All the news that’s fit to capsulize!
‘DEVIL MAY’ AFFORD IT
Got $1,500 to spare on a book? Then you can buy one of the 300 copies of the “special edition” of Sebastian Faulks’ DEVIL MAY CARE, the new James Bond novel. What makes it so special? Leather casing, hand stitching, individual numbers, special typography and a die-cut containing a 1:43 scale model of Bond’s Bentley car. Don’t have $1,500 to spare? Then you can download a making-of PDF for free.
THINK INK … THAT STINKS
For a look at how truly awful some of the tattoos are featured in the recently reviewed NO REGRETS: THE BEST, WORST, & MOST #$%*ING RIDICULOUS TATTOOS EVER, peruse the online photo gallery. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
I, CLUELESS
Engineer Howard S. Smith has written a technothriller about artificially intelligent military robots called I, ROBOT. Yeah, Dr. Smith, that title’s pretty much taken.
AND, OF COURSE, WITTY CARTOONS
THE NEW YORKER’s annual “Summer Fiction Issue” is now on sale (issue date: June 9 and 16), containing a never-before-published-in-English short story by LOLITA author Vladimir Nabokov: “Natasha,” written in 1924. Other contributors to the issue include Annie Proulx, Tobias Wolff and Haruki Murakami.
THAT’S WHY HE USED THE WORD ‘MURDER,’ MY FRIENDS
Illustrator/author Jonathan Santlofer stars in a gory little mini-movie to promote his new novel THE MURDER NOTEBOOK, his second featuring NYPD forensic sketch artist Nate Rodriguez.
HARD TO BELIEVE
Titan Books offers a glimpse into the wonderland of Vern’s SEAGALOGY: A STUDY OF THE ASS-KICKING FILMS OF STEVEN SEAGAL with these fun Seagal facts:
• Throughout his films, Seagal has made weapons of a skewer, sand, a microwave, a pylon, a table saw, a sausage, a bar towel, a pool cue, a pan, a rolling pin, a corkscrew, a decorative rope, a tusk, a tree, an empty 2-liter bottle, a helicopter blade, a pipe, a cable, concentrated coconut oil, lighter fluid, a flare gun, a credit card, a bulldozer blade, a telephone, some lumber, a wine glass, a kerosene lamp, a CD, a phonography, a chair leg, a ceremonial wooden club, a barber’s smock, chopsticks, a faucet, urinals, a metal pole and a fork.
• Most of Seagal’s characters are cops, intelligence agents or soldiers. However, he has also portrayed a doctor, a rogue corporate firefighter, an EPA agent, a thief and a professor of Chinese archaeology at Yale.
• Although Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme have never appeared in a film together, they have shared a stunt: The same shot of a stuntman rappelling was used as Van Damme in 2001’s THE ORDER and as Seagal in 2005’s TODAY YOU DIE.
• One of Seagal’s special talents is to injure someone’s body part in such a way that they are forced to yell something about that body part. In OUT FOR JUSTICE in particular he causes people to yell “Motherfucker, you knocked my teeth out!,” “You took my leg!” and “My balls! My balls! Balls!”
• Seagal’s movies are a boon to the sugar glass industry; in THE GLIMMER MAN alone, there are nine separate occurrences of characters jumping through or being thrown through windows. —Rod Lott
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Well, between the “I, Robot” cover with all the fire, and the hilarious “fun facts” about Seagal being a firefighter, I had to put in a recommendation for a book I read recently, “One Foot in the Black. It’s about a young man who leaves his abusive home and becomes a seasonal (wildfire) firefighter in California. I think the adventures in the book probably rival anything Seagal fought in the movies!