From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • The suspected father of a murdered three month old baby boy who was found Tuesday in Galveston has surrendered to authorities in Philadelphia. • 8,000 cases of meat from HISD school cafeterias are being pulled after hidden camera video released by the Humane Society shows ill cows being tortured before slaughter. • A Union Pacific train en route to Indiana derailed near......

Good morning, Houston. If you've been working on a list of things you can do with cow patties, we've got another item for you: You can make pens out of them. Just ask John Lopez of Poteet, who has gotten semi-famous in South Texas by making pens from ground-up cow patties. No, really — the ground poop is mixed with a plastic resin, milled into cylinders and fitted with pen parts; the finished product,......

Good morning, Houston. We're regular NPR listeners, and we enjoy it as much as the next guy when legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg gives us another thrilling reading of a Supreme Court transcript. Even so, we were a little surprised to hear an ad the other day for NPR's newest piece of merchandise, the limited-edition Nina Totin' Bag. Yes, it's what you'd think it is: a tote bag with Totenberg's mug on it (in,......

Good morning, Houston. If anyone out there's looking for a show idea to pitch to MTV, may we suggest The Real World: Monsatery? Based on the statements of Hugh Brian Fallon, a monk from Blanco, The Christ of the Hills monastery would fit right in with the Real World drama: Fallon told authorities that fellow monk Samuel Greene encouraged sex among the monks, offered people marijuana when they were having problems and faked tears......

The man who had the only winning ticket in Saturday's $75 million lottery drawing returned to the League City convenience store where he bought the ticket to let the staff know — but no one apparently thought to get his name. Not that it really matters: The only people who need to know his name are the ones at the Texas Lottery Commission in Austin, where he'll claim his prize. Still, Houstonist was hoping to......

Good morning, Houston. If you live anywhere along the proposed University light rail line, here are a couple of chances to express your opinion on the choo-choo, pro or con: Metro will hold public meetings today and tomorrow. The first, from 6 to 8 p.m. tonight, will be at the Renaissance Hotel at Greenway for folks along the west end of the line (between West Alabama, Main Street/Wheeler Station, Bissonnet and the Hillcroft Transit......

Hey, guess what? It rained again yesterday — and we mean a lot, in case you didn't notice. Not only was there a bunch of rain, but also high winds and hail of all varieties: "I got a lot of reports of hail — pea-sized, marble-sized, from Sugar Land to Tomball out toward Pasadena, Hobby Airport, League City — dime-sized hail is being reported there," KPRC meteorologist Frank Billingsley said. Most areas reportedly got 1......

The Houston Astros are cranking up their public relations machine as part of Major League Baseball's annual Caravan program. Members of the Astros organization, i.e. players (Ausmus, Bagwell & Roy O.), coaches and staff (Milo Hamilton), will be visiting Houston's surrounding areas and parts of Central Texas over the next two weeks. They even squeezed in a casino trip to Lake Charles and a jaunt down south to Monterrey Mexico. So, now's your chance to......

Houston smokers, it looks like you'll have a new favorite hangout when the city's smoking ban takes effect in September: Last night, the Bellaire City Council voted down a similar ban in their city. Bellaire Mayor Cindy Siegel, who cast one of two votes in favor of the ban, backed up her position with statistics about the harmful effects of secondhand smoke — the same tactic Houston City Council used. "A person's decision to smoke......

So here's something odd: Yesterday morning, two toddlers were found wandering naked along a League City street. The kids — girls, ages 1 and 2 — were spotted in the 400 block of Perkins around 8 a.m.; after some searching, police found the apartment where the kids lived. Their mom and grandmother were asleep, and the apartment was reportedly dirty and unsafe, KTRK reported: "There was food strewn about the floor of the apartment," said......

Another thing to add to our list of things not to do in a moving car: Don't jump out in a fit of teenage angst. A 17-year-old girl did just that today in League City, and she's now in the hospital: The teen, who had been arguing with her father, opened the passenger door and jumped out of the car as it traveled at about 35 miles per hour, League City Police Capt. Pat......

Well, those storms we mentioned yesterday morning ended up blowing through the area — and though Houstonist didn't notice much aside from gray skies and the occasional burst of rain, the weather did impact a lot of people. In Waller, winds that gusted up to 60 mph knocked some trees over and sheared others off halfway up their trunks; nearby, a barn under construction was destroyed. And in La Marque, a rogue lightning strike......

State Sen. Mike Jackson's League City office had something of a 9/11 scare yesterday when one worker opened a letter that contained a white, powdery substance. The immediate thought was, of course, anthrax (no, not that one), and the office was evacuated. Lamoin Scott, Jackson's League City district director, opened the letter and read a portion of it, which he said was about something the writer had asked Jackson to do but had not seen......

This just in: Houston might have inherited its crime problems of the past year from some hurricane evacuees This also just in: It's really hot outside! Meanwhile, HPD is rolling out a plan to rehire retired cops for part-time jobs to help make up for its staffing shortage Judge Sim Lake has ruled that it's OK for Ken Lay's lawyers to substitute Lay's estate for Lay himself in court proceedings, the first step to getting......

Texas EquuSearch founder Tim Miller's daughter Laura was killed 22 years ago, one of four young women whose bodies were found in the so-called "Killing Fields" along I-45 near Calder Road in League City. None of the murder cases were ever solved, and it was Laura's killing that helped prompt Tim Miller to form Equusearch in 2000 (for the full story, read a profile of Miller and Equusearch from the Crime Library). So imagine Miller's......

If you live in Sugar Land, there's really no reason not to be happy — unless, of course, you sit around dreaming about live in Fort Collins, Colo., or Napierville, Ill. See, Sugar Land is the third-best place to live in the United States, according to Money magazine and CNN/Money (only Fort Collins and Napierville came in ahead of the Houston suburb). The ranking represents a huge leap for Sugar Land, which placed 46th on......

Andrea Yates showed signs of severe mental illness and psychosis in the weeks before she drowned her five children, doctors and Yates' former mother in law testified yesterday in Yates' capital murder retrial. At least one doctor who saw Yates before the killings said she presented a substantial risk to herself and other people: "She was one of the sickest people I've ever seen, and I think she was suffering from some sort of mental......

The Houston area is well-known for forgetting about its past, so it's especially interesting to hear about something like "the Settlement," a community founded by black cowboys who settled in Galveson County in the 1870s. Though most traces of the community are gone, locals hope to revive interest by converting the one remaining historic house into a museum. Four ex-cowboys — Calvin Bell, David Hobgood, Thomas Britton and Thomas Caldwell — earned money herding......

Police have arrested a La Marque couple in connection with a series of robberies at fast-food restaurants in Houston and the southeastern suburbs. John T. Mock and Maxine Sallie, who KPRC call "a modern day Bonnie and Clyde," targeted Subway and Church's restaurants in Houston, Pasadena, Deer Park, Baytown, League City and Alvin. According to KTRK, Mock and Sallie weren't the sharpest plastic knives in the package: They robbed a Subway shop in Alvin, but......

An 87-year-old League City woman has been charged with shooting her 80-year-old caretaker after a dispute over car keys Katrina evacuees have until Feb. 17 to apply for free furniture under a city voucher program A Houston judge granted the Houston SPCA custody of 119 animals seized in Kirbyville last week Local Hispanics are calling for a new name for Houston's soccer team because they say "1836" carries negative connotations for them Sharpstown residents are......

Houstonist has its own guilty pleasures when it comes to TV, but we're happy to say ABC's Wife Swap isn't among them. Even so, we've seen enough commercials for the show to know the basics: Two families switch moms, one of them with certain traits and the other with the opposite traits. Chaos ensues. And now it's come to the Houston area! In last night's episode, Shantrise Maness of League City swapped with Frankie Roy......

Jailbird Charles Victor Thompson described his hijinks in a letter to an anti-death penalty activist: "I had fun, got drunk, ate good and hadn't a care in the world," the condemned killer wrote A man robbed a League City bank, threatening to shoot customers if he didn't get cash The city is now requiring older high-rise buildings to install sprinkler systems by 2017 An off-duty HPD officer won't be ticketed for running into a jaywalker......