It's not even Christmas yet, and we're still talking about Murder City Devils at Fun Fun Fun Fest, but that won't stop us from gearing up to begin bringing you the latest rumors and confirmations regarding 2008's SXSW music festival. It's right around the corner, and we're not the only ones with our minds set towards March: plenty of bands have already announced their intentions to be here for the week. ...

Intelligence reports now reveal that Iran is *not* making a nuclear bomb. Remains to be seen whether this will make a difference to Bush, who just doesn't like the cut of their jib. Damn! What is it with the Senate and thirteen-year-old boys? Brad Pitt, perhaps in a contest with Angie to see who can adopt the most people, takes the entire Lower Ninth Ward under his wing. Two popular musicians were recently murdered......

Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho will remain in the Senate despite calls for his resignation. Myanmar junta summons U.S. envoy for talks. Ig Nobel awards celebrate jet-setting Viagra-using hamsters and our military's attempt to make a "gay bomb." East Sixth Street, between Pedernales and Robert Martinez, now open after yesterday's train accident caused it to be closed. North Korea agrees to dismantle "all" of its nuclear facilities by the end of the year.......

We were strolling through West Campus this morning when we came across a gaggle of cops, endless yellow Police Line tape and, of all things, the bomb squad. Rio Grande between 22nd and 24th streets had been sealed off. Word was that some residences had been evacuated as well. Minutes earlier, the ubiquitous post-9/11 "suspicious package" reared its ugly head and was reported to the police. We stuck around, alongside the small crowd of bleary-eyed......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. Bostonist got a crash course in what not......

You bring up the idea of “art”, and you’re definitely begging for some heated shit talking. Opinions are the first to fly, then potentially followed by epithets, then perhaps some brass knuckles. All metaphoric in form, of course. Why must these disagreements come to pass? Notorious MSG comes to mind. It could be said that this is exactly what art and artists, as functional cogs in the machines of social industry, are supposed to......

Fat Man and Little Boy seem like innocuous pejorative phrases, possibly used to tease other kids on the monkey bars, but when associated with a date, specifically August 6th and 9th, 1945, those words become something else altogether. No longer mere verbal darts, those words evoke images of pillars of fire and shredded skin, of a war certainly ended, but possibly not won. Wednesday night, Academy Award winning director Steven Okazaki will take you on......

As of this writing, 911 in Hays County is out. How much does that suck? A backup system (of sorts) is being used. The reason the fiberoptic line was cut and 911 is out? Bees. The fire at ACL was the result of a propane leak, AFD says. Austin is the most congested medium-sized city in the nation. Um, yay? Woman dies in North Austin house fire this morning. Remember the Houston office building......

#6 Texas (2-0) vs. Central Florida (1-0) Time: 2:30 pm, Saturday, Sept. 15 Location: Bright House Networks Stadium, Orlando, Fla. TV: ESPN2 Radio: KVET (98.1 FM, 1300 AM) Texas heads to Florida for their first road game of the season on Saturday, but when the Longhorns step onto the field at Bright House Networks Stadium, they'll have played as many games there as the home team. How's that? Central Florida rushed to build the......

Austin is full of small, out of the way places that we have grown to love. These aren't the big name restaurants that everyone already knows about or the restaurants in the warehouse district or downtown locations. In fact, two of them are in nondescript strip malls, and one is surrounded by giant safety cones. These places offer up good (and in the case of Tomo, great) food in locations away from the city center.......

David Owen has an interesting article in last week's New Yorker (the Aug. 20 issue - only the abstract is online) discussing light pollution. The bottom line is that leaving the lights on all the time (mainly streetlights and building-exterior lights) not only brightens the night sky, but is also economically wasteful, environmentally damaging and probably causes cancer. It also doesn't decrease crime or have any other real benefits. Lights like the "glare bomb"......

Quick, get me the Pentagon. American superiority is waning in the human longevity department. Can't we just bomb somebody over this? A lengthy but entertaining goodbye to Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, recently deceased. Informative readers' Q&A with Floyd Norris, chief financial guru at the New York Times, on the current state of the U.S. economy (not suggested for feel-good reading). Instead of simply fading away into the annals of big hair rock, Van......

Don't look now, but Mitt Romney might really be the Republican nominee. They found that fake Steve Jobs guy. Some couple in Arkansas just had their seventeenth child. Would it be rude for us to send them a copy of The Population Bomb? Stevie Wonder is going on tour! (The real Stevie Wonder, not the fake Stevie Wonder.) Bad cops in Bangkok have to wear Hello Kitty armbands. That's supposed to be a punishment?......

I Know Who Killed Me: Oh LiLo, you are such a desperate mess. Shouldn’t the name of this movie be “I Know Who Killed My Career – Me!” There is a joke here somewhere about Lohan portraying a stripper, but we can’t quite put our finger on it…. No Reservations: Yes, Hollywood has absolutely no reservations about continuing to make trite, cliché rom-coms. This one is about two chefs and (GASP!) one of them......

It's tough to believe that Spoon have been playing in Austin for almost thirteen years. Few who saw them gig during their early, Pixies-inspired days would've predicted that in 2007, Spoon would have one of the most bulletproof catalogs in indie rock. Their entire tenure with Merge Records has been stellar, showcasing a band who found confidence in independence and the concept of a slow but deliberate artistic and commercial build. Britt Daniel hasn't......

Bad Brains Build a Nation (Mega Force) It's been a decade since the proper Bad Brains lineup released a proper studio album, and Build a Nation finds the group just as furious as ever. Produced by the Beastie Boys's Adam Yauch, Nation is reminiscent of I Against I-era BB, and the album's songs are split pretty evenly between hardcore and reggae, as you might expect. For those uninitiated, the release of another full-length by......

An Austinist reader just alerted us that a bomb threat was called into the State Capitol this morning. As of 10am, the building has been locked-down; no one is being admitted in through the doors or tunnels, and folks are allowed to leave (though an evacuation order hasn't yet been issued).We'll keep you posted. Update: (11:10am) People are now being admitted into the building. Thanks, Natasha! Photo by Shahram Malek of ZIBA Studio......

Last week, the suspect of the attempted bombing of the Austin Women's Health Center is thought to have attempted suicide while in jail. Paul Ross Evans, who has a bail hearing today, was alone in his cell when he tore apart a disposable plastic razor and cut his arm with the metal razor. It was a bad enough wound to need stitches, and now Evans is on "medical watch" (which seems to be like a......

*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors Due to extreme apathy toward Austin having a flag (and Benji adding further, in so many words, that perhaps even I myself did not actually care about this issue), I doodled together some rough sketches for the pleasure/disgrace of your eyeballs. Exhibit A: Perhaps it is an old school, Spy vs Spy......

WEDNESDAY [9] books • Amy Guth presents Three Fallen Women at BookWoman (7:00pm) comedy • Jimmie Roulette at Cap City Comedy Club film • Texas Doc Tour: "Ten Under Ten 2007" at Alamo Downtown film • "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with Golden Ticket Giveaway at Alamo Downtown film • Weird Wednesdays: "Cop Killers" at Alamo Downtown food • Angel Valley Organic Farm Farmstand at Asian American Cultural Center, 11713 Jollyville Road (10am-2pm) food......

In case you haven't heard, local playwright Dan Dietz will be leaving Austin (boo for us!) to take on a professorship at Florida State University (yay for him!). We're very sad to see him go. The author of such lauded works at Dirigible, Blind Horses, Tilt Angel, and Americamisfit, Dan Dietz is a brilliant rising star in the theatre world. The women of Shrewd Productions are gifting us with one final production of Dietz's work,......

- If you are one of the many in the South Austin area who feel that downtown is hogging all of the good wine bars, take heart. Central Market's Westgate location has actually opened a wine and cheese bar in the middle of their store. The bar, dubbed A22, will feature a rotating mix of 16 wines by the glass, along with approximately 25 cheeses. Both wine and cheese flights will be available, and......

A woman in South Austin was taking out the trash yesterday when she stumbled upon a suspicious-looking device outside her house. This contraption, a metal pipe wrapped in electrical tape, turned out to be what Austin Police are calling an "improvised explosive device," essentially a catch-all term for a homemade bomb. Austin Police Department's Bomb Squad safely detonated the explosive. It's currently believed that yesterday's discovery was unrelated to last week's attempted bombing of the......

New Visions/Works in Progress: Bringing Texas to the Latino Film Map. Hideout Upstairs Cabaret, 11 AM A new program section at the festival, New Visions/ Works in Progress showcases films that are looking for production or completion funds, as well as case studies that represent examples of Latino or indigenous filmmaking in Texas. These projects are brought to the consideration of investors, producers, distributors, and artists with the goal of fomenting industry participation and......

Local fans of Spoon might have to cope with only occasionally seeing Britt Daniel and his co-dependent black dress shirt performing downtown since his relocation to Portland, but Merge is handling one part of our loss: the new album, titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The band also has a few spattered tour dates lined up for the spring to tide us over until the full scale outing in the fall to support the......

Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha (Fat Possum) In a strange small way, Bird's violin and trademark whistle takes a backseat (driver) position on Armchair Apocrypha, allowing more emphatic drumming and leading guitars to rise to the occasion. The album is undoubtedly Bird, showcasing songs about mountains of handkerchiefs and Scythian empires, violin picking and soaring harmonies supporting his soothing croon as expected. "Imitosis" finds his songwriting taking a slight turn in a darker direction, while......

Over at Gothamist we have a thing called Tourist, where bands from New York keep tour diaries for us. My Brightest Diamond is one of the bands doing this for us throughout SXSW, check out Nate from MBD's first entry here. And here's an excerpt. Three days before flying out from NY to Austin for the South by Southwest music conference, I had a rather ominous dream. It was the sort of dream you wake......

Okay, okay - we've haven't been doing a very good job keeping you informed about SXSW Film stuff. But a lot of news has built up over the last week or so, so we're gonna drop it on you all at once, like some kind of awesome 50-megaton knowledge-bomb. SXSW Film Festival Passes are now on sale at Waterloo Records Video. They cost $65, and they work sort of like music wristbands (at screenings, badges......

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's......

The city’s number one comedy theater has a Friday night lineup that is guaranteed to get your ass laughing, regardless of your particular comedic styling predilections. The full night of comedy at ColdTowne kicks off with some hot woman on woman comedy action (interested now, you sick bastards?). In the One-Woman Showdown, local improvisers Kaci Beeler and Jill Morris interpret their favorite movies as one-woman shows. Beeler will be adapting every geeky pedophile’s favorite......