Thumbs down: Those puffy letters graffitied on an I-10 underpass spoke for us all: CenterPointle$$. It’s not as if disasters started hitting Houston this year. Why can’t our utility company figure out how to keep the lights on? And how many times are we going to have to throw everything out of our freezers while CenterPoint’s executives pad their pockets? Every politician from Gov. Greg Abbott to Houston Mayor John Whitmire is in on the rage and has vowed to hold the utility accountable. The mayor, actually, doesn’t have much power to punish the utility but the city does apparently have the resources to bring down our bit of collective pathos, sending cleaning crews out Friday morning to remove the CenterPointle$$ graffiti. We could suggest some better uses of city crews than helping CenterPoint clean up its image. How about picking up all that debris and tree limbs still cluttering the streets? Cleanup is probably futile anyway. Nature always finds a way. And so does art. 

Thumbs twiddled: Sometimes, though, nature needs some help. A baby bird out in West Texas was aided in its recovery by a quick-thinking family and a flour tortilla. The image of the fuzzy white bird, a Mississippi Kite, snug in its impromptu blanket of flat bread made the rounds this week after the Wild West Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Amarillo shared the story of how the bird, now nicknamed Taquito, came to its facility. A family called about what they believed could be an orphaned barn owl and the rehab worker asked if they’d placed the bird in a box. “We wrapped him in a warm tortilla.” Silence followed. We’re not experts and our general rule of thumb is not to mess with baby animals, no matter how cute, but we applaud the compassionate repurposing of one of Texans’ favorite foods. “Undoubtedly it was an inventive method to keep the baby warm,” the facility wrote in its post on social media, “and surprisingly, it was effective.”

Thumbs up: It was Christmas in July for another Texas treasure: Richard Reyes, the gregarious Houstonian better known for his alter ego: the zoot suit-wearing, low rider-sporting Pancho Claus who organizes and delivers toys to all the good boys and girls in underserved areas across our community every December. Pancho Claus, Santa Claus’ Mexican cousin, hails from the South Pole, but, in the off-season, Reyes lives in Aldine, where his brick home was recently devastated by Hurricane Beryl, taking on two feet of water. When the Chronicle caught up with him, many of his belongings and large pieces of furniture were piled by the curb alongside a downed tree and still he found some of that holiday spirit: “I hate to brag, but I’m a master at making lemonade out of lemons,” he said. In this case, that lemonade was the community support he found, largely from local comedians, who rallied around Reyes, helped him clean out his house and raise money for the repairs to come. When so many of us aren’t feeling all that holly jolly, we’re thankful to Reyes and his comic crew for reminding us what we love about Houston.

Thumbs up: Speaking of silver linings, Houston Mayor Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo managed to be in the same room without sniping at each other in front of the cameras. That’s the magic of disasters. They can bring us together in common cause. In this case, the two elected officials helped announce a Hurricane Beryl Recovery Fund that benefits nonprofits working with The United Way. Considering the frequency with which 2024 is dolling out disasters, Whitmire and Hidalgo might be best buds by the time December rolls around.

Thumbs down: In Japan, they’ve got vending machines for just about everything: toys, T-shirts, bananas, burgers, flavored milk, crunchy scorpions, soup stock containing a whole fried flying fish. And yet, Texas may win for the most shocking vending machine inventory of all. A Lowe’s Market in downtown Canyon Lake, about an hour north of San Antonio, now features a gun ammo vending machine that’s gained national attention in the past few weeks. Definitely not as cute as a kiosk dispensing teddy bears in Tokyo — honestly, it’s disturbing, even for Texas. The bullet dispenser is located next door to a middle school. Don’t worry, though, the contraption uses facial recognition tech. What kid could figure out a way to get past that? We’re pretty sure that the Founding Fathers didn’t have ammo vending machines in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. But maybe Justice Clarence Thomas, while whiling away the hours on a private jet with Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow, can dream up some rationalization for a constitutional blessing.  

Thumbs up: Time for Houston chefs to get out their tweezers and work on their plating skills. The Michelin Guide is coming to Texas. Taxpayers apparently are footing the bill for the renowned French guide to send their inspectors to sample the best morsels from restaurants in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio. Travel Texas, the state’s tourism department, is paying an undisclosed sum and Houston First Corp., the city’s destination marketing organization, is pitching in $270,000. It makes sense for our friends on the other side of the pond to finally recognize our burgeoning food scene, but we’re hoping that our favorite restaurants don’t go too fancy and change their menus. No one goes to Gatlin’s to eat truffle-oil gelée or culinary foam.