Despite sagging paperback sales in the publishing industry, romance novels -- and particularly hen lit -- fiction featuring older female heroines -- are thriving. In 2006, according to Romance Writers of America, 26.4% of all books sold were romances, generating $1.37 billion in sales. In hen lit aka Matron literature, heroines typically are over-40, widowed grandmothers whose romance yearnings are secondary to family, work, and hobbies.
posted by terranova on Nov 21, 2008 - 29 comments

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. He plays the banjo, but he isn't just some hick. He enjoys Chicks, jamming with friends, wide open spaces and fights.
posted by stavrogin on Jan 18, 2008 - 74 comments

"Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex." It's a dirty job (YT). Sexing chicks early is important so that the cockerels can be separated and culled^ or fed to be broilers^. The obvious differences take weeks to develop, so when the vent sexing method was developed in Japan in the 1920s, professional chicken sexers became sought after. [more inside]
posted by parudox on Nov 19, 2007 - 37 comments

Two peregrine falcon chicks hatched today (almost) live on downtown Indianapolis' FalconCam. Yay! They're very cute, but the parent sits on them a lot.
posted by thirteenkiller on Apr 26, 2007 - 12 comments

Jack T. Chick. When Clowes, whose screenplay for the indie film Ghost World received an Academy Award nomination, was in college, he read 80 Chick tracts in one sitting. "By the end of the night I was convinced I was going to hell," he says. link by bb.
posted by the fire you left me on May 1, 2003 - 26 comments

Anime from a religious perspective This could never get tiresome - Jack Chick and others may think they have cornered the market in (unintentionally) hilarious Christian interpretations of popular culture, but this excoriation of Anime by (I suspect) a Baptist and definitely a fundamentalist is wonderful reading, and provides some competition. Quite apart from the fire and brimstone article itself, the pictures are a good laugh too.
posted by tiny pea on Nov 29, 2001 - 14 comments

Jack Chick Parody Site is up. Not surpringly, Chick Publications isn't pleased.
posted by milnak on Jan 8, 2001 - 6 comments