Children reading less for pleasure (pop! pop! pop!… that’s the sound of the tv, computer, and Wii plugs coming out of the wall… presto! Reading for pleasure!)

Pinnacle of hotness Kate Evangeline Lilly will take time off after Lost to concentrate on what turns her on most—writing… Oh. My. Gaaaaawd. Someone catch me. Between two hours of her last night (with surprisingly few shots centred around her mathematically perfect ass while she was climbing something—I guess they must have been moving the plot forward) and this news today, I think I’m going to take up smoking just to smooth out the glow… I don’t even care what or how well she writes… She does. (Yes, I know, she’s not my usual Lisa Loeb type, but it’s the only show I watch… And last night marked the first time I’ve had to watch it with the peasants instead of on commercial-less DVD. And since we only get NTV at our house, I had to travel to watch it. Thanks to our generous, wired friends in Middle Cove!)

Bronte’s dollhouse up for auction

Straight off’a the tely: Conman kills author to assume his wealth and identity

“Virgin” selling her cherry gets literary agent to broker interest in her lemon…

Jonathan Ames sold The Extra Man in Hollywood! (I have a soft spot for Ames because the first ever reading I attended in New York was Ames at the Housing Works. It was about a day after we got there and I found it in a listings section and just went. After about five minutes explaining to the crowd how badly he was balding and how he’d combed his hair to hide this, he read a story about a man with a wooden leg who developed a prosthetic vagina that could be worn over his penis. He called himself The Mangina. I thought, this is weird but kind of cool and, hey, we’re in New York. Maybe this is what fiction is here. Then when he finished, he said, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, THE MANGINA.” And the actual dude came out. It wasn’t fiction. He was wearing an old diving bell helmet and standing in a tub. Two scantily-clad go-go dancers then filled his sealed helmet with water as people from the audience were encouraged to come up and pay a dollar to “finger the mangina”. Which they did. In droves. Lady Ninja and I were gobsmacked. We looked at each other with open mouths and an expression that would a couple years later come to be known as “WTF?”. Two yokels from Toronto who knew they were in over their heads. We backed out slowly. A year later, that would have seemed charming and tame. Huh. New York. How I miss you, grand old city of insane people.)