The Houston Zoo has a new exhibit, Toby the Red panda.

Also, I like these pictures of the Chilean Flamingoes I took.

A Bird’s eye view of a Birds eyes.

Full Set can be found here.

Went to the Houston Rodeo on Sunday. Had a great time. This kid got totally Mutton Busted. The set can be found here.

Just spoke with a friend who bought a house in the suburbs. The house was fairly cheap and discounted, the interest rate was 5% and only a 3% down payment was needed for closing. It’s out in one of these planned neighborhoods and the builder is still building houses, and they must be getting desperate because the builder covered the closing costs and even threw in a plasma TV. Whether the TV was refurbished from a recent foreclosure, I can’t tell.

Current Homeowners in these sprawling burbs aren’t doing so hot. I think it depends on where you are, however. Here in Texas, a home in the burbs cost between 100-190K.The top end of that is closer to 150K now. In a sprawling burb an hour away from the outskirts of a city in California, the house price was close to 400K, and is now close to half that. Because a large part of the media industry belongs in California, we are led to believe that society, government, and culture there is far more enlightened than it is here in Texas. Part of the reason those house prices were so high was because zoning regulations in California cities are so strict that it creates artificial scarcity, inflating the prices sky high. Not only does this encourage homelessness, the cities create a market for homelessness by subsidizing it. Meanwhile, here in Texas the homelessness rate is nonexistent…I’ve lived in Houston for 1 year and have seen the same five guys panhandling near the mental hospital. There are some shoddy houses in some shoddy neighborhoods, you betcha, but no one here acts all high and mighty about how here in Houston we have plenty of cheap housing. Even if they did, the industry here is oil and health care, both evil according to the left, and not the media, banking, or lawyering, like on the coasts. Since the coasts control the media, the coasts are enlightened and here in the South and Midwest we just don’t get it. Funny how that works.

Oh, Instapundit had a great article on killing the Community Reinvestment Act.

One of the many times of the year when annual “best of” lists come out. Any time start seeing these in the middle of the summer I am happy because there is no real news out there. Anyhoo, note that Loudoun County had 58% job growth last year. I figure 10 years from now DC suburbs will stretch out to Marietta, OH.

If you would like to actually afford the house you live in, however, you may want to consider the H-town. Houston added 100,000 jobs last year (100.001, if you include mine). There are millions of Houston haters out there, typically those that work in the media, guys like Bill Simmons from ESPN who for some reason prefers to live in Los Angeles.

Over the course of the summer I’ve seen an Astros game and wandered into a free symphony concert in the park right next to my house. There are plenty of great concerts in the summer and a ton of theater seats. To all the haters on the coasts, please don’t move here and try zone us out and flip our houses and bust our economy…stay where you are, hate on Houston, and be miserable.

Every time I hear people say, “The illegals are doing jobs Americans aren’t willing to do!” I think of stories like this:

Many had been holding out hope that they would be home in New Orleans by now, but the city’s rebuilding has been painfully slow, and about 100,000 are still here. They have settled in more or less permanently, some still on food stamps.

About 12,000 families are still getting federal aid for housing, the city said. Of that group, about 5,500 heads of households are unemployed, not counting those who are elderly and disabled, city officials said.

Sadly, Katrina evacuees, citizens of the US of A, are treated with less respect than people who willfully (and sometimes repeatedly) broke American laws to enter the country, and have no plans of assimilating or even learning English. What does Al Sharpton or Hillary Clinton have to say about all this?

Rothell’s comment deserves headline status here at the Logipundit. I just came back from Houston and noticed some similar problems with workers in the hospitality industry. Asking for help was useless as I couldn’t understand the bad, broken English from the hispanic waitress and had to find a hotel restaurant on my own. Surprisingly, Houston seems to show much more animus to Katrina refugees than to immigrants of questionable or variable legal status. Say what you want about Katrina refugees, they are at least American citizens.

I have a feeling that the motivation for English-only policies in businesses mentioned in the article stems from growing agitation caused by the overwhelming number of Spanish-speaking people (usually Mexican) living and working here today.

My girlfriend meets men and women patients from other cultures who, despite being middle-aged or older, are learning or are already proficient in English despite having lived here for as little as one or two years. Virtually all of these determined individuals are Asian. The patients who can’t or won’t speak English are Mexicans. There are Mexicans who have lived here for fifteen or twenty years who still can’t speak English. It is not uncommon here in L.A. to find yourself facing a Hispanic cashier in many business establishments (usually restaurants or grocery stores) who are unable to speak English. At the cash register!

The tendency among any immigrants living anywhere to flock together is inevitable. You see this with Chinese in San Francisco or New York, with Polocks in Chicago, Persians in southern California. But most of these people arrive legally, are usually not poor, are often professionals, and have to know English to assimilate in the workplace. Mexicans arrive illegally, are destitute, usually have no skills and do work that requires next to no English. These people are typically from undereducated familes. This separates them from other cultures who’ve moved in. That is forgivable. But there is also an unwillingness or lack of interest among Mexican immigrants (illegal and legal) to learn English. This is not so forgivable. Mandating an English-only atmosphere at work is in my opinion purely the result of the ubiquity of millions of Spanish-speaking people not taking the responsibility to learn English.