It was a year of altitude-adjusting actors, bird-flipping benevolences, chili charlatans, dastardly deejays, embattled educators, flying freighty-cats, gubernatorial gallivantings, hip-hop hostilities, insatiable Isoptera, Judaically jolting jamborees, Kloroxed Kings, loblolly Leatherfaces, methodological manure-men, neuterings non grata, olé-less objets d'art, piscatorial policemen, queso quarrels, rear-end rectifyings, showboating second bananas, trio-trashing tractors, unamused über-actresses, vituperative vixens, wool-pulled-over Wal-Marts, x-coriated x-millionaires, "Yeehad" yuks, and zinged Ziggyburgers.

It’s the nation’s biggest spread within the confines of a single fence—more than eight hundred square miles extending across six counties. So it’s fitting that the family feud over its future is big too. And mythic.

That would be 75-year-old Robert Hughes, who has amassed more victories while coaching in Fort Worth than anyone in high school basketball history. For most people, that would be enough.

Growing up, I read scores of pulpy paperback westerns with good-guy-bad-guy action—and it was their amazing covers in gaudy, manly hues that roped me in.

Which means she's an expert at reading bovine body language, and that makes her, at the absurdly young age of thirteen—only four years after overcoming her fear of horses—one of the world's best practitioners of the art of cutting.

Master of the Senate.

After years of writing about chefs, I wanted to get a taste of what it’s like to be one—which is how I found myself browning veal knuckle bones at the fastest-growing cooking school in Texas.

Led by the NBA’s most inadvertently colorful coach, this year's Houston Rockets are so much more than an excuse to see a certain ninety-inch-tall Chinese import.

When the San Antonio River’s downtown stretches are drained for a week each January, the crowds may ebb too. But it’s a perfect time to discover the waterway’s more natural side.

What do you do if your university's administrators extinguish your Bonfire? If you're Aggies, you take the show on the road.

Andy Roddick avoids Tracy Austin Syndrome.

My Jerry Jeff Walker.

Nellie Connally, now and always.