mkultra25

Ah yes, the original Mam's. I believe they changed ownership before they moved to the Cavalcade location. It was never as good as when it was still in the trailer at 20th and Rutland. My signpost for "before everything blew up in the Heights" is when Kaldi Cafe was still in operation on 19th. Those who are only familiar with 19th as it currently is might have trouble believing how sleepy it was back in the 90s. Hopefully the new gumbo place will do well. I don't think there's been a single restaurant that has managed to succeed at that location.

Randall Davis appears to have had a thing for print shops. IIRC, his first loft conversion was the Tribeca Lofts on W. Clay, which is also a former Clarke & Courts facility. http://www.houstondeco.org/1930s/clarke.html

I think the Committee to Prevent Colonization of Houston by Austin can definitely cut Thundercloud some slack. I only remember the Montrose-area store (which, if memory serves, was on W. Alabama just west of Greenbriar), but according to this interesting oral history, there were once five locations in Houston.

Given the name, perhaps it will feature ritual human sacrifice with obsidian daggers. If you're going to dip your toes in the waters of Mayan cultural appropriation in the service of hipster craft cocktails, you'd better come up with something more compelling than pickleball and cornhole.

Ran across this photo of the building's longtime former tenant, Yamaha dealer House of Wheels. This would probably have been taken in 1982-83, judging from the ad in the window. Note the old-style McDonald's roof barely visible on the far right.

Unfortunately, you can't. Either the hosting service that was used by the original posters to host the photos has gone belly-up, or the photos have been taken down there. I usually save a copy of any photos that I might want to refer to in the future, as there are no guarantees that what is on the web today will still be there tomorrow. Don't think I saved any of these, however.

Picuki is a pretty handy tool to browse Instagram profiles with if you don't have an account.

"Weed and beer" Montrose > "Cheese and wine" Montrose

There was a recent thread on the Houston subreddit from someone who was having a hard time dealing with grief after the loss of a family member, and several commenters recommended Bo's Place highly. I had never heard of it previously.

Fred's was the first place I thought of when I saw this, but @mollusk beat me to it. Not sure how much a place in a strip center can have an old-school Mafia vibe, but it certainly was an old-school red-sauce joint. I was just thinking about Fred's the other day - those bargain-priced lunches kept me well-fed for some years when I lived in the area. Also, the Sacred Heart Society's family-style pasta dinners, a longstanding tradition that has sadly ended (IIRC they got hammered by Harvey and tried to continue afterwards but it wasn't feasible): The Sacred Heart Society of Little York

I'm pretty sure this house was one of the houses featured on a tour of mid-century modern houses around 10-15 years ago. It is indeed an awesome house.

The developers obviously intend to put a stop to the owner of that Bullitt-era Mustang from doing donuts in the middle of the street, given the residue from said activity that's clearly visible in the last photo.

Seeing the "free standing restaurant" available for lease rubs salt in the open wound that still festers from the closure of the building's longtime former tenant, the late, lamented Triple-A Restaurant. Forget Underbelly Burger, nothing will ever compare to the Triple-A's fresh ground cheeseburger.

Sounds like there will be at least some continuity between Revival and the restaurant that will be taking its place: Houston’s 11-Year-Old Butcher Shop and Cafe Revival Market Will Close Sunday

I've always heard "Crosstown Series" or "Crosstown Classic" for the Cubs-Sox games. Crosstown Classic

Remember when someone edited the Yankees' Wikipedia page to add Altuve under "Owner"? Isn't it about time for Yordan to take his rightful place among the Yankee ownership too?

Pretty sure that particular section of Fulton has always been a small neighborhood street. Some of the sections of Fulton north of this one used to be four lanes until the light rail was built and they were scaled back to two lanes as a result.

That was just one location that closed (although a couple of others are currently up for lease). Other locations are still in business, there just aren't any inner-loop ones left.

There's also one underneath 1100 Louisiana (Enterprise Plaza). I haven't been there in a very long time, but when it was a regular stop on my lunch rotation, the line was frequently out the door.

I have been meaning for a long time to set up something that allows me to record OTA programs, but I've always been inclined to go down the path of a TV tuner card in my computer rather than a standalone unit connected to the TV. I currently have cable and internet via Comcast/Xfinity, but I also have a Roku for streaming as well as a Mohu Leaf antenna for OTA. In addition, I frequently download video files from the web via a browser plugin, and use ffmpeg to manipulate them as necessary. This usually amounts to transcoding or copying files to an mkv or mp4 container. I have 3TB of storage spread across two USB drives hanging off of my Oppo blu-ray player, which also does yeoman's duty as a media streamer for locally-stored digital files. As the Oppo is no longer manufactured or supported, it unfortunately doesn't handle newer codecs like H.265, so I have to transcode any files using that codec to H.264. I really need to get a new computer, as my elderly HP desktop definitely struggles to keep up when ffmpeg is doing anything processor-intensive. My next challenge is to figure out a way to archive recorded programs off of the Xfinity DVR. I have almost the entire run of Hawaiian Eye episodes that have been airing on MeTV+ recorded, and would like nothing better than to be able to upgrade the crappy copies I've had for a long time. I suppose an OTA DVR would be a much simpler solution, since in typical MeTV fashion it looks like they're getting ready to start re-airing all the episodes from the beginning once again, and as Ross pointed out, the OTA broadcasts aren't compressed like cable/dish offerings are.

Hard to believe there will be no more JCIs inside the loop, but I think they kind of lost their way when they rebranded to JCI Grill and tried to move more upscale with new menu items and cross-promotions with local chefs. The majority of customers I see at JCI order the tried-and-true items that made them what they were - the original coney, chili, frito pie, etc. I haven't been there in quite a while, but my go-to location was the one near 45 and Crosstimbers, so I'm sad to see that one listed as also being for lease. When they have the annual anniversary special with 99-cent coneys, the line is almost out the door there.

A close friend, now deceased, used to live on Memorial in the 1990s. There was a pond in the front yard occupied by several adult swans (he had "inherited" the swans when he purchased the property). Every time I went to visit him, it was like running a gauntlet to actually get inside the house, as those swans were quite aggressive and would go after anyone that got within range. Ducks are usually mild-mannered. Geese and swans, not so much.

Props to the artist for making the Oilers logo huge and the Texans logo a comparative afterthought.

I'd normally be a little wary about geese getting that close. In my experience they tend to be territorial and somewhat ill-tempered, but I'm guessing the ones in Hermann Park are probably pretty tame due to the number of people that feed them.

Guess that explains Adam Zuvanich's recent departure as editor. I thought the Village Voice and LA Weekly had different owners now?