Good morning, Houston. There's nothing quite like a building implosion to lift our spirits at the beginning of the week — if, of course, it's a building we won't miss. That happened to be the case with the Crowne Plaza hotel in the Medical Center, which was reduced to rubble Sunday; click the link for video from KHOU. (Be prepared to wait — there's a lot of buildup to the big moment in Channel......

Better late than nevah - here's our roundup of feasting and imbibing in the very near future. See the bottom of the post for some Thanksgiving food ideas, we'll be continuing to update that, and no, we won't add Grandma Kroger to the list, or any other supermarket, for that matter. Well, maybe Central Market or perhaps Whole Foods, maybe. Great American Bake Sale -Dessert Gallery, Sugar Land Friday, November 16th – 6:00 p.m. until......

Good morning, Houston. Seriously, what is it with North Texas these days? Yesterday we had the story of the 18-wheeler full of human heads, and today there's the Fort Worth man who accidentally shot himself in both legs in his cubicle at work. According to police, the 47-year-old man put his .45-caliber gun into his jacket pocket Tuesday morning, then draped his jacket over the back of his chair at an insurance office. When......

Houston! We’re going to be rounding up current food and wine events once a week, so you don’t have to. Previously, we posted these gastronomic opportunities, along with festivals and the like – having let that slip was criminal! Once again, Culinary Adventures comes your way!!! Tour de Donut – “The Sweetest Bike Ride in Texas”Sunday, November 4th – beginning at 8:00 a.m. Sun & Ski Sports @ Katy Mills Mall $25/participant in advance $35/participant......

Good morning, Houston. Well, uh here's something you don't hear about every day — but it being Halloween and all, we couldn't resist: In Hunt County, police pulled over an 18-wheeler Sunday morning and found about two dozen human heads in the back. True story. But it's not what you think: Turns out the heads (which were embalmed) were specimens used in medical training in Fort Worth, and they were headed back to a......

If you're one of those people who sits in the car for more than an hour every day on your way to and from work, we're sorry — and there's bad news: It may be getting worse. According to a transportation researcher, Texas' strong population growth over the next 20 years or so will mean that we'll see more and more "extreme commutes" of an hour or more. Better invest in some books on tape,......

Houston and four other Texas cities were among the big American cities that gained the largest number of new residents last year, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau today. The estimates show that 26,600 people moved to Houston in 2006, bringing the city's population to 2.14 million — and we're sure every one of them is already joining the fray on the Katy Freeway. San Antonio and Fort Worth gained the second-......

Good morning, Houston. Hot weather? Rain? Another week in our cube farm? Looks like Houstonist has a case of the Mondays. We'd better just move on to the news ... >> Mayor: I'll find money to keep day-labor site open: A spokesman for Mayor Bill White said Friday that the mayor will help find $100,000 to fund a day-labor site after city officials voted to cut its public funding. Critics of the site, which......

Good morning, Houston. If you're a fan of the Early Show, you probably caught Mayor White's national television appearance Monday morning. He appeared on the show seated between two foxy ladies, Caroline Kennedy and Doris Voitier, to discuss his receipt of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Like we told you before, he and Mrs. Voitier are sharing the award for their outstanding public service during and after Hurricane Katrina. This award......

With the official beginning of the 2007 hurricane season a little more than a week away, Harris County officials have released a new evacuation plan based on ZIP codes. Residents of coastal and low-lying areas can determine whether they're in evacuation zones using a map of the area that groups ZIP codes into four zones based on threat, from the coast up through Brazoria and Galveston counties to Houston's East End, Channelview, Baytown and......

Good morning, Houston. Are we the only ones who've had a really long week? Even though Thursday just reminds us that it's not yet Friday, we can still find some Thursday goodness. For example, did you know Thursday is named for Thor, the god of thunder? OK, then, how about what it meant if you wore green to high school on Thursday in the '60s? And did you know the universe was actually created......

Good morning, Houston. Do you feel more metropolitan? Or bigger, maybe? According to estimates released by the Census Bureau yesterday, the influx of hurricane evacuees has made the Houston metro area the country's sixth largest. The Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown metropolitan area now has an estimated 5,483,857 residents, which puts it ahead of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach but still behind the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Philadelphia metro areas. Another population fact: Harris County......

There are few details about it so far, but a Porter couple was arrested yesterday for helping a convicted robber escape from a Fort Worth lockup. The escapee in question is Eladio Diaz Jr., who was last seen Sunday night at the North Texas Intermediate Sanction Facility, a minimum-security compound for parole violators; Jose Chavez and his wife, Jacqueline Diaz Chavez — Eladio Diaz's sister — were arrested for allegedly helping Diaz break out. Diaz......

Gov. Rick Perry took another step Tuesday in his effort to get Texas Southern University's finances back on track: There's now an 11-member advisory panel in place, and it has been charged with finding a plan by mid-March to get TSU out of debt. We talked last week about the school's financial troubles, which include millions of dollars in debt for capital improvements, building repairs, purchase orders and athletic program; without emergency funding, university officials......

BB King was released from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston this afternoon, feeling “fabulous and ready to go.” As we noted earlier this week, King was scheduled to play a concert at the Grand 1894 Opera House this past Thursday and Friday. Instead, he was admitted to UTMB for a fever and flu symptoms. The legendary blues singer and guitarist is 81 years old, and, because of his age, doctors wanted to......

But it's better than Dallas and Fort Worth. So says Fit Pregnancy magazine in their new report "The Best Cities in America to Have a Baby 2007", where we're ranked 42 out of 50. The California-based magazine assembled a board of experts that judged on criteria including affordability, health risk to mother and child, prevalence of breastfeeding, birthing options, stroller friendliness, fertility laws/resources, access to hospitals/doctors, safety, and child care. For whatever reason, the......

Remember last week, when rocker Ted Nugent made headlines by performing at Gov. Rick Perry's inaugural ball wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt and brandishing fake machine guns? Yeah, it still puts a smile on our faces, too. Anyway, we halfway expected some half-apologetic statement from Austin about the performance, but no — Perry loved the show, and so did the Nuge. The Chronicle caught up with Nugent by phone yesterday and asked him about the......

Just when you thought you should move to Dallas Austin because all of your single friends keep telling you how kickass it is, Worldwide ERC and Primacy Relocation name Houston a top destination for relocating singles in their annual report. In fact, Texas fared well as a whole in the survey (must be our 800+ miles of I-10) with seven metropolitan areas represented. Three cities were in the Top 10: Austin (#2), Houston (#5) and......

The Chronicle ran a report this morning on Google’s semi-new search engine “Google Trends,” which allows you to type in multiple words and phrases and see the Top 10 cities and regions that have googled those terms in the past two years. We think it’s a fun feature, too, so we thought we would share someof our findings. Since we’re so competitive with other Texas sports franchises, we thought we’d take a look at......

Remember earlier this year when the Dallas area said it couldn't handle the 40,000 special-needs evacuees who might need shelter there if a major hurricane hits Houston? And remember a little while later, when the area decided maybe it would be able to accommodate them after all? Well, the most recent news is that D/FW has confirmed shelter for about 16,500 evacuees so far, and now it's worried that providing for the other 23,500 could......

You may have seen the chain restaurant Houlihan’s on a trip to the Midwest or Northeast. The restaurant/bar chain has remained very popular in that region, along with Florida and California. The chain has now announced a return to the Texas market, beginning in Austin, with plans to build a dozen restaurants around Houston and several in Dallas/Fort Worth. At first glance, Houlihan’s exterior looks like your typical TGI Friday’s or Bennigan’s. Do we really......

State highway officials are accepting proposals for a leg of the Trans-Texas Corridor that would run from North Texas to Mexico, passing west of the Houston area and including links to the Port of Houston. The TTC is a proposed network of superhighways that will include separate lanes for cars and trucks, freight and passenger rail lines and infrastructure for communications and pipelines. The first TTC route will run parallel to Interstate 35 through Central......

Gas prices jumped in Texas this week on concerns over possible summer gas shortages, landing at an average $2.59 per gallon statewide, the weekly AAA Texas gas price survey says. That's 11 cents higher than last week and 45 cents higher than this time last year, and it's just a penny under the national average of $2.60 a gallon. Houston is ahead of the state and national averages, with a local average gas price of......

More movie/dinner theaters coming to the suburbs: This time it's Movie Tavern, a Dallas-area company that already operates theaters in Fort Worth, Denton, Arlington and Bedford. Movie Tavern is opening two locations here: one in the former AMC theater at The Commons at I-45 and Richey Road, and another in the old General Cinemas 6 at Deerbrook Commons across from Deerbrook Mall. (The Richey location was originally slated to become an Alamo Drafthouse, but that......

Talk about your inexplicable magazine lists: Houston has ranked No. 42 on Prevention magazine's list of America's top 100 walking cities. Huh? Prevention and the American Podiatric Medical Association recognize the country's most walker-friendly cities each year using a formula based on the percentage of adults who walk for exercise, the percentage of residents who walk to work, percentage of adults who participate in sports and/or ride public transit, the number of parks and walking......

Cindy Sheehan led a protest in Houston yesterday targeting Barbara Bush, who protesters hoped to convince to tell her son to stop the war in Iraq [video] A woman has been arrested for selling drugs at a South Houston bakery; her boyfriend, the bakery's owner, was arrested in 2004 for doing the same thing Closing arguments resumed today in the trial of Max Soffar, who spent 25 years on death row but had his conviction......

Yesterday, Knight-Ridder Newspapers carried a wire story highlighting the tensions between Katrina evacuees and Texans — specifically Houstonians — as the Gulf Coast diaspora continues. Some Houston residents say they are growing uneasy about their "guests," following a trail of hotel rooms left ransacked by evacuees and as Houston experiences a sharp jump in its homicide rate, with at least 33 Katrina refugees being involved in 25 killings in that city. In Houston, where......

A CenterPoint Energy pilot program to deliver broadband Internet access over power lines seems to have turned out to be a flop — at least for now. CenterPoint began offering Broadband over Power Lines to a Greenway Plaza-area neighborhood last year, which allowed users to plug modems into their electrical sockets and surf the web faster than a standard broadband or DSL connection. Though it apparently worked, the company decided BPL isn't right for......

What if you held a bowl game and nobody came? The situation leading into Friday's Fort Worth Bowl isn't as bad as that, but tickets aren't selling like hotcakes at the University of Houston or the University of Kansas. According to reports, UH has sold about 4,000 tickets out of its allotment of 10,000, while Kansas has sold about 6,000. That isn't really an accurate picture of who's going to be at the game, though,......

It's far from a national championship, but it's something — the University of Houston Cougar football team found out Sunday it'll face Kansas in the Fort Worth Bowl. For the Cougars, the bowl is a chance to test their mettle against a Big 12 opponent. And it promises to be an interesting game: Kansas has the No. 19 defense in the country; the Cougars have the No. 20 offense. That either means a lot of......