The most terrifying woman on cable news, Nancy Grace, turns 50 today. Director Sam Raimi and "Weird Al" Yankovic are both turning 50 today, too. Actor Ryan Reynolds is 33. Oscar-winning director Ang Lee is 55. Writer Augusten Burroughs is turning 44. ABC News correspondent Brian Ross turns 61. Jessica Stroup of 90210 is 23. Retired soccer legend Pelé is turning 69. Andy Warhol muse Jane Holzer is 69. And Meghan McCain turns 25 today. A list of people celebrating their birthdays this weekend is below.

Maniacal cable news host Nancy Grace turns 49 today. Also celebrating: Oscar-winning director Ang Lee turns 54. Memoirist Augusten Burroughs is 43. Novelist Michael Crichton turns 66. ABC News correspondent Brian Ross is 60. Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is turning 49. Retired soccer legend Pelé is 68. And "Weird Al" Yankovic is 49.

Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs gives an on-camera interview in which he reveals his secret writing process to the world. He works in bed! Gets up, showers, gets dressed, walks the dog, makes the bed, then gets back in bed. Weird. More importantly, he shares his simple and foolproof solution to overcoming writer's block. Hint: "It's like dropping a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets into water. Fizz!...If you want to find out how powerful the storm is, fly the plane into the eye of the storm!" Okay! The revelatory video is below:

Chronicler of every single moment of his life Augusten Burroughs is back with yet another memoir, this one titled A Wolf At the Table. Despite his marvelous success as an humorist and essayist, his latest 'oir hinges on the darker tales of his late father John Robison, a popular professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who by all accounts wasn't the kindest patriarch to his wife and children. That Robison is a complicated and troubled man isn't in dispute. What is up for debate in this Times piece are certain episodes of what Burroughs calls "stunning psychological cruelty." For example, the book claims Robison put a cigarette out on Burroughs' forehead. The surviving members of the Robison family also have divergent memories of a scene from A Wolf At the Table in which Burroughs defends himself and his brother John Elder Robison from their father with a BB gun. After the jump, the two sons and their mother relate three different versions of the same sad tale.

Burroughs is best known as the author of dark-comedy childhood memoir
Running with Scissors, which was made into a 2006 film with Alec Baldwin and Gwyneth Paltrow.

"James Frey is a liar. His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money." Back when Tom Scocca wrote those words in the Observer last January, it was nearly impossible to imagine the disgraced memoirist would ever sell another book to a major U.S. publisher. Sure, he'd have little tossed-off pieces in magazines every once in a while, or maybe he'd go back to writing screenplays. Hollywood doesn't care about this kind of thing! But the idea that Frey would sell what amounts to his third novel, for more than a million dollars, to Harper's Jonathan Burnham, seemed as unlikely as, say, Ron Goldman's family pimping a book by O.J. Simpson. And then it happened. A lot of things happen that shouldn't.

Are the publicists at St. Martins Press expert spinmeisters, or are they obfuscatemeisters like their author Augusten Burroughs? That's what we're wondering after reading the press release they distributed this morning about the settlement of the Turcotte family's lawsuit against Burroughs, which, as the AP reported, will result in the reclassification of the book "as a 'book' rather than 'memoirs.'" But St. Martins Press disagrees, or lies, or something, though.

Excellent news today for the Turcotte family, and for fans of, you know, truth and justice: Author Augusten Burroughs has reached an undisclosed settlement with the Turcottes for unfairly describing them as filthy, perverted, Pink Flamingos-style loons in a hugely popular book that was supposedly about his adolescence. Running With Scissors will now be "classified as a 'book' rather than 'memoirs'"—guess we'll look for it in the "books" section at Barnes & Noble!— and Burroughs will include a note in the acknowledgments of future editions of the book. From the sounds of it, it's going to be a bit of a Crap Email From A Dude!

Non-fiction: Memoir: John Elder Robison's memoir of growing up with Asperger's Syndrome and emerging as a fully-realized adult, with a foreword by Robison's brother, Augusten Burroughs, to Rachel Klayman at Crown, in a pre-empt, in a major deal, reportedly for $1.1 million (NY Post dollars), by Christopher Schelling at Ralph M. Vicinanza (world).

"Sure, A Million Little Pieces author James Frey is a fraud, but Augusten Burroughs is an even bigger phony." Ouch! What could have possibly spawned such a cutting remark about that scamp Burroughs? Why, a little Fake Writerness, of course!

• We really don't want today to end, if only so that everyone can continue to hyper-analyze Katie Couric's insane farewell on the Today show. [BWE]
• A new theory on Brangelina: did she have a C-Section because she didn't want to give baby Shiloh herpes? And did she give herpes to Brad Pitt? Was that how Jen Aniston found out he was cheating? Could we be any more stupid about this whole thing? [OhNoTheyDidn't]
• Martha Stewart puts her Westport, CT home up for sale for a mere $8.9 million. But you'll have to pay extra to have that hideous wallpaper removed. [FishbowlNY]
• In the soft underbellies of New York's hipster havens, there are at least 3 people who don't drink. Granted, you won't see these folks on the Cobrasnake — but dammit, they're out there. [VV]
• Give K-Fed a shower and a comb, and he could be dominating the halls of Goldman Sachs. [Us Weekly]
• Memoirist Augusten Burroughs indulges the girls at Jane with a message board Q&A, wherein we learn that he doesn't know how to spell per se. Not that we should talk, but then again, we have a lot less money and a much bigger chip on our shoulders. [Jane]
• With all these celebrity babies being spit out left and right, a career in child therapy — especially with a Beverly Hills practice — may prove to be very lucrative. [The Letter D]
• During its last launch, Radar housed its visiting web designers at the opulent Hotel Carter. This time around, maybe the Chinatown Best Western? [Flickr]
• Presented without comment, a Vincent Gallo blog. Oh hell, we can't not comment — it's really creepy. [I Blew Vincent Gallo]