Bum Steer Awards

And the Texas Monthly 2014 Bum Steer Award goes to ...

For fans of Texas culture, politics, sports and, well, the Lone Star State in general, today is a big day. This morning, Texas Monthly announced the nominees for the 2014 Bum Steer Awards. While we have to wait until next week to read the full report, TM did announce that 2013 was the "fourth-bum-steeriest year in Texas history."

So, who was named the Bum Steer(s) of the year?

Texas Monthly's steertisticians (using undoubtedly highly scientific methods) homed in on Houston for 2014, lauding the Astros, the Texans and Lt. Gov. David "unruly mob" Dewhurst with a very special triple Bum Steer Award.

The national magazine of Texas notes that the winners were selected because of the "unfathomably horrible baseball team, a phenomenally bad football team [and] a lieutenant governor prone to embarrassing moments on the telephone."

(While he doesn't have an official share in this year's awards, Ted Cruz did receive an honorable mention for being "prone to shutting down the federal government while reading nursery rhymes from the dais.")

Though the awards were announced mere hours ago, Texas Monthly is already getting flak for its January 2014 cover depicting, as the Houston Chronicle points out, "the Astros' 2012 brick pinstriped uniform, not the orange-and-blue uniform design that debuted for the 2013 season."

The notoriously cheeky Texas Monthly Twitter staff responded to the criticism, writing:

About Astros uniform: we told artist, watch a game on TV to do the illustration. He could only find an MLB Network rerun from 2004.

— Texas Monthly (@TexasMonthly)

December 13, 2013

Not to be outdone, the Bum Steer staff also gave kudos to Dallas for its bad behavior this year. The magazine says that while the city usually has Jerry Jones to blame for its Bum Steer kudos, this year Dallasites had no one to blame but themselves.

Here in Austin, we remain (for now) unscathed. Looks like Romeo Rose wasn't enough to get us on the short list. Phew.

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The January 2014 Bum Steer edition of Texas Monthly hits newsstands next week.

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More Foraging

Free 'food forest' in East Austin expands with thousands of new plants

Angelina Alanis at Festival Beach Food Forest

Photo courtesy of KVUE

Angelina Alanis gives a tour of the garden, which is open to anyone.

In East Austin, there is an edible forest garden called Festival Beach Food Forest where anyone can walk around and harvest free produce, nuts, medicinal plant leaves and herbs. And over the summer, it grew to several times its size.

The forest has fig trees, peach trees, grapevines, asparagus and more that's not in season right now. You can grab passionfruit and plants like yaupon holly, with leaves that can make a caffeinated tea, rosemary and lemon balm.

"[Lemon balm] is part of the mint family," said Angelina Alanis, communication and partnership coordinator for Festival Beach Food Forest. "It has a lemony taste but it's good for a nervous stomach. I'm prone to anxiety so I always grab a hunk."

The food forest is located right next to Interstate 35 and Lady Bird Lake on 29 Waller St., near a part of town that's known for being a food desert, lacking grocery stores.

"There's as much as a 20-year life expectancy difference between parts of East and West Austin, and a lot of that comes down to food access, health care access and also access to nature."

Alanis said for the past nine years, the volunteer-based grassroots project been helping with the issue and just recently expanded in the summer from two-thirds of an acre of city parkland to over 3.5 acres.

"We're going to have hundreds of new trees," said Alanis. "We've already planted 150 new trees in the area and then thousands of plants on the ground."

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They also plan to add a community kitchen and a pavilion to do things like cooking classes or informational sessions.

Read the full story at KVUE.com.

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