“I know you, of all people, would want to know this! At five minutes and six seconds after four o’clock AM on the eighth of July this very year, the time and date will be 04/05/06/ 07/08/09. This will NEVER happen again!” I present this little, important-but-useless factoid from our devoted wOw reader, Barbara Kaster of Destin, FL, on what they call the “Redneck Riviera.”

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In the fall, the late Lyle Stuart’s Barricade Books — they are fearless and often punished for it — will bring out another of their surprise potential big hits. It’s to be called Unreasonable Men: A Father & Son Who Changed America, The Birth of the National Enquirer. We’ll see this book on Columbus Day 2009. 

The author is the only man who could write this book; he is Paul David Pope, grandson of Generoso Pope. The latter was a young Italian immigrant who spoke no English and came to the U.S. with only $10 in his pocket. Yet when he died, they closed down Fifth Avenue at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for his funeral.

I am told this is a great read. Generoso Pope produced Gene Pope who brought the Enquirer to national attention in the late ’70s, early ’80s. It has had a number of “personality” changes since. Most recently, under David Pecker, it has vied for national publicity via its many scoops over the mainstream media. 


Image: Amazon.com

On May 30 at BookExpo America in the Javits Center, New York, Paul Pope will autograph copies of the book’s bound galleys.

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And just in time for the book’s release, the news that Brooke Shields is thinking of suing the Enquirer. She claims a reporter took her mother, Teri Shields, out of a nursing home to get a “story.” The tabloid says the reporter was “an old friend” of Teri’s. Brooke’s mother is somewhat incapacitated.


Brooke Shields © Robin Platzer/Twin Images

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I loved the 2003 Helen Mirren movie, “Calendar Girls,” about a group of middle-aged English ladies who pose nude for charity. The movie took in an astonishing $93 million, and ever since, there have been rumors of a sequel. But one of the other actresses in the movie, Penelope Wilton, thinks not. “There is a West End stage show based on the movie, but I don’t believe there should be a new film.”


Helen Mirren © Robin Platzer/Twin Images

No word from Dame Mirren, who has never been shy about disrobing. And with her body, why should she be?

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Do any of you remember Depression Cake? No, it wasn’t something cooked up to lift your mood. It was a butterless, eggless dessert, concocted to suit the empty pockets of so many Americans in the 1930s. (This was many years before butter and eggs became “bad foods.”)

You can find this antique recipe and many others in The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky. The author put together this book from papers abandoned by the Federal Writers Project. In the 1930s, a handful of scribes were sent out to catalog regional eating across America. World War II interrupted the survey and it was never published.

But now you can  devour – literally – such things as Eudora Welty’s recipes for gumbo, notes on how the Sioux and Chippewa Indians chowed down, the charm of Maine clambakes and, in Hollywood, the discovery of “a sandwich called a taco.”