Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

My wife and I recently decided to buy our first home together. For the past two years, we’ve been living in a two-bedroom townhouse in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood that I purchased in 2021, when I was still single. It was the perfect bachelor pad, but less than ideal for a couple with two young dogs. After a few weeks of house-hunting, we fell in love with a Craftsman-style bungalow on a quiet street in the Heights, northwest of downtown, with a large kitchen, an old-fashioned front porch, and a fenced-in yard where our dogs could play. We knew we’d have a high mortgage rate and pay high property taxes. What we didn’t anticipate, when the sellers accepted our bid, was a home insurance market that…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The smiling, geriatric face, plastered upon a twenty-foot-tall billboard, looms above a four-lane roadway on the edge of Sweetwater, Texas, a dusty 10,000-person town an hour west of Abilene. To the right of the cheerful visage, a desperate message—part personal ad and part hostage-negotiation note—beckons drivers down a romantic rabbit hole in large block letters:  LONELY MALECAN RELOCATESWEETWATERSEEKS FEMALE MARRIAGE MINDED. ENJOY KARAOKE. Like the mysterious monolith that appeared in the Utah desert some years back, this visual mating call has manifested in the most unlikely of locations. Sweetwater, a religious, family oriented community surrounded by prairie, is better known for its annual rattlesnake roundup than its robust singles scene. In fact, according to Karen Hunt, executive director of the Sweetwater chamber of commerce, many…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Sprawled across the shag carpet in his San Antonio living room in 1979, six-year-old Dario Robleto was convinced that extraterrestrials had made contact with humankind. Robleto, home with a mild fever and possessed of an active imagination, mixed up something he saw on a news broadcast concerning the Golden Record, a time capsule–like phonograph album that had been launched into space four years earlier by NASA’s Voyager program. The newscasters announced an 800 number that viewers could call to listen to the record’s audio track, which was full of sounds—ranging from a Bach concerto to surf pounding the sand—for an extraterrestrial civilization to someday decipher. “I thought they were announcing that we had made contact with aliens, and this was the record they were sending to…

The post The Artist Who Wonders What Creatures on Other Planets Will Think of Chuck Berry appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The lunch hour at Harlandale Middle School, on San Antonio’s South Side, is one of the only times during the school day students are allowed to use their phones. Between the streams of incoming notifications and the rumble of preteen socializing, the short period slips by quickly, and loudly—which makes the Bible-study session at the back corner table all the more notable.Since the beginning of the winter semester, ten 13- and 14-year-old boys have met weekly with Jaime Carmona, a 23-year-old part-time campus minister who seems to vibrate with excitement when he talks about Jesus. The teens bring their Bibles, move through the lunch line to retrieve their food on styrene trays, and huddle around Carmona as he emphasizes core Christian beliefs regarding sin, Jesus’s…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The final episode of Shane and Sally ties up whatever loose ends are capable of being tied. But as Karen and Rob discuss in this closing interview, not all the questions have been answered. They return to the podcast studio one last time to discuss their investigation’s four main conclusions.

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