I Swear, These Kids Today...

13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers-to Play XBox With:

A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad's credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.

Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing "Halo" on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.

The credit card company involved said it was regular practice to send extra credit cards out as long as all security questions are answered.

The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business.

...They told the suspicious working girls they were people of restricted growth working with a traveling circus, and as State law does not allow those with disabilities to be discriminated against they had no right to refuse them.

The $1,000 a night girls sensing something up played "Halo" on the Xbox with the kids, instead of selling their sexual services.

Here's my favorite part:

Ralph's ambition is to one day become a politician.

Okay, ladies: How many of you would sign up to play "Halo" with rich kids for a thousand bucks a night?

I'm seeing a whole new market here.

You Talk, We Listen, Then We Talk Some More

At the suggestion of Hellion Celine, here's an MP3 preview of tomorrow's column.

Just in Case You Were Wondering...

Can a human skull be used as a bong?

Awesome, dude.

Wait, what?

Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party

This is brilliant.

Hat tip to Wil Wheaton (yes that Wil Wheaton-the net gets stranger every day) and John Cole.

The Great Psychobilly Blog Road Trip of 2008: Day Four, Part One

The sound of a massive engine cuts through the heavy, sodden morning air. I sit up in bed, listening. "They're here."
"Yeah," she says. Her voice sounds resigned.
I look back at her. "You knew this was going to..."
"Yeah. Well. Part of me was hoping it might all be a hoax. Or maybe some kind of game."
"These people don't play, darlin'." I pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.
"I'll put on coffee," she says.
The screen door bangs behind me as I step out onto the porch. "Hey y'all," I say.
Smith swings down out of the door of the Hummer-sine, a toothpick hanging from one corner of his mouth.
"We've come for the blog," he says.
I nod to him. "I know. It's ready."

Last stop: Kent Gowran's Blood Sweat & Murder Blog

The humidity gets you first. Like furnace blasts, only more moist (poor Billy Crystal...). Pretty soon you hear the insects, the banjos, and not long after, the muttered Southern-drawl curse: "Goddamned Bush." And you know you're there: Hell as imagined by J.D. Rhoades. He's got a bottle of Wild Turkey larger than my head, and he's ready to use it.

You know how it is: you want some great Southern crime fiction that feels authentic (and being from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I got bit and burned by authenticity every summer til I moved up North, so...). Something that's not not some pretender hitting all the touristy things, but is a change of pace from the great James Lee Burke. In that case, you pick up some of J.D.'s novels (we call him "Dusty" around these here parts). I mean, just read the opening of his second Keller novel, Good Day in Hell, aloud:

"The first blow split Stan's lip and knocked him into a stack of recapped tires at the back of the repair bay. He caught a glimpse of the bright sunlight and the road outside before his stepfather's bulk eclipsed the light like an evil moon. The second, third, and fourth blows were softer but more humiliating, delivered as they were by the hand holding the rolled-up magazine."

It sings, man! Fucking sings like a George Jones tune. And most visitors to this blog have already heard Dusty read the first chapter of his upcoming Breaking Cover, I hope, and I bet it felt good, didn't it? He just gets better and better.

And so the Hummer-sine takes on another passenger, he of the voluminous whiskey bottle and a greasy paper sack full of fried catfish fillets to spread around. We'd all forgotten how hungry we were (no fucking wonder).

It's something, being a Southerner in "exile". Luckily, I'm in the rural Southwestern corner of Minnesota, so I can at least see that "country" is "country" all over this country. The revelation gave me a foothold (until the snow started, and good God Almighty, that's when the homesickness starts--at about the same time as the shivering). And in a fever pitch I launched into the novel that became Yellow Medicine (which you should buy on May 12 from some form of the Barnes & Noble corporate giant), featuring another exile, a bent cop running from the bad choices he made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It took Billy Lafitte some time to adjust up here, too, but we both did eventually, even if his adjustment was much more spectacularly violent and heartbreaking. Me, I got married and bought a house instead. I still plan on writing about my home state of Mississippi soon, but I needed to write two Minnesota novels first to keep the blood boiling in the sub-zero evenings. I feel blessed to have had writers like Dusty, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Flannery O'Connor, Vicki Hendricks, and Daniel Woodrell, to keep those Southern accents alive in my head before they blow away in one of our stiff winds. But truly, I think they're going to hang on even in the fiercest tornado.

Who's joining up next? Back up into Detroit for a rendezvous with the eloquent crime fiction slinger Patti Abbot.

Driving Time: Slower than lightning, faster than thunder

Tune for the leg: "Dark Hair'd Rider" by Heavy Trash

"You ready?" Smith says.
I nod. "Yeah."
He grins. "That's what you think."
I turn to her. "I have to go."
She raises her chin defiantly, tears glistening in her eyes, but she won't let them fall. "I know."
I give her a long, soft kiss, and then, without a look back, I climb in. I gesture at the Wild Turkey bottle in Gischler's lap. "You gonna fondle that thing all day, son, or you gonna open it?"

It Won't Be Long Now....

And it's late afternoon on a warm Carolina day.
somethin' strange is goin' on, and we's all in the way.

Well there's fifty or sixty people they're just sittin' on their cars,
and the old men left their dominos and they come down from the bars.....

A cloud of dust appears in the distance, and on the light ineffectual breeze is borne the sound of grinding gears...

(apologies to Guy Clark)

They Are Coming.

They'll be here soon.

Brace yourselves.

"Roll the Tanks, Cue the Air Force...."

The Clash. Just because.



HAH! Gitalong Gitalong!

Okay, Let's Try It...

The first attempt at podcasting is here! Let me know how it works. This is me reading the first chapter of BREAKING COVER, suggested by Hellion Cheryl Malaguti, who wins a copy of Julia Spencer Fleming's I SHALL NOT WANT. Congratulations!

Link to it here.