If you've read your City Hall Hustle this week, then you know that Bill Spelman hopes to win his old job back, as a Place 5 city council member. But after a single term, 1997 - 2000, Spelman stepped down when the Attorney General issued an opinion that he couldn't collect his LBJ School prof's salary and a city salary at the same time. How would he solve that problem in another term? By serving as a city council member without taking any pay for the job, he posits. That makes public service more like public servitude - handily trumping Jennifer Kim's refusal to take a pay raise.

The Red Cross doesn't have the easiest or best-funded job in the world (as its staff keep having to remind everyone, it's a volunteer operation, not the government. Feel free to donate to either the Red Cross of Central Texas or the national Disaster Relief Fund. Or both). But as they continue to assist in the post-Hurricane Ike clean-up (see our coverage of the ongoing activities here), they're still having to deal with allegations that what they did was too little, too late. The big accusation is that they didn't provide cots in the initial shelters opened in Austin ISD schools. Their response is that trying to roll out that many beds in what it ultimately someone else's facility just wasn't going to work. So why does this mean no cots? Because the Red Cross doesn't have $1,500,000 and a bunch of spare warehouse space.

Senior Night at UT: Halloween night, against Baylor, is the home finale for perhaps the best Longhorns senior class ever: Courtney Gaines, Jill Gilbeau, Stephanie Logterman, Kasey Moore, and Dianna Pfenninger. They all contributed in two good road wins last weekend – 1-0 at Kan­sas and 2-1 at No. 20 Missouri – and Pfenninger and Moore were named defensive and offensive players of the week, respectively, in the Big 12, as the Horns rose to No. 8 in the country (but only fifth in the Big 12). Friday, Oct. 31, 7pm at Myers Stadium. Free if you wear a costume; $3 for players and coaches wearing jerseys; $3 with Web coupon: www.texassports.com/ot/bevo-bargains.html. The St. Edward’s women won four games in nine days to move into a tie for the Heartland Conference lead and into position for an NCAA tournament bid. They’re on the road for their last four games. St. Edward’s men dropped another heartbreaker, 2-1 in overtime, to the top-ranked Division II team in the country, Midwestern State, but they, too, remain in good position for an NCAA bid. They’re on the road this weekend, before ending the season at home next Friday and Sunday (St. Mary’s and TAMU-International).

[video-1] The Hustle chats up Central Texas pols running for all manner of seats: U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, Texas House member Valinda Bolton, U.S. House candidate Larry Joe Doherty, and judicial candidate Woodie Jones. All this, and a socialist sandwich too.

Pat yourselves on the back, Travis County residents of 2008 – you have shattered our record for early voting. After 10 days of early voting, with two still to go, 229,575 of you have either voted in person or sent in a mail-in ballot, easily eclipsing the old high of 222,085 from the 2004 general election. Of course, we were helped a bit by the fact that Austin’s population has continued growing at its ridiculous clip, and voter registration has gone up with it. In fact, the 37.7% of registered voters that have cast ballots thus far is still behind the 40.1% that voted early four years ago. County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir is still pleading with residents who have not yet voted to get to the polls in the next two days – with our current number of registered voters at 609,224, she worries that if too many people put it off, the county’s election staff will be overwhelmed on Election Day (Nov. 4) and citizens will face long, discouraging lines. Unlike Election Day voters, who must vote in their neighborhood precincts, early voters can go to any of the county’s 26 early voting locations, including the two “mega sites” – one north at 5501 Airport Blvd., the other south at 4534 West Gate Blvd. (West Tower Village #115).

"The Austin Chronicle has a bone to pick with Sen. Cornyn" Well, you're darn tootin'! That's the caption of a blog post at Texas Politics, blog for the capitol bureaus of the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News, who wrote up the Cornyn campaign's theft of our video blog Hail to the Hustle's footage of Rick Noriega. (The Association of alternate Newsweeklies is on it too.) TP quotes Cornyn spokespeople Dave Beckwith and Kevin McLaughlin as calling their appropriation "fair use" – a rather dubious claim considering the length of the footage they took, and that it's used to advance a partisan political agenda, and not in a newsworthy capacity. As for their use, we've filed a DMCA complaint with video host Blip.tv, but they seem to be dragging their heels. However, that's our best hope, as the Cornyn campaign is either completely intellectually dishonest, or astonishing in their sheer breadth of stone-ass ignorance. (Newsdesk hasn't ruled out some mixture of the two.) When we emailed them to tell them to take their video down, one of their responses was, "Once YouTube puts it on the Internet, isn’t it considered in the public domain?" Eeesh. And if you haven't Hustled yet:

Following up from yesterday's posting about the House of Torment Halloween attraction: Any haunted house is a huge investment of time and energy (some bigger than others) but artistic director/twisted genius Matt Garcia took some time to explain how he designed the attraction.

Look, we don't really get the whole Twilight thing, but we've, er, osmosisified (nope, not a word) the thing enough to get that this announcement marks a very big deal – that the Austin Film Society will present a special Austin premiere of Twilight on Nov. 20 with director Catherine Hardwicke in attendance at the IMAX theater at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. $50 tickets get you into the screening, plus an afterparty at d berman gallery. Screening only tickets go for $15. Tickets go on sale Nov. 3. Go to austinfilm.org to find out more. Twilight opens in theaters everywhere Nov. 21.