CULTURE BUZZ: The beloved children’s writer and illustrator — of books like Where The Wild Things Are and Chicken Soup With Rice — recently turned 80, and is still as sad, angry, and misanthropic as ever. After undergoing triple-bypass surgery and losing his partner of 50 years, Sendak is a dark and depressing figure who has brilliantly managed to provide generations of adoring children with a legendary canon of fantasy subversively steeped in his own gloomy disposition.

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The Best Links:

1. Maurice Sendak at 80: Still Wrestling With Wild Things
2. “Chicken Soup With Rice” (Sung By Carole King)
3. Where the Wild Things Are
4. Sendak On NPR
5. Sendak: “We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever.”
6. Maurice Sendak’s 80th Birthday: A Star-Studded Celebration
7. Gays <3 Maurice
8. Maurice Sendak Kind of Comes Out?

Gallery of the Absurd gives Heidi and Spencer the children’s book treatment. The entry for “Fun At The Beach” really gets at the central truth of these two reality-show non-celebs: “Boobs, boobs, boobs. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Beach, beach, beach. Isn’t the beach fun?”

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The Best Links:

1. See The Full Gallery: Fun With Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt

CULTURE BUZZ: A hard truth goes down easier when it comes from a children’s book full of anthropomorphic animals. “Things They Don’t Tell You” reveals the unspoken truth about ugly people, self-importance, and how tall people only date each other. Everyone’s bound to find one page in here to pin to someone else’s cubicle wall. For example, “Love is like a grocery store apple: look all you want, but you’ll never find one without a huge dent in it.”

The Best Links:

1. Things They Don’t Tell You
2. “If you turn out to be ugly, everyone will like you. Nobody will love you.”
3. “Nobody’s perfect, especially you.”
4. “It’s what’s on the outside that matters.”
5. “Tall people only date other tall people.”

POLITICS BUZZ: Meghan McCain is writing a children’s book about her daddy. Yay! Should be good times for kids, especially the Vietnam sections, like the part that reads, “He didn’t get the right kind of medical care for his broken bones, and the food was really bad.” It’ll be the first kid’s book about surviving torture since the Dr. Seuss classic, The Wubbler Gets Waterboarded.

The Best Links:

1. The Book Really Focuses on Vietnam, For Some Reason
2. McCain Blogette Announces the Book
3. By The Time This Has a Chance to Sway Young Voters, McCain Will Long Be Dead
4. “Children’s eyes across the land of the free will no doubt be lighting up already at this prospect.”

CULTURE BUZZ: A book called Gallop! employs a new patented technology called scanimation which makes static print images look animated. It’s cool when they make cool educational things for kids that can also serve as trippy sh*t for adults.

The Best Links:

1. It’s More a Gazing Book than a Storybook
2. When You Turn the Pages, the Animals Move
3. iParenting Media Awards Excellent Products of 2008; Scanimation
4. Get it on Amazon
5. Even the Guests at My Dinner Party Were Into It
6. Avoid Lead-Tainted Toys - Get Your Kids Books
7. This Groovy Book Is Only $12.95
8. “It is AWESOME!!”