True Grit Days

An old friend of mine, Fred Williams, lives in Ridgway, Colorado, where True Grit was filmed. This weekend they're celebrating with the first annual "True Grit Days." A few of Wayne's co-stars are in town for the event, and Fred took a few photos. On top is a guy who was supposedly one of Wayne's stand-ins. Below that are Angie Dickinson and Kim Darby in a crowd of autograph seekers.

TIME Magazine - 100 Best TV Shows

I'm too lazy to read the whole list.

Happy Birthday, Phyllis A. Whitney!

From the official website. Click on the link if you want to send greetings.

The Official PHYLLIS A. WHITNEY Web site - 2007 Birthday Book: "In honor of her upcoming 104th birthday, please join me and others in sending birthday greetings to Phyllis A. Whitney; someone who has brought us so much reading pleasure over the years. Perhaps you might send a few words about why you like her books, which books are your favorites, or even how her books may have impacted your life. Our greetings will be presented to her on her birthday, September 9, 2007, as she celebrates this special occasion with her family."

Gator Update (Ohio Edition)

Gator gone wild in Elyria

Lisa Roberson | The Chronicle-Telegram

Pet alligator escapes cage

ELYRIA — A missing baby alligator has residents on one Elyria street sticking close to home while the creature wanders inside drainage ditches.

An empty cage behind a Lucille Drive home once contained an 18-inch baby alligator, but now the animal is on the loose. It peeks its head out from the ditch sometimes but is mostly out of sight, residents said.

Aggies Pwnd by One of their Own

My Way News - Alum Charged With Hacking Into Texas A&M: "HOUSTON (AP) - A recent graduate of Texas A&M University is charged with hacking into the school's computer system and illegally accessing information on 88,000 current and former students, faculty and staff members.

Luis Castillo must appear before a magistrate judge Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors said Castillo, who graduated in December with a computer science degree, accessed the system in February and caused more than $5,000 in losses to the university. The school had to hire extra staff to minimize damage.

Castillo was charged with felony reckless damage to a protected computer and could face as many as five years in prison if convicted."

Top 10 Shoot 'Em Ups

With film clips.

Thanks to Gerard Saylor for the link.

Ah, Rejection

No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov - New York Times: "For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Ana�s Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”)."

Madeleine L’Engle, R. I. P.

Madeleine L’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead - New York Times: "Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year."

Will the Persecution Never End?

Et tu, Hallmark?

Larry Wachowski Is Still a Man

FOXNews.com - No Sex Change for 'Matrix' Director Larry Wachowski - Celebrity Gossip | Entertainment News | Arts And Entertainment: "Larry Wachowski is still a man. The co-director of the 'Matrix' movies was rumored to have had a sex-change operation recently. Internet sites started buzzing recently that Larry was now called Lana. Someone even edited his Wikipedia entry to that effect. The Wachowski Brothers, they said, were about to become the Donny and Marie of filmmaking."

The Concrete Maze -- Steven Torres

Steven Torres leaves Precinct Puerto Rico for the mean streets of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn in 1992, and in The Concrete Maze, those streets are about as mean as they've ever been depicted.

Jasmine, the 13-year-old daughter of Luis Ramos, disappears. Luis is determined to find her, and he enlists the aid of Marc, his nephew, to find her. Ramos is a veteran of Viet Nam. He has guns, and he knows what it is to kill. The loss of his daughter makes him a little crazy.

Marc is young. He's not naive, but he doesn't know the darkness of the streets first hand. He's about to. His narration gradually reveals the terrible things that can happen to the young and not-so-innocent (both to Jasmine and to himself). By the end, he's walked the circles of the Inferno to the lowest level.

The Concrete Maze is fast, tight, and tough, just right for a paperback original. It will shake you up before it's done. Check it out.

Davy Crockett Letter Update

Thanks to Scott Brown for pointing out this link in his comment on an earlier post.

Fine Books Blog: Texas Pays $490,000 for Fake Crockett Letter?: "The governor of Texas personally announced two days ago that the state of Texas had coughed up about half a million dollars for Davy Crockett's last letter, written to his children, two months before the Alamo. 'Today we're here for a very special purpose,' Governor Rick Perry said at the unveiling ceremony, 'To peer through the mists of time.' Unfortunately, the 'mists' may be the mists of wishful thinking. Everett Wilkie, a library security expert, has been posting about this on the ExLibris mailing list [here, here]"

Hang Onto those Baseball Cards from Your Childhood

Someday they may be worth Big Bucks.

Rare Honus Wagner 1909 baseball card sold for record $2.8 million: "(09-06) 15:54 PDT Mission Viejo, Calif. (AP) -- A rare Honus Wagner baseball card has been sold for a record $2.8 million, just over six months after it was bought for a then-record $2.35 million.

Referred to as the 'Mona Lisa' of baseball cards, the almost mint-condition collectible — released in 1909 by the American Tobacco Company — was sold by Brian Seigel of Las Vegas to an unidentified Southern California collector in February. SCP Auctions was a minority owner, but David Kohler, the company's president and CEO, said that's no longer the case.

Kohler said the new owner wishes to remain a private collector for now, but might identify himself at a later date. The sale was completed last week and announced Thursday.

The T206 baseball card features a youthful Wagner in his Pittsburgh Pirates uniform. At the time of the February sale, it was displayed at a Dodger Stadium news conference."

A Writing Contest for fans of Will Rogers

Entries are being received for the 2007 Will Rogers Writing Contest.

Sponsored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the contest is open to writers everywhere who are interested in the writings of Will Rogers.

Authors of entries that best reflect the Rogers style of writing will be awarded cash prizes. The first place winner will receive an award of $200. The prize for second place is $100 and third place $50.

An entry consists of an essay of 500 to 750 words (maximum) written in the style of Will Rogers. Detailed rules and information may be found at the NSNC Web site www.columnists.com or at www.willrogersok.org (click on What's New? and scroll down to the September 2007 newsletter).

The deadline for receipt of entries is October 1.

Robert L. Haught

Director, 2007 Will Rogers Writers' Workshop

Will the Persecution Never End?

No, especially not if there's an offspring to kick around.

Thanks to Jeff Meyerson for the big news.

The Edsel is 50

Back in the Olden Days, the new cars appeared in the fall of the year. The '58 cars came out in the fall of '57. One of them was the Edsel. Sheriff Dan Rhodes owns one. There are some great photos in the gallery.

Link via Boing Boing.

Edsel.com Gallery: The 1958 Edsel: "Released into a nation struggling with a weak economy and fears of the Soviet satellite flying high overhead, the Edsel rollout couldn't have had worse timing. Combined with an undersupplied dealership network, radical styling and overhyped publicity, the 1958 Edsel undeservedly became a symbol of failure that endures to this day."

Quote of the Day

From Stephen King: Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Jane in Jail (Stage, not Film)

Paris Hilton goes back to prison : Bang : Celebs : Entertainment : Sympatico / MSN

(BANG) - Paris Hilton is set to go back to prison - for a West End musical.

The hotel heiress, who recently served 23 days in jail for driving with a suspended licence, is to appear in a London stage version of cult Australian TV show 'Prisoner: Cell Block H'.

A source said: "Everyone is very excited. There was a real buzz around the show when we thought we would get some well-known Australian soap actors but Paris is a major coup.

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The Spellman Files: A Novel -- Lisa Lutz

I was alerted to this book by Steve Steinbock, who said it was a "laugh out loud treat," or something like that. It's about a family of private-eyes, narrated by the elder (mid-20s) daughter, Isabel, or Izzy. The younger daughter (age 14) is Rae. Then there's Uncle Ray, and Izzy's parents.

As you can see from the title, this isn't called a mystery or a thriller. It's "a novel." I think that's part of my problem with it. It couldn't quite seem to make up its mind about what it wanted to be. There's a mystery, but it doesn't even get mentioned until about halfway through the book. There's also a disappearance, which is mentioned early on, but it's not much of a mystery. So it's a novel.

It's about a family that has problems, and while most of the problems are Izzy's, certainly not all of them are. There's the war between Rae and Ray, for example. There's the perfect brother, David, and his secret. And more. As Steve said, it's very funny, and I like the way Lisa Lutz writes. I'd recommend it for those reasons, but don't come to it expecting anything like a mystery novel. There's a sequel, Curse of the Spellmans, coming in 2008. It might be interesting to see what it's about.

Otto Penzler: Blogger

It appears that Otto Penzler has begun blogging. Check out his first post here.