At no point in my life did I ever expect to make three postings about Leah McLaren over a two-week period, but I've got to close off some business.

J. Kelly Nestruck summed up the aftermath of the trashing of McLaren's book by one Ryan Bigge, including the reaction of Toronto Star books editor Doug Smith.

Marc Weisblott of Paved almost triggered another feud when he described Nestruck as a fellow fluff reporter. :)

Leah McLaren decides to permanently check out of checking out the blogosphere after doing a Technorati search on herself and several other writers she admires and finding a world of hate, envy and -- worst of all -- bad spelling out there.

The call for more rallies against the Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the Islamic party alliance known as the MMA on drew crowds in the hundreds on Friday.

When the gunmen came for Al-Arabiya's Atwar Bahjat, one yelled, "We want the anchorwoman." On Wednesday, they killed her and two of her colleagues.

And today, her funeral was fired upon by gunmen.

File this under wacky news: A council of elders in Sudan's Upper Nile state has ordered a man caught having sex with someone else's goat to pay that person the equivalent of $50 US as a dowry.

If anyone was looking to make a film on the life of a tortured songwriting genius, Townes Van Zandt lived his to provide all the raw material they could dream of. But the wellspring of that raw material appears to be a treatable mental illness.