Subject: New York

• Gift Giving at Soon-To-Be-Closed J. Will Jones Elementary

  Thanks to some generous people in Houston and from as far away as New York State, J. Will Jones Elementary will celebrate its annual "Gift of Giving" celebration this Thursday, distributing "donated presents and hurricane relief supplies to students and their families," HISD announced today. St. Nicholas will show up and everyone gets a gift.  "This year is especially important since so many families have faced hardships in our community," says Principal Brian Flores.  "Hurricane Ike,

  December 15, 2008

• Nut Case

  May 12, 1994

• Mr. S.O.B.

  October 24, 1996

• Do You Believe in Magic?

  September 4, 1997

• Building Interest

  May 7, 1998

• Class Action

  January 7, 1999

• Buyer Beware of Confessions of a Shopaholic

  February 12, 2009

• Texas Wants Beer!

  October 16, 2008

• Houston Has a Bad Reputation with Touring Indie Bands

  July 10, 2008

• Oh, Baby Baby

  June 7, 2007

• Karachi Rock

  Haven't heard of Junoon? They've sold 20 million albums, and they're at the Meridian this week.

  April 14, 2005

• Wretched Excess

  Sludge, spread across the land, makes some people vomit and others very rich

  March 31, 2005

• Over the Limit?

  PCBs may prompt a first-ever warning against bay speckled trout fishing

  January 27, 2005

• Banana Republicans

  A Hispanic GOP confab leaves delegates yelling foul

  March 20, 2003

• Definitive Jux Tour

  Saturday, October 12

  October 10, 2002

• Young Lion

  Though only 17, Brandon Lee blows a mighty horn

  April 27, 2000

• $tocks and Bonding

  Boiler Room steams with the stark greed of go-for-brokers

  February 17, 2000

• No Local Server?

  Zagat.com (temporarily) neglects Houston

  June 10, 1999

• Think Tanked

  November 30, 2006

• Aftermath: Common and The Roots Crew's Private Engagment at the Corinthian, With Special Guests (Cough, "Nite and Day")

  Photos by Larami Culbertson​ 9:10 p.m.: We pull up to the front of The Corinthian and hand the car off to the valet. He says, "It's $20 plus tip." Oh, so it's $20, then? Got it. Thanks. 9:20 p.m.: Common just walked in. He's way more stout than we imagined him to be. His skin is also less clear than we were anticipating. Not sure which one is more surprising, or even why we feel the need to write this down. Is this what our life has become? Taking notes about the girth of someone's chest and t

  October 6, 2009

• Crypticon Countdown: Troma's Lloyd Kaufman On The Toxic Avenger And His Yale Classmate George W. Bush

  ​The legendary Lloyd Kaufman is the co-founder of Troma Studios, and directed classics such as The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke 'Em High, and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, which will be screening this weekend at Crypticon Houston. Hair Balls asked the legendary actor, author and Yale graduate about Troma's past, future, and George W. Bush.Hair Balls: First is the question I have to ask everyone: have you ever spent any time in Houston?Lloyd Kaufman: Yes, I have been to Houston many

  October 16, 2009

• Friday Night Noise: The Homopolice You've Heard Of, How About Oneohtrix Point Never?

  ​ The Homopolice "Sex Drugs Death" Picture it, if you dare: abject anarchy on H-Town's streets, sexual insanity run amuck, fresh blood pooling in drains, some escaped, foaming-at-the-mouth mental patient narrating with a busted megaphone. That's more or less what "Sex Drugs Death" sounds like in a nutshell, its ten punked-out psych-noise minutes barging by in a effects-pedal abusing, snarling hissy fit. Cymbals shattering. Larynxes lacerating. Ax stings flogged relentlessly. Halfway though, Ho

  October 16, 2009

• Bernardo Cubría Is Counting The Minutes Until Tonight's Premiere Of Down, Boy

  ​New York actor and former Houstonian Bernardo Cubría is starting to get a little nervous right about now -- he's just hours away from the staged reading of his play Down, Boy by Wordsmyth Theater Company. At the first reading, earlier this year, he was, ah, anxious. "It's like watching your baby bungee jump," he tells Hair Balls."This is the first full-length play I've ever written," he says, adding, "though I did, in the seventh grade, write an amusing play about the O.J. Simpson trial.

  October 19, 2009

• Stirred and Shaken: Catbird's Truck Stop Cappuccino

  Photo by Troy Fields​Bartender Matt Trimble of Catbird's (1336 West­heimer, 713-523-8000) is an impressive man. Before taking his current job, he undertook a weeks-long bicycle odyssey from Houston to New York, sleeping on the side of the road and surviving on his ability to charm strangers. He dates an exotic journalist who makes a young Christiane Amanpour look like a present-day Helen Thomas. And, most importantly, he made me an outstanding Sunday hangover cure, despite sufferi

  October 21, 2009

• Burgers and Hash

  October 22, 2009

• CATBIRD'S TRUCK STOP CAPPUCCINO

  October 22, 2009

• Sampler Plate: This Week In Food Blogs

  Each week, we put together a sampler plate of the most interesting links from both local and national food blogs. Know a blog we should be paying particular attention to? Leave the address in the comments section below. Guns and Tacos: Hilarious and topical (with pictures and captions that always crack us up), this is one of our favorite food blogs in town. Check out Jay's handy "Taco Stand Translation Guide" from last week. Feed the Heights: One of several excellent Heights-specific blogs

  October 21, 2009

• Take This Tie and Shove It Part II: Houston As Fashion Capital For The Hot World

  ​Yesterday, we shared the vision of urbanist and blogger Andrew Burleson, who dreams of a Houston in which we dress for the weather at all times, even at work. It's his view that this would lower energy costs and immensely improve civic life overall.He thinks we could begin with a Dress For The Weather Week, and after ten years or so of these weeks, Houston could become a city that always, in his words, "lived like it's hot 'cause it is" and "lived in the place that we're at and learned to em

  October 21, 2009

• Lonesome Onry and Mean: The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" and the Tragic Ballad of Kirsty MacColl

  Lonesome, Onry and Mean has never hidden our distaste for Christmas music. So if we were ever called on to choose our favorite Christmas song, the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" would win hands down. We can still remember the day - we were still Pogues virgins - when the lyrics, waffling between an aching level of poetic sentimentality and the utter down-and-out drunken surly hilarity of a marital spat ("It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank") finally penetrated the cranial area and we

  October 28, 2009

• A Typical Venezuelan Dance Band

  October 29, 2009

• The Pogues

  October 29, 2009

• Twelve Musical Fuck Yous Better Than Gov. Ah-nuld's Coded Message

  ​Photo illustration by John Seaborn Gray​We admit, we never thought he had it in him, but apparently the Governator is capable of human cleverness - just like all non-cybernetic organisms. That is, if we accept that the acrostic in this veto message here isn't just a coincidence (read the first letter of each line in the second and third paragraphs). That's a good one, but this being Rocks Off, we would've preferred Schwarzenegger put his F-U into song form, like these folks.

  October 29, 2009

• Looking for a Bull Market

  November 5, 2009

• Vision Quest

  November 5, 2009

• This Is Why You're Fat: Now In Convenient Book Form!

  Back in February, we lauded one of our favorite food websites -- This Is Why You're Fat -- for bringing such monstrosities like the Corn Dog Pizza to our attention and for bringing the Deep Fried Mars Bar into the collective consciousness (we couldn't bear to be the only ones familiar with that abomination). And now, like so many other popular single-topic websites -- Stuff White People Like and Fuck You, Penguin are just two examples -- it's been turned into a book. This Is Why You're Fat: Wher

  November 5, 2009

• The Office: We're Officially Afraid of Ryan

  The Office has always been at its best when it mixes the eccentricities and occasional cruelties of its characters with a kind of sad humanity; basically, every character is constantly rediscovering just how much life can suck, then acting out about it, then dealing with it, then repeating the whole process. "Double Date" was a great example of that, and it combined the show's nimble humor and one-liners with an uncomfortably blunt end to the story of Michael dating Pam's mom, Helene (Linda Pu

  November 6, 2009

• On Its 40th Birthday, the Top 10 Sesame Street Musical Guests

  Sing the blues, Kermit... or greens. We know how you feel. Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Elmo and Grover have something to celebrate. Sesame Street, their fictional New York borough, and the television show probably responsible for everything you knew as a kid, turns 40 today. Created in 1969 from the psychedelic mind of puppeteer Jim Henson (back in the freewheelin' '60s, when puppeteering could actually be a career), Sesame Street is now the longest-running children's television

  November 10, 2009

• The Lost Weekend?

  November 12, 2009

• City of Coffee

  November 12, 2009

• Wine of the Week: A Pick from H-E-B's Robert Salyers

  ​It's just so tempting. After a long day of work, you pick up your bread and milk and then turn the corner to find rows and rows of delicious wine, begging you to take it home. You can't resist. That is exactly what Robert Salyers, Beer and Wine Manager for H-E-B on Buffalo Speedway, wants you to do. It's his job. Robert has been in the restaurant and hotel business for more than ten years. He's lived in New York, Philadelphia and even Hawaii. Before moving to Houston, he worked for Haak

  November 11, 2009

• The Music of HBO's True Blood, Episode 1.6: Making the Two-Backed Beast to Cat Power

  Alan Ball was known for his masterful use of music in Six Feet Under. He's lost none of his touch when it comes to his current HBO series, True Blood - which happens to be set in the Louisiana swamps, not terribly far from Houston. With Season 2 just completed, Rocks Off is now working our way backwards through the episodes we missed as HBO begins reruns. Episode 1.6, "Cold Ground"​Have you ever noticed that no one on television loses their virginity in silence? Are we the only one whose first

  November 13, 2009

• Good Deals on Texas Oysters

  ​Texas oyster season opened November 1, and the oysters have started to flood the local market. Lots of restaurants around town are running specials. The cheapest price I've seen is at the Ragin Cajun on Richmond, where they offer 25¢ oysters during happy hour (Mondays through Fridays from 3 to 7 p.m.). That's an incredible $3 a dozen. You'd be lucky to find one oyster that cheap at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York.

  November 13, 2009

• Ask a Rapper: Street Military's Icey Hott on "What If DJ Screw Were Alive Today"?

  The hip-hop world is a less than sensible place - lots of times, you're even required to clarify when bad means bad and when bad means good - so once a week we're going to get with a rapper and ask them to explain things. Have something you always wanted to ask a rapper? Email it to introducingliston@gmail.com. We headed over to K-Rino's album release party Sunday night and, lo and behold, Icey Hott from Street Military made a surprise guest appearance. Even though we had no idea what he looked

  November 17, 2009

• StoryCorps Historias

  November 19, 2009

• The Tug of War

  November 19, 2009

• Bayou Body Count: A Stench At The Airport

  ​George Bush Intercontinental Airport may not be on the same level as mythic Mafioso burial grounds such as JFK in New York or the airport in Newark, N.J., but it still finds a stiff every once in a while.Last week, airport police got a call about a terrible stench coming from the parking lot of the D terminal. And as we have learned here at Bayou Body Count, a foul stench coming from a parking lot can only mean one thing: a body.Sure enough, police tracked the smell down to a Ford Focus parke

  November 19, 2009

• Game Time: The 10 Greatest Sopranos Episodes Of All Time

  ​The Sopranos is the greatest television show of all time. I know that sentence right there will be enough to start plenty of discussion, tweets, and emails, both in support of and in disagreement with that statement.It's funny, with sports expansion breeds mediocrity. The more teams that get added to the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball, the more watered-down the product becomes. Essentially, new homes are created to house the crappy quarterbacks, point guards, and soft tossing lefti

  November 19, 2009

• The Office: The Slovenly Joys of Wastefulness

  Last night's The Office was great for one thing: Jim's complete pwnage of Ryan. I mean, it was an emotional teabagging. B.J. Novak is a hilarious writer and actor who's got a gift at making Ryan a complete douche, and it was great to see Jim get the better of him after weeks of Ryan's snotty whining. Oh yeah, plus Michael tanked the shareholders' meeting. But seriously though: Way to be, Jim. That was sweet. The cold open was fun enough, with Dwight's insanely costumed ReCyclops tearing throu

  November 20, 2009

• Inquiring Minds: Deer Tick's Front Man Goes for That Chased-by-Alligators Sound

  Providence, R.I., band Deer Tick may hail from "Up North" but their sound is purely steeped in grungey folk and rockabilly yelp. They, in fact, hear this description so much that the band has started to rebel against it by in fact upping the dosage on their new More Fuel For The Fire EP, which just hit iTunes this week. The band has been the brainchild of lead singer and songwriter John Joseph McCauley III since the very beginning in late 2004. He was joined by a full band in 2007, right before

  November 20, 2009

• Eating Out on Thanksgiving Day? What's Open

  ​Not everyone in the city celebrates Thanksgiving, and that should come as no surprise given our increasingly diverse tapestry of residents (something for which Eating Our Words is thankful). And not everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving does so with a big family dinner at home. For these folks, it can be frustrating to seek out a good meal on a day when so many restaurants are closed.Below is a list of restaurants that will be open on Thanksgiving Day, as well as the menus that they're of

  November 23, 2009