Our little literary festival celebrates ten years this October, with nine days of events, featuring over 500 local and national authors. Highlights include a tribute/roast of Amy Tan, an opening night Book Ball, a night of punk rock storytelling, and the closing night Lit Crawl, which has expanded to over 50 venues in three hours, throughout the city’s Mission District. The festival runs October 9-17, check the website for more details!

Since December 2006 Silke Tudor and I have been working almost full-time on an oral history of punk rock in the Bay Area. We’ve interviewed nearly 300 people, from Green Day, Rancid and Operation Ivy, on back to Maximum RocknRoll magazine, Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Avengers, Crime, and the Nuns.

The book officially goes on sale September 29, the first launch party will be October 12, in conjunction with Litquake and Porchlight Storytelling. Check out our brand-new website for all the details of book parties, plus tons of extra images and chapters!

From vacationing golfers to local policemen, at some point every person in Santa Fe is faced with the same question: red or green? Meaning, would you like sauce made from red chile peppers, or green? For both, the answer is simply, “Christmas.”

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It’s one of Mother Nature’s most beautiful and inspiring mysteries: the migration of the monarch butterfly from North America to the Michoacán forest in central Mexico and back. It’s been happening for thousands of years, and it will, no doubt, continue for thousands more. But will we ever truly understand why?

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Tigeorges Laguerre is on a mission to save Haiti — or at least one little part of it — one coffee bean at a time.

Donkeys laden with bananas plod down the mountain path, followed by village women, carrying goods to market atop their heads. On either side of the trail, wild taro and cacao fill the slopes. TiGeorge Laguerre stops and points to a wooden shack. “My cousin lives here. She just had a baby.”

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Down inside a yacht anchored off an island in the Caribbean, skipper Jason White shows off a state-of-the-art computerized control center. He points out a marine single sideband (SSB) radio, somewhat of a sailing-instrument anachronism amid modern technology like satellite phones and weather faxes. And then he tells me about Herb. Somewhere out there, on the frequency 12359 kilohertz, is a man named Herb who will give any boat a personalized weather forecast upon request. He’s more accurate than any weather service, say the mariners who rely upon his expertise. But very few sailors even know he exists. “He only says it once, and he talks so fast, you have to record it and listen to it later,” says White, holding up a small digital recorder. “I use him all the time. But if you bug him too much, he’ll just ignore you.” Full text of article here.

The second annual International Yo-Yo Open & New York State Yo-Yo Contest describes itself as the world’s largest yo-yo event, attracting a crowd of more than 20,000. Yo-yo stars have flown in from the UK, South America, Japan, and Central Europe and are now mingling about the room, eagerly showing each other tricks. The constant whizzing noise sounds like an assembly of excitable insects. Open yo-yo cases bristle with arsenals of colorful models resting in padded foam. One owner shows off his collection by popping the prized yo-yos in and out of their padded foam as though he’s in an action movie, demonstrating parts of a sniper rifle. Full text of article here.

These days, martial music also means Marshall stacks. That’s right, soldiers rock—officially. In fact, every branch of the armed services maintains “show bands” as part of their music divisions. Not only are these groups of sailors and soldiers battle-trained, they also know how to plug in and squeal out a note-perfect version of Van Halen’s “Eruption.” This is an overview of ten military rock bands currently defending our freedom with guitar solos and cymbal crashes — check out the videos!

A history of the world’s most famous acoustic guitar, including an interview with company president Chris Martin IV, and a visit to the factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

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In a world where many hotels can appear so similar, it’s always nice to know that there’s room for the offbeat, weird, and just downright bizarre lodging options, like the following hotels, which actually exist and await your reservation. Vacation anecdotes are one thing, but it’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser to tell your friends you stayed the night inside the head of a giant dog.

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