Le Journal

Austin's roaming newsstand Tomo Mags — which sells books out of a signature blue bus — is moving up in the world. Its new brick-and-mortar bookstore and partner coffee shop, Cielito Lindo, are celebrating their grand opening Thursday, January 22, at 411 Brazos Street, #101. A ribbon-cutting ceremony from 10-11 am with the Downtown Austin Alliance and the Austin Chamber of Commerce will mark the occasion.

The thing about Cubs Convention is that you can be as big of a Cubs fan as anyone you know, a rabid poster on various Cubs communities like Bleed Cubbie Blue, the type of person who gets notifications for multiple teams and players, and odds are the crowd at Cubs Convention will out-fanatic you. It won’t be one or two people, either. It will be 95 percent of the crowd, at all times. In 2026, however, it was hard to get to the point of feeling overwhelmed by any one else’s fandom because the size of the crowd itself was overwhelming at virtually every moment. To be clear, there is always a crowd at Cubs Convention and waiting in line for a bit is part of the game whether you want seats on Friday night or an autograph from a player. But 2026 was orders of magnitude different from every other year I’ve attended Cubs Convention. This year’s lines and crowds strained the capacity of the Sheraton Grand and resulted in large numbers of disappointed fans being turned away from events. It’s a perfectly reasonable assumption for fans that buying a pass to the Convention means access to those events, and for marquee events this year that simply wasn’t the case. As I was heading to Cubs Convention at approximately the same time I have every year since I began attending in 2017, I was stunned to get a call from a friend, Ken Schultz. He just heard he wasn’t getting into the Opening Ceremony. That struck both of us as odd, he’d been at the Sheraton for a couple of hours and neither of us are new to this gig. In fact, we’ve attended every Cubs Con together since it returned after the pandemic. My curiosity was piqued. I walked towards the hotel entrance and saw more than a few disappointed fans calling ride shares to take them back to their hotels. I stopped to chat with a couple guys, one on crutches. They’d been there since about 2:30 p.m., and while they weren’t sure what time they finally joined the line to get into the Opening Ceremony when doors opened, they both estimated they’d been standing in line for at least an hour when they were told the room was full. It was their first Cubs Convention, the tickets had been a Christmas present. You could sense their disappointment that they’d spent $150 on each pass, not to mention money on travel and a hotel room, only to be turned away from the first event 45 minutes before it was scheduled to start. I headed in to meet Ken and the line still snaked through the lobby with Cubs staffers at the escalators to keep fans from heading up to the at-capacity fourth floor. I didn’t do a head count of the number of people in line, but I was stunned at how long it still was: To be clear, there are always some diehard fans who get in line at 8 a.m. on Friday to ensure they are seated at the front of the room. However, in the years I’ve attended Cubs Convention getting there when the doors opened at 4:30 p.m. for a 6 p.m. start was adequate to get in the fourth floor ballroom. You might be able to snag a single seat, you might have to stand in the overflow, but you’d be in the ballroom. According to a Reddit thread about this year’s convention, that was not the experience in 2026: Ken and I opted to head to Lizzie McNeill’s for dinner and watched the Opening Ceremony on the TV over the bar. That pub is traditionally a late-night hub for Cubs Convention activity and 2026 was no exception. Friends and other bloggers trickled in all night. The crowd was a topic of conversation with almost all of us agreeing the convention was oversold considerably, along with speculation about what that could mean for the activities on Saturday. For those who have never been, Cubs Convention happens in more than the ballroom on the fourth floor. There are autograph signings, a vendor expo on the first floor and side events all weekend long. The only times almost everyone is in the ballroom are the Opening Ceremony on Friday and Bingo on Saturday night. At previous iterations of Cubs Convention that capacity seemed to cap…