New #1 on the NYTimes Bestseller List - Fiction for September 24th 2010

Here are the Top 5 novels on the New York Times Fiction Bestseller List for September 24th 2010

5 - The Help - Kathryn Stockett (77 weeks on list)

4 - The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - Steig Larsson (17 weeks)

3 - Wicked Appetite - Janet Evanovich (Debut)
A dangerous man needs Elizabeth Tucker’s help to find an ancient power source.


2 - Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (3 weeks)

1 - Safe Haven - Nicholas Sparks (Debuts at the top) The arrival of a mysterious young woman in a small North Carolina town raises questions about her past.

In Case You Missed It (Monty Python Edition)

This sounds like a bit from Monty Python or Benny Hill but its a real story out of Michigan
I have included videos that are just as funny as this story.

Man and Parrot Scuffle on Ann Arbor Street

Celebrity Bowling

Here is my new guilty pleasure if I were guilty about it.

Its ESPN Classic showing "Celebrity Bowling" hosted by Jed Allen.

The show is on monday nights at 10pm and 1030. The format is 4 celebrities on 2 teams playing best ball style.
In this episode I found on Youtube features great game show host Tom Kennedy teaming with the wonderful Richard Deacon of The Dick Van Dyke Show fame. You dont get to see them bowl but the team they are against is McLean Stevenson and Ed Ames, who is probably remembered for both Mingo on Daniel Boone and of course as a member of the Ames Brothers singing group and his great solo singing career.
Last night had the teams of Roy Rogers and Gavin McLeod against Robert Culp and Richard Dawson. Roy was a fairly good bowler but nothing like Tom Kennedy who looks to have bowled quite a bit in his day.

In Case You Missed It

The remains of Alexander the Great's father or dim witted half brother? A story of Royal intrigue, murder and death.

The Beach Boys - California Girls

Here is your Jack Benny clip of the day. Jack with Bob Hope and the Beach Boys.
Jack is the master of the ad-lib.

NYTimes Bestseller List - NonFiction for September 9th 2010

This week on the NY Times Non Fiction Top 5 we have 2 debuts and last weeks debut at #1 holds steady.

5 - Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell (93 weeks on list)

4- The Perfection Point - John Brenkus (debut)

Subtitled: Sports Science Predicts the fastest man, the Highest Jump, and the Limits of Athletic Performance

3 - A Journey - Tony Blair (debut)


2 - SH** My Dad Says - Justin Halpern (18 weeks on list)

1 - Crimes Against Liberty - David Limbaugh
(2nd week on list and 2nd week at #1)

New #1 on the NYTimes Bestseller List - Fiction for September 9th 2010

This week we have 3 new books debuting in the Top 5 of the NY Times Bestselling Hardback fiction list.
Here is the Top 5 for this week.

5 - The Postcard Killer - James Patterson (3 weeks on list)

4 - Lost Empire - Clive Cussler with Grant Blackwood (debut)

3 - Dark Peril - Christine Feehan (debut)


2 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson (15th week on list)

1 - Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (debut)



From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen's The Corrections consistently appears on "Best of the Decade" lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors with whom her eerily independent and sexually precocious teenage son, Joey, is besot, and, later, "greener than Greenpeace" Walter's well-publicized dealings with the coal industry's efforts to demolish a West Virginia mountaintop. The surprise is that the Berglunds' fall is outlined almost entirely in the novel's first 30 pages, freeing Franzen to delve into Patty's affluent East Coast girlhood, her sexual assault at the hands of a well-connected senior, doomed career as a college basketball star, and the long-running love triangle between Patty, Walter, and Walter's best friend, the budding rock star Richard Katz. By 2004, these combustible elements give rise to a host of modern predicaments: Richard, after a brief peak, is now washed up, living in Jersey City, laboring as a deck builder for Tribeca yuppies, and still eyeing Patty. The ever-scheming Joey gets in over his head with psychotically dedicated high school sweetheart and as a sub-subcontractor in the re-building of postinvasion Iraq. Walter's many moral compromises, which have grown to include shady dealings with Bush-Cheney cronies (not to mention the carnal intentions of his assistant, Lalitha), are taxing him to the breaking point. Patty, meanwhile, has descended into a morass of depression and self-loathing, and is considering breast augmentation when not working on her therapist-recommended autobiography. Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at--incredibly--genuine hope.
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This Week in Music History

In 1995 Michael Jackson went to No.1 on the US singles chart with a song written by R. Kelly 'You Are Not Alone'.
It holds a Guinness World Record as the first song in the 37 year history of the Billboard Hot 100 to debut at No.1.
Making the video even more noteworthy were the scenes of a partially nude Lisa Marie Presley, then Michael's wife. She later admitted that she regretted it but had been swept up in the moment of being in a Michael Jackson music video.