The news site Al.com reports that a passerby called 911 in Birmingham on Thursday morning after seeing the woman slumped over her steering wheel at a traffic light.

Police say officers roused the woman and removed her from the SUV. Authorities say she was handcuffed and taken to the city jail on a DUI charge.

A photo of the woman by al.com showed fake blood covering much of her torso as she was apprehended.

Details on her identity weren't immediately available.

Continue Reading...

USC police Capt. David Carlisle says two men outside the Ronald Tudor Campus Center party were arguing at about 11:30 p.m. when one of them pulled a gun and opened fire.

One man was shot several times and critically wounded. Three bystanders were also wounded with non-life threating injuries.

None of the people involved were USC students.

The 100 people in the students-only party were kept inside and a campus-wide shelter-in-place email alert was sent.

Carlisle says the suspects were arrested about 10 minutes after the shooting and the alert was called off.

In April, two USC graduate students from China were shot to death in a car near the campus.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/11/01/4953466/4-wounding-in-shooting-on-usc.html#storylink=cpy

Continue Reading...

I soon realize, though, that the world doesn’t look back up. No one can see me. I have just seen “Beauty and the Beast” at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Washington, D.C., where I have also seen “The Music Man,” “Hello Dolly” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” I loved these productions so much that I have signed up for a drama workshop here. But when it’s my turn to improvise onstage, I giggle with so much self-consciousness, I am told by the drama instructor to get off the stage. “You need to get into your character,” she says. “Who are you going to be?” Alas, I have always, only, been myself.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

I haven’t worn a Halloween costume since way back in my 30s, when we hipster chicks all marched in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade dressed in our sluttiest, fishnettiest attire, a cabal of blood-red-lipped medieval serving wenches, Mad Maxine dystopian sci-fi wet dreams, and Morticia-vampiras in satiny black slip dresses with glow-in-the-dark fangs (I plead extra-guilty to the latter). Back then, my chief fear was that I would fail to achieve and do and be all the things I wanted; I frequently lay awake in bed in a wee-hour welter of panic, imagining obscurity, failure, and thwarted ambition.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Mocking oversexed Halloween costumes is catnip to feminists. For one thing, it’s one of those arenas where the double standard is undeniable. Men’s costumes, at least those sold in Halloween stores, tend to be basic scary costume fare. Women’s costumes are so oversexed it gets silly. Sexy bacon? Sexy Finding Nemo? A sexy melon that is so sexy you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be?

Continue Reading...

The brunt of the weather mayhem will be concentrated where the hurricane comes ashore early Tuesday, but there will be hundreds of miles of steady, strong and damaging winds and rain for the entire Eastern region for several days, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The hurricane has killed at least 20 people in the Caribbean, and just left the Bahamas. It is expected to move north, just off the Eastern Seaboard.

As of Friday morning, federal forecasters were looking closer at the Delaware shore as the spot it will turn inland and merge with a wintry storm front. But there is a lot of room for error in the forecast and the storm could turn into shore closer to New York and New Jersey and bring the worst weather there.

Wherever Sandy comes ashore will get 10 inches of rain and extreme storm surges, Louis Uccellini, NOAA's environmental prediction director, said in a Friday news conference. Other areas not directly on Sandy's entry path will still get 4 to 8 inches of rain, maybe more, he said. Up to 2 feet of snow should fall on West Virginia, with lighter snow in parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, regardless of where Sandy first hits.

Continue Reading...

“I wish you’d take that thing off,” the guy said, as we both sipped our beer.

“Why?” I said, propping my bare legs on his lap. I liked that wig. It was magenta, a fiery and improbable color, and its long, flippy layers draped across my shoulders with architectural perfection.

The wig also looked surprisingly natural on me, like I was born to wear a fiery and improbable drag. I wore it to a bar on the Lower East Side, and it was such a trip to realize that every stranger believed this weird lie about me. Nobody thought I was wearing a wig, because why on earth would I be? The next day I posted a picture of myself on Facebook in that wig, and even my friends bought it. The comments exploded. Yowzah love your new hair. And the compliments were so frothy, and felt so good, that I couldn’t bring myself to puncture the magic.

Continue Reading...

Year after year, new measures are introduced to keep registered sex offenders of all stripes from coming into contact with trick-or-treaters -- and yet there is zero evidence to support the legislative trend. In fact, the available data suggest it's a useless diversion of resources that creates a false sense of security. Just take a look at this absurdly misleading headline from a Fox News affiliate: "Police Work to Keep Halloween Free From Sexual Predators." (Because all sex offenders faithfully register and offenses are only committed by those with previous records?) Meanwhile, other outlets are playing up the danger: Albuquerque's KRQE advises readers to "beware of real monsters on Halloween," and talks to a 12-year-old girl who is "excited to go Trick-or-Treating" -- but only because her family has no idea that they live "in a neighborhood full of secrets." Dun-dun-dun.

Continue Reading...

By the time I was a kid, in the 1980s, not much had changed.

In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We’d travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats. At that time, rumors on the evening news said maniacs were injecting Almond Joys with rat poison, tucking razor blades inside candy apples before handing them out to children.

Continue Reading...

It’s known as "Liber Linteus." It’s the longest Etruscan text ever found. It seems to be a ritual calendar of some sort, but no one really knows what it says. No one has spoken Etruscan for 20 centuries. Only a few fragments have been translated, like this one:

For the spirit of night, for the city, for the people everlasting.

You can see the "Liber Linteus" on display in a glass case in Zegreb. And quite near to it, you can also see that certain someone. You can see the unwrapped mummy that was once inside of it.

How was this treasure of Etruscan writing found? It sounds like something that happened in a frat house. The Croatian guy takes the Egyptian mummy home. He props it up in the corner. He shows it off to his friends when they come over. They make jokes about it. They rattle their drinks and point their cigars at it.

Continue Reading...

Although tricks and treats have been part of Halloween tradition for ages, October 31st didn’t become a candy-centric holiday until the 1950s, when aggressive marketing campaigns began to tell Americans a different story about All Hallows’ Eve. And naturally, the story was about candy. Perhaps this is appropriate. Our larger story as a people is, in a sense, a story of candy.

Continue Reading...

While severed body parts and corpses may not have a tourist-brochure ring, gore sells. Catholic churches have been collecting bodies and relics for pilgrims to visit for centuries. Little bits of the Buddha are scattered in shrines around the globe. Medical curiosities and oddities fill glass cases and jars in museum sideshows.

Continue Reading...

The box wasn’t nearly large enough to contain so much money — it looked as if it might be a 4-by-6-inch index card box — but then again, how many times do you stumble across a box sitting in an open hole?

I crouched down, the late afternoon Friday sun hot on my neck. The box was not stone, as I had originally thought, but a heavy-duty black ridged cardboard. Hmm, I thought, perhaps someone’s family heirlooms?

On a grave not too far from where we stood, someone had left several pieces of costume jewelry atop one of the headstones. I lifted the heavy box out of its shallow hole. On one end, someone had typed a white label.

A man’s name. A place of residence. And the note: “Human remains. Cremated August 1, 2011.”

Continue Reading...

As a mother of two, I've noticed a creeping austerity in our treats haul in recent years. Sure, we were used to the Bug Bites Endangered Species mini-chocolates that reliably cropped up from the more eco-friendly parents along the trick-or-treat route. But last Halloween, we seemed to score a record number of pencils, toy bugs and, unsubtly, toothbrushes. And the least enthusiastically embraced prize in my daughters' bags was a pamphlet explaining that deforestation from the palm oil in some candy brands is threatening to wipe out Southeast Asia's orangutan population. It was festooned with skulls and read: "DYING FOR A COOKIE?" Sorry, kids.

Continue Reading...

Dad had gone to high school with (and had dated) the owner at the time, Dolly, who ran the place with her husband, Jack, who'd inherited the place from his father. Eating there was like going to a friend's house for a meal -- a German-influenced meal, that is. Which is not to say the food wasn't first-rate because it was, from fresh-caught trout and whitefish (it was on the Milwaukee River) to more traditional German dishes (veal Oscar and duck with cherries).

I had a sweet tooth back then (still do) and so would order some dish I couldn't or wouldn't finish in order to save room for one of Boder's delicious desserts. Among the highlights was schaum torte with strawberries.

Continue Reading...

"Wha, wha, wha ... what's the matter?!" Groff asks.

"I just feel ... weird," Bagans mutters.

A hiss-like sound -- the noise heard just moments before -- is played back. It was all the proof the two ghost hunters needed.

"I said, 'use my energy,'" Groff says, his tone now professorial, "and then all of a sudden your energy was drawn from your body at the exact moment. And then -- at the same time -- I heard that weeeird voice."

Bagans struggles to lift his head. "It's using my energy," he whimpers.

"Exactly!"

Bagans and Groff are hosts of "Ghost Adventures," one of the most popular programs on the Travel Channel -- and one of about a dozen similar reality TV ghost-hunting shows on television today. Over the past decade the ghost-hunting genre as a whole, led by series like "Paranormal State," "Ghost Hunters" and "Psychic Kids: Paranormal Children," has become a virtual fixture on cable television. The shows follow a basic formula: Everyday Joes -- sometimes aided by a psychic, sometimes not -- travel to supposedly haunted locations, wait for the sun to go down, and spend the night freaking each other out. It may seem hilariously contrived, but it's some of the most popular stuff on TV today.

Continue Reading...

While this may sound sinister or downright peculiar, let me assure you that Felix holds a cherished position in our family. He's a silent but reliable teacher and a master at imparting lessons of impermanence -- someone who is just plain good to have hanging around.

Felix -- affectionately named by my grandfather, George Becker Sr. -- was born around 1900 and was about 17 years old when he died. His cause of death is unknown, though my grandmother always maintained he had been struck by a Model T Ford.

Just how did we come to possess the remains of Felix?

My grandfather was a young boy when his father was thrown from a horse-drawn wagon after a practical joker startled the horse. He suffered a traumatic head injury that kept him from meaningful employment for the rest of his life. Coming from a family in which industriousness was the paramount virtue, my grandfather studied hard and eventually borrowed money and played semi-pro football in order to attend Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. Around 1925 in a gross anatomy seminar, he and his classmates were issued human skeletons to use as study aides.

Continue Reading...