Party on the Plaza has been the most popular way for Houston's music lovers to let off a little steam in the summertime for years. Working-class stiffs and yuppie execs have packed this little grandstand in the middle of downtown every summer since the 1980s. And it's no wonder: Houston proper doesn't have a lot of natural resources to help us keep cool. So where does one turn? To beer, of course. A happy hour tradition, the original Party on the Plaza still goes strong, though it's now controlled by Clear Channel and most of the acts fall into the Texas C&W realm. A few other groups have made good use of the plaza as well in recent years. So on almost any given Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday evening from Memorial Day to Labor Day, you can hear live music, drink cheap beer and dance your wahoos off under the stars, just steps from your office door.

The best smell? Coffee, of course. And there's no bigger coffee smell in town than the odor steaming out of Kraft's Maxwell House factory, a few blocks (and miles of attitude) east of Enron Field. Most days the prevailing winds blow that smell, ooh that smell, in a northwesterly direction, toward the north end of downtown and away from most eastside residents, many of whom can more or less stand on their porches and read the smoky plume from the one-million-square-foot facility for changes in the weather. And a fine day it is when the winds change, blowing that slightly processed coffee smell back over the near east side, where it mingles with, and partially masks, the cabbagy stink of wastewater treatment facilities and some of the ranker stretches of Buffalo Bayou. Fusion City, indeed.

Sure, they love him out in Sugar Land, but to many people across this country, U.S. Representative Tom DeLay is a bombastic, moralistic, self-righteous -- you get the idea. So when his adult daughter, who works for him, hit the newspapers in a story about Las Vegas hot tubs, lobbyists, and champagne being tossed on people's heads, it brought a smile to a lot of faces. Dani Ferro's brief moment in the spotlight began when the Capitol Hill weekly Roll Call broke the story last fall, quoting a witness as saying Ferro was "among the revelers" at a late-night party and "there were a lot of lobbyists in the hot tub, pouring champagne on each other." And no doubt discussing those sybaritic Democrats. DeLay quickly turned to his hometown newspaper to deliver the spin he wanted on the incident: "A totally innocent thing has been blown terribly out of proportion," the Houston Chronicle quoted one "steamed" (and anonymous) DeLay aide as saying. The Official And Complete Explanation of what happened, as delivered by the aide through the Chron: "Ferro and a female colleague donned swimming togs and climbed into the hot tub. A lobbyist came onto the balcony and, after a brief exchange with Ferro and her colleague, dumped a glass of champagne over Ferro's head, then left." Well, that explains everything...

Maybe you're a pilot looking for an interesting jaunt. Perhaps you're a WWII buff nostalgic for a blast from the past. Or maybe you're just a Houstonian hankering for an unusual weekend getaway. If so, Fredericksburg's new Hangar Hotel fills the bill. Bypass Fredericksburg's German beer halls and quaint B&Bs, and fly straight to the Hangar Hotel at the Gillespie County Airport. This WWII-themed property sports meeting rooms decorated as "flight briefing" Quonset huts, an officers' club bar and a 1940s-style diner and soda fountain. The alabaster light fixtures and green army-style blankets on the mahogany and rattan beds add even more retro-ambience. The hotel also has palm trees, a searchlight and a water tower -- guaranteed to transport you to Pearl Harbor itself. And if you just can't get enough of a WWII fix at the hotel, check out the Admiral Nimitz Museum and National Museum of the Pacific War nearby.

The beauty of Houston, in a perverted way, is the wealth of opportunities for individuals to rise up amid corruption and misconduct and take their moral stand, consequences be damned. Just in the last year, there was the implosion of Enron, the callous cunning of Arthur Andersen and the market manipulations from other energy companies here. So has the Bayou City's moral backbone gone to the dogs? In this Best of Houston winner, we're proud to say it has. Sam Levingston, a 72-year-old veterinarian at the city's animal pound, wouldn't remain quiet about reports of atrocities: workers viciously mistreating dogs and cats, holding them under water with choke sticks. At least once, they even washed puppies down the drains of their cages. His investigations and reports to supervisors got him fired. He then had to endure the backlash of city allegations that he'd been canned for incompetence. While a pound spokeswoman continues to deny the awful actions there, a jury heard the facts -- and hit the city with a $1.2 million verdict. For Houston's sake, let's hope there are more Sam Levingstons in local government.

Bob "Alwalee" Lee proclaims himself "Da Mayor of Fifth Ward." This retired social worker is already a legend in his northeast Houston community for his person-to-person efforts to help the disabled and elderly. And he's backed by a prime political connection. His brother is none other than Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee. Those on Da Mayor's mailing list are also treated to a stream of politically oriented collages that poke fun at everyone from preacher pimps to former Enron chairman Ken Lay. He has labeled State Senator Rodney Ellis an "honorary white boy" and skewered former city councilman Michael Yarbrough as "Yardboy." A recent mailout pictures Houston City Councilman Michael Berry and Congressman Tom DeLay, while blasting "opportunistic white politicians who chase our votes by kissing black babies, old folks and pretending to like fried chitlins."

Bradshaw v. Utility Marine Corporation, et al. is no one's idea of a landmark case, but the Galveston lawsuit has achieved the kind of instant immortality that's possible only now in the Internet age. Federal judge Sam Kent has long been known for his hair-trigger temper and utter lack of patience with attorneys whom he deems to be not up to his standards of professionalism. In tossing Bradshaw out of court this past June, he once more made sure his feelings were clear: "[T]his case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact -- complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words -- to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the court would be so charmed by their childlike efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed." It gets worse after that. Within days, the opinion had been posted on the Internet and had traveled the globe, even earning mention in a London newspaper. Kent reportedly was mortified at the publicity and apologized to the lawyers involved.

The Fourth of July is supposed to be about freedom, and where better to celebrate liberty than the anarchistic Bolivar Peninsula? Want to drink openly on the beach? That's not a problem here. Neither is the possession and liberal use of extremely powerful fireworks. For two solid hours after the hot sun settles in Galveston Bay, the good folk of Bolivar launch steady streams of Roman candles and artillery shells into the air. The skies whine with whistling jakes, the dunes crackle with the reports of black cats, and sparklers sizzle on every beach house deck. Every hundred or so yards, there's another display, each of which must have cost hundreds of dollars and none of which is publicly funded. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

Most fixations require cross-dressing midgets, trailer-park love triangles or an element of Satan worship to be worthy of the tabloid TV circuit. But the odd obsession of this industrial filmmaker is a touchy-feely affair. Yaqi, who derives his name from Carlos Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, believes tickling is the road to enlightenment. Yes, there's some tying to bedposts involved (his subjects can't be allowed to get away, now, can they?), and they are videotaped in their underwear (the skin must be exposed, you see, for his wandering fingers to have the maximum effect). But when all's considered, this fetish is about as benign as they come, yet is still strange enough to have made this New Age pornographer a regular on Howard Stern, and to be featured by other chroniclers of weirdness on MTV and elsewhere.

"Trophy" may be too strong a word for this apparently abandoned behemoth: a concrete block, presumably of Portland cement, standing near seven feet high and about five feet wide, featuring a high relief of some sort of Greco-Roman figures, and the inscription: "Awarded Trinity Portland Cement Company Houston Texas Plant for a Perfect Safety Record in 1929." The block was re-awarded, and re-inscribed, for perfect safety records in 1945, 1947, 1959, and then, silence -- Trinity Portland Cement Company appears to have been Dallas-based, and the Houston plant was shuttered in 1975. How long it took the site to degenerate to its present state -- at the intersection of two abandoned roads to nowhere, scattered with illegally dumped trash, no sign at all of a cement plant -- is anyone's guess, but still the monument stands, too heavy to move, in silent remembrance to those few special years when no one got crushed in the machinery.