Letters

Shannon Rasp
via Internet

Mea Cup-pa
Coffee ["Best of Houston," Sept. 24] is not fresh if it was:
1. Roasted two months ago in Seattle
2. Roasted three months ago in California
3. Roasted six months ago in Italy.
Stop fooling your readers and feeding them misinformation about coffee.

You help the community if you tell the truth about coffee standards and freshness. Be coffee smart!

Jim Minica
via Internet

The Way We War
I enjoyed your review of Saving Private Ryan ["Combat Reality," by Peter Rainer, July 23]. You have understood and you talk about the truth of the movie -- how horrible war is, and that later wars (Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War) weren't more horrible than WWII, only better covered by the media.

As a combat veteran, I felt sick watching the movie, and I was at the same time happy that someone had the courage to make this movie in this way. I think it is important for all people to understand that war is the most extreme experience known to man. Spielberg's motion picture gives a clue to all the people fortunate enough not to have experienced war to understand that a war isn't something you just walk away from when it is over.

Fredrik Wallin
via Internet

Fight or Flight
Jackie Harris ["It's Jackie's Neighborhood," by Brad Tyer, Sept. 17] used to live in my neighborhood, and I wish she had never left!

I know what it's like to stand in her shoes! It's a never-ending battle trying to take care of your surroundings. I, too, feel the frustration; the repeated calls to the police seem to fall on deaf ears.

If all my previous longtime neighbors hadn't fled for the suburbs, all these derelicts would never have settled here in the first place! It doesn't have anything to do with racism; these people just don't know how to act in the big city.

Roland Salazar
Houston

We were wrong, but we were led astray
Houston Independent School District did not raise taxes in 1997 for 1998 as we said in our October 29 story, "Easygoing George W. Bush," by Stuart Eskenazi. HISD's public spokesman Terry Abbott pointed out that taxes weren't raised in 1997, although there is a 1998 school board-approved proposal that they be raised for 1999 (going from a tax rate of $1.384 to $1.459). Unfortunately, we received our original misinformation from the district, a representative of which answered "yes" and provided numbers (which were also wrong) when we twice asked if HISD had raised taxes in 1997.