Blathr Wayne Lorentz

When the National Museum of Funeral History tells you not to open a casket, you do not open the casket.

When it comes to transit hardware malfunctions, I guess itʼs better that the ticket machine fails than the train.

Although, I think I havenʼt seen a parity error in 30 years.

I think this is Siriʼs passive-aggressive way of telling me Iʼm drunk.

When I went to vote today, the Harris County election people gave me a little finger condom to keep me safe from cooties on the touch screen voting machine. Or maybe to keep the voting machine safe from me.

I got a new computer today. Itʼs hard to believe that Iʼve been using my old computer for (math… math… math…) eleven years.

That wee machine has been with me through a dozen homes and another dozen countries, from Turkey to Japan to exotic Canada. Iʼd miss it, if the new one wasnʼt so much better.

“Paging Alfred Hitchcock. Mr. Hitchcock, white courtesy phone.”

If you ever want to know what the inside of an automatic barista machine looks like, just head to Whole Foods in Midtown Houston. Thereʼs a good chance itʼs inner mechanism is open and available for you to examine.

Iʼm not sure how many times Iʼve been to this Whole Foods store — maybe a dozen times — and the coffee machine has never been working.

Every time I go, thereʼs a repairman busy tinkering with it. Which seems like quite a coincidence. Either Costa Coffee has an employee whose job is to repair this one machine full-time, or thereʼs something about me going to Whole Foods that causes the machine to kill itself.

I donʼt drink wine. I havenʼt been to New Jersey since before the internet. No, I didnʼt sign up for your mailing list. I do not want your spam, filthy lying spammers at Renault Winery Resort in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey.

Guess which state wonʼt get my tourism dollars.

Iʼve long moaned about how Houston is a city that would rather spend a lot of money tearing things down and rebuilding them, than spend a little money maintaining what it already has. Since Iʼve returned to the city, I see it over and over again.

This is the latest example. These are warning lights that were embedded into the stop lines of streets that cross Metroʼs Red Line downtown. They were pretty neat when the train first ran, taking the flashing lights usually hanging beneath a grade crossingʼs crossbuck, and putting them into the street, itself, nice and tidy. The resulting wigwag light pattern both alerts drivers to the approach of a train, and also lets them know where to stop.

That is, if theyʼre working. Which theyʼre not. None of them work anymore. I wrote to Robert Gallegos, my elected city councilman asking what happened to them.

Not only did he not respond to my letter, his office didnʼt even acknowledge its receipt. Having previously lived in Chicagoʼs 42nd Ward under its very responsive Alderman Brendan Reilly, Iʼm surprised that a local politician would simply ignore a constituent. I guess Mr. Gallegos doesnʼt need my vote.

If the single largest technology company on the planet canʼt keep its web site from upchucking, what chance do I have?

A nice autumn day at the tree museum.

Houston has a number of interesting second-line musea that often donʼt get the attention they deserve. One of them is the former Houston Municipal Airport terminal, now known as the 1940 Air Terminal Museum.

It is chock-a-block with exhibits of aviation history, with a heavy local focus, which is appropriate since so many airlines got their start in Texas, and Houston was formerly the home of several majors.

You can climb inside a vintage passenger aircraft, like one you might see in an old movie. And if you go on the right day, you can be escorted up to the top of the control tower.

That space is in an advanced state of decay, which is why the museum requires a chaperone, but itʼs a nice elevated location from which to take photographs of the adjacent Hobby Airport.

Annie likes to pull the green peppers and black olives off of my pizza. But only if itʼs from Frankʼs Pizza. If itʼs any other pizza, she just eats the cheese.

My cat eats a lot of cheese.

I woke up to a jumping spider in my garden. I guess theyʼre called that because of the way people jump when they run across one first thing in the morning.

Today I discovered that my microwave has a frozen burrito function.

Where have you been all my life?

I spent a bit of today watching the bees toil outside of the Houston City Hall Annex.

Iʼve been told that the big bees, like this one, are locals. Itʼs the small bees that are migratory.

While I agree that the former mayor Brown deserves to have a train car dedicated in his honor, I donʼt like when these sorts of awards are bestowed on people while theyʼre still alive.

They say you can find anything in a used record store. And I think I just did.

For a low-lying coastal city on a bayou that is regularly subjected to hurricanes, itʼs sometimes amazing how ill-prepared Houston is for routine thunderstorms.