Cowboy Who?

The Texas Department of Transportation began construction work last fall on a multibillion-dollar initiative to expand and reroute I-45. The project is expected to take the better part of two decades to complete.

“Next we’ll get started on for-profit prisons!” Luke and the Panel (Clare Blackwood, Ian MacIntyre and Nile Seguin) dive into the Throne Speech, including the absurdity of hearing a hereditary monarch talk about saving famillies 840 dollars a year, the confusion over Justin Trudeau’s footwear and the delight of hearing the words Pierre Poilievre and […]

The post Alberta gets head start on life as a U.S. state by banning books appeared first on The Beaverton.

OTTAWA – Health Canada released a new hearing safety report today, highlighting a new top cause of hearing loss across the nation: advertisements playing on a new generation of gas pumps equipped with high-powered, military grade mega-speakers. The report said the change comes after a steady increase in gas stations using the modern pumps to […]

The post Ads playing on gas pumps now leading cause of hearing loss appeared first on The Beaverton.

Wow, he’s wearing a Chia Pet hat.

Miss Maki also appeared in Wicked Things. Her intentions were occasionally obscure. But her outfits clearly signalled a woman of precision.

The post Freak leap appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Until recently, I was fairly ambivalent about one-pan pasta recipes. I appreciate them in a pinch [here’s a longtime favorite; and this is my total comfort food], but I sometimes find that when the pasta is cooked in a sauce the whole time, it doesn’t quite get that al dente definition and structural integrity that it does when cooked in water. I’m so glad I didn’t quit on them, though, because with this recipe, not to be dramatic or anything, but I feel like I’ve finally cracked the code.

Read more »

#Kento #Rowen #RoninWarriors

In brief: In the Pacific, while TD One-E (soon likely to be TS Alvin) isn’t a serious concern, it may bring an influx of moisture to the Desert Southwest this weekend. On the Atlantic side, it looks mostly quiet for the first week or so of the season.

As a meteorologist who is devoted to communication, it’s somewhat important to keep tabs on what is “out there.” In other words, what are people seeing or hearing about that they might want to know more about or understand? I have a bunch of news apps and weather news apps that I get push alerts for because I’m a masochist in order to accomplish this. And let me tell you: They are itching for the Pacific season to open up so they have something to alert the masses about. Of course, they keep the push alerts somewhat vague and general to give you a good scare and force you to open the app to find out what terrors may be lurking in order to cash in on that sweet, sweet engagement revenue.

But enough about them.

Pacific system may bring welcome moisture to the Southwest

Yes, folks, the Pacific hurricane season is underway now. It officially began on May 15th. Our first depression has formed, and while it’s not expected to become a big storm, it will take on the name Alvin, assuming it becomes a tropical storm.

From a wind and surge perspective, this won’t be a big story. I am somewhat intrigued by the track it takes, which should send it up into Baja because the moisture from this system is likely to push into the Desert Southwest by later this weekend.

That will rev up the rain and storm chances across parts of Arizona in particular but also perhaps Utah, portions of southeast California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado.

At this point, it does not look like a major rainfall event, but any sort of tropical moisture plume into the desert can end with flash flooding somewhere.

Regardless, it will help cool things off. Phoenix sees highs near 105 degrees this Saturday, but the rain chances will nudge high temps back into the mid-90s, a few degrees below normal. Overall, this should hopefully be more beneficial than troublesome.

The Atlantic stays quiet — mostly

On the other side of Central America, the Atlantic looks to open the season Sunday on a calm note. For now, there are no signs of any realistic attempts at development and most reliable model guidance is showing quiet. That being said, by the end of next week we may start to see some semblance of unsettled weather near the Yucatan. That’s a common feature in early June, and it can periodically lead to development (usually sloppy) in the southern Gulf or western Caribbean.

So, at this point, I suspect that the first 10 days of June will be mainly quiet in the Atlantic. But if I were to at least keep track of a place, it would be that Yucatan region starting late next week. More in the days ahead.

Sponsorship

After two summers of The Eyewall and nine summers of covering the tropics for Houston with Space City Weather, we are seeking sponsor(s) for The Eyewall. Please see this post for more details and scroll to the bottom of it to contact. Thanks for your consideration!

A 37-year-old cryptocurrency investor was charged with kidnapping a man and beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks inside a luxury townhouse in downtown Manhattan, all in a scheme to get the man’s Bitcoin password. What do you think?

The post Crypto Investor Tortures Man In Attempt To Steal Bitcoin Password appeared first on The Onion.

AUSTIN, TX—In an effort to give the impression that they had been burning the midnight oil while CEO Elon Musk was away in Washington, D.C., employees at Tesla reportedly scrambled Thursday to make the office look like they’d been sleeping there. “Elon’s going to be back any minute, so make sure to throw some dirty clothes next to the bathroom sink to make it seem like we’ve been showering here,” said Tesla engineer Todd Costello, who appeared panicked as he scarfed down pizza and threw the crusts all over his coworkers’ desks, explaining that his boss would be furious if he found out the staff had experienced even a semblance of work-life balance over the past few months. “Better start inflating the air mattress in the boardroom. Oh, and we should throw some used toothbrushes around the kitchen while we’re at it. While you guys do that, I’m just going to piss in the corner real quick to get a rank smell going.” At press time, Musk was reportedly too strung out on ketamine to acknowledge the state of the office.

The post Tesla Employees Scramble To Make Office Look Like They’ve Been Sleeping There appeared first on The Onion.

Larry Hoover founded the Gangster Disciples, one of the most notorious US street gangs.

Severe weather swept through the Central Texas city causing floods, damage and power outages.

A reader writes:

I am the sole full-time employee for a state-owned museum. Aside from a very part-time maintenance man, all work is on me. I am only able to pull off events or large group tours thanks to the labor of some very wonderful volunteers. Currently there are 10 or so local volunteers who are very active — they come to the monthly volunteer meeting, attend training sessions, and assist with most projects/events/tour groups/etc. Then there are another five or so volunteers who live further away and only come to help with a specific event or program, but otherwise aren’t regulars. Finally, there are two or three “volunteers” who I believe are worth keeping in the loop for their specific expertise, but who I wouldn’t consider as active.

One in particular, Liza, has been a challenge from my first day. She is very qualified — she is from one of the tribes the museum’s history covers — and can be great with visitors. But since I started this position nearly a decade ago, I can count on one hand the number of times she has shown up in person (she does live three hours away) and actively participated. I can go months without hearing from her, and when I do, it’s through her preferred method: spamming a series of one- to two-line long emails. Usually, they’re criticisms that X is a waste and why don’t we do Y, but without any offers to help or any practical suggestions of how to make improvements. This is a small museum with very strict limits on what I can do, what volunteers can do, and what our very limited budget can be spent on. She can’t seem to understand or accept this.

Her latest emails are about not being able to attend the monthly volunteer meetings, which are and always have been held in-person at the museum after normal operating hours. Even during Covid, what sporadic meetings we held were brief and socially distanced in our parking lot! We don’t have the setup to host adequate meetings via Zoom or a hybrid in-person/digital meeting. It isn’t a priority to correct this, when parts of the museum are literally falling apart. I believe it’s important to keep everyone informed, so I always send out a very detailed email the following day that recaps the meeting’s contents. This satisfies everyone else, even my (off-site) boss, but not Liza. I’m not sure how to accommodate her, or frankly if I even want to put in the effort to! She once threatened me and the museum with a discrimination lawsuit when I “fired” one of her buddies (the guy had a history of loudly and violently disagreeing with visitors and his fellow volunteers). Now she wants me to call her from my personal cell phone every meeting so she can participate. I don’t want her to have my personal contact info! How do I politely, but once and for all, get the message across that she needs to manage her expectations?

All you can do is calmly and firmly restate what is and isn’t an option.

So: “We’re not set up to do remote meetings, unfortunately, and the technology available to us doesn’t support it. You are always welcome to attend in person if you want to, and I will always send out detailed meeting notes the next day.”

There is a question of whether you should just bite the bullet and let her call in (she wouldn’t need to have your personal number to do that; you could use Google Voice). But if you don’t have the technology to support it, having one person attend via phone while everyone else is in person can change the way meetings feel: you can end up having to stop to repeat things, the person misses visual cues everyone else is getting (such as that they need to stop talking so the conversation can move on), and it can generally make things less efficient. Plus, if you’re going to let Liza do it, other people will want to as well, and at that point you need a better set-up. If the meetings are working well for everyone but Liza, and Liza isn’t a particularly active volunteer anyway, it’s not unreasonable to hold firm on sticking to the way that works for the largest number of people.

But that’s just that one issue, and it sounds like the pattern is the bigger problem. If Liza has shown up to volunteer less than five times in ten years and instead mostly sends aggravating emails criticizing the museum’s work … well, do you even want her as a volunteer anymore? That said, there can be a ton of politics involved in firing a volunteer, especially in the context you described, so your best bet may be just to firmly and cheerfully hold your boundaries. You’re not required to respond to every email she sends (or if you feel you need to, you can reply with something vague like “we’ll take a look at this” or “this can’t be a priority right now but I’ll put it on our list as we consider priorities for next year” or “thanks, appreciate you taking the time to send this”). You can also just cheerfully and firmly decline to modify things to suit her specific needs, as with the language above about the meetings.

You can’t make her manage her expectations; you can encourage that, of course, but ultimately you can only manage your side of it and how you respond to her.

The post an opinionated volunteer is demanding too much of our small organization appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Tejano music superstar Selena Quintanilla has been gone for 30 years, but the late singer’s family issharing unseen footage of her life in a new documentary, which had its Texas debut at Austin’s Paramount Theater at this year’s South by Southwest festival.

Selena y Los Dinos is the first feature-length documentary film produced about the late singer and her family band. Directed by Mexican-American filmmaker Isabel Castro, the movie offers a tender portrait of the lives, love, and loss of the Quintanilla family. 

The film follows the family’s tribulations using a tapestry of decades-old intimate camcorder footage and recent interviews woven together. Some salient scenes include: the primary-school aged Quintanilla children rehearsing and making faces at the camera and Selena laughing alongside guitarist Chris Pérez not long before the two became a couple, stitched alongside a recent interview including his telling of their first “I love yous” exchanged in Laredo.

Archival footage brings viewers to Selena’s humble beginnings, from the foreclosure on the family’s home and restaurant in Lake Jackson after the decline of the town’s economy to a brief flash of a local social services office where the Quintanillas waited to file papers for food stamps.

In an interview shot inside a van chock-full of costumes, Selena giggles as she answers the question: “What’s your final goal?” Her answer was ready: “Mercedes Benz. I don’t care if I have to live in it!” she exclaimed, unaware of the fame and fortune that awaited her.

Castro’s depiction of Selena and the band reveals a goofy, down-to-earth family, even after they struck success. After signing a record deal, the two Quintanilla sisters filmed a tour of their California hotel room: “I am in Long Beach, California, lifestyle of the rich and famous!” Selena yelled, her arms splayed out as she posed in front of the building.

Photos and interviews carefully stitched together also explore the nuances of Tejano identity—the struggle of straddling two identities and two cultures—and the beauty, banality, and occasional blunders of being (or not being) bilingual. 

Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father, recalls stories of his youth growing up during an era of segregation and anti-Latino sentiment. Although Spanish was his first language, he struggled to speak it fluently decades later when the band was breaking into the Mexican music market in the ’90s. Growing up for part of their childhood in Lake Jackson, the small petrochemical town south of Houston, the children did not feel in touch with their roots, Selena’s brother explained in the film (though that changed when they moved to Corpus Christi).

In one early scene, a Spanish-speaking journalist interviews a teenage Selena, asking about how the band had made their costumes—white denim jumpsuits with bursts of multicolored splatter paint—to which she replied in English: “wet paint!” 

“And for the people listening in Mexico?” he asked her in Spanish, encouraging her to explain the provenance of the costumes in the language his audience spoke. “Los paint-amos,” she replied, which was immediately met with the journalist’s laughter.

Later in the film, Castro includes photographs of Selena’s Spanish studying materials, and archival media footage shows the late singer as a young adult confidently expressing herself in both languages in TV interviews.

As for the woman who murdered Selena in 1995, the film essentially ignores her altogether. The film’s exploration of the loss of Selena’s life focused on the family’s grief and the late singer’s legacy. Even 30 years after her death, Selena’s influence remains powerful, in Corpus Christi and far beyond.

As a non-Hispanic Texan with a deep appreciation of Tejano and Latin American music, raised far from South Texas in a Collin County suburb, what struck me most about this movie was the audience’s journey alongside the Quintanilla family. Throughout the film, attendees put their hearts on display. They cheered. They erupted in laughter. Some sobbed, as if Selena were, too, part of their own family. Any mention in the film of Selena breaking down doors for the Latino community, breaking the glass ceiling for women, or breaking into a bilingual music market just before her death was met with thunderous applause and shouts of joy.

As theater workers ushered us out of the Paramount Theater, fans paused for a moment to pose for photos or pay their respects to Selena’s now elderly father, who sat in a wheelchair by the exit. I’d joined a friend of mine and her mother at the screening. The mom, a proud Tejana who raised her kids listening to Selena, was among those who stopped to greet Abraham.

She leaned in. “Thank you for sharing your daughter with us.”

The post The Love and Loss of the Quintanillas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Suddenly, this movie is an excruciatingly detailed travelog.

HB 186 missed a key procedural deadline Wednesday night, halting one of the nation's most aggressive social media restrictions for minors.

Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, reporting for The New York Times (paywall-busting gift link):

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

On Wednesday, the Court of International Trade, the primary federal legal body overseeing such matters, found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the president by the emergency powers law. Ruling in separate cases brought by states and businesses, a bipartisan panel of three judges essentially declared many, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to have been issued illegally.

Enough with the euphemisms. “Novel interpretation” is shorthand for “bullshit mad-king fantasy stuff”. Paul Krugman, on his blog (which he really should move away from Substack):

The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.

Look past the bluster and Trump is getting his ass kicked left and right. Every organization — universities, law firms, computer makers — that’s been hesitant to just call his nonsense nonsense and his bullshit bullshit should put their big boy pants on and stand up. The whole thing is falling apart. The system might actually still work. But everyone needs to make their choice known: courage or cowardice?

Not much is worse in a boss than extreme micromanagement, and here are some ridiculous examples that have been shared here in the past:

“Several years ago, I took over a department that had been badly managed by a borderline psychotic micromanager. While trying to make sense of the ridiculous, overly complex procedures she left behind, one of my new employees gave me the ‘party procedures.’ This three-page, single-spaced document detailed which holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries were to be celebrated and when, the types of gifts that were to be given to the various classes of employees for each occasion, and what type of food was to be served at each event.”

•     •     •

“Our former director felt that any desk decor was clutter, and issued an edict that we could only allocate an outlandishly small amount of space on our desks to personal items (e.g., photos or little trinkets) because things were looking too sloppy around the building. Needless to say, staff did not appreciate this kind of micromanagement, and a staff member who had a fairly visible desk cut a piece of paper to the exact measurement that we could devote to personal items (it was smaller than an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper) and put a bunch of toy dinosaurs on it, all crammed together. There were probably fifteen plastic dinosaurs of different sizes sitting on this little piece of paper, and every time I walked past it, I couldn’t help but laugh.”

•     •     •

“I used to work in a call center that had ridiculous micromanagement demands. Like insisting we email the manager if we spent more than five minutes in the bathroom to provide reasoning why. We all decided management needed to know every intimate details of period flow, period pain, also if we’d had a bean burrito for lunch and it didn’t set well … we were brutally honest (to other grown adults who should know better) about why five minutes is often not long enough for bathroom needs. After about a week, they changed their policy to allow for seven minutes per bathroom break and no explanation required. Humans are so stupid sometimes.”

•     •     •

My boss has announced that now that we’re all working from home, the entire company will now be spending the work day on a Zoom call with video. He framed it as being for our benefit and useful for “establishing a work life balance” and so we can “see our coworkers and feel like we’re back in the office.” Plus, it’s supposedly so we can “ask questions without having to take meetings.”

While we are a small company, most of the people I work with already worked in another location before we went remote, and none of us do similar work. I can think of no world where this is helpful and anything be highly distracting.

But don’t worry, we are still allowed to have bathroom breaks and get snacks (wow, thanks so much). But the majority of our work day should be spent in this weird online room with video and we are supposed to be “dressed for work.”

•     •     •

Let’s discuss the most ridiculous examples of micromanagement you’ve seen. Please share in the comments!

The post let’s talk about ridiculous examples of micromanagement appeared first on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work for a consulting firm that deals with a flurry of client demands and ever changing deadlines. I’ve needed extra support for a while, and we recently hired someone to support my portfolio. I was thrilled to get them on board but here’s the issue: this staff member is entry-level. They had strong references and great internship experience, but I really underestimated how much time I would need to spend managing their work. I figured we’d spend a lot of time on training, but they’ve been working for me for months now, and I end up having to redo their work all the time. The one time I tried to take a step back from the heavy editing, my client called to complain about the quality of work. Somehow, since we’ve hired this person, I’m now working longer hours than ever and frequently spend my evenings redoing their work and then the next mornings trying to explain my edits, and then my evenings reviewing their latest versions and finalizing it for the client. In between all of this, I’m still trying to stay on top of my own tasks.

Is this normal for managing entry-level staff? If so, how can I manage my expectations? I’m just so stressed and overwhelmed that I wish I had never asked for additional staff.

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

• Candidate didn’t do the work her resume says she did
• People want to network with me, but I’m already drained

The post should managing an entry-level staffer be this much work? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

President Donald Trump has frozen more than $3 billion in grants and contracts as his feud with Harvard University continues to escalate. The Onion shares a timeline of the dispute’s key dates so far.

January 29: Trump administration accuses the Harvard Law Review of promoting violent pro-law rhetoric.

February 3: The Justice Department announces the creation of the multiagency Task Force to Own the Libs.

February 19: Trump’s negative view of Harvard cemented after watching the Good Will Hunting barroom scene on Paramount+.

March 6: Trump signs an executive order declaring that the president can’t be accused of antisemitism.

April 3: Harvard pressured to increase diversity of viewpoints by hiring more professors with successful AM talk radio shows

April 14: Harvard pointedly rejects the Trump administration’s demands by sending his messenger back to the White House decapitated and strapped to their horse. 

May 2: Harvard asserts there is “no legal basis” for taking away its tax-exempt status, making it a near certainty that Trump will do so.

May 15–17: Brief respite as Trump forgets any of this happening.

May 28: Trump demands a list of all international students’ names, countries, and skull measurements.

September 1, 2027: Trump awarded honorary degree in exchange for releasing Harvard president from Oval Office bird cage.

The post Timeline Of Trump’s Battle With Harvard appeared first on The Onion.

Nature of Things, a new gallery in Dallas, opened in April with the exhibition A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: An Homage to Dave Hickey. The title directly references the influential gallery Dave Hickey opened in Austin in 1967. Occupying the bottom floor of an old home, Hickey’s original space carved out an unlikely site for contemporary art — something rare for Texas at the time — and helped launch the careers of artists like David Reed, Jim Franklin, and Terry Allen. 

Hickey was an art critic and essayist who rejected the conventions of academia. His writing often wove personal experience into his observations on art, lauding the importance of beauty and pleasure over theory. With wry, often biting commentary, he meandered through reflections that collapsed distinctions between “high” and “low” culture with a causal ease. 

Dallas native Tessa Granowski, who founded Nature of Things on the bottom floor of her own home, saw a fitting opportunity to honor Hickey. In A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, she channels the aesthetic openness and playful criticality that defined his writing and thinking. Rather than articulating a singular thesis, Granowski spins a web of historical and visual connections, allowing the show to drift through a broad range of approaches — from the irreverent to the poetic. 

The exhibition reads as a Venn diagram of intentions with overlapping histories, regions, and sensibilities. The loose, intuitive curation moves between artists that Hickey once exhibited (a 1983 pink, pyramid-shaped painting, TBT, by Jim Franklin, greets visitors at the entrance) and a wide range of emerging and established artists from Alabama, California, New York, and Texas. Across three rooms, a hallway, an atrium, and backyard moments of resonance form in pockets, setting up larger dialogues of play and friction.

The show unfolds in sections, not linearly, but through a series of shifts — provocative, contemplative — that echo the curatorial looseness at its core. As you enter the first space, alongside Franklin’s TBT, Ada Friedman’s Everyday Drawing (2018), a collage-drawing hybrid featuring an ambiguous figure in a mashup of gesture, torn paper, and scattered notes, faces off with Texas native Sam Linguist’s Untitled (2025), a stoneware sculpture that juts out on overbuilt legs. A small and delicate graphite drawing, Candice C. Chu’s After portrait (2025) features a haystack-like figure wrapped in fraying locks and whispers just to the left of the two works, offering a soft counterpoint.

In the neighboring gallery, Terry Allen’s Enterprise (1991), a bronze birdbath sculpture, is suspended dead-center, its outstretched arm offering a thumbs-up into a cheekily contoured basin. Flanking the piece are 1971 works by Vera Simons and David Quadrini, with Anne Herbert’s calming abstraction Temporal Glare (2024) balancing the impudent and the restrained, tapping deeper into Hickey’s aesthetic.

In the third room, Andrew Moeller’s Boring (2022) — a painting that fully commits to its title, depicting thousands of painstakingly rendered bricks — overlooks a collection from 00ps b00ks curated by Brandon Kennedy, in conceptual affinity with the exhibition. As visitors pass through the atrium, they encounter Mia Ardito’s Te Amo Grotto (2025), a Barbie-scaled pool-sanctuary. In the backyard sits Versatile (1999), an obsessively mosaiced 1971 Centurion, by Allen “Big Al” Bartell.

In its fluid structure and layered references, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place — an afterimage of Hickey’s writing — is not an anachronistic assemblage. It builds on a legacy rooted in historicity and shaped by aesthetic intent, opening a dialogue with young, contemporary artists. Like Hickey’s prose, it moves by association, with an eye towards pleasure. As he once noted, “Beauty’s not the end of art: it’s only the beginning.” This show marks a confident and considered start, signaling what this new space might become.

 

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: An Homage to Dave Hickey is on view at Nature of Things in Dallas through May 31, 2025.

The post Review: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: An Homage to Dave Hickey” at Nature of Things, Dallas appeared first on Glasstire.

The president was not pleased with an acronym, standing for "Trump Always Chickens Out", reportedly coined on Wall Street.

IT's coPtok, and you'll only find it right here on Cowboy Who? #CowboyWho

In brief: The Houston area has had a wet week, and by and large this has been beneficial for the region before the onset of summer and the lurking potential for drought. We have a final chance late tonight and on Friday as a weak front moves into the area, providing a spark for showers. After that we’ll see June-like weather as June begins.

Rain status

Houston has picked up some much needed precipitation this week, with a vast majority of the region picking up up 2 to 5 inches of rainfall as a series of disturbances have passed through. As rarely happens, for Houston at this time of year, the region got just enough rain rather than too much; with our soils receiving a good drenching without too many flooding issues. This week’s rains put us in a much better posture heading into the coming summer, drought-wise.

Our rain chances have not ended. The primary driver over the next 36 hours will be an advancing front that stalls near the coast on Friday, bringing some decent rain chances to areas along and south of Interstate 10, before pushing offshore. However, we don’t expect too much in the way of organized storm activity. Oh, and if you’re tired of the rain, after Friday conditions look mostly dry for at least the next week or so.

Thursday

Our weather today will be mostly sunny, with high temperatures this afternoon pushing up to around 90 degrees or a touch higher. Winds, generally, will be light. (If you like to go bike riding in the evening, this will be especially noticeable). I think it’s possible that we will see some isolated to scattered showers this afternoon, but for the most part the region should be rain-free. Lows tonight will be muggy, in the upper-70s for most locations.

Friday

On Thursday night a front will be pushing through Central Texas, and we could see a fairly strong line of showers and thunderstorms along the I-35 corridor advancing toward the Houston area. But as of now, I expect these storms to weaken some as they move down toward Houston. Still, I think the region will see a healthy possibility of some showers and thunderstorms on Friday morning, perhaps around sunrise or a bit later. We cannot rule out some hail and damaging winds with these storms, but overall odds seem fairly low.

As the front nears the coast it could stall, and thus for coastal counties we may see some lingering showers in the afternoon (or they may simply remain offshore). Skies will be partly to mostly cloudy on Friday, with light winds from the northwest. Highs will be around 90 degrees, with lows in the lower 70s.

Saturday

The front will usher in some briefly drier air. Don’t expect much, but humidity may be a tad lower on Saturday. Expect highs in the upper 80s with partly to mostly sunny skies. Lows on Saturday night may again drop into the lower 70s. Rain chances are near zero.

Sunday

Temperatures should reach around 90 degrees, or slightly above, with mostly sunny skies. We may see a few scattered showers during the afternoon as humidity levels recover some. Lows on Saunday night will drop into the mid-70s.

Next week

Most of next week should see mostly sunny skies with highs in the low 90s. We cannot rule out temperatures rising toward the mid-90s by the end of the week. However, conditions will feel fairly typical for June in Houston, which is to say hot and humid. Rain chances are low each day, but probably non-zero as a few areas may catch a stray shower.

NEW YORK—With unexplained natural phenomena having predicted seven of the last eight market collapses, experts confirmed the likelihood of a recession had increased Thursday amid reports that herds of panicked economists had started running off cliffs. “We still don’t know what causes them to do it, but economists can naturally sense a recession in the air, which triggers a mass panic and leads to these self-destructive stampedes,” said J.P. Morgan analyst Rebecca Herrera, who explained that before the Great Recession began in late 2007, thousands of spooked economists started running headlong off sheer drops into the canyons of the Colorado River. “Even as the bloody, broken bodies of Ivy League economics professors and Federal Reserve employees pile up on the rocks below, they will continue to throw themselves over the edge with no regard for their own life. While economists do tend to exhibit herd behavior, they will usually steer clear of dangerous river crossings and cliffs. Sometimes you get a scattering of individual jumps after a routine market downturn, but large economist stampedes like this always indicate a full-scale general recession. Some think they possess an instinct to sacrifice themselves when they sense lean times ahead, and it may be a behavior that evolved to thin the herd before mass layoffs.” At press time, the S&P 500 was rallying and forecasts of a recession were declining after a mass die-off of private equity owners.

The post Recession Forecasts Jump After Herds Of Panicked Economists Start Running Off Cliffs appeared first on The Onion.

CHICAGO—After forgetting to bring sufficient entertainment for the two-hour flight from Atlanta to O’Hare Airport, area man Kenneth Vargas reportedly spent his entire time aboard a plane Thursday reading War And Peace over the shoulder of the passenger seated in the row ahead of him. “I felt like an idiot for not downloading any books on my Kindle, but when I noticed the guy in front of me was reading something, I figured I could just look off of his,” Vargas said of the man’s print copy of Leo Tolstoy’s roughly 1,300-page seminal Russian epic. “While I really didn’t know who all the characters were, I think I mostly got the gist of it. At first I was just casually reading to amuse myself, but now I’m honestly kind of invested. During drink service I missed a couple pages, so I’m not exactly sure what happened with Natasha Rostova. I think I can pretty much fill in the blanks, though.” As he exited the aircraft, Vargas confirmed he was disappointed the flight had ended before he had time to finish the novel.

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CUPERTINO, CA—Amidst the strain of tariffs, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Thursday the launch of a new 7,083-piece iPhone kit. “Apple customers will have a blast soldering, polishing, and drilling as they build their very own iPhone,” Cook said in a Keynote presentation at Apple headquarters, touting the new product as an innovative, first-of-its-kind achievement and noting that the tech giant’s competitors were already scrambling to offer similar build-your-own products of their own. “Based on your level of manufacturing experience, it should take anywhere between one and four days to assemble, not counting any bathroom or sleep breaks. It’s the perfect family activity. Kids love it! It even comes with a free rock you can use to mine your own lithium.” At press time, Cook confirmed the kit was exclusively available to U.S. customers.

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Proponents of SB 2880 have singled out Rep. Ken King, House State Affairs committee chair, for letting the bill languish.

NPR and three Colorado public radio stations are suing the Trump administration over the president's executive order seeking to ban the use of federal money for NPR and PBS.