New Yorker fiction frequency

The Millions has a swell analysis (based on a meticulously sorted spreadsheet created by reader Frank Kovarik) of fiction in The New Yorker over the past five years. William Trevor has had nine stories in the magazine from 2003-2007, followed by Alice Munro with eight, and another dozen writers with five or more stories -- this prolific group accounting for 32 percent of all fiction in the nation's most revered venue.

Other tidbits: 37.4 percent of the authors were women; 48 percent weren't American, with British and Irish authors leading the tally of foreign writers.

And while we're visiting The New Yorker, why not try your graphic hand at the magazine's Eustace Tilley contest? If your entry is accepted, note it in the comments form and we'll link to it here.

Weekend at Virgilio's

Arraignments were filed today in the New York scheme to cash a dead man's $355 check after wheeling the corpse through the streets of Hell's Kitchen in an office chair. The New York Times details how an alert detective noticed a pair of 65-year-olds rolling the corpse, their friend Vergilio Cintron, outside a Pay-O-Matic check-cashing store.

“When they dragged his feet, his feet were just very rigid and they were bouncing off the edge of the sidewalk, and I knew right then and there that he was dead.”

Sir Edmund Hillary dies

Frankly, it came as some surprise the pioneering climber was still alive. His conquest of Everest in 1953 with sherpa Tenzing Norgay seems buried in a distant past.

Returning to Everest base camp, he famously greeted another member of the British expedition group with the words: "Well, George, we've knocked the bastard off."

On top of the Kerry endorsement, the Obama camp has to be chuckling a little at the prospect of so many front pages proclaiming "Hillary dies."

Blackhawk gases crowd

In May 2005 civilian security contractor Blackhawk dropped from a helicopter noxious gas on an unruly crowd at a checkpoint leading into the Green Zone in Baghdad, The New York Times reports. The helicopter's rotors drove clouds of CS, a riot-control gas, onto the soldiers guarding the checkpoint.

"This was decidedly uncool and very, very dangerous," Capt. Kincy Clark of the Army, the senior officer at the scene, wrote later that day.