Several months back, I mentioned seeing one of my professors at an Insane Clown Posse concert. Pete asked for more about the show and I said I would post on it later in the week. That was in October. But anyway, it took me a while to find the write-up I did after the show. Anyway, here it is:

In January of 2001 I had a very short romantic acquaintance with a girl named Poe. While it ranks as the second most pointless relationship of my life, if it wasn't for her I never would have seen Insane Clown Posse live, so it wasn't for naught.

When she and I first me, she was surfing the Internet on my computer and opened the web site of Fitzgerald's, the local bar where we usually went to see Phil Pritchett. Insane Clown Posse, a rap band known for outrageously graphic and irreverent lyrics that appeal to the thirteen year old boy in us all. Later that night, after Poe had left, I talked to Jay and Brian on ICQ and we all agreed we had to see these guys perform live.

Everyone I told that I was going to see Insane Clown Posse almost all said the same thing: "You don't strike me as the ICP type." Discussing this with Jay, we decided it would be worthwhile to play up our stuffiness if, instead of wearing face paint or multiple piercings like many of our fellow concert-goers would, we would dress in slacks, dress shirts, and ties.

With the exception of going to see They Might Be Giants, this was the first time that I had gone to see a national band. It did not occur to me until later that we ought to have ordered tickets ahead of time. When we saw some scalpers dealing on the way to Fitz, we knew we were in trouble.

The line was moving quickly, so we decided to go ahead and see if we could get in. When we got to the front, I asked if Insane Clown Posse was sold out. He said it was and I quickly jetted out of the way. Jay, however, thought he heard the bouncer say "But for $20 I can get you in anyway."

So I went back and asked him "Did you say $20 can get us in anyway?"

He gave me a dirty look and said "Yeah, if you're quiet about it!"

"Woah, sorry," I replied. I thought the $20 was the "door" price. It didn't occur to me that he was offering to sneak us in.

So we got back in the line and went through again. This time we got the money and out and I had to $10's underneath my wallet for the taking. He took the bills and told us to wait off to the side. The people behind us asked if it was sold out and he told them it was, without mentioning the alternative he made available to us. He snuck us in, pointed us out to the ticket collector, and sure enough, we were in.

He had taken my $20, but he assumed that I was paying for both of us so he didn't take any money from Jay. So by not being responsible and purchasing tickets ahead of time, we saved $15 ($17.50 x 2 tickets). It also struck us as odd that he would make the offer to the two of us, of all people, who were dressed like we had just gotten off of work. For all he knew, we were clueless undercover narcs (okay, or more likely, two stuffy guys who took a wrong turn to our John Tesh concert). Not that we were complaining, mind you.

We got our hand stamped, but did not get the bracelet for purchasing alcohol. It didn't matter since we didn't intend to drink anyway. We wanted to be in total control of our senses for the concert, which we figured would be filled with some rather rambunctious individuals.

The second story floor of Fitz, where ICP and most major acts perform, has no chairs or anywhere to sit, except in the front row of the balcony. We positioned ourselves right underneath the balcony. An attractive young blond interjected into a conversation we were having. Jay had managed to bum a cigarette off of her. She asked if, since he was 21, he would procure some alcohol for her. He agreed, but there was a problem. He didn't have the paper bracelet to buy alcohol.

As we pondered this, she went her merry way relatively quickly for a better view. She was seen later in the show on the shoulders of some brawny guy - one who actually could buy her a beer. Between our inability to buy beer and the cheap cover, we were making out like bandits.

If I hadn't gotten my shirt at a thrift shop, I would have lost my gains in laundry bills. There is apparently an ICP ritual that invovles shaking up soda and squirting it everywhere. We did manage to avoid the glitter, however.

The show was great. The lurid dancing Eminems were a particularly nice touch. So were the cutely provocative girls holding up the "BITCH!" sign in appropriate intervals.

But by the time the show was over, it took its toll. We were hot, tired, wet, and coke does something to your hair that you wouldn't even believe.

When we got to our car, there was someone dressed in ICP gear who was asking us if we were able to get in. We talked briefly about the show. Two young men with incredibly frizzy hair, dressed in slacks and coke-drenched shirts, and a chubby guy in a tank-top and dark clown make-up discussing songs called "Fat Sweaty Betty" and "I Didn't Mean To Kill'em." Luckily there wasn't much foot traffic unrelated to the show or we might have looked funny.

As many of you know, Texas passed a law regulating on a state level what kinds of license plate frames a car can have. I can't remember the specifics, but the long and short of it is that it can't cover the state's name. If the registration stickers still went on the license plates, that would be an issue as well.

Since that covers most license plate frames, I was sure to got a UH one before they stopped selling them.

In Idaho, the stickers still go on the license plates, except that instead of going on the top - like Texas's used to do, they go on the bottom. This creates a bit of a problem because it's at least partially - if not wholly - covered by my license plate frame. I've been keeping an eye out on the road to see what other drivers do before I put my Idaho plates on.

I also checked the Rothers UH store to see if they had anything that would leave the bottom area uncovered. I discovered that they do still sell license plate frames, but they have new "Texas Legal" ones that don't obstruct the state's name.
That's all well and good, but these things are absolutely hideous. They look like those stickers that were cool when I was in elementary school. All shiny and all that. Even if these things didn't obstruct where the registration sticker is, I wouldn't dare put one on my car.

What are they thinking? Does anyone prefer this glittery crap to a nice standard plate frame?

I ran in to the same thing when I was trying to buy a UH sticker for my car, forcing me to buy a plain white one.

Anne Linehan over at blogHOUSTON posts on some complaints at UH regarding Chartwells, their managed food provider and links to a Daily Cougar article where students are registering their protests:

I'm not a huge, huge fan of Chartwells, but to be honest I can't rally behind their current set of complaints. Of course, I'm not a clean freak and I couldn't find bottled soft drinks for 99c to save my life.

Mostly, though, I had to endure the company that handled food at UH before when they were on their way out.

From all I'd heard, the company was bad to begin with. It was bad enough that it became pretty obvious that their contract was not going to be extended and they were very unlikely to get a bid (Adam, who was in the RHA at the time, may be able to elaborate on this). Once the company realized that they were serving us on borrowed time, they simply stopped serving us.

For example:

The sandwich place would run out of bread on Thursday and wouldn't replenish their stock until Tuesday.

If someone called in sick, they wouldn't have anyone fill in. Increasing absenteism during exam season meant that a lot of places were closed a lot of the time.

Not only would they not have anyone fill in, they wouldn't make people working at other places help out - even if they were sitting their twiddling thumbs working at the sandwich place without any bread.

They could do all this with impugnity because they knew they weren't getting a contract and residents had to have a meal plan, so they were getting their money anyway.

So when Chartwells came in, they were like a white knight to our rescue. The personnel problems cited in the Daily Cougar didn't exist, the one really good guy from the previous company was held over, and they enlarged the convenience store and had better stock.

The honeymoon didn't last (for me, anyway). The all-you-can-eat cafeteria ceased being all you can eat and the prices of the different plates basically meant that you could have one helping for the same price that you used to have a buffet for. The last straw for me was when they discontinued breakfast.

I wrote a column in the Daily Cougar making this point:

If the purpose of the restaurants is to serve the student population, then we ought to move to a completely capitalistic system where we buy what we want and subsidize the vendors, who pay rent to the University. But if this is to be the case, then we should not be required to buy a meal plan to live on campus. I should not have to shell out more than $400 and then lose that money if it is not spent.

If the purpose is to serve the student residents, then the eating places should at least be open for three meals a day, five days a week, even if there is no profit to be made. The University should also replace any dysfunctional equipment and do whatever needs to be done so Chartwells can do its job (or face the consequences of not doing it without anything else to blame). It's getting to the point that I am waiting for Chartwells to announce it can only serve food between 1 and 1:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

I don't know who is to blame. Chartwells rightfully points out that it has inferior equipment and a disinterested student body. Students point out how everything is being taken away from them. However, the administration and Chartwells need to figure out something or give up, rent the space out, and give me my $400 back.

With the student population of UH being relatively small (4,000 or so, I think) and increasingly sprawled, I don't know whether a more capitalistic system would really work.

But the current system isn't working either. Chartwells's predecessor and Chartwells then and Chartwells now all demonstrate this. But if UH wants to become less of a commuter campus, these problems have to be addressed.

Even as I became more liberal in my high school years, I never much cared for Jesse Jackson. While I even supported a lot of what he proclaimed to stand for (including affirmative action), there was something about his demeanor that put me ill-at-ease. But while I never cared much for Jackson, I was generally able to vaguely, ambiguously feel that his heart may not be entirely in the wrong place. Then, in March of 2000, he came to Houston and everything changed.

Texas Southern University was a wreck at the time. Night after night there would be stories of how students were getting dropped for classes for lack of payment even when the remaining balance was owed by the university's own scholarship fund. The University's president had somehow managed to get the undying support of of the students getting screwed in the process and attempts to keep him from getting fired were wrapped in a civil rights flag. They were ultimately able to get rid of him in 1999, but things had not improved when Jesse came to town in early 2000. I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise that he blamed the entirety of the problem on white racism, but it certainly came to a surprise to me that he blamed it on white universities and he declared, of all schools, University of Houston to be white.

The University of Houston was then and is now one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the nation. Nationally, every ethnic group except whites are overrepresented. Locally, only blacks lagged seriously behind their Houston numbers and one of the big reasons for that was TSU, the historically black university located right across the street. Not only was the school diverse in numbers, UH's College of Technology remains one of the least segregated places that I've ever been. I recall one class that amazingly had twenty students: five whites, five blacks, five Hispanics, three Asians, and two of Middle-Eastern descent. Not only were the groups not clumped together, but when we had to break off in self-selected groups of four, no group had more than one person of any given race. This was not done in the name of diversity, but rather based on where we were sitting. I was probably the only person in the class who noted the ethnic breakdown of the groups and I only did because Jesse Jackson had been on television calling UH a "white school."

There were, at the time, nearly as many black students at UH as there were at TSU. Of course, since UH is the 25th largest campus in the nation and about four or five times the size of TSU, no argument can be made that UH was more "black" than TSU. That's what it all came down to and how Jesse reformed UH into a white "have" to TSU's black "have not."

"When I ride down Scott Street and look at UH on one side and look at TSU on the other, I see two school systems under one state flag and in one nation," Jackson said. "On one side, the grass is green, the flowers are blossoming, the research is abundant, and the growth is phenomenal.

"On the other side, inadequate computers, old dormitories, not enough teacher pay," he said. "We want equal protection and equal funding."

It was all choreography for a "civil rights march" from the UH to TSU and UH was a convenient target due to its close proximity. A more fitting demonstration would have been some sort of "freedom bus ride" from College Station to Prairie View between two universities in the same system with huge demographic differences and a huge gulf in funding instead of two poorly funded schools in urban areas in which the black school got more money from the state per student than the white school did:

The source of some of the protesters' data remains unclear, however.

For example, proponents of equal funding, including Jackson, have claimed the state spends $14,000 per student at traditionally majority schools vs. $11,000 per student at minority schools. But state budget figures show that TSU receives a larger portion of state funding per student than UH does -- $4,916 per capita in general revenue at TSU as opposed to $3,620 at UH.

No one at TSU was able to explain the source of the larger figures to The Daily Cougar.

But that didn't look as good on television and since national audiences (which he was playing to as Governor Bush ran for president) didn't know the first thing about UH, convincing them that UH was a white school was easier than presenting an even remotely accurate picture of the two universities.

The symbolic march did not lead to equality in funding in Texas academics. The real battle is UT and A&M versus every other university in the state, but that wasn't a battle that Jesse was particularly interested in fighting. He wasn't even really fighting for TSU as much as he was fighting against Governor George W. Bush. He lost that battle, too.

Apparently, the famous "Bill Gates will give you a zillion dollars if you email this to 10 people" hoax was accidentally started by a former University of Houston student:

Jonathon Keats at Wired Magazine decided to track down the origin of the Bill Gates e-mail tracking hoax. After a few dead ends he finally located then-student Bryan Mack, who created the hoax on November 18, 1997 while at the University of Houston. In Mack's own words: 'It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand. One of his buddies had gotten a make-money-fast spam and Mack said 'I can come up with something better than that.' Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. At first he just sent it to a few friends, but those friends sent it to other friends (and so on), and it didn't take long for the e-mail to transform from a joke to a full-fledged hoax."

Here's the Wired story.

That hoax never bothered me. The one that bothered me was the email tax. I swear that every week at UFC some new coworker would tell me about it. I'd tell them it was a hoax and they would look at me as if to say, "You naive, naive boy..."

Update: Or not. Bryan Mack writes to say that he was a student at Iowa State and not UH. Apparently, the UH connection was that an archivist who helped them find Mack was a UH student.

As much as I love the University of Houston, I had to deal with my fair share of bureaucratic crap when I went there. That all paled in comparison to the bureaucratic crap I had to put up with when to get out of there. In the summer of 2001 a crucial hard drive of mine was formatted over. I flung into panic about all of the personal writing I'd lost (about a year's worth), the mp3s that I would have to re-rip from my CDs, and the general crap that comes with losing all of one's data. An afterthought was that I lost my academic work. Papers and programs I'd written were gone. I lost something else that would come back to haunt me.

In the spring I had dropped my Chem II-Honors class. I'd had enough trouble with Chem-I and I needed to scale back a little to keep my full-time work and full-time school schedule. A week later I was laid off from Nova, but it was too late. It was just as well, though, because I had no particular love of chemistry. A couple months before I realized that my chosen minor (Business Administration Education) was going to require an additional 30 hours (they'd only told me about 12 hours... some sort of misunderstanding that I probably can't blame them for) and I'd switched to Industrial Supervision. The problem is that Industrial Supervision required one class that was only offered in the fall. The long and short of it was that I would not be graduating until December 2001. So I figured while I was (okay, okay, my parents were) paying tuition for that fall, I'd go ahead and take Geology then.

Before signing up for my final summer and fall semesters, I consulted with an academic advisor to make sure that I got all the credits I would need to graduate. It was about then that I realized that among the other things lost in my reformatting was my class spreadsheet. My regular advisor was off on maturnity leave. I should have realized that this was shaping up to be really, really bad. My new advisor said that my schedule was great and that I'd graduate in December.

Six months or so later, he sent me a form letter saying that I was a Natural Science credit short of graduating.

I looked through the requirements; I needed six hours, I had six hours. What was he talking about? It took me about two days to finally track down the right course guide. Apparently the year before I got there, they upped the requirement to seven hours. Two years later, they dropped it back down to six. Since I declared my major my freshman year, I fell within that two year window and needed that seventh hour of credit. Because of one fraggin' hour, I wouldn't graduate until May 2002. Not only was I an hour short, but it was an hour that had nothing to do with my major and it was an hour the same advisor that said I couldn't graduate didn't say that I needed when I actually could have done something about it. Words cannot convey how low I felt. I called Audrey in a state of despair - something I rarely did given the timultuous nature of our relations - and even called Mom looking for solace. I figured Mom would be the angriest of all, but she really came shining through with a hilarious story about her time at Georgia Tech when a bunch of Montgomery GI's were denied their degrees for lacking a PE credit. I will never forget how supportive she was.

So with the hysteria passing, I had to figure out what I was going to do. Audrey suggested testing out of the credit (I couldn't find the information needed to) and Mom suggested going to San Jac to pick it up (I couldn't, the last 30 hours of credit had to be local). Desperate, I went back to the advisor, who said that I should have thought of that missing credit before I preverbally printed my graduation invitations. The fact that one of his job functions is to alert me of such things completely flew over his head. It wasn't as though I didn't do my part about seeing an academic advisor to make sure. I talked to my de-facto faculty advisor and she told me that I could apply for a waiver. She told me to see the department chair.

I talked to the Chair, who was surprisingly accessible, and told him about my situation. In his immortal words: "This is the dumbest thing I've heard since... well since this morning. It's not easy working in administration."

He gave me the form and said that he would be glad to sign it. I raced home, filled it out, and sent it back in. I asked him how long it would take me to get my degree. He said some time in January, assuming that all the credits had been met. By February, I was getting concerned.

I called the college office and asked them about it. They said to give it another couple weeks and hang up before I could respond. I gave them another couple of weeks and called back. "It was denied. You were missing a natural science credit." I asked who I could talk to about it, and he gave me the name of the advisor who signed off on my remaining credit and denied my graduation application.

The next couple of weeks were spent trying to contact the advisor. I finally had to take off early from work and go down there personally. He said that there wasn't any record of my applying for a waiver. Did I have my carbon copy? No, I never picked it up. It turns out that was a good decision on my part because it was still there. He said that should be sufficient, gave me another graduation application, and sent me on my merry way.

Two months later, he denied my second graduation application.

Not even bothering to try to call, I went down there again. He told me that he couldn't accept the yellow carbon copy (mine). He needed the white one. If I wanted to graduate, I had to get it signed all over again. That required a third half-day at work to talk to the Chair again. He signed off again, I turned it in along with a third graduation application.

Two months later, he denied my third graduation application.

I took my fourth half-day and went down there to talk to him again. He said that there was no record of my being a current student. He told me that I needed to be a current student in order to have a graduation application approved. I asked what I could do and he said I could sign up for a summer course and apply then. Somehow my graduation had been denied from December 2001 until August 2002 because I was missing a credit that I got waived twice (the first time while I actually was a student). This was unacceptable to me so I poured over the Student Handbook to see if I had any way that I could appeal, who I could talk to, and where exactly it said that I had to be currently enrolled. I found no information on any of the three items I was looking for. That was a good thing because it meant that no enrollment requirement existed.

Instead of talking to my advisor, I talked to the aforementioned professor. She told me that she would take care of it. Within a month, I got my degree, dated December 14, 2001. I didn't even have to send in a fourth application.

Apparently the University of Houston is advertising in the New York Times. I was reading an article about private (lower level) schools and there it was. NYT makes you register, so they probably have my Houston ZIP code in there. It'd be cooler if they were advertising across the country, but it's cool regardless.

Good ad, too.

To see the ad, click below.

[Read More!]

The University of Houston Law Center was ranked #59 in the nation according to US News & World Report. It ranked fourth in Texas, below UT (15), SMU (47), and Baylor (50) but above South Texas (NR), Texas Tech (NR), and Texas Southern (NR). Comparing to nearby states, it ranked ahead of Oklahoma (67), LSU (89), New Mexico (99), Arkansas (99) and Tulsa (NR), but barely below Tulane (56). It tied with fellow urban schools Temple, Loyola (CA), and Cincinnati.

When I was looking at law schools UH was my first choice. They have an excellent program for Intellectual Properties law, which is likely the area I would have gotten in to. The requirements to get in have been practically going up exponentially over the last couple of years. Bad for non-overachievers like me, but great for the University!

I could have gone all my life without knowing that MPAA head Jack Valenti is a University of Houston alum. I really could have. Honest.

The Chron has an informative article on the University of Houston System's strategic vision:

One way to make UH more selective would be to increase admissions standards -- SAT and GPA requirements. But Jay Gogue, system chancellor and UH president, hinted recently that the most likely option might be to cap the number of freshmen -- say, at the current level of 3,400 -- making it cater more to upper-division and graduate students. Given the area's projected growth, Gogue said, that would make UH more selective.

But just funneling students to UH-Downtown is complicated by a lack of physical space there and, perhaps more importantly, the belief that the open-admissions school should not just be seen as a UH feeder school.

"Listening to comments at the UH-Downtown forum, I picked up a strong sense that they view it as a unique institution and not just a place for students who don't get into UH," said Gogue. "That's a valid perspective. Because of that, we might want to rely more on community colleges in the future."

Nevertheless, UH-Downtown President Max Castillo says he's planning for significant growth from the school's nearly 11,000 students. He says he expects UH-Downtown to reach 18,000 students in a decade.

UH presently has two options: Expand or become more exclusive. I think that there's something to be said for each.

The flagship presently has a reputation for accepting just about anyone and consisting of an irregular student body. There are many among the alumni, administration, and student body who would like to see UH become a more traditional university. As long as it caters a great deal to non-traditional students, that may be difficult.

The most obvious answer to that is to do precisely what the article infers they will (despite protestations to the contrary) which is to ship off a lot of the lower-performing students to UHD. The UHD administration and students obviously don't want it turning into a junior college of sorts, but frankly I'm not sure why anyone would spend their first two years at UHD instead of a much cheaper juco. Where's the problem here?

I also think it's worth noting that a lot of potential students with money that can't get in to UH may simply choose to go to school out of the city. I'm not sure UHD would recieve all the fallout. Those that aren't going "off" to college due to lack of funds or a full-time job that can't get in to UH will probably go to UHD, but that's exactly the kind of student an open-enrollment university like UHD is supposed to serve, isn't it?

Anyhow, doing this and raising standards would allow UH to become more of the kind of university a lot of people would like while still giving those in Houston that need a college degree a way to get it.

Making UH more competitive would definitely raise the university's stature, which would be a good thing. Would that in and of itself be sufficient? Without more highly touted professors and more research cash? Probably not. It might have the effect of bringing in more such people, however. Also, capping the number of students allowed would free up money that would otherwise be used to facility expansion towards hiring more professors and opening more classes with lower prof-student ratios. Moreover, it would help the university shed the Cougar High image - which it really mostly has - and bring in more traditional students and the campus activity that brings.

The downside to this plan is that it would hinder UH's expansion. One of the things UH has going for it presently is that at 35,000 students, it's the third largest university in the state. If it holds at this number, though, there's a solid chance that #4 North Texas and #5 Texas Tech could pass up UH in size pretty quickly. It's something that shouldn't matter, but every little bit helps with recruiting Texas kids.

Regardless of which direction they decide to go, the residential problems are not going to go away. They've been talking about building two new dorm towers since I was a freshman there and they still haven't been built. Students were literally being housed at Texas Women's University and bussed over (not to mention getting cots in spare classrooms and office buildings). They've got some new high-class facilities such as Cambridge Oaks and they bought the former motel across the street, but this is an area that needs "strategic vision." The market is there and the university wants more dorm residents. They just need to figure out a way to make that happen.