11/20/12 11:28am

About a year after snatching up the Penguin Arms building at 2902 Revere St., Dan Linscomb and Pam Kuhl-Linscomb announce to the Chronicle‘s Lisa Gray their plans to incorporate Arthur Moss’s pedigreed 1950 Googie-style apartment building into the multi-building streetside campus of their Upper Kirby home-furnishings-and-knick-knacks empire: “In about a year, after a round of renovation and restoration, they plan to open the Penguin Arms as a showroom,” Gray writes. “Maybe, Dan says, they’ll reserve a little piece as an apartment, so they can literally live above the shop.”

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11/20/12 8:30am

Photo of Alabama Trader Joe’s: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool

11/19/12 3:05pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: SCRAPPING IT ALL — OR NOT — IN WESTBURY “So I have a home in Westbury that I purchased in the $190 range. It’s ok shape but I am living in another home inside the loop. As I am interested in a larger home and can’t find an affordable lot inside the loop, I am considering demoing my Westbury home and rebuilding on that lot. Does anyone have an opinion on this? I am only aware of one other Westbury new build from 2006. I love the neighborhood, I just need more space. Another option I am considering is building a second story to the existing home. Thoughts?” [Westbury Owner, commenting on A Londoners’ Guide to the Westbury Land Rush]

11/19/12 2:55pm

It’s either a store with small display cases or a home with really big curio cabinets. Fully-fenced and mostly burglar-barred, the shape-shifting property fronts the rebuilt roadway and drainage improvements of Fulton Street in Pine Grove, east of I-45. Metro’s Red Line extension plans its future Northline Transit Center just past Crosstimbers, 3 blocks north of the storefront-residence. Earlier this week, the mixed-use property reappeared in the MLS listings with a new agency and price, $99,900, after a 2-month market breather. That’s about twice the price of its sale for $45,500 in 2009 — but significantly lower than the $135,000 sought in a year-long listing that expired down a bit ($124,900) just this past September.

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11/19/12 8:30am

Photo: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool

11/16/12 2:59pm

After waiting for 4 years for any kind of ship to cruise it, the all-but-virginal Bayport Cruise Terminal will at last get a seaborne visitor — starting next year. And it’ll be . . . a Caribbean Princess!

What was it that finally sparked the hookup — the daily grooming and maintenance? The word put out on the street that the $108.4 million taxpayer-funded facility would be willing to do whatever it takes to lure a few sailors to its waiting docks? More likely, the Galveston County Daily News‘s Laura Elder reports, it was just that the popular-with-the-cruising-set Port of Galveston was full-up, and Princess Cruises wasn’t interested in just squeezing in with all the other ships.

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11/16/12 10:13am

For this video to go with its song “Just a Memory,” Houston band Jealous Creatures set out to find a few untamed places in the middle of the city, reports band member (and Swamplot reader) Ian Hlavacek: “Our goal was to create a fantastical, natural environment using only inner-city, urban Houston settings, and although we only managed to fit in two shot locations I think we got the vibe we were looking for. One of the best parts about the whole thing was because these were pretty busy areas, we sometimes had an audience of very-amused strangers. Oh, and one very unamused security guard who didn’t particularly care for us being anywhere near her art — even inches away with foam chisels. But we got the shot anyway, and I swear the art is fine!”

Video: Jealous Creatures

11/16/12 8:30am

Photo of Shadowdale Dr. stormwater ditch: elnina999 via Swamplot Flickr Pool

11/15/12 3:13pm

After slinking its nameplate away from a prominent site in North Montrose sometime after the company’s name became a not-so-revered household word in the aftermath of the late-noughts financial meltdown and the $182 billion in government bailouts it received (see sign-free photo at right from last month), insurance giant AIG has decided the froth has subsided enough that it can call itself AIG again. This week a new shroud disguising a new-again three-letter logo was lifted on the 42-story America Tower — er, AIG Building — in the American General Center at 2929 Allen Pkwy.

Photos: Candace Garcia

11/15/12 2:31pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSTON FIRST SKIPS THE BULLY SALES BLOCK “Instead of ‘hoping’ to get residential/retail development on the site, why not REQUIRE such development on the site via deed restrictions or other contractual agreements with the buyer? This is how HISD screwed themselves on the sale of their old administration building. They sold to the highest bidder and ‘hoped’ they would build something like the fancy mixed use rendering they were passing around. Instead we got a Costco and an LA Fitness. When you consider that HISD pockets more than 50 percent of every tax dollar paid by the property, they might have made more money in the long run by GIVING AWAY their land to someone who would have developed it more intensely.” [Bernard, commenting on Headlines: Downtown Block for Sale; Accessing Remote Hermann Park]

11/15/12 1:35pm

Extracted from a national map by datavisualization wiz John Nelson, here’s a map of Texas showing where votes for Romney and Obama came from, plotted point by point, by county. Using data from the Politico website, Nelson plotted a red dot for every 100 Romney votes and a light blue dot for every 100 Obama votes. Clumped purple masses fill the counties that envelop the state’s major metropolises.

Nelson tells future-fan website io9 that more typical red-blue political maps accentuate geographically large but population-light areas. “This method avoids the geo-social visual bias of large geographic areas having small populations overwhelming the overall picture. In this way both the relative volume and geographic distribution are apparent, as well as the partisan proportions throughout,” Nelson wrote of his national map, pictured here:

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