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Alison Cook looks back at 1997: The Year That Bit

Continued from page 4

Sorta like Houston City Council
Mexico's former attorney general, Mario Ruiz Massieu, left town $7.9 million poorer after a Houston jury decided the U.S. government could confiscate most of the $9 million he kept in a Houston bank -- although Massieu claimed the money came from political payoffs, not drug payoffs, saying "Mexico has a very unique system."

Those Inventive Houstonians

He thinks he can; he thinks he can't...
Woodlands-based Zonagen's shares leaped 40 percent in value after the biotech company released tests showing its Vasomax product was effective in treating male impotence -- then tumbled after a short-seller predicted it would never gain federal approval.

If Eckhard Pfeiffer answers, hang up
After Aerial Communications, a wireless phone company, bought naming rights to the new concert venue at Bayou Place, they planned to install mobile phones hanging from the ceiling in place of the usual pay phones.

Coming next year: a giant Aerial wireless phone
Houstonians Ginny Galtney and Diane Marks appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show modeling their respective coiffures from the Hair Ball -- a six-foot-wide replica of the Astrodome and a four-foot-high Prince's Hamburgers sign.

Just get me past Joe Jamail
An enterprising attorney and accountant launched a concierge service at the downtown court complex -- offering valet parking, office space and services, mediation, escorts for befuddled or intimidated clients and witnesses, plus catered meals and entertainment.

Fine, but can we use them along White Oak Bayou?
Two Rice University archaeologists placed giant, concrete-hard termite mounds built of saliva-soaked particles around a West African dig site threatened by torrential rains and flooding.

The Elmer Wayne Henley model is forthcoming
Houston fashion design student Vanessa Meades won a scholarship for her ecru shantung ball gown featuring zippered, roll-down panels of old master paintings reproduced on cotton Lycra stretch fabric.

And "Proud Mary" looping endlessly on the sound system
Houston artist Dean Ruck announced plans for a Sesquicentennial Park project that will regale visitors with steamboat whistles, thrashing paddle-wheel effects and a big bubble in the bayou that will release large volumes of compressed air, simulating riverboat turbulence.

Their Dean Ruck special effects were really convincing
During the Houston mayoral race, it was revealed that Rob Mosbacher's barge company, Hollywood Marine, once avoided city property taxes by claiming the landlocked west Texas town of Ozona as its home port.

But they nixed Aerial as the official state telephone
A Texas House committee named buckminsterfullerene, the so-called "buckyballs" discovered by Rice University's Nobel prizewinners, the official state molecule.

They left out a "chip-your-own Chupacabra party"
A Chronicle story on "101 Things to Do When It Hits 101 Degrees" suggested keeping your underwear in the freezer; floating flowers frozen in ice cubes in your bath water; wearing only diamonds or jewelry in white, pale blue and frosted tones; and having a huge block of ice delivered to your home, then inviting neighbors in for a chip-your-own daiquiri party.

Out, damned spot
Metro came up with a flashy fare card covered in designer leopard spots -- which obscured two crucial white spaces, preventing the fare box from reading the magnetic code.

Who says the gods don't have a sense of humor?
Longtime morals activist Geneva Kirk Brooks proposed that the city create a red light district.

Begging the question, superior to what?
After mayoral chief of staff Jimmie Schindewolf had a brainstorm while at the supermarket, his Public Works Department floated a plan to bottle Houston city water and market it nationally under the name "Superior Water."

Along with a microcassette eulogy by Sheila Jackson Lee
The ashes of LSD guru Timothy Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were shot into space aboard a Pegasus rocket on the "founder's flight" of a commercial funeral service offered by Houston-based Celestis Inc.

Crime and Punishment

Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law
When a cop asked Kerri V. Goode, who had been stopped for speeding just after a holdup at Texas Commerce Gulfgate, what the big envelope stuffed with cash was doing on her front seat, she replied, "It's mine. I just robbed a bank."

Kerri V. Goode taught him everything he knew
A man who robbed Resource One Federal Credit Union walked across the street, in full view of a teller, and proceeded to have lunch at Ryan's Steak House, where he was arrested.

At Kerri V. Goode's suggestion
An unemployed carnival worker fleeing Maryland assault charges was nabbed in Brookshire after he went to a police station to borrow gas money.

They think Kerri V. Goode may have been involved
When two armed robbers jumped an armored car guard picking up money at the Atrium 10 Tower, officers from Harris County's Organized Crime Task Force poured from their same-floor classroom, exchanged shots with the pair and arrested one of them as the other fled.

When you've got to go, you've got to go
After a brief chase, police arrested a trio of teenagers who had been spotted along a freeway feeder as one boy relieved himself beside a stolen gray Ford Taurus.

But he nailed them for embezzling the take from the Christmas bake sale
Six years after discrepancies were discovered in the bingo books of VFW Post 2427, two elderly ladies finally were acquitted by a judge of stealing $10,000 from the Ladies' Auxiliary bingo proceeds.

Awwwww....
Four men who robbed a flower shop and shot the owner, wounding her, stopped on their way out to pick up four white Valentine's Day teddy bears.

Don't fire until you see the whites of their toenails
Wayne Bateman, 76, a retired Houston cop, told a jury that when he shot his 35-year-old girlfriend in the hip -- after ramming her with his motorized wheelchair -- he was only aiming for her big toe.

Gimme that hard-time religion
Rocky Bert Cozzens escaped from the Liberty County Jail by scaling a fence after hiding under a water tank used for prison-yard baptism services.

He had run out of his special homemade jerky
James Hand, a skilled outdoorsman who had been jailed for butchering a 1,500-pound buffalo and slaughtering a prize breeding bull, escaped from a Brazoria County prison and hid out in nearby woods for two days, blackening his face and clothes with shoe polish and subsisting on peanut-butter crackers.

Then he gave him an enema
A Houston pharmacist thwarted a would-be robber by sitting on him and wrapping him up with medical tape.

The law west of Dow Chemical
Lake Jackson bank president Buddy Baker -- who last year followed a bank robber to her mobile home, where she was arrested -- tackled this year's robber and wrestled him to the floor while the suspect's wife and three children waited in the getaway car.

That's exactly how we feel about our HMO
David Jefferson Jennings, disgruntled over Social Security benefits and bad teeth, was arrested in an alleged plot to take hostages from a dental office and plant bombs in daycare centers, after which eight homemade pipe bombs were recovered from his Baytown mobile home and his pickup.

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