Archive for September, 2006



Adam Ant’s Autobiography Spawns Marriage Proposal

Published on September 27, 2006

Hark back to those balmy days of 1980, when Adam and the Ants was an art-school-new-wave band helmed by Adam Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, who drew on his father’s Romany (“gypsy”) heritage when designing his own flamboyant dark-haired stage persona. He had a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the band broke up in [...]


Dad Files Suit re: Fantasia’s Memoir

Published on

After Fantasia Barrino won the 2005 American Idol competition, it was revealed that the dazzling singer was functionally illiterate. Shortly afterward, she became the “author” of an autobiography. And now Barrino’s dad is suing Simon & Schuster, which published Fantasia: Life Is Not A Fairy Tale. According to AP: “Joseph Barrino disputes details in the [...]


Kitten-killing Novelist Inflames Japan

Published on September 23, 2006

Award-winning Japanese novelist Bando Masako threw kittens over a cliff. As a result, she might now face prosecution for breaking animal-protection laws in Tahiti, where she lives. In a column she wrote for the Japanese paper Nihon Keizai Shimbun on August 18, the author of horror novels Inugami and Yamahaha expained that she hadn’t spayed [...]


Euthanasia Book Seized by Australian Customs

Published on September 22, 2006

The author of a new book advocating euthanasia is outraged that 45 copies of it have been seized by Customs at Brisbane airport in Australia. Medical doctor Philip Nitschke is a controversial figure in his home country, where he has founded a euthanasia group called Exit. Defying Australia’s anti-euthanasia laws, Nitschke has personally assisted several [...]


Nebula-winning Author of Seventy Novels Dies

Published on September 20, 2006

One of the most prolific sci-fi/horror authors of all time died of cardiopulmonary disease last Friday. Charles Grant, who was born in 1942 and won two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards, had taught public school and served in Vietnam before becoming a full-time writer in 1975. Since then, the New Jersey resident wrote [...]


When Osama Blurbs a Book, Watch Out

Published on September 19, 2006

Three books have been removed from the Baillieu Library at Australia’s Melbourne University for promoting jihad and martyrdom, according to the Herald Sun. The country’s new anti-terror sedition laws drove the decision to remove two of the books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, which “were the subject of an investigation by [...]


Not Death Row Records — Now It’s Death Row Recipes

Published on September 13, 2006

He’s on Death Row in an Ohio prison, sentenced in 1987 for the murder of two-year-old Cynthia Collins. And now Kenny Richey wants to publish a cookbook based on recipes he has devised in prison. The 42-year-old Edinburgh native “is in talks with US publisher Excess Q to see if he can have Death Row [...]


Blind Mountain-Climbing Amputee Author Dies

Published on September 12, 2006

And you think you have “challenges”! Blind one-legged mountaineer Syd Scroggie, whose death at age 86 was reported yesterday by the BBC, was a poet and author and World War II vet, serving in a ski/mountain regiment called Lord Lovat’s Scouts. “Just weeks before the war ended he was injured by an anti-personnel mine in [...]


The Children of Famous Party Animals Sometimes Meet With Sad Ends

Published on September 11, 2006

Just as news reports are surfacing today about the tragic death last weekend of Anna Nicole Smith’s twenty-year-old son Daniel, a new (posthumous) book by the late son of another very famous figure is about to be published. Billed by its publisher, Soft Skull, as “a portrait of a wasted life,” Cursed From Birth is [...]


Is Nothing Sacred?

Published on September 10, 2006

Irish firefighters are commonly assaulted by hooligans who stab them with used hypodermic needles and trash their firetrucks as they attempt to fight conflagrations and save lives, according to a new book, Firecall: True Stories of Irish Firefighting & Rescue, by Ruairi Kavanagh, former editor of Firecall magazine, the official journal of Irish fire and [...]