Morning Roundup: Holy Internet! edition

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 head-to-head with). Now, in addition to learning about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's makeup, President Taft's tone deafness and how to build a fallout shelter, we can also find out how to start a clown ministry and how Wikipedia is trying to make us all Democrats by using British spellings of some words (see No. 12 on the linked list). Knowledge, need we remind you, is power. [Thanks to By the Bayou for turning us on to GodTube.]

>> A setback for Perry's vaccine plan?: The state House voted 119-21 yesterday to tentatively approve a bill overturning Gov. Rick Perry's executive order requiring all pre-teen Texan girls to be vaccinated for HPV. Rep. Dennis Bonnen (R-Angleton), who authored the bill, said the vaccine is too new for widespread use and argued that Pap smears are highly effective in catching cervical cancer, which some HPV strains can cause. But Rep. Jessica Farrar (D-Houston), a supporter of the vaccine, urged her colleagues to look deeper into the issue: "Please continue to learn more about this issue, the vaccine," she said. "I see it as the ability to save a lot of women's lives and also the quality of their lives."

>> Double trouble: An elderly La Marque man is thinking about moving after being the victim of home robberies twice in two months. The first time, in early January, someone rang the man's doorbell, then two men forced their way into his house when he answered the door; they ended up making off with about $1,000. Then, on Friday night, the man discovered someone had kicked in his back door and stolen his shotgun and some shells. Investigators aren't sure whether the two incidents are related, but the man's family isn't waiting around to see: They're trying to find a safer place for the victim to live. Smart move, we'd say.

>> A hometown star: Houstonian Christopher Scott has landed a role in My Brother, a movie with Vanessa Williams and Tatum O'Neal — but that's only half the story: Scott is the first black man with Down syndrome to play a leading role in a feature film. And it's Scott's first movie, too. "I was like, 'Wow, I can't believe I'm here with this great cast of this movie," Scott told KTRK. His parents can hardly believe it either: Brenda Scott, Christopher's mother, said most doctors told them Christopher would only reach the mental level of a 3-year-old, but one held out hope. "I thought of his words because I said, 'This is the miracle,'" Brenda Scott said. "It still seems like a dream to me, because it seems so unreal."

>> Today's weather: Rain! Again! We're looking at a 70 percent chance of showers today, some heavy and possibly including gusty wind. The high this afternoon should reach 73. The good news is, all this rain nonsense should be out of the way by tomorrow morning: Tonight, there'll be a diminished chance of rain before 1 a.m., with fog moving in toward daybreak and a low around 59 — and we should have a sunny weekend.

It's always sunny after the jump ...