As the Astros start their Spring Training schedule today in Osceola County, the college baseball season has been underway for a couple of weeks now. The annual Houston College Classic returns to Minute Maid Park this weekend as one of the premier regional showcases of top-level NCAA baseball. Starting on Friday and continuing through Sunday, the Juice Box will be host to an almost non-stop flow of games. The teams participating in the tourney are:......

Nolan Ryan, Astros franchise icon and co-owner of two of the team's minor league franchises, today exited his personal services contract a year early to assume the team president position offered by the Texas Rangers. Ryan will oversee the daily operations of the floundering Arlington-based team, working with mercurial owner Tom Hicks. The fate of his owner's stake in the minor league affiliates is up for debate, but the assumption is that they will remain......

Texas schools came out of Saturday's college basketball action with a collective 3-2 record, spread across two different conferences. (Big XII and Conference USA) The premier showdown of the weekend pitted the 12th ranked Texas Longhorns against Bobby Knight's Red Raiders of Texas Tech. With an outstanding defensive effort put up by head coach Rick Barnes' boys, the Longhorns were able to run away with a 73-47 victory in Austin. Texas won its 12th straight......

Rice junior Matthew Wilson, 20, is still missing, and while authorities are not treating the case as foul play, concern is growing. Wilson, whose car is gone but who left his cell phone in the apartment he shares with a roommate, often goes into near-isolation around finals period, say those who know him. His roommate, upon not seeing him for several days, assumed he had merely missed him on his way to or from the......

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,......

After speculating about unearthing former head coach Jack Pardee, the University of Houston Cougars decided today to go with Oklahoma University assistant coach Kevin Sumlin as their replacement for the departed Art Briles. At OU, Sumlin rose to the rank of "co-offensive coordinator, passing game coordinator, and wide receivers coach", which has to be the damn longest job title in the world, short of Elizabeth II. He's been a journeyman, having coached at five other......

We realize that we're almost a week late on this, but as the only media outlet in the city unafraid to actually directly quote the incident in question, we felt it was our duty to follow up on the story of the Rice MOB's halftime show against Tulsa this past Saturday. For both of you who follow Rice athletics (Houstonist fun fact! Rice has sports teams besides baseball!), you know that after making a bowl......

Apparently competing to find the most thankless college football head coaching position in the state of Texas, University of Houston head coach Art Briles today accepted the Baylor job that was made vacant by the firing of Guy Morriss last week. Briles' contract with Baylor will extend through seven losing seasons at $1.8 million dollars per losing season. Cougar athletic director and all around quote machine Dave Maggard has said that Briles will leave immediately,......

Thursday night saw the Texans fall in their final preseason warm up against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 31-24. The defense was harried, but the much-maligned Mario Williams turned in a good performance, with 3 unassisted tackles and a sack. (Which, for you stat-heads, was one more sack than either Vince Young or Reggie Bush recorded last week. So there.) The first-string only saw limited playing time as head coach Gary Kubiak made evaluations leading up......

Good morning, Houston. Yeah, we remember how (relatively) mild the first part of the summer was, and we're grateful for that. But now, after weeks of oppressive heat, we're sick of the weather — so you can imagine how excited we were when we checked out the long-range forecast and saw highs in the low 80s and lows in the low 60s coming in early September. But it might not come as early as......

A couple of University of Houston stories for your Friday, so listen up Coogs. First, back on August 13th, Cougar offensive lineman Jarrod Butler collapsed while lifting weights in an on-campus weight room. It was later determined that he had suffered a heart attack as a result of an electrical abnormality in his heart. After spending the past two weeks under observation and treatment at The Methodist Hospital, Butler is being released today to return......

Several notable musicians/bands have some from Norman, Oklahoma; including The Flaming Lips and (on the other side of the spectrum) Toby Keith. But, there’s another band hailing from that city that hasn’t (yet) received the notoriety of the above mentioned – Starlight Mints. Starlight Mints is pure indie-pop (definitely more in line with The Flaming Lips than Toby Keith, of course). The quintet looks beyond the usual guitar/keyboard/drum mix. They add strings, bells and other......

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......

The Tommy Tune Awards ceremony was held last night, and several high schools walked away with armfuls of very tall statuettes. We're just kidding, but Klein High School did rule the night with five awards for their production of Oklahoma. If you're not familiar with the high stakes game of high school musicals (not High School Musical), then you might not know what the Tommy Tunes are. Let us inform you. The Tommy Tunes are......

The shot from flickr user and Houstonist photo contributor fourfive. We've got a great set of the Capitan Theater in Pasadena, which is one of the most endangered sites in Texas according to Preservation Texas. "The Capitan Theater, Pasadena, Harris County. The Capitan is deteriorating though attempts to restore the building’s exterior, neon signage and some interior murals have been made. The theater remains threatened and closed to the public. The Capitan is a......

Back in June, we heard that Six Flags was planning to sell or close several of its properties, including Houston's Splashtown. And sure enough, the company is selling Splashtown and six other parks in a $312 million deal. The parks' new owner, PARC 7F-Operations Corp. of Jacksonville, Fla., will immediately sell them to CNL Income Properties, then will lease them from CNL. Whatever. The good news for all you Splashtown lovers is that the park......

Much beloved and sadly departed comedian Mitch Hedberg used to joke that comedy couldn't be like pancakes, exciting at first and then dissapointing by the the time you get halfway into them. Unfortunately, that looks to be an apt description of this weekend. Monday through Wednesday Things heat up slightly as high temperatures creep into the lower 80s through the early part of the week as the area falls under the influence of high......

Fangirls everywhere, rejoice: Wolverine (the multi-talented Hugh Jackman, who can also sing and dance--we saw him in Oklahoma! once on stage on London) and Batman (Christian Bale, who can brood, and also brood) are together in a movie at last. Everyone else should rejoice too, though, because The Prestige is one of the smartest, most engaging big-studio pictures to hit theaters in recent months. And clocking in at significantly more than two hours, it......

So we doubt we'll live to see the day when Texans give up their pickup trucks — but for a change, truck sales in Texas are almost flat this year compared with the same period in 2005, and it took dealers a longer time to sell trucks during the summer. Truck sales are better in Texas and Oklahoma than in the rest of the country because the oil business is doing well and companies are......

We -ists are an eclectic bunch, but there's a couple of things we all love: famous people, social causes, and wacky local facts. Join us as we starf**k, get virtuous, and learn across the -ist network! Austinist starts us off right by filling the famous person quota by interviewing Lewis Black, covers the social cause with a non-profit car sharing company, and gives us more wacky local facts than we can handle with Austin by......

First Six Flags shut down AstroWorld, and now it's talking about closing Splashtown, too. It makes us wonder: Why doesn't Six Flags want Houstonians to have fun? The Oklahoma City-based Six Flags announced overnight that it's struggling financially and may be forced to sell or close six of its 30 properties, including the 20-year-old Splashtown. The company cites falling atendance and rising operation costs as reasons for the trouble; Six Flags President and CEO Mark......

Sustainability, the ability to provide for the current population without compromising resources for future generations, is an increasingly hot topic. What with Al Gore's recent documentary and George Clooney's electric car, people are starting to take the whole "future of our planet" thing seriously. That's why its too bad that when SustainLane recently came out with their annual ranking of the most sustainable cities in America, Houston came in at a fairly dismal 39 out......

So the Dixie Chicks have a new album that tons of people are buying, and they are becoming more popular/notorious every day. That would seem like good fuel to sell scores of tickets for venues on their tour, right? Apparently not, at least in the United States. Houston, along with St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Memphis have either been cancelled or postponed due to lack of ticket demand. St. Louis' Savvis Center website reads:......

Houston's own Rice Owls will host one of four NCAA super-regionals this weekend. The best-of-three series will write the winner's ticket to the College World Series in Omaha, which begins June 16th. Rice (boasting a 53-10 record) will play Oklahoma (44-20) at 6:05 pm on Saturday, with a second game on Sunday at noon. A third game, if needed, will follow on Monday, also at noon. Tickets are fifteen dollars and avaliable here. While you're......

In a bizarre circlular move, the state House approved a $1 hike in the state cigarette tax today, an increase expected to generate $680 million that will be used to offset lower property taxes in Gov. Rick Perry's retooled school finance plan — and the higher price of cigarettes is expected to cut smoking in Texas, which means tobacco companies will have to try harder to convince teens to buy cigarettes so they can stay......

Local health officials are keeping an eye on the outbreak of mumps that's hit six Midwestern states. It began in Iowa and spread to Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and Oklahoma, affecting more than 1,150 people — and the CDC says it expects the mumps to spread. About two dozen cases of mumps are reported in Texas every year; so far this year, nine cases have been reported. None of them has been linked to the......

Have you noticed fewer home meth lab explosions in your neighborhood lately? There's a reason for that: A state law requiring cold and allergy pills to be sold behind pharmacy counters has cut home meth making by more than half, officials estimate. But have you noticed your friends strung out on better speed? The law may be responsible for that, too. In various parts of the state, police report dramatic drops in the number of......

It's no secret that Texans like their guns — why, Houstonist is packing heat right this second, because hey, you just never know. Even so, businesses can (and do) prevent people from carrying concealed weapons into their buildings, and now Houston-based ConocoPhillips is trying to get guns barred from parking lots, too. Drunks getting arrested in bars, guns getting banned from parking lots — what next? They won't let us park our horses in the......

Police have arrested the boyfriend of a woman whose 3-year-old was found dead Monday after being left alone with the boyfriend Winds that have been fanning wildfires in the Panhandle died down today, but winds in Oklahoma picked up, spreading fires there More than 3,000 Harris County senior citizens rely on Meals on Wheels, but the charity can't serve hundreds more because it lacks the funding Halliburton failed to protect the water supply for U.S.......

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......