On Monday, we told you about the super groovy Houston: It's Worth It campaign, the brains behind it, and the accompanying photo book that will be released tonight at a special event at Lawndale. Check. So what else is happening tonight? Glad you asked. Hey, we can't do it all, we need your help in this fight to cover the mean streets of the H. Now get out there and get your event on. The......

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......

Looks like Priscilla Slade's trial may be held in Houston after all: On Monday, state District Judge Brock Thomas denied her lawyers' request for a change of venue, though he could still change his mind after screening the jury pool. Slade's attorneys asked Thomas to move the trial to Travis County last month, claiming that heavy media coverage of the former Texas Southern University president's alleged spending spree with $2 million in public funds meant......

Anyone who's been to Crystal Beach knows it can be busy — but is it dangerous? We wouldn't have thought so, but we might have to think again after a woman was found raped and murdered on the beach early Sunday morning. The victim was 28-year-old Bridgette Gearen of Orange, who was visiting friends at a beachhouse near the corner of Crystal Beach and Redfish roads. After they spent Saturday at the beach, the group......

Good morning, Houston. When we hear the words "concrete canoe," two other words come to mind: "doesn't float." But our instincts are wrong: Concrete canoes can be seaworthy, and one created by University of Houston engineering students floats so well that it's headed for the national concrete canoe competition in Seattle. The national contest is set for mid-June, and it could lead the team to a spot in the international competition in Holland in......

Needing to brush up on your smarts? No date for Monday night? Good news. On Monday, May 21, Progressive Forum Houston welcomes playwright and queen of academe, Anna Deveare Smith to the Wortham Center. Smith first received national attention for her play, Fires in the Mirror, which brought the harsh street realities of 1990's Brooklyn to the stage. Smith's work in the theater addresses issues of identity politics and race, and her academic reputation is......

You've probably never thought that building training equipment for astronauts is so easy that high school students could do it. Turns out, though, that it is. Several Houston high school students were given the opportunity by NASA to help build equipment that will be used to train International Space Station crews. The program, High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH), was created by a Johnson Space Center engineer who wanted to create......

In case you hadn't picked up on it, Houstonians aren't accustomed to wintry weather. Anytime the temperature drops below 60, people start pulling out their parkas; if a few snowflakes fall, we all run outside, furiously snapping photos and trying to build snowmen (turns out you can't actually make a snowman out of five snowflakes — but we sure as hell tried). All harmless, right? Sure, until it gets icy — then all bets......

So here's something kinda interesting about the news earlier this week that most of the West 11th Street Park will be saved from development: The Chronicle reports that Bob Perry, who has spent the last few years trying to cover the inner Loop with townhomes, gave $100,000 Wednesday to try to preserve the rest of the property. On Monday, the city agreed to buy the site from HISD, which has owned the wooded land......

Remember the rolling blackouts in freakishly hot mid-April? Fast-forward to freakishly hot mid-July, and we may be in for more of the same — although state power grid officials say blackouts now aren't likely. Sort of. On Monday, with temperatures around the state above 100, Texas used a record 62,396 megawatts of electricity between 4 and 5 p.m. (the old record was 60,274, set last August.) The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the......

More than a thousand of Ken Lay's friends and associates and local dignitaries attended Ken Lay's second memorial service yesterday at First Methodist Church downtown, remembering the human side of the former Enron chief. Among the speakers at the service was the Rev. Bill Lawson, who officiated at Lay's first memorial Sunday in Aspen, Colo. On Monday, Lawson compared Lay with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus; yesterday, he paralleled Lay and......

Houstonist admits it: We're jealous of Jason Poland. See, deep down inside, we're still huge Lego fans, and Poland, a Houstonian, is going to get to build stuff out of Legos for a living — yesterday, he won Legoland California's national search for a new Lego master builder. It was a much more involved process than you might think. The Lego finalists were chosen from seven regional events across the country, and the winners gathered......

Yesterday in the Lay/Skilling trial, defense lawyers hit witness Kevin Hannon right where it hurt: in the funny bone. Hannon, the former CEO of Enron Broadband Services, testified Thursday that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told executives during a May 2001 meeting, "They're on to us," referring to a Wall Street investment firm questioning Enron's earnings. On Monday, Skilling lawyer Mark Holscher asked Hannon whether Skilling might not have made the statement sarcastically: "Anything's possible," Hannon......

The latest witness in the Lay/Skilling trial testified that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told a group of top Enron executives, "They're on to us," referring to Wall Street analysts who asked questions about the company's earnings, the value of its Internet division and the stability of its trading arm. The comment came during a May 2001 meeting that former Enron Broadband Services CEO Kevin Hannon told jurors about Thursday: He said Skilling, [ex-Enron Chairman] Ken......

The temporarily former House majority leader's experience with public justice isn't going as well as he'd like, it seems: On Monday, senior state District Judge Pat Priest dismissed a charge against Tom DeLay of conspiracy to violate the state election code, but upheld a conspiracy and money-laundering charge against DeLay and two associates. Had all the charges been thrown out, DeLay would have been able to regain his post as majority leader — he was......