Here at TWKY, we know someone who nearly died last week from Lyme Disease. This was no wilting and aged flower, mind you, but a 6'2", 210-lb. athlete in good health. He probably picked up the infected tick earlier this summer while mowing his lawn in northern Massachussettes. A few months later, he's flat on his back for 7 days in an Intensive Care Unit with an infection that had all the signs of congestive heart failure.

Like many other insect-borne illnesses, Lyme can be deadly. (Everyone who's read the book already knows that mosquitos kill more than a million people every year.) Each infection takes a unique path, too, so one person may have cardiac trouble while another's liver fails, or has neurological damage, or gets intensely swollen joints. We know bugs can ruin a picnic -- now they can turn your lunch-on-a-blanket into an orthopedic horror fest.

Heads up, tough guys. Giants among men can be taken down by bugs smaller than a grain of rice. KY

TWKY would like to present a Dumb Sh*t award to William Maclean, security correspondent for the Reuters news group in London. Truly a dumb sh*t, Maclean wrote a front-page article saying Al Qaeda needs to make another attack on the West before it loses credibility as a terrorist leader. In the opening paragraph, Maclean writes that "[Al Qaeda's] outpouring of rage will ring hollow if it cannot land a punishing new blow in the West."

Perhaps another option for Maclean is to put his thumbs to his temples and wiggle his fingers (ideally, while wearing a yarmulke) at the extremist Muslims he sees on the streets of London, where 52 innocents were killed on the underground in 2005. Does Reuters think that terrorists have no web access, no sense of public perception, no pride? While reporting on the successes of Western security is important in building confidence among populations, Maclean's article is sure to do an effective job of rallying Al Queda's troops for another strike. And that, dear readers, will kill you.

According to FBI figures, the number of women arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs went up 28.8 percent between 1998 and 2007. The recent tragedy on New York's Taconic State Parkway has brought these stats front and center. Despite adamant protestations from her husband, toxicologists determined Diane Schuler was more than twice the legal limit for alcohol--and high on dope as well--when her wrong-way car crash killed four kids and four adults.

In the same 9-year period, DUI rates for men came down 7.5 percent. It's tough to say why women are trending up while men trend down. Perhaps it's a long-tail effect of gender equality, wherein women have become empowered to be just as well paid, just as outspoken, and now just as dumb as guys can be. Ladies, please: will you let men take the wheel of stupidity? We need someone to take away the keys.

The do-it-yourself movement has gotten a kick in the pants commensurate with the economy's kick in the 'nads. Why not take a money-saving cue from all those people doing DIY home repairs, "staycations" and backyard weddings, and plan a DIY family funeral? With the average cost of funeral-home services soaring well over $6000, many U.S. residents are realizing their state doesn't require a funeral director to handle a dead body (though several states do). If you're good with your hands, you could knock together a pine coffin for about $40 in plywood and bury Grandpop out back next to the hamsters.

The 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 has us mooning over the abandoned space program. NASA spokespeople have said that if a manned moon program was being proposed today for the first time, it would never get off the ground. That's based not only on politics and red tape or funding, but because it wouldn't be safe enough by today's standards.

Of the 38 astronauts to fly for Apollo, three have died -- and those three were part of the later-named Apollo 1 mission, which met a fiery and unfortunate fate in a launch training. Point is, the most dramatic changes in history have pivoted on the courage and nerve of a daring few. Can we afford to be risk-averse? Yes, space travel is dangerous and always will be. So is fighting the Taliban on its own soil, or being the first pro athlete to advocate for AIDS awareness, or telling a busdriver in 1955 you're not going to sit in the back just because you're black. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made a descent to alien soil in a lunar module that had walls of tin foil and was out of gas. Dangerous? Hell yeah. Skip the mission? Hell no.

The world gets weirder, doesn't it? Whatever happened to dying in old-fashioned ways like getting hit by a horse-and-buggy, or succumbing to smallpox? For the most part, those days are gone, replaced by stranger methods by which the Dark Lord reaches out to snuff souls from the flame of life. This week, 10 mountain climbers, eight of whom were over age 60, were killed in the Hokkaido region of Japan, noted for its lovely--and now apparently lethal--mountains. No word yet on what killed them all, but bad weather is suspected. Just as bad weather is suspected in the deaths of nearly 250 kids under the age of five who lived (past tense) in the mountains of Peru.

But the greatest ignominy this week was bestowed on the two workers who died while building a stage for Madonna's current concert tour in France. The stage collapsed, injuring scores and killing the two. We hope they were fans. Because, as we've always maintained, Madonna's music is bad enough to kill you. Now we have proof.

Once upon a time in America, children were quite literally being struck dumb by lead poisoning. The ingredient that made paint look swell on the walls and clean up so nicely, it turned out, could lead to brain damage (among other problems) in kids who chewed on chips. Lead paint was banned in 1978 and its risk has been greatly reduced thanks to improved removal methods and awareness campaigns.

Now there's a more nefarious threat behind the walls. According to the New York Times, some 6,783 residential homes in the US were discovered last year to be clandestine labs for producing methamphetamines (in 2003, the DEA reported seizing a record 17,356 labs and dumpsites). And what happens to the house after the meth shake-and-bakers are busted? Well, someone hangs up new drapes and sells it to an innocent young family. There are no clean-up guidelines, and no restitution for the families who fall ill after breathing the toxic particles emanating from their very walls and floors.

Check here for a field guide to meth labs. And then go here to see the crank heads to blame.

As a species that's been around for more than 10,000 years, humans (aka homo sapiens) haven't quite found a way to minimize the number of things that can kill us. In our book, we llist nearly 100 things that will hasten your entrance into the under and afterworlds. Even a quick look at the ways in which famous people -- and crowds throughtout the Third World -- have died over the past couple of weeks is testament to Death's multi-hued palette. Gunshot wounds, anal cancer, bone cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, brain injuries, falls, old age, Alzheimer's, bombs, drug overdoses, pneumonia, and even swine flu have all garnered headlines for their affect on members of our species. (By the way, THIS WILL KILL YOU will always refer to swine flu by its popular and easy-to-remember name. Calling it the H1N1 virus doesn't make it any less menacing.)

You'd think evolution would have outfitted us with better defense mechanisms. Maybe harder skin, or infection-resistant blood. But no. The Grim Reaper gets through our thin skins easier than bomb makers getting through government security. Who knows what will kill us in the future? Airplane delays, bad movies, stupid reality shows, talking heads, traffic, taxes, nosy neighbors, computer crashes, and partisan politics are all enough to make us want to kill ourselves during the best of times. Who's to say they won't evolve to become actual things that will kill us? After all, if unstable girlfriends and religious zealots can cause more deaths than anthrax, it's not too far-fetched to think that watching idiots like Nancy Grace or reading blowhards like Paul Krugman may someday be lethal.

What's the massive draw of the Michael Jackson memorial concert? Upwards of 2 million people sought tickets, and a quarter million are expected to fill the sidewalks surrounding L.A.'s Staple Center. About 18,000 will make it inside and into a nearby "overflow" theater.

We attend funerals to pay respect to family and acknowledge the deceased. Actual mourning is a private, inner process, a means of dealing with loss and appreciating how the life lost enriched our own. It's no public event, and unless you're turning a memorial service into a good way to meet other singles, it's not a scene for putting your own emotions on display.

Attending the show is like a high school girl demonstrating to all her friends how upset she is that some kid she hardly knew died in a car wreck. Vanity at its worst. The few people who actually knew Jackson are going to be on the stage. How is it that audiences don't separate affection for music from the person who created it? We like the last U2 record but we don't need to have lunch with Adam Clayton. We just wanna hear the songs.

Meanwhile, as showtime nears, news outlets are saying MJ's family may bring his dead body to the show. That's weird. Are we alone on this?

You know what will kill you? Independence Day. And we don't just mean the traffic fatalities due to drunk driving, though July 4th is, year after year, one of the deadliest holidays on the highways. This weekend, tilt that can of Schlitz skyward in memory of the 25,000 or so revolutionary soldiers who gave up their lives in America's War of Independence and brought you a Fourth of July so you could cook your burgers and dogs any way you damn well please.

Now think of all the people around the world still fighting for independence and representation -- and losing their lives for it -- some 233 years after you got yours. Kinda makes that BBQ dinner taste a little better, doesn't it? Stay alive and enjoy your holiday.

Ed McMahon: bone cancer killed him. Farrah Fawcett: anal cancer killed her (although we've heard that her son and pseudo-husband were real pains in the ass, so there may be more to this story that previously reported). Michael Jackson: fame and sheer wackiness killed him. The reports are everything from pain-killers and sleeping pills to injected drugs and his father's lifelong abuse killed him.

Then Billy Mays: brain trauma. Then Fred Travalena: non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Then Karl Malden: natural causes (sweet, when you're 97). You know what? Maybe being famous will kill you. That's the current line of thinking over at the Celebrity Death Trio, where celebrities die in threes, whether they like it or not. It's kind of hard to imagine they like it (dying being what it is and all), but it sure gives their careers a huge boost. Amazon reported that it sold more Michael Jackson music in 24 hours than it had in the previous 11 months.

Nothing beats death for being the ultimate career move. The rewards probably aren't nearly as tasty as when you're alive, though. So that's worth thinking about.

The prospect of dying in an airplane strikes fear in every traveler. In addition to the helplessness, sheer terror, and having the final descent take wayyy too long,  your last meal was probably over-salted. But when 60-year-old Craig Lowell died on Continental Flight #61 last week, he was spared the white-knuckled panic and teary hug from a row-mate. In fact, he was flying the plane. Lowell's co-pilot thought he was just taking a nap en route from Brussels to New Jersey, but it was tray-tables-up for pilot Lowell. Certainly could have been a lot worse way to go for his passengers; except for an onboard doctor who was called in to help, few passengers had any idea what had happened until after the plane landed safely. And if Lowell was headed to heaven, well, he got a 30,000-foot head start.

It's a dangerous time to have a conscience, if you live in Iran. Demonstrators have been hiding their faces from cell-phone filmers and photographers for fear of governmental reprisal. But now the Basij, a force of plain-clothed vigilantes lurking among the crowds, are watching faces and taking names. Instead of whacking knee caps in the middle of the march, where they stand to be outnumbered, they're hunting demonstrators down later for a deadly thrashing.

For all of the millions out there on foot in that potboiler of a country, it's striking that not one of the 13 deaths officially on record (as of this writing) has been the result of a trampling or a protest gone out of hand (a method of dying that has strangely become one of the most popular chapters in TWKY). Here in the States, we can't even put a hundred people in front of a Wal-Mart without someone getting trampled to death. Remember last November, when bargain shoppers in Long Island literally ran over an employee in their urgent desperation to spread holiday cheer? It was like Christmas in Pamplona. In the Middle East they're risking their lives for the rights we already have, which include not only personal and religious liberties but the right to a free market. Meantime, we'll kill each other for a Webkinz. What's wrong with this picture?

The healthcare debate this week is all about keeping us healthy so we can live long and productive lives, right? The problem is that we indulge in too many things that will kill us from the get-go. No amount of healthcare is going to make up for sucking on cigarettes, soaking up sugar, and dieting on drugs and drink. There is no magic pill to make you better once you've beaten your body to the point where it says "Okay you bastard, I'm done with this." Our suggestion? Enjoy your vices and keep them to yourself, or live like Mother Teresa and demand better medical coverage because you subsist solely on vegetables and prayers.

There are plenty of things that will kill you, but if you're going to go, might as well enjoy the ride. As for us, we'll take our chances with Tanqueray and tonics, barbecued pork sandwiches, and Chocolate Murder birthday cake.

An 88-year old white supremacist goes into a Jewish Holocaust museum . . . no, it's not the beginning of a joke. It's today's headline. And surprisingly, getting killed by an 88-year old deranged nutcase isn't in our book! Ah, yes, but that's why sequels were invented. Anyway, this cracker opens fire in a D.C. museum like he thinks he's Rambo. Maybe he is -- isn't Sylvester Stallone about 88 years old? Death by gunshot, as we note in the book, is a quick and relatively easy way to go. Except, if you're 88, you probably don't have a driver's license, so shouldn't have a hunting license, so shouldn't have a gun. But maybe he was using the gun as a symbolic representation of his own grizzled phallus. Which should lead us to a David Carradine joke, but it's not going to.

This week has been like a CNN Headline News edition of our book. First, 228 people make an unscheduled plane landing (page 317) in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Next, 63 illegal miners are found dead in South Africa (page 321). Finally, Mr. Kung Fu himself, David Carradine, is found hanging by his neck (page 112) in a hotel room in Thailand. We didn't plan any of this. But we wonder if the publicity department over at our publishing house did. Hey, way to go, guys!!! Great celebrity tie-ins. Can't wait until next week.

THIS WILL KILL YOU, the most important literary tome since Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls," is unveiled today. The world has waited with an anticipation that simply can't be measured. We'd call it a hunger, but then people would think the whole book is about fast food. We're glad to be out of our box, so to speak, and exposing TWKY to the bright light of day.

The radio and online people already love THIS WILL KILL YOU, and Newquist and Maloof have been promoting the book like rabid 1950's Bible salesman. Check out the NEWS section to see where they've been showing up.

So this is just the beginning. Life is good.