Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Department of Twisted Logic

The Joseph Fritzl case in Austria is a horrifying train wreck that I can't stop reading about. But today's story takes the cake, what with Fritzl complaining about poor media coverage from jail:

His criticism of the international media's reporting was published in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung.

"I could have killed them all," reads the front page headline of today's Bild Zeitung. And Fritzl, dubbed a monster by the Austrian media, told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, "I'm not a monster," according to today's report.

Fritzl is sharing his prison cell with another man who is serving time for taking part in a shooting incident. The men have a TV set and a radio available to them in their cell.

Ah, the delusions of psychopathic grandeur...

Scam Artists in the Literary World

Or, to get all 1337-speak, my reaction upon reading this LA Times article by Scott Timberg was on par with OMGWTFBBQ!!!!111!!!:

With the explosion of computer viruses, identity theft and Nigerian e-mail scams over the last few years, it may have been inevitable that bookstores got a part of the action. And slowly but surely, stores are being contacted by people claiming to be someone they're not and trying to persuade the bookstore staff to send them money. It's bewildering to a community that operates largely on trust and personal relationships.

"It's an annoyance," said Jennifer Ramos, who handles the more than 300 author events a year at Pasadena's Vroman's Books. "It was funny at first, but it seems wrong now."

This tale is typical: [Skylight Books manager Kerry] Slattery was heading out of the store, not long ago, to see a movie down the street when a staffer handed her the phone. The caller addressed her like an old friend: "Oh -- thank God I got you before you left," he began.

The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.

"I thought, 'Why isn't he calling his wife?' " recalled Slattery. "But maybe he can't reach anybody, maybe he had an extra drink. . . . It never occurred to me that it wasn't him.

Well, it wasn't, but Slattery was thisclose to wiring $200 to the resourceful scammer, just one of several hitting West Coast bookshops. "We all think that we're smart about things,"Slattery tells Timberg. "There is this sense that bookstores have this special relationship with authors, that they help them out. And if it had really been Mark Sarvas I definitely would have done it."

The baby with two faces

Yes, I love these kinds of stories. And this one is both a doozy and heartwarming:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated — she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

"My daughter is fine — like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

"She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time," Ali said.

Naturally the story is being linked all around the blogosphere, but this post, from Fracas, struck me as particularly appropriate:

I couldn’t help but think to myself, how different things would be had she been born here in Canada or the United States. Chances are, the first thought would have been horror, followed by an immediate, “Who and where can we have this surgically corrected?” We who worship celebrity, perfection and a media that insists on impressing upon our own young that if their nose is less than perfect, they must fix it; if their boobs are not big enough they must inflate them… and we who choose to irrationally believe that all the “beautiful people” on magazines are actually that perfect without any help from the re-touch artist, would no doubt be traumatized to have given birth to a child with two sets of eyes, two noses and two pairs of lips.

No kidding. It remains to be seen how healthy Lali will remain but right now, she's pretty damn beautiful.

Good Thing No Foul Play Was Involved

Because if this was fiction it sure as hell would be:
 

Terry Cottle and Sonny Graham never met, but the two men shared two very important things -- a heart and a wife.

They also died the same way: Cottle, 12 years ago from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the Summerville home he shared with his wife, Cheryl; the 69-year-old Graham died the same way last week outside his Vidalia, Georgia, home that he shared with his wife, Cheryl.

When Cottle died at age 33, his organs were donated. Graham got Cottle's heart and nine years later, he married Cottle's widow. Harvey says the former golf tournament director had used a shotgun and no foul play was suspected in his death.

I fully expect to see this on either Law and Order or in a crime novel, stat.

Somehow Appropriate

I've been on a bit of an international pop star kick of late, and the recent death of Jules Dassin had me hunting around on YouTube for clips of his son Joe, a massive star in France in the 1970s whose life was cut short in 1980 at the age of 42 thanks to heart attack number five.

Anyway, chances are "Les Champs Elysees" stuck in your head at some point in your life, but this is my kitschy fave of Joe Dassin's work right now: Something tells me Freddy Mercury saw this...

Beware of Nude

Though the story's headline is far, far funnier:

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) - Police in Pennsylvania say they've arrested a naked man who ran amok on Friday, attacking businesses near a resort area.

A supermarket and the nearby Willow Valley Resort hotel are assessing the damage. Authorities say some office space at the hotel was trashed, a forklift was driven into an interior wall, and an overhead sewer pipe was damaged. Police say the man then entered a nearby market, and threw a 300-pound pizza oven to the floor. Among other equipment damaged in the incident -- which was captured on surveillance cameras -- was a $90,000 meat-wrapping machine.

The 28-year-old suspect had reportedly been a guest at the resort.

Pictures of his, ah, misdeeds are here.

I Blame Daylight Savings Time for This

Normally I don't blog much about politics and current events, but I'm still picking up my jaw from the Spitzer scandal, like just about everybody else. For example, it was topic one among those working at the mail drop where I make regular visits to pick up books that have just arrived and they never talk about political-related stuff. But when the story is about variations on a theme of "Spitzer WTF", no wonder people are paying attention (not to mention that "Client Number Nine" has now been instantly enshrined as a phrase, with a Searchers-like parody in store, no doubt.)

News stories will be appearing round-the-clock for the next few days and I hope some of them answer my burning question: what's Spitzer really hiding? Because his quick admission smacks of a McGreevey-like smokescreen, where sex scandal may well mask greater financial improprieties. And will the NYT's vigilant sniffing uncover the whole story, or is this destined to stay a tawdry, if highly addictive story with many more twists and turns in store?

UPDATE: This is why it is good to have an older brother who can write rhyming song lyrics at a near-instant.

The Agony of The Feet

Forgive the cringe-worthy title, but this story, set off Gabriola Island in British Columbia, is rather indescribable in its potential for mystery:

Should a fourth human foot float ashore here in the evergreen Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada, the person who finds it would no doubt want to know the answers to three questions.

Is it a right foot?

Is it wearing a running shoe?

Is the shoe a size 12?

After all, for the first three feet that surfaced on the rocky coastlines of three separate islands in the Strait of Georgia over the last six months, the answer has been yes in nearly every case. The only uncertainty is what size shoe No. 3 was wearing when it was spotted by a boater on the beach of remote Valdez Island on Feb. 8. The coroner’s office, facing a bit of a news media blitz, has yet to say.

“This is the first incident in recent memory where we’ve had three such similar sets of remains come to our attention in a certain time frame and a certain geographic area,” said Jeff Dolan, assistant deputy chief coroner for the British Columbia Coroner’s Office.

Could it be murder? Something's definitely askew but others dismiss the notion. “The whole thing is a scam, as far as I’m concerned, all part of a big joke,” said 80 year old Digby Jones. “If they go to the mortuaries on the mainland, you’ll find some guy laughing his head off.”

(hat tip to EP and JH)

Oh yes, there's definitely movie potential

Because this is one of the greatest sentences I have ever read:

Two twin brothers, who are also black gay porn stars, were arrested for allegedly pulling off a daring three-state crime spree that hit more than 40 businesses in 18 months.

Read on for more about the exploits of identical twins Keyontyli and Taleon Goffney.

Sheer existential brilliance

Granted, I'm deluged with work again, but still, this is genius. (via)