If you're a fan of 24 (Mondays at 9 pm on FOX), you don't have to be told what needs to be done to save America from a terrorist attack. So in this season's hour 4, when FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching) needed information from a former undercover contact in the Russian mob, she did what any red-blooded American would do: she put the guy's hand in a vise and cut his thumb off.

Author Augusten Burroughs is all too familiar with the disastrous and absurd — to the point that all six of his memoirs (starting with the hugely successful Running with Scissors in 2002) have veered so far from the conventional that critics have questioned whether they’re even true.

Apparently, Burroughs has a knack for attracting chaos even post-youth.

Whenever Chuck Palahniuk comes to town, you know you're in for something weird. After all, the man is a card-carrying member of the Cacophony Society (the jolly culture jammers who gave us the Santa Rampage) and claims to have caused some 40 public faintings with his gruesome reading of "Guts," the grim saga of a boy who turns his own colon inside out with a pool filter.

Comediennes Giulia Rozzi and Margot Leitman host "Stripped Stories," a night of sexual storytelling that regales titillated audiences with tales of wet/hot/sweet/sweaty/awkward lovin'. The show hit Mottley's Comedy Club last month, featuring Rozzi, Leitman, Jess Sutich, and Mindy Raf.