KILLADELPHIA: 3 More Dead Since U Went 2 Bed

INQUIRER: Warminster police are looking for three men believed to have taken part in the killing of two people and the wounding of another at an apartment complex. “This is not a whodunit, it’s a where-are-they?” said chief Michael Murphy after SWAT operations at two locations failed to snare the suspects. Shortly before midnight, a gunfire erupted at the apartment of Mendez Thomas, 22, in the Bucks Landing Apartment Complex in the 100 block of East Street Road. Thomas was pronounced dead at the scene. Lisa Diaz, 27, was taken to Abington Hospital, where she died. Both had been shot […]

HOT DOCUMENT: Collateral Damage

Hello – Last week there was an unfortunate incident outside of The Starlight Ballroom during a private birthday party (not an R5 event). After a group of people left the venue once it was closed — two individuals began to fight over a woman. The argument escalated and security directed the two men to leave the block. Once they were across the street and down the block (away from security and a stationed police officer) — an individual produced a handgun and shot at the man who he was arguing with. Sgt Wilkins from the Philadelphia Police department has made […]

MAILBAG: The Royal Dressing Down

DEAR PHAWKER, At what age are snarky, dismissive film critics for online publications required to find a new schtick? Or is it acceptable for you characters to continue following the same script: praising early esoteric efforts from young directors, and then criticizing them for the same esotericness after their films have become more popular, because their later efforts fails to fulfill some abstract and ad hoc social contract to which you, in your infinite if largely uncredentialed expertise, choose to hold up films? This is, ostensibly, a movie review. And yet I learned precious little about the movie, and far […]

THE WAY WE WERE: When We Were Kings

During the Centennial year of 1876, Philadelphia was host to a celebration of 100 years of American cultural and industrial progress. Officially known as the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the Centennial Exhibition, the first major World’s Fair to be held in the United States, opened on May 10, 1876 on a 285-acre tract of Fairmount Park overlooking the Schuylkill River. The fairgrounds, designed almost exclusively by 27-year-old German immigrant Hermann J. Schwarzmann, were host to 37 nations and countless industrial exhibits occupying over 250 individual pavilions. The Exhibition was immensely popular, drawing […]

NPR 4 THE DEAF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006

FRESH AIR As host of the NPR news quiz Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, Peter Sagal spends a lot of time reading the newspaper. Lately, though, he’s also spent many an hour going to strip joints, a swingers club, a porn-movie set and casinos — among other dens of what some call iniquity. All research, of course, for his new project, The Book of Vice. He wanted to get a perspective on the indulgences of others, and report back to the rest of us. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 Is Afghanistan‘s government becoming paralyzed by corruption? We’ll talk with ANDREW WILDER […]

JUNK SCI: Offering A ‘Burning Man’ A Drink Of Water

BY ELIZABETH FIEND They burn a pony, not a man. The vibe is chill, not hot. I was trying to describe the difference between Burning Man, which by now every one knows about, and Playa del Fuego, which is still pretty much a secret, to my Burning Man campmates last year, who would be coming to PDF for the first time.) PDF is the mid-Atlantic regional “burn” – one of the many regional off-shoots of Burning Man. Playa del Fuego is nothing and everything like Burning Man. Held in not-so remote Odessa, Delaware, PDF is a four-day campout with a […]

KILLADELPHIA: Taking It To The Streets

Survivors of gun violence hope a noon march in Center City will publicize a message: Get illegal handguns off the streets. It could also block traffic on a busy stretch of Broad Street. People in wheelchairs will be part of the procession, from Magee Rehabilitation Hospital at 16th and Race Streets to the State Office Building at Broad and Spring Garden Streets, where a rally will be held. Permits to march up Broad Street have been requested, but may not be officially approved until just before the event, a spokesperson for Handgun Sanity said this morning. The demonstration is to […]

NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs

POE DISPUTE TURNS GRAVE, DARKER THAN ‘THE NIGHT’S PLUTONIAN SHORE’ In the Oct. 4-11 issue of the City Paper, local literary blogger Edward Pettit declared that Edgar Allan Poe, who flourished in Philadelphia but inconveniently died in Baltimore and is buried there, must be exhumed and reinterred in Philadelphia by 2009, marking 200 years since his birth. Poe lived in Philadelphia from 1838 to 1844. Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozzella replied with a caustic piece headlined “We Have the Body and We’re Keeping Him!” Baltimore mystery novelist Laura Lippman groused, “What’s next, a crab cake hoagie?” Jeff Jerome, curator of […]

MISSION OF BURMA: Top Democracy Activist Arrested

FINANCIAL TIMES: Burma’s defiant military junta captured a leading ­dissident who had been on the run for weeks as its official mouthpiece warned “national traitors will soon meet their tragic ends.” Htay Kywe, a charismatic democracy activist who had been the target of a huge manhunt since late August, was seized in a raid on a house where he was hiding with two other members of the 88 Generation Students group. Amnesty International expressed concern that the arrested dissidents would be tortured. Although it made no direct reference to the Saturday arrests, The New Light of Myanmar newspaper, the junta’s […]

NPR 4 THE DEAF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006

FRESH AIR Author Alice Sebold has produced difficult books before: Her novel The Lovely Bones, soon to be filmed by director Peter Jackson, centers on a 14-year-old looking down from heaven after her own rape and murder. Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky began with an account of the author’s own rape, which occurred when she was a freshman at Syracuse University. The title comes from a comment made by a policeman, who told her she was lucky not to have been killed and dismembered like another woman attacked in the same vicinity; the unflinchingly candid book detailed Sebold’s battles with the […]