Morning Roundup: Banana-fana-fo-fanna edition

Good morning, Houston. We just don't understand the entertainment juggernaut (or is it "juggernette?") that is Hannah Montana: Tickets to her Nov. 11 Toyota Center show sold out in five minutes Saturday, and now they're going for as much as $1,275 on eBay — granted, that's for a set of four tickets, but still, wow. The markup through eBay and ticket brokers has left some parents shelling out big bucks to give their kids a piece of the Montana action: Take Sandra Isget of Groveton, who paid a broker $629 for a pair of tickets so she and her 8-year-old son can see a show in Bossier City, La. "It was supposed to be something light-hearted and fun, and it's turned into something more expensive than our monthly mortgage," Isget told the Chronicle. "My son has no knowledge of us going into credit-card debt to get the tickets. I thought it would be worth it — that it would compensate for my own mental anguish — but it leaves me with such a bad feeling. I'd promised him. How far am I willing to go to keep that promise? If I refused, that only hurts him." Not as much as it'll hurt him when there's no money for food — but that's a lesson for another day.

>> Changes to HISD bond proposal: After a series of town hall meetings, HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra announced several changes to the district's $805 million bond proposal that will be on the ballot in November. Among them: Some schools will be rebuilt instead of renovated, others will be replaced instead of being consolidated with other campuses, and renovations will be carried out at 134 schools. Most of the projects originally proposed in the bond issue are still in place, however, including $90 million in safety and security updates districtwide and $29.2 million in new science labs at middle and high schools. The changes came after a number of groups, including residents of predominantly black neighborhoods, said they wouldn't support the referendum if schools in their areas were tabbed for closure or didn't receive enough renovation funding. "At the dawn of this decade-long effort to improve our school buildings, the HISD school board decided that schools would be built and improved based on need, not based on politics," Saavedra said Monday.

>> Oops, Part II: For the last year, police have been looking for the man responsible for at least 11 burglaries of downtown buildings — and now they say they have him, based on evidence from a surveillance camera. The most recent robbery happened Friday at Two Shell Plaza, when someone entered the building after hours and stole laptop computers, purses and cash from the empty offices. "He virtually had free reign into these buildings, riding the elevators at his own free will," HPD Capt. Greg Friman told KHOU. The suspect, 47-year-old Kevin Lee, was arrested outside a homeless shelter carrying the shirt police say he wore during the break-in in a bag; last year, Lee had been arrested for the same crime. Amazingly enough, police say Lee didn't use sophisticated techniques to break into the closed skyscrapers: "What he would do is come up to the door and pull on it very hard to the point, violently, where he just breaks the locking mechanism or he would kick it very forcibly," Friman said. Why didn't we think of that?

>> Today's weather: Wow, was yesterday beautiful or what? The low humidity and nearly cool morning almost made us forget that it was still 90 degrees in the afternoon. Good thing, too, because it looks like today's pretty much going to be a carbon copy of yesterday: temperatures in the low 70s this morning, followed by a clear afternoon with a high around 92.

More headlines this way ...