Boom! Studios sends word that comics writer Mark Sable was detained by TSA security guards at Los Angeles International Airport this past weekend because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries Unthinkable. Sable was detained while traveling to New York for a debut party at Jim Hanley’s Universe today.

The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type “unthinkable” terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. (See this article for more on the series.)

Sable wrote of his experiences: “Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley’s Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for ‘extra screening’. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then ‘discovered’ the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

Read more here: Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts – SFScope – Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

US author of anti-Obama book detained in Kenya.

NAIROBI (AFP) — The American author of a best-selling, controversial book blasting White House hopeful Barack Obama was detained Tuesday by security officials in Kenya, police said.

Jerome Corsi “has been detained and he is currently being held at the immigration office” in Nairobi, a top police official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Corsi was to unveil “The Obama Nation” to the Kenyan public at a Nairobi hotel.

Obama’s father, now deceased, was Kenyan and the US senator running for president enjoys wide support in East Africa.

In a press release distributed earlier this week, Corsi announced he would “expose deep secret ties between US Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and a section of the Kenyan government leaders.”

He was also to detail Kenyan leaders’ “connections to certain sectoral groups in Kenya and a subsequent plot to be executed in Kenya should Sen. Obama win the American presidency,” the release said.

The police official denied Corsi’s detention was linked to the contents of his book.

“Just like anybody else, we are concerned with his immigration papers. We have nothing to do with the book or whoever it’s about. It’s about the law of Kenya,” he said.

Corsi made his name by co-authoring “Unfit for Command,” which maligned 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and is believed to have contributed to his defeat by President George W. Bush.

Corsi’s book on Obama, subtitled “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” was released on August 1.

The book’s publisher, Threshold Editions, said it examined “why the extreme leftism of an Obama presidency would leave the United States weakened, diminished and divided, why Obama must be defeated — and how he can be.”

AFP: US author of anti-Obama book detained in Kenya.

See also …

Kenya detains Corsi during Obama probe.
Officials scuttle WND reporter’s news conference on investigation.

Charles Fort, writer and pioneer of paranormal investigations

Is there anybody out there, Mr Fort?

CHARLES FORT: THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SUPERNATURAL by Jim Steinmeyer (William Heinemann, £16.99)

Pearson

For many of us, the paranormal will, like cheese fondue and Mateus Rose, be forever associated with the 1970s. This was, after all, the decade of Erich Von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and the TV series The Mysterious World Of Arthur C. Clarke.

The Seventies were, as a scientist at Loch Ness recently told a friend of mine, ‘a very credulous era’. This is a fact, as anyone who ever bought a Ronco button-o-matic will testify.

The truth, however, is that the paranormal was fashionable in the 1920s, making it the psychic equivalent of Oxford bags – those wide baggy trousers.

The man credited with kick-starting the weird world as we know it is Charles Fort. Fort’s name may at first seem unfamiliar, but once you know his followers dubbed themselves Forteans, his place in the universe becomes altogether clearer.

Jim Steinmeyer – who wrote a well-received history of the Golden Age of stage magic – has produced a richly entertaining and illuminating biography of the author who brought spontaneous combustion, water-divining and UFOs into the public domain.

His book is sub-titled The Man Who Invented The Paranormal. This is a bold claim, especially since writers have been focusing on the weird and the monstrous since Beowulf.

The difference is, of course, that Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Machen and co. wrote of the paranormal as fiction. Fort wrote of it as fact; meticulously cataloguing the bizarre and the unexplained on thin strips of paper, which he filed in shoeboxes lining the wall of his New York study.

(Whether he invented the paranormal or not, Fort may well be the world’s first geek.)

Without Fort there would, in all likelihood, have been no Bermuda Triangle, no Chariots of the Gods. Agent Fox Mulder, of X Files fame, is his spiritual grandson.

The man who invented the word ‘teleporter’ was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, the son of a prosperous grocer. His mother died when he was a child, and his father tended towards the brutal end of autocratic, beating his three sons regularly and locking them in a darkened cellar for days at a stretch. Charles escaped into journalism and pulp fiction.

By the age of 20, Fort’s appearance – stocky, moustached, bespectacled, nervously agitated – variously called to mind Teddy Roosevelt and Oliver Hardy.

As a writer, he had a gift for amusing similes and the vernacular speech of tenement life. It was this that caught the attention of Theodore Dreiser, then editing periodicals, but soon to emerge as one of the most influential novelists of the age.

Read more … Is there anybody out there, Mr Fort? | Mail Online

From NYT coverage of Scott “Son of Carol Keaton-Tax Collector” McClellan’s new book:

[McClellan] calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

Stress » Ex-Spokes-pimp Calls Out White House Johns, Media Whores

(Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP) Arthur C Clarke at home in Colombo last year

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, has died aged 90 in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, it was confirmed tonight.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30am after suffering breathing problems, his personal secretary Rohan De Silva said.

“Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital [in Colombo]. He had a cardio-respiratory attack,” he said.

His valet, W. K. M. Dharmawardena, said that funeral arrangements would be finalised when his close family returned to the island from Australia.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke dies aged 90 – Times Online