This Sunday, grab a friend, grab a kite and head down to Zilker Park for a local tradition that is over 50 years older than SXSW and over 70 years older than ACL Fest. If we're talking about true Austin, the Zilker Park Kite Festival can't be beat....

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......

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.......

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......

Marginal religious sects, ritual sodomy, women and children in danger and one “evil, evil man”? Just another day in our Legislature. Yesterday a House committee heard from Utah’s attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, about the hazards posed to the state by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a fringe sect of Mormonism which is currently building a compound outside El Dorado, near San Angelo. The leader of the Fundies, Warren Jeffs (pictured), is being......