Just got through reading Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin - hence the earlier post - which if you have a sense of humor I would recommend, no demand, you read as soon as possible.
At any rate, on with the excerpt....
Mixed reviews continued. At the end of my closing-night show at the Troubadour, I stood onstage and took out five bananas. I peeled them, pit one on my head, one in each pocket, and squeezed one in each hand. Then I read the last line of my latest bad review: "Sharing hte bill with Poco this week is comedian Steve Martin...his twenty-five minute routine failed to establish any comic identity that would make the audience remember him or the material." Then I walked off the stage.
I'm so used to months going by without any West Memphis Three news, I've managed to let a bunch of stuff slide recently. With the new motions and DNA results in, there is a media frenzy (Finally!) in the works, one can only hope it continues.
WM3.org has video of Damien Echols death row interview with Larry King as well as full-page images of an article People magazine included in their January 12, 2008 edition and a blurb from Time magazine. If you're looking to expose the masses to the WM3 cause, Larry King, Time, and People are a great route to take, you can't get any more mainstream than that.
The recent revelation that Terry Hobbs DNA was discovered on the murder victims apparently caused Hell to freeze over and in turn cause John Mark Byers to become a WM3 supporter. As if the case couldn't get any more surreal.
And finally a feud has broken out between WM3.org and the WM3 Innocence Project. The feud seems to have sparked over questions made by WM3IP, over the handling of funds raised by WM3.org. I don't have anything to say about the spat, other than hoping that a public flame war does nothing to help Damien, Jason,and Jessie - in fact, quite the opposite. I will say this however, I interviewed Mara Leveritt - author of Devil's Knot and member of the board of directors of the WM3IP - a while back and have nothing but positive things to say about her. I just hope people remember the big picture here.
Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. Be gentle and peaceful each day. Be warm and human and grateful, And have a good thing to say.
Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike, Be witty and happy and wise. Be honest and love all your neighbors, Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.
Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed.
Be sure to stop at stop signs, And drive fifty-five miles an hour. Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth. And when you get home get a master's degree in geology.
Be tasteless, rude, and offensive. Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional. Put a live chicken in your underwear. Go into a closet and suck eggs.
Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.
Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph. - RGJ.com
A man who believed he bore the "mark of the beast" amputated one of his hands, put it in a microwave and summoned authorities, Kootenai County sheriff's deputies say.
The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when deputies arrived at his home in this north Idaho town Saturday afternoon, and neither he nor the severed hand bore any noticeable tattoo or other mark, sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger.
The man, whose name was withheld, was in protective custody in the mental health unit of Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d'Alene, where he and the hand were taken by ambulance. Hospital spokeswoman Lisa Johnson would not say whether an attempt was made to reattach the hand, citing patient confidentiality restrictions.
"He put a tourniquet on his arm before, so he didn't bleed to death," Wolfinger said. " That kind of mental illness is just sad."
The New Testament Book of Revelation contains a passage in which an angel is quoted as saying, according to the New International Version of the Bible, "If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink the wine of God's fury."
Wolfinger said didn't know which hand was amputated. - Seattle Times
In 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram found the sole link to the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history buried in the sandy banks of the Columbia River.
Now 36, Ingram hopes to auction the weathered bundle of $20 bills as the Federal Bureau of Investigations launches a new effort to find the unknown hijacker who parachuted into the night after taking over the 1971 Northwest Orient Airlines flight.
"Think about it, it was the biggest manhunt. They never found any clues to this man," said Ingram, who followed family ties to Arkansas and now lives in Mena, west of Little Rock in the Ouachita Mountains. "The money that I found in 1980 is the only evidence ever linked to this guy that jumped out of the 727 at the altitude that he did with the weather." - OregonLive
On a cold November night 36 years ago, in the driving wind and rain, somewhere between southern Washington state and just north of Portland, Oregon, a man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a plane he'd just hijacked clutching a bag filled with $200,000 in stolen cash.
Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced?
It's a mystery, frankly. We've run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved.
Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case - thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing.
You can help. We're providing here, for the first time, a series of pictures and information on the case. Please look it all over carefully to see if it triggers a memory or if you can provide any useful information. - FBI.gov
I'm not one to get reflective come the holidays, but sooner or later I'm going to have address the fact that all of my heroes are criminals and junkies. (And puppets....)
