Good morning, Houston. If you're tired of driving all the way to San Marcos to snag those sweet outlet-center deals, get ready to get excited: As our friends at Swamplot note, the all-new Houston Premium Outlets throw their doors open at 9 a.m. today. We can almost hear the stampede out Highway 290 now. The 430,000-square-foot center, off 290 between Mason Road and Fairfield Drive, will eventually be home to 120 stores — not...

Good morning, Houston. If you had hopes of buying the Williams Tower as a new Galleria-area crash pad, we're sorry: The 64-story building has been sold for $271.5 million to a subsidiary of Hines Real Estate Investment Trust. Hines built the skyscraper back in 1982, still leases and maintains it and even has its headquarters there, but the company has no ownership stake in the building. The deal — expected to close on May...

Good morning, Houston. Planning a day trip to see the bluebonnets? Well, the good news is that they've started blooming — but the bad news is that the season may be relatively ho-hum thanks to dry weather in the past few months. But did we mention the good news? If it rains in the next few weeks, the flowers could come out full-force. "The rain is good," Andrea DeLong-Amaya, horticulture director at the Lady...

Good morning, Houston. We'll be the first to admit that we used to take ankles for granted — but we won't make that mistake again after reading that a court battle is raging in Texas over the very existence of ankles. No fooling: In Austin, medical doctors and podiatrists are wrangling over whose turf the ankle is, and in the process, they've called into question whether anyone really has ankles. "You don't have an...

Good morning, Houston. If between the wind, the lukewarm weather and the clouds of pollen floating around, you've somehow managed to forget that it's the day before spring officially begins — well, consider yourself reminded. So how about we get straight to the news so you can start coming up with excuses now for blowing off work tomorrow? >> Rodeo protesters call for federal help: The American GI Forum, one of the groups claiming...

Good morning, Houston. Up to now, we thought one of the worst things that could happen during an airplane trip would be sitting next to Victoria Osteen, but it turns out things could be worse: You could end up sitting next to a guy who ejaculates in your hair. That's what reportedly happened to a 21-year-old Harris County woman on a flight from Dallas to Los Angeles last spring — the woman claims she...

Good morning, Houston. The next time one of your friends from Seattle tells you how high-tech her hometown is, here's something to fight back with: a Forbes magazine survey that ranked Houston as the nation's No. 4 up-and-coming tech city — right behind Palm Beach County, Fla. (uh, is that really a city?). The rating doesn't necessarily mean that we'll all be hanging out with robot babies anytime soon; instead, it reflects the advances...

Good morning, Houston. We're sure you remember Joshua Mauldin, the Arkansas man accused of burning his 2-month-old daughter in a Galveston hotel microwave last May, right? Turns out there's even more weirdness surrounding him: According to prosecutors, witnesses say they saw Mauldin having sex with his wife in an interrogation room days after he was arrested for nuking the baby. Houstonist's mom used to tell us that there's a time and place for everything...