Recent Reads: Shot I.Q Payback

An amusing bathroom book.

Another amusing bathroom book.

WOW!   Detailed, filled with interesting backstories and histories.  A thorough look at the birth and growth of the Rap music world.  An interesting read for anyone interested in music/contemporary history/popular culture... even if you're not a Hip Hop fan (and I'm not!).  Heavy lifting but worth the effort.   Reads like a novel.  Really, a terrific, engrossing book - very hard to put down!!!

I couldn't make up this stuff!

I heard about a strange and horrible robbery here in Toronto yesterday.  A couple of jerks walked into a hospital and pretended to be visiting a sick friend.  They wandered into the room of an old and dying woman and stole her jewellery.  Yes, from her death-bed.  They will no doubt get caught (security cameras have their pictures and they've been splashed all over the local press).


So, I looked in to other jaw-dropping crimes and came across a website called Clumsy Crooks http://www.clumsycrooks.com/ .  Sure enough, it has the death-bed heist mentioned, but also some other eye-rolling and head-scratching crimes, like:

• the dentist who used paper clips instead of stainless steel rods in dental surgery
• a man who showed up drunk at his DUI hearing
• a man paying his crack dealer with Monopoly money
• a woman who called police because of suspiscious noises... that turned out to be her vibrator
• newlyweds who spent their first night of wedded bliss in jail

If I tried to put  these kinds of stories in a novel, the publisher would probably reject the manuscript and/or readers would find the plot hard to swallow.


Yes, truth really is stranger than fiction!