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Our sister paper, the Village Voice, has gotten its hands on an e-mail describing just what went on as the crew of the Maersk Alabama went toe-to-toe with pirates off the African coast.

It turns out the cook wasn't an ex-Navy SEAL (Under Siege reference!). Instead, the crew took matters into their own hands, turned out the lights so the pirates wouldn't venture into the depths of the ship, and took a few out when they did. 

The crewmember tells friends that by the time the pirates had commandeered the bridge, the chief engineer and two other crewmen had taken control of the engine and steering rooms.

The pirates initially captured the captain and three crewmembers on the unsecured bridge. But the rest of the crew was able to flee to the relative safety of the lower parts of the vessel. "We kept swinging the rudder side to side," the crewman says. "The pirates' boat capsized ... after about 20 minutes, the engine was killed, I don't know by whom. At that point I shut off the air bottles and Mike [the chief engineer] killed power. He was also able to get outside and trip the fuel shutoff for the EDG [emergency generator]."

Once the power was out, the interior of the ship was pitch black. "The pirates were very reluctant to go into the dark," the crewman says.

Check it out here.

 

The Wachovia branch in Midtown was robbed today -- one Twitter report read "Man came in, did the usual I have a gun' patted his normal groin area, held up the bank. Bank is now in lock-down" -- but really, bank robberies have gotten so ho-hum these days.

Unless the robbing is an inside job.

Like the one done by Brooke Nelius of Conroe, whose indictment was announced today by the US Attorney's office.

Just 19 years old, Nelius is charged with taking full advantage of her teller position at an Amegy bank branch, to the tune of $25,450 in less than two months.

How? By just filling out withdrawal forms with fake info.

Photo courtesy www.cavalla.org

The USS Cavalla, the World War II submarine that is a tourist attraction at Seawolf Park, has finally reopened after repairing Ike damage.

The storm surge lifted the sub and refloated it, curator John McMichael tells Hair Balls, and when the tide flowed back out it brought with it dirt that has left the sub five feet higher off the ground than it used to be.

"We left it like that; it's more impressive," McMichael says. "We had to add about seven steps to the stairs that go up to it."

Also damaged were parts of the a/c system, and some water had to be pumped out of the ship. The bill for the repairs has yet to come in, McMichael says, but it will have to be paid partly from FEMA and partly from donations.

As the whole blogosphere knows by now, Rick Perry -- the only governor Texas has at the moment -- has talked of the possible need to secede from the United States.

This apparently counts as pro-America rhetoric at a tea party; the logic of that escapes us. (Oh yeah, it's no longer "America" when there's a Democrat in charge.)

Perry is trembling with fear at the thought of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison taking him on next year, so he's running madly as far right as he can get.

Still -- even though it's Rick Perry we're talking about -- we find it hard to believe he's thought this thing through. And we not referring to all the federal money Perry's all too happy to demand and use that would dry up.

We're talking about border control.

Well, Warner Ervin, superintendent of the Houston Independent School District's south region, must be feeling pretty good today.

He's the administrator being reluctantly investigated by the Texas Education Agency -- after a lot of urging from citizen and former HISD high school teacher Del Murphy -- for tapping into HISD discretionary funds to buy tickets to the Black Heritage Western Gala. Reportedly, principals and other administrators, working with and for Ervin, were persuaded by the regional superintendent to put up as much as $100,000 total for the tickets out of their campus discretionary funds.

In a letter dated April 13, the TEA's Laura Taylor, tells HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra that "the agency has identified an area of concern related to the determination of a public benefit or use of public funds."

All right. That's affirmation that there's something there, right?

A closer look of the accompanying four-page letter to Taylor from Rita Chase, the director of Financial Audits for the TEA who was in charge of the investigation, basically exonerates Ervin and all HISD administrators, every step of the way. After noting that the TEA had shut down its initial investigation on June 27, 2008, Chase confirms that her agency re-opened the case after receiving additional information (Read: Del Murphy screaming at them to do what he considers the right thing.)

Photo by Keith Allison

(Note: This was written by Ben DuBose.)

The next time someone tells you that early-season games in sports like basketball and baseball don't matter, refer them to the case of the 2008-09 Houston Rockets.

The No. 5-seeded Rockets were one game from having a dream path to the Western Conference Finals, at a minimum. They were one game from a No. 2 seed, home-court advantage in the first and second rounds, a Southwest Division title, and most importantly, avoiding any possibility of playing the Lakers until the conference finals.

Instead, fate turned against the Rockets on Wednesday night, not just in their own game with Dallas but also with games in San Antonio and Portland. So, a team that was one game -- and in several situations -- one shot from having a division crown and a dream playoff path... won't even have home court in the first round.

No, the season isn't over. But the postseason is all about matchups. Even the famed 1993-94 championship team - the first major one in Houston sports history - benefited greatly from No. 8-seed Denver's historic upset of No. 1 Seattle in the first round. The Rockets, in those days, couldn't touch the swarming Sonics.

For the first round, this year's Rockets appear to have a good draw with No. 4 Portland, who they've beaten convincingly two out of three times. But it's the potential second-round confrontation with the No. 1 Lakers that's the issue. The Rockets were 0-4 against LA this season.

And it all could have been avoided. With one more win, anywhere on the schedule, the Rockets would have had home-court advantage against Portland. One more win against a division opponent or one more Spurs loss against a division opponent, and the Rockets win the Southwest and have the No. 2 seed.

We're not saying the Somali pirates are bad at their job, exactly; just that it doesn't take a lot of skill to take over ships when you're the only guys with guns. They showed the extent of their foresight most recently by hijacking some American ships, thus rousing the sniper-y might of the United States Navy. While they plot their next move, here are some fellow unfortunate buccaneers to keep them company.

5. The Pirate Movie (1982) This is the first movie I ever walked out of. Of course, "walking out" of a movie when you're only 12 years old meant "loitering in the lobby and occasionally playing Asteroids," but it was a pretty significant move for a kid who -- at the time -- counted Godzilla vs. Megalon among his favorite films.

Photo by Katharine Shilcutt

We promised, and we are Promise Keepers! (of a sort).

Here's the slideshow of the tea-party protest at Jones Plaza yesterday. Check to see if you made the cut. We are not responsible, however, if the fact that your photo is posted here puts you on a Department of Homeland Security watchlist and is the first step to sending you to one of those FEMA concentration camps that Glenn Beck can't disprove.

Photo by sirtrentalot

Yesterday we noted how KTRH had factually reported that the tea-party protests planned for that day "might be the single largest mass gathering in the country's history."

We noted it wasn't "a mass gathering," merely a series of them, and therefore a typical college-football Saturday would be one of the largest mass gatherings in American history.

We were wrong.

It wasn't even a typical college-football Saturday. It would only have to be a typical SEC college-football Saturday.

The website fivethirtyeight, which libs and conservatives both found to provide the most accurate polling analysis of the 2008 race, has come up with its official estimate of tea-party attendance across the US -- 262,000.

Nate Silver admits he might be missing some of the smaller parties, so let's bump that up by another 10,000, to be (really, really) generous.

You're still left with less people going to one weekend's games at Florida, LSU and Tennessee.

Photo courtesy ESPN

ESPN has been charged for years with having an East Coast bias. ESPN's morning SportsCenter anchor Hannah Storm somewhat agrees with that charge, though she says the charge doesn't apply to her show and says that to her, "it is a non-issue." And if she does have any bias, it's probably to the Houston Rockets.

"I love my Rockets," she told Hair Balls yesterday. "I'm totally cheering for the Rockets. The Lakers are tough, but I love what the Rockets are doing this season. I love their depth. I really do. They've got so many great role players. I'm psyched."

Hannah Storm didn't call to talk about the Rockets or East Coast bias. She called to talk about being named as a Champion of Literacy  by the Literacy Advance of Houston. 

To her the award is an honor. Not only because she sees it as an award honoring her journalistic contributions, but also because it's coming from a Houston organization. "It means a lot because it's happening in Houston which I consider to be my hometown," she said. "I sort of adopted Houston as my hometown, so just the fact to be recognized for anything in such a great city where I really got my start as a serious broadcaster means a lot."