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It’s never any fun turning on CNN and seeing Nancy Grace trash your hometown. But last night, Grace was asking some very intelligent questions about the four Houston-area toddlers who tested positive for cocaine.

The children are a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, a 22-month-old boy and 11-month-old twin boys. The parents, Emanuel Jones, 43, and Tammy Lynn Melton, 25, also have four-week-old twin girls and two older children from two of Melton’s previous relationships. All eight children were taken into protective custody. Jones and Melton were arrested.

Nancy, I call her Nancy or Your Grace, depending on my mood…anyway, Nancy wanted to know why the entire family -- eight children, the two parents and the children’s great-grandmother -- were all living in a one-bedroom apartment. (The apartment is on the 5600 block of Holly View.) Surely this is the exact situation that warrants emergency housing assistance, which local service agencies can provide.

Contrary to popular belief, Daryl Morey is not just a stats guy. Oh sure, the Rockets new GM has earned the nickname “Deep Blue.” That kind of goes with the territory when you’ve got a Masters from MIT and a computer science degree from Northwestern. And when you do crazy, incomprehensible things such as mastering the NBA salary cap… in a single weekend. And when one of your former colleagues describes your brain as a “supercomputer.” But—no, really – the man is more than a mere number cruncher.

The truth: Morey hated school and skipped a lot of classes. His friends — people like Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane and sabermetric guru Bill James — say his people skills rank right up there with his gift for analytics. And for all the talk about Morey bringing Moneyball to the NBA, he’s quick to remind you that the true key to team building lies in finding that perfect balance between the objective and the subjective.

Click the image for a slideshow.

Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) has mistakenly been called a Mexican Halloween (not!). Because of the use of skeletons and skulls, it has also been accused of being satanic worship (really, really, really NOT!). Día de los Muertos is, quite simply, a day of remembrance.

Mexicans who celebrate the holiday often build alters dedicated to loved ones who have passed over. Skeletons and skulls are usually part of the design. Not because Mexicans have a morbid fascination with death, but because they accept death as part of everyday life. There is an afterlife. Hopefully one where they serve margaritas and dance to mariachi music.

In honor of Halloween, Miss Pop Rocks the Horror Film Fan needs to rant and then give a quick shout out to the best horror films of all time.

First, the rant. Call me old-fashioned, but I just cannot get into these modern splattercore torture porn films they call horror movies these days. I’m talking about crap like Hostel, Hostel 2, Saw 1, 2, 3, and 4 (God already!), and The Devil’s Rejects. Fine with me if you think Eli Roth and his pals are making statements about American consumerism and pushing the boundaries of “art” or whatever. I’m not opposed to these films being made or anyone going to watch them.

It’s just that I think they suck.

Here’s the official memo from editor Jeff Cohen on how the Houston Chronicle will be even bigger and better now that it’s gotten rid of all those pesky reporters and editors:

The carnage continues over at the Houston Chronicle. Besides the names we mentioned yesterday, folks who have either taken a buyout or been laid off include (and by “include” we mean these are the names culled from various sources; if you are erroneously included, our congratulations and please let us know):

Among the bylined folks are features writer Andrew Guy, Patty Reinert of the Washington bureau and writer Bruce Westbrook.

Ned “Noogie” Krapczak is a bit of a loser. First, there’s the nickname, “Noogie.” Then there’s the fact that his last name is announced Crap Sack. He’s a film lover in his 30s who lives in Jersey City at home with his Mom – who charges him $300 a month rent – and he’s bounced from job to job, even though he’s a graduate of NYU’s Film School.

Noogie’s current job is loading ATMs. And one day he discovers that he can slip a twenty or two or three into his pocket and it won’t be missed, primarily because the company for which he works is based in Florida. After about a year, the accountants notice some missing money, about five million dollars worth of missing money, and Noogie decides to go on the run.

The rest of the first half of the book takes Noogie on a winding journey down the back roads of the U.S. until he winds up in Miami Beach. And it’s in Miami Beach that he will die drunk, choking on his vomit, on the couch in the living room of the place he’s renting. The second half of the book deals with the police trying to solve his death and the Feds trying to find all of the money.

So goes Noogie’s Time To Shine, the new novel from Jim Knipfel.

It’s obvious what Knipfel is aiming at: that dark comedy with quirky characters just living on the edge of respectability. He’s visiting worlds trod often by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. There’s just one problem. He doesn’t have the skill of Leonard and Hiaasen.

News is starting to seep out about the cutbacks at the Houston Chronicle. As with any cutbacks, the news is not good.

Management had announced a five-percent cut in what it termed a “position-elimination program” (We can imagine the “We’re Full of PEP!!!” motivational memos); buyouts were also offered.

Okay, so I’m totally going to Hell. Even though through the eyes of the pop culture calendar this event took place 100 years ago, I can’t get enough of Marie Osmond fainting. I’ve watched the incident on YouTube approximately 127 times since it first became available. And I’m not the only one. The Marie Osmond fainting clip is fast becoming the Zapruder film of our time.

As everyone knows by now, Marie Osmond fainted on live television shortly after a recent performance on Dancing with the Stars. Now, I want to make something totally clear. I do not watch Dancing With the Stars. And I have never seen the dance number Marie performed shortly before fainting on live television because I really couldn’t care less about the dance number.

All I want is to watch Marie Osmond faint. Again and again and again.

British novelist/essayist Nick Hornby will be in town Sunday to promote his latest novel Slam, a story about Sam, a teenager who gets his first girlfriend pregnant. Houston Press Assistant Night & Day Editor Dusti Rhodes talked to Hornby on the phone about the book (which she highly recommends for both kids and adults).

Dusti Rhodes: What made you decide to tackle a story from a younger character’s perspective? And also to write a young adult novel?

Nick Hornby: I’m not sure if there was anything conscious about the decision. When I thought of the idea it was just a regular novel as far as I was concerned, but that the protagonist happened to be 16 years old. I then remembered that somebody had asked me a while before if I was interested in writing a young adult novel and I kind of went to her rather than to my regular editor because it seems like that was what I was planning out.

In the book, it seems like you’re not trying to pander necessarily to a younger audience as far as writing style and word usage. It seems like anyone at any age would enjoy reading it.

Well, yeah, hopefully. [Laughs] It wasn’t the intention necessarily that I would only reach the one audience. You know, I wanted to write about this kid and what he was going through, and it seems to me as kind of senseless to say this is only for a young audience as it would be to say this is only for an old audience if you’re writing about a 75-year-old man. Pretty much all the books have had characters of different ages in them and it never occurred to me then that it would only appeal to a certain age range.

Have you received response from older audiences about the book?

This post may only speak to a certain cadre of ladies (and men) who love Ralph Macchio. If it doesn’t appeal to you, please feel free to move along. Now that I’m among friends, I’ll start off by saying that back in the day, I was in total hot love with the man. I mean, like, how could I not be? The first time Miss Pop Rocks laid eyes on the Italian stone fox from Long Island, he was starring as Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid. I remember my dad taking me to see it in the theaters and just totally losing my mind.

I don’t know what it was that got me hooked, but I think it was the puppy dog eyes, the olive skin, the rebel without a cause, the `I come from a broken home and need love’ look, and so on…whatever the trigger, when he won the karate championship and wrapped an undeserving Elisabeth Shue in his arms, I melted to the floor, filled with Ralph lust.

The guys over at BlogHouston, who must enter more marathons than we do, have found an interesting twist: Scalpers trying to sell places in the Chevron Houston Marathon.

Marathon organizers cap the number of entries, but this year they allowed runners to transfer their slots to another runner if for some reason they couldn’t make it.

Apparently some runners took this as an invitation to sell their $85 place in the race for significant profit. Craiglist and eBay soon offered bidding for people who’d been shut out.

And that displeased marathon officials. They’ve sent out an e-mail, the relevant part of which is in all-caps:

Today’s lesson on the Constitution, and such amendments to it as, say, the First, will not be given in Galveston schools.

That’s because the folks at Galveston ISD seem to have only the foggiest idea of what the First Amendment is about.

The school district’s lawyer is threatening to sue the Web site GISDWatch for having the temerity to criticize school board members.

Of course, the lawyer says, it’s not the fact that they’re being criticized that is causing the lawsuit threat. It’s because some of the criticisms are libelous, even if they involve publicly elected officials.

The world of big-city journalism is just full of surprises. “Can someone explain to me,” began an email from my editor this morning, “why when I pick up my Houston Chronicle from my driveway this morning and open it, the first face I see is my assistant music editor’s?”

Um… ah… let’s see…

Click the button below for a Radio Houstoned interview with director Steven Fenley and Houston Press Night & Day Editor Olivia Flores Alvarez.

You think you know Dracula? Think again. In Texas Repertory Theatre’s new production, the king of vampires is equal parts horror and humor, suspense and seduction. “What [playwright] Stephen Dietz has done is to go back to the way the book was written,” says Steven Fenley, the play’s director. “If you read Bram Stoker’s novel, it’s all told in journal entries and news reports and little pieces, and you’re asked to put the story together in your mind; and Dietz has really captured that. There’s something that’s pure evil about [Dracula], and then there’s something that’s a little sad about him. It’s a monster of a play.”