handbags and gladrags

A German man has been arrested after he climbed into an emergency postbox for unwanted babies while drunk.
Heinrich Mueller, 28, slid down the chute and ended up in an emergency incubator, triggering alarms among medical staff. But instead of another unwanted newborn baby, they found Mueller smoking a cigarette. He then fell asleep as staff worked out how to get him out of the incubator at the hospital in Dortmund.

Hundreds of babies have been deposited in the boxes set up across Germany and Austria since the scheme started five years ago. It came into effect after more and more young mums unable to cope with their newborns had been abandoning them on the street. The baby boxes offered a safe ‘no questions asked’ alternative.

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I started reading "Magic For Beginners" by Kelly Link.The first story is called "The Faery Handbag".It opens in somewhere I have been (& have pictures to prove it!)
The opening paragraph goes..............


"I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We'd take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It's kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world's largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. "Guess what color this is."............................{read more}
Thats it! here are some photos we took inside.
This is the second book recently that has opened on somewhere i visited once.Stephen King's The Cell opens on Boston Common with a 7/11 type death-thing...........(its a shit book,dont bother)
Kelly is good.For style think Raymond Carver on Acid rather than booze..........& she seems to enjoy her writing.She's having fun!Some great oneliners e.g.
"..I went up to Zofia's coffin,and I looked her right in the eyes.They were closed.The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow,and blue eyeliner.She looked like she was going to be news anchor on Fox television,instead of dead......."