FRESH AIR Edgar Award-winning author Charles Ardai is founder of Hard Case Crime, a pulp-fiction publishing group that reprints classic crime stories as well as publishing new pulp. All Hard Case novels are published in mass-market paperback editions, much like the classic crime novels from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, with cover art inspired by images from the genre’s heyday. Under the pseudonym Richard Aleas — an anagram of his own name — Ardai writes crime fiction, too: His novels Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence detail the exploits of private investigator John Blake. Blake is no hard-boiled, flint-eyed […]
LISTEN LIKE THIEVES: NIN Gives Away New Album
NIN.COM: As a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com. The music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits. For those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in July. details coming […]
Q&A: It’s Too Late To Fall In Love With Sharon Tate
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Meet Roza Frykowska, 26, a recent emigre from Lodz, Poland. She is a barista at Cafe Ole in Old City. She is also an up and coming photographer, and recently started shooting for Suicide Girls. All of that would make her interview-worthy in and of itself in our book, but wait, it gets better, or worse, actually. Roza’s grandfather, the filmmaker Wojtech Frykowski, came to America in the late ’60s to establish a career in Hollywood, at the behest of his dear friend, Roman Polanski. Wojtech and his then-girlfriend, Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, […]
KILLADELPHIA: 2 More Dead Since U Went To Bed
INQUIRER: Investigators this morning are probing a double shooting in West Philadelphia that left two dead and riddled with bullets, police said. Officers were called at 12:38 a.m. to the 300 block of N. 62nd St. They found a 19-year-old woman shot twice in the chest and a 19-year-old man shot in the head and buttocks, police said. The woman was rushed to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where she was pronounced at 1:20 a.m.; the man was taken to HUP where doctors declared him dead at 1:05 a.m. Police have no suspects or motive.
JOHN MCCAIN: C-Words Matter
IOWA POLITICS: Clive businessman Marty Parrish was escorted from Sen. John McCain’s town hall meeting by Des Moines police and members of the Secret Service after asking McCain if he had called his wife Cindy an expletive in 1992. Parrish, an ordained Baptist minister who holds a master’s degree in political science, was questioned by Secret Service agents before being released. He was not charged in the incident. Parrish asked whether McCain called his wife Cindy an expletive related to the female anatomy, as has been alleged in the book “The Real McCain,” written by Dem strategist Cliff Schecter. MORE […]
All Of This Happened While You Were Tanning
SUNSHINE SUPERMEN: Mehr & Sher Ali, Painted Bride, 5:34 PM BY JONATHAN VALANIA Sufi is the mystical arm of Islam, and Quawwali — a 700-year-old tradition of droning, kaleidoscopic incantations rendered hypnotic and ecstatic by a maze of tabla beats and hand claps — is the devotional music of Sufism. In Pakistan, Quawwali singers are part rock star, part holy man and spend years studying Sufi texts in preparation. Mehr & Sher (they are the two balding gentlemen on the stage) were taught by their father, a court classical singer in the Sikh principality of Patiala, now part of India. […]
KILLADELPHIA: Wanted, Dead Or Alive
INQUIRER: Philadelphia police this morning said they are looking for a 33-year-old city man in connection with the fatal shooting Saturday of Philadelphia police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. Police identified the suspect at large as Eric Floyd, 33, currently of Clearfield Street, Philadelphia. Police said Floyd had escaped from a halfway house in Reading, and is considered to be armed and dangerous. Police said at least three men were involved in the robbery and shooting of Sgt. Liczbinski, 39, on Saturday just before noon. Liczbinski was responding to the robbery of a bank inside a grocery store around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. […]
WARNING: Graphic Reality & Inconvenient Truth
UPDATE: “The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp’s oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I […]
GUAM: Yes We Can
HAGATNA, Guam – Barack Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton by seven votes in the Democratic presidential caucuses Saturday. The count of more than 4,500 ballots took all night. Neither candidate campaigned in the U.S. island territory in person, but both did long-distance media interviews and bought campaign ads for the caucuses. Results of the count completed Sunday morning Guam time show delegates pledged to Obama with 2,264 votes to 2,257 for Clinton’s slate. That means they’ll split the pledged delegate votes. Obama’s slate won in 14 of 21 districts. Eight pledged delegates will attend the convention, each with one-half vote. […]
Eight Belles Euthanized After 2nd Place Derby Finish
ASSOCIATED PRESS: LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Eight Belles was euthanized after breaking both front ankles following a second-place finish in the Kentucky Derby. WASHINGTON POST: The camera cut away from her, but it should have stayed on her. Eight Belles had run herself half to death yesterday, and now the vets were finishing the job as she lay on her side, her beautiful figure a black hump on the track. Horses don’t just fall down like that, you thought, as NBC flitted away, cowardlike, from the sickening picture to the more appealing image of the Kentucky Derby victor, Big Brown. There […]
KILLADELPHIA: Bank Robber Dead, Cop Slain
INQUIRER: A Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed with a military assault rifle late this morning when he confronted at least two robbers who had just held up a Bank of America branch at a Shoprite supermarket in Port Richmond. At 11:26 a.m., police received a report of a robbery at the American Bank at 3547 Aramingo Avenue. Another officer, responding to a “flash” that had been broadcast on police radio, ran into the robbers at Schiller and Almond streets and shot one of them dead, officials said. One, perhaps two, of the robbers remained at large late this […]
DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT: The Sincerest Flattery?
The header banner on the Inquirer’s new bidness blawg looks, um, familiar. Oh, and we meant to say something about this weeks ago: Blinq‘s new header is winktastic! And while we are cutting and pasting, we would like to FYI you to the fact in the last week there has been a curiously high level of interest in our primary debate coverage from the Russkie Internets. Smells like KGB. Well, good luck with that, Boris & Natasha.