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Friends, Wookiees, Star Wars fans—lend us your ears! To celebrate the release of The Jedi Doth Return, author Ian Doescher will be crisscrossing the country to meet, greet, and sign books. And he's probably coming to a town near you! Check out all the stops and details under the jump.

BEEMAN, ah-ah-ahhhh! 

When it comes to regular, predictable orthography, English is a hot mess. Our language built of ill-gotten calques, mutant morphemes, and poorly-constructed neologisms adds up to a zany, mongrel, bric-a-brac vocabulary (that sentence alone contains words from four linguistic groups). In other words, spelling is im-freaking-possible. Take the very word language: why isn’t it pronounced “lan-goo-a-gee”? Or spelled langwidge? With the exception of a few spelling-bee know-it-alls (*sheepish wave*), no one enjoys struggling with making wurdz luk rite.

But history has known some clear-eyed crusaders who tried—really tried—to get us to make some damn sense with our letters and sounds. Here are six alternative movements that (sadly) failed to cast a spell.

(Image via flickr)

It’s sad but true: bad moms make for great stories.

I’m not talking about the kind of bad mom who made you eat your broccoli or picked you up from a high-school dance in her pajamas. I mean the really bad mothers you (hopefully) only see in books. The ones that take such pleasure in manipulating, belittling, or just generally screwing up their offspring that you can't help but assume the author took the advice to "write like your parents are dead" to heart.

Yes, they're terrible mothers, but with every abandoned baby and murderous rampage, these women make for page-turningly compelling reading. So for Mothers' Day, let's celebrate five of these literary momsters who definitely don't deserve breakfast in bed this year. 

It's (almost) Star Wars Day (May the 4th—get it?!?!). As Yoda would say, love this day, we at Quirk do. So in honor of the greatest holiday under the two suns of Tatooine, we've rounded up all of our fantastic Star Wars stuff—book trailers, blog posts, ecards, and more!—under the jump.