cicada-crazy, sad books, news that is troubling, etc.

Let's get the depressing, alarming stuff out of the way first...

True cowards show themselves as such, in this WP piece about the lukewarm to ice cold welcome that Joseph Darby (the most prominent whistleblower on the Abu Ghraib abuses) has gotten in his home town of Corriganville, Maryland.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Darby for his "honorable actions." But Washington is a universe away. "They can call him what they want," says Mike Simico, a veteran visiting relatives in Cresaptown. "I call him a rat."

The sentiment is so deeply felt that even those who praise him do so only anonymously, or with many reservations.

"That boy's got a lot of courage," says Alan St. Clair, who lives down the road from Darby's high school home. "But when you go against your fellow man like that, I don't know. Some people won't like it."

Some people. It's always "some people" you have to watch out for.

And, in further disturbingness, Howard Kurtz talks to various news organizations about how their Iraq coverage is being impeded by dangerous conditions.

In sad books news, disturbing in an entirely different way, the Boston Globe has various writers -- including the Kelvin-Grinks -- weigh in on the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo in Boston.

Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, writers and publishers in Northampton, met while they were working at the shop, and he even proposed to her there. (She accepted). They say the closing is a huge loss for Boston.
''It's incredibly sad," says Grant, 33, who, with Link, owns Small Beer Press. ''It's amazing that you would lose an intellectual space like that. . . . Boston will not be the same to us without Avenue Victor Hugo."

(Via Beatrice.)

Doing happy Wiscon dance now... Oh wait, that means we have to finish the magazine. Stopping happy Wiscon dance for a few days...

The only truly good news of the day being in Massachusetts, of course. Happy weddings, all! THe pictures are amazing, but hearing the cheers on NPR this morning was something even more special.

Does anyone actually care that Anne Rice is now Anne Surburbia?

Also, cautionary, big caution:

Do not eat cicadas.

A man who cooked and ate nearly 30 cicadas sought medical treatment after suffering a strong allergic reaction to the sauteed insects.

The man showed up at a Bloomington clinic Thursday covered from head-to-toe in hives, and sheepishly told a doctor he'd caught and ate the cicadas after sauteing them in butter with crushed garlic and basil.

And please, refrain from referring to yourself as a "cicadamaniac."