From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • A man crashed his car into a Sugar Land home on Lynnwood at Oak Wood early Saturday morning. No one in the home was injured and the driver is in the hospital in stable condition. • The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo is 76 years old. • An 84 year old Puerto Rican man with dementia is missing after walking out of......

From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • A bicyclist is in serious condition after being struck and dragged by MetroRail in the Medical Center. The bicyclist was wearing headphones and riiding between platforms. The incident occurred Friday afternoon around 4:45pm. • A car crashed into the State Grille on Alabama after losing control of the vehicle and jumping a curb. The driver had to be cut out of his......

You may have heard the various stories about the possibility of a fatality connected to Sunday's implosion of the Crowne Plaza hotel in the Medical Center. So far, the Chronicle reports that someone may have sneaked into the hotel before the demolition, KHOU reports that Medical Center workers say they saw someone enter the building just before demolition and possibly closed a door (on the video), KTRK has a blurry close-up of the aforementioned door,......

Good morning, Houston. In these days of near-$3 gas, there's one group of drivers who aren't so worried: hypermilers, who use certain techniques to squeeze every possible M out of their MPG. Hypermiling involves a few pretty simple changes in the way you drive, including coasting, accelerating slowly from stops and the skillful use of cruise control. Used correctly, hypermiling can increase your car's fuel efficiency by 30 percent or more — so why......

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......

Local tech news in a compact, digital format. Keyboard Reviews Dwight Silverman over at The Chronicle has reviewed a couple of keyboards. One from Microsoft and another from Logitech. Check out his article for the lowdown on this new hardware. Raawwr! Leopard Unleashed The latest OS from Mac, Leopard 10.5 is on the loose. JKOnTheRun, Dwight Silverman and Dr. Mac have all recently run articles on this revolutionary new operating system from Apple. Metro......

Good morning, Houston. We suppose Tex-Mex is finally official: The New York Times wrote about it yesterday in an article that looked at famed Mexican joints in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. "Neon signs flicker above pastel storefronts promising excellent Mexican food in virtually every block of the city," the Times' Joe Drape writes of Houston. "The trick is to figure out which places will deliver on that promise." Indeed. Drape visited El Jardin......

Good morning, Houston. If you've walked — or driven — downtown or in Midtown lately, chances are you've noticed the fancy new "countdown signals," which flash the number of seconds pedestrians have to cross an intersection before traffic lights change. They'll soon be installed at more than 300 intersections in neighborhoods with high amounts of pedestrian traffic, including the Medical Center; though they cost $1.3 million to put up, officials say the efficient LED......

We have to begin this week's Shelterporn with a disclaimer: Manhattan, Randall Davis' odd residential concoction across the street from the Water Wall, doesn't really suit our taste. But we'll freely admit that, if someone came to us and offered the keys to this penthouse in the building, we'd find it hard to turn down. Just saying. Access to the eighth-floor unit is through a 38-foot gallery that's perfect for hanging your art collection......

Today’s Photo of the Day comes from flickr user and Houstonist photo contributor MasTaPiannis. It's an eerily edited photo of a scene that is very familiar around town, cranes. There are cranes all over the place. We see them in the Upper Kirby District, Downtown, The Medical Center and a couple of other places we can't recall. Crane rental and construction are booming here in Houston. If you have a passion for Houston and......

Westheimer Road is a long, thriving, paved snake of potholed infrastructure. It guides you into town from the Grand Parkway through Beltway 8 and Loop 610 until it brings you all the way into a cozy, little enclave of town we lovingly refer to as The Montrose. Not really the heart of Houston, because that would probably be the Medical Center, but more like the liver or one of the kidneys of Houston as......

Good morning, Houston. If you happened to be in the Medical Center yesterday afternoon, we're pretty sure you noticed the natural gas leak. Even if you didn't see it, chances are you got caught in the massive traffic snarls it created after Main Street was closed between University and Sunset. Officials with The Methodist Hospital said a construction crew accidentally broke the gas line around noon, and it took most of the day to......

You may remember that we talked last fall about the Texas Medical Center testing its buildings for the effects of stray current from the MetroRail line — electricity leaks that Metro says are inconsequential, but that observers worry could be weakening the foundations of nearby buildings, bridges, roads and other structures. Well, the preliminary results of those tests are back, and they show worrisome levels of current at three sites. Does that mean buildings are......

Today’s Photo of the Day comes from flickr user and Houstonist photo contributor Polar Bear in a Snowstorm. Check out the smoothness of the water in this image of the Gus S. Wortham Memorial Fountain. Do you know who Mr. Wortham was and how important he was to our fair city? Honestly, we didn't until we did a little searching. According to the New York Times, Mr. Wortham was "a cattle baron and an......

Today’s Photo of the Day comes from flickr user and Houstonist photo contributor hugged2death who provides us with a rare glimpse into an operating room where open heart surgery is being performed. Did you know that The Medical Center is the largest medical district in the world with over five million patients a year? If you had to have open heart surgery, Houston is definitely the place you'd want to be. Here's to your......

Good morning, Houston. 'Stros win! 'Stros win! Whooooooo! Ahem. Yes, well, as you probably know by now, the Astros beat the Cincinnati Reds 10-2 last night to end their 10-game losing streak. The game marked the highest run total for the 'Stros in three weeks, and the team's 16 hits matched their season high — not bad. "It was a fun night for everybody," Woody Williams told the AP. "I know it's one win,......

If you're like Houstonist, you've driven past the former Warwick Hotel sometime in the past few months and wondered what the distinguished old building would be like when it reopened as the Hotel ZaZa. Well, you won't have to wait much longer to find out: The hotel is set to open Monday, and the Chronicle had a preview this weekend. The short version comes from the hotel's co-owner, Charlie Givens, who described the property as......

Those of you who ride the MetroRail regularly might be interested in reports today of two near collisions caused when trains were running on the wrong tracks. Both happened earlier this month, six days apart; the good news is that no passengers were in danger. More or less. The first incident happened at 8:30 a.m. May 9 near the Smith Lands station south of the Medical Center. A crew was working on a switch near......

The cause of a fire at an electrical substation at 59 and Kirby that knocked out power and caused thick black smoke around 1pm today is unknown, according to officials. Power was affected in a large area surrounding the site, but is currently being restored. Investigations are underway to determine if the fire was arson or the result of some kind of malfunction. As if that weren't enough, a fire has broken out at......

Multimullion-dollar philanthropic gifts are nothing new in Houston — but yesterday, oilman T. Boone Pickens shook things up a bit with his $50 million donation to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. As a condition of the gift — which, by the way, is the largest in M.D. Anderson's history — the cancer center has to turn the $50 million into $500 million within 25 years to be able to use the money......

Good morning, Houston. As faithful Houstonist readers, you know we have trouble resisting a good crime report, so we were nearly beside ourselves when we read about the family that might have set a grocery store potato chip display on fire in February. Seriously. It happened at a Sellers Brothers on Telephone Road on Feb. 10, and surveillance video — which you can see if you follow the link — shows a young man......

The consensus of people at an urban planning workshop on the Main Street corridor Monday? In short: It needs to be more urban. The Planning Partnership, a Toronto firm hired to create a development plan for Main Street, held the workshop, which was meant to get the public's input on how to guide future construction along the corridor. Because the MetroRail line is already in place and major buildings already stand along Main, planning will......

Ah, you know it must be Friday when you hear a story about a man who apparently had a fight with his girlfriend, then shoved her into a clothes dryer. No, really: A man put his girlfriend in a clothes dryer. And it wasn't a stupid human trick. Harris County sheriff's deputies found the woman yesterday afternoon inside a dryer in an apartment at the Nantucket Square complex near Kuykendahl and Place Rebecca. The police......

Frenchman Sébastian Bourdais took home first place at the Houston Grand Prix this weekend for the second year in a row. Oui, oui. But it sounds like a few Houstonians were a little too inspired by Bourdais' high speeds. Street racing at Spencer Highway and Beltway 8 is the probable cause of a 5-car crash yesterday afternoon. The crash included two Ford Mustangs, which are the cars suspected of racing. One of them fled the......

From the "Thieves in disguise" file comes the story of a man who has carried out one robbery and attempted two others — all while dressed as a U.S. postal worker. The guy's first robbery attempt was at an EZ Pawn location at the East Freeway and Lockwood on March 26; he ended up leaving the store when a clerk asked him for ID. But things went better at a nearby EZ Pawn on Lyons......

Good morning, Houston. The Internet has become such a part of our lives that it's hard sometimes to step back and see just how pervasive it really is — but the folks at Domain Name Wire came up with an interesting way to do that: They counted the number of URLs advertised along Highway 71 and I-10 between Austin and Houston. The grand total? More than 68, including the whopper qualityconcreteandswimmingpools.com (which doesn't seem......

Good morning, Houston. We initially kicked off the day with a story about warnings of tainted fish in Clear Lake, but it turns out it's not the Clear Lake around here — it's one in Panola County, East Texas. Two Clear Lakes? Who knew? (We would have, had we checked online. Oops.) So you'll be happy to know that there aren't any seafood warnings out for our area, but that doesn't mean we're not......

More in the ongoing saga of MetroRail's stray electrical current: Looks like Metro is going to go after payment from contractor Siemens, despite a refusal letter. Last summer, Metro billed Siemens Transportation Systems $917,400 for monitoring related to the stray current between May 2005 and June 2006. No one's sure where the leaking current is coming from: Metro has tracked down and repaired points it thought were causing trouble, and it replaced metal anchors in......

Remember last weekend's story about Norman Fulton, the man who fell 12 stories down an elevator shaft while trying to escape from a stuck elevator at his Galleria-area condo in December? The death might have been prevented if elevators in the building where Fulton lived had been equipped with door restrictors, which prevent trapped passengers from being able to pry open the doors of a stuck elevator car before trained rescue personnel arrive to......

If driving along Main Street through the Medical Center is in your weekend plans, we're sorry, but you're going to have to come up with an alternate route: The northbound lanes of Main between University and MacGregor will be closed all weekend for the installation of a construction crane. The closure starts at 7 p.m. today and will continue until 5 a.m. Monday. We assume the crane is being erected for construction of the......