Registered Nurse, Machel Oswalt says, “We were blindsided by this because, unfortunately, the union works by gagging our management staff. This makes our managers unable to discuss anything about the union with us. They are unable to educate us in any way. So, several of us have done our homework and researched for hours to become educated about the union. We have discovered the union is making numerous verbal promises without written guarantees and nurses are falling for this. Many of the things they are promising us, we already have. We have made multiple attempts to meet in our hospital to educate staff about the union. These meetings were educational only, not anti-union. The union blocked these meetings. We feel that denying us the right to meet in our facility to educate staff about the union is a violation of our First Amendment Rights. They are taking away our voice and our freedom of speech.”

On second thought, I’m resigning from MetroBlog. Doesn’t seem like many people want me here and I’d rather spend less time online anyway due to the pain I’m in.

It’s been fun!

You can always catch me at DerekShumate.com, Flickr.com/Photos/Shumate & ArtForTruth.Info

Thanks for letting me be a part of this and for putting up with my rants.

After reading the latest article in the Houston Press about the Elder Street Artist Lofts I was utterly disgusted. First of all I could not even figure out why the article was being written. I had heard it was going to be written about the process of getting into affordable living spaces for artists here in Houston. However, it turned out to be one big slam jam on the Elder St. Lofts spouting one negative comment after another.

I want to go on the record right now and say that just about every single piece of negative criticism written is completely false when it comes to my experience of getting into this space. The editor even hinted at getting my input numerous times as far back as one month before this article dropped. For reasons unknown I never received a call back even though I agreed more than once to help out. Instead, he decided to focus the story around one poor girl’s experience there and support the argument with rumors spouted by disgruntled people which are no longer there.

The most obvious of all lies is that there aren’t a lot of artists living there. To date I’ve met 2 gallery owners, an Art Crawl organizer, a displaced New Orleans artist, a newly engaged couple with more tattoos than motley crew, an organic gardener and have seen numerous artsy looking types crawling around the property. Not to mention myself being an artist or the fact that the third place winner of this year’s big show, Matthew Sullivan lives there. This is only a fraction of the artists who are there because I hear from other residents about the people residing there and what they do for a living along with the fact that there’s artwork scattered around the corridors of the building created by the residents. Another point HP lied about.

The whole wait-listing artists and only letting in friends bit? Give me a break. I didn’t know a single person there and the management could have easily turned me away at my first attempt to snag a place but instead they reworked not one, not two but three different applications (spanning 3 weeks) to help me get in due to my financial situation. I didn’t once feel like I was being discriminated against or being given special privileges. The management was super helpful and polite during the whole process and has continued to help me get settled in. Not to mention the fact that they have allowed me to hang my art in the halls contrary to the HP’s report about not being able to do so. And that guy whining about not being able to run a business there? Well how do you explain the Gallery on the first floor?

I could go on and on but I thought I’d just point out how the HP decided to ignore a positive experience and focus on nothing but bad ones to produce a prime time hit piece slamming the space from end to end. Where are the voices from the residents who are still living there and have lived there for over 2 years? FOX news uses this same tactic so you can expect the same effect. Which is, why should we continue to support or even think about building affordable living spaces for artists when we couldn’t even get this one right? This article is nothing BUT detrimental to Houston’s progression as far as art studios & living spaces are concerned. If you’re going to produce an article that goes city-wide in front of people’s faces and talk mess about something then I think it’s only fair to expect some kind of solutions or alternatives to be presented, which weren’t.

You know that anyone who reads the article will walk away thinking the project didn’t work. When in fact, it’s the complete opposite. It IS working and the space is amazing. Who knows, maybe in the future things will change my mind but as for now, I’m sticking up for these people and my new home because it’s worth fighting for. That’s how great it is.

Points of interest:
- Texas leads in the largest number of bridges in the country with 50,183 bridges.
•4% of Texas bridges are categorized as ’structurally deficient’ (2,125 bridges).
•16% are ‘functionally obselete‘ (7,802 bridges)
•77% are ’sufficient bridges’ (38,425 bridges)

KHOU lists the following Houston bridges that are considered unstable but still usable:
•I-45 over Buffalo Bayou downtown
•The Eastex over the San Jacinto River
•The North Freeway bridge over the San Jacinto River

You can check out the rest of the state’s critical bridge list here.

If you would like to leave a message for his family, KTRK has set up a forum.

Houston gets to keep a little bit (as in 21 acres) of green, thanks to state funding to buy W. 11th Street Park land from HISD. The park area had been declared ’surplus’ by HISD in 2005 and was put up for auction to the tune of $10 million.

Residents and Houstonian nature enthusiasts banded together to save the park and, in conjunction with the City of Houston, raised nearly $5.8 million. But now… from Jeff Balke:

I finally spoke “face to face” with Lara Wendler, Sen. Whitmire’s executive director.
She emphatically assured me that the allocation of $3.75 million for the W. 11th Street Park was 1) intended to pay for the PURCHASE (not improvements) of the remaining property of the park and 2) not constrained by any “matching funds” rules. She said that despite language or misconceptions to the contrary out there in the ether that the house, senate, and governor knew the intent of the Senator’s allocation and that she was fully confident that this would happen and that a check would be cut on September 1. (I asked her if she thought there was any chance the governor would strike this/not approve it and she did not)

Woo hoo! Now we can all continue to wander through nature in the middle of Houston, while still being connected to the Internet (or hopefully pretty soon at least). Doesn’t get much nicer than that.

Uhmm… ewwww??? Technical Knockout, Inc., a Houston-based company, sent a customer a punching bag full of used underwear and bathing suits. (See full story here)

“(There were) bras, thongs and bathing suits. We could not believe there were clothes inside instead of sand,” he said. Heckel said the smell was “bad, real bad.”

Heckel said that contacting the store where he’d bought the bag didn’t go anywhere.

“I called to ask them if they could tell me if these were clean underwear, but I don’t think that he believed me,” Heckel said. “I said ‘I’m a cop, I’m telling you that’s what’s in there!’ He stated that he had never looked in a bag so he didn’t know what was in them.”

A TKO, Inc. representative has promised to send another ‘new, non-underwear-filled bag’ immediately to the family. Hee hee.

AutoVantage recently published its In the Driver’s Seat Road Rage Survey listing the country’s worst places to drive (and craziest fellow driver antics).

Okay, so I’m surprised. Houston is way down at #11 on the list of nastiest road rage-filled cities in the U.S. Considering what I see on a daily basis in our fair city, I can’t EVEN imagine what happens in Miami.

1. Miami
2. New York
3. Boston
4. Los Angeles
5. Washington, D.C.
6. Phoenix
7. Chicago
8. Sacramento, Calif.
9. Philadelphia
10. San Francisco
11. Houston

Your thoughts? Photo thanks to Mayotic via Flickr.

Photo courtesy of Landmark Theaters