Goodbye, Octavia Butler. I'll miss going to book events in Seattle and scanning the audience for your gorgeous tall self with your queen's posture, and reveling in the feeling that we were graced to have a person, and a writer like you in our midst.

It is a cliche to say that she was too good a soul, but it's true.

--Tananarive Due

When I was in Driver's Ed, I lived in terror that this would happen to me:Student driver, instructor killed in crash.

A car driven by a 15-year-old student driver turned into oncoming traffic and was broadsided by a van, killing the student and his instructor.

Doesn't it seem like every time the world has completely forgotten his existence, George Michael gets arrested for something?

Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) is being sued. And no, not for subjecting the world to a mega-bestseller with cardboard characters, barely servicable prose, and a conclusion that was both disappointing and obvious. He is being sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of the 1982 non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, for breach of copyright. Since UK copyright law does not protect ideas, the suit claims that Brown copied the "architecture" or narrative structure of their work. Which is going to be very hard, and expensive (lots of lawyer time) to prove. I really hope they don't win this case -- it would set a dangerous world precedent, one where Jared Diamond (author of the non-fiction Collapse) could sue me for writing a post-apocalypse SF novel based in part on the failures of the Norse Greenlanders.

On the other hand, being sued by Jared Diamond might be just the thing to boost sales of this hypothetical novel.

On the subject of The DaVinci Code, I just wanted to point out something -- the Big Secret that drives the plot through a series of ultimately arbitrary historical puzzles, is that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, and their descendants have been protected by secretive Roman Catholic sects for 2,000 years. (Hope I'm not spoilin' it for ya.) So the whole big deal, this toweringly important thing, is -- what, exactly? I know there are some Christians whose faith would be shattered by the notion that a guy who actually had sex could be the perfect sinless Son of God. So doctrinally there would be a reason to suppress the knowledge of any Jesus/Mary babies. But the actual genetic descendants? What's the big deal? Is there supposed to be some kind of magic Jesus-gene that makes people better or something? If so, the book doesn't state that, it just takes it as a given that it is really special to be a genetic descendent of Jesus. (Of course, being played by Audrey Tautou, the most adorable human since Audrey Hepburn, makes anybody seems special.)