Today in History: April 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The writer who gave the world young Ramona Quimby, her sister Beezus, Henry Huggins, Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, and a mouse on a motorcycle—Beverly Cleary—is 100 today. “People tell me I don’t look a day over 80,” she told the Washington Post last week.

She stopped writing several years ago and lives now in a retirement community, but one can see that she is enjoying the present moment and the attention this milestone birthday is bringing to her characters, her books, and herself. The TODAY show interviewed Cleary recently (the interviewer, Jenna Bush Hager, is the daughter of a former president and granddaughter of one, which is today’s trivia):
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A New Prize for Raif Badawi

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the 1418th day the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has spent in prison. Last night, the International Publishers Association awarded him its Prix Voltaire, and his powerhouse wife, Ensaf Haidar, traveled to London to accept the award on his behalf.

Raymond Johansen of the Pirate Party of Norway (#‎PPNO‬) and my sometime collaborator on The Gad About Town website, traveled to London and met with Ensaf this weekend (photo below the fold):
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An Angry Man

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The greatest newspaper—ever!—is and was the Weekly World News. Its presence next to every grocery store checkout lane is thoroughly missed by every non-Bat Boy walking among us.

Most American boys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, and by most, I mean me, made this progression in our reading: from Cracked magazine, which quickly revealed itself to be a pale imitation of Mad magazine, to Mad magazine, which was brilliant but I (we) stopped looking at it around age 14, through a wasteland of our teen years and the New York Times and homework—heck, the Times and all newspapers everywhere just feel like permanent homework, don’t they? AmIRight?—to, finally, the discovery that the Weekly World News existed.

It is a three-word title and only one of those three words is true: Weekly.
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