Morning Roundup: Location, location, location edition

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 San Marcos airport. Not to worry, though: University officials will keep scouting for a site. There's a lot of room around the outlet mall, right?

>> Perry names 5 TSU regents: Gov. Rick Perry has picked five new regents for Texas Southern University: Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe, former state Rep. Glenn Lewis, Choice Energy President Javier Loya, ex-Dell executive Richard Salween and management consultant Richard Holland. The state Senate is expected to confirm the appointees early next week, and the new regents will need to immediately get to work. At the top of their agenda is picking a new interim president for the school, who will likely be TXU board member and former Xerox exec Kerney Laday. "I have great faith that these individuals will provide the leadership and accountability that TSU needs and taxpayers demand while lawmakers are working on legislative solutions," the governor said in a statement.

>> KHOU busts fake parking attendants: Channel 11's intrepid news team took its cameras downtown and caught some guys taking money at parking lots where they don't work — a problem we've run into time and again. One confrontation was classic: The reporter, Brad Woodard, pulled into a parking lot, where a man came up and placed a parking ticket on his dash. Woodard asked the man if he worked for the parking company and the main said he did; afterward, Woodard identified himself as a KHOU reporter and the man admitted he didn't work at the lot after all. "So you're collecting money?" Woodard asked. "No sir," the guy replied. "You just tried to collect money from me!" Woodard retorted. "No, I was giving you directions," the man said. For a fee.

>> Drive carefully: The death of a motorcyclist whose bike hit a stray piece of wood on the East Loop on Wednesday raised some interesting questions: How much debris is on Houston roads, and who's responsible for cleaning it up? The answer to the first question: No one really knows how much stuff is out there, but one TxDOT official told KTRK he thinks the problem could be getting worse. As for who cleans it up: If it's on a highway, it's TxDOT's responsibility, and it's an expensive one. The local TxDOT office spends about $5 million a year cleaning up roadway debris and another $5 million sweeping roads, and even that doesn't get everything. "It's a daily battle," the agency's John Zientek told Channel 13. "I'm pretty sure that when I get back out there, there will probably be another good amount to pick up just on the same area I just went through."

>> This weekend's weather: Looks like we'll have a slight chance of rain all weekend, but probably nothing near the storms that rolled through the northern suburbs last night. Today, look for partly cloudy skies, a high of 82 and a 30 percent chance of showers. The chance of rain will decrease tonight and will hold at 20 percent through the weekend, with highs in the mid-80s and lows around 65.

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