Dr. Frank's What's-it

Sorry for Freaking Out on the Phone Last Night

I remembered it pretty good, mostly:

Why You Should Avoid Calling the Police for Pretty Much any Reason Unless You're Comfortable with the Idea that You Could Get Someone Killed, Including a Baby or even Possibly Yourself

Pizza demo lady at Costco freaks out over dwindling pizza supply; employees call cops; police arrive and shoot her dead.

Now, it does sound as though this woman's behavior was strange and evidently it was disturbing enough to spur fellow employees to call the cops. And I suppose it is *possible* that she was wielding her scissors and kitchen knife in a threatening or dangerous way as claimed (though if you follow these cases, you soon learn that initial police accounts in such circumstances are almost always misleading if not outright lies.)

However, opening fire in a crowded supermarket is hard to excuse, even if this woman warranted restraint. A ricocheting bullet injured one of the officers, and it could well have hit a customer, or, like, a baby. The ensuing stampede out of the store could well have led to more injuries. Ultimately, it strains plausibility to the breaking point to imagine that two armed officers were incapable of restraining a single, middle-aged woman without killing her. But them's the facts.

Every time I read these stories, I can't help thinking of the poor people who naively call the police to help with this or that: in that position, I'd be wracked with guilt. It certainly makes you think twice about calling the cops for any purpose, because, you know, you could get someone killed (and risk getting killed yourself if they decide to start shooting in an enclosed space.)

Will You Still Love Me When I Don't Love You?

What Could Go Wrong?

Dan Brown reveals the message that told him the door to the Lodge is open...

Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend

Listed

Hey, King Dork turns up on Whitney Matheson's list of her favorite twenty-five books from the last twenty-five years. Thanks, Whit!

Charted

From Flavorwire, a fascinating collection of charts and outlines used by famous authors for their books.

Here's the one for Catch-22:

I used iCal for all three of my books, which obviously wouldn't be at all suitable for framing like some of these. I also kept a photo record of tarot spreads used in the composition of Andromeda Klein, which was a pretty weird thing to do, now that I look back on it (the tarot spreads themselves, I mean, not the photos, because I did use them.) I never used the calendars as a way to plot things out before writing, though; I filled it in as I went along to help remember what went where. Like Raymond Chandler, I guess, I would find a fully mapped out plot too dead to work with -- though I have sometimes been known to pray that someone or something would just send me one.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he is fresh out of ideas...

A collection of great quotations on writing drawn from Raymond Chandler's letters, including:

I am having a hard time with the book. Have enough paper written to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn’t know where I was going and when I got there I saw that I had come to the wrong place. that’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it. If you gave me the best plot in the world all worked out I could not write it. It would be dead for me.

(via Michael Scott.)

Magic Man

Hillary

Casket Vignette

Here.

Boys/Girls

Patrick (who used to comment here as Cpt. I believe) passes on this photo of a seldom-seen Our Bodies Our Selves poster. His is probably the only one I've ever encountered "in the wild":

Jamaica