The State of Texas: May 31, 2016

Quote of the Day

“When my fine came due, I just decided I may as well pay with pennies and we’ll make a big spectacle of it.”

—Brett Sanders of Frisco, to NBCDFW. Sanders paid off his speeding ticket with $220 worth of pennies. This is something we have all done in our dreams, but Sanders, the hero that he is, actually brought five-gallon buckets filled with 22,000 one-cent pieces and dumped them on the counter at Frisco Municipal Court. Sanders was sore after he challenged the ticket and lost in court. He was ticketed for driving nine miles per hour above the limit in his neighborhood.

Daily Roundup

Mourning Harambe—A rare gorilla was shot and killed by zookeepers in Cincinnati on Saturday after a four-year-old boy fell into the ape’s exhibit, sparking a lot of sadness and a mini-controversy over whether lethal force was the best course of action. The male western lowland gorilla, Harambe, was a Texan. According to Cincinnati’s WCPO, Harambe spent most of his life at Brownsville’s Gladys Porter Zoo and moved to Ohio last year so he could hopefully breed with female gorillas there. The Brownsville zoo’s Facilities Director Jerry Stones was devastated by the news of Harambe’s death. “An old man can cry, too,” Stones told the network. “He was a special guy in my life. Harambe was my heart. It’s like losing a member of the family. I raised him from a baby. He was a sweet cute little guy.” Stones told the Brownsville Herald that Harambe “grew up to be a beautiful, beautiful animal, never aggressive and never mean.” The Brownsville zoo has even started a fund to benefit gorilla conservation in Harambe’s honor, and Stones has chipped in $1,000.

Augie Out—After twenty seasons coaching baseball at the University of Texas, 77-year-old Augie Garrido is done. The winningest coach in college baseball history was dismissed on Monday, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The Longhorns had their worst season ever this year, finishing 25-32, and Garrido had been on-and-off the hot seat for the past few seasons. Still, some might call it cruel to kick a legend like Garrido to the curb. He was just 25 wins away from 2,000, and it’s certainly an unceremonious end to a career that saw eight appearances in the College World Series and two national titles. But Garrido was more than just a win-loss record. As ESPN writes, he had a “personality of California cool” and an “aura as a Zen-master coach who talked as much about thinking about winning as swinging a bat.” After Saturday’s season-ending loss, Garrido weighed in on his own future with an almost-Buddhist perspective: “Trails end, baby,” Garrido told reporters. “They all end.” Garrido is expected to stick around as “special assistant to the athletic director,” according to the Statesman. Garrido also has something to look forward to in July, when he’ll be inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.

Waterworld, Cont’d—It sort of seems like these “100-year floods” are an annual thing in Texas. Exactly one year after much of Central Texas and Houston were hit with historically devastating floods, some parts of the state are again inundated with water. Pockets of intense “rain bombs” spread throughout the state from Thursday through Memorial Day, impacting cities from Corpus Christi and Fort Worth to Houston and Austin, but it was Washington County (about 100 miles northwest of Houston) that saw the biggest impact with an astonishing 30 inches of rainfall, according to the New York Times. The results have been deadly. The most recent count has the number of flood-related fatalities in Texas at six, but that could increase. According to the Weather Channel, there is no reprieve on the immediate horizon. The rain is expected to continue this week, with some parts of North and Central Texas predicted to see three-to-five inches of rain with “locally heavier amounts” from Tuesday through Friday, while East Texas will get its share of the storm Wednesday through Friday. Brace yourselves, again.