Rumors are flying out of Cupertino about a new Apple device, the iShit. Expected to be priced from $499, the iShit will be the first consumer product made entirely from human feces. While the iShit won’t necessarily do anything spectacular (or anything whatsoever), the Apple logo will be prominently displayed on its case.
Analysts expect demand to be high.
Every Easter, after our dinner guests have gone or we return home from a restaurant or another’s home, my wife and I watch our DVD copy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
We watch the DVD copy as it is unlikely that Gibson’s controversial film will be played on TV in the way we see The Ten Commandments each year.
I note this and offer an old column I wrote when Gibson’s film was released in 2004 on my most recent post on my blog, http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com.
It has been an interesting two weeks of existence we’ve had here in America, hasn’t it? Ever since the Democrats gave America’s Tina the Ike Turner Treatment by passing health care in the face of majority opposition, we’ve had the Democrats give us a victory lap, settle down, look at their poll numbers, and apparently they’ve begun to feel something similar to the uncomfortable state of being which accompanies the passing of a kidney stone the size of your average brick.
This has been a great NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. It has had all the right ingredients: buzzer beaters, upsets, and break through performances. So with a near perfect formula, why would the NCAA consider expanding the Tournament, and risk cheapening its significance? I mean will anyone watch Selection Sunday anymore? College basketball is not alone in wanting too much. There are a lot of successful professional sports that ignore the adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”Then there are others that need fixing bad! Let us take a look at a few. [Read more →]
This week I am digging Starburst jelly beans. We are making a basket for our two year old son Jack, which means we are picking out candy we like since he can’t really have much of it. I was happy to find my favorite Easter candy- the elusive Starburst jelly beans. The Holy Grail of beans made of hardened jelly. Each year is different, sometimes you can’t find them, sometimes they seem to be raining from the sky. (At least in my dreams) The O’Connor house is on bag number three and they may be the reason I have had trouble sleeping lately. [Read more →]
Beatings, beagle-sniffings, institutional-under-the-bus-throwings, karma-blowings, biblical possessions, bad right-wing metal, and last, but not least, snail mucus. For true believers, think of them as 5 more tests-of-faith . . . and for the rest of us, 5 more reasons to not totally dismiss nihilism.
One of the reasons for which we can be grateful for the 2008 election campaign is that it revealed to young people who might have been contemplating a few years at journalism school what a waste of time, money and effort such an ‘education’ represents. [Read more →]
I’ve mentioned Lenore Skenazy once or twice before in my column. She’s an author, a columnist, a blogger and a mom who let her kid ride the subway by himself at the age of 9. Quick! Everybody gasp in horror. Her website Free-Range Kids is a must read/browse/love/hate — whatever — if you’re a parent, you have to check it out. Parents today are so afraid of losing their children at the park, the mall, whatever — that they’ve taken to literally attaching tracking devices to their children’s feet. Sensational Beginnings even makes it look cute and fuzzy so the kids will go for it.
Charlie Crist’s having a rough stretch. Florida’s governor is seeking the Republican nomination for the Senate and finding opponent Marco Rubio much tougher than expected in a race that isn’t volatile so much as manic-depressive, with Crist having both led and trailed by over 30 points in the polls. Crist has been deemed too liberal by much of the party base, putting a man who once fancied himself a future President on the verge of a likely career-ending defeat. Oh, and many people believe he’s secretly gay. [Read more →]
Michael Connelly is a best-selling crime novelist whose series of crime thrillers about Harry Bosch, a troubled but dedicated LAPD detective, is very popular with crime and thriller readers.
I spoke to Michael Connelly about his latest novel, Nine Dragons, and his previous novel, The Scarecrow. We also discussed the Internet, crime novels, crime, Clint Eastwood, and the current state of journalism.
Below is my interview with him:
During the Bronze Age, a number of publishers attempted to mimic the mainstream success of “the big two,” Marvel and DC. The largest of these — companies like Charlton, Archie, Harvey, Whitman, and Atlas — were able only to make a small dent in the big two’s market share. But one company that popped up in the mid-1970s, Hues Corporation, didn’t necessarily need to grab a big share of the comics market.
That’s because Hues Corporation existed primarily as a way for the “publishers” to launder money made from illegal drug sales in Miami and New York.
Despite the fact that the company had little interest in creating quality comic books, they did manage, during their three-month publishing existence in 1974, to release some interesting and eccentric titles. There was SuperWulf, “The Werewolf with super powers!”; there were The Base Ballers, a professional baseball team that won every game they played, because, of course, they had super powers (which they used to fight crime): there was Senator Secret, a United States senator from New Orleans who had “the power of the Magick,” and managed to fight supernatural crime while still finding time to serve as the ranking minority member of the Senate sub-finance committee; there was The Ochinaut, a man who shrunk himself down to microscopic size and entered people’s bodies to fight “the crimes within us all”; and there was my personal favorite, the hero with “the stomach of steel,” The Gormandizer. [Read more →]
In “The Package” Jin is distraught over having his $25,000 confiscated at the airport, Sun is panicked that her lavish bank account was emptied by her father, Widmore is angry that events aren’t going according to plan, and Desmond didn’t seem particularly happy about being drugged, stuffed in a sub, and brought back to the island. But if there’s anything that life and Lost teach us, it’s that our plans aren’t always in our own best interest. They say that man plans and God laughs. The question is, is God laughing with us, or at us? [Read more →]
