As we move to the next square on the calendar you're still out there trying to make a connection. Sadly you let most of them slip by without saying a word. We understand, no one wants to be overzealous and get shot down. If only you had some place to find a second chance. Oh yes, Missed Connections. If only you had someone to sort through and find the best of the above. Oh, right, read below....

The Asarco smelter in El Paso has sat dormant for the last seven years, but lately, there has been a cacophony of voices debating the pros and cons of its return. ...

Britain creates new drug to combat obesity...dog obesity. Dear Abby supports gay marriage. A London judge has found nine lies in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, orders disclaimer to air before being played in schools. The Empire State Building will glow green for the end of Ramadan this year. In China, there is a 95-year old woman growing a horn out of her forehead. Houston ISD is thinking of charging students (and their parents)......

Delaware State University is locked down after two students were shot there in the wee hours of the morning. Burmese monks have been walking in protest of the dictatorship for four days now. The Justice Department hasn't forgotten DeLay (or his staffers). Military cemetery at Ft. Riley in Kansas is full. The Vatican actually approves of China's pick for bishop of Beijing. In case you were worried: Paddington Bear still eats marmalade. Well, it......

University of Florida journalism student provokes John Kerry, gets Tasered by campus cops. A 10-year-old boy has woken up with a posh English accent after undergoing life-saving brain surgery. Betty Perry is charged with resisting arrest and failing to maintain her landscaping, both misdemeanors. Fed up with the threats, tired of natural disasters, Nebraska's longest-serving state senator is using his legal muscle against who he says is the culprit - God. State Sen. Ernie......

M.I.A.'s Friday ACL performance felt so seductive because it was both spicy and sweet; but what else can you expect from a girl who salts and peppers her mango? She burst onto stage wearing pink pedal-pushers, white trainers, wrap-around glasses and war paint, all the while shimmying her heart out to Kala's "Bamboo Banga." Her dancing seemed confounded by tentative limb placement, and it marked her as one extremely sexy dork. (Hawt!) It's this......

Austin’s rising population and stagnant housing supply have resulted in increased housing prices. Even though there are a lot of condos under construction, few have hit the market. Our pal Wells Dunbar over at the Chronicle has a nice article discussing the complicated answers to the problem of affordable housing. One undiscussed simple answer would be to get people to stop moving to Austin. Despite our commenters efforts, that plan isn't working [ed: isn't......

Austin police nab the asshole who (allegedly) pretended to sublet several campus-area apartments to unsuspecting folks, who'd later discover they'd been dupedHaving temporarily lost their brand new skate park, kids in Round Rock promise to behave A Fort Worth cop who slapped a girl's ass after catching her fooling around with her boyfriend in a parked car gets arrested Two con artists in North Texas are convicted for scamming would-be vacationers out of over......

Tonight, unless an unlikely eleventh-hour reprieve is granted, Texas will execute its 400th inmate since the state resumed the practice in 1982. Johnny Ray Conner32-year-old Johnny Ray Conner was convicted for murdering Houston resident Kathyanna Nguyen during a grocery store robbery in 1998. Nguyen, the store's owner, had been trapped behind the counter and was surrounded by a bulletproof enclosure; the killer reached his gun through the change slot and shot her in the head.......

A former lawyer at the Texas Secretary of State's Office sues after being fired in 2005 for making "embarrassing" statements about Karl Rove's Texas residency status In yet another sign of Austin's ongoing transformation, the Statesman debuts its own gossip/society column, helmed by entertainment editor Michael Barnes Things in Crawford, Texas quiet down now that no one cares to visit (or protest) TxDOT is rolling out a fancy new $9 million ad campaign to......

Have you ever found yourself yearning to be lost in the sea of lesbians that is the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, but you can’t seem to get away? Do you want to have a night off from struggling to figure out where all the lesbians go in Austin and why the full-fledged lesbian bars in town can't keep from closing? More importantly, have you been patiently waiting since the year 1930 to attend......

RGK Ranch, a proposed suburban development in the Hill Country west of Bee Cave on the south side of Highway 71, was the subject of some protest at the Travis County Commissioners Court hearing last night. The commissioners delayed their vote on the project by at least two weeks. The project would add another 1,500 single family homes to the area. Two similar projects, Sweetwater Lazy 9 and West Cypress Hills, are already in......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

As most of us know, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) is making it harder and harder for Internet radio producers to finance their stations. Retroactive royalty fees and increased future fees are forcing webcasters into a corner: the fees increase both per-listener and per-song rates, and are based on audience size, increasing as listeners do. This proposed scheme would put public radio stations that stream their broadcasts and web-based radio programming at a great disadvantage......

Jeff Friedman (1945-2007) became involved in politics at the young age of 26 (fresh out of law school), when he joined the city council in 1971. Friedman's run for office was part of a reaction of progressives/pacifists city-wide to Austin officials' refusal to allow an anti-war protest after the shootings at Kent State [Statesman]. In 1975, Friedman became Austin's "hippie mayor", indicative of the new liberal movement taking charge of local politics (and it's pretty......

Students at Trimble Tech High School in Fort Worth picketed their school district headquarters yesterday, in protest of a decision to prevent seniors who'd failed the TAKS exam from participating in commencement exercises. Screen capture from WFAA-TV......

Our friendly neighborhood Tax Assessor/Collector Nelda Wells Spears (shown right) looks nice, but don't be fooled - if you own a home in Travis County, she wants your money. Don't want to give it to her? Then protest your 2007 valuation. Unlike most types of protesting, protesting your property tax valuation is easy and often effective. Click here to get your 2007 Preliminary Valuation. Click here to get the protest form. Fill it out. Mail......

It looks like we dropped the ball on this one, as it's officially No Pants Day. A "Pantsless Protest" was staged in front of the Capitol at 8am this morning, and a day-long rally will take place on the West Mall of UT campus. "No Pants Day is a day where everyone, be they students, respectable businessmen, or cherished community leaders, leave their pants behind," reads the official website. "When large groups of people......

Photos from yesterday afternoon's protest rally in front of the Capitol gates. If you can't view the Flash slideshow above, an alternate version appears after the jump.......

A day after President Bush vetoed a bill that would have allocated $124 billion for the Iraq/Afghanistan war funds but required the total withdrawal of U.S. troops by March, hundreds of local grassroots organizations and individuals have mobilized to stage simultaneous protests across the country. At least a dozen different rallies will take place within a 300-mile radius of here. Austin Operation Democracy Council, the local MoveOn group, is staging its protest in front of......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

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......

Katherine Gregor does a nice job in this week's Developing Stories chronicling the negotiations surrounding the redevelopment of the former location of Concordia University. The setup is a familiar one - developers propose crappy project, neighbors get upset and protest. Here's the twist: the New Urbanist gurus at ROMA step in to mediate and they work out a project that everyone is happy with (at least the developers and the heads of the neighborhood......

Just minutes ago, South Congress Cafe was again cited by Austin's city code enforcement office, after repeated negotiations with Bouldin Creek residents and businesses went unresolved. As you might recall, the chic SoCo eatery (yeah, we said it) built an enormous deck where their back parking lot used to be, despite several stop-work orders from the city. Given the scarcity of nearby lots, this enraged nearby residents, as diners took to parking on the small......

Austinites met at City Hall this weekend for a rally, followed by a march to the Capitol to protest the American occupation of Iraq and the administrations handling of the pre-, mid- and post-war effort. The Austin protest was one of hundreds happening concurrently nationwide. The amount of participants was estimated at nearly 500. Images courtesy of Stewart Jarmon.......

As 2006 ends and 2007 begins, the -ists look back not at the past week, but at the past year. So here it is, your Best of 2006 Spectacular. And from all of us at the -ists, happy New Year! Austinist was all about controversy as new construction to increase urban density ran rampant in 2006, as did threats to the city's image from gigantic corporations looking to set up shop in town, leading......

Paul Burka, Senior Executive Editor of Texas Monthly, reports on his latest blog that plans for a George W. Bush Presidential Library on the SMU campus are meeting some serious resistance. Burka writes, “A letter, dated December 16, from ‘Faculty, Administrators, & Staff’ of the Perkins School of Theology to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, is now circulating not only on the SMU campus but also among a wider academic community,......

Someone other than the government might have your census information. Speaking of the government, the feds allowed the Red Cross to visit the "high value detainees" at Guantanamo. The Yankees pitcher who loved flying was killed yesterday in a fiery plane crash in Manhattan. Gothamist kept us updated throughout the afternoon. No more cursive in schools? What about graphologists? Won't somebody think of them? Students at Gallaudet University are so upset with their proposed......

That guy in the black cowboy outfit is Kinky Friedman, speaking to students yesterday morning at UT's The Union Ballroom. Outside The Union, students in support of Democrat Chris Bell protest the Kinkster's appearance.......

Democratic goobernatorial candidate Chris Bell is demanding that Carole Keeton Cougar Rylander Strayhorn return $29,500 she received from members of the Zachry Family, which owns Zachry Construction Corp. Zachry Construction is involved in a partnership to develop the first phase of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which includes 4,000-plus miles of tollways. What bothers Bell is that this is the same project that Strayhorn has spoken out against publicly. In other Grandma Cougar news: Kinky wants......