Houston News Blog

Photos by Jeff Balke

We don't know who this character is supposed to be, but she was killing some Japanese opera.

​The costumes are expected. The fanciful, the extraordinary, the bizarre, the obscurely referenced, the painstakingly planned and the larger than life weren't surprising -- after all, this was a cosplay (short for "costume roleplay) convention. What was unexpected, however, was the gender-bending everywhere that we looked.

The most gorgeous men were dressed as exotic women, while the most beautiful women were dressed as Bowie-esque men. And we suddenly found ourselves questioning our sexuality. Perhaps this is how Tim Booth felt when he wrote "Laid": "Dressed me up in women's clothes / Messed around with gender roles / Dye my eyes and call me pretty." But we're pretty sure Tim Booth never attended a cosplay convention.

We didn't think pumpkins could be hot. We were wrong.

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The rampant androgyny was only one fascinating aspect of a world in which we had no foothold or prior understanding aside from our own passing knowledge of certain graphic novels, video games and anime series. Our geekiness, it seems, only goes so far.

Upon entering the Marriott Westchase on Saturday night, we were immediately stunned by the sheer volume of attendees at the 2009 Oni-Con -- around 6,000 over the course of the weekend, it turns out, despite its smaller venue this year -- which is one of the largest anime and cosplay conventions in Texas. (Ed. note: We apologize for the incorrect attendance figures that were posted earlier. We received incorrect information about the convention and have made the correction.)

​This just in from Bryan, TX: Abby Johnson, the very recently former director of Planned Parenthood in that city, is now a protester outside the facility.

In an interview filmed by KBTX - TV, Channel 3, Johnson said she'd had a change of heart after viewing an ultrasound and can no longer support a woman's right to abortion.

Now, after joining the nearby Coalition for Life, Johnson is one of the protesters, which in turn, has caused Planned Parenthood to file a restraining order against her and the Coalition -- which doesn't stop anyone from their prayerful protest, but seeks to stop Johnson from releasing "certain information."

Johnson says she quit because Planned Parenthood wanted more abortions, which translated into more revenue. Commenters so far have leaned heavily toward the belief that she is a) doing this for attention and b) never believed in the pro-choice movement to begin with.  

​The code of conduct at Texas A&M is hard to keep straight, but here's the latest: It's okay to be an Aggie yell leader and sing the Ding Dong Song on video, but it's not okay to be a yell leader adviser and sing the Ding Dong Song on the same video.

Because of these antics, Rusty Thompson, A&M's director of student activities and yell leader adviser, wasn't allowed to travel with the man cheerleaders to Lubbock for the team's game against Texas Tech. No disciplinary action was taken against the yell leaders in the video.

The Ding Dong trouble started about a week ago when one yell leader, Casey Schaefer, posted a video on YouTube of four yell leaders in white uniforms dancing and singing in a car before the Aggie's game against Kansas State.

Schaefer has removed the video from YouTube, but the Bryan-College Station Eagle has a nice description:

One of the yell leaders films as the others in the car dance, bob and mouth the lyrics to the song, which features the chorus, "Ooooh, you touch my tralala."...It was unclear what the objection was to the song. Bloggers made fun of the video for being "gay."

Hair Balls has absolutely no idea why anyone would call this song gay.
 

On Monday, we told you about the abject horror that gripped the streets of Montrose as the undead shuffled their way through the neighborhood in search of fresh brains (also known as the second annual Houston Zombie Walk). Our videographer, Philip Nwachokor, barely escaped the zombie hordes unscathed, and while he's recovering from his terrifying brush with death, we'd like to present his interview with a zombie (several zombies, actually) below.

For more images from the zombie walk, check out our slideshow.

This is the final post in our series of articles offering Halloween costume advice. Check out the other four entries here, here, here and here.

You've been too busy to run by Frankel's, Party Boy or even Wal-Mart to start formulating your Halloween costume this year. No ideas have jumped out at you. We've all been there -- stuck a day or two before the witching hours of October 31 with nothing to wear to the big party except a shrug and whimper.

So to help you out, your friendly Halloween staff came up with two lists -- ten adjectives and ten nouns -- to match up to save you the shame of going as "That asshole who didn't wear a costume." Just print out this handy list, cut out each term, drop the nouns in one hat and the adjectives in another, and enjoy your instant inspiration. These can't be any worse than that Scream mask you've been wearing since Halloween 1997.

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Since we are so goddamn helpful, here are three examples of how you might pull off some of this stuff:

Coked-up Darth Vader

Darth Vader alone makes for a great last-minute costume, since most people have black helmets and capes lying around. If not, you can still find a Vader mask at any reputable costume store. But the twist here is that you're not just an evil, Alderon-exploding Sith lord -- you're an evil, Alderon-exploding Sith lord on coke. Dab some flour on that mask and ratchet up those mechanical wheezes Vader always makes when he talks; this Vader's in a hurry to totally own the Dark Side tonight.

​It's a never-ending debate around these parts. What is Creole? Is it the same as Cajun? If not, why not?

And let's say you were an Australian supermarket chain and were looking for a name for your in-house generic rip-off of the Oreo, and you decided to call it the "Creole Cream." Should you expect a visit from the PC Brigade?

If you answered no, think again. Aussie grocers Coles recently found that out the hard way, when they were broadsided Down Under by a professor of Aboriginal descent.

"The word Creole comes from a period when people's humanity was measured by the amount of white blood they had in their bloodstream. This is the same kind of thought that underpinned horrific regimes like the Nazis," Sam Watson, the deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, told brisbanetimes.com.au yesterday.

A spokesman for the grocery chain denied any racist intent. He said the name referred to the "well-known Creole cuisine style that originated in the US.''

It certainly seems to us less offensive than Dairy Queens Moo-Latte milkshake, which we called into question five years ago, thus inspiring Slate to chime in from their ivory tower..

And one thing's for sure: Watson's head would explode if he ever visited Houston, where there are whole apartment complexes called things like the Creole at Yorktown and Memorial Creole, and where Cajun/Creole is one of the more popular cuisines. Googling Houston and Creole gives you almost a million results.

We put the Creole Cream question to Linda Smith, the Breaux Bridge, Louisiana-bred proprietor of the Louisiana Creole Cafe on Dowling Street in the Third Ward.

First off, she was as puzzled as we were about the allegedly Creole food in question.

"I don't know what any of this has to do with an Oreo cookie," she laughed.

Photo by Son Lam

​Despite appearances, the Texas Renaissance Festival isn't all chihuahua butt-plugs and rampant insults. There are plenty of activities to do each weekend, such as chug ale, gnaw on turkey legs, try out your longbow skills and ogle beautiful women -- just like they did in Ye Olde Tymes!

To assist you in this noble pursuit, we've compiled a slideshow of the 15 hottest women of Ren Fest for your perusal. Enjoy!

 

Photos by Katharine Shilcutt

​The undead arose from their graves and took to the streets of Montrose (where else?) on Saturday night, shuffling and moaning their way through the city in support of Tillman Troops, organized by Zombie Walk Houston. In between scavenging the flesh off dead bodies and searching for brains, zombies can be charitable too, you know.

Roughly 300 people gathered in the parking lot behind the old Alabama Bookstop in their finest zombie attire and Hair Balls was there to take it all in. To their credit, we were surprised to see only one Zombie Michael Jackson and exactly no Slutty Zombies. Instead, we were greeted with some of the most realistic, original and entertaining costumes this side of a George Romero movie.

​Chris and Jen Mathis only spent an hour getting their zombie attire ready, but the results were both hilarious and terrifying: a Snuggie Zombie with her partner, who had eaten the head off the baby that occupied his Baby Bjorn.

Halloween is coming, and that means many, many costuming mistakes will be made by normally sane adults. To help stop this scourge, each Thursday we will be offering tips and analysis of what to avoid, or possibly what to do. Check out past entries here, here and here.

There's one thing -- or should we say two things? -- you can count on every Halloween: some annoying couple dressing up in a his-and-hers theme that they consider pure genius, if for no other reason than it expresses their false belief in their own cuteness and romantic longevity. Our first instinct is to vomit all that candy corn and tequila, followed closely by the urge toward violence, and then, lastly, by silent meditation on the fact that, as statistics are wont to show, one of these people will cheat on the other before next Halloween. However, one way to avoid all this rage might be by suggesting costumes that aren't stupid and trite. And one way to avoid stupid and trite is by being bold, shocking or just plain offensive. Behold!

FLDS Members​

We believe Texas authorities had their hearts in the right place when they raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints' wackadoo camp in El Dorado earlier this year. They just forgot all that technical stuff about needing warrants and probable cause and whatnot. But anyone who's followed the exploits of the Warren Jeffs gang knows that, if there's one thing these folks like, it's a good ol' incestuous child bride. Or two. Or seven. Sure, some might call polygamy harmless and quaint, like small pox, but do yourself a favor and take a look at that uber-creepy picture of Jeffs and that little girl on the eve of their wedding. You'd be hard-pressed to find a scarier costume than that, and that shit's real. The great thing about this idea is that it's not just limited to couples. In fact, it'd work even better with one dude and a handful of women, provided they dress age-appropriate, by which we mean age-inappropriate. The guy can just wear a conservative suit and a creepy grin; the women can wear anything you'd see the Ingalls-gals wear in an episode of Little House. Now go gather under that banner of heaven!

​Yesterday, we shared the vision of urbanist and blogger Andrew Burleson, who dreams of a Houston in which we dress for the weather at all times, even at work. It's his view that this would lower energy costs and immensely improve civic life overall.

He thinks we could begin with a Dress For The Weather Week, and after ten years or so of these weeks, Houston could become a city that always, in his words, "lived like it's hot 'cause it is" and "lived in the place that we're at and learned to embrace it."

Burleson says the invention of air conditioning has stopped us from coming to terms with who we really are.

"If a/c had not been invented for 100 years, if you could have taken 1885 or 1905 and paused the world's technology right there, and gave it 100 years of a gap, culture would have changed."

He cites the fashions of the 18th Century versus those of the 19th. "Things were really trimming down," he says. "And then you get to the early 1900s and you start to see Theodore Roosevelt wearing khakis instead of wool pants and the big hats. So you see they were already starting to deal with this [hot] reality, but then air conditioning is like this Band-Aid that came along and people said 'Okay, we don't have to deal with this anymore because we have this artificial cooling device that will make it fine as long as we never go outside.' But never going outside is kind of a big problem."

Nowhere more so than Houston.

Today, we'll explore the benefits of Burleson's dream -- a reborn downtown and Uptown and Houston's emergence as a world fashion capital -- in a little more depth.

First -- downtown revitalization.

​Andrew Burleson hates wearing dress clothes. He also believes this cultural hangover from our distant European ancestry costs too much money, is completely illogical and ruins much of Houston's social life for about half of the year.

"In the summer if you're dressed for work and you go outside it's just murder," says Burleson, an urban designer and real estate consultant and blogger. "Then you go home and change into something that's more appropriate, it's still hot but it's not nearly as bad. So on a weekend I can enjoy going to Discovery Green or on a walk somewhere outside, but not during the week."

As we all know, Houston is famously a city where you can see lots of people not enjoying themselves downtown on a daily basis. Especially during the work week in the summer months, those few that venture on the street for any length of time end up a sweaty mess, so most don't bother. Instead, workers stick to the tunnels and skywalks and stay fast in the embrace of air-conditioned comfort. But since the tunnels close around seven, Houston's downtown empties each day at closing time, and on weekends, the whole district save for a few bars and nightclubs is a virtual ghost town.

Unthinkingly, we've sacrificed our civic center on the altar of conformity to fashions developed long ago in much cooler countries. Another of the more obvious results is very high energy bills. Houston has long been known as "the most air-conditioned city on Earth" for a reason.

Burleson points out, and research bears him out, that women feel cooler than men. Thus we have the absurdity of women needing to take sweaters to work or play with them on days when the heat index tops 100. "We'll go to the movies, church or a restaurant and she will feel like she has to take a change of clothes with her, because she'll be really hot on the way, and then we'll get to the theater or whatever and go inside and she's freezing to death," says Burleson. "She can't sit there and enjoy the movies because she's freezing so hard."

To Burleson, our attachment to dress clothes is not just costly and a pain in the ass, but utterly unreasonable: Here on the cusp of the Tropics, why must we dress as if we are beset daily by cool London fogs?

"We get our fashion sense from Northern Europe, and it comes down to the rest of the U.S.," he says. "Our seasons are linked to that. In September, they start selling sweaters here. Are you kiddin' me?"

"Let's live like it's hot 'cause it is," he says. "Let's live in the place that we're at and learn to embrace it."

Ergo "Dress For The Weather Week."

​The "Illegal Alien" costume causing uproar amongst immigrant rights activists, anti-immigrant supporters and free speech advocates is the first major faux pas of this Halloween season. While anti-immigrant supporters are scrambling to find the costume, immigrant rights activists are calling for a public boycott of the suit.

"We feel it's dehumanizing and that it's inappropriate. We're trying to put a face on immigrant issues and this costume takes away from that by making fun of them," says Houstonian Cesar Espinosa, executive director of America Para Todos.

Espinosa is not alone. The costume is no longer available online at Toys"R"Us or Amazon, we assume due to the controversy. It is, however, still available on Walgreen's website. (Update: No longer!!!)

Here are Hair Balls top 5 major costume mistakes so far in the 21st Century:

October 2002 - Walmart, Party City and Urban Outfitters offer "Kung Fool" and "Chinese Man" costumes to buyers, drawing ire from the Asian community. Featuring buckteeth and slanted-eyed masks, Fu-Manchu style mustache, a pigtail and glasses, the suits caused a national protest that took the outfits off the shelves.

January 2005 - Prince Harry of Wales dons a Nazi uniform including the swastika armband to a party. "He apologised...after the mistake became public, " the Lord Chancellor told the BBC. The conservatives of the country wanted a public apology but since Prince Harry is royalty, that request wasn't met.

We went to the Texas Renaissance Festival in Plantersville this weekend to attend our cousin's wedding, and wouldn't you know we brought a camera along to document through our drunkenly narrow and judging eyes all the WTF-ery walking amongst the trees. Secretly we wish we could also don a pair of tights and play the lute whilst sitting against a turkey-leg stand, because -- sweet Lord -- those chicks west of Conroe love shoving their boobies skyward. Sadly we have gone full-nerd for much less.

Below are the top 20 freaks you'll meet at Ren Fest, in handy picture form.

Photos by Craig Hlavaty

​The last time we saw someone blowing glass this well, we...OK, we tried to come up with a pun about someone fellating composer Phillip Glass but we sort of gassed out. So just imagine someone blowing him in a bathroom stall or something.

It seemed the entire city was out and about this weekend, as the first gorgeous weekend of fall brought beautifully blue skies and perfect temperatures. Check out what you missed this weekend by spending the day on a patio somewhere, sipping a latte (silly you).

Photo by Groovehouse

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The third annual No Holds Barred Chili Cook-Off at Shady Tavern took place on Saturday afternoon. Click here for a slideshow.

Halloween is coming, and that means many, many costuming mistakes will be made by normally sane adults. To help stop this scourge, each Thursday we will be offering tips and analysis of what to avoid, or possibly what to do. Check out past entries here and here.

If VH1 has taught us nothing else, it's shown that it's never too soon to be nostalgic. This Halloween, tap into the cultural era academics refer to as "the `90s" and impress friends with your knowledge of history. Rekindle their fond memories of last decade with your meticulously assembled, detail-rich costume. Or just piss people off with a tasteless O.J. get-up. Either way works.

​ZomBenet Ramsey

Proudly honor the memory of JonBenet Ramsey, the tiny victim of the decade's most sensational unsolved murder, by donning a tiara and fancy sash. The slaying of the six-year-old beauty queen is still largely a mystery to investigators and her parents, with the latter even being initially linked to the slaying of their own daughter. The case helped spawn countless books and television shows, and even led to a screaming shrew like Nancy Grace having a valid career. But why plaster on copious amounts of draggish make-up and dodgy doll clothes when you can go as...ZomBenet Ramsey! With an insatiable taste for Lisa Frank stickers, beauty-pageant trophies, brains of the living and ice cream, this little undead cutie is sure to help you win any Halloween costume contest that comes your way. Hell, get a buddy to dress up as John Mark Karr, the batshit loonball who admitted to killing the child in 2006 only to have his confession dismissed as a hoax.

Photo by Paul Knight

​Hair Balls was prepared for an evening of stale beer and possibly mullets at this weekend's opening party for the new Lucky Strike Lanes & Lounge in the Houston Pavilion. Then we noticed a small warning at the bottom of the invitation: "dress code enforced."

Our confusion mounted as we climbed to the Pavilion's third floor to find a mile-long line of overly groomed folks dressed in things like suits and sultry dresses, along with an unsettling amount of chest hair popping out from button-down shirts and even blazers. This was, quite obviously, not a typical bowling crowd -- a sentiment that was only reinforced when a confused bouncer initially failed to recognize the importance of our press credentials and forced us to join the procession.

"What are you doing here?" someone asked the middle-aged man behind us in line, who was wearing fancy shoes, designer jeans and a purple, floral-patterned shirt that he had neglected to properly button.

"Gettin' my bowl on, I hope," the man replied, before going on to discuss catching waves, his subsequent plans for disco and "late-night sushi" and the Lucky Strike locations throughout the continent that he has visited in the past.

"I told Jodi in my email, we like the Lucky Strike," he said. "You bowl Lucky Strike, you're gonna be shellin' it out."

Halloween is coming, and that means many, many costuming mistakes will be made by normally sane adults. To help stop this scourge, each Thursday we will be offering tips and analysis of what to avoid, or possibly what to do.

While we don't know when or where we'll black out/get sick this Halloween, one thing's for sure: we'll see a bevy of boring "sexy" standbys - the slutty nurse, the Playboy bunny, the fetching feline. And thanks to the inexplicable popularity of Mad Men, a show unanimously panned by critics for its cardboard characters and summer stock acting, we're sure to see some ladies dolled up as "hot" housewives and office assistants. What we'd really like to see is something that catches us off-guard, that makes us stop dead in our tracks and say, "Now that's sexy!" Here, then, are some challenges for Halloween '09: if you ladies can pull off any of the following, you are guaranteed to stand sexy head and sexy shoulders above the rest.​

Sexy Osama bin Laden

He's tall, with piercing dark eyes, high cheekbones and a slim figure. If bin Laden weren't a cave-dwelling mass-murderer, he'd make one hell of a centerfold. You could position the turban just so, allowing gorgeous locks to spill out from underneath and down toward your off-the-shoulder mini-robe. Add a pair of knee-high black boots and an AK-47 with a Fleshlight bayonet, and you'd be hot enough to make any man blow his top in a crowded outdoor market.

​Can't find a match on Match.com? Can't get it in tune on eHarmony? Desperate for a young hottie, but not exactly a catch yourself and unable to fly to Russia for a mail order bride? We've got a dating sight for you: Jailbabes.

Jailbabes is just like any other dating site, except all of the women on there are incarcerated. And there might be a few more disclaimers than usual, such as this one:

"These ads are written by unique individuals expressing their desires. They may or may not be complete fabrications of wishful thinking."

(How's that different than any other dating site?)

And this one:

"You can find more information about the inmate, including their crime, by calling their prison directly and/or using an Internet search engine (MSN, Dogpile, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). When using an Internet search engine try putting the word PRISONER either before or after the inmate's name."

And finally, this one, from a Texas prison official:

​The Daily Beast has ranked the IQ of each of America's 55 metro areas with populations over a million. Here is how they arrived at the concept of a municipal IQ.

They measured how many residents had bachelor's and graduate degrees, nonfiction book sales, the ration of institutions of higher education, and political engagement, as measured the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election.

And where does Houston rank? Well, ahead of San Antonio (Number 53 of 55) and more importantly, Dallas (Number 48). That's the good news.

The bad news is that we are tied with Orlando at Number 46, where we lag behind such august seats of erudition and ivory tower-studded metropolises as Baltimore, Detroit, Oklahoma City, Birmingham, Miami and Jacksonville. Our civic IQ was listed at 66, which original IQ inventor Lewis Terman classed at the top end of the "definite feeble-mindedness," "mildly retarded" range.

Halloween is coming, and that means many, many costuming mistakes will be made by normally sane adults. To help stop this scourge, each Thursday we will be offering tips and analysis of what to avoid, or possibly what to do.

It seems that every year Halloween becomes less and less about scaring other people and more about what current pop-culture reference you can cleverly pull off. One year wearing a Cubs hat and headphones was all the rage after fan Steve Bartman snatched a foul ball from outfielder Moises Alou's glove. It was just last year that the streets were awash with Heath Ledger's Joker. Who can forget the great Borat Flood of 2005? (Something tells us we won't be seeing many Bruno's running around this year after the Sacha Baron Cohen's film about the fictional gay media gadfly tanked at the box office.)

Here's a list of our predictions for 2009's most cliche costumes:

Photo courtesy of Play Happy

​Octomom

Nadya Suleman -- that's Octomom, to you -- could very well have been created in a secret National Institute of Health laboratory for the sole purpose of inspiring Halloween '09 costumes. We have a feeling Octo-suits will be as proliferate as the IVF-induced issue from her cavernous womb. All you need are some puffy lips, a not-all-there look in your eyes, and at least a few baby dolls tethered to your torso. If you get tired of lugging the plastic passengers around after a while, you can toss 'em in a Dumpster, prom-style, and just tell everyone you're Angelina Jolie.

​Okay, get ready to have the bejesus scared out of you. David M. Buss and Cindy M. Meston, professors of psychology at the University of Texas, have a new book called Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between). They interviewed more than 1,000 women about why they did the deed, and some of the reasons the women gave were, according to Buss, "borderline evil." The scariest reason of all: to give someone an STD.

"If you asked me in advance if I thought a woman would have sex in order to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease, that's not something that would pop into mind," says Buss. "But even though it's a very infrequent motive, those can have large and far-ranging consequences."

Yikes.

Photo by Danny Lopez

​Alright fellas, we'd like to be serious for a minute: It's time to talk man things. The 2009 football season is under way, which means a lot of us will be doing some tailgating. Whether it be Sunday morning for the lowly Texans, or it be Saturday evening for the 12th ranked Coogs (or even the Dynamo), us men are going to be out there, drinking it up.

Unfortunately, that poses a problem. See, the cool air is going to dehydrate our skin, and all that beer won't help the situation. At my age (and I'm still young), I'm already getting wrinkles under my eyes, and my facial skin is more rugged than the misses likes it to be. I could drink less beer and watch the game at home with my girlfriend instead of tailgating, but then I could go to baby showers and spinning class and shop for potpourri.

So why should us guys care for our heaviest organ (alright, second heaviest)? Hair Balls met up with the experts at Jack Black (no association with Shallow Hal) to get some manswers. Alayne Cyk, the regional sales director in Texas for Jack Black, summed it up best by comparing our skin to our cars. "It's like maintenance for their car, guys have to maintain their car so why wouldn't they want to maintain their face. They want to look as good as women, and more and more men want to stop anti-aging."

I can attest to that, I like to keep my ride clean (although those damn birds in the Heights don't help me). Jack Black makes products like cleansers to scrubs, moisturizers, serums, lotions, shaving creams, etc. Most importantly, their men's products aren't scented like women's, so you don't walk around smelling like lavender or cucumber melon.

Arcos, the owner

​It's hard out there for a video-store pimp.

Rob Arcos, owner of MOVIES! The Store, hasn't had a stellar summer, sales-wise. He based his 2009 forecast on the previous two summers, but this year has failed to live up to his predictions, leaving one of Houston's coolest independent establishments (and a Best of Houston 2008 winner) in the red.

To make things worse, a certain amount of budgetary leeway is necessary to stock the place with new releases for the much more lucrative holiday months. (As we proactive, paradigm-shifting whiz-kids at Hair Balls say, you've gotta spend money to make money.)

"I've been operating in the red for four months now," Arcos says. "The period that actually sustains me, I'm going into it with a very weak budget."

So Arcos and friends decided to do what any enterprising entrepreneurs would do: throw a fuckin' party.

In life, everything can be distilled down to chart form. It's a truism born of the PowerPoint age.

Each week we will examine some pressing event or trend via the easy-to-follow form of putting a chart together that explains things. Today's subject: Serena Williams.

Houston's Serena Williams made nationwide headlines - and not in the usual "good" way - with an over-the-top rant at a small, unprepossessing line judge at the U.S Open. It wasn't a lengthy monologue, but the best threats are succinct, in our opinion.

And this was a damn good threat. But how does it stack up to another classic threat?

Check after the jump to find out.

​What are you doing next month to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS and poverty in South Africa? Hair Balls admits we didn't get around to scheduling any time for that, but Houstonian Ganesh Krishnan is heading to South Africa to participate in Enduro Africa, an eight-day motorcycle ride through the country's Wild Coast that raises money for different charities, including Prince Harry's Sentebale organization.

"I just didn't want to travel -- I wanted to do something to impact people's lives," Krishnan told Hair Balls. He says he got his charitable spirit from his father, who has always encouraged him to help others whenever possible.

While the event isn't well-known in the U.S., it's a big deal in the U.K., probably because of the attention bestowed upon it by the aforementioned prince. Krishnan says he was flipping through some British papers last year when he came across a story about the event, so he decided to buy a Honda off-roader and take some lessons. A few spills later, his work has paid off, and he and some friends are heading overseas.

​Charles Roberts -- aka Alabama, aka Hell Boy (according to a lawsuit he filed from prison) -- was recently transferred to Huntsville from Edinburg after he claimed, via lawsuit, that the prison didn't allow him to practice his Wiccan religion.

Michelle Lyons, the director of public information for the state's prison system, told Hair Balls, "He was not moved to Huntsville for any reason related to the lawsuit." She added that the Lopez Unit in Edinburg, where Roberts stayed for about two years, is more of a short-term facility.

It is an interesting coincidence, though, and it'd be really interesting if Huntsville just happened to have a few practicing Wiccans. Lyons wasn't sure if it did, but she said there are Wiccans at a state prison near Sugar Land. (Update: Lyons said there are five Wiccans in Roberts' new unit.)

​Everyone's making such a big deal out of today: It's September 9, which means it's 9/9/09.

It is, according to one site, "the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we'll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), or a millennium (mark your calendars for January 1, 3001), depending on how you want to count it."

That seems a little bit of a stretch to us when it comes to statistics, kind of like "most hits on the road against lefties with runners in scoring position on even-numbered days."

Come on -- we're having 10/10/10 next year, 11/11/11 and 12/12/12 after that, what's the big deal with 9/9/09? Wasn't January 23, 1945 cooler, as these things go?

But we give up -- apparently it is a big deal. Journalists have dug up obscure references to prove it, so it must be true.

How best to celebrate this momentous day?

We'll give you -- ha ha!! -- nine ways to do it.

1. Play "Revolution Number 9" nine times. What, you got a better way to send an hour or so?

Has there ever been a song better designed for the "skip" button? What did Beatle fans do back in the day of LPs -- actually sit and listen to this thing? After you finish with this, put on Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and really jam.

Photo courtesy of Dario Lipovac

​Thanks to some help from his friends, Marwan Hamza's mother is on her way to Houston.

Hair Balls reported last week that Hamza, who relocated to Houston after his work with U.S. troops forced him to flee Iraq, had been in a near-fatal car accident -- and that his family was scrambling to win temporary visas to be at his side.

After learning about the crash, YMCA International, Hamza's resettlement agency in Houston, made a push through Congressman Al Green's office to secure the visas, which seemed a highly unlikely task. But the agency received word yesterday that Hamza's mother had been approved for a one-year, multiple-entry visa. She'll soon be on her way to Houston.

"So somebody tells you that something's impossible, don't trust them," says Dario Lipovac, the YMCA's resettlement director, who spearheaded the effort.

​People are up in arms (Are people ever "down on arms"?) about a new report that shows Houston leads the nation in teen births, at least among women aged 15 or less.

Abstinence-only ain't working, we need more abstinence-only, yadda yadda yadda.

Sure, having a baby when you're 15 isn't the best choice out there. In fact it's right up there with, oh, building your NFL franchise around David Carr.

But there are some examples of very young moms who we should be grateful for. Where would we be without these five?

1. The Virgin Mary. No one knows quite how old Mary was when she sold hubby Joe the story that she'd gotten pregnant without having sex, which you gotta admit was a pretty neat bit of a sales job. Experts agree, however, that there couldn't have been too much grass on the playing field. She was 15 or so, most likely.

Her kid turned out okay, except for that part where fanatics used his name to launch crusades hundreds of years ago, or six years ago.

​A couple of researchers at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy have released a study that gets close to proving that speculators caused oil prices to shoot up in 2008.

This theory is nothing new, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates U.S. futures markets, is expected to release a report that details how speculators played a part in the price spike, the first time that the agency has admitted as much. According to the Baker Institute's Kenneth Medlock, who has researched this issue for years, the Baker study was released to coincide with the trading commission's report.

"The reasons for high oil prices last year is a difficult issue to digest, but these are inescapable facts that need to be part of the discussion," Medlock tells Hair Balls.