Good morning, Houston. Remember the city's smoking ban, which went into effect in September? Well, so does KPRC. The station checked around and found something that will shock you to your very core: Houstonians are still smoking in bars and restaurants! No, really. One of the bars Channel 2 visited was Henry Hudson's Pub on the west side, where reporters found customers and the bartender smoking — and "we even bought a pack of......

Good morning, Dynamo fans. Ready to see the Orange in the MLS playoffs again? Well, playoff tickets will go on sale at 10 this morning. Depending on where the Dynamo finish in the standings, the team will play in the Western Conference semifinal match at Robertson Stadium either Oct. 27 or Nov. 3; pick your tickets up at Ticketmaster or the Dynamo's website. >> The scandal effect: TSU's enrollment has fallen to its lowest......

Good morning, Houston. Sure, you've heard a lot about Alamo defender Davy Crockett — but have you ever read his final letter? Soon you'll be able to see it in person: The Texas Historical Commission has bought the letter, which was discovered in a file folder last month, for $550,000. Crockett wrote the letter to his children Jan. 9, 1836, shortly after he arrived in Texas and less than two months before he died......

Good morning, Houston. It's August, and that means hurricane season is starting to get heavy. The country's got fins to the left and fins to the right, so to speak. As of last night, Tropical Storm Dean was crossing the open Atlantic with winds at 50 mph, while Tropical Depression #5 had put part of the Texas coast under a tropical storm watch. And over in the Pacific, Hawaii's dealing with Hurricane Flossie. Time......

If you're one of those people who sits in the car for more than an hour every day on your way to and from work, we're sorry — and there's bad news: It may be getting worse. According to a transportation researcher, Texas' strong population growth over the next 20 years or so will mean that we'll see more and more "extreme commutes" of an hour or more. Better invest in some books on tape,......

Good morning, Houston. If you're looking forward to Earthquest, the $600 million-plus, 250-acre theme park being planned for east Montgomery County, you should be happy to know that the park plan has gotten a boost: Earlier this month, Gov. Rick Perry signed legislation to enable tax incentives for the project. The park, to be built on Caney Creek near Highway 59 and FM 1485 in New Caney, is the brainchild of paleontologist Don Lessem,......

Despite initially vowing to keep writing tickets for drivers with obscured license plates until a revised state law takes effect in September, HPD Chief Harold Hurtt announced Tuesday that his department would stop writing such tickets after all — apparently feeling the heat from Mayor Bill White, who called obscured plate tickets a "gotcha system" earlier this week. As you'll recall, the state gave police the authority to write tickets for obscured license plates with......

Just a couple of days after the Chronicle's Matt Stiles reported that HPD was still ticketing drivers for having license plate frames despite a new law meant to prevent them from doing so, Mayor Bill White said the police department should knock if off, calling the practice of writing tickets for obstructed license plates a "gotcha system." The 2003 law that technically allowed police to ticket drivers for having obscured plates was apparently intended to......

Good morning, Houston. We don't mind telling you that we really have no love for cockroaches, but we do have a little bit more appreciation for the little critters after reading the Chronicle's interview with the Houston Museum of Natural Science's curator of entomology, Nancy Greig. "They're neat," Greig said. "Only 12 out of 4,000 are pests." Ah, well, good. But why are those 12 always in our apartment? >> Perry: We need more......

Good morning, Houston. Remember Radar, the adorable Channel 2 weather dog? If you're a Ken Hoffman reader, we can't imagine how you'd forget. It turns out someone in Tyler was a big fan of the idea: a TV station there has their own weather dog, Stormy. Stormy serves a function similar to Radar's and also wears an American flag bandana and takes ridiculous pictures. Just another reason to be glad you don't live in......

Looks like some changes to red-light camera citations could be on the way, thanks to legislation on Gov. Rick Perry's desk: If Perry signs the bill by Sunday (or if he doesn't), drivers with outstanding red-light citations may not be able to renew their state vehicle registrations — and cities that issue the citations would no longer be able to send unpaid fines to a collection agency. Questions do remain about the proposal, including exactly......

So Gov. Rick Perry has appointed five regents to the Texas Southern University board. That leaves four seats open, and though there has been a surge in the number of applicants in the last year, finding people to fill those empty spots won't be easy, as the Chronicle notes today. State records show that fewer than 50 people applied for spots on the TSU board over the past six years, while twice as many applied......

Looks like The Woodlands is a step closer to being a real city: On Tuesday, the state Senate approved a piece of legislation that will give The Woodlands the ability to extend a sales and property tax district throughout the community. If it's approved by Gov. Rick Perry, the bill could lessen the property tax burden of Woodlanders Woodlandites Woodlandonians Woodlands residents. The bill, along with one Perry signed last week enabling The Woodlands to......

Good morning, Houston. If you're like Houstonist, you've watched those TV specials about the University of Tennessee's body farm with morbid interest — and you were morbidly interested when you heard that a similar facility was being planned for Texas State in San Marcos. But the plan keeps running into roadblocks, the latest of which is a concern that the buzzards the body farm would attract could affect airplanes on their way to the......

Good morning, Houston. We're sure thieves will think twice before trying to rob 85-year-old Lena Williamson: On Tuesday Williamson's crime-fighting friends had a man arrested after he stole her wallet. It happened after Williamson's car broke down as she was leaving a Woodforest Bank branch at Woodforest and Uvalde; she asked a man for help in fixing the car, but instead of giving her help, he took her wallet and ran off. Fortunately, Williamson......

Good morning, Houston. As faithful Houstonist readers, you know we have trouble resisting a good crime report, so we were nearly beside ourselves when we read about the family that might have set a grocery store potato chip display on fire in February. Seriously. It happened at a Sellers Brothers on Telephone Road on Feb. 10, and surveillance video — which you can see if you follow the link — shows a young man......

Good morning, Houston. Are we the only ones who've had a really long week? Even though Thursday just reminds us that it's not yet Friday, we can still find some Thursday goodness. For example, did you know Thursday is named for Thor, the god of thunder? OK, then, how about what it meant if you wore green to high school on Thursday in the '60s? And did you know the universe was actually created......

Today's news in the story of TSU Board of Regents Chairwoman Belinda Griffin vs. Gov. Rick Perry can be summed up in five words: former Chairwoman Belinda Griffin. No, really. Griffin, who turned in her resignation on Friday — but not really — actually resigned once and for all yesterday, paving the way for Perry to appoint five new regents to lead the school, with a fast track to legislative confirmation. The plan to appoint......

The emergency meeting of the remaining Texas Southern University regents Monday morning ended up not panning out after all when only three of nine voting regents attended, meaning the group didn't make quorum — perhaps because Board of Regents Chairwoman Belinda Griffin had submitted the regents' resignations to Gov. Rick Perry on Friday. But if the regents have already resigned, why were they planning to meet yesterday? Add that to the ever-growing list of questions......

It's been a busy weekend for Texas Southern University, where the regents are reportedly meeting this morning to fire interim President James Timothy Boddie, whom they had picked to lead the troubled school last fall. According to KTRK, the new president will be Morris Overstreet, a law professor who earned his law degree from TSU in 1975 and was elected to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1990. There aren't any more details on......

Good morning, Houston. We're happy to report that we've found out the AIA and Google have combined two of our favorite things: architecture and Google Earth. Now there's a Google Earth layer featuring 3-D models of some of the structures on the AIA's list of America's favorite architecture, which brings desktop tourism to a whole new level. Among the buildings on the AIA layer: Pennzoil Place, the Astrodome and the Williams Tower, the three......

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......

Good morning, Houston. We forgot to mention a bit of news last week: According to ForbesTraveler.com, Houston is the sixth-best restaurant city in the country. "San Antonio may have a far more manifest Mexican food culture, but Houston, which spirals forever outward, has far more breadth and depth," the site said; it specifically cited upper-end Tony's, Café Annie and Américas, but also mentioned the Breakfast Klub, with its "irresistible" chicken and waffles. Mmm. >>......

The Chronicle reports on the latest developments in the TSU saga today: Three of the school's regents are resisting Gov. Rick Perry's call for their resignations, and an accrediting agency says Perry's plan for state conservatorship could endanger TSU's accreditation. "I'm not going to resign because that would be an acknowledgment of doing something wrong," Regent David Diaz told the Chronicle. "I haven't done anything wrong." Diaz, the Rev. Robert Childress and Belinda Griffin had......

More on Gov. Rick Perry's proposal to oust the Texas Southern University regents and appoint a state conservator to run the troubled university: Perry has agreed to consider an alternate proposal from the Texas Legislative Black Caucus if the group can come up with a plan that would get the school back on track as quickly as conservatorship. "If members of the black caucus can bring us a tool ... that gets us there, that......

Another development in the story of Texas Southern University's ongoing problems: On Friday, Gov. Rick Perry asked all the university's regents to resign and called for the appointment of a state-appointed conservator who would have the sole power to run the school. It's a drastic step — especially in light of the fact that a commission Perry appointed to find a way for TSU to get back on its feet decided a conservator wasn't necessary......

Good morning, Houston. If you loved the DeLorean DMC-12 — and who didn't? — you might be interested to know that what's left of the DeLorean Motor Co. (basically, the name and the logo) is now headquartered in Humble. And the company's vice president, James Espey, is hoping to collect former De Lorean employees' into a book, I Lived the Dream: Stories From Those Who Built the DeLorean Sports Car. This summer, the DeLorean......

There's an interesting legislative battle brewing in Austin over the appropriateness of a tax that would go toward funding sexual assault prevention, response and counseling. No one would oppose a measure supporting that work, would they? Ah, you'd be surprised: There's opposition when the funding is tied to the adult entertainment industry. At issue here is a $5 fee that would be added to price of admission to adult entertainment clubs, which was proposed in......

Good morning, Houston. So how about this Internet thing, eh? Thanks to it, we now have more information at our fingertips than ever before — but how do we know we're staying on the moral and religious high ground? By looking at sites that take on the godless liberal element of the info superhighway, that's how: Take, for example, Conservapedia and GodTube (we hope we don't need to tell you what sites they're going......

Two things seem clear from last night's town hall meeting on problems at Texas Southern University: one, that TSU has problems that need fixing, and two, that supporters feel putting the school under a state university system would be a big mistake. Hundreds of people attended the meeting held by the Texas Southern University Advisory Committee, the group Gov. Rick Perry appointed to find a way to clean up far-reaching financial problems at the historically......