What I Heard This Week! April 19, 2018
In Honor of Income Tax Week – “I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need – just so long as I die by four o’clock.” Henny Youngman
There’s a new ‘solar’ garden robot named Tertill that looks like a ‘Roomba’ with a baby weed-whacker superglued on its belly. It’s weather-proof, lives patiently in your garden and was invented by the Roomba people. It knows what to cut based on plant size and only cuts plants smaller than an inch. You can put a collar around plants and it will know not to go there, you can use your Bluetooth to check and make sure it is behaving, it’s 4WD, and performs best, in home gardens (not farms), and costs $249.
A survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day last week shows that many adults lack basic knowledge of the events that happened 70-plus years ago. I’ve said it before; The Holocaust Museum in Houston is a must for families. It’s not light hearted but our children need to know what happened.
An international committee of meteorologists have officially retired four of the 2017 names from the rotating roster of cyclone names. In case you haven’t guessed, they are Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate. The National Hurricane Center said that the names “don’t bear repeating.” Replacement names in the rotating roster will be Harold, Idalia, Margot and Nigel and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but hurricane season starts on June 1. Sigh. First name up is Aletta. I personally, would like to go back to the time when if someone mentioned Harvey, we all thought they were talking about the six-foot, three-and-a-half-inch tall invisible rabbit.
Just watched and listened to the Facebook LIVE Album Release of Blue Water Highway’s new album, “Heartbreak City” – these local kids are putting out some really great music. You’ll love their new album cover and I think you’ll all recognize the picture. Look it up, I’m not going to tell you.
Earth Day is here, reminding us not only to celebrate our planet but to DO OUR PART. Why, you ask, do we only celebrate something as magnificent as our Earth, on just one day a year? I ask myself that same question every single day. Do your part TODAY and EVERY DAY to help provide a positive world for our children and grandchildren to live in. I’m going to hate to tell them that we could have done something, but we didn’t. We were too busy, too uninterested, or just didn’t think that it really affected us. Shame.
The moment has come…beginning now at age 5, girls can now join Cub Scouting. This will allow participating girls to work towards and earn Scouting’s highest honor, the Eagle Scout. Requirements will be the same for young men and young women and uniforms will remain the same, though the fit and styling may change. Providing good character and leadership opportunities will always be in style. For those of you that poo-poo the idea, I can tell you as the mother of an Eagle Scout, it is a family affair. It will be as much fun for your family as it is for your kids and you will love it. Even camping on the coldest night of the year has only positive memories for me, my son, and my daughter. If this had been available years ago, my 18-year-old daughter would now be an Eagle Scout. There is an ‘information only’ night for boys and girls on May 10th at St. Michaels Catholic Church in LJ. So, pull the kids off their cellphones and load them up. Something awesome is getting ready to happen. I promise. 409-750-3657.
A Florida couple found a letter in a bottle after Hurricane Irma hit last year. The bottle and message had been written by a child in Scotland then thrown into the North Sea in 1992, as a class project about pirates. Yes, 4,500 miles.
Local boy and musician, Justin Gambino, invites you to join him at his album release party at The Clarion on Friday April 27th. Download your FREE ticket at www.justingambino.com. Come support him.
RECENT BIRTHDAYS: Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI is 91. Basketball Hall of Fame Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is 71. Contributing columnist for The Washington Post and Time Magazine, now writes nonfiction and mystery books. Actress Claire Foy is 34. The Crown. Rock singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds is 75. Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. Actress-screenwriter Emma Thompson is 59. Country singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton is 40. Actress Emma Watson is 28. Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. Columnist Heloise is 67. She attended Texas State University and full name is Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans. She inherited the nationally syndicated column from her mother, Eloise, the original creator of the “Hints from Heloise” when she died in 1977.
Reba McEntire is 63. On Sunday, she hosted the Country Music Awards and sang a duet of “Does He Love You” with daughter-in-law Kelly Clarkson. Even better, was the fact that she was wearing the same low-cut, sequined red dress that she wore during a performance of the same song at the 1993 CMA Awards. The dress has been housed in a display at the Country Music Hall of Fame until McEntire retrieved it. She looked GOOD.
Movie director Francis Ford Coppola is 79. Singer John Oates is 70. Actor Jackie Chan is 64. Actor Russell Crowe is 54. Mouseketeer Darlene Gillespie is 77. Singer Peggy Lennon is 77. The Lennon Sisters. Singer Julian Lennon is 55. Actress Robin Wright is 52. Actress Patricia Arquette is 50. Actor Sean Bean is 59. Ned Stark in Game of Thrones. Actress Jennifer Garner is 46.
Former Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon, 51, confirmed that she will run for governor of NY this year.
It took me forever to finish this. I started, then stopped so many times because it’s just heartbreaking and unfathomable to most human beings. I had tears so please be warned. In Brazoria County (November 2016), a boyfriend of only 2-weeks (Antoine Allen Gorman, 28) was left to care for a 7-week old baby boy and two older children, 3 and 4, while his girlfriend/mother of the children (Tashiay Nelson, 29) was at work. The mom returned from work, found the baby was not breathing and that the children had been left unattended. Hospital personnel attempted to revive the baby for more than 30 minutes. The boyfriend was arrested three days later in Houston. Prosecutors allege that the boyfriend grabbed the baby by the foot and dunked him in toilet water, therefore drowning the child. It was suggested by the Galveston County deputy chief medical examiner that forensic experts needed to test for the presence of ‘semen’ in a swab of the baby’s mouth that he had taken during the autopsy. The medical examiner had found fluid he compared to soap froth in the baby’s windpipe. No sample was taken of this fluid. The DNA swab (a swab…a Q-tip) contained five sperm cells, but this amount was not enough to identify who the semen belonged to. Sigh. The autopsy could not determine how the baby died, but pictures produced in court showed bleeding in the baby’s upper chest, lower abdomen and lungs. The jury reached their conclusion less than ‘60 seconds’ after they retired to deliberate the sentence. Life in prison. ‘Boyfriend’ raised his middle finger and rested it against his face during the reading of the jury’s verdict and then did it again as Brazoria County sheriff’s deputy placed him in handcuffs. He is also currently facing a third-degree felony charge for attempted sexual assault of another inmate. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for those jurors, the attorneys, and every single person associated with the case. The mom (who should in my opinion, needs to accept some responsibility) met him on dating app, Plenty of Fish. Enough said. There’s only one place I think they should send him and I can assure you, it’s not prison. And I would suggest surgical removal of a body part, and I don’t mean his finger.
A Chinese couple that had been trying to have a baby through in-vitro fertilization were successful four years after they were both tragically killed in a car accident. Four grandparents fought a lengthy legal battle to inherit the frozen embryos and won. Since surrogates are illegal in China, they had to travel to Laos, then the surrogate had to come back to China on a tourist Visa to give birth, so the child would have Chinese citizenship.
The Community Foundation of Brazoria County gave its Philanthropist of the Year award to Vernon and Joyce Stewart who had many of their four children, twelve grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren join them on stage to accept the honor. Also honored was Pearland resident and former Pearland Rotary Club president Craig Slater. Congratulations to all and thank you for being great volunteers in our community.
Volunteer Recognition Day is April 20th. Please thank a volunteer. Please be a volunteer. If you don’t know where to start, come by my office and we can talk about it for a few minutes. “Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections once a year, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the kind of community you want to live in.” – Unknown
Forgot to tell you this is Vinyl Week. Columbia Records introduced a 12-inch, 33-1/3 rpm long play record in 1948. Lighter and less brittle than its predecessors, it dominated the recorded music market.
Lake Jackson celebrated again this pastweekend with the 75th Anniversary Pioneers Banquet. Former mayors and residents with stories and memories to tell, packed the LJ Civic Center and celebrated.
Huey Lewis just announced that he has lost most of his hearing therefore making it impossible to find pitch and must therefore cancel all future shows. The belief is that he has Meniere’s disease which causes vertigo and ringing in your ears, but in some cases the symptoms have been known to subside. ‘The Power of Love and I Want a New Drug.’
The Art Car Parade was last weekend. My son was running the fog machines in one of the cars, so I ran up to support him, never giving any thought to the fact that it’s one of my favorite things to do. I just love it! When my kids were little the parade was on Mother’s Day, so we spent the weekend at the Doubletree, doing downtown stuff before and after the parade. Gage and I shared a late outdoor lunch afterwards, so the day was perfect. Favorites were Rain-X mini car with an umbrella spraying water…the singing and dancing lobster and Big Mouth Billy Bass Volvo where the crustaceans and fish all move in unison. One truck was hauling a 12’x10’ full fountain, there was the dragon motorcycle, the traveling popcorn machine, the Astros fan who motorized his lounge chair to travel 20 mph. He crashed right in front of us. A John Deere riding mower with a baby grand piano attached and a tux suited gentleman playing. But my favorite was a skinny 18-20 ft. canoe that was traveling right down the middle of Allen Parkway. Heck, they were all my favorites. Fun day with a trip to Central Market before home.
Barbara Bush died. She reminded me so much of my grandmother that died about 21 years ago. She was something special. Feisty, proud of her grey, and always willing to do the right thing for her family. Here is a nice quote from Barbara Bush. “At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent.”
Remember to do the right thing even when no one is watching. It’s called integrity. Thanks for reading this. Lisa
