There are lots of celebs out there doing some very public charity work, and that’s cool. But I love it when a celeb reaches into his or her very own pocket and donates to a local cause. That’s what writer Stephen King and wife Tabitha did recently. The couple donated $12,999 to help bring home the Maine-based members of an infantry unit so they could have Christmas with their families before being deployed to Afghanistan. The total cost of transporting these brave soldiers home was $13,000, but because King is very superstitious about the number 13, he split the cost with his assistant: she paid the additional $1.

Stephen and Tabitha King had no problem donating money to ensure that the 150 members of Bravo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit could come home for the holidays.

They did have a slight problem with the requested amount, though.

“Steve is such a numbers person,” said Julie Eugley, one of the author’s personal assistants. “When we were approached for $13,000, he thought that number was a little unlucky. He didn’t want any bad whammies associated with these troops.”

So instead the Kings donated $12,999 and Eugley chipped in the $1 to complete the request. That money will help pay for two bus trips — one from Camp Atterbury, Ind., to Portland, one from Camp Atterbury, Ind., to Bangor — for the soldiers of the Brewer-based 172nd, a division of the Maine Army National Guard.

Earlier this week, the unit departed from Maine for training at Camp Atterbury, Ind. They were scheduled to remain there until their January 2010 departure to Afghanistan, and even though they had a few days off for the holidays, they didn’t have the means to return home.

Thomas “Skip” Chappelle, who runs Operation Community Support — a Bangor-based military assistance nonprofit agency — thought something needed to be done. So he solicited the Kings for money.

Eugley stressed that the donation came from the Kings’ personal accounts and not through the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, which does not donate for travel purposes.

“It was a pretty easy sell. I asked. Steve said yes,” Eugley said.

Operation Community Support, which Chappelle and other volunteers founded in 2003, incorporated as a nonprofit in 2007. The group seeks to ease the burden on deployed service members and their families statewide by coordinating sendoff ceremonies, buying Christmas gifts for military families and other efforts. The Kings’ $12,999 donation is the largest ever given to Operation Community Support.

“This is the best opportunity we’ve had to get the word out about what we do,” Chappelle said Friday. The buses will be operated by Notch Above Tours of Colchester, Vt. The round-trip cost for each bus is $8,350. In addition to the donation from the Kings, Chappelle said the Family Assistance Center of the Maine Army National Guard would provide the remainder.

Maj. Gen. John W. Libby, adjutant general of the Maine Army National Guard, said the guard always tries to ensure that soldiers come home for the holidays as time permits. The donation from the Kings certainly made that much more feasible this time.

The bus ride from Indiana to Maine is more than 15 hours one way, but for soldiers heading home to see families before spending a year in Afghanistan, the long trip is worth it. They’re expected in Bangor around Dec. 23 and will leave shortly after Christmas. “We all know what that does for soldiers and their families,” Chappelle said.

Members of the 172nd took part in an emotional sendoff ceremony on Monday at the University of Maine’s Collins Center for the Arts. The 172nd Infantry, which includes other companies from New England, will head overseas sometime after the first of the year as part of an Army brigade.

By early 2010, the Maine Army National Guard will have deployed about 50 percent of its force overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan. The 133rd Engineer Combat Battalion, with 540 soldiers, returned from Iraq in 2005 and tentatively is scheduled to re-deploy to Iraq in early March.

Since 2001, the Maine Army National Guard has sent more than 2,300 men and women to Iraq and Afghanistan. Nine have died.

[From The Bangor Daily News]

Is it any surprise that King would have a thing about numbers? He is the master of horror, after all. But despite his creepy imagination and love for all things macabre, King is reportedly one of the nicest, most down-to-earth guys around, supporting such causes as The Jimmy Fund and Heifer International. He and his wife have set up the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, a non-profit that helps underprivileged families in Maine, as well as the Haven Foundation, which provides financial support to people who have been in catastrophic accidents.

Prolific king of horror Stephen King has some choice words for Twilight series author Stephenie Meyer. He told USA Weekend that while Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is actually talented, Meyer “can’t write worth a darn.” King also says that thriller author James Patterson can’t write either:

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

[From USA weekend via Celebutopia]

Many will disagree with me, but I don’t think that Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown can write, either. The prose in that book was laughable, and the characters were completely flat. He wove a good tale, though, and I learned about theology, history, and art along the way. From what King is saying Meyer might have similar appeal. Authors don’t need to write deftly in order to draw you in. In some cases, like Brown for me, bad writing can distract too much from the story though. I haven’t read the Twilight books yet, but from the excerpt of the first book available on Amazon, they don’t seem that bad. She does use flowery descriptions and it’s all a little too emotional and fraught with meaning, but teens seem to like it. Writers don’t have to please other authors in order to have a successful book, they just have to appeal to the masses.

Stephen King is shown at a book signing on 11/7/06. Credit: WENN. Stephenie Meyer is shown at the premiere of Twilight on 11/17/08. Credit: PRPhotos

Time Magazine has a new interview with prolific horror author Stephen King, in which he bemoans how celebrity-obsessed the media is at the expense of actual news. He says that Time should declare Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan the people of the year so that we’ll have a discussion about why we’re elevating these do-nothing trainwrecks by paying so much attention to them. This is similar to Liz Smith’s suggestion that Internet Celebrity Gossip should be person of the year, since we never get a break from it anymore.

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Person of the Year?
TIME: I really don’t know, there’s a very small group of people who make that decision.

I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
Really?
Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you’re missing the whole fox hunt.” Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who’s gonna get custody of Britney’s kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit…

Do you actually think Britney and Lindsay should be on our cover?
Yeah, I do.

Sort of a, ‘This is what the media’s actually interested it, so let’s just put it out there’ thing?
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don’t know who their f—— Representatives are….

But you’ve been well in the public eye for decades now. Is it pretty blatant how much worse it’s gotten?
It’s worse every year. And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name. Granted, I haven’t been feeling real well and it was a long day of interviews. But he said to me, “If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.” And I’m like, “Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.” They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana. That whole issue of online ticket sales and scalping fascinates me. There are [legitimate] issues there about the Internet, so that actually does seem to have some cultural significance. But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That’s all. I mean, I don’t mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, “Here’s a lady who can’t take care of her kids, she can’t take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands.” And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it’s Britney, it’s Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

[From Time.com via Fark]

That’s great how he just lays it out there and says she’s trash, and that it’s ridiculous that we pay so much attention to her when she contributes so little to society. We’re a gossip blog and Lindsay and Britney have received so much undeserved press that we’ve decided to stop covering them for stretches at a time. I know in King’s estimation we’re part of the problem, and that’s true, but hopefully our gossip is just part of your balanced news diet. When they’re aren’t a lot of other options of what to pay attention to, that’s just sad. Kind of like Britney’s life, which consists mainly of the pursuit of mindless entertainment like shopping, eating, and staying at hotels.

Stephen King is promoting his new horror film, The Mist, which was out in the US on November 21 and stars Thomas Jane, and Marcia Gay Harden. It is getting mixed but mostly positive reviews.

Stephen King is shown with Marcia Gay Harden at the NY after party for the premiere of The Mist on 11/12/07, thanks to PRPhotos.