Acting through the Harris County Attorney's Office, the State of Texas is suing the Fannin Food Mart and the property's landlord, Jae Kim. The state claims that the property is a public nuisance and neither Fannin Food Mart's registered agent Azeem Ali Noorani nor Kim have done anything to abate the problems despite being admonished to do so.

The store in question is located at 2111 Fannin and is adjacent to the Greyhound station on Main. It is also known as the Tiger Mart, and it once housed a Creole lunch counter and still is home to a doughnut shop.

The state's suit portrays the 24-hour market as a veritable hive of scum and villainy, a place where the crooked Fannin Street of Tom Waits song lives on ("Don't go down to Fannin Street...You'll be lost and never found, you can never turn around, don't go down...to Fannin Street.")

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No reasonable offer refused.

It's not the easiest real-estate market in history, but the city of Houston says it made $8 million in selling 171 scattered homes and three lots around town that had been designated for low-cost housing.

The 1987 experiment in scattering low-cost housing around neighborhoods only worked to a degree (Note: You must have read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop to get that reference), and the city sold the inventory and will apply the money to other low-cost housing.

"This is an example of innovation and efficiency that has beneficial results for Houstonians in need of housing, communities around the city as well as investors," Houston Mayor Annise Parker said in announcing the sales.

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HAR

Got a spare $3.5 million lying around? You can buy the home of Beyoncé's mom, Tina Knowles, and still have a dollar left for a McDonald's breakfast!

The 8,850-square-foot mansion is near the Kinkaid School by San Felipe and Voss. According to its official listing, it:

unfolds on 2.6 acres of rolling lawns, island pool features, ravine views, and a backdrop of natural woodland. A perfect venue for entertaining, the open floorplan includes an enormous great room with soaring ceilings; island chef's kitchen with designer finishes; lavish master suite with fireplace, study, coffee bar, marble-clad, mirrored dual baths; 4 ultra-luxurious bedroom suites; game and media rooms; gym; and guest/pool house.

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It doesn;'t say what you think it does

A 19th Century Portuguese man named Pedro Carolino took it upon himself to compose a Portuguse-English phrasebook, despite the fact that he knew no English and didn't even own a Portuguese-English dictionary.

He did know French and he believed that was enough. He thought he could simply filter a French-Portuguese phrasebook through a French-English dictionary and voila -- he would have a Portuguese-English phrasebook for the ages.

Instead, his laughably terrible English As She Is Spoke has gone down in publishing history as one of the greatest of all unintentionally hilarious works, a compendium of terribly translated idioms, misconjugated verbs, and unnecessary apostrophes by the boatload.

As The Room is becoming to cinema, so this was to 19th Century printing. Mark Twain was such a fan he wrote the introduction to the U.S. edition, and therein he claimed that "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

Maybe not with the tools available in Twain's time, but now we have the Internet. Today, thanks to online translation services, such inter-linguistic hilarity abounds.

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We have some great commenters here on Hair Balls, and it's time we paid some damn attention to them.

So we'll be highlighting a Comment of the Day each morning, from the previous day's work. Maybe two comments, even.

This will all be determined by a highly rigorous scientific formula involving wit, clarity and whatever else we feel like at the moment.

We put together a greatest-hits collection of Swamplot's daily feature of odd, sometimes disturbing photos from local real estate listings.

One particularly struck a chord.

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HAR via Swamplot

For a while now, the lively real estate blog Swamplot has been running a daily feature on well, unusual photos included on listings in the area.

Editor Gus Allen tells Hair Balls the photos are not merely picked on the basis of their oddity or horrendousness, although there's plenty of that.

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Candace Garcia

Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia has a Flickr page documenting the ongoing teardown of the former long-vacated but still-funky Wilshire Village apartment complex, now essentially a parking lot.

That's the Fiesta on the corner of West Alabama and Dunlavy in the far background of the above picture, just to orient you.

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Ten years ago we looked at the owner and builder of an extremely odd Third Ward house, Charlie Fondow. The guy just could not stop adding to his house in the 2300 block of Wichita, whether it was gables, turrets or proposed Plexigas elevators.

We learn today via Swamplot that the home is for sale.

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Flip it, Houston.

You might have thought the real estate implosion would mark the end of those "house-flipping" TV shows, where someone buys a fixer-upper, fixer-uppers it and then makes a huuuuge profit selling it to a beaming couple.

The genre, it seems, cannot be killed.

Adweek reports that the A&E Network has greenlighted Flipped, which features the host "buying up houses at a discount in Houston, Texas, renovating them, and trying to sell them off at a profit."

The host is "three-time former Survivor contestant Russell Hantz," which proves conclusively that you can be a three-time former Survivor contestant and we will have never heard of you.

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Brittanie Shey

Going down.

Driving past the downtown YMCA last night about 7 p.m., the sun was filtering through what had become an empty, windowless hulk.

Today there's even less of it.

The trucks have moved in and started the takedown of the building, which looks charming and is quirky enough inside to mourn, although supposedly it's so full of asbestos it could never be renovated in a financially feasible way.

The new Y, a couple of blocks away, has been open for months now, of course.

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