Houston News Blog

​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

​

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.

Photo courtesy of Dario Lipovac

​Houston's Iraqi refugee community is saying a painful goodbye to one of its most valued members. Now Marwan Hamza's friends are scrambling to help his family do the same.

Hamza, 22, is on his deathbed at Memorial Herman hospital after crashing his car earlier this week. Hamza's work with U.S. troops in Iraq forced him to flee alone for a refugee camp in Ankara, Turkey. There he used his nearly flawless English to help with security and translation at a refugee support organization, whose founder wrote him a recommendation letter when he left for the United States.

"I have never met a refugee with this kind of attitude, who willingly and positvely offered help with no expectation of anything in return," the letter reads.

Photo by K's Glimpse

​Have any extra room in your home and heart for a pit bull? There are a bunch of 'em available in Nacagdoches, rescued from an alleged puppy mill that telegraphed its redneck roots by choosing the name "Swamplot Kennels."

The pits are among the 118 dogs constables and animal control officers seized from Swamplot August 13. According to The Daily Sentinel, "most of the dogs were chained to the ground and had little food or clean water within reach." Some dogs were "locked inside hot tin sheds and trailers with no water." And Swamplot owner Lauree Brown is of course insisting she loves the dogs that she held captive like Jaycee Lee Dugard.

Hair Balls has received pleas from animal welfare advocates in Houston and Nacagdoches who say that while many of the dogs were adopted right away, the pits (surprise, surprise) haven't found homes. The advocates also point out that these pits were never in a fighting ring.   

Photo by Rob Ainsley

​At first glance it seemed like the cash for clunker bike promotion at Daniel Boone Cycles was little more than a spoof on the government program to get some advertising for the bicycle shop. Turns out, you might call it a political statement.

"It's a matter of making people aware they can go green, have a new bike, and it can all be done by private enterprise," Joy Boone, who started the shop in 1968 by buying and selling used bikes, tells Hair Balls. "Every dealer in town could do the same thing."

Boone isn't the biggest fan of government. She received a $200 check from one stimulus program, she says, but that money just went back to paying taxes.

"I think [the government] has wasted a lot of money," Boone says. "The cash for clunker program was probably the wisest thing they did, because it put the money in the hands of the people without 20 million layers of bureaucracy."

Photo by Gwen

​On September 12, the casting team of the CW's America's Next Top Model will be hitting H-Town to destroy the fragile self-images psyches of women all over the area. The makers of the hit modeling show are having an open casting call for would-be Marissa Miller's and Naomi Campbell's from our fair city.

But if you are less than 5' 7", it's best you keep your ass at home. The show is looking for only tall women and more than likely the more diminutive of you will have pig's blood poured on you if you try to bust the hatch to the auditions. Another caveat is that only women between the ages of 18 and 27 will be eligible. So all you grandmas pushing 30 can stay home and knit or something.

​After a summer of what seemed like a million racist and sexist offerings from the Houston Fire Department, it started to feel like our city had to have the worst department around. But that changed earlier this month when Channel 13 reported some "explosive new allegations" about racism and sexism, along with a cover-up, in the Texas City Fire Department.

Kelly Alcocer, a former fire marshal and captain in the Texas City department, told the news station that she was the target of attacks, including feces smeared on the commode in the woman's restroom, hateful messages spray painted on her mailbox, car tires slashed, flowers mailed to her house with threatening notes attached, and she even found a staple in the earbud of her MP3 headphones.

Hair Balls couldn't reach Alcocer, but we did speak with Tina Krenek, a lesbian firefighter for Texas City since 2005, and she told us that Alcocer's reports were wrong.

"I think it's just a disgruntled employee, and whether she resigned or was fired, it's just sour grapes," Krenek said.

​On Wednesday we wrote about a New York Times review of the new JC Penney store in Manhattan, in which writer Cintra Wilson spent much of the piece articulating the lack of class manifest in the pudgy, butterball-esque people who a) don't live in Manhattan and b) shop at JC Penney.

A lot of other bloggers took notice, too, as did commenters. So Wilson apologized on her blog. It took her three times to get it right.

The first, which apparently was taken down, was preserved by New York magazine: "I don't have any negative feelings at all about extra weight -- I think fat is totally sexy and gorgeous. I saw the light on this way before I interviewed Beth Ditto, even. I'm an unregenerate chubby chaser. I didn't write the piece from an inner place of look-ist elitism or anti-fat condescension."

Gosh, thanks!!!!

Lois Bernstein

​Skateboarding Twinkies, ninja squirrels and space hamsters are making their way to Houston, with Commander Mark leading the way. Things might get a little weird.

Mark Kistler, the self-styled Bob Ross of children's art, will be holding drawing camps in the area over the next two weeks. Kistler got his start teaching after-school drawing classes, and in 1985 he left college to start his own public television show.

"I'm a little more hyper than Bob," Kistler, who has dropped the Star Trek-inspired "Commander" from his title, says. "I scream and throw stuffed ducks and screaming monkeys."

Kistler, who lives in Tomball, has produced about 300 shows (some of which will be running on KUHT this fall) and several books on children's drawing. He says he was inspired by Ross's ability to "invite the world into his imagination."

For a peak into Kistler's mind, the Press asked him to explain some of the themes
used in his drawing classes.

Todd Parker of STP Images

​The supermodel Alek Wek, a refugee from Sudan who had been resettled in London, was discovered by a talent scout at a market. Louice Ali was working his summer job last month when his break came.

Born in Khartoum, Ali fled war-torn Sudan with his family just after middle school. He spent the next four years in a refugee camp in Damascus, where he couldn't go to school, or do much of anything. In December of 2007, he came to Houston with his mother, father and five siblings.

Soft-spoken, extremely shy and, having just turned 18, still in high school, the thought of becoming a model had never crossed Ali's mind. Shawn Webb, the education director at YMCA International, which resettled Ali and his family, thought it might be worth a try.

Ali works at the agency as a summer case aide, helping incoming refugees with the transition to their new lives. One day last month, Webb suggested he enter the "Faces of Summer" modeling contest hosted by Page Parkes, who runs a modeling and acting center in Houston. Webb took a picture of Ali in the office and submitted an application. The next day, he received a call saying that Ali had been selected as one of six male finalists. He was the only one without any experience or training.

​Heading into work this morning, we noticed two guys walking down Milam who we assumed were either crazy American or regular German tourists.

They looked like twins and were dressed identically, each sporting a frame backpack with a bedroll attached to the top. We didn't think much of it, until the bedroll brothers wandered into the Press's receptionist area and told us what they've been up to for the past two years.

Turns out they're neither crazy nor German. They're Hungarian brothers named Ferenc and István Ivanics, ages 32 and 27. They come from a city called Szeged, and they're attempting to walk around the world.

They've made it about a third of the way, nearly 7,000 miles in two years. (Make sure to check out their flickr photostream.) Ferenc and Istvan trekked through Europe into Africa and across the Sahara before flying to Miami, but now their mission is in jeopardy.

 Unemployment in Texas has more than doubled since last year, causing one former oil-industry worker to ask: Why can companies continue to sponsor work visas for foreign workers?

"It's not like we're talking about people picking fruit in fields," Rick Everinghim, who designs refineries, along with petrochemical and nuclear plants, tells Hair Balls. "Guys in my field are specialized, some making about $200,000 a year, but we're starving out here."

Everingham, now living in his home state of Florida, estimates that for every 1,000 employees at an engineering firm, about 200 are here on a work visa.

Everinghim first came to Houston in the early 1990s to work for KBR. Most recently, up until about eight months ago, he was doing contract work for several different engineering firms in the Houston area, mainly in the petrochemical field.

"That industry fell apart, and all of a sudden, it was tough finding work," Everinghim says. "But [the companies] are still sponsoring work visas to different companies."