There is a recent trend with men in chimneys.  Not long ago, I wrote about a would-be spy stuck in the ducting of an art museum.  Now here’s a naked guy wedged in the chimney of a supermarket in England.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7683826.stm

Is this a trend?  Has the myth of chimney-borne happiness impacted an entire generation of cat burglars? Is there some deep-seated need to act out the Santa psychodrama (in the buff!) in the midst of their nefarious crimes?

I just hope all Santa’s elves received counseling.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/3229125/Swimming-with-tigers.html

I thought this was just too cool. After dancing with wolves, we can now swim with tigers ….

This week brought early Hallowe’en presents from the universe.  RAVENOUS has cover quotes! It’s impossible to describe how much this is valued by an author, especially one like me who is launching a debut. Let it be known that these fine ladies have bestowed an act of kindness–and they’re darned fine writers, too!

A multilayered plot, a fascinating take on paranormal creatures living among us, plus a sexy vampire, a sassy witch and a mystery for them to solve. . . RAVENOUS leaves me hungry for more!

 -  Jessica Anderson, author of The Final Prophecy series

 Sexy, suspenseful fun. Ashwood really knows how to tell a story.

 - NYT best-selling author Kelley Armstrong

Sometimes when you go a-surfing for interesting tidbits, you find things better left unfound. I stumbled across a short article from last March that relates an incident covered by both London’s Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph.
An older gentleman was living alone in his nice house in Australia. His relatives wanted that nice house and pressured him to move into a seniors’ home. So, he found the plans for a suicide contraption on the Internet that involved power tools and a .22 semi-automatic pistol. He set it up in the driveway, and he killed himself.
Yikes.  The account is very bare-bones, but it seems to me that if this 81 year-old was with it enough to log on, find the plans for this thing, and assemble it, he wasn’t exactly on his last legs. Let’s just say the relatives (going by what the article says) don’t come off well at all.
I’m sure some people will leap up and say “instructions for suicide machines shouldn’t be on the Internet!”, but that is missing the point.  The point is, we can rarely fix families (oh, if only there were handy-dandy diagrams for that!), but it would have been nice if there was enough of a community wherever this guy was to turn to for support.
I guess it’s a reminder to go be nice to our neighbors. After all, I’m told there are plans for thermo-nuclear devices on the Web, too.