Not-so-fresh off the heels of last year's Wild Mountain Nation, Portland's Blitzen Trapper swings by the Bayou City tonight at Walter's on Washington. Even though they're painfully under the Houston musical consciousness' radar, it'll do you some good to check their set out. Released on Sub Pop Records last year, Wild Mountain Nation proved to be one of the strongest releases of 2007, although somewhat overlooked considering the heavyweights that ended up dominating the ridiculous......

How difficult is the Western Conference? Well, your hometown Houston Rockets just defeated the Portland Trailblazers tonight to notch their 11th victory in 12 games. With a 31-20 record to their name, the Rockets nevertheless continue to find themselves battling it out with the Golden State Warriors for the eighth and final playoff spot. Despite the grim outlook in the hyper-competitive conference, citizens of Houston can take solace in the fact that they are currently......

The Houston Rockets are seemingly transitioning into the New York Giants of the National Basketball Association. No, they haven't just won a championship. No, they haven't defeated arguably the best team in league history. No, they haven't snapped an opponent's 18-game winning streak. OK, so maybe they're nothing like the NFL's Super Bowl winner. Save for the fact that the Rockets have turned into road warriors (as the Giants have been characterized this season), after......

With All-Star center Yao Ming sidelined, the Houston Rockets found themselves on the wrong side of a 97-89 score against the Utah Jazz at the Toyota Center on Sunday night. The loss ended Houston’s four game winning streak and brought to light Houston’s season long free throw shooting woes. Yao, who sat out the game with an upper-respiratory infection, has been listed as “day-to-day” on the injury report. In his place, rookie Luis Scola scored......

En route to a fourth-straight victory, the Houston Rockets defeated the scorching hot Portland Trailblzers to the tune of 89-79 at the Rose Garden on Friday night. The Blazers entered the contest having won 12 consecutive home games, thanks to the heady play of such stars as guard Brandon Roy and former Texas Longhorn LaMarcus Aldridge. However, the game remained very much undecided until Houston coach Rick Adelman elected to infuse the starting lineup......

From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • Two local developers are accused of bribing a former director of the city's Building Services Department. • A woman was shot in the face during a carjacking that occurred in Southwest Houston on Bellaire Blvd. near Larkwood around 8pm Friday. • An erratically driving man crashed his car into a home in south Houston and died after the car burst into flames......

Local tech news in a compact, digital format. No New Timing System For Houston Marathon Officials for the Chevron Houston Marathon have opted not to use a new timing system by Michigan-based SAI Timing and Tracking after it failed to operate correctly during a marathon in Honolulu. Chevron Houston Marathon officials have decided to stick with ChampionChip, the timing system it has used since 2000. Early Warning: HAAUG Swap Meet Mark your calendars, the......

A lot of jokes are made at the expense of the boy-girl synth and vocal duo. Granted, it has become a recipe in the D.I.Y. music scene. And sure, the charming and attractive female singer and the quietly reserved guy on the keys being relatively easy to come by, but Portland's Glass Candy is anything but formulaic. So polish those dancing shoes because these heralds of the newly revived Italo disco movement are coming back......

Jugglers, performers on stilts, dancing girls, horn players, a bass player, drummers and percussionist all converged on Market Square as the sun went down for a little free early evening entertainment. It was Portland's own MarchFourth Marching Band who provided Friday nights free show and we posted about them earlier in the day. So we took our own advice and headed down there to catch this unique and highly entertaining show. As we strolled......

Look, we're gonna make this one real easy for you. No thinking involved. Music. Art. Community. And a scientist who raps about space travel to a power point presentation. See? Simple. Houston, Our Ears Depend on You, this Saturday at Diverseworks, materializes Rice Radio's KTRU's presentation of Ashmathitic Kitty's 4th Unusual Animals party. Huh? See, we told you we were gonna make it simple. Just trust us. Or, just keep reading. DiverseWorks is excited to......

"Creative Crowdsourcing Through Mobile Technolgy" We couldn't have said it better ourselves, and you'll have to see this to believe the awesomeness of it. This has been on our radar for quite some time and we are so excited it's finally here. The Houston Center for Photography and Aurora Picture Show band together this summer to present the 3rd annual summer SPIN Party and Exhibition Txt Me L8r on August 24 from 8-11pm. On July......

As any good sports fan will tell you, the end of the season is just the beginning of the fun. Here's what's going on with the Houston teams that aren't playing games right now: Rockets -Plenty of Rockets news this week, starting with the announcement of their 2007-08 schedule. Their home opener pits them against the Portland Trail Blazers and 74 year old rookie Greg Oden. Full schedule at the Rockets' website. -Yao Ming is......

In less than one week after Jeff Van Gundy was fired, the Houston Rockets have tabbed Rick Adelman as the next head coach. Sources close to the situation have stated that the Rockets will fly in Adelman on Tuesday and the official press conference will be held Wednesday at the Toyota Center. Adelman was recently the head coach for the Sacramento Kings from 1998-2006 leading them to the playoffs every year including three trips......

It's Friday, another grueling week of piloting your cube has ended. You and the rest of the water cooler kids are counting the minutes until your boss heads to the club house for her early afternoon sales meeting/golf-a-thon. Then, happy hour is officially in effect. The trouble is that the tribe can't break the habit of going to the same old watering hole since no one can remember life before Schlitz night at Bob's Country......

Just when you thought you should move to Dallas Austin because all of your single friends keep telling you how kickass it is, Worldwide ERC and Primacy Relocation name Houston a top destination for relocating singles in their annual report. In fact, Texas fared well as a whole in the survey (must be our 800+ miles of I-10) with seven metropolitan areas represented. Three cities were in the Top 10: Austin (#2), Houston (#5) and......

When Houstonist hears about an upcoming festival we typically think of sweaty strolls to downtown, meat on a stick and sword fights by knights in homemade armor. CityFest Houston, adds a new wrinkle to the mix when it brings "festival envangelism" to Eleanor Tinsley Park on Saturday & Sunday. Festival evangelism aims to spread the Gospel to the non-church crowd by attracting them with a mash up of music, extreme sports and bible study. Festival......

Since the Austin City Limits Music Festival is this weekend, we thought we’d play a video from one of the bands were most excited to see live. To make it even more special, we thought we’d play a performance from an actual Austin City Limits series airing. The band is The Shins, from Portland, Oregon. This show aired in 2004, when they were still touring supporting their CD Chutes Too Narrow. The song, “Gone......

SustainLane, a web resource for making choices about personal health, home, and city sustainability, has published this year's City Rankings, which measure the quality-of-life and economic factors of the U.S.'s fifty largest cities. There are fifteen categories ranging from air quality to housing affordability, and four possible rankings in each category: sustainability leader, moving to sustainability, mixed sustainability progress, sustainability at risk, and the melancholy sustainability laggard. Surprisingly, Houston ranked best on metro transit, city......

If it weren't for our life as an -ist, we're not sure we'd ever leave our apartment. Fortunately, to fully -ist, one must seek out the new, the fresh, and the unknown. Brand new, or just new to us, that's what we're all about this week. Phillyist keeps it fresh by getting a new motto, learning to prioritize, and taking in an experimental indie rock show. Torontoist does their first post in franglais, gets ready......

We've always been partial to the little neighborhood wedged between Main Street and Montrose Boulevard just south of the Southwest Freeway, with its eclectic 1920s architecture and out-of-the way feel. Sadly, the area has had its share of hard knocks — the massive Museum Tower plopped at the end of the charmingly human-scaled Portland Place springs to mind — but it's still not bad. This week, shelterporn takes us to that area — specifically,......

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddie for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bid's Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. Yeah, we may have a few issues with our World Cup broadcasters here, but this guy......

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......

Oh, the things you learn from the Internet: According to the Scott Clog Clinic, Houston is the nation's fifth most clogged city. Yes, there apparently is a group that studies clogs, and yes, we are talking about clogged toilets. The news was released yesterday, National Plumber's Day (today is National Zucchini Bread Day, but no one's released information on that, oddly enough). Scott, of course, released the list of the nation's most clogged cities as......

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......

The 2006 Winter Olympics ended Sunday. Did you notice? Apparently, not many Americans concerned themselves with their skiing, skating and curling brethren: According to Nielsen, nightly television ratings for the 2006 games were the lowest in recent history. NBC and its cable networks pulled a 12.2 Nielsen rating and a 19 share for its nightly coverage of the Olympics — an average of 20.2 million viewers per night. That's down from the 19.2 rating and......