Category: News

According to the AP, J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye has died. He was 91.

From the AP obituary:

“The Catcher in the Rye,” with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made “Catcher” a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight – and concern.”

Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel’s themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. “Catcher” presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter’s “The Blackboard Jungle” to Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep,” movies from “Rebel Without a Cause” to “The Breakfast Club,” and countless rock ‘n’ roll songs echoed Salinger’s message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of “The Graduate,” was but a blander version of Salinger’s narrator.

It’s a sad day.

I’m actually working on a new History Blog post today, but in the meantime, here’s a quick news dump to tide you over:

– You’ve probably heard about the mysterious stranger who left roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave on his birthday every year… well, this year he (or she) didn’t show up. Or at least, he hasn’t shown up yet. For the past sixty years, he’s shown up every January 19th before 5:30 am… but there’s been no sign of him so far.

– The folks over at Audioholics have noticed something interesting: the Lexicon BD-30, a high-end ($3,500!) Blu-Ray player is nothing more than a $500 Oppo BDP-83 Blu-Ray player stuffed into a fancy case. Apparently the people over at Lexicon didn’t even bother taking the Oppo out of its chassis: the Lexicon is literally an Oppo (chassis and all) stuffed into a fancy aluminum chassis and marked up $3,000. Nice. Read more here.

– Speaking of disc players, here’s Stereophile Magazines’ very first review of a CD player from 1983: the Sony CDP-101. It’s kind of funny how they worried whether there’d be enough “software” (music) to make the purchase worthwhile! Also interesting: the player’s $1,000 list price is $2,134.47 in 2008 dollars. To think that you can buy one for $13.96 these days.

– Baltimore football fans are a special kind of crazy.

– Want to make sure that your luggage arrives safe and sound on your next flight? Pack a gun in your bag. As you might know, carrying a handgun in checked luggage is not only not a crime, it only involves filling out a simple form at the check-in counter at the airport. And once your hand your bag over, your bag is placed in a high security area that’s constantly monitored (TSA really doesn’t want to lose a bag with a gun in it). What you may not know is that starter pistols are included on the list. Yes, those blank-firing “guns” used to start track and swim meets are considered “firearms” by the FAA. So you can buy one – no background check or waiting period needed, and legal in every state – and stuff it right into your bag. Even better: a used starter pistol should only set you back around $20.

– First of all, let me just say that my thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti. I’ve been watching CNN all day, and it appears that the death toll will be in the hundreds of thousands (500,000 is not impossible here). It’s heartbreakingly sad, and I hope that rescue workers can get there as soon as possible.

– Speaking of disasters, a mystery object flew by Earth yesterday. The object, which was no larger than 50 feet across, came within 76,000 miles of our planet, or roughly a third of the way to the moon. That’s pretty close in planetary terms! Astronomers disagree about what it might have been. Italian scientists Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero think it’s space junk, but NASA is not so sure. Given the object’s trajectory, the space agency thinks that it’s unlikely to be space junk and is more likely to be a small asteroid.

– Fast food giant KFC is suing itself. Sort of. It’s complicated.

– A lost and hungry pig made her way to the drive-through at a Quizno’s in Lake of the Pines, California last week and attracted the attention of employees by oinking into the microphone. They fed her some Quizno’s while they waited for Animal Control to arrive. The pig was malnourished, but is now doing fine and should have no problems being adopted.

– I’m not a big fan of “emotional distress” in lawsuits, but I think I agree with this one: a family is suing two funeral homes… because they included a mother’s brain in the personal affects given to the family. The woman (named only as “M.F.R.” in the suit) died in a car accident in Utah. The body was prepared there, then returned to her home in New Mexico for the funeral service and burial. During the embalming of someone who died from trauma, organs in the damaged area are typically removed from the body and placed in plastic bags (which makes sense: if someone died from a bullet wound to the head, it would be kind of gross to have brains leaking out everywhere). Somewhere along the line, the bag containing the woman’s brain was mixed in with the bag of her personal items (clothes, purse, etc.). The two funeral homes blame each other, and the family is presumably having nightmares about the entire incident.

– Speaking of gross, I guess you’ve heard by now that a Mexican drug cartel killed an opponent, skinned his face, and then stitched it to a soccer ball.

– Lastly, in lighter news, fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia might like this pic from a local newscast, where the dreaded Dick Towel made an appearance:

– You know those news stories you sometimes read about a child trapped under a heavy object, and a panicked parent temporarily gaining super human strength in order to rescue the child? Well, it’s apparently happened again, this time in Kansas. Apparently Nick Harris, a completely average 5’8″, 185lb. man, saw a neighbor’s daughter being accidentally backed over by a Mercury sedan. He rushed over and lifted the car off her. He tried lifting several other cars later that same day, but could not replicate the deed.

– In his new film Up In The Air, George Clooney stars as somone who is a member of an airline’s super-secret frequent flier program that offers such perks as private check-in, secret doors that allow him to get “cuts” to the front of the security lines, customer service on a first-name basis who will do anything to get him to his destination, even if that means booking him on another airline or holding connecting flights at the gate, and a “never, ever, ever bumped” policy. Although the film takes a few liberties, such über-elite programs are actually real. This post over at ABC News talks about the real-life perks that some lucky folks get.

– Firefox 3.5 has apparently overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the single most popular browser.

– Click here to read about the couple who paid around $150,000 for a 175 square foot “micro studio” apartment in Manhattan. The apartment is 15 feet long and 10 feet wide, and the bed takes up a whopping third of the living space… but the view is reportedly spectacular!

– Britain’s Prime Minster Gordon Brown once bounced a £3 rent check when he was in college. This news came to light as his former landlord, who found the check while going through some old papers, decided to put it up for sale on eBay. I’ll let you write your own “how can he balance the budget when he can’t even balance his own checkbook” jokes.

– A group of undersea archaeologists have found yet another strange formation on the bottom of the Caribbean sea, and think that the pictures show more proof of the existence of Atlantis. I say “another” because some people have been convinced for years that the so-called Bimini Road is evidence of some great civilization that once flourished in the Caribbean islands. The group hasn’t released the specific location of their “find” yet.