Indians great Al Rosen dies at age 91 - Let's Go Tribe: Al Rosen, one of the greatest players in Cleveland Indians history, passed away Friday night at the age of 91.
Rosen (#16 in LGT's countdown of the greatest players in franchise history) was born in South Carolina but grew up in the Little Havana section of Miami. Al suffered from severe asthma as a boy, but was encouraged by his mother to be active. A series of fistfights (stemming in part form him being one of very few Jewish boys in the neighborhood) helped him develop into a fine boxer, and of course he became a great ballplayer as well.
My son, Allen, has been a KISS fan for a long time. The first big concert he ever attended was a KISS performance in Houston in the old Sam Houston Coliseum, which no longer exists. Since Gene Simmons is a part of KISS, Allen would probably get a kick out of this book, which plays off the Chuck Norris meme ("Guns carry Chuck Norris for protection") that you may have seen. Only this time it's Gene Simmons.
Samples: Gene Simmons has a yacht . . . in his swimming pool.
When Gene Simmons has a candy bar, it takes off its own wrapper.
Friday the 13th is afraid of Gene Simmons.
There's a lot more, including some great illustrations by Corey Marier and Crag Marier, kids giving their thoughts on Gene Simmons, poetry, wacky definitions, posters from famous movies altered to depict Simmons in the lead role, and even a foreword by Simmons himself, which proves that he's a good sport. Or maybe he believes all this stuff. At any rate, KISS fans and Gene Simmons fans will have to get this, of course, and who can blame them. Others might find some fun in this "authorized parody," too. Check it out.
Bowling Green Daily News: News: Lockport, N.Y., native Jimmy Sacca, lead singer of the Hilltoppers, a vocal quartet that notched 29 hit singles from 1952 to 1957, died Saturday in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Lexington. He was 85.
Kurt Singer, Gentlemen Spies, Pinnacle, no date
9 Historical Mysteries Solved By Astronomy: Who uses the skies to solve historical mysteries? Astrophysicist and forensic astronomer Donald W. Olson and his team at Texas State University use their astronomical tools to solve all manner of mystery.
Yahoo News: Gene Patton, the NBC stagehand in Burbank who stole the spotlight as Gene Gene the Dancing Machine on NBC’s wacky The Gong Show, died Monday, his family announced. He was 82.
Pi Day: Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “Ï€”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159.
Archaeologists used Light Detection and Ranging technique to discover fabled lost city in Honduras: After centuries of lore that promulgated the idea of a lost El Dorado teeming with untold riches deep within the Honduran rainforest, a team of archeologists, engineers and anthropologists claims to have discovered the fabled location of the City of the Monkey God or The White City, where people worshipped a monkey god and from which visitors never returned.
Robert E. Howard, Tigers of the Sea, Sphere, 1977
Yahoo News: Jenna McMahon, a three-time Emmy Award winner and the co-creator of the long-running comedies The Facts of Life and Mama's Family, has died. She was 89. McMahon, whose real name was Mary Virginia Skinner, died March 2 of heart failure at a hospital in Monterey, Calif., her daughter, Kerry Holden-Dixon, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
A post about this book on Detectives Beyond Borders made me pull it off the shelves and reread it. There's an interesting story behind it. Whittington submitted it to Gold Medal books as a sequel to one of my favorites among his many novels, Brute in Brass. For some reason Gold Medal turned it down and it was sold instead to Beacon Books, of all places.
Note the quotation from Joseph Moncure March on the cover. It has nothing at all to do with this book. No sex acts occur here, not a one, though there's some disrobing and near-sex, along with plenty of references to women's bodies. How much of this was added for the Beacon publication is anybody's guess. This isn't a sex novel. It's a crime novel through and through.
Mike Ballard is a cop who's just trying to get through the day and do as little as possible. In the past he was branded as crooked and although his job was saved, he no longer seems to care. The town where he works is as crooked as they come, and the DA wants Ballard's help in cleaning it up. The DA, by the way, is married to Ballard's former fiancée. Ballard turns him down. People start to die, beginning with the DA. Ballard stays out of it. He's thoroughly tough, disillusioned, disaffected. He wants no part of anything. But of course . . . .
Any Woman He Wanted (the title has no more to do with the book than the quotation from March) is hardboiled and dark all the way through, almost. The ending is something you have to read to believe. I'm sure it wasn't the original ending, and maybe we'll never know what that was. I'd bet the house it wasn't the one in the book, however.
I don't know why Gold Medal rejected this book. It's topnotch Whittington, and that means it's very good, indeed.
Amazon.com: BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled 3 eBook: Patti Abbott, Fred Blosser, Hilary Davidson, Chris F. Holm, Sophie Littlefield, Andrew Nette, Keith Rawson, Kieran Shea, Josh Stallings, David Cranmer: Kindle Store: The third time’s a blood-splattered charm as BEAT to a PULP and nine of today’s hard-hitting, top writers stalk the depraved streets where no good deed goes unpunished, vengeance is the norm, and lady luck is a cold-hearted bitch that just left you for dead in a back alley. Raw-nerved, pure virtuosity seeps from the grunge-tainted keyboards of Patti Abbott, Fred Blosser, Hilary Davidson, Chris F. Holm, Sophie Littlefield, Andrew Nette, Keith Rawson, Kieran Shea, and Josh Stallings.
RIP: Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015): BBC is reporting that author terry Pratchett has passed away at the age of 66. Pratchett had been battling with Alzheimer’s disease for the past few years.
Michael Moorcock, The Sword and the Stallion, Quartet, 1975
Hunter attacked by naked 'Sasquatch' asks: 'Why are you trying to kill me?': "Well, I asked him who he was, and he replied very calmly, just as sane as anyone, that his name was Linus Norgren," McDonald recalled. And in the same reasonable voice, that "he was a Sasquatch from a family of Sasquatches."
Examiner.com: On its official Facebook page, legendary rock group Three Dog Night today announced the death of its original keyboardist, Jimmy Greenspoon.
Jack Williamson, The Green Girl, Avon, 1950
NY Daily News: Windell D. Middlebrooks, a gentle giant on numerous TV series and the picky deliveryman in Miller High Life commercials, died Monday morning. He was 36.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Ulysses for Dummies
Hat tip to John Duke.
Ocala.com: Truck, trailer, tons of mozzarella stolen from parking lot in Summerfield
Michael Moorcock, The Oak and the Ram, Quartet, 1974
All 6 of these realities are on fictional display in Duane Swierczynski's new book, Canary, which I might get around to commenting on one of these days.
6 Insane Realities of Being a Confidential Informant
Flavorwire: Notoriously Difficult Literary Classics, Transformed Into Popular Page-Turners
Hard to believe this movie appeared in 1997. Seems like only a couple of years ago. Maybe part of that is because I'm an old guy, but part of it is because the movie's just as relevant now as it was then.
The president of the U.S. is running for reelection and gets involved in bit of a scandal with an underage girl. Conrad Brean (Robert de Niro) is the spin doctor brought in to distract the nation from the scandal. His solution is to get the country into a fake war with Albania, and he hires Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to do the faking.
This cunning plan works at first, and when it starts to unravel, Conrad and Stanley go to greater and greater lengths to cover things up. The more bizarre it gets, the funnier it gets, or at least that's how I found it. At each disaster, Stanley declares, "This is nothing!" and comes up with a story from his Hollywood past to top it. And then goes on to create more outrageous incidents. The CIA gets involved, but Stanley and Conrad get them on board with the plot. Things get all too real in the end, and it's easy to believe something like this could happen just as it's shown in the movie.
De Niro and Hoffman are great, but so is the rest of the all-star cast. Things move fast, the dialog is snappy and funny, and the satire is sharp and on point. Great stuff.
Michael K. Williams To Star In ‘Hap and Leonard’ : “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire” star has been cast as a lead in Sundance TV’s “Hap and Leonard,” plus IFC’s “The Spoils Before Dying,” alongside Will Ferrell, both cablers announced Monday.
Flavorwire: Sam Simon, co-creator of The Simpsons, died Sunday, surrounded by his family and beloved dog, after a long battle with colon cancer. He was 59 years old, and was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012.
Fox4News.com: State legislators on Tuesday will look at a bill that would end Daylight Saving Time in Texas.
Keith Laumer, A Plague of Demons, Coronet, 1977
