Here's the Bumper for that Column that I wrote about Scare last year!

It's September, which means it's totally time to start getting ready for the enormous haunted event SCARE FOR A CURE .

Today I ran across the cell phone bumper that a lot of people from Scare helped make. I wrote about that shoot and SCARE for a column in the Austin-American Statesman last year.




If you want to see the work that it took to do this make-up, check out the Flickr set.

Read Instead

Read Instead
Originally uploaded by annainaustin

This is from a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.

Books: The President is a Sick Man

I really couldn't have picked a worse book to keep me company as I stayed up late with the ouchy results of some long-dreaded dental work. It wasn't that the book was bad, it's that the subject matter was totally wrong for someone with an aching mouth!

Yet despite my unhappy mouth, I had a hard time putting down my copy of "The President Is A Sick Man: Wherein the supposedly virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and vilifies the courageous newspaperman who dared expose the truth" by Matthew Algeo.

In 1893 President Grover Cleveland had a tumor removed from the top of his mouth. In secret. On a yacht. In 1.5 hours. BEFORE THE INVENTION OF ANTIBIOTICS. Or ex rays. Or, or, or..... I feel a bit faint just thinking about it.

I'm far, far too lazy to do a proper review of the book, but it's a well paced tale of a little-known saga from American history.

It's a story located at the nexus of American history, the history of medicine, and the history of journalism. Together it comes to a page-turning beach read for the serious-minded.

Maybe I should pass this book along to my dentist. The pictures of the casts made of the inside of Cleveland's post-surgical mouth (p. 185) were enough to give me the willies.

"The President Is A Sick Man: Wherein the supposedly virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and vilifies the courageous newspaperman who dared expose the truth."  Matthew Algeo, Chicago Review Press, 2011, 1st ed.

Someone Really "Sampled The Dog"

One of the things I find very curious about music is how stratified it is. If you are 20 something you listen to one kind of music. If you are older, you listen to something else. Bands I'm super-excited about seeing mean nothing to some people I went to college with.
This makes no sense to me.

Yet the fact that I've been listening to music critically for a very long time means that sometimes I see connections no one else does.


Recently the blogosphere was agog with this new song from indie darlings James Blake & Bon Iver. This song incorporates barking. I don't know if this barking is from a dog or a wolf, but it's natural enough to confuse my dog.  



My mind lept immediatly to Austin band Tinbuk 3's vintage tune "Sample The Dog." This song came out a year before wee wunderkind Blake was born.

There's the off chance that you might know Tinbuk 3 from their song
"The Future's So Bright, I've Gotta Wear Shades."

Other people write about Latvia!

One of the curious things about regularly visiting a small country where you don't speak the language is that when you leave, it's like the country--except for your friends-- vanishes from your world. Good luck if you want to know anything about the elections, or the economy, or which politician is divorcing his wife.

But in the last couple of days, I've bumped across two interesting articles about Latvia and/or Latvians. Both of them are in English!

This is a New York Times story about bad boy tennis player Ernests Gulbis.


This is a first-person account in the Wall Street Journal of a trip to Latvia by Kathy Reichs, the writer of the TV show "Bones." Reichs is married to a Latvian.

Who knew?

Update: I also found a link to new book about the Estonian ambassador during the cold war.