[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOhvSvKIhc]

Morning, readers. And Happy Mardi Gras.

*Today in Posthumousness: Hunter S. Thompson calls audio-video establishment, begins to voice coherent complaint, wavers, descends into blabbering rage, threatens to ruin audio-video establishment by writing about it. (Audio portion above.) Here, the good Doctor might’ve benefited from M.I.A.‘s example.

*So Rip Torn tries to rob a bank. So GQ notes the eight silliest bank robberies of all time.

*Wait, you mean Nick Cave hasn’t already done The Threepenny Opera?

*While new biographies of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are welcome, let’s not forget I Had a Hammer, Aaron’s auto-bio co-written with Lonnie Wheeler. It’s everything the ballplayer was: straight, workmanlike, and, with the possible exception of its title, self-effacing.

*More backroom politicking in The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Think Heilemann-Halperin, except for late-’90s nostalgia junkies.

*Early sounds from the first Strokes record in four years.

*Tonight in City Lights: Henning Mankell speaks at Politics and Prose.