End of Silence

As Alamo Drafthouse Downtown prepares to face its last week at the Colorado location before they close down for the summer in anticipation of the move to the Ritz, they’ve made the news for another reason: the South Lamar location had computer problems this week and has overcharged customers, some multiple times.

That’s one way to raise money for the move. 😉

On another note, former Metblogger, Marc Savlov has an Alamo Downtown remembrance in this week’s Chronicle and Jette Kernion is running an Alamo Downtown blog-a-thon on Monday. Be sure to get your posts to her.

There’s a lot of local and national coverage of the beating death of David Morales, passenger in a car that apparently hit a 2-year-old yesterday. The child was described as having non-serious or non-life threatening injuries, as also reported by the independent law firm in New York.

Initial coverage, including the APD press release seemed to imply that there was a huge mob of 1,000 or more involved. It now appears that there were only 20 people in the immediate area and only 5 or fewer were involved. A larger crowd from a nearby Juneteenth celebration may have formed after the incident and were merely spectators to the aftermath, but the updated APD press release is very careful not to associate the incident with the Juneteenth festivities at least 2 blocks away.

The News8Austin story says that our incoming new police chief pushed for the more moderate update of the press release. This is the last thing APD needs given recent events and their current reputation in the community, especially East Austin. The city has been making a big deal about the selection of the new police chief, Art Acevedo. It looks like he’s got his work cut out for him.

Dale Rice had blog post yesterday foreshadowing his Statesman article today about foie gras. I was the first to comment on the blog post, which was followed by the typical uninformed anti-foie gras blather. I tried to continue posting over there, but I can’t stand waiting for comments to appear and you can’t use HTML (thanks, Statesman).

This is a debate that’s already been going on around the country for the past year or so. Chefs Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman are at the forefront defending foie gras when a ban was threatened in NYC. There’s a Salon article from last year, a Ruhlman post on Megnut and several more on his own blog.

So now the debate is here (6-12 months behind the rest of the country as usual) and I have to deal with it.

I happen to not just like foie gras. I love it. I only get a chance to eat it once or twice a year, but it’s not for Noah Cooper and his cronies to decide whether or not I can have it. I’d like to know how many foie gras farms he’s personally visited? How many commercial poultry farms or commercial pork farms like Smithfield, which was profiled in Rolling Stone recently? Has he read Omnivore’s Dilemma? I have. It made me switch from eating commercially produced beef to trying to find grass-fed alternatives.

I made that choice. Am I on a campaign to get Austin restaurants to stop serving steak? No. So stay the hell away from my foie gras.