Pardon Me

Miriam Amanda Ferguson was the first female governor of Texas.  She was the second woman to be elected  governor in  the United States - two weeks before Mrs. Ferguson’s  inauguration, Nellie Tayloe Ross was sworn in as governor of Wyoming.   Ross had won a special election to finish the unexpired term of her late husband. 

Her husband, James Ferguson, served as Governor of Texas from 1915 to 1917. After being re-elected in 1916, Ferguson vetoed the appropriations for the University of Texas. The veto was retaliation against the university because of its refusal to dismiss certain faculty members whom Ferguson found objectionable. This move spurred the drive to impeach Ferguson.

The Texas House of Representatives prepared 21 charges against Ferguson and the Senate convicted him on 9 of those charges. The Senate removed him from the office of Governor and declared him ineligible to ever hold office in Texas again.

After her husband's impeachment and conviction, she ran as a Democrat for the office herself. During the campaign she said she would follow the advice of her husband and that Texas would get "two governors for the price of one.

“Ma” Ferguson served as governor from 1925~27 and again from 1933~35.   Aside from several unproven charges of wholesale corruption, her politics are described as populist and  fiscal conservative. 

She signed the bill that created the University of Houston, and she was (falsely) quoted as saying “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” - There are variations of this phrase going back to 1881 that were often used to ridicule the backwardness of various unnamed Christians – but she was most famous for her pardons.  .

There was a story that made the rounds saying that when Ma Ferguson was touring the Walls prison in Huntsville, she bumped into an inmate that was mopping the corridor.  He backed up and said “Pardon me, Ma’am.”  So she did.

Mrs. Ferguson's infamously over-generous granting of pardons was her way of relieving the overcrowded conditions in Texas prisons.  Some said that the pardons were the result of bribes, though that was never proven.

Her actions did cause the Texas Legislature to amend the law so that the Governor could no longer unilaterally issue a pardon. Today, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles must first recommend a pardon. Even if the Board recommends a pardon, the Governor can still choose not to grant it.

For all the pardons she granted, Ma Ferguson never pardoned a dead man.  The current Governor, Rick Perry, became the first governor to issue a posthumous pardon in January of this year.

 

The Problem With Naked Babies

This picture isn’t one of mine, it’s some anonymous kid off the internet, but back when our daughters were more-or-less that age, I took a picture of them playing in a couple inches of water in our walk-in shower.  It was so cute that we sent it off and had it made into a calendar – one their grandmother kept on her kitchen wall until they were well into their teens.

It should come as no surprise that the world has changed a lot since then, but it is a damn shame that it has.  Every generation since the dawn of time has viewed the next as a step toward immorality and chaos – I know my parents didn’t consider my generation the age of innocence – but my God, we’ve lost a lot since then.

Just consider this story by Brian Alexander from earlier this week:

Eye of the beholder: Cute, naked photos of tots pose dilemma for parents

By Brian Alexander

When Nicole Saupe’s son was about 18 months old, the Cincinnati-based photographer snapped a picture of him sitting in a big, rattan chair shaped like a wok. He was too cute to resist in his jammies, his spread legs revealing his diaper, his belly poking out from under his shirt. And so Saupe uploaded the image onto a new online gallery she had created.

“Before I knew it, it had been downloaded three times. That had me very unsettled,” Saupe recalled. “It did freak me out so much that somebody downloaded these pictures.” She doesn’t know why somebody downloaded the images – maybe he or she just thought it was a cute picture. But Saupe kept envisioning a pedophile and “it made me so ill.”

Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, it’s not hard to find pictures of children, some in varying degrees of undress, some naked, being shown off by proud parents. But others on mommy sites and blogs question the practice, warning that child sexual predators can see, too. Some warn it may be dangerous for another reason: that parents themselves can be viewed as suspect — and even arrested — for taking what they see as cute pictures of their kids but others may misinterpret as compromising.

As a result, the question of how, where and whether to show what formerly seemed the most innocent of pictures, like tots playing in a bathtub, has parents in knots.

“What [parents] might think are normal pictures could be seen the wrong way,” says Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin professor of law at New York University. “As a legal matter parents should be extremely cautious. I hate that. I think it is a shame.”

The days when parents breezily photographed toddlers at the beach or young kids running naked through the back yard sprinkler on a hot summer day may be over, she says.

“People could be arrested for [what we used to regard as] normal pictures,” says Adler.

Indeed they could. This spring, Alma Vasquez, a 22-year-old Utah mom, was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after, police said, she took photos of the child’s father, 34-year-old Sergio Diaz-Palomino, sexually abusing their infant son.

But charges were later dropped because police determined Diaz-Palomino did not assault the baby. Instead, the couple was giving the boy a bath and after the bath, while the baby was still wet and laughing and the father happily kissed the infant’s body, Vasquez documented the scene as family memorabilia. She took the film to Walgreens for processing into prints, and a technician alerted the police. Arrests, jail, indictments, the child’s removal from Vasquez’s home by the state, followed. Diaz-Palomino, who was in the country illegally, was deported.

There have been a handful of such cases over the past few years and though most of the charges were eventually dropped, a lot of damage has been done.

We now live in a culture in which any nude photo — and some non-nude images, too — of a child is seen as potentially pornographic. Thanks to new laws, legal decisions that redefined what can constitute child pornography, and near-constant pop culture coverage of potential and real sex crimes against children, even innocent pictures of our own kids are often viewed with what Adler calls “the pedophilic gaze.”

As Betsy Schneider, a photographer and Arizona State University arts professor who sometimes uses her own naked children as photo subjects, told me, “once you suggest that it is pornographic, once they are painted in a certain light, it is hard to get that out of your head. Then we are all trapped.”

Back when those of us over the age of 35 were little, parents wouldn’t dream they could be arrested for taking such photos. But we weren’t as afraid then. Now fear drives everything from our politics to our diets to how we raise our children. And it is fear, Judith Levine, author of the book “Harmful to Minors,” believes, that turned innocent pictures of children into crimes.

Starting in the late 1980s, she said, as the government cracked down on child porn, which was then relatively rare, and child sexual abuse, arrests for child porn rose. As arrests rose, “the public said ‘Gosh we have a problem and so we have to get even tougher,'” Levine said. “That’s how panics start.”

In response to the outcry, federal and state laws were toughened and judicial decisions narrowed — but sometimes the definitions of those laws only raised new questions because they called for interpretations of terms like "lascivious." But in the context of a picture of a child, what is lascivious? To whose eyes? A parent? A pedophile? Could it include the cover the Nevermind, the 1991 Nirvana album that depicted a naked baby boy in a pool?

Schneider, the arts professor, said she has been forced to self-censor due to the way an adult could view her children’s photos. “I have a picture of my son. He is about 4 and he his totally naked and he’s holding this gun made of Legos and wearing a police hat and nothing else. He has a campy pose.”

Even though she loves the image, even though her son, now 8, is so proud of it he has hung it on his wall, she doesn't show it publicly.

Just as we aim to protect the photos of our children from being misappropriated, we find ourselves looking at images with new eyes.

No rational person questions the repulsiveness of true child sexual exploitation. But the other day a friend of mine told me about a vacation photo she found of her little boy. He was standing in her pair of cowboy boots, which came up past his knees. He was naked and laughing and when she saw this photo again, after having forgotten taking it, she laughed, too. Then she started to worry. What if somebody found this?

She hit the delete button, turning a precious memory into digital dust.

Brian Alexander is the author of the book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction," now in paperback.

Out On A Limerick

That hinged monstrosity above is a patented Limerick Trout Hook.

Since today’s post is about Limericks, and I didn’t want to feature just one, and because I’ve been “hooked” on Limericks since I first learned to read, I figured it was as good a picture as any.

I love Limericks. Love to read them – love to write them – and I’ve collected them as long as I can remember.

By definition, a Limerick is “A comic, sometimes rude, verse made up of five lines of varied length.”
Limericks have a a very specific structure:
The first, second, and fifth lines rhyme
The third and fourth lines rhyme
The first, third, and fifth have the same verbal rhythm (meter) and length, and so do the second and fourth

Limerick writers commonly take remarkable liberties with language and spelling to achieve that definition. The simplicity of the form makes it easy to compose and probably adds to their appeal

Limericks do not have to be dirty, but most of the best of them probably are.

The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep him in close quarantine
Or he sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
- Morris Bishop

While English professors my look down their noses at the form, some of the language’s best writers have composed Limericks. For example, this from Will Shakespeare:

"And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink
A soldier's a man;
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink."
(from Othello, Act II Scene III )

A couple points here -

• a canakin is a small cup
• It’s not a very good Limerick; I would’ve expected better from the Bard
• They didn’t call the form Limericks in Will’s day. They weren’t called Limericks until the 1800’s

In addition to Old Will, here are some offerings from other famous authors:

There was a young lady of station
"I love man" was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, "You flatter"
She replied, "Oh! no matter
Isle of Man is the true explanation"
by Lewis Carroll

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'
by Edward Lear

There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck
When they said, "Are you friz?"
He replied, " Yes, I is —
But we don't call this cold in Quebec"
by Rudyard Kipling

T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas
Crying, “What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill On the Floss?”
by W. H. Auden

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called the hen a most elegant creature.
The hen pleased with that
Laid an egg in his hat -
And thus did the hen reward Beecher !
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our novels get longa and longa
Their language gets stronga and stronga
There’s much to be said
For a life that is led
In illiterate places like Bonga
by H. G. Wells

Of course, some of the best Limericks are anonymous:

There once was a lady named Cager,
Who as the result of a wager,
Consented to fart
The entire oboe part
Of Mozart's quartet in F-major.

or

When Custer was fighting the Sioux,
He sent for two punts, one canoe.
Came a wire the next day,
It read "Girls on the way,
But what in the Hell's a panoe?"

Finally, Google “Shakespeare Limerick” and you’ll find that Graeme King wrote a whole series of Limericks about William Shakespeare. Here are a couple of them:

Young Romeo came on the news
With tears in his eyes did accuse
"Those Capulet scum
Can all kiss my bum"
(then was stabbed by fifteen Montagues)

Young Will had a bee in his bonnet:
"I can't seem to find my new sonnet"
"I don't find that queer..."
(Thought Mrs. Shakespeare)
"I think I spilled coffee upon it!"

Is That A Missile, Or Just Glad To See Me?

The traffic helicopter for a TV station recorded what they thought was a missile launch off the California coast yesterday. 

The military quickly issued a statement that said basically “Wasn’t me.  I don’t know what is was.”  As anyone should have been able to predict, that made the story HUGE!

Still no definitive answer, but the most plausible explanation today – one the nay-sayers will never believe – is that it wasn’t a missile launch at all, but the contrail of an airliner headed toward the coast. 

You can judge for yourself after watching the video from KCBS, the station that first aired the story, HERE.

The Tide May Be Turning

Historically, folks who own houses on Texas beaches have been gambling with the deck stacked against them – if a hurricane didn’t take your place outright, the State might grab whatever was left – and prevent you from rebuilding – using an easement based upon their definition of the “permanent vegetation line.” 

 

That might be about to change, based on this story in the Galveston Daily News:

Are Texas’ beaches still open to the public?

By Ian White

The Daily News

Published November 6, 2010

GALVESTON — The long-held view that Texas beaches belong to all Texans is being put to the test by an opinion delivered Friday by the state’s supreme court.
In a split decision, the court sent answers to three questions asked by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that, if accepted, could grant superior rights to some beach-front property owners on Galveston’s West End.
But the Texas General Land Office said there’s a long way to go before legal machinations throw the act into disarray.
“This is not a decision that changes anything right now,” Jim Suydam, the GLO’s public information officer, said.
The appeals court, which sits in New Orleans, sought the Austin court’s opinion in its review of a case heard in Houston’s federal Southern Texas District Court in 2007.
That case pits petitioner and West End property owner Carol Severance against Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Galveston County District Attorney Kurt Sistrunk.
In the case, Severance, whose three West End beach houses ended up in the public beach easement after Hurricane Rita in 2006, claims the state’s subsequent threat to have her houses demolished violated her constitutional protection against unreasonable seizures.
Depending on its outcome, her case will either gut the act, limiting public access to the Gulf of Mexico to a few island parks, or uphold the state’s ability to maintain a public beach easement as erosion moves the coastline inland.
The district court in 2009 rejected Severance’s argument, but she appealed and the Fifth Circuit sent its questions to the state supreme court Nov. 19 that year.
In broad terms, the questions the supreme court was asked to answer were:
• Does Texas recognize a “rolling” public beach-front access easement ... in favor of the public?
• If the state does recognize such an easement, is it derived from common law or from a construction of the act?
• To what extent are Texas landowners entitled to receive compensation for limitations on their property use when such easement rolls onto it?
In a 33-page response, six members of the supreme court held that Texas cannot condemn and take private property that ends up on the public beach because of erosion because it gave up that right when it became a U.S. state.
The opinion’s conclusion said: “Land patents from the Republic of Texas in 1840, affirmed by legislation in the new state, conveyed the state’s title in West Galveston Island to private parties and reserved no ownership interests or rights to public use in Galveston’s West Beach.”
Signed by Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright, the opinion said: “Although existing public easements ... are dynamic, as natural forces cause the vegetation and the mean high tide lines to move gradually and imperceptibly, these easements do not migrate or roll landward to encumber other parts ... as a result of avulsive events.”
The phrase “avulsive events” is legalese for sudden occurrences, which, in this case, includes severe storms and hurricanes.
In a 21-page dissenting opinion, Justices David Medina and Debra Lehrmann wrote: “The court’s vague distinction between gradual and sudden or slight and dramatic changes to the coastline jeopardizes the public’s right to free and open beaches, recognized over the past 200 years, and threatens to embroil the state in beach-front litigation for the next 200 years.”

Not Enough Goats or Virgins?

Indonesia’s Mount Merapi has been in the news lately.  Multiple eruptions have created a ring of death and devastation (death toll 130 as of this morning) and have caused the evacuation zone to be expanded several times.  Smoke and ash from the eruptions have disrupted flights over and around Java.

In all the stories about the eruption, one in particular caught my attention.  I only saw it once, and didn’t see it quoted anywhere else, so I’m glad I copied it and can share it here.

The fires of Mt. Merapi have consumed the volcano's spiritual gatekeeper.

 

Mbah Maridjan was the sultan's representative to the spirits atop the volcano on the Indonesian island of Java, where an eruption claimed a dozen victims in the small village of Kinahrejo on Tuesday.

His charred body was discovered in an attitude of prayer, according to an announcement by the present Sultan of Yogyakarta, an Indonesian province to the south of Mt. Merapi. He was 83 years old.

"My job is to stop lava from flowing down," Mbah Maridjan told the Jakarta Post in an interview last August. "Let the volcano breathe, but not cough."

His record up to then had been pretty good. Appointed to the job of gatekeeper in 1983 by then-Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, Mbah Maridjan had survived previous eruptions that volcanologists had warned could have been much worse.

Mt. Merapi's smoking cone—Merapi means "mountain of fire" in Javanese—lay within a few miles of his home, but Mbah Maridjan insisted on staying put when the Indonesian government ordered an evacuation in 2006.

He refused to leave Merapi, even while conceding in interviews that he might be killed there. The threatened eruption never materialized, and his already high prestige as a prognosticator rose.

The volcano has long been revered as home to a spiritual kingdom. Eruptions have been interpreted by Javanese as punishments for offending the spirits. Mbah Maridjan organized an annual ceremony in which offerings including clothing, perfume and cigarettes were sacrificed at shrines on the mountain.

A kind of bridge between Indonesia's spiritual past and the future, Mbah Maridjan talked with spirits, worried about the environment and had a Facebook account.

In recent years, the spirits had become angry over excessive logging and sand quarrying on the slopes of Mt. Merapi, he said.

"We should stop making nature suffer through our destructive behavior," he told the Jakarta Post in 2006. The mountain's rumblings also sometimes seemed to people in Java to prefigure political change, including an eruption in 1997 that preceded the resignation of longtime Indonesian President Suharto.

Even as he clashed with government scientists over evacuations, Mbah Maridjan—Mbah is an honorific term, meaning, roughly, "grandfather"—became a revered figure. Politicians asked for his blessing at election time. He appeared in advertisements for a popular line of herbal beverages.

"Everybody sought his support and claimed to be associated with him," including fundamentalist Muslims and opponents of the Sultan, said Judith Schlehe, an anthropologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "I see him as an interesting figure symbolizing the tensions between many interests in present-day Java."

Mbah Maridjan tended to cattle and maintained shrines on the volcano while receiving a modest government stipend.

Thousands turned out for his funeral on Thursday, when he was buried next to the previous gatekeeper, his father, in the family plot two miles from his home village.

"We knew long ago that Mbah Maridjan would be taken by Merapi," said a spokesman for the sultan. "Now he's gone, we have to choose a new gatekeeper soon."

Art in Houston – Can’t Give It Away

The Prudential Building just south of the Texas Medical Center has a date with the wrecking ball.

Located at 1100 Holcombe Blvd., it was built in 1952 and it is still prized as an example of modern architecture. It is considered one of the finest designs ever conceived by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim.

Art associated with the building has caused concern, if not outright controversy, both at its birth and now again at its impending death.

In front of the Prudential Building was a fountain with a sculpture of a man and woman holding a baby entitled “Wave of Life” by artist Wheeler Williams.

That sculpture scandalized matrons and fascinated little boys all over Houston because they were essentially nude – bare assed Buck nekkid, without a hint of embarrassment or shame!    Imagine the arrival in the Houston in 1952 of a 30 foot tall woman flaunting her bare breasts for all to see! Even as a kid I liked the sculpture.

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Center bought the building and surrounding property in 1974 for a reported $18.5 million. The Prudential Building was renamed the “Houston Main Building” by the hospital administrators, but I don’t think anyone outside the Medical Center ever called it that.  Sort of like the Transco Tower will always be the Transco Tower to native Houstonians, regardless of how many times the building changes hands – changing the name of an iconic building is almost sacrilegious and we just won’t stand for it.

Preservationists tried for years to save the Prudential Building. But retrofitting the old building is prohibitively expensive and more room is needed so more cancer patients can be treated in efficient new buildings, so it’s time for the Prudential Building to go. The building is being fenced in, dismantled and will vanish forever in 2011.

The big artistic concern associated with the Prudential Building’s demise has been what to do with this:

That’s part of a 16 by 46 foot mural by Southwestern Artist Peter Hurd, which the artist titled “The Future Belongs To Those Who Prepare For It.” 

Although the piece is definitely valuable – estimated worth around four million dollars – the current owners haven’t been able to give it away. 

As you might imagine, lots of folks would love to have it, but the cost of removing and relocating the huge curved mural is somewhere in the half-million dollar range. For most of a year, there had been no takers, but this past week the Houston Chronicle reported that the painting will be headed to a new home in New Mexico.

An anonymous donor has agreed to pony up the moving costs, and the mural is headed for the new public library in Artesia, New Mexico, a town where the artist once lived and worked.

By the way, in researching this piece I learned that Wheeler Williams, the artist who did that sculpture, was a member of the jury in the Alger Hiss perjury trial - before the statue - and a big supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his search for communists - after.  It doesn’t have anything to do with the story; I just thought it was interesting.