My Calculating Life

Right now, I have over 550 handheld LED calculators from the 1970s sitting in my basement. At one point, I was the third largest collector of these calculators in the country. How could this have happened to me?

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Christopher Walken

Inside the Mad, Mad Head of Christopher Walken
After this piece ran, Bob Dylan called the magazine to say that it was the best profile he'd read in the past 6 years!

Walken

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Jenny McCarthy

Jenny McCarthy

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Long-distance Casting: It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion

The Utterly Amazing World of Long-Distance Casting!
If I had this one to do over, I would leave out the business about how fat this one fellow was. I understand it caused him considerable pain, and I've felt bad about it ever since. I thought about cutting it at the time. I just didn't think about it hard enough, I guess. He didn't deserve what I did to him -- or, actually, what I allowed another fellow to do to him in a quote.

Motion

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Fly Fishing with Lefty Kreh: a Bummer Tale

Learning to Fly Fish with Lefty Kreh (a tale of woe...)
The magazine reported an unprecedented, record-breaking number of hate calls and letters after this one came out. It was flooded with subscription cancellations. Seems readers thought I had gored the sacred cow. Indeed, one of the magazine's largest advertisers -- Llyon's Publishers -- threatened to pull its advertising for a full year because of it. Wow!

Lefty

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My Y2K Problem

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Y2K Bug.
Living by the words in this piece cost me $250,000 at last count. It's probably a half a million at this point. Garffff!

Y2K

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The Killer World of Pro Bodybuilding

Size Matters: a report from the trenches of professional bodybuilding
Got many threats upon publication of this story -- threats of physical violence and lawsuit-type threats. None were carried out. Actually, everything I wrote in the piece was true, as was acknowledged by the bodybuilding buff magazines, which in print begain refering to me as a ``pencil necked geek.''

Bodybuilding

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Tori Spelling

This is the second story I've done about Tori Spelling. She gets a lot of heat, but I like her (though, as you'll see if you read my eBay story, I did skip out early during a lunch with her so I could go on an old-calculator hunt in L.A.'s 2nd-hand shops. Hey, you've got to have your priorities!)

Tori! Tori! Tori!

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Inside the World of Professional Bass Fishing

Inside the World of Professional Bass Fishing

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My Short Happy Life as a Professional Gambler

My Short Happy Life as a Professional Gambler

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Neve Campbell Is Something Wild

Neve Campbell Is Something Wild

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Grady Stiles, the Lobster Boy

Cruel and Unusual: Grady Stiles was born with claws for hands, flippers for feet, and a stone for a heart. This is the story of the bizarre life and gruesome death of the last of America's sideshow freaks.
This one has troubled me weekly ever since it came out. I. Can't. Shake. It. Really, I can't.

Lobster Boy

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The World of Pro Bikini Contests!

America's Cups: the girls of the professional bikini-contest circuit

Bikini

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How I Got Unstuck

My battle with my inner-investing demons
Unstuck

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This Is Your Brain on eBay

This Is Your Brain on eBay: a tale of addiction, loss, and little gain
During the writing of this story, I became a buyer, seller, and collector of LED pocket calculators from the 1970s. I now have 550 of them. And I no longer care about them. Can anyone say, OCD?

eBay

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