From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • A grisly discovery of human remains along I-45 have been identified as Traveon Jamel Jordan LeBlanc, a 12 year old, fifth-grader from Schneider Middle School. Police are investigating how Traveon's remains ended up on the Gulf Freeway. • LifeFlight now has a new helicopter in its fleet. It's the first of six that are slated for duty. • After more than a......

Good morning, Houston. We admit that we have a thing for interview shows, so we thought we'd take a second to note that NBC's Meet the Press, the king of Sunday morning TV news, made its television debut 60 years ago today. Meet the Press began life as a radio show in 1945 and moved to TV a couple of years later, and it hasn't stopped since. Now, MtP is the longest-running show on......

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......

Good morning, Houston. Suppose you're trying to keep up with piles and piles of government reports. How can you tell when there are too many? Simple: You ask for a report, of course. That's what the Texas State Library and Archives Commission did — and in a 668-page report, the commission has declared that the state is over-reported. The commission looked at more than 170 state agencies and universities and found more than 1,600......

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. Have you ever been lounging around on the couch, curious about how the state of Texas spends its money but frustrated because you can't hop online and find out? Well, cheer up: Now you can, thanks to a new feature on the state comptroller's website. The database allows users to search the $74.5 billion in expenditures from fiscal 2007 by agency, payee and spending category. For folks with the ability to......

Good morning, Houston. We've run into some, uh, active parents of student athletes in our day, but we can't remember remember hearing about one who was actually banned from his kid's sporting events — until now, that is. Meet Joe Dalton, who has been barred from his son's Stafford High home football games because school district officials allege he assaulted a student. It happened at the last home game Dalton attended, where he said......

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......

Good morning, Houston. If you've ever been to Rich's, the dance club in midtown, you probably won't be surprised to hear that the crowd there Saturday was sporting "feather boas, glittering hair accessories, sparkling dresses and tutus." But exactly who was in the crowd might take you by surprise: It was a bunch of kids there for Baby Loves Disco, part of a national series of dance events that benefit childhood cancer research. (In......

Good morning, Houston. In case you didn't hear yesterday, we'll soon see the end of an era in air travel: Beginning Oct. 2, Southwest Airlines will assign passengers a place in line based on the order in which they check in. That means no more of the airline's (in)famous "cattle call" boarding process, which means there's no longer any point in arriving at the airport 16 hours early to get in the A group......

Good morning, Houston. These days, when everyone and their dog has a computer, it's getting harder to remember the days when all "official" writing was done on typewriters. The practical modern typewriter was invented in 1868 by an engineer named Christopher Latham Sholes, but it wasn't until 121 years ago today — Sept. 14, 1886 — that George K. Anderson of Memphis got a patent for the typewriter ribbon. They were originally made of......

Good morning, Houston. It's no secret that Texans like fried food — so it's no wonder that the Big Tex Choice Awards, the taste-test contest at the State Fair of Texas, focuses on fried concoctions. But this year's Big Tex winner for the best-tasting new food might surprise even the most jaded connoisseur of fried delicacies: It's fried cookie dough, created by Abel Gonzales Jr. The fried cookie dough is a cookie base with......

There is no word from HISD yet on whether three schools, Kashmere High, Sam Houston High and McReynolds Middle School, will open again next fall. HISD officials wouldn't discuss the issue, saying only that they're they're waiting on the Texas Education Agency to analyze students' test scores and decide whether or not these three campuses are "academically acceptable." The high schools are both located in north Houston, while McReynolds is east of downtown, just off......

In order to maintain a sense of order during the last week of school, HISD has banned the bringing of backpacks to school at the following campus'. Those miscreants trying to have fun will have to find some other means of smuggling silly string into class - or packing heat, whichever the case may be. Fortunately, duffel bags and gym bags were not mentioned in the article we read, just saying. Houstonist was particularly amused......

Saturday marks the "piece de resistance" of Art Car Weekend - The Art Car Parade! Houstonist is singing "I Love a Parade" in our very best Ethel Merman voice in celebration of this event (normally, we stick to "There's No Business Like Show Business"). The world's largest and oldest parade of its kind makes its way into downtown on Allen Parkway for the 20th year to an anticipated crowd of over 200,000 people. This year's......

Good morning, Houston. When we were little, Mother Houstonist was always warning us not to look at the sun. But now we actually have good reason to stare — in a way, at least — because yesterday, NASA released the first-ever 3-D images of our galactic lightbulb. The images could lead to better predictions of solar eruptions, which can affect power lines and communication on Earth — but all we're really interested in right......

The drive-by shooting that killed a 13-year-old Houston middle school student early Saturday morning was likely a case of mistaken identity stemming from a pair of gang fights, police said yesterday. HPD Sgt. Brian Harris said there had been two large gang-related fights at the Butler Skating Rink, 14083 Main St., where Cornisha McCowan and friends attended a dance Friday night. At around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, McCowan's brother-in-law, Sam Monroe, picked McCowan and his stepdaughter......

Houstonist has never been a substitute teacher, but we're pretty sure it could be a boring job at times. From what we can remember, the regular teacher would often leave the substitute some kind of busy-work assignment for the students, so all the sub would have to do is set the kids to work on whatever it was — writing a paper on sexual diffidence in Victorian literature, for example, or making turkeys from the......

Back when Houstonist was in junior high, the worst thing kids did was sneaking a cigarette behind the gym (or occasionally sniffing formaldehyde). But today's youth are much more stupid daring — case in point, the 11 students at Spring Woods Middle School who were taken to the hospital yesterday after popping pills a classmate was handing out. Ah, youth. "Somebody showed up with some, a lot, and just started handing them out like candy,"......

It's a good thing when a school bus driver doesn't take any guff off the students on board his or her bus. But it's a bad thing when that means the driver kicks kids off the bus miles from home with no help and no protection — case in point, a Fort Bend ISD bus driver who did just that Monday. Eleven-year-old Laitfu Anderson and a fellow student at Hodges Bend Middle School were......

So it's after lunch and it's still not icy — yet. To celebrate, officials have reopened some freeway interchanges that were closed yesterday when it looked like all hell would break loose. According to the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the following ramps and bridges are now open: ramp from eastbound Westpark tollway to Southwest Freeway northbound ramp from the southbound Grand Parkway to the eastbound Westpark tollway the Fort Bend Parkway from the Sam......

Remember back in August, when the HISD board voted to close three underperforming schools if they didn't shape up? The schools in question — Kashmere High, Sam Houston High and McReynolds Middle School — are three of the lowest-performing in the state: Kashmere and Sam Houston have earned "academically unacceptable" ratings for four consecutive years, while McReynolds has been ranked one of Texas' bottom five schools three years in a row. Supporters of the schools......

On Sundays, Houstonist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in Houston. The opinions expressed below are entirely those of the author. Check out this list: Xavier Regan Joel Mr. Peepers Bob Who are these people? Guys I’ve slept with? Coworkers? Members of my skeet shooting team? If I were 12 years old and attending Pin Oak Middle School in Bellaire, officials there would say this is my hit list, and they would suspend me from......

OK, so this is weird: A 12-year-old girl has been suspended for making up a hit list containing a bunch of made-up names (and one real one, but we'll get to that in a minute). The whole thing started when a fellow Pin Oak Middle School student reported seeing the girl with the list on a school bus Friday. The girl was immediately suspended, and then officials started checking the list out. That's where things......

In Houstonist's adolescence, we didn't have the Internet — we were forced to amuse ourselves by playing Connect Four, watching "The Facts of Life" and finding creative things to do with sticks and mud. But these days, kids can do almost anything on the Internet — including tattling on their classmates, thanks to an anonymous email-based system in place at several local schools. The system is run by AnComm, a company based in Oxford, Miss.,......

HISD trustees voted 8-1 yesterday to shut down three of the district's worst-performing schools next summer if the schools don't improve test scores and keep students from dropping out. The three schools — Kashmere High, Sam Houston High and McReynolds Middle School — are three of the lowest-performing in the state; according to state accountability ratings released last week, Kashmere and Sam Houston were the only schools in Texas to earn "academically unacceptable" ratings for......

So yesterday, the first day of school for Aldine ISD, a bus full of middle school students was involved in a hit-and-run accident. Does anyone else out there think this is a karmic thing related to starting school in early August, or are we the only ones? It happened at about 4 p.m. near West Road and Sweetwater when a van hit a wrecker, which then veered into the side of a bus with around......

Things must be pretty boring over at Channel 2: One of the station's news stories today is "Trash Can Catches Fire At Middle School." So we're thinking, "Oh, the trash can blaze must have gotten out of control and ended up enveloping the school in a fiery holocaust, right?" Well, no. Here's the story: A Houston Independent School District police officer discovered the fire outside of Black Middle School on 34th Street near Chantilly Lane......

Reagan High School Principal Robert Pambello has resigned amid allegations that he sexually harassed a teacher. Pambello is the same guy who got in trouble in late March for flying the Mexican flag outside the school, and some students say they think that's the real reason he left: Reagan High School junior Jose Louis Cantu, 18, said rumors have been circulating around campus about Pambello's employment status since the flag incident. At the time, students......

Police have released a description and sketch of the man suspected of shooting at a crowded HISD school bus Tuesday afternoon. Thirty students from Westbury High School and Johnston Middle School were on the bus in southeast Houston when a shot shattered one of the vehicle's windows, injuring two 11-year-old students. Early news reports didn't give much detail about the appearance of the suspect, but now we have the following description: An African-American man with......