KGW.com, Seattle’s channel 8, is reporting that a local fire department’s hazmat team was called out after a library in Ballard, Washington was evacuated today because of a suspicious substance deposited in the book drop. A librarian complained that after touching it, her hands began tingling. Results of the investigation haven’t yet been released.
She earned nearly $2 million, partly from her book Mark of Voodoo, but now it’s thirty months in federal prison for “voodoo chief” and “shaman psychologist” and convicted tax fraudster Sharon Caulder. Having practiced a lucrative form of psychotherapy by which clients in Northern California paid $300 a pop to have Caulder perform exorcisms and identify supernatural creatures (rather than phobias, neuroses or personality disorders) that were plaguing them, the jailbound PhD claims to have been subjected to childhood ritual abuse (cats were killed!) in Brooklyn under the auspices of her Christian Scientist parents. When these allegedly repressed memories emerged out of the blue in middle age, Caulder decided that what was really going on in her family circle was voodoo, and that she should pursue this as a career. One thing led to another, and she became a shrink. Then she moved from Oakland to New Orleans and opened Chez Vodun, a “voodoo museum and temple” with its own bar and cafe on Rampart Street. But even a ferryboatload of Beninese fetishes couldn’t keep the Feds from charging Caulder last year with two counts of bankruptcy fraud and five counts of failure to file income-tax returns. Prosecutors said they proved that Caulder received more than $1.7 million in gross income for providing alternative healing services and from royalties, according to Bay City News Wire. In her book, Caulder claims that an African Voodoo Pope thought she was smokin’ hot, and that she can levitate.
Idi Amin’s shag rug, Saddam Hussein’s murals, what appears to be colonic-irrigation equipment in Nicolae Ceausescu palace (whose construction required the demolition of 7,000 structures) … laugh and cry as you pore through vintage photographs detailing the home decor of infamous men and women whom style-guru York calls “the world’s most colorful despots,” but who he also concedes were responsible for untold suffering, ruined nations, and the deaths of millions. York’s commentary is nothing short of irresistible: for instance, tiled pavilions were given to Zaire’s Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (who called himself “the All-Powerful Warrior, Who, Because of His Endurance and Inflexible Will to Win, Will Go From Conquest to Conquest, Leaving Fire in His Wake”) by “the freedom-loving People’s Republic of China, though God only knows what Mao expected in return.”
Grade: A
Jack McLaren’s slender 1956 book Let’s All Hate Toronto inspired filmmaker Albert Nerenberg — who lives in Toronto — to make a documentary with the same name. Currently in the works, the film explores why this fifth-largest city in North America, nicknamed “Hogtown,” so inflames residents of other Canadian cities and, apparently, the entire population of Earth, including Toronto’s 5.6 million — who, as Nerenberg told the Calgary Herald, indulge in “a sort of self-loathing, a resentment of the fact that they have to live and work there.” Wow. Bummer. It’s a sad role for any city to fill. Nerenberg says he got the idea in Montreal, but has found a lot of material in Alberta as well.
An English manor house in the 1920s. Part love story, part mystery — a young poet commits suicide right before a plush society party. The only witnesses are a pair of sisters: one is engaged to the poet; the other may or may not be his lover. They become estranged. At 29, debut novelist Kate Morton is breaking records in her native Australia with advances for The Shifting Fog and her second novel approaching $1 million, with foreign rights sold in eleven countries and a film deal likely, according to The Australian. Jealous?
He’s got a hunch that Oprah Winfrey doesn’t like black men, and he’s talking about it on radio shows nationwide. Syracuse University finance professor Boyce Dewhite Watkins, author of What If George Bush Were a Black Man?, fuels his claim by pointing to the recent feud between Winfrey and Ice Cube — who, along with other top rappers, resents never having been invited to appear on Winfrey’s show. A fan of Cube, Dr. Watkins explains in a press release that “the presence of very prominent black men on Winfrey’s show does not mean that she does not have a bias against black men.” He elucidates: “If you have a Grammy Award, next to your Nobel Prize, next to your Academy Award, then you are OK with Oprah…. But if you are a rank and file black man, you are more likely to be put on the show if you are ‘on the downlow’ — secretly gay — or beating your wife. I rarely see the spotlight placed on black men who are on the front lines working hard in their communities to educate and empower their people.” As revealed on his blackmanbush.com web site, Boyce feels “ostracized for even saying the words ‘black man’ in my research.” On a Fox radio show, he called Condoleezza Rice “Aunt Jemima” and “Bush’s personal porch monkey.” He doesn’t remember where he said “I’m living proof that you should never give an angry black man a PhD, ‘cause he might kill somebody with it,” but he firmly assures us that he did indeed say it, somewhere.
He wasn’t hanging out at the prison library to bone up on botany or read the entire ouevre of Rumer Godden. Instead, Rudolfo García-Lopez was scouring the shelves for books containing maps of Texas, photocopying them to aid in his escape plan. After cutting through a prison fence and climbing serpentine wire to break out of the Newton County Correctional Center on Monday evening, García-Lopez — who had been serving up to twenty years for aggravated assault and attempted kidnapping — broke into a home a mile away, stealing clothes and jewelry, which he added to the tweezers, razor blade, sunglasses, cigarette lighter, vitamins and map that comprised his escape package. When cops found him yesterday, he was wearing a floral swimsuit, riding a stolen bike, and reeking of skunk spray. The odor had put police dogs off his trail, hindering search efforts. “He was dang sure out there,” said the local sheriff, according to Southeast Texas Live. “He got lucky he was sprayed with that skunk or we would’ve had him the other night.”
Have you ever wondered what Peter Pan’s been up to since … well, since Peter Pan? Revealing yet again its increasing tendency not to leave good enough alone, Disney has launched a series of sequels. This one follows Peter and the Starcatchers, and we find the flying boy sallying forth into pirate territory, where he crosses paths with his old enemy, Cap’n Hook, now known for some reason as Black Stache. (Because as the possessor of a hook-hand, the captain is disabled, and now it’s considered cruel to point that out?) Disinterring a beloved classic protagonist out of peaceful oblivion like this and putting words into his mouth — it’s the sort of presumption you either love or hate. You might also have wondered what Pulitzer Prize-winner Barry (author of Boogers Are My Beat) has been up to lately — well, it’s this, in partnership with bestselling novelist Pearson. Aimed at young readers aged ten and up, the writing is as sprightly as you’d expect from seasoned pros, who at nearly 550 pages of dialogue and detail and sassy snits involving Tinkerbell are clearly going the J.K. Rowling bigger-is-better route.
Grade: B, probably, if you like this sort of thing
A Muslim organization in Indonesia is striving to set a world record by creating the largest-ever replica of the Koran. Made of massive batik sheets and measuring about seven feet by three feet (2.250m by 1.15m), the faux holy book took ten years to complete and will be publicly unveiled for the first time, according to the Jakarta Post, at the Istiqlal Mosque on July 22, with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in attendance. Any would-be competitors will have to complete their enormous Korans before that date.
An Illinois school-board member has just lost her bid to have nine popular books banned from the required-reading list in the state’s second-largest district. Lesley Pinney, the mother of a local high-school grad, sought to ban Beloved by Toni Morrison, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. According to the Chicago Tribune, Pinney explained her plan by saying, “If the media are bombarding our children with explicit sexual images and graphic violence and prolific profanity, can’t a school relent from that?” She said that she opposed books containing vulgar language, brutal imagery or depictions of sexual situations inappropriate for students. She specified masturbation references in the Chbosky book and a bestiality scene in Beloved. (Pollan’s book explores how various plants, including potatoes, reproduce.) But she also admitted not having actually read all the books on her ban-list. At a school-board meeting last week, Pinney’s proposal was voted down.