Dibs

When he wasn’t busy rehearsing, playing riffs, engaging in affairs with thirteen-year-old girls, scribbling in his journal or metal-detecting, ex-Stones bassist Bill Wyman was snapping photographs. Selections from his 22,000-image archive will go on exhibit at the San Francisco Art Exchange tomorrow, launching an international tour. The photos depict Wyman’s famous friends as well as [...]

The current fad in which parents make kids feel like omnipotent geniuses is not just a fad but an industry whose players include such self-publishing “print-on-demand” (but I ask you — demanded by whom?) Web sites as lulu.com. The parents of homeschooled North Carolina eight-year-old Thomas Little have issued press releases announcing that their son [...]

You know him from The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and Biodome. “I feel like I have gone skydiving and I’m falling from the sky toward earth at 120 miles per hour,” says Stephen Baldwin now, anticipating the release of his new memoir about finding religion. “The wind is howling in my ears and whipping [...]

You know her as the megabestselling author of such books as Toxic Bachelors and Daddy, but Danielle Steel is also the brains behind a San Francisco art gallery, Steel Gallery, soon to be defunct. In 2003, Steel got the idea of opening a showplace for comtemporary artists who, as she told the San Francisco Chronicle, [...]

Beantown isn’t big on pastures, but from June 4 until September 5 the city is home to more than a hundred life-size fiberglass moo-cows, “grazing” on sidewalks and other urban settings as part of CowParade Boston, a public-art extravaganza and fundraiser. To celebrate the launch of Houghton Mifflin’s new American Heritage® Dictionary, Boston Edition, HM [...]

She wanted to be an orthodontist, but at seventeen, hot island babe Dayanara Torres was persuaded to enter the Miss Puerto Rico pageant instead. She won, then shortly thereafter she entered the Miss Universe pageant and won that too. Told you she was hot! During and after her reign, she founded scholarship programs for poor [...]

It’s always fun or at least psychedelic to imagine your fav books recast in alternate genres, alternate time periods, alternate countries and such. A sci-fi version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Beowulf as chick lit. So imagine Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses … set in 18th-century Korea! At least the century hasn’t changed from the [...]

Admit it. You get soooo hot over those preternaturally huge eyes, that wild flowing hair and the cute way those sailor-suited schoolgirls and cone-breasted androids wreak havoc and save damaged planets. It’s all female Japanese cartoon characters all the time at Yuricon, the Tokyo convention for fans and creators of lesbian manga and anime. Yaoi [...]

Alexander McCall Smith, beloved author of several bestselling novels featuring Botswanan female detective Precious Ramotswe, is great friends with Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The pair met in 2004 after the bassist (real name Michael Balzary) posted on the band’s web site about how much he loved Precious Ramotswe. Having survived a [...]

Amazon.com was forced to admit having made a huge mistake last weekend and has vowed to alter its UK site as a result. The trouble erupted when links to books for gun enthusiasts and marksmen appeared on the page for Sandra Uttley’s book Dunblane Unburied, about a tragic 1996 school massacre in Scotland that left [...]