Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Suzanne Moore: The decay of women is obsessively charted. Now men are finding out how it feels (Guardian)
I am all for equal-opportunity desire, but I have no wish for men to be subjected to the same pressures as women.
Daniel Gross: Beyond Energy Efficiency (Slate)
We're not just reducing demand for electricity-we're destroying it.
Daniel Gross: Förbränning for All! (Slate)
The sensible Swedes burn a lot of their garbage. Why can't we?
Adam Curtis: The Hidden Systems That Have Frozen Time and Stop Us Changing The World (BBC)
If you are an American politician today, as well as an entourage you also have a new, modern addition. You have what's called a "digital tracker". They follow you everywhere with a high-definition video camera, and they are employed by the people who want to destroy your political career.
James Temple: The Sixth Extinction Is Here - And It's Our Fault (recode.net)
The defining characteristic of the current round - the latest since the dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago - seems to be driven mostly by the actions of humankind. We're steadily encroaching on the habitat of millions of species while fundamentally altering the environment.
Weird Al Yankovic: 'I think Robin Thicke was glad I just mocked his grammar' (Guardian)
After 30 years in the music business, Weird Al Yankovic has finally broken through. Hadley Freeman asks the cult hero what it's like to be number one.
John Cheese: 8 Totally Free Games to Kick Your Boredom's Ass (Cracked)
It's 2 a.m. Your insomnia has demanded that you never go to sleep without first seeing the sunrise. Twitter and Facebook have become public displays of your friends' drunken texts, and you've been chain-clicking YouTube videos so long, you've finally made it to the really, really weird stuff. Don't worry, I have your back. The following games have saved my sanity on numerous occasions, and the best part is that they're free and you don't have to download a damn thing.
Alasdair Wilkins and Charlie Jane Anders: The 13 Greatest Science Fiction Comedies Of All Time (io9)
On Friday [Aug 1], Guardians of the Galaxy hits theaters, with its unique blend of space-opera and insane comedy. Which classic films must Guardians defeat to take its place among the greatest science fiction comedies? Here are the 13 greatest (live-action) science fiction comedies of all time.
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wrote:
took the day off.
has retired.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
BartCop
Hello Bartcop fans,
As you all know the untimely passing of Terry was unexpected, even by
him. We all knew he had cancer but we all thought he had some years
left. So some of us who have worked closely with him over the years are
scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. My job, among other
things, is to establish communications with the Bartcop community and
provide email lists and groups for those who might put something
together. Those who want to play an active roll in something coming from
this, or if you are one of Bart's pillars, should send an email to
active@bartcop.com.
Bart's final wish was to pay off the house mortgage for Mrs. Bart who is
overwhelmed and so very grateful for the support she has received.
Anyone wanting to make a donation can click on this the yellow donate
button on bartcop.com
But - I need you all to help keep this going. This note
isn't going to directly reach all of Bart's fans. So if you can repost
it on blogs and discussion boards so people can sign up then when we
figure out what's next we can let more people know. This list is just
over 600 but like to get it up to at least 10,000 pretty quick. So
here's the signup link for this email list.
( mailman.bartcop.com/listinfo/bartnews )
Marc Perkel
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hotter. More humid.
Cambridge Folk Festival
Van Morrison
When Cambridge City Council decided to hold a music festival in the historic English university town back in 1964, few expected it to be going strong 50 years later.
But this year the Cambridge Folk Festival is celebrating its golden anniversary in style with headliner Van Morrison - who had to be courted for years before he agreed to attend - as well as Roseanne Cash and Sinead O'Connor.
There also will be time for folksy pursuits like rapper dancing, which is a dance using a short sword, and yarnbombing - the graffiti version of knitting.
It's this eclectic approach that keeps people coming back year after year to the festival, which runs from July 31 to Aug 3. And although it has evolved and expanded since the 1960s, it is still held at the compact Cherry Hinton Hall site just outside town.
Van Morrison
Cinema Makes Lone Stand
Paris
In a shabby cinema tucked away in a backstreet of central Paris, a crowd of aging devotees are putting up quiet resistance to the might of on-line pornography.
Faced with the onslaught of the Web and its thousands of sex sites catering to every taste, "Le Beverley" bills itself as the last registered porn-only cinema in Paris still serving a diet of retro classics to a loyal clientele.
Its program of 35mm films from the 1970s, along with more modern offerings, attracts 700 customers a week, many of them regulars.
Owner Maurice Laroche has run the theater for 30 years and remembers the heyday of sex cinemas, when Paris's Grands Boulevards area was full of competitors.
The films are shown on a loop and its 120-seater cinema is at its busiest around three o'clock in the afternoon. Laroche says the aging clientele have little desire to brave the Paris metro system late into the night.
Paris
Millions Wash Up On Western U.S. Beaches
"By-The-Wind Sailors"
Millions of jellyfish-like creatures have washed up on beaches along the U.S. West Coast over the past month, giving the shoreline a purple gleam and, at times, an unpleasant odor, ocean experts said on Thursday.
Though not poisonous to most people, beachgoers should avoid the animals because their venom can cause stinging in the eyes and mouth, said Steve Rumrill, an expert at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Known as Velella velella to scientists, and more informally as "by-the-wind sailors," the creatures regularly cluster offshore each spring. But it is unusual for so many to wash ashore at once, especially this late in the summer, he said.
In addition to the millions that have been spotted on beaches from Southern California to Washington, millions more are floating near the ocean surface offshore, Rumrill added.
Though most people think the animals are jellyfish, they are in fact colonies of much smaller creatures known as hydrozoans, Rumrill said.
"By-The-Wind Sailors"
Crop Circle
Bavaria
Thousands of people are trekking to a Bavarian farmer's field to check out a mysterious set of crop circles.
The ornate design was discovered by a balloonist last week and news of the find quickly spread online.
Farmer Christoph Huttner, who owns the wheat field near Weilheim, couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday but told the dpa news agency Tuesday he didn't create the circle himself.
He suggests students on summer holiday may have cut the image with a 75-meter diameter (246 feet) into his field.
Bavaria
Should Try Stand-Up
Reince Priebus
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told a national convention of black journalists on Thursday that the GOP has been working to better compete for black and minority votes as it eyes the 2016 presidential race.
Priebus also said he's confident the party will take back the U.S. Senate from Democrat control and add more seats to its majority in the U.S. House in this year's midterm elections.
But Priebus, the RNC chairman since 2011, said the national party's focus continues to be rebuilding a campaign "ground game" that's been outperformed by Democrats, particularly in recent presidential races.
"We have become a national party that has decided it is okay to show up every four years, about five months before an election," he said. "We've become a national party that's really just a U-Haul trailer of cash for a presidential nominee."
Priebus said the GOP is also working to diversify its staff, but acknowledged it "must do even more" at the senior level.
Reince Priebus
Cop Reassigned
Seattle
The Seattle Police Department has reassigned an officer who single-handedly issued about 80 percent of the marijuana tickets handed out in the city during the first half of this year, authorities said on Wednesday.
Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole said staff reviewing data to prepare the department's first biannual report on marijuana enforcement found that 66 of 83 citations for public pot use were given out by just one officer.
"In some instances, the officer added notes to the tickets," O'Toole said in a statement, adding that some of the notes requested the attention of City Attorney Peter Holmes and were addressed to "Petey Holmes."
In one case, she said, "the officer indicated he flipped a coin when contemplating which subject to cite."
The police department said 36 percent of the tickets were issued to African-Americans, who make up just eight percent of the city's population.
Seattle
Problem In Paraguay
Vatican't
Pope Francis is taking action in a divisive diocese in Paraguay where an Argentine priest, accused by a former superior of being a "serious threat to young people," has been removed as the No. 2.
The Rev. Carlos Urrutigoity is still an active priest in the Ciudad del Este diocese, however, in a sign that he remains in good standing with his bishop.
Urrutigoity has denied allegations of impropriety and has never been charged, and his bishop, Monsignor Rogelio Livieres, has stressed that there is no accusation against him that he sexually abused minors. But Urrutigoity's case re-emerged after Francis sent a team of Vatican investigators to the diocese this month to look into criticisms against Livieres by local residents and other Paraguayan prelates.
Livieres in 2005 allowed Urrutigoity to join his diocese, even though Urrutigoity's then-superior in Pennsylvania had warned Livieres and the Vatican that he was a threat and unsuitable for the priesthood.
Urrutigoity's subsequent re-emergence in Paraguay was documented by the online resource BishopAccountability.org and the Global Post.
Vatican't
US Restocks Ammunition
Israel
The United States confirmed it had restocked Israel's supplies of ammunition, hours after finally sharpening its tone to condemn an attack on a United Nations school in Gaza.
But while both the White House and the State Department condemned the shelling of the UN-run school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza in which at least 16 Palestinians were killed, neither would assign blame to staunch US ally Israel.
"Obviously nothing justifies the killing of innocent civilians seeking shelter in a UN facility," deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf acknowledged, in some of the toughest US comments since the start of the 23-day fighting in the Gaza Strip.
But despite heated exchanges with reporters, Harf stressed that "we don't know for certain who shelled this school, we need to get all the facts."
Israel
Saratoga Tweet
David Cassidy
A horse racing tweet prompted prosecutors to halt a court hearing at which a lawyer for seventies heartthrob David Cassidy was supposed to accept a plea deal on the singer's behalf.
Cassidy was charged last summer with driving while intoxicated in the town of Schodack (SKOH'-dak), near Albany. Because he lives in Florida, prosecutors agreed to let his lawyer appear in court for him Wednesday.
But a tweet by the New York Racing Association said Cassidy was at Saratoga Race Course, 40 miles north of Schodack.
A prosecutor told The Daily Gazette of Schenectady that officials were "disturbed" to learn Cassidy was nearby but apparently unable to appear. Cassidy's lawyer said his client may not have known the timing of his court date.
David Cassidy
In Memory
Dick Smith
Dick Smith, the Oscar-winning "Godfather of Makeup" who amused, fascinated and terrified moviegoers by devising unforgettable transformations for Marlon Brando in "The Godfather" and Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" among many others, has died. He was 92.
Smith, the first makeup artist to win an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, died Wednesday night in California of natural causes. His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by the president of the Make-up Artists and Hairstylists Guild, Sue Cabral-Ebert, who declined to give further details.
Widely regarded as the master in his field, Smith helped pioneer such now-standard materials as liquid foam latex and make special effects more realistic and spectacular. He was also known and loved for his generosity, whether exchanging letters about his craft with a teenage J.J. Abrams or mentoring future Oscar-winner special effects artist Rick Baker, who in 2011 presented Smith his honorary statuette.
With Smith on hand, the middle-aged Brando was transformed into the jowly patriarch Vito Corleone, the teenage Blair into a scarred and wild-eyed demon, and William Hurt into a mass of protoplasm for "Altered States."
Smith and Paul LeBlanc shared an Oscar in 1985 for their work on "Amadeus," for which Smith spent hours each day turning 44-year-old F. Murray Abraham into an elderly man as Mozart's rival Antonio Salieri.
Smith also fashioned a mohawk out of a plastic cap and chopped up hair for Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver" and created breasts out of foam rubber for Katherine Ross in "The Stepford Wives." Through foam latex and a newly flexible kind of false eyelashes, Smith managed to capture extreme old age in "Little Big Man," which starred Dustin Hoffman, in his mid-30s at the time, as a centenarian claiming he had survived the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Before breaking through in Hollywood, he was among the first great makeup artists for television. Smith headed NBC's makeup division from 1945 to 1959, using soldered wire to create a panther mask for a then-unknown Eva Marie Saint and slushed-in latex to enhance the nose of José Ferrer for "Cyrano de Bergerac."
In the 1960s, his experience turning Jonathan Frid into a 100-plus-year-old vampire for the series "Dark Shadows" helped prepare him for "Little Big Man." His other notable aging projects included Walter Matthau for "The Sunshine Boys" and Hal Holbrook for the 1967 TV special "Mark Twain Tonight!" for which Smith won a Primetime Emmy. Holbrook and Matthau were among those who participated in a 1991 TV documentary about Smith.
A native of Larchmont, N.Y., Smith described himself as an introvert with little interest in special effects until spotting an instructional manual while attending Yale University. He became so obsessed that he made himself up as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, scaring his classmates. He later turned up at a screening of "Frankenstein" as the title character.
After school and serving in the Army, he acted on his father's advice and took a chance on television. One of his early assignments was applying makeup to Democratic Party leaders at the 1948 national convention.
Out of all the praise he received, Smith liked to cite a compliment paid by Laurence Olivier, whom Smith worked on for a 1959 TV production of "The Moon and Sixpence." Olivier's character was based on the painter Gauguin, who died of leprosy. Smith never forgot Olivier's response after he completed making up the actor. "'Dick, it (the makeup) does the acting for me,'" Olivier told him.
Dick Smith
In Memory
Robert Halmi Sr.
Prolific TV producer Robert Halmi, Sr., died Wednesday in his New York City home at 90, said spokesman Russ Patrick.
The Hungarian-born Halmi found success as a magazine photographer after arriving in America in 1951, shooting pictures for such publications as Life and Sports Illustrated.
But in a mid-career switch in the mid-1960s, he turned to moving pictures. During the next half-century he produced more than 200 programs and miniseries for television.
His specialty was family friendly entertainment, with TV projects including "The Josephine Baker Story," the Bette Midler-starring "Gypsy," ''Merlin," ''Dinotopia" and "The Lion in Winter" with Glenn Close.
Other projects included TV versions of "The Odyssey," ''Alice in Wonderland," ''Gulliver's Travels," starring Ted Danson, and "In Cold Blood," with Anthony Edwards and Eric Roberts.
Often teaming on his films with his son, Robert Halmi Jr., he claimed every project was a passion project, including the 1994 miniseries version of "Scarlett," Alexandra Ripley's sequel to "Gone With the Wind," which he defended as not a rip-off of the world's most beloved movie, but "an eight-hour study in American history."
Still active well into the new millennium, he produced the TV miniseries "Neverland" in 2011, and a year later a new version of "Treasure Island," starring Donald Sutherland and Elijah Wood.
His projects were honored with 136 Emmy Awards. A Peabody Award citation hailed him as "perhaps the last of the great network television impresarios."
Halmi recently had begun filming "Olympus," a mythological series for the Syfy channel.
Robert Halmi Sr.
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