'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Two-Minute Video: 61-year-old librarian threatened with arrest at McCain town hall for holding sign (rawstory.com)
When Republican presidential candidate John McCan held a town hall meeting in Denver on July 7, 61-year-old librarian Carol Kreck showed up in the plaza outside holding a sign reading "McCain=Bush." She was asked by security to leave and then told by a police officer that she would be charged with trespassing on city property if she did not give up her sign. When Kreck refused, she was ticketed, escorted off the premises, and threatened with arrest if she tried to return. "Why is that offensive?" Kreck said of her sign. "Why would Republicans who voted for Bush find it offensive?"
Peter Gosselin: Working without a net (latimes.com)
The shift of economic risk to ordinary families has them staring into a financial abyss.
Jonah Goldberg: Forced servitude in America? (latimes.com)
The U.S. already has high rates of volunteerism, but that's apparently not good enough for our presidential candidates.
Arianna Huffington: Surge Amnesia: The Media's Newest Affliction (huffingtonpost.com)
John McCain, aided and abetted by his loving protectors in the media, is running a victory lap on Iraq. To hear them tell it, the surge has "worked" -- indeed, it has been a huge success -- and this, like a last second Hail Mary pass, has vindicated the entire disastrous Iraq misadventure.
Mark Morford: You are not reading enough (sfgate.com)
Has the Internet killed the joys of sitting down with a good book?
Lulu Author Interview: Georgina Spelvin (lulublog.com)
In June, the star of one of the most famous adult films published a book through Lulu.com about how she became an erotic film star with the making of "The Devil in Miss Jones" in 1972. The book reveals her life for the next 30 years after the release of the film.
Richard Roeper: 'The Secret' conspiracy (suntimes.com)
Book that teaches selfishness and delusional thinking is just so much snake oil.
Dave Zirin: Talkin' Sports with Ralph Nader (huffingtonpost.com)
Ralph Nader: "There was over $600 million dollars spent to build the new Washington Nationals' baseball stadium, but if you look around Washington, DC, you see schools crumbling, clinics--the usual urban deterioration. And not enough recreational facilities for youngsters so they can engage in participatory sports, not just spectator sports."
Neil Fisher: "Chorus of disapproval: the complaints choir" (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)
Every tedious aspect of modern life has passed the lips of a complaints choir: a new performance art that is taking root.
20 QUESTIONS: The Motion Sick (popmatters.com)
Named SPIN's "Band of the Month" for their first release, Her Brilliant Fifteen, the Motion Sick draw parallels to Vonnegut with lyrics ringing of social commentary. Mike Epstein answers PopMatters' 20 Questions.
Red Rocker: A Chat with Trace Adkin (bullz-eye.com)
Bullz-Eye: Having been all over Webster's dictionary website, typing in different spellings and even different languages, I must ask what is the textbook definition of "badonkadonk"?
Trace Adkins: Huh, huh-uh, I think in the Rap dictionary it's "much junk in the trunk."
Ellen Gray: Holly Hunter thrilled to return as boundary-pushing cop in 'Saving Grace' (Philadelphia Daily News)
The phrase "passion project" gets thrown around a lot in Hollywood, but in television, where even the brightest ideas can lose luster in the grind of a weekly series, passion like Holly Hunter's can be hard to sustain.
Reader Request
TV Shows
Marty,
You need to include TBS, TNT, and USA networks in your program
list...............especially when programs like The Closer and Burn
Notice and Mad Men start. They are far superior to anything on the Big
Three!
Sarah
Thanks, Sarah!
Like last summer, I'll include the FRESH programs on TBS, TNT & USA.
But only the FRESH shows will be listed.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Lovely marine layer til noon, followed by a cool afternoon.
A Fond Memory
Privacy
Credit card companies know what you've bought. Phone companies know whom you've called. Electronic toll services know where you've gone. Internet search companies know what you've sought.
It might be reassuring, then, that companies have largely pledged to safeguard these repositories of data about you.
But a recent federal court ruling ordering the disclosure of YouTube viewership records underscores the reality that even the most benevolent company can only do so much to guard your digital life: All their protections can vanish with one stroke of a judge's pen.
In the past, court orders and subpoenas have generally been targeted at records on specific individuals. With YouTube, it's far more sweeping, covering all users regardless of whether they have anything to do with the copyright infringement that Viacom Inc., in a $1 billion lawsuit, accuses Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site of enabling.
The YouTube database includes information on when each video gets played. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer - identifiers that, while seemingly anonymous, can often be traced to specific individuals, or at least their employers or hometowns.
Elsewhere, search engines such as Google and Yahoo Inc. keep more than a year of records on your search requests, from which one can learn of your diseases, fetishes and innermost thoughts. E-mail services are another source of personal records, as are electronic health repositories and Web-based word processing, spreadsheets and calendars.
Privacy
Lyrics Sell At Auction
John Lennon
Christie's auction house has sold John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance" for $833,654.
The lyrics were written during Lennon's 1969 Bed-in protest for peace at the Queens Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.
Christie's spokeswoman Zoe Schoon said Lennon gave the sheet to 16-year-old Gail Renard during the eight-day Bed-in.
Lennon wrote the lyrics and recorded the song in the hotel room with about 50 guests, who included singer Petula Clark and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
John Lennon
MySpace Deal
Sid and Marty Krofft
1970s TV titans Sid and Marty Krofft are setting up shop on MySpaceTV.
All of their classics, including "H.R. Pufnstuf," "Land of the Lost" and "The Bugaloos," will make their exclusive global home on the social networking platform. The license extends to condensed versions of Krofft-produced TV episodes as well as taped messages from the Kroffts themselves.
In addition to the condensed "Kwikies," which run 3-5 minutes, the Kroffts are also making available highlight clips. MySpace subscribers will also make theme music from the shows available.
Sid and Marty Krofft
Tornado Videographer Denies Doctoring Footage
Andy Fabel
A storm chaser accused of doctoring old tornado video and selling it under the pretense that it was taken last week in Nebraska denied wrongdoing Thursday, suggesting that professional jealousy was behind the allegation.
Andy Fabel agreed to sell the footage for $295 to The Associated Press, and also made it available to the other news organizations. The AP has purchased tornado video from Fabel on three previous occasions.
A fellow storm chaser, Dan Robinson of Appalachian Skies Media, contacted the AP to say he believed Fabel's video was a doctored version of images taken of another twister that touched down four years ago in Rock, Kan.
Robinson said the image was "flipped" to make it seem the tornado was pointed in another direction, and the action sped up. The supposed Nebraska footage includes power lines not seen in the Kansas storm; it also is minus trees shown in the Kansas images.
Andy Fabel
Wedding News
Newton-John - Easterling
Olivia Newton-John wed John Easterling on June 21 in Cuzco, Peru, said a statement from the Reno, Nev., office of attorney John Mason. Other details were not released.
A statement on Newton-John's official Web site Thursday said the couple had a private ceremony, followed by a second ceremony on Jupiter Island in Florida the following week.
Easterling, 56, who has been nicknamed "Amazon John," is the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon Herb Co., which sells botanical supplements from the rainforest. The business is based in Jupiter, Fla.
Newton-John - Easterling
Wedding News
Shawhughes - Hawke
Ethan Hawke has married girlfriend Ryan Shawhughes, the actor's publicist said Thursday.
The couple, who are expecting a baby, were married last month in New York City, Mara Buxbaum said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
"No further details are available," Buxbaum said.
Shawhughes - Hawke
Worth Less Today
American Life
It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be.
The "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May - a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.
Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.
When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.
American Life
French TV Shake-Up
Patrick Poivre d'Arvor
French star news anchor Patrick Poivre d'Arvor bows out Thursday after 21 years to make way for a glamorous younger rival, amid suggestions President Nicolas Sarkozy may have influenced the shake-up.
Known in France by his initials "PPDA", the 60-year-old Poivre d'Arvor Thursday hosts his last news broadcast on private channel TF1, the country's most-watched news with a daily audience of some 10 million viewers.
The channel announced last month that he will hand over after the summer break to Laurence Ferrari, a 41-year-old blonde TV host, as part of an image revamp to fight a ratings slump.
Several newspapers reported that Sarkozy apparently let it be known he would be happy to see Ferrari in the job, while others reported PPDA had offended the president by likening him to a "little boy" in an interview.
Patrick Poivre d'Arvor
Pleads Guilty In Art Theft
Bernard Jean Ternus
A French man pleaded guilty Thursday to attempting to sell four valuable paintings that were stolen last year from a French art museum in a brazen robbery by masked, armed thieves.
Bernard Jean Ternus, 56, admitted conspiring to sell the paintings for about $4.7 million to buyers who turned out to be undercover FBI and French police agents. Four of their meetings were videotaped and dozens of conversations recorded, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Hunter.
"Why are you pleading guilty?" asked U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz.
"Because I am guilty," said Ternus, speaking in French that was translated into English.
Bernard Jean Ternus
Bad Contract
Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett says he has "never made a dime" from album sales during his two-decade career, and hopes to rectify that situation when his contract expires.
The eclectic country singer has two more albums on his deal with Curb/Universal, his home since 1985, and figures the horizons are wide open.
"The possibilities are very exciting, I think," Lovett told Billboard.com. "I've never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I've been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows."
Lyle Lovett
Find Ancient Masterpiece
Archeologists
Macedonian archeologists say they have discovered a well-preserved naked statue of the ancient goddess of love in a ruined Roman city near Skopje.
Archeologist Marina Oncevska said Thursday that the 1.7-metre-tall marble Venus is a masterpiece of ancient art, executed in the late classical Greek tradition. It dates to the 2nd or 3rd century and was found Tuesday in the ruins of Scupi on the northwest outskirts of Macedonia's capital.
"The smoothness of the marble and the beauty of the statue give us the clue that this masterpiece came from one of the best artistic schools in the Mediterranean," said Oncevska.
The goddess is depicted coyly covering her groin and breasts with her hands and has a dolphin attached to her left leg.
Archeologists
New England Vacation
Great White Shark
The island where "Jaws" was filmed had a real-life shark scare Thursday, when an unconfirmed sighting of a great white forced the closure of two beaches.
South Beach on Martha's Vineyard was closed for a short time, and swimmers were kept out of the water at State Beach in Edgartown, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation said.
A plane was dispatched to try to confirm the sighting, but no shark was spotted, said Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
Shark attacks are extremely rare in waters off New England, but great whites have been known to occasionally prowl in the region.
Great White Shark
Adopted By Cat
Red Panda
A newborn red panda rejected by its mother in Amsterdam's Artis zoo has been adopted by a domestic cat, the zoo said Friday.
The cat is nursing the red panda, currently about the size of a kitten, along with her own four kittens, the zoo said.
The red panda was born on June 30 and rejected by its mother soon afterwards. Red pandas look like raccoons and when fully grown are slightly larger than a domestic cat -- substantially smaller than the black and white giant panda.
Red Panda
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