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.”

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 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:

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.

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

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.

File this under Trends We Were Not Aware Of: apparently Texans pay to have fish nibble their feet.

But not anymore! The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which covers a ton of industries including cosmetologists, has banned the practice of "fish pedicures."

"We decided it doesn't meet our health and safety rules," spokeswoman Susan Stanford tells Hair Balls.

State officials say that Texas Lottery sales are slumping because the games are "boring."

We couldn't agree more.

If you possess the kind of sharp, brilliant, mathematically sophisticated mind that says "I'm buyin' lottery tickets!!", then you will quickly grow bored with the same-old, same-old.

No one wants to see the lottery lose sales, except maybe the people in convenience-store lines waiting not-so-patiently while some loser spends ten minutes figuring out which games he wants to toss away his money on.

So we have our own ideas for new lottery games that are guaran-damn-teed to sell like hotcakes:

5. Just in time for the Red River Shootout, it's the joy of college football.

As we know, Austin must be kept weird, San Antonio must be kept lame, and Dallas must be kept pretentious. Now, web designer Vernon Caldera is trying to make “Keep Houston Rich” happen. Caldera (disclosure: a friend of Hair Balls) got the idea for his campaign when a friend came over in a “Keep Dallas Pretentious” T-shirt. He started turning over ideas for Houston and hit upon this one looking at photos of an opening at the Hotel ZaZa.

“You had all these very, very, very interesting characters,” he says. “You had doctors and plastic surgeons walking around with mannequins basically…There’s this huge stripper society that exists here in Houston.”

The battle to get people to give up their hi-def TVs for a night and actually attend a movie in the theater just heated up in Houston.

AMC announced today they are adding IMAX screens to two of their multiplexes, the First Colony 24 and the Gulf Pointe 30 (the extra "e" is for excellence!!).

The screens will mostly show IMAX versions of current films, which has become something of a cash cow for theaters. You haven't seen The Dark Knight until you've seen it on a 30-story tall screen, apparently.

If you've been listening to KTRH-AM more than usual because of Ike, you may have noticed a small blessing -- Joe Pags is gone.

"Joe Pags" is Joe Pagliarulo, a San Antonio-based radio shouter who ably carries on the choir-preaching duties of all of Clear Channel's local talk-show hosts. He also shows up on TV; recently he was on Larry King informing America that the current economic crisis is all the fault of Democrats, who apparently have been secretly running the country for the past eight years.

The good news is that Pagliarulo is being replaced by more news; the bad news is that he's simply moved over to another of Clear Channel's AM stations, KPRC, where he joins such illustrious and subtle thinkers as Michael Savage.

Lisbeth Ortiz, a local artist and MECA’s coordinator of visual arts programming, has been announced as the official Latin Grammy Artist. (That means her painting, Latin Grammy Night in Tejas, will be used as the official image on the cover of the invitations, posters, program book, etc.)

Latin Grammy Night in Tejas shows a skyline of Houston made up of musical instruments done in deep, rich blues and vibrant reds and yellows. “I work for MECA and my office faces downtown,” Ortiz told Hair Balls. “So, when I got a call asking me to participate in the contest, I immediately thought of the Houston skyline. I turned all the buildings into instruments typically used in Latin music, like the conga, the maracas, and the accordion. I did the sky as Starry Night swirls and had the full moon with the profile of a rabbit, which is an Aztec legend.”

Here’s some cheerful news for you: Only eight percent of Houstonians who suspect someone of abusing a child actually contact authorities, according to a survey released today.

The awkwardly titled “Hope Shining Houston Bystanders and Child Abuse Survey,” commissioned by domestic violence services agency Safe Horizon, asserts that “a shocking number of Houston residents are unwilling and afraid to report suspected child abuse.” The study was conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, a marketing firm with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

The report claims that:

Sad news has come in over the wires from Bloom County.

Houston boy Berkeley Breathed has announced “Opus” will be no more come November 2.

“With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation,” Breathed said in a press release from the Washington Post Writers Group. “The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”

Opus, we hardly knew ye. Actually, we knew you pretty well – your search for Betty Crocker, your active fantasy life, your strange obsession with Diane Sawyer, that one time your ass fell off. We realize you might still make appearances in Breathed's children's books, but we'll miss the PG-13 version. – Keith Plocek

If you plan on voting a month from now, you have until midnight tonight to register.

Fortunately, there are plenty of places that will be accepting forms right up until the witching hour.

Unfortunately, it will involve getting up off your lazy ass and getting to them.

Fortunately, two of the places that will be open til midnight taking registrations are the Ginger Man in the Village and Katz' Deli in Montrose.

Here's a list of sites and hours.

-- Richard Connelly

The Houston SPCA, in the form of Meera Nandlal, who’s in charge of public relations, got back to us finally today and made it clear there has absolutely been no change in policy by the SPCA about adopting out pit bulls.

The Houston SPCA, as we've noted, makes a big point of saying they do not adopt out pit bulls because they consider them unsafe.

Asked about the apparent change in policy -- why the SPCA didn’t kill the dozen pit bulls it picked up on Galveston Island after Hurricane Ike but instead handed them over to other rescue organizations -- Nandlal replied forcefully: “Explain to me how that’s an adoption!”

As noted in our

sister sports blog, Astro pitcher Brandon Backe got himself involved in an incident in Galveston this weekend.

The headline on the Houston Chronicle website this morning said Backe was arrested as part of a "riot" in Galveston.

A riot in Galveston? We had visions of tent-city refugees finally rebelling against no power, no FEMA, no way to get to their homes.

Then we read the story and saw two key words: "wedding" and "party."

October, for some nostalgic people, brings the thought of Fright Nights at Six Flags Astroworld.

Those days are no more, of course. The park was demolished a couple of years ago.

But Astroworld lingers on in many a Houstonian's mind: they're still pumping out fond looks back at the place. There's one in the latest postings of the Thrill Network website, but this one has an extra bonus: We find out what actually happened to some of those Astroworld rides.

The Astrodome -- which never hosted as bad a late-game collapse as Reliant Stadium -- is still sitting forlornly in the shadow of the the new facility.

People are trying to turn it into a hotel, into a space museum, into just about anything. (Tearing it down, which seems the most logical choice, is not an option. No politician wants to call for tearing down the dear ol' Dome.)

How about making it...a movie studio?