Kaboom Books is one Houston’s best kept secrets, unfortunately. The used bookstore run by Post-Katrina/New Orleans transplants Dee and John Dillman features a wealth of already-been-read fiction and 80+ other genre selections.

The pair has had a couple of shops around the Heights area – with the longest-standing store at 3116 Houston Ave. Next week, they’ll open up a second location at 729 Studewood next to Antidote Coffee. But they’re leaving out the “P.” (It even says so on the sign: Kaboom Books (Less P).”

“We do not have, in mainstream fiction, any author whose last name begins with P,” John Dillman tells Hair Balls. The literature lover says it’s an ode French novelist George Perec whose book A Void did not contain the letter “E.”

The happy days of the ’50s that were once yours and mine are still kicking over at Mark Twain Elementary, where Principal Joyce Dauber was reinstated after being suspended for making racially insensitive comments to teachers about her grandson’s class placement.

Three parents upset with Superintendent Abe Saavedra’s decision to bring back the educator who insisted at least four times that her grandson be placed in a classroom with “nice white neighborhood boys” spoke up at the HISD board meeting Wednesday.

The school’s PTO president, Jill Herrera, and a teacher voiced support for Dauber.

As some of you may know, Wall Street has been experiencing some turbulence of late.

We know because we’ve been seeing lots of images of depressed dudes on trading floors clasping their heads. In fact, there is a whole blog devoted to these shots, complete with sardonic captions, at Sad Guys on Trading Floors.

What we hadn’t seen yet was this slow-motion carnage set to the exquisitely melancholy music of Nick Lowe. So we ripped off a bunch of shots from Sad Guys and made us a montage, and you can see it here.

– John Nova Lomax

File this under “Since you just got your ass kicked by Hurricane Ike, we’re gonna give you a break (kinda).”

Freddie Mac has ordered its servicers to suspend all foreclosure sales on Freddie Mac properties until December 31, including mortgages that were in default prior to Hurricane Ike. (Servicers, by the way, are the banks and mortgage companies that hold home loans.)

Now, wait a minute: before you get all warm and fuzzy about Freddie Mac’s big-hearted gesture, it wasn’t because the people at Freddie Mac saw all of the newscasts showing Houston and Galveston devastated by the storm and took pity on much-put-upon homeowners.

Channel 11 had a shocking report this morning about how kids' Halloween costumes are becoming "skanky."

To back this up, they showed a lot of costumes consisting of long pants and shirts that -- gasp! -- displayed belly buttons , with no regard for whether they were innies or outies.

They interviewed a worker at Halloween Express, who somehow said the store allows parents to choose the outfits for their kids. As opposed to forcing them to buy certain outfits, we guess.

Anyway, the piece failed to show what are no doubt the top five costumes you don't want to see your kid wear this Halloween:

5. The Jenna Jameson Jumper. This kicky little number features an EZ-Wash fabric that makes it a cinch to get rid of any kind of stain.

Just in time for Halloween and Election Night Fever, a professor at Rice is scaring the crap out of us … well, kind of. Dan Wallach, an associate professor and Director of Rice’s Computer Security Lab, is an e-voting expert who specializes in what-could-go-wrong scenarios.

He’s headed to Austin Wednesday to tell the state senate about all the risky business associated with the computers Texas uses to count its votes. (As in, the ones we’ll be using Tuesday, November 4 to pick the next president.) Back in June, Wallach testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections about the dangers of ES&S, the e-voting computers used by Texas.

“All of these voting machines were vulnerable to what we call ‘viral attacks,’” Wallach tells Hair Balls.

Just a day before a new crew heads up to the International Space Station, NASA has announced the return of an old problem: The station's toilet is broken again.

The troubles involve a "gas separator" which, frankly, sounds like something you'd definitely want to be working in the toilet of a space station.

The Russian-built toilet failed late yesterday, a NASA spokesman says.

A campy musical set in East Houston, featuring a rebelling teen trying to deal with an emotionally distant dad who works at NASA, starring Howard Stern's daughter -- what could go wrong?

Plenty, according to Variety.

Earth Sucks is the name of the musical, which opened recently in LA.

And even the Houston angle couldn't help it from a vicious review:

Galveston may still be struggling with basic services....but the golf course is soon going to open!

In fact, the driving range already is open, so people can take out their FEMA frustration on the ball. The rest of the Moody Gardens course should be open in two to three weeks, officials say.

Not being much of a mystery fan, I haven't read Dennis Lehane's best-sellers like Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. But I like to rummage around in the often-sneered-at genre of historical fiction, and Lehane's latest is squarely in that category.

The Given Day takes place in Boston just after World War I, when the city was full of anarchists, cops itching to strike over horrid working conditions, a flu epidemic and a clannish world of newly arrived immigrants.

With a cast of finely drawn characters and events that seem sadly inevitable even as they're suspenseful, Lehane easily draws you into the world with hardly a misstep.

There are some strange new lights piercing the night downtown near where Dallas intersects with Fannin and San Jacinto.

They're the "sky rings" that are to be a signature of the new Houston Pavilions development, which will begin opening next Thursday.

The lights were supposed to be unveiled in a grand-opening ceremony that night, but things didn't turn out that way.

And all this time we thought HISD Abe Saavedra’s outreach to dropouts was just in the kids’ best interest. Turns out, it can be a money maker as well – or at least that’s the pitch made in a July 31, 2008 letter to the superintendent from a local attorney speaking on behalf of the private alternative schools used by the district.

In the just-unearthed letter, Houston attorney Vidal G. Martinez writes on behalf of Community Education Partners to point out the money to be made by bringing more overage kids back to the classroom.

After thanking the superintendent for renewing the New Aspirations contract with CEP to serve 185 HISD kids at most risk of dropping out, Martinez offers Saavedra a new deal, extending the present program.

Martinez targets certain

high schools whose graduation rates could increase and dropout rates decrease by implementing this program.

It will prove to be a revenue generator for the district by re-enrolling those students who have dropped out.

The district can claim the revenue generated, which last year was $9,531, while paying CEP $5,400.

That’s a clear profit of $4,131 per kid!!! The proposal calls for re-enrolling 200 additional students, meaning about $826,000 in revenue to HISD.

We've already noted that Houston Chronicle DC blogger Julie Mason and film critic Eric Harrison are no longer with the paper.

Other reported victims of the voluntary buyout/layoff purge at 801 Texas whose bylines you might recognize: DC staffer Bennett Roth, metro writer Rad Sallee, classical critic Charles Ward, longtime Galveston reporter Kevin Moran (who was ordered to work downtown a while back), and reporter Eric Hanson and photographer Buster Dean.

We wish them all the best and hope they land on their feet.

-- Richard Connelly

We sure miss the innocent days of 2000, before we went to war and the economy tanked, when song lyrics were what people worried about. Mark Oliver Everett, also known as E or A Man Called E – his band is the EELS – had the surreal experience of his work being used as a political prop.

“The campaign to elect the tragically inept Republican candidate George W. Bush to the White House used the Daisies of the Galaxy album as an example of the entertainment industry marketing smut to children,” he writes in his memoir, Things the Grandchildren Should Know. “I know. Pretty hilarious. I was thrilled by it, of course.”

The album has a “storybooklike” cover and features songs such as “It’s a Motherfucker,” so of course E had made it to corrupt the children. One of the offending lyrics held up by the geniuses in the campaign was from a song called “Tiger in My Tank”: "When I grow up I’ll be/An Angry Little Whore." What the song’s really about is selling out, a major theme of the book.

The demise of the film critic has been reported in media sources from the august to the obscure.

The butcher's bill from the last few years reads like a Reviewer's Hall of Fame: Nathan Lee (The Village Voice), David Ansen (Newsweek), Stephen Hunter (Washington Post), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader). Hell, even quote whore emeritus Pete Hammond was dropped by Maxim in a cost-cutting move (and not, as one might assume, in response to howls of outrage brought on by his shitty reviews). The (for now) still-employed movie critic for the Salt Lake Tribune, Sean P. Means, is keeping an updated list of the departed on his blog.

He'll need to add the Chronicle's Eric Harrison to that.