Of all the news stories one expects to see upon awakening on a Monday morning, this one has to be near the bottom of the list:

Steve Irwin, the passionate conservationist who shot to international fame as the Crocodile Hunter, was killed today in a freak accident while diving off the north Queensland coast.

In a bitter irony, the man who risked his life handling one of the world’s most dangerous reptiles was mortally wounded by a stingray, a usually passive sea creature which attacks only if threatened. Irwin, 44, was stung in the chest by the stingray’s barbed tail, which whips up in a reflex action. The accident happened while he was filming a TV documentary called Oceans’ Deadliest at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas.

A member of the production team said he had gone out to film a sequence on stingrays when he swam over the venomous bottom-dweller, which has…

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I haven’t visited the Drudge Report in … well, I can’t remember the last time. But look at all the cool stuff I found there this morning:

* A mutant wolf-dog hybrid found in Maine

* An exhibit in St. Louis features the most two-headed animals ever displayed together (and to think I just missed this one on my last vacation)

* A Starbucks in New York may (or may not) be infested with roaches and rats

* 20 people were arrested at an alleged gay wedding in Saudi Arabia

Amazing that I’ve resisted this for so long….

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In a post about steroids the other day, I cooked up this bit of medium-grade blogsnark:

You know what I’m wary of? Shark bites. Granted, it’s not likely to happen here in Pennsylvania, but you just never know.

So leave it to Rob Duffield, just back from presumably shark-free Belarus, to call me on it with this:

Authorities say a nine-year-old Pennsylvania girl was apparently bitten by a shark today as she played in the surf on a barrier island in Florida. Her injuries are not considered life-threatening.

Juliette Shipp, of Harleysville, was transported to a hospital for treatment of a bite wound on her right calf. That’s according to police in Fort Pierce, Florida.

The girl, who was visiting her grandmother, was standing in the surf with a boogie board at about 11 a.m. on Hutchinson Island off Florida’s Atlantic Coast when she was bitten.

In my defense, I did say “here…

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The married guys reading this will probably relate: My wife’s yoga night is my only chance to watch a DVD that’s 100 percent estrogen-free. I don’t watch one every week — it’s kinda selfish, with three kids I’m supposed to be supervising — but when I do, I like to make it count.

Last night’s choice was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and it’s a winner. (The last yoga-night movie I rented, The New World, was so slow and unplotted that I stopped it halfway through.)

This review by Christopher Orr on The New Republic‘s website describes its essence better than I ever could:

As with [Raymond] Chandler’s tales, the plot of the film is almost willfully convoluted. But it’s also largely beside the point, an excuse for quite a few good scenes, most of them equal parts homage and subversion. The familiar ingredients of the hard-boiled school (and the noir…

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I have some more serious stories to blog this morning, but I couldn’t resist starting with this one:

Alice Alyse is quite plainly a bombshell, a knockout: She’s slim, leggy and gorgeous, with long, dark hair and a great set of cheekbones.

Also, she’s stacked.

And that, she says, is why she’s out of a job.

Alyse claims that her generous breast size got her fired from the cast of Movin’ Out, the Broadway show choreographed by Twyla Tharp to songs by Billy Joel. Alyse was an ensemble dancer in the national tour until her bra size “naturally increased” from a C cup to a D, according to her lawsuit against the production company. The growth spurt happened while she was on leave last year with an injured big toe; the 29-year-old says she neither gained weight nor got implants. When she returned to the show, she needed new bras sewn into her…

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Scientists believe they’ve discovered the oldest known cave drawing:

A drawing discovered … on the wall of a cave in the west of France appears to be the oldest known portrait of a human face. …

Drawn with calcium carbonate, and using the bumps in the wall to give form to the face, it features two horizontal lines for the eyes, another for the mouth and a vertical line for the nose. “The portrait of this face is unique,” said Jean Airvaux, a researcher at the French Directorate of Cultural Affairs. “We have other drawings, but they are more recent. Here, it could be the oldest representation of a human face.”

Archaeologists are particularly interested in the Vilhonneur cave because there are several drawings, including one of a hand in cobalt blue, along with animal and human remains.

Click on the link above and scroll down to see the actual drawing, which is…

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This is the weirdest story about the media, politics, and election fraud that I can recall reading:

The election took place in Ellensburg. On the campus of Central Washington University. For student-body president.

The story began May 15 when the college newspaper, The Observer, got a tip about one of the two candidates, Ash Gilmore: Last September, a jury acquitted Gilmore, now 23, of second-degree manslaughter in connection with the 2004 death of Joseph Tibbs.

At the time of Tibbs’ death, Tibbs and Gilmore were roommates attending Washington State University. According to a February 2004 Pullman police report, Gilmore, who had been drinking, told officers he kicked a gun from Tibbs’ hand in horseplay. When the gun hit the floor, it fired a bullet into Tibbs’ chest.

Rachel Guillermo, 24, The Observer‘s editor in chief and a print-journalism major, said the weekly paper interviewed Gilmore about his past and his election bid. The…

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If you’re not in the publishing biz, you probably didn’t know that the annual Book Expo America (BEA) was held last weekend in Washington, D.C. More than 500 authors, 2,000 exhibitors, and tens of thousands of publishing professionals showed up with a singular purpose: to not talk about me or my books.

Oh, I’m sure they had other items on their agenda, like selling their own books and getting drunk at cocktail receptions. But, from my perspective, the most important order of business was not talking about me.

This is why I’m never invited to these things; it’s a lot harder to not talk about me when I’m actually standing there.

Some actual news came out of BEA this year: Oprah and her trainer, Bob Greene, signed a $12 million deal for a weight-loss book.

You may wonder, as I did, how any book can contain $12 million worth of information about…

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Friday afternoon, bored and Googling around, I came across this collection of Will Rogers quotes. The man was the Jon Stewart of his time. Hell, he could be the Jon Stewart of our time.

I mean, which of these jokes wouldn’t be just as funny today as they were in his time?

A fool and his money are soon elected.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling…

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A friend of mine read my blog entry about the plagiarism scandal du jour and told me about a part of the story I hadn’t paid much attention to: The young author, Kaavya Viswanathan, has published her book via a book “packager” called Alloy Entertainment.

The New York Observer explains how it worked:

Ms. Viswanathan first signed with agent Suzanne Gluck [of the William Morris Agency], who then passed the author to a junior agent in her office. The junior agent worked with Ms. Viswanathan and eventually hit a wall in terms of developing a commercial proposal. The junior agent then suggested that the writer speak with Josh Bank at Alloy. The Opal Mehta idea emerged from Ms. Viswanathan’s conversations with Mr. Bank; once an outline was ready, it was decided that another William Morris agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, would try to sell it to publishers, which she did, to…

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