Two weeks ago, while the Republican presidential field verbally duked it out in New Hampshire, Rick Perry tuned in … to watch the Texas A&M baseball team battle Florida State in the NCAA Super-Regionals.

Perry delighted in passing on this tidbit when he appeared on Fox News the day after the GOP debate. For one thing, it enabled him to flex the above-it-all bravado that makes his detractors want to put a fist through the TV screen whenever his smirking face appears on it. For another, it gave him a chance to send a little Hullabaloo Caneck Caneck shout-out to a constituency that he could certainly use in a 2012 presidential dogfight.

Hikers and bikers on the newly opened stretch of the San Antonio River's Mission Reach were greeted Friday morning by lines of police tape and handmade signs warning them that they were trespassing on private property. Many of these folks had been surreptitiously stepping over the construction workers' barricades for months to travel to the edge of the restoration project, so they just kept on trucking.

The makeshift barriers most likely were intended for a different audience, anyway: a grand opening starring U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar scheduled for Saturday morning.

In late 2007, the City of San Antonio and CPS Energy grabbed headlines for filing the first application since 1978 to build new nuclear reactors in the United States. It was hailed in some parts of the energy and environmental activist communities as the vanguard of a nuclear renaissance that would replace dangerous and dirty coal-derived electricity with a zero-emissions technology. At the time, the Express-News reported that San Antonio was already getting more than a third of its energy from the South Texas Project nuclear facility, completed in the late '80s after years of delays and cost overruns. Then-Mayor Phil Hardberger estimated that after the expansion, nearly half of the city's power would come from the Bay City nuclear plant.

Amanda Blake is probably best known for her 19-year stint as “Miss Kitty,” the red-headed saloon proprietress on the television western Gunsmoke. Long before we even knew what a cougar was, fans fell in love with her icy wit and the signature beauty mark that would be imitated by later Hollywood stars. In 1968, she made her mark in history by being only the third inductee into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Blake unintentionally made history one last time when she died of AIDS-related complications in 1989, proving that “public enemy number one” wasn’t just a gay disease.

On one front of the battle against drug trafficking, President Felipe Calderón’s government scored an important, if fleeting, victory: in the theater of public opinion. On another front, one we can call the theater of national security, the high-profile arrest last week of José de Jesús Méndez amounted to little more than spanking the monkey. The capture of the notorious head of the La Familia Michoacana cartel and owner of the curious gang moniker “the Monkey” commanded the lead story of all the national news outlets, and indeed garnered more than a few international headlines. For about a day.

As the new-model San Antonio City Council gathered Wednesday morning for a marathon budget work session, they were greeted with good news.

They learned from Budget Director Maria Villagomez that the City’s 2012 budget shortfall, previously projected somewhere between $8 million and $20 million, has shrunk to the $5 million-$16.4 million range. Compared to Houston – which is contemplating massive layoffs – and Austin – which faces major tax increases – San Antonio’s fiscal challenges seem fairly small.

But there was an elephant in the room at Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center Wednesday, the same one threatening to stampede its way through Council budget sessions in each of the state’s major metropolitan areas.