Houstonist has an active and amazing Flickr photo group. We receive many, many photos of Houston and the surrounding areas every day and unless you are an active visitor to our photo pool many of these photos go unnoticed. So in a weekly effort to bring you more amazing photos from Houstonist readers and photographers, we are going to feature a block of photos submitted to our Flickr photo group. The images will be dug......

We're always looking for more ways to learn about our great city, so why not start at home? Not only is it interesting to know about the plat upon which you live, but it can also help to paint part of the picture of Houston's interesting, albeit short history, and there are quite a few on and offline resources to help with research. An easy way to start is to find the specific name of......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

The Friends of the Houston Public Library invite you to peruse the more than 80,000 books of all genres that will be on sale at bargain prices this weekend at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The sale, held annually, benefits the Houston Public Library - and you, of course. Who doesn't love cheap books? Friday is preview day for members of the Friends, but you can join at the door for $20. On Sunday,......

Houston Public Library's Julia Ideson building, which houses the Texas Room and Archives/Houston Metropolitan Research Center, is long overdue for an expansion. Not only did Cram & Ferguson, Watkin, and Glover's original 1920s plans of the library include an additional wing that was to the south of the building facing Lamar St., but local archives have been amassing in the building since the late seventies. The Julia Ideson Preservation Partners was created at the request......

Yes, we know Houston doesn't boast the famous haunted places some of our sister -ists do — London, for example, where you can hardly turn around without running into some long since beheaded spirit (or, for that matter, spirits). But still, in the spirit of the season, we combed the Interweb and found some local haunted sites, some of which you might have heard of and some you might not know about. So steel your......

When Houstonist thinks of retailing behemoth Wal-Mart, the first thing that springs to our mind isn't fine art. But that could change when the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton open the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2009. In the meantime, the museum's permanent collection is growing, but there's no place to display the paintings — which is how the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is going to get to borrow a genuine......

It's raining, it's pouring, so get out of the wet and join Houstonist in finding out what's doing in H-town for ten dollars or less.... Friday, July 28 Houston Shakespare Festival presents fantastic, professional productions of Shakespeare's masterworks at Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park. Tonight, they present Titus Andronicus, an early and oft-misunderstood Shakespeare about lust, power, greed, revenge, and, oh right, gore. 8:30 pm. Free. (100 Concert Dr. in Hermann Park). Saturday, July......

The Chronicle reports today on the most and least popular books in the Houston Public Library system — and it turns out HPL users are (still) crazy about the Harry Potter series. The six Potter books count for 75 percent of the books checked out most often at the library's branches in the past two years, possibly because it attracts both kids and adults. "Harry Potter is a phenomenon all its own," said [HPL technology......