Austin ChronicleWe're thrilled and so very honored that you've voted us Best of Austin for the third year in a row! And for two equally wonderful categories this year, no less: Best Local Blog and Best Local Entertainment Website. We're also touched that critics chose Austinist's Urban Development Editor, Shawn "Shilli" Shillington, along with Mike "M1EK" Dahmus and Chris "Austin Contrarian" Bradford for the jointly-shared award for "Best Urban-Development Echo Chamber." "Like a box of... [continue]

Years of downing PBR and listening to Liars haven’t suppressed our past full of enthusiastic youth group meetings, praise band concerts and Sunday services. That’s what growing up in (non-Austin) Texas is about. And those memories made Altar Boyz at Zach Scott Theatre all the funnier.... [continue]

Our pal Austin Contrarian is reporting that at last night's City Council hearing, the councilmembers acceded to demands from the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association to deny pedestrian and bicycle access between Hyde Park and a new development on 51st Street. This means that not only will the street grid that is the basis of Hyde Park not be extended for cars, it will also not be extended for bikes and pedestrians. The street grid is the groundwork on which an urban environment is built. Urban streets form a network that allows movement in every direction via multiple modes of transportation. Suburban streets form a maze of dead ends and require every trip to use an arterial road, almost always by car.... [continue]

*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors There’s this guy, not sure if you’ve seen him around town, but he’s one of the wandering of the downtown area. I can’t say he’s homeless, because I don’t know that; I’ve never witnessed his lack of a home. What I do know is that he’s black, looks to be mid/late thirties,... [continue]

Howdy istites. My name's Mike Dahmus, otherwise known all around various ratholes of the internet as M1EK, and I've been invited to write an honest-to-goodness post instead of a wimpy little comment. Normally, I crackplog ("crackplot blog") at my own place, M1EK's Bake-Sale of Bile, which is "Mostly Austin. Mostly Transportation. Mostly Bile.". I served on the city's Urban Transportation Commission from 2000 to 2005, before Daryl Slusher gave me the boot for being insufficiently slavish to Mike Krusee's plan to screw Austin's rail fans forever. I've been writing that crackplog since about 2003, starting in the run-up to the commuter rail disaster. ... [continue]