Can't decide what to do for the Fourth of July and upcoming three-day weekend? Don't know which Independence Day scene is quite right for you? Don't worry, patriots: Houstonist is here to help. Freedom Over Texas For the traditionalist in you, the City of Houston will hold its annual Freedom Over Texas event at Eleanor Tinsley Park in downtown. Sponsored by Chevy, you can all but count on the attendance of truck-owners and NASCAR fans.......

From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • A man crashed his car into a Sugar Land home on Lynnwood at Oak Wood early Saturday morning. No one in the home was injured and the driver is in the hospital in stable condition. • The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo is 76 years old. • An 84 year old Puerto Rican man with dementia is missing after walking out of......

::AMC Oscar-Nominated Best Picture Showcase:: The Academy Awards are this coming Sunday and if you want to win the pool at your Oscars party, here's how to catch all the movies nominated for Best Picture: AMC is showing them all in a row on Saturday. Houstonist so loves this concept. You buy one pass for $30 and get to see five movies, plus get a free large popcorn with unlimited refills all day Saturday......

From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits......

Good morning, Houston. Remember the plans for the Dynamo stadium on the east side of downtown? And remember Metro's plans for two new light rail lines heading out from the east side of downtown? Turns out there's a question about whether the stadium will be in the way of the rail lines — and it's not clear yet whether the proposed stadium will have an effect on the rail alignments. "We are evaluating a......

Good morning, Houston. If you've been working on a list of things you can do with cow patties, we've got another item for you: You can make pens out of them. Just ask John Lopez of Poteet, who has gotten semi-famous in South Texas by making pens from ground-up cow patties. No, really — the ground poop is mixed with a plastic resin, milled into cylinders and fitted with pen parts; the finished product,......

Good morning, Houston. 'Tis the season for strange missing persons reports: In Tyler, the latest individual to go missing is a 42-foot-tall snowman. The inflatable snowman was last seen at a Tyler tree farm Friday night; the tree lot's owner, Royce Wisenbaker, told the AP that he believes it was hoisted over a fence and carted away. The snowman is worth about $10,000, and a $1,000 reward has been posted for information leading to......

From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • A World War II era ship that Texas A&M-Galveston used as a classroom at sea has been sunk in the Gulf of Mexico to create an artificial reef. • HPD is cracking down on ID Theft. Here's a story that focuses on one recent bust. • Hey, what do you know...people like public transportation. • The U of H Cougars beat Marshall,......

Better late than nevah - here's our roundup of feasting and imbibing in the very near future. See the bottom of the post for some Thanksgiving food ideas, we'll be continuing to update that, and no, we won't add Grandma Kroger to the list, or any other supermarket, for that matter. Well, maybe Central Market or perhaps Whole Foods, maybe. Great American Bake Sale -Dessert Gallery, Sugar Land Friday, November 16th – 6:00 p.m. until......

Houston! We’re going to be rounding up current food and wine events once a week, so you don’t have to. Previously, we posted these gastronomic opportunities, along with festivals and the like – having let that slip was criminal! Once again, Culinary Adventures comes your way!!! Tour de Donut – “The Sweetest Bike Ride in Texas”Sunday, November 4th – beginning at 8:00 a.m. Sun & Ski Sports @ Katy Mills Mall $25/participant in advance $35/participant......

Good morning, Houston. Suppose you're trying to keep up with piles and piles of government reports. How can you tell when there are too many? Simple: You ask for a report, of course. That's what the Texas State Library and Archives Commission did — and in a 668-page report, the commission has declared that the state is over-reported. The commission looked at more than 170 state agencies and universities and found more than 1,600......

Good morning, Houston. Time to flex your democratic muscle again: Early voting begins today for the Nov. 6 election. You can check out a map of early voting locations here and get more information on where and how to vote from the Harris County elections website — so now, you can't say you haven't been informed. See you at the polls! >> For some, a flood of bad news: If you're a property owner......

Houstonist has an active and amazing Flickr photo group. We receive many, many photos of Houston and the surrounding areas every day and unless you are an active visitor to our photo pool many of these photos go unnoticed. So in a weekly effort to bring you more amazing photos from Houstonist readers and photographers, we are going to feature a block of photos submitted to our Flickr photo group. The images will be dug......

Let us eat cake, well, cupcakes - lots of them, at Dessert Gallery Bakery & Cafe. Yep, head on over to any Dessert Gallery location, either at 3200 Kirby Drive, 1616 Post Oak Drive or, at the newest location 2260 Lone Star Drive at Sugar Land Town Square (read: fake downtown). A donation of ten percent of the purchase price of every pink ribbon cupcake sold will go to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Specifically, to......

Good morning, Houston. Are you registered to vote? Do you need to make changes to your registration? Better take care of it fast: Today is the last day to register or alter your registration if you want to vote in the Nov. 6 elections. Voters in 34 jurisdictions will elect candidates this year, and the state has 16 bond issues on the ballot — and, of course, there are big-ticket items like HISD's $805......

Good morning, Houston. We enjoy a good, quick breakfast as much as anyone, but seriously, there are limits — just ask the four people who were hurt Monday when a driver who was eating oatmeal at the wheel crashed into a Metro bus near downtown. Witnesses told KPRC that the driver ran a red light at Pierce and St. Charles and hit the front of the bus, which caused the driver's vehicle to spin......

Good morning, Houston. How many of you knew what Monday was? Anyone? Anyone? That's right: It was the 220th anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution. To mark the anniversary, the nation had a little holiday, Constitution Day — but how many people actually knew about it? Not many, apparently: Though federal law says students at public high schools should be taught about Constitution Day, a recent survey of students found that......

Good morning, Houston. These days, when everyone and their dog has a computer, it's getting harder to remember the days when all "official" writing was done on typewriters. The practical modern typewriter was invented in 1868 by an engineer named Christopher Latham Sholes, but it wasn't until 121 years ago today — Sept. 14, 1886 — that George K. Anderson of Memphis got a patent for the typewriter ribbon. They were originally made of......

Good morning, Houston. As you might have noticed, we passed the night sans Humberto — but our friends in the Beaumont area weren't so lucky. The sudden hurricane made landfall early this morning and battered Beaumont with winds up to 62 mph and Orange with gusts of up to 85 mph, the Chron's Eric Berger reports. From across Southeast Texas came reports of knee-deep water, downed power lines and damaged buildings, including an apartment......

Good morning, Houston. Did you hear the one about the high school teacher who might have appeared in a bunch of gay sex videos? Well, now you have. He's a faculty member at Clements High in Sugar Land, and Fort Bend ISD officials got a tip last week that he has appeared in dozens of sexually explicit videos under an assumed name. The district has removed the teacher from the classroom while it investigates......

Good morning, Houston. The Chron's Eric Gerber points out something interesting: a Washington Post story that says people hold onto utterly untrue myths even when they're faced with factual information that disproves them. An example: A University of Michigan psychologist showed people a CDC flyer stating that myths about the flu vaccine aren't true — such as the story that the side effects of the vaccine are worse than the flu itself — and......

Good morning, Houston. Yeah, we remember how (relatively) mild the first part of the summer was, and we're grateful for that. But now, after weeks of oppressive heat, we're sick of the weather — so you can imagine how excited we were when we checked out the long-range forecast and saw highs in the low 80s and lows in the low 60s coming in early September. But it might not come as early as......

Good morning, Houston. It's August, and that means hurricane season is starting to get heavy. The country's got fins to the left and fins to the right, so to speak. As of last night, Tropical Storm Dean was crossing the open Atlantic with winds at 50 mph, while Tropical Depression #5 had put part of the Texas coast under a tropical storm watch. And over in the Pacific, Hawaii's dealing with Hurricane Flossie. Time......

Good morning, Houston. Time for the results of another sex study: This one, from two UT-Austin psychologists, looked at the reasons people have sex. No. 1 on the list, as you'd expect, was attraction — but there's more to it than that. Among the 237 reasons Cindy Meston and David Buss cataloged: "It seemed like good exercise." "The person was a good dancer." "To get rid of a headache." And perhaps most odd: "I......

Good morning, Houston. Are you feeling particularly crunk today? Maybe you should be: Crunk is among the words added to Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary this year. Also among the 100 new words are DVR, IED, gray literature and smackdown. But we think we'll get the most use out of crunk, which M-W defines as a style of Southern rap music but which has a variety of definitions in the Urban Dictionary. Which brings us to......

Good morning, Houston. We've seen various incarnations of Google, but this one was new to us. Blackle is a search engine that is very similar to Google, but with a darker color scheme. And it's not just Google for the depressed - it's meant to save energy. A predominantly black screen requires less energy to display than Google's white background. One blog said that Blackle could save 750 megawatt-hours a year (or $75,000), if......

Just when you thought it was safe to confine your red-light running to the suburbs: the Sugar Land City Council voted to put up red light cameras at intersections in their town as soon as September. Copycats. Sugar Land police chief Steve Griffith said that there would probably be cameras at 59 and Highway 6, one of the city's busiest intersections, as well as three or four other heavily traveled intersections. He said that as......

Good morning, Houston. We're regular NPR listeners, and we enjoy it as much as the next guy when legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg gives us another thrilling reading of a Supreme Court transcript. Even so, we were a little surprised to hear an ad the other day for NPR's newest piece of merchandise, the limited-edition Nina Totin' Bag. Yes, it's what you'd think it is: a tote bag with Totenberg's mug on it (in,......

Good morning, Houston. In place of the usual Morning Roundup, we've decided to offer you some good, all-American July 4 information to begin your holiday. And ours — we're taking the day off to spend with our families and friends, as we hope you are (you may see a few posts today, but we'll get back to our usual schedule tomorrow). Before we head out, though, did you know: There are 30 places in......

Good morning, Houston. Remember Radar, the adorable Channel 2 weather dog? If you're a Ken Hoffman reader, we can't imagine how you'd forget. It turns out someone in Tyler was a big fan of the idea: a TV station there has their own weather dog, Stormy. Stormy serves a function similar to Radar's and also wears an American flag bandana and takes ridiculous pictures. Just another reason to be glad you don't live in......