plans to start non-stop flights between Bush Intercontinental Airport and Istanbul next year, the Houston Airport System announced in a press release.

The announcement comes three weeks after Council approved an expansion of Hobby Airport to accommodate plans by Southwest Airlines to start commercial international flights from that airport in 2015.

United Airlines had argued strenuously that the expansion would hurt the city’s economy by diverting international air traffic from Bush that all of the airlines depend on to support marginally profitable flights. In fact, the day Council approved Hobby expansion, United announced it would reduce its Houston-area staff by 1,300 employees and that it was canceling its planned service to Auckland, New Zealand.

Turkish Airlines, on the other hand, will start the new route with a Boeing 777-300ER, which seats up to 334 passengers.

It would appear that not even fellow Star Alliance member Turkish Airlines is buying United's gloom-and-doom predictions about Houston "losing its competitive edge" as an international air hub now that Southwest will be offering international flights out of Hobby. More likely, the Turkish flag carrier took note of the amount of economic activity that occurs between Houston and Istanbul (the two are sister cities) and decided that nonstop service between the pair made financial sense:

“The total Houston to Turkey trade value in 2011 was $3.6 billion,” said Celil Yaka, President of Texas Turkish American Chamber of Commerce. “We anticipate this trade will grow significantly thanks to this new flight.”

Service will begin on April 1, 2013 with four flights a week. I've always wanted to visit Istanbul, so perhaps this service will be of use to me someday.