Month: August 2015

Alien Invasion in My Backyard has been featured in the 2015 ABC Best Books for Young Readers list.

Thank you to the American Booksellers Association for this honor.

Sketches for sale at Wish List.

"Ruben Bolling’s New Kids’ Book Extracts Magic From The Mundane"

"He still doesn’t know what it was. At age 7, Ruben Bolling and his friend both crept behind the stack of firewood in his backyard, and there it was — a pulsating, pink blob creature the size of a football. They screamed and ran."

Alien Invasion in My Backyard is a Library Pick in the Statesman Journal:

"Readers will laugh their way through this first 'Emu Club' adventure and perhaps begin their own summer club."

I've written about this on Twitter, and Derf has written a long essay about this situation.  

Basically, in May, my friend editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a blog item about a 2001 incident in which the LAPD handcuffed him for jaywalking, while a crowd formed, jeering at the police officer.  The LAPD somehow got an audio recording of the 14-year-old incident to the Times, which through minutes and minutes of static, seemed to depict only a polite interaction.  The Times publicly "fired" Rall (he was a freelancer who regularly contributed to the Times) because of "serious questions" about accuracy and integrity.

Ted, and apparently others, have since had an audio analysis of the recording done, and the enhanced version seems to include voices in the background saying things like "He was just jaywalking" and "You need to take off the handcuffs."

It's been over a week since Ted's provided this new evidence.  I'm puzzled why The LA Times hasn't responded, and why this hasn't become a bigger national news story.

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"Cool Book … Get your tweens excited about reading with this fun new book and accompanying online fan club"

–New York Family Magazine