Staten Island

Filomena Tobias: Middle Finger-Flipping Miami Heat Fan's 15 Minutes Of Fame Has Begun

While the viral celebrities of the internet age are, in our minds, all part of the same dysfunctional family (Ladies and gentlemen, the VIRAL Family! Tay, Chris, Antoine, Charles, and Zombie Kid! Ready for action!) , the fact of the matter is that none of them actually know each other, and none of t ... More >>

Boston Bombing: Former New England Patriot Joe Andruzzi Was Rescuing People Yesterday

As is tradition on the third Monday every April, thousands of Bostonians and Boston visitors took the day off to celebrate Patriot's Day. On paper, Patriot's Day serves as a tribute to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first two battles of the Revolutionary War, but above and beyond that t ... More >>

NBA Season Jump Starts with Spate of Christmas Day Games Including the Rockets

In 2011, Christmas Day was the literal start to the NBA season thanks to a lockout that kept the season from starting for nearly two full months. Most every other year, the season starts in October, but for the casual fan, it doesn't really get going until Christmas Day. With the NFL taking the day ... More >>

The 5 Best Shows In Houston This Week: October 15-18

Metric House of Blues, October 15 Along with future members of Stars and Broken Social Scene, Metric front woman Emily Haines went to an arts high school in Toronto, and started the group with guitarist James Shaw after returning from college in Montreal and Vancouver. Metric has found it difficult ... More >>

Meet the 2012 HPMA Showcase Nominees: Tianna Hall

Rocks Off reached out to the artists playing this year's Houston Press Music Awards showcase Sunday, August 5, and asked them to introduce themselves. Here's what they sent back. Catch up with the other showcase nominees and see the rest of our HPMA coverage Rocks Off: When and where was your firs ... More >>

Tales From Aisle 14: Grocery Shopping for the Non-Cook

I spent six years living in New York City, eating every meal except breakfast Cheerios out and about on the wide streets of Manhattan. During that time, cooking seemed like a quaint idea in the face of all of New York's world-renowned, and hole-in-the-wall, eateries. Cooking. Cute, but unrealistic. ... More >>

Specialty Rolls and Customer Service Make The Blue Fish a Solid Washington Ave. Destination

See more photos of The Blue Fish in our slideshow. Despite the popularity of sushi, many of us still cringe at the idea of eating raw fish. I remember the first time I tried it, during my early twenties. No amount of coaxing, reassurance, or gentle prodding could get me to taste it until my colleag ... More >>

The PasDoctor Geronimo Manifesto: A Presidential Run and a Birthday "Tepee/Tent-Residence" Orgy, Starring Cameron Diaz

Jessica Cooley / Lufkin Daily NewsPasDoctor Geronimo has quite the bash planned tonight.​Hair Balls' old friend PasDoctor Geronimo is back at it this week. This time around he's not in trouble with the law. Instead, the Lufkin man, whose "white man's name" is Douglas Paul McCoy, has filed a ... More >>

The Funky Chicken: Good Stuff in the Mailbox

Yeah, it's like that.​Once again our mailbox has filled to overflowing with CDs (and zip files). The desk looks like a Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of jewel cases, and the entire room is littered with (largely unread) piles of hype-and-tout. And while much of what comes over the transom ... More >>

Comment of the Day: Sweet, Sweet Manischewitz

Here on Eating Our Words, the commenters absolutely make the blog, and our Comment of the Day honors the best of the bunch. Every day, we read you guys and pick the commenter, or commenters, who made us laugh, cry, salivate over something delicious, or think about things in a new way. In return, w ... More >>

Pop Rocks: Twilight vs. Harry Potter And 9 Other Geek Throwdowns

Still the only crossover I'd pay to see.​Anyone watch the MTV Movie Awards? Anyone? I didn't think so, mostly because I suspect the majority of Hair Balls/Art Attack readers are over the age of 12. And while I have no intention of revisiting the whole "'Music?"Television line of jokes, I did ... More >>

The Mayor of Montrose

Charles Armstrong, owner of four gay clubs and benefactor to feral cats, is the most powerful man in his neighborhood.

Miranda Phillips: Poses As Medical Pro in Attempt to Score Purple Drank

Miranda Phillips: Not a trained medical professional​Although Miranda Phillips claimed to be working for a doctor in Livingston, employees at the Lufkin Walmart's pharmacy thought something was fishy about her phoned-in request for a prescription last December. She told the pharmacist that s ... More >>

The Girls Gone Wild Bus: Where It Should Go In Houston

Photo by Marc BrubakerWe have better suggestions for Houston spots for this bus to visit​When the Girls Gone Wild tour bus is spotted around town, as our own Katharine Shilcutt nodded to on Twitter, people are wont to talk. Speculation begins to pop up, and the town starts abuzz - where is it, ... More >>

KTRU Color Chart Shows Local Radio's Dull Future

Brittanie Shey​Every time it seems like the story of the controversial Rice-University of Houston deal to sell Rice student station KTRU's over-the-air facilities to U of H is slowing down a little, it always gets a little more interesting. Most recently, the activist group Friends of KTRU fi ... More >>

Feeling Comfortable at Baker St. Pub & Grill

The shepherd's pie. ​The folks at Baker St. invited me out to sample some of their comfort food items. I occasionally go to the Baker St. out in Willowbrook to watch a little football on Sundays. It had been years since my last visit to the Rice Village location, but I had fond memories of a ... More >>

Five Groups We'd Pay To Break Up

​Why do people support so much bad music? What if people paid awful bands to quit instead? Weezer fans are willing to try. Sick and tired of being let down by his favorite band, last week a fan jokingly offered Weezer $10 million to split up. Naturally, this had Rocks Off thinking of other ac ... More >>

Clifton Middle School -- We Don't Need No Stinkin' Textbooks!

Who needs them?​All this fuss across the state about what's in children's textbooks and as Clifton Middle School in the Houston ISD will tell you -- it doesn't matter at all. A friend of Hair Balls contacted us the other day to say that there were no lockers and no textbooks for students at Clift ... More >>

Special Mexican Independence Day Edition

Trevisio Touts a Texas-Sized Happy Hour

Photo by bhamsandwichAll this and more can be yours...​A common complaint of Medical Center denizens -- whether they're in the area to work, to receive treatment or to visit someone in one of the maze-like hospitals -- is that there are very few decent places to eat and drink. (You thought we ... More >>

"Fashionable Felon"? You Call This Fashionable, FBI?

Photo courtesy FBITerrible lighting, awful pose -- this is a fashion shoot?​The FBI has put out an alert for someone it's calling "The Fashionable Felon," a woman who robbed a Wachovia Bank branch on the northwest side yesterday afternoon.We realize the FBI was not created to be an arbiter of fash ... More >>

SPECIAL ETHNIC STUDIES EDITION

Rocks Off's Rodeo Concert Guide: Brad "Not Jake Gyllenhaal" Paisley

Date: March 11 Name: Brad Paisley AKA: "Isn't That Jake Gyllenhaal?" Genre: Freemason country Best Known Song(s): "Alcohol," "She's Everything," "Ticks," "Ow, My Back" Key Demographic: Confused Brokeback Mountain fans, people who only eat the vanilla section of Neapolitan ice cream Previous HLSR A ... More >>

Cymbals Eat Guitars

New Braunfels Fights The College Kids With All Their Dang Noise

​If there's one thing that Texans have always prided themselves on, it's love of Big Government -- especially The Man telling you where, and with whom, you can live. Or at least that's how some folks in New Braunfels see it.Spurred by complaints over noise and parking issues, the NB Planning Commi ... More >>

Capsule Stage Reviews: Un ballo in maschera, A Picasso, Thunder Rock

Houston Music Fight Club: Chris Wise vs. Cody Swann, Chris Ryan vs. Frank Beard, Washington Avenue vs. Westheimer

​So this past week, Houston Music Fight Club began getting solicitations from various local musicians to be matched against other strummers and pickers around town in their cage matches. Rocks Off looks around. We see a lot of new faces. This means a lot of you have (happily for us) been breaking ... More >>

Upcoming Events

Jenny Wang and a bag of miracle berries ​The Berry Fairy is back in town! After taking her popular Miracle Berry Parties on the road, Jenny Wang is back in Houston for another series of the popular "flavor tripping" events. The term "flavor tripping" refers to the manner in which your tasteb ... More >>

No Reservations: Montana

Photo by gaby53mt​Usually Anthony Bourdain is a hedonist. He indulges in food, alcohol and not a few off-color sex jokes, no matter what city or what audience. But this week while visiting Montana, he exits out of the fast lane. Maybe it's the mountains, but in the first 20 minutes of the epis ... More >>

Kemah Still Being Pretty Damn Casual About Its Future

Photo by Daniel Kramer​Kemah is at a crossroads where some residents want to keep the city an eclectic, fishing-village-type place, and others want to turn the town into a mini South Beach, with high-rise condos lined up along the shore. That's what Robin Collins, a city councilwoman, told us at t ... More >>

Things to Do This Weekend If You're (Almost) Broke: "Thriller" at Midnight at Numbers, Free Tickets and More

What's the best thing about going to see live music? Frickin' air conditioning, because even the dingiest dive will be pumping out some sort cooled air to calm down all you crybabies who forgot sometime after Ms. Pelz's tenth-grade IPC class that we live in a humid-as-shit subtropical climate ne ... More >>

Soul Power

Houston throwback singer Leela James does it again.

Listening Room: What's Been Tickling Our Earholes Lately

As Rocks Off has noted in our periodic Mail Call entries, even though the tide of promo CDs has been greatly reduced by the digital revolution - Rocks Off can count on one finger (the middle one) the times he's actually used the streaming/download email link publicists are ever more fond of these d ... More >>

Bacliff Wiggers

The other kind of white gang

Notable tour sponsorships in U.S. history

Take It On the Run

Righteous Party

Get some Easter Salvation at the Jungle 13 weekend

Midtown Getdown

Rich's goes straight, and the wait for a first-class, midsize Houston venue could be over

Take This Love and Shove It

The best X-rated breakup songs

What Was That?

Horton hears a Who in Seussical

Hushing Up

What's all the fuss about Hush?

Ground Zero Hour

A man's last day of freedom becomes Spike's moving meditation on 9/11

Culture

Live in Africa (RAS Records)

Ballads Nuevo

Corridos get updated with drugs and guns

Dumb Waiters

Ignorance, thy name is waitstaff

Letters

Full-time Friendly, In the Hood, Humanitiy's Teacher

The Last Good-bye

Aquarium owner dies along with her bar

World Jazz

Highlights from the Houston International Jazz Festival

Empire's End

High drama and spirited romance spice up The Last September

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Globetrotters

Oh, Brother!

Oh, Kay! may not be okay by 21st-century standards