Annise Parker, and the Good the Bad and the Ugly: Friday’s Show (November 4, 2016)

It's been about a year since Annise Parker finished her time as Houston’s mayor. After her fellowship at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, she joined the faculty at Rice University. Even before her time in elective office, Mayor Parker was heavily engaged in LGBT activism here in Houston, and she’s returning to those roots, in a way. She recently gave a speech at Texas A&M as part of the school's week of activities to promote tolerance and acceptance of the LGBT community.

On this edition of Houston Matters, we welcome back former Mayor Parker, to hear her thoughts on LGBT issues in Greater Houston and to discuss her future plans. We also welcome your questions and comments for her at talk@houstonmatters.org or call us starting at noon at 713-440-8870.

Also this hour…

Reforming School Finance and Sid Miller’s Tweet: The Good, Bad and Ugly of the News

A lot can happen in a week. Some of it good. Some of it bad. Some of it downright ugly. When faced with intriguing developments in the week's news, we turn to our rotating panel of "non-experts" to parse The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of it all. This week our panel examines Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s thoughts on reforming school finance in the upcoming legislative session, and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller using some coarse language in a tweet. Our panel of non-experts this week are Houston Chronicle writer Lisa Falkenberg, Vlad Davidiuk, a conservative writer and political analyst, and MochaDad.com blogger Fred Goodall.

Houmoji — Houston-Themed Emojis Inspire LOLs and OMGs

Smartphone users are no doubt familiar with emojis – those little smiley faces or other images you can text to your friends. Well, a Houston marketing and design firm called Primer Grey has started creating Houston-themed emojis – dubbed Houmoji – to represent people, places and experiences in the Bayou City. To learn more about the project, Michael Hagerty talked with the company's Hannah McClure and Chris Valdez. (This conversation originally aired July 21, 2016).

Houston Matters offers a free daily, downloadable podcast here, on iTunes, Stitcher and various other podcasting apps.

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