Thumbs up, down
Beyoncé fans jam the Ticketmaster website, while Third Ward hoopsters make us proud.
Weeks like these we wish we had more than two hands because Third Ward has earned a pocket full of thumbs. First off, Harris County announced plans to invest $30 million improving roads and drainage in the the historic neighborhood. Under the Complete Streets agenda, UH Cougars, TSU Tigers and townhouse gentrifiers alike can look forward to better walkability and bikeability. We just hope it involves linking the proposed West Alabama Street bike lane with the Columbia Tap hikeand-bike trail.
Third Ward will have a refurbished hospital to match all the new roadwork. The bankrupt and abandoned Riverside General Hospital is being purchased by the county, with help from the Houston Endowment. The building was Houston’s first nonprofit hospital for black patients but has served as little more than a home for vines and weeds ever since it was caught in a Medicare billing scam in 2014. Now it is set to reopen as a muchneeded mental health services clinic.
Treatment for March Madness, however, is more about a sixpack, a reliable streaming service and a well-picked bracket. Two Third Ward teams made it to the Big Dance this year. Texas Southern University beat North Carolina Central on Wednesday to earn a spot and played first-seed Xavier on Friday. The University of Houston landed a No. 6 seed and, after Rob Gray’s 39-point game against San Diego State, the Cougars are set to take on Michigan on Saturday night.
But the real hard-to-get tickets for a Third Ward phenom will be the upcoming Beyoncé tour (along with her husband Jay-Z). Miss Third Ward won’t be in Houston until September, but the Beyhive apparently couldn’t wait and the swarm of fans broke the Ticketmaster website.
They can’t all be Beyoncé. Houston native Elizabeth Holmes faces fraud charges from the Security and Exchange Commission after her biotech company, Theranos, was caught exaggerating revenues and faking results. The whitecollar crook faces a $500,000 fine, but that’s just a slap on the wrist given the scale of deception. How about some Enron-style prosecution and threat of jail time?
Humanity lost one of our greatest minds this week. Physicist Stephen Hawking died at 76 after spending years confined to a wheelchair by ALS. If Hawking represents the pinnacle of human achievement, then Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain is in the running to capstone the other end of the spectrum. The Baytown representative marked Hawking’s death by tweeting: “Stephen Hawking now knows the truth about how the universe was actually made. My condolences to his family." Cain explained the tweet for the Chronicle: “My tweet was to show the gravity of the Gospel and what happens when we pass, namely, that we all will one day meet our Creator face to face.” Hawking was a notable atheist. Cain notably exploited this to promote his political ambitions.