The State of Texas: March 18, 2014

Video of the Day

There are a lot of jackasses parading down the San Antonio River Walk. And then there’s Steve-O, the extreme stuntman of Jackass television fame. He recently did a gainer off the tourist bridge into the River Walk’s shallow water, and police are now looking into fining the jackass $500 for his stunt:

Holy Roller Tuesday

If you keep up with such things, you’ll know that Angus T. Jones, the forner child star of Two And A Half Men, has, in the words of Gawker, pulled out of the show completely to “pursue a new beard and his relationship with God.” Jones recently appeared at the Houston World Harvest Outreach Church to talk about concepts unfamiliar to Charlie Sheen, namely, faith and love. He also sat down with KHOU to discuss his new path in life, which sounds relatively tame compared to other celebrity reawakenings:

Daily Roundup

The Hangover — As the dust settles from SXSW, stark figures are coming into focus. For one, another victim succumbed to injuries sustained during the horrifying crash that had already claimed two others. She was surrounded by roughly twenty members of her family who came to Austin after the accident, and “they were at her bedside when she died Monday morning,” according to the Austin American-Statesman. While the crash certainly left a black mark on the festivities, the actual crime statistics weren’t as bad as might be expected. The number of EMS calls increased, but “emergency workers had fewer problems at South by Southwest than they did last year.” Police “arrested 22 people for driving while intoxicated, 45 for public intoxication, 66 for theft and four for aggravated assault.”

As I Lay Praying — The polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs, who’s serving life in prison, was hospitalized yesterday for undisclosed reasons. Officials won’t say much apart from the fact that Jeffs condition is not life threatening. He is 58, so it could be something routine, or it could be something more serious, something easy to consider given that fellow cult leader Fred Phelps is supposedly close to death. (For more on Phelps, check out the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal‘s varied (and very good) coverage.) Maybe Jeffs will get a similar spotlight in the near future, but in the meantime, the state of Texas still owns Jeffs old compound.

Dirty Business — What with the money and prosperity, Texas’s drilling and oil boom is great. Except for that pesky part about what do do with all the chewed up land that nobody wants. The San Antonio Express News‘s Jennifer Hiller has extensive look at that issue, in a story perfectly titled “Not in their back pasture.” It’s NIMBY on a large scale. All that wonderful “[d]rilling in the Eagle Ford generates a lot of waste that must go somewhere, but no one wants it to end up next to them.” What’s a bit more surprising than people not wanting a dump-site behind their house is that officials have been pretty bad at keeping track of just exactly how much drilling sludge we’re producing. Or where it goes, Or how to safely regulate and permit such sites. Oh, well. We’ll figure it out the next time we have an oil boom.

Slashing Flicks — Texas Monthly‘s April coverboy, Robert Rodriguez, is in the news. Or rather, the production company behind his Machete movies is, for suing the Texas Film Commission for denying the film state incentives. “In the suit, Machete Productions said it ‘spent millions of dollars in Texas and created hundreds of jobs for Texans producing the film, but the Film Commission improperly denied the grant based on a perception that the film glorifies the role of a Mexican Federale (Mexican Federal Police Officer) and sympathizes with immigrants.” The suit claims that the commission “violated the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution,” according to the Statesman. As the story develops, it’s sure to be another interesing chapter in the horror subgenre of state-sponsored movies.