In a dilapidated shopping center at the Highway 183/Spicewood Springs Road intersection of northwest Austin lies a gem of Cajun restaurant called Sambets. Don’t judge this book by its decor inside either. Judge it by its food.

Which is nothing short of fantastic. Whether you want Austin’s best muffuletta or a seafood po’boy, Sambets won’t disappoint. Their etouffee’ and gumbo are amazing as well.

With American Idol Season 8 on the books, here are the best performances of the season. I didn’t include any of the results show performances, or Kris and Adam singing with Queen and Adam singing with Kiss would probably have been number one and two.

With the NBA conference finals in full swing, my mind has turned to basketball movies. Strangely, there just aren’t that many good basketball movies. It seems that baseball and football movies get all the love.

In any case, here are my five favorite basketball movies.

The best planetary convergence of May 2009 occurred this morning, with the Moon, Venus and Mars forming a triangle in the eastern, pre-dawn sky. Being in the eastern sky, there was considerable light pollution coming from Austin and Round Rock. I didn’t feel like driving to the other side of Williamson County at 5am, so I just worked with it as best I could.

Mars is in the lowest part of the images, many times only visible as a small dot. It was actually a bit more visible to the naked eye, with a clear reddish tint.

Congrats to Kris Allen who won Season 8 of American Idol this evening. I just finished watching on DVR, and I’m ready to crash, so a few notes and it’s off to bed for me.

All in all, the two hour finale was a darn good show. Yes, they had several of those stupid group numbers, but they had quite a few good to great performances as well. And the star power of their guest performers was amazing.

Like any American Idol fan, I’m very curious who is going to be named the American Idol winner this evening. In fact, I’m so curious, I don’t want to wait. I’d rather use the data one can find on the Internet to try and predict who is going to win between Kris Allen and Adam Lambert.

The first thing I did was to look at the Google Trends data.

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The final performances of American Idol Season 8 are finally here.

With seven thousand people in attendance at the Nokia Theatre, Adam Lambert and Kris Allen are to each perform their favorite song of the season, a song chosen by American Idol creator Simon Fuller, and the winner’s song for the season, which was co-written by Kara DioGuardi.

© Copyright 2009 John Cole – All Rights Reserved.
Used with permission.

Football season is long over. Even the fill-in-the-gaps events of the draft, recruiting and spring football are done for the year. And there are more than three months until football starts back up.

One way to fill the long hours until football returns is by watching football movies. Here, in my opinion, are the ten best.

Many of the American Idol contestants, both current and former, are popping up on Twitter. Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that these are all real.

In fact, I can guarantee that some are fakes, as some have multiple accounts claiming to be that person. For now, I’m listing the multiples until I can determine the authoritative account.