Subject: Al Qaeda

• That Man Makes a Mean Lemonade

  February 21, 2007

• Well, At Least He Did Better Than the Republicans

  December 12, 2006

• The Astrodome Speaks

  October 26, 2006

• Dear John

  September 18, 2006

• The Astrodome Speaks

  October 26, 2006

• Shelby Sendelbach to Write a Letter of Apology. Love (for Alex) Conquers All.

  July 31, 2007

• Playbill: Mark Germino at Anderson Fair

  May 29, 2008

• ICE Raids Getting Flack

  November 10, 2008

• Balls...Hair Balls: Best Bond Villains

  In compiling a list of the best Bond baddies, one has to establish a few parameters. For starters, you must take into account the bad guy's ultimate objective, weighting plans for global conquest/destruction more heavily than mere monetary gain. Then there are more esoteric factors, like background, motivation, and even hair (or lack thereof). The end results shake out thusly: 5. Frank Sanchez (Robert Davi) - License to Kill (1989) Diabolical Plot: Make a shitload of money selling cocaine.

  November 15, 2008

• Aftermath: B.B. King at House of Blues

  Photos by Mark C. Austin   B.B. King deserves a break. If the genial Buddha of the blues, now 83, would rather spend the bulk of his two-hour set bantering with the sold-out crowd about Viagra (groan) and the wayward ways of womankind instead of, you know, singing and playing, he's earned it. And besides, he's a pretty funny guy.   "You look 30!" one audience member cried out shortly after King went onstage Saturday night around 9:20 p.m.   "You need new glasses," the Kin

  November 24, 2008

• A Handy Guide To Terror Targets In Houston

  Sometimes it seems like organizations that want to protect Americans from terrorism end up doing all the terrorists' research for them. The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank headed by John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, has compiled a handy guide to the nation's most vulnerable chemical facilities, complete with how many millions of lives could be taken were the terrorists to win. And guess what? Twenty-seven of the 101 "most dangerous" chemical facili

  November 26, 2008

• Sam Houston's Not The First Politician To Be In A Cheesy Ad

  If you needed any more evidence that Comcast was an agent of evil on par with Al Qaeda or whomever makes those peanut-butter-filled pretzels, look no further than the cable company's inescapable local commercials featuring Sam Houston. The former Texas President/Governor is shown engaging in a variety of "hip" and "with it" activities to dupe us into signing up for Comcast's antiquated coaxial garbage. Sadly, these are merely the latest in a long and unpleasant series of appropriating political

  December 1, 2008

• Good Morning, Houston -- You're A Target

  It's near-freezing, there's a huge accident causing traffic nightmares, half the workforce has called in gay  (and half the others are coming in with hugely contagious flu symptoms just to show they're not gay), so who needs bad news?Houston, apparently.A Washington radio station has talked to a terror expert this morning, and he states pretty plainly that Houston should get ready to duck and covre any minute now because of a pending al-Qaeda attack.

  December 10, 2008

• Guantanamo's Final Days, For Better Or Worse

  Photo by Barry BlandOur sister paper, the Miami New Times, has done an in-depth look at the last days of the prison at Guantanamo Bay.A reporter was there for the last hearing at the camp -- involving the youngest detainee -- and when the order to close it came down the next day.The article, linked here, shows there are no easy answers about what to do with Gitmo:Cases like the child soldier's represent perhaps the new president's most difficult challenge: what to do with the men -- now further

  February 25, 2009

• News Hostage

  June 3, 1999

• Lonesome Onry and Mean: New Albums from Webb Wilder and Commander Cody

  Sometimes Lonesome, Onry and Mean flat dreads going out to the mailbox. Why? Because there's no telling what musical mediocrity or aural atrocity lies ticking like an Al-Qaeda dirty bomb inside those bubble-packs with faraway foreign addresses like Saginaw, Michigan or Sausalito, California. I haven't had my typing hand blown off yet, but my cranial lump has certainly taken some whacks to the eardrum lately. So it was a pleasant surprise to find albums by two old friends in a recent pack fr

  April 14, 2009

• Guantánamo's Final Days

  As America prepares to close the infamous camp, what about those prisoners?

  February 26, 2009

• Thin Steak and Samuel P. Huntington

  January 22, 2009

• Harold and Kumar Go to Prison

  April 24, 2008

• Mexican-American Culture

  August 23, 2007

• Guantánamo: Pictures from Home. Questions of Justice

  A FotoFest exhibition questions justice

  May 17, 2007

• The Big Valley

  April 5, 2007

• SANGRIA

  HANS' VILLAGE BIER AND VINO HAUS

  October 12, 2006

• Raking It In

  Are Houston cops trying to make up for lost revenue?

  December 15, 2005

• Girls Gone Wild

  It's a regular bacchanal in one small town

  December 8, 2005

• Train in Vain

  A bomb scare at a Midtown light-rail stop

  August 11, 2005

• The Break-Up, with Clueless, Harris Newman and Swayback

  Sunday, March 20, at Super Happy Fun Land, 2610 Ashland, 713-880-2100.

  March 17, 2005

• Horse Sense

  Locking horns with the Unicorns

  June 10, 2004

• Drat!

  Racket proposes a rock radio revolution. Clear Channel beats him to the punch.

  February 12, 2004

• Split Lip Rayfield, with the Meat Purveyors

  Saturday, September 13

  September 11, 2003

• This Week's Day-by-Day Picks

  September 11, 2003

• You, Spy

  Why can't Americans make TV shows as good as Brit import MI-5?

  July 31, 2003

• War on War Songs

  Iraq and roll don't go together well when rockers protest

  March 27, 2003

• Uncivil Defense

  March 13, 2003

• Band of Brothers

  Local emocore rockers the Tie that Binds lose one sibling and add another

  October 31, 2002

• Best Place to Take Out-of-Towners

  Art Car Museum

  September 26, 2002

• Bashing Bush

  The Chronicle's film critic doubles as a pinko commie naysayer

  August 15, 2002

• Dems' New Year Vow: Oust GOP Judges

  Candidate recruits include a former Republican jurist

  January 3, 2002

• Repro Man

  Darryl Lauster's resin antiques replicas take the art-versus-craft debate to a new level

  December 20, 2001

• Caring for the Kids

  Plus: Last Seen Wearing..., Punch Lines, Looking Down

  December 13, 2001

• America's New War Against Enron

  Lawyers go gunning for corporate terrorists

  December 13, 2001

• Letters, November 29

  Piety or Pac-Man, At Any Rate, Bell View

  November 29, 2001

• Doing All He Can

  Bomb Osama, a KRIV reporter sings

  November 1, 2001

• Running on Empty

  Local political campaigns struggle to get news coverage

  October 25, 2001

• Houston Airport System Won't Release Salaries....Because Of National Security Issues

  A while back we wrote about the Houston Airport System exporting its vast knowledge of running airports to countries all over the place. HAS wasn't too forthcoming about the financial aspects of it all.A couple of months later, Mayor Bill White suddenly forced out the HAS director -- at least partly because of the foreign-country stuff -- the Chronicle tried to get answers about finances and was stonewalled too.The reporters at the Texas Watchdog website have jumped into the fray, filing Open Re

  June 18, 2009

• For Ramadan: Five Movie Muslims

  Ramadan is a time of reflection and prayer for the world's Muslim population. It is meant to teach them patience and self-restraint, and to bring them closer to Allah. We at Hair Balls know little of patience, and have never been good at self-restraint, but we're nothing if not equal-opportunity in our irreverence. So in lieu of fasting and good deeds, here's a list of some of the more memorable Muslim villains from the movies.A Salaam 'Alaykum.Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik) -- True Lies (1994) "

  August 21, 2009

• The Sheriff Of Crosby, N.D Protects His Citizens From Terror Better Than Adrian Garcia

  ​Harris County Republican chair Jared Woodfill is steamed, according to a letter we first found on Isiah Carey's Insite.He is totally pissed and outraged because Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia has "opened the doors" of his office to Al-Jazeera. A, umm, media outlet.Maybe not a media outlet with a viewpoint everyone agrees with, but a media outlet just the same. "As you probably know," Woodfill wrote to "fellow Republicans," "Al-Jazeera has been linked to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Hamas a

  September 4, 2009

• Stuck In a Moment You (Still) Can't Get Out Of: Remembering 9/11 In Music

  Just as none of us will ever forget where we were the morning of September 11, 2001, Rocks Off will never forget what he was listening to most of the day of the terrorist attacks. Sadly, he admits it was System of A Down's Toxicity, which had come out just the week before. For us the album conveyed the same sense of hysteria that we would see that whole day, the rest of the week, the year, and for almost a decade later. Don't hate, we were also in a deep Lou Reed trench at the moment (stupid gi

  September 11, 2009

• Sam Houston Race Park Welcomes The Teabaggers

  ​Sam Houston Race Park has a new way of trying to entice customers to the park: radical, extreme political events wherein the office of the President of the United States will be disparaged and its occupant compared to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and whatever other figure talk radio comes up with.The event is similar to the anti-Iraq war protests held during the Bush administration, where Park officials welcomed the thousands upon thousands of Americans to disagree with the current White House o

  October 29, 2009

• Why Notre Dame Will Win The BCS And Texas Won't, Part Ten

  ​This was a tough, tough week for the BCS title hopes of Texas. They played at, what -- 11 in the morning? (Again? What are these guys, some effete "Brunch Bunch"?) They played against some directional Florida school? While Oklahoma was exposing itself as worthless, therefore destroying UT's strength of schedule?Still, it must be said -- UT plays absolutely crap teams from here on out (as they have from here on in) -- so they may go undefeated. If so, they arguably would be considered for the

  November 10, 2009