Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Tom Danehy: GOP legislators' refusal to raise taxes and only make cuts will harm the public they're 'serving' (tucsonweekly.com)
The line about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" is commonly attributed to Mark Twain, although Twain went out of his way to attribute it to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Nevertheless, the Disraeli/Twain truism has been demonstrated by minds large and small, and hearts pure and purely evil, countless times over the years.
Catherine O'Sullivan: Americans are already too distracted ... and now we're talking about legalizing pot?! (tucsonweekly.com)
Granny was right: We are going to hell in a hand basket. Hillary Clinton is right, too: What's putting us in hell along the U.S.-Mexico border is not just the greedy, vicious Mexican drug lords, but the insatiable consumption habits of the American public.
Andrew Tobias: CAP AND TRADE (andrewtobias.com)
... it is a tax you can chose not to pay. All you have to do is strive, over the next 10 years, to use a lot less energy. More efficient lighting, more efficient appliances, more efficient insulation, more efficient cars; better habits (do you really need the lights on when you're not in the room? Is there no way to idle the computer a few hours a day?
Mark Morford: The last muscle car (sfgate.com)
Sexy as a swollen porn star on meth, twice as useless.
Etan Horowitz: Kindle 2 will no doubt find lots of new fans (The Orlando Sentinel)
The Kindle 2, the second version of Amazon's breakthrough electronic book reader, is cheaper ($359), thinner (0.36 inches), can hold more books (more than 1,500 compared with 200), and has a longer battery life (Amazon says you can read for four to five days with wireless turned on and for longer than two weeks with it turned off) than the original.
"Columbine " by Dave Cullen: A review by By Art Winslow
Officials of Jefferson County, where the mass murder occurred, had records dating back more than a year of Harris' death threats and rants, 10 pages from his Web site brought to their attention by the parents of a student whom Harris said he would kill. Thirteen months before the slaughter, sheriff's investigators had evidence that Harris was making pipe bombs but never executed a search warrant in response. In the days after the killings, officials denied knowledge of Harris' Web site. They suppressed evidence of their previous knowledge of the pipe bombs for five years; files of the original affidavit related to that were destroyed, perhaps intentionally. The memory of the "Thirteen," as the victims became in shorthand, was thus desecrated as they were publicly consecrated.
Allen Pierleoni: Harlan Coben's fictional alter ego, Myron Bolitar, gets the adventure - but Coben got the girl (McClatchy Newspapers)
"Myron is me, but with wish fulfillment," Harlan Coben was saying on the phone from his Ridgewood, N.J., home, which he shares with his pediatrician wife, Anne, and their four children.
Kevin Horrigan: Blaming Brenda Starr for newspaper woes (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Over the past few years, it has been my sad duty to help "roast" dozens of friends and colleagues who have retired - or, because in the journalism business, "retire" is a transitive verb - been retired from newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The newspaper business is going through some tough times, that's no secret. We lost another great one last week: Brenda Starr, the gorgeous redhead with the sparkling eyes who graced the comics pages for decades, was laid off.
20 QUESTIONS: Mark O'Connor (popmatters.com)
Like Benny Goodman, Mark O'Connor is a virtuoso in the realm of popular music, and also like Goodman, he easily and brilliantly performs classical music, as well.
The Richard Dawkins of Hollywood (guardian.co.uk)
US comic Bill Maher tells John Patterson how his new film proves that religion is not just ridiculous but Religulous.
Will Harris: A Chat with Rob Schneider, Director and star of "Big Stan" and "Deuce Bigelow"
On "Big Stan": I didn't want to make a studio picture. I wanted to make a movie that was a little crazier, a little more outrageous. I'm absolutely unapologetic about it. And the response I've gotten is overwhelming, because I didn't give a f**k and I just went for it.
ATC (A Touch of Class): Mistake No 2 (youtube.com)
The Weekly Poll
The next Poll will be April 7th - BadToTheBoneBob's 'out state' on vacation.
A pistachio tree averages around how many nuts every two years?
wrote:
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Marine layer hung around til late afternoon, again.
Lincoln Center Fund Raiser
'Poetry & the Creative Mind'
Wynton Marsalis didn't bring his trumpet to the podium during Wednesday night's poetry benefit at Lincoln Center. But he did hum a few bars as he half-sang, half-recited Sterling A. Brown's "Riverbank Blues."
Marsalis was one of 10 performers at the seventh annual "Poetry & the Creative Mind," presented by the Academy of American Poets as a kickoff to National Poetry Month and as a demonstration of how words in rhythm can bring together some otherwise unlikely company.
Among those on stage, sharing the spotlight with a floral arrangement worthy of a Triple Crown horse race, were a musician (Marsalis), a singer (Joan Baez), a composer (Steve Reich), an actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a scientist (Harold Varmus) and even some poets (Rose Styron, Mark Strand and Jorie Graham).
Readers were asked to stick to American poets, dead ones, but the rule was ignored by Varmus, who chose John Donne and other British writers; by Gyllenhaal, who selected the Russian Anna Akhmatova and most defiantly by Baez, who acknowledged that knowing nothing about reading poetry hadn't stopped her from writing it.
'Poetry & the Creative Mind'
New Orleans Benefit
'The Domino Effect'
Little Richard and Chuck Berry are dusting off the songbook of a New Orleans legend to raise money for the city's parks and schools.
They're part of a May 30 concert at the New Orleans Arena called "The Domino Effect" because they'll be performing songs popularized by New Orleans native and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist Fats Domino.
The concert is a fundraising event for a charity run by New Orleans Saints Quarterback Drew Brees called "Operation Kids," which has raised more than $1.5 million since 2007.
Brees says he's thrilled about the lineup that also includes Keb Mo, Junior Brown, Taj Mahal and other artists.
'The Domino Effect'
Auctioning 200 Wax Celebs
Hollywood Wax Museum
The Hollywood Wax Museum is offering wax representations of these and nearly 200 other celebrities at the first auction in its 44-year history, set for May 1.
Fans can bid on political figures, such as George Washington and Bill Clinton, and athletes like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Musicians such as Cher, Stevie Wonder and the Fab Four will be available, along with TV and film stars including Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, Will Smith and Charlie Chaplin.
The auction will be administered by Profiles in History and a portion of the profits will support efforts to preserve Hollywood's historic Walk of Fame.
Hollywood Wax Museum
Telescope Visits Philly
Galileo Galilei
Though it looks like a cardboard tube that got left out in the rain, it's a priceless instrument whose owner changed the world. The mottled brown cylinder on display at The Franklin Institute science museum is a 400-year-old telescope used by Galileo Galilei, whose observations of the heavens ultimately changed the face of not only astronomy but all of science.
"Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy" opens Saturday and runs through Sept. 7. The show makes one other stop, in Stockholm, in time for October's Nobel Prize announcements, before the telescope and other items return in January to their home in the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
On display are more than 100 artifacts from that museum, which is closed for extensive restoration work, as well as the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace in Florence. But the star of the show is the 3-foot-long telescope, a humble-looking wooden tube with Galileo's own handwriting at one end noting the magnifying power of the lens.
It's unknown whether this particular telescope was the one with which Galileo first observed the moon, discovered sunspots and the moons of Jupiter and marked the phases of Venus. But it is one of only two of his telescopes still known to exist.
Galileo Galilei
Ditches Time Delay For 2010
Golden Globes
The Golden Globes will air live across the United States for the first time next year, meaning viewers on the west coast won't have to wait three hours to see what Hollywood stars wore to the annual awards bash.
In a statement issued on Thursday, event organizer the Hollywood Foreign Press Association acknowledged that the time delay was a quaint vestige of a simpler time.
The 67th annual installment of the Golden Globes will be held on Sunday, January 17 at 5 p.m. PST (0100 GMT, Jan 18), and broadcast in the United States on NBC. Nominations will be announced on December 15.
Golden Globes
Wrongly Fired By University of Colorado
Ward Churchill
A jury ruled Thursday that the University of Colorado wrongly fired the professor who compared some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi, a verdict that gives the professor $1 and a chance to get his job back.
Then-Gov. Bill Owens was among the officials who had called on the university to fire Ward Churchill after his essay touched off a national firestorm, but the tenured professor of ethnic studies was ultimately terminated on charges of research misconduct.
Churchill said claims including plagiarism were just a cover and that he never would have been fired if it weren't for the essay in which he called World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader who orchestrated the Holocaust. Jurors agreed.
A judge will decide whether Churchill gets his job back, after his attorneys file a motion for reinstatement.
Ward Churchill
Melting Faster Than Expected
Arctic Sea Ice
Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years. A new analysis of changing conditions in the region, using complex computer models of weather and climate, says conditions that had been forecast by the end of the century could occur much sooner.
A change in the amount of ice is important because the white surface reflects sunlight back into space. When ice is replaced by dark ocean water that sunlight can be absorbed, warming the water and increasing the warming of the planet.
The Center said Arctic sea ice reached its winter maximum for this year at 5.8 million square miles on Feb. 28. That was 278,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average making it the fifth lowest on record. The six lowest maximums since 1979 have all occurred in the last six years.
Arctic Sea Ice
Legislating Submission
Afghanistan
A new Afghan law makes it legal for men to rape their wives, human rights groups and some Afghan lawmakers said Thursday, accusing President Hamid Karzai of signing the legislation to bolster his re-election prospects. Critics worry the legislation undermines hard-won rights for women enacted after the fall of the Taliban's strict Islamist regime.
The law - which some lawmakers say was never debated in parliament - is intended to regulate family life inside Afghanistan's Shiite community, which makes up about 20 percent of this country of 30 million people. The law does not affect Afghan Sunnis.
One of the most controversial articles stipulates the wife "is bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires."
The law's critics say Karzai signed the legislation in the past month only for political gains several months before the country's presidential election.
Afghanistan
Starts In Late-20s
Mental Decline
Declining mental function is often seen as a problem of old age, but certain aspects of brain function actually begin their decline in young adulthood, a new study suggests.
The study, which followed more than 2,000 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 60, found that certain mental functions -- including measures of abstract reasoning, mental speed and puzzle-solving -- started to dull as early as age 27.
Dips in memory, meanwhile, generally became apparent around age 37.
On the other hand, indicators of a person's accumulated knowledge -- like performance on tests of vocabulary and general knowledge -- kept improving with age, according to findings published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Mental Decline
Variation On A Theme
Phone Sex Line 1
An Oregon company has ordered new packaging for its Peace Cereal after a typo on the box sent callers to a phone sex line instead of the cereal maker's 800 number. Instead of reaching Golden Temple of Oregon, callers were greeted by a recorded voice asking, "Do you love sex? ... Isn't that why you called?"
Spokeswoman Elissa Brown said Eugene, Ore.-based Golden Temple ordered new packaging when the mistake was discovered in December and new boxes have been shipping out for weeks.
However, 13 varieties of the cereal were on shelves Wednesday at one Halfway, Md., grocery store, including seven varieties in boxes bearing the incorrect telephone number.
Phone Sex Line 1
Variation On A Theme
Phone Sex Line 2
Journalists based in the United States got a shock Thursday when they dialed a toll-free number to join a conference call with senior officials accompanying US President Barack Obama in London.
The number turned out to be a sex chat line inviting callers to use their credit card numbers.
Reporters finally got through to the two officials in London -- National Security Advisor James Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- when they gave up on the US "800" number and instead dialed an international number.
The White House did not offer an explanation when asked how it sent the wrong number in an email listing both numbers -- one for journalists in the United States and the other for those overseas.
Phone Sex Line 2
Paging Dr. Freud
Bulls
As investigators delve into the private life and personal possessions of Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff, at least one thing has become apparent -- he was obsessed with bulls.
A pair of boats christened "Bull" and "Little Bull" were seized by federal agents in Florida on Wednesday as authorities swooped on the possessions of the jailed financier, who has acknowledged running what is probably the biggest investment scam in U.S. history.
A U.S. Marshal involved in the seizure of a $9.4 million luxury home owned by Madoff in south Florida's ritzy Palm Beach enclave said on Thursday it was filled with objects and images depicting bulls, the symbol of a confident investment market.
"There was a lot of bulls in the house ... There were bulls everywhere," said Deputy U.S. Marshal Barry Golden, who spent about three hours inside the two-story Palm Beach home that was secured by federal agents late on Wednesday.
Bulls
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