Baphometronome — which is to say, the duo Lisa and Christian Seger, who run Blue Heron Farm in Waller County — continue to release splendidly strange, ultra-low-tech music videos each week. 

It’s Friday. You owe it to yourself to check out “Space Oddity.” There’s a baby space goat.

🛢️ The wildest Republican primary: Despite its confusing name, the Texas Railroad Commission regulates energy — a big, big deal here. Incumbent commissioner Wayne Christian, a Grammy-nominated gospel singer, is accused of a major ethical lapse: taking a $100,000 campaign contribution from a group whose oil-field waste dump he approved. Last week, one challenger, Marvin “Sarge” Summers died after his Cadillac Escalade hit the back of a tanker truck. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, challenger Sarah Stogner released a social-media video that shows her riding a pumpjack while wearing only a cowboy hat, underwear and pasties. “They said I needed money,” she wrote on her post. “I have other assets.” (Texas Monthly; Sarah Stogner’s tweet)

🎒 Teacher raises, librarians all around: Teachers will get raises and bonuses under Houston ISD’s new five-year strategic plan. HISD aims for each school in its system to have a librarian, a nurse, and an art or music teacher. Plus counseling services will expand. (Houston Chronicle)

🦪 Oystermen protest reef closures: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has temporarily closed 21 of 27 oyster harvest areas in the state’s bays, saying that the reefs need time to recover, that the oysters there now are small and low in number. More than 100 fishermen and their supporters marched outside a TPWD office, chanting, “¡Queremos trabajar!” (“We want to work!”) (Houston Chronicle)

🚀 The Houston spaceport’s anchor tenants: At the spaceport-to-be next to Ellington Field, three tenants are building facilities: Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that’s working on a lunar lander; Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that’s building a private space station and will train astronauts; and North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, which builds space suits and life-support systems. (Engineering News-Record)

He's the king of Houston furniture sales, a pitchman whose pitch we all love to imitate. He's a philanthropist, a gambler, and maybe a political force. He’s one of Houston’s great characters.

Today producers Dina Kesbeh, Ferrill Gibbs and I discuss Jim McIngvale, Gallery Furniture’s “Mattress Mack.”

Thousands of years ago, in the Eastern U.S., purple martins (Progne subis) lived mainly in the holes that woodpeckers left in dead trees. To encourage the swooping birds to eat bugs nearby, tribal people began to hang gourd birdhouses for them on poles. Then, as urban development made dead trees rare, purple martins completely shifted their nesting behavior. 

Now they live mainly near cities and towns, and almost exclusively in human-made birdhouses. Usually that’s one of two types: Either a gourd with a hole drilled for an entrance; or the kind of birdhouse that looks like a little apartment complex on a pole. 

This month in Houston, female purple martins are picking their mates. The most important factor: The quality of the male’s real estate.

Our podcasts this week:

• TODAY: Mattress Mack
• THU: Gardening for Sanity
• WED: Music for Rothko Chapel
• TUE: Rice and the statue of its slave-holding founder
• MON: Very Houston love stories

CHATTER

🌼 About telling plain dandelions from Texas dandelions, Andrew Kragie cracks: “You can tell a Texas dandelion by its brazen open carrying.”

🎸 About Houston being ranked the worst city for live music, Barbara Szalkowski writes: “They’re not wrong.”

⚖️ About Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Edward Lara says, “He’s been under indictment for so long! If he were regular folk, he’d be in jail already!”

🧘🏽‍♂️ Jennifer Smith writes that Sunday morning, Sumeru Collection, a new nonprofit meditation group, offers a free class on meditation “without getting bored, distracted or feeling like you’re wasting your time.” 11 a.m., in Spring.

Feedback? We love it: houston@citycast.fm