'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Richard Florida: The Future of the American Workforce in the Global Creative Economy (cato-unbound.org)
In March of 2003, I met Peter Jackson, Academy award-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson did something unlikely in Wellington, a city of roughly 400,000: He built one of the most advanced filmmaking complexes in the world-a "global talent magnet," he called it.
"The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy": Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake (cia.gov)
America's greatest woman spy was able to parachute behind enemy lines with her wooden leg neatly tucked into her knapsack...
Frederick Crews: Introduction to "Follies of the Wise" (butterfliesandwheels.com)
On the day after Christmas, 2004, as everyone knows, a major earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal regions around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as 300,000 people outright and dooming countless others to misery, heartbreak, and early death. Thanks to video cameras and the satellite transmission of images, that event penetrated the world's consciousness with an immediate force that amounted, psychologically, to a tsunami in its own right.
Impoverished shelf life (telegraph.co.uk)
The philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who accumulated one of the greatest fortunes the world had ever seen, founded 660 public libraries in Britain, because, as a poor messenger-boy, he had borrowed a book a week from a free library, and the experience led him to value a library beyond all other forms of beneficence. "It is the mind that makes the body rich," he declared.
Roger Highfield: The world's funniest joke was written by Spike Milligan (telegraph.co.uk)
Two hunters are out in the woods in New Jersey when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps 'My friend is dead! What can I do?' The operator says: 'Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.' There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says 'OK, now what?'
Soul Men (guardian.co.uk)
They wrote songs for some of the best acts in history - but what do they think of today's R&B divas? Alexis Petridis talks to Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham.
Stephen Bates: Brouhaha in the Bible belt (guardian.co.uk)
Being in a room with 11,000 Americans who all believe in the inerrancy of the Bible is a curiously scary experience. That's the Southern Baptists, the fundamentalist denomination whose 16 million members in the US make it the second largest Christian group (after the Catholics) in America. Large, overweight, overwhelmingly white and middle class, their eyes and teeth gleam at you as you pass by.
Marilyn D. Davis: Diary of a Strung-out Search Committee Member (irascibleprofessor.com)
Last spring, I submitted my name to be considered for a position on a college search committee. To my great delight, I was chosen. When I found out this was not a support group for people who misplace things in their offices, it was too late to bail. What follows is my authentic account of the key happenings leading up to the interviews for our next college dean.
Father's Day
Avery Ant
Hubert's Poetry Corner
BALLAD OF THE YELLOWEST BERET
2,500 AND COUNTING!
Purple Gene Reviews
Coulter & Carlin on Leno
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and warmer.
Today was the kid's last day of 7th grade. He passed.
No new flags.
Attends Hearing
Cher
The subject was whether to modify helmets for soldiers in Iraq, but all eyes were on Cher. As photographers clicked away, the singer and actress entered a Capitol Hill hearing room through a back door 20 minutes after the session was scheduled to start. The hearing soon got under way.
Cher has donated more than $130,000 to the group Operation Helmet, which pays about $100 to modify the inside of soldiers' helmets to make them better able to absorb shock from a bomb blast.
Cher, wearing a white lace top under a black pant suit, looked solemn as she sat behind the group's founder, Dr. Bob Meaders, while he testified. Meaders said she didn't want to cause a distraction by testifying herself.
Cher
Huntington Library Gets Archives
Charles Bukowski
The genteel Huntington Library will house the gritty literary collection of author Charles Bukowski.
Bukowski's widow announced Wednesday that she was donating her late husband's literary collection to the museum. His chronicles of a hard-drinking, bar-brawling life in Los Angeles will be ensconced with the likes of Chaucer and Dickens.
"It's going to be scandalous. This would tickle my husband. It would crack him up," Linda Lee Bukowski said.
Charles Bukowski
Partisan Pandering Pays Off
Indecency Fines
Resident Bush on Thursday signed into law legislation that raises fines tenfold for radio and television broadcasters that violate U.S. decency standards by airing extensive profanity or sexual content.
The new law, which boosts fines to as much as $325,000 per violation from $32,500, could help congressional Republicans woo conservatives in a tough election year as they have faced ebbing support from key core constituencies.
The Christian Coalition had placed legislation to increase the fines as the No. 5 item on its 2006 legislative agenda. The new law also caps any continuing violations from an incident at $3 million.
Indecency Fines
Fans Still Want Statue
Don Knotts
Fans of Don Knotts, who played bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show," still want a statue to honor him, despite legal problems that appear to have killed the project.
Tom Hellebrand and Neal Shelton, two fans of the '60s family comedy, were trying to raise $35,000 for a statue of Knotts in Mount Airy, model for the fictional town of Mayberry.
Paramount/CBS, which owns the rights to the series and its characters, initially granted permission for the statue. The company said last week it didn't have the authority to do so. Network lawyers said the Knotts estate doesn't want the statue built.
Hellebrand says he just wants to move on. He and Shelton are auctioning off a replica of a Mayberry squad car so they can refund $8,000 in donations used to pay a nonrefundable deposit for the statue.
Don Knotts
Cancels 'Maury & Connie'
MSGOP
Connie Chung and Maury Povich (R-Creep) will have a little more free time after this weekend.
The married couple's short-lived half-hour talk show, "Weekends with Maury & Connie" will air its final edition Saturday at 10 p.m. EDT, the network has confirmed.
The move comes just days after NBC News legal correspondent Dan Abrams was put in charge of MSNBC. Rick Kaplan, who was president of the cable network for two years, left last week.
MSGOP
Launches Shakespeare Site
Google
"How beauteous mankind is!" For lovers of William Shakespeare, memorizing one of Hamlet's soliloquies or recalling whether "The Tempest" is a romance or a tragedy just got easier.
Web search leader Google on Wednesday launched a site devoted entirely to the Bard, that allows U.S. users to browse through the full texts of his 37 plays. Readers can even plug in words, such as "to be or not to be" from "Hamlet," and immediately be taken to that part of the play.
Google
Letter Donated To University
C.S. Lewis
The recipient of a handwritten letter from C.S. Lewis, in which the author explains the meaning of the "Chronicles of Narnia," has donated it to a university in the author's hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Anne Jenkins was 10 when she wrote to Lewis with questions about a paragraph in one of the Narnia books, "The Silver Chair." Lewis failed to answer her questions exactly, but his 1961 reply provided insights into the magical Narnia story that has enchanted generations of children.
The letter will be displayed in the C.S. Lewis Reading Room at Queen's University's new $80 million library when it opens in 2009.
C.S. Lewis
World Cup Icon
Cristiano Ronaldo
Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo has been anointed the pin-up boy of the World Cup by Dutch gay magazine 'Gay Krant.
They judged the 21-year-old - who was also adjudged the finest male specimen at Euro 2004 - to be 'the most beautiful, the most attractive and the sexiest' player at the showpiece event.
Cristiano Ronaldo
Loses Appeal
Gary Glitter
A court in Vietnam on Thursday turned down an appeal by former British rock star Gary Glitter against child molestation charges and ordered him to serve a three-year jail sentence and deportation.
An appeals court judge in the People's Supreme Court of communist-run Vietnam announced the decision in Ho Chi Minh City after a one-day hearing that was closed to the public and the media.
At a press briefing after the hearing, a court official said the court considered evidence from Cambodia that Glitter had sexually molested children there as well as his conviction in his home country of Britain of storing pornographic pictures of children on his personal computer.
Gary Glitter
Annual Celebrity List
Forbes
Never mind the couch-jumping and the depression-dismissing. Tom Cruise is the world's No. 1 star, according to Forbes' annual "Celebrity 100 Power List," which ranks famous folks based on earnings and buzz.
Perennial Forbes-list favorite Oprah Winfrey, who claimed the No. 1 spot last year, dropped to No. 3 in the latest rankings. The $225 million she pulled in, according to Forbes, should ease the pain.
Winfrey's windfall pales next to Steven Spielberg's take of $332 million. The director-producer was the year's highest-paid celebrity. He ranks sixth on Forbes' list.
Satellite radio star and self-proclaimed "king of all media," Howard Stern, was the second highest-paid celebrity, with $302 million. He placed seventh on the list, up 20 spots from last year.
Forbes
Dead Celebs
Forbes
Even in the afterlife, some celebrities remain big-time moneymakers. Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol and Marilyn Monroe continue to earn enviable incomes from the grave, according to Forbes magazine.
Presley, who died in 1977, raked in an estimated $52 million last year. Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994, generated about $50 million. Most of that came when his widow, Courtney Love, sold 25 percent of Nirvana's song catalog in April.
Einstein, who has been dead for more than 50 years, took in about $20 million in 2005, Forbes estimates. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem controls the famed thinker's estate and collects $5 million a year from the use of his images. The university also earns royalties from Disney's line of Baby Einstein toys and videos, Forbes reports, which generated $400 million in sales last year.
Forbes
Divorce News
Sweeney - Lynch
After a month of marriage, director David Lynch has filed for divorce from the mother of his 14-year-old son.
Lynch cited irreconcilable differences for the split with film editor and producer Mary Sweeney, according to court papers filed Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The pair has worked together for years on films Lynch directed, including Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Mulholland Drive.
Sweeney - Lynch
Geyser Erupts After 8 Years
Yellowstone
A large geyser that hadn't erupted since 1998 surprised two hikers near the edge of Norris Geyser Basin with a roar and burst of steam.
The geyser erupted at full bore around 5 p.m. Saturday, sending a plume of steam about 100 feet high.
The eruption coincided with other unusual activity at Norris over the weekend, including the eruption of other sporadic geysers and changes in surface water. Henry Heasler, Yellowstone's lead geologist, said Norris appeared to be undergoing a "thermal disturbance" - an infrequent and often sudden shift in activity.
Yellowstone
Union Objects To Concert Venue
Bruce Springsteen
A local union says promoters picked the wrong arena for Bruce Springsteen to perform the pro-labor music of folk singer Pete Seeger.
The decision to hold the concert Wednesday at the non-unionized Bradley Center was "bafflingly ironic and somewhat infuriating," said Paul Friday, who coordinates the Milwaukee chapter of a union of musicians, actors and stage hands.
"We're not really protesting," he said. "We just want people to know Springsteen's taking the music of a very pro-union campaign into a venue like that."
Bruce Springsteen
Statue To Reunite With Head
Venus
For the first time in possibly 170 years, a Roman marble statue of Venus will be reunited with its head.
Both pieces are going to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where conservators will piece them back together.
The museum bought the charmingly prudish portrait of the goddess of love - called Aphrodite by the Greeks and Venus by the Romans - for $968,000 at a Sotheby's auction in New York on June 6. A private collector in Houston, Texas, agreed to sell the head at auction to the buyer of the body. The head, which sold for about $50,000, was last documented attached to the body in 1836.
Venus
In Memory
Jack Anquoe
Jack V. Anquoe, a noted powwow performer, composer and member of the Black Legs clan of the Kiowa tribe, has died. He was 73.
Anquoe, who died Monday, wrote more than 100 powwow and ceremonial songs.
A Tulsa firefighter for 25 years, Anquoe also served as president of the Tulsa Pow Wow Club and was known internationally for his powwow performances. He was raised in a traditional Kiowa home and began to sing at gatherings in the mid-1950s.
By the 1960s, Anquoe was composing music. He originated the "three-tailed fancy dance song" form that allows dancers to exhibit their skills to varying rhythms and speeds. Although initially discouraged, it proved popular in the U.S. and was also picked up by Canadian singers.
Anquoe and his dance troupe recorded 20 albums and performed across the United States and Europe and in Canada and Japan. Anquoe retired from performing in 1997.
Jack Anquoe
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