Mr. Smarty Pants Knows
The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 40 years. According to Nick Newton and Bill Minutaglio in Locker Room Mojo: True Tales of Superstitions in Sports, St. Louis slugger Steve Bilko ate at least one candy bar before each game. And Steve Preece of the Seattle Seahawks ate a candy bar every hour…
What Will the Neighbors Think?
Still and all, the tallest order of the day appears to be the day labor center’s move from its current site at Cesar Chavez and San Antonio streets to make way for a new public-private venture to include the Computer Sciences Corp. complex, a new city hall, and a residential high-rise. One of the many…
Food-o-File
Lucky for us that in reviewing 40 restaurants we seem to have made only two mistakes. In her review of Lewis’ Bar-B-Q (1814 Harvey, 473-2225), contributor Ronna Welsh listed the address as the corner of Harvey and Manor Road; it’s actually at Harvey and MLK Boulevard. As for Rudy’s Country Store & Bar-B-Que (11570 Research,…
On The Lege
Voucher fears have faded, the attempt to keep Mueller Airport open is officially history, electric dereg is around the corner, and Gov. George W. Bush has hit the campaign trail running, starting with a press conference on Tuesday at which he claimed victory on tax reductions, kids’ health insurance, and teacher pay raises, as well…
Common Foodborne Illnesses
With all the different microbes that can infect the human body, standards for good hygiene and food temperature become of the utmost importance. The following chart lists the most common of these microbes. Name Method of Contamination* Oxygen Requirement� Implicated Foods Prevention BACTERIA: Require temperature in the danger zone, proper pH, high protein source, and…
Naked City
Rumors that the city’s financial and administrative services director is on her way out are far from true, insists Betty Dunkerley, the object of the whispers. Dunkerley says it was she who whittled down her heavy workload by delegating other responsibilities to city controller John Stephens, a number-crunching whiz who now bears the title of…
When Good Food Goes Bad
photograph by John Anderson Let’s hope you food sanitation neophytes out there already know this, but good food can turn very, very bad when it sits at the wrong temperature for too long — so bad, in fact, that it can kill you. On its way from the pasture (or garden) to the dinner table,…
Just Your Average Stiff
Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead II A hapless Shemp facing off against ravenous demons and reanimated corpses in a lonely forest cottage. Autolycus, the scheming King of Thieves. A wisecracking Forties-era newshound. A six-gun toting cowpoke with one foot in the bizarre and one in the Fox network. Ellen’s bookstore boss, Mr. Billik. Cult superstar…
Code Changes
After 23 years, the Austin/Travis County Health Department has altered its inspection code. Unlike the former code, which emphasized the environment in which the food was prepared, the new code specifically targets foodborne illness and its prevention. An excerpt of the health code’s major changes follows: � Food service establishments, retail food stores, and other…
Going the Distance
Haile Gebreslassie Ten thousand meters is a pretty long distance to run (6.2 miles, for us Americans). But it’s nothing compared to the distance, both figurative and literal, that separates the lives of Haile Gebreslassie and Leslie Woodhead. The former is, quite simply, the greatest long-distance runner in history. Standing at only 5’3″, Gebreslassie isn’t…
Articulations
Last week, in remarking on the news about Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long’s phenomenal $20 million gift toward the renovation of Palmer Auditorium, I inadvertently eclipsed another significant item about the Palmer project heretofore unreported in this column. ARTS Center Stage, the nonprofit at the helm of the auditorium makoever, has selected the fairy…
Dirty’s: The Real Story
One case that people constantly refer to is the method of hamburger patty-making at Martin’s Kum-Bak Hamburgers (Dirty’s). What you often hear is that the burgers just aren’t the same since the health department forced the cooks to quit smashing the patties down on the grill with their spatulas to shape the burgers. Let me…
Play It Again, Sam
All About Eve D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz; with Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Bates. A Triple-S movie (three suicides in the cast — Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Bates, and George Sanders), All About Eve has enough dirt to satisfy even the heartiest appetite. A record 14 Oscar nominations…
Hollywood Swingin’
The Thirties were a long time ago. That rather obvious observation holds true by almost any measure. After all, this is the Nineties; it only takes one pretty simple application of mathematics to determine that there’s six decades of distance there. But the considerable expanse between our time and the Thirties seems especially keen when…
Food Health Guidlines
Info provided by the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services: 469-2015 Food Times and Temperatures: How do you know what the temperature is? Buy a chef’s thermometer at a restaurant supply house, a good market, or a hardware store. Two methods may be used to calibrate it and make sure it’s reading the correct temperatures.…
The Paramount Theatre Summer Film Classics
6/2 7:30 Casablanca 9:40 To Have and Have Not 6/3 7:30To Have and Have Not 9:40Casablanca 6/6 7:15Casablanca 9:25To Have and Have Not 6/6 4:00Babes in Arms 6/7 7:15Houseboat 9:35To Catch a Thief 6/8 7:15To Catch a Thief 9:30Houseboat 6/9-10 7:30Doctor Zhivago 6/12 8:00 The Dirty Dozen 6/13 3:00The Dirty Dozen 6/14 7:30The Black Cat…
Summer Reading
David Foster Wallace Little, Brown and Company, $24 hard This is the most frustrating sort of book. Loaded with dense and heavily researched passages that challenge even Pynchon’s patience for information, David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a collection of short prose pieces that offer firm challenge to a reader’s self-knowledge and…
Food Safety and Haccp Web Sites
National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation: http://www.edfound.org FDA Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/fcanex5.html Institute of Food Technologists:http://www.ift.org USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service: http://www.fsis.usda.gov International Food Safety Council: http://www.foodsafetycouncil.org National Food Safety Database: http://www.foodsafety.org/search.htm Texas A & M Links to Food Safety Sites: http://www.ifse.tamu.edu/ifse/WWWsites.html Consultant List of HACCP Links: http://www.haccpcg.com/page15.html Oklahoma State HACCP…
Scanlines
D: Jeff Pollack (1994) with Duane Martin, L�on, Tupac Shakur, Bernie Mac, Tonya Pinkins, Marlon Wayans, David Bailey, Byron Minns. Above the Rim is the Hoop Dreams story — star basketball player from the inner city navigates the perils of street life to reach the NCAA — as told by Hollywood. As such, point guard…
The “Master of Disaster”
Scott Anderson’s The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life & Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny (Doubleday, $24.95 hard) is the biography of someone very few people have ever heard of set largely in a place no one knows much about: Chechnya. Quickly, however, Anderson makes the enigma of Fred Cuny enthralling,…
Hill Country Breakdown
The confusion was evident. It was showtime out at the Backyard on a cool and clear April evening, but the silent stage, normally bustling at this point with last-second soundchecks and guitar tunings, was bare except for a long table toward the back, filled with water bottles and harmonica braces. At the front of the…
Short Cuts
Marjorie Baumgarten By way of highlighting a couple of film series currently getting under way this summer, I’d like to present the following quote from a 1985 issue of the Chronicle. It was an introduction to a survey of the Paramount Theatre’s Summer Classics schedule written by our resident “revivals” expert George Morris. How appropriate…
Off the Bookshelf
Local bestsellers are based on recent sales at Austin bookstores selected to reflect varied reading interests. This week’s list of bestsellers is from Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy, 616 W. 34th St. 1. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore 2. Kurt Busiek’s Astro City by Kurt Busiek 3. Bone by Jeff Smith 4.…
Dancing About Architecture
Back From the Castle … “Life-changing, career-changing — the best week of my life” is how Kacy Crowley calmly describes her week at Miles Copeland’s Paris castle, where songwriters meet annually and pair up to write a song a day while soaking in the beautiful sights. Parasites abound everywhere in the music industry, but Crowley…
TV Eye
Sure, June is the beginning of fun in the sun, picnics, camping out, and all that. But for those of us who can’t take the Texas heat, get tired of shooing bugs from our food, and refuse to use facilities with non-flushing appliances, a little TV in air-conditioned comfort is the perfect summer getaway. Here…
Postscripts
Austin graphic designer Nick Newton and Dallas Morning News reporter (and The Sporting News contributor) Bill Minutaglio have crafted what must be the definitive book on superstition in sports with Locker Room Mojo (Middlefork Press, $32.95 hard). It reads like an athletic News of the Weird, though it’s perhaps more palatable and presented in a…
A Survivor’s Journey
Jasper, Alberta, 1978. A young woman with a troubled past, beat-up guitar, and a thing for the Rolling Stones walks into the local police station, looking for help. Her her bandmate and husband of three years has taken a turn for the worse. The beatings are more frequent now, the blows heavier and less contained.…
Friendly Skies of Crestview
photograph by John Anderson I live in Crestview. You’ve probably heard of it but can’t place it exactly. Among North Austin’s neighborhoods, it lacks the distinction of Hyde Park, Tarrytown, or even Allandale. Unofficially lined by Lamar, Burnet, Anderson and Koenig, it’s a kind of Bubbaland North. Working class, small houses on smallish lots, some…
About AIDS
We have known for decades that stress is immunosupressive and exacerbates many health conditions or retards improvement. Now comes a new study providing clinical evidence that stress may accelerate progression to AIDS among HIV-infected people. For 5.5 years, researchers studied 82 HIV-positive gay men, initially nonsymptomatic, checking semi-annually for disease status, depression, stressful life events,…
Darcie Deaville
Tornado in Slo Mo (Redwing) It would be a mistake to think of Darcie Deaville in terms of singer-songwriters. Deaville is first and foremost a musician, as is evident by her competence here not only on the fiddle, but also with the guitar and mandolin as well. Her songs are built around tunes, a succession…
Coach’s Corner
Alamodome: Take akid, any kid with a hoop stuck in the ground or hanging from a garage, standing on the edge of the driveway counting off the seconds, doing a game play-by play in his head, “It’s the NBA finals, 10 seconds left, down by two, he gets the ball deep in the corner, he…
Live Shots
Continental Club, May 25 Last turn of the century, Americans in the rural South had to work a little harder for their entertainment than the click of a mouse or the push of a remote control button. They’d work sunrise to sunset (or later) on the farm or at the sawmill, and a few times…
Day Trips
Arcadia Fundraisers to help restore the old theatre in Kerrville that once hosted vaudeville and movie shows features the Band-Aid Jazz Band, New Orleans-style Dixieland with a South Texas flavor, June 6 at 3pm. Kinky Friedman joins the efforts to save the 1926 theatre with friends Larry L. King and Ridge Floyd, June 11 at…
Preying on Atheists
David Waters had been stealing the O’Hairs blind. According to the affidavit, shortly after Waters went to work for the O’Hairs at the American Atheist General Headquarters in February of 1993, he stole a computer, printer, and other items worth some $4,000. Shortly after that, he lifted $70,000 worth of bearer bonds from a safe…
Page Two
Weak Mayor system? Not so as you’d notice. Once again, at today’s City Council meeting, we will get a vivid demonstration of Mayor Kirk Watson’s amazing mastery of this city’s political machinery — a machinery so delicate and subtle, under our somewhat unusual “weak mayor” city charter, that no mayor in the past quarter-century has…
A World of Their Own
Francis, Patrick, Kyle, and Ben are among the 134 students — out of AISD’s 9,400 special education students — diagnosed with autism. Except for one known genetic factor, called Fragile X Syndrome, the causes of autism remain a mystery. Not all children with Fragile X develop autism. Nor do all children with autism carry the…
Public Notice
There are at least two sides to pride. Pride can be a terrible thing. It can be many terrible things: snobby, smug, conceited, self-important, cocky, insolent, condescending, vain. Not to mention overbearing, immodest, narcissistic, boastful, and supercilious. The arrogance that it takes to assume superiority over someone else and deny them their dignity, for example,…
Ben’s Turn
It’s the end of the school year at O. Henry Middle School. More than two dozen sixth graders are giving oral presentations in David Matthews’ social studies class. The kids are grouped at tables around the room. They alternate between semi-rapt attention during the presentations, to summer’s-almost-here distraction in between. Ben Lowe, a child with…
