Connelly On A Roll

The Houston Press‘s Richard Connelly seems now to have been given the Hair Balls column in its entirety — which makes one who doesn’t understand the ways of corporate alternative media wonder why his old column was taken away — and he’s all wound up about the recent auto/train crashes on the light-rail line:

The casualty-free street violence gets a thumbs-up from professional stuntman Mark Anthony Chavarria, a Houstonian who’s done stunts in Walker, Texas Ranger and Pearl Harbor and who will be the Mexican soldier killing Billy Bob Thornton’s Davy Crockett if The Alamo ever gets released.

Trying to re-create Metro’s weekly Jerry Bruckheimer carnage would be expensive, he says. “Doing a stunt like that would take at least a week of prep time,” he says. “You probably wouldn’t want to have the train hit the actual car because of budget reasons — you’d cheat it by dragging a crunched car in front of the rail car.”

If you did it the no-holds-barred way of Houston’s drivers — having someone actually behind the wheel as the crash occurs — costs go up further. “If you got a guy in the car, basically you’d be asking him, ‘What’s it worth to you?’ He’d probably get $2,500 to $5,000 for it,” he says.

Elsewhere in the same column, Connelly describes Houston’s efforts to create a pedestrian-only entertainment zone downtown (it’s not working out so well) and he visits with a KKK member.

And here’s the beginning of a column on the Aeros:

On a recent Friday night — like most nights when the Houston Aeros play a home game — the new $235 million Toyota Center downtown can seem like the most expensive mausoleum ever built.

Ouch.

Dude’s on a roll this week. And more Connelly definitely makes for a better Houston Press.