Arts

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.

One afternoon when I was 13, I discovered, in our house's airless attic, an aged paperback copy of the French novel Emmanuelle. The cover featured a woman's lips opened provocatively over a black background and this text: "The great French erotic novel now a sensational film. With 25 photographs from the film."

I was 13 years old, and this was the pre-Internet age: I flipped straight to the photos.

On-air challenge: You will be given some sentences with two blanks. Add the letters E and Y to the word that goes in the first blank to get a new word that goes in the second blank to compete the sentence.

Last week's challenge: Take the last name of a famous world leader of the past. Rearrange the letters to name a type of world leader, like czar or prime minister. What world leader is it?

Answer: (Golda) Meir; emir

Winner: Daniel Fisher of Westport, Conn.

In the early 2000s, the get-rich-quick scheme of choice for young college dropouts was poker — and not your grandfather's poker, with clinking chips on green felt tables. Online poker. For a few years it was a national obsession for a generation of young men who grew up playing hours and hours of video games.

Many of these players couldn't get into casinos because they were underage, but they used their brains and introductory statistics courses to rake in millions, often playing 10 or more games simultaneously on huge computer monitors.

The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

For actor Jeffrey Wright, whose credits include Basquiat, Syriana, W. and Broken City (currently playing in theaters) — the movie he could watch a million times is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Life and Times is a 10-hour play about the life of one ordinary woman. It opens this week in New York city, and weekends on All Things Considered host Robert Smith attended a performance, complete with meals. He talks to the play's directors and to the woman on whose life it's based.

Thirty years ago, Guy Kawasaki went to work for a computer company that was trying to change the business with a product named after a fruit. Since helping launch the Macintosh computer, Kawasaki has been a venture capitalist, an author and a business consultant.

Update at 12:52 p.m. ET, Monday, Jan. 28:

It wouldn't do to call Insane City "a typical Dave Barry novel." What kind of thing is that to say about a book? The story begins with a bachelor dinner that goes off the rails, then brings in Russian mobsters, the fourth-place finisher in the Miss Hot Amateur Bod contest, a goodhearted escort and her "sales representative," if you please, an albino Burmese python — or is that a Burmese albino python?

Don't fear the haggis. Just think of it as a big, round sausage. That's what it is anyway.

Haggis is Scotland's national dish and every year on (or near) Jan. 25, it plays the starring role in Burns Suppers held around the world in celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns on his birthday.

In the strictest terms, Jason Statham isn't the perfect candidate to play Parker, the single-minded career criminal created by the late Donald E. Westlake (working under the pseudonym Richard Stark). Statham, despite having built a career playing rough-and-tumble skull-busters, is just too much of a big pussycat.

As Westlake himself explained, Parker is angry: "Not hot angry — cold angry." Statham, with those inquisitive, cautious eyes and that slow-burning purr of a voice, can act cold, but he can never be cold. Even at his coolest, he's all heat.