Image courtesy of Nacional RecordsThe first annual Ground Zero Texas fest kicks off their weekend schedule of events on Thursday, with the opening ceremony at Sound On Sound Records at 6 p.m. (featuring a performance by the official GZT mascot NOBUNNY), followed by opening night action at Beerland with music from The Spits, The Wax Museums, and The Hibachi Stranglers. Denton’s The Reds will also re-unite and rock this special evening. The plethora of local......

Last year, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas (BBBS-CT) provided over 82,000 hours of mentoring to 1,588 children in Travis, Williamson, McLennan and Brazos counties. This year, they've teamed up with the Neighborhood Longhorns Program (NLP), and are currently recruiting and pairing UT students with children at AISD elementary schools for a one-on-one mentoring relationship. Volunteers are needed to provide educational and social support through mentoring and tutoring for kids ranging from 6 to......

We're gonna come right out and say it: We're total crybabies. No seriously, we may be the most empathetic people in the entire world. Anytime that we see someone in pain, someone suffering injustice, or even something sappy and overly romantic, like a first love, it's Niagara Falls, Frankie Baby. When you see a bunch of puffy-eyed, slobbery messes walking around downtown for next week, you can blame these films. And yeah, we're fine, we've......

Man sweat, burned tongues, and cold beer dominated the Austin Chronicle’s annual Hot Sauce Festival and competition on Sunday. A bounty of Austin’s bravest descended on Waterloo Park to test their Texas taste buds on sauces both red and green, chunky and thin, zing-zangy and hotsy-totsy. Lines were long, but spirits remained high among those eager for a mouthful of abuse. What was good: No scarcity of chips. Revolts have broken out in years past.......

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you hit “reply” to those Nigerian e-mail scams to strike up a conversation with the sender? Have you ever thought about responding to a classified ad, just to harass the ad placer in an outlandish way? Does the idea of pushing people’s buttons via the anonymity of e-mail appeal to you? Do you just like laughing at stuff that’s funny? If so, David Earthman might be......

From the tallest skyscraper in the City of Brotherly Love to Canadian tourism copywriting brilliance, here's what you should know from our -ist cities: This week, Phillyist took a gleeful listen to the White Stripes' exciting new release, watched in awe as their new tallest skyscraper was finally completed, found a cheaper way to get to Gothamist, invented a tasty new dessert, and brought back their Craigslist Round-Up feature with a bang. Bostonist watches......

Austin Police need your help to identify a man who attempted to molest a 4-year-old girl. The incident took place at the Half Price Books on South Lamar (next to Chotchkies) at roughly 8:30pm last night last Tuesday. A father, taking his child to the bookstore, noticed a suspicious-looking man following the two as they went about their browsing. At one point, while the father was retrieving something from the bookshelf, "the other gentleman lifted......

The AFS retrospective of Michael Haneke's films concludes tonight with Caché (Hidden), a film which was lauded by critics yet went largely unseen during a national release just over a year ago. Haneke's insistence on audience discomfort probably has a lot to do with this, as he calls into question everything from Western abuse of wealth (by the French) to the inherent goodness of children. The film begins with a videotape of a Parisian......

Please take a moment and enjoy Austinst's first installment of staff writer Matthew DeWitt's column, Hots On For Nowhere, which will appear each Thursday, concentrating on one album (maybe a new release, maybe a dollar bin discovery, or perhaps an over-looked classic) in depth. DeWitt is a longtime Austinist contributor and freelance writer splitting his time between here and Skyscraper Magazine. -Paige Maguire, Music Editor Tuesday saw the release of New Moon, a collection of......

The Fuse Box Festival, that is. We've already mentioned a play or two we think you'd like, but there's even more happening at this funky little fest that warrants your attention. Among many things, Fuse Box is a multimedia event, and to that end there's music this weekend. Quite a lot of music. Check the following shows...and note that all of 'em are one performance only. San Antonio pop band Buttercup plays the Blue tonight......

Students at Austin High School, LBJ High school, Travis High School, Westlake High School, Hendrickson High School, and many other local schools will join students across the nation in a Day of Silence to protest the discrimination, harassment and abuse faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students and their allies in schools next Tuesday, April 18. Over 100 silent participants will wear stickers and pass out 'speaking cards' that read: "Please understand my......

Hall of Famer and Lady Longhorns coach Judy Conradt resigned earlier this week after 31 seasons at UT. MTV is in town this week filming for a special on alternative spring breaks. The Austin crew will be focusing on the "Anti-Death Penalty Alternative Spring Break" activities going on at UT. State Rep. Garnet Coleman has put forth a bill in the Lege that would supply free condoms to Texas inmates. Warning to City of......

FRIDAY [9] art • Grand Opening Party for DRAW, 150 artists strong at Gallery Lombardi (7pm - 10pm) comedy • Todd Barry, Matt Bearden at Emo's Lounge music • Deerhoof, Macromantics, Experimental Dental School at Emo's music • Primordial Undermind at End of an Ear (6pm, Free) music • The Everyday People CD Release Show with The Hero Factor, Live Oak Decline at The Parish Room music • Lucinda Williams, Heartless Bastards at Stubb's......

City counsel members from Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, unanimously approved fines for landlords who rent to illegal immigrants, making English the city's official language and allowing local authorities to screen suspects in police custody to check their immigration status. Mexico's largest airline, Aeroméxico, will launch the only nonstop international service from Austin, with four weekly flights starting Dec. 15. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has made the first step in......

No film festival is complete without a contribution to the teenage misfit subgenre, and the Austin Film Festival is certainly no exception. Shot in the damp urban wastes of Seattle, Urban Scarecrow benefits from impressively gritty digital photography and a plethora of endearingly ugly locations. Wesley Downs has problems; when not weathering abuse from skateboarding bullies or enduring pitiful stand-up comedy from his downwardly-mobile father, he finds solace doing Whip-Its with his best friend or......

APD Child Abuse Unit is on the lookout for this man, Miguel Melendres Garcia, who allegedly sexually-assaulted a 10-year-old girl on August 15. From the APD release: "He is also known as Miguel Melendres and is described as a Hispanic male, 5’5” tall, 210 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, Spanish speaker and walks with a pronounced limp." Please call 911 if you know the whereabouts of this man. If you are familiar with him......

Over the past 40 years, the voice of Willie Nelson has come to represent everything Texan and Western. And now he is using that significant voice to speak out against the abuse of another symbol of the American West, wild horses. The Abbott, Texas native has joined in the fight to help protect wild horses from being slaughtered and used as Happy Meals overseas. On September 7th, Congress will convene to argue over HR......

We don’t know what you’re doing Saturday afternoon but we’re going to a birthday party for the Queen of Thailand and you’re totally invited. Chef and all-around culinary superstar, Dr. Foo Swasdee, is celebrating both the queen's birthday and the grand opening of her new outdoor garden and patio at Satay Restaurant featuring Thai classical dance, Thai music, complimentary Thai tapas and a cash bar. Now stop sitting around this house complaining about not......

Joe Jamail is a household name around Austin. The football field at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and the Texas Swimming Center both carry his name. In his most famed case, Jamail represented Pennzoil in their lawsuit against Texaco, won and was paid somewhere in excess of one billion dollars for his efforts. Joe Jamail is known for being abrasive and straightforward; he was once quoted as saying, "I grew up fighting. I had to.......

Austin made the list of the Top 10 Sweatiest Cities in America. But some people in Florida are pissed that they didn't make the list. The Central Texas Area, including Austin, of course,was listed as one the Top 10 Chill Places in America. We found this and thought you needed a good tear-jerker. Local animal rights activists are accusing Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus trainers of abusive behavior towards the circus animals.......

For those whose tastes run a little more esoteric than, say, Superman Returns, there is an alternative action/revenge flick in town this week that will cinematically slap you around and freak you out. Park Chan-Wook's Lady Vengeance is the final chapter in a trilogy of revenge films. The first one, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, was little seen in the US, while the second, Oldboy, caught a cult-film buzz in indie circles for its rather......

On Wednesday night, The Austin Film Society hosted a little over one thousand friends to watch Austin's very own premiere of A Scanner Darkly at the Paramount Theatre, with a post-screen party down the street at The Austin Museum of Art. Originally written by Philip K. Dick in the late 1970’s and adapted to the screen by Austin's own Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly is an eerie, yet hilarious, film of drugs, paranoia and......

Some strange bird behavior in California is being blamed on acid. Philanthropist Warren Buffet is donating a substantial portion of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Want to see a minor leage baseball coach lose his cool? The Department of Homeland Security is getting too many calls from telemarketers on their "secrect homeland defense" hotline. As healthy as you hippies think you are, extreme vegetarianism can actually lead to diseases including......

As if we needed to be more aware of the pain, this week is National Headache Awareness Week. A whole week dedicated to being completely aware of that pounding, that vice grip on your head. We propose a National Let's-Get-Drunk Week (no, that's not every week!) so we can really justify those headaches. A man in Kiev was not protected by God when he jumped in to the lion's cage at the zoo. Brian......

Decades ago, the eucalyptus-lined, coyote-infested network of bungalows and winding roads known as Laurel Canyon, perched high above Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills, served as the mise en scène for a countercultural revolution of herculean proportions that uprooted the music industry and launched the careers of dozens of hippie folksingers. This mythic locale is the subject of pop culture journalist and Laurel Canyon resident Michael Walker's book, Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock......

Several teachers in Dallas got to experience the joys of marijuana this week. Muffins left in the teacher's lounge helped to expand the consiousness of the administrators. We'll call that a special delivery. The Pink Taco Restaurant is opeing a second location in Scottsdale, Arizona. Apparently the city fails to find it humourous. We wonder if we need to enlighten them with some muffins. In the Vatican, Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado is being punished......

With its wide loops of stream-of-conscious narrative and its disturbing string of events—including physical and emotional abuse, poverty, madness, and death—In Night’s City by Dorothy Nelson isn’t an easy read. The mother and daughter team of Esther and Sara share narrating duties, their stories prompted by the death of their abuser, Joe, a not-so-devoted husband and father. Despite the nonlinear narrative and nonstandard prose, the story moves quickly, and we were drawn in by the......

After much public outrage over the Catholic church's sexual abuse scandals involving teenage boys back in 2002, the Vatican yesterday formally released, in an official document, the church's stance towards gay priests. From Reuters: Confronting an issue that has divided the faithful worldwide, it says practising homosexuals should be barred from entering the priesthood along with men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies and those who support gay culture. The document, which has been leaked over......

Saturday was the third annual “Keep Austin Weird” 5k run. And we ran that trail to hell. It was our first timed run ever. Well, “run” may be a bit cavalier a word to describe our pace. You see, Austinist decided to get into this “health thing” last year, and we’ve been kicking up dust along Town Lake ever since. In our world, it’s all about the Yin & Yang, the attempt to balance......

In the nature of things, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Few of us would agree with Thomas Hobbes' famous condemnation of humanity's default condition, and yet our days aren't all picnics at Barton Springs with puppies and rainbows. As long as life is less than perfect, jokes are conducive to happiness, if not out-and-out necessary. Taking features of the external world—from banana peels to sectarian struggle—jokes turn tragedy or banality into......