'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Christoph Uhlhaas: Is Greed Good? (sciam.com)
Economists are finding that social concerns often trump selfishness in financial decision making, a view that helps to explain why tens of millions of people send money to strangers they find on the Internet [as on eBay]
Bob Somerby: EIGHT YEARS TOO LATE (dailyhowler.com)
If this nonsense hadn't changed world history, you could just throw your head back and roar! Yesterday, only eight years too late, the New York Time finally corrected. Cover the eyes of the children and pets. Sit down when you read this: Š Naomi Wolf "was not involved in [Al Gore's] decision to wear earth-toned clothing," the Times finally proclaimed (our emphasis). And it only came eight years too late!
Jim Hightower: STRENGHTEN THE FDA (jimhightower.com)
Wow. If George W thought that Scooter Libby got "harsh" punishment for being the Bushites' fall guy, he ought to consider how top Chinese officials treat their scapegoats.
Roger Ebert: "Ingmar Bergman: In Memory"
"How large a crew do you use?" David Lean asked him one year at Cannes. "I always work with 18 friends," Bergman said. "That's funny," said Lean. "I work with 150 enemies."
Kelly Vance: Bourne, Baby, Bourne (eastbayexpress.com)
The Bourne Ultimatum is the most exciting movie of the summer by leaps and bounds.
Richard Roeper: We've crossed the $5 barrier for a cup of joe (suntimes.com)
Remember when John Travolta's Vincent Vega was stunned by the $5 milk shake ordered by Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace in "Pulp Fiction"?
'I'm kinda different' (guardian.co.uk)
Four decades after her first gig, Suzi Quatro still rocks. Or does she? Her new book tells of six-hour sex sessions and dressing-room brawls - but she lives in a moated manor house and worries about visitors dirtying her spotless carpets. Stuart Jeffries meets her.
Tom Hall: OneTwoThreeFour! (blogs.indiewire.com)
I was too young to have been here in NYC. I was actually 5 years old. My parents were getting a divorce at the time, and I was blissfully unaware of pretty much everything except the idea of getting my ass into kindergarten, which was exciting. The summer of 1976, while America listened to FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE! (and my mother, recently single, was listening to Neil Diamond in her VW Bug), there was an explosion on Bowrey and 3rd that was heard all the way in London. That explosion was the release of RAMONES, one of the most important albums in the history of rock and roll.
PHIL DUPERRON: "End of the Century" unearths the tortuous backstage story of the Ramones (vueweekly.com)
In 1974, four leather-clad misfits calling themselves the Ramones exploded on the New York scene, and the sound of rock 'n' roll would never be the same. Their fast and furious songs about sniffing glue and turning tricks struck a chord with people tired of the flaccid, over produced music of the '70s.
Reader Recommendation
BBC Video
Marty-
Wildlife authorities in central Sri Lanka have rescued a young elephant who had fallen into an old well.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still sunny and cooler than seasonal.
New U.S. Poet Laureate
Charles Simic
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who learned English as a teenage immigrant, will be the new U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday.
Simic, who lives in Strafford, will replace another New Hampshire poet, Donald Hall of Wilmot, who said Thursday he was delighted by Simic's selection.
Simic taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years before moving to emeritus status. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, "The World Doesn't End." He also is an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature.
Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and his childhood was disrupted by World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15 and joined his father in New York a year later, in 1954. He has been a U.S. citizen for 36 years.
Charles Simic
Praised In Venezuela
Sean Penn
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised Sean Penn for his critical stance against the war in Iraq, saying the two chatted by phone and soon plan to meet in person.
Chavez said Penn traveled to Venezuela this week wanting to learn more about the situation in the country and walked around some of Caracas' poor barrios on his own.
Chavez read aloud from a recent open letter by Penn to resident Bush in which the actor condemned the Iraq war and called for Bush to be impeached, saying the president along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are "villainously and criminally obscene people."
Sean Penn
Swedish Post Honours
Ingmar Bergman
The Swedish Post said Thursday it will release a new stamp to honour Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman, who died earlier this week at the age of 89.
"Our aim is to show Ingmar Bergman in his role as a film director," spokesman Thorsten Sandberg told AFP.
"We were looking forward to honouring Ingmar Bergman's 90th birthday next year and we were planning to release a new stamp edition, but now we will release a memorial edition instead," Sandberg said.
Ingmar Bergman
New Face Of Louis Vuitton
Mikhail Gorbachev
Move over Scarlett Johansson! Mikhail Gorbachev is the new face of Louis Vuitton.
The former Soviet leader is to appear in an ad campaign for the French luxury label, along with Steffi Graf and her husband, Andre Agassi, and Catherine Deneuve, said a statement Thursday from Vuitton, a division of the LVMH group, Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA.
Shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz, the ads focus on travel - a "core value" for the company that started in 1854 as a trunk-maker, the statement said.
Vuitton said it was making donations to former Vice President Al Gore's The Climate Project to fight global warming and Green Cross International, founded by Gorbachev to promote sustained development. The company didn't disclose the amount of the donations.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Malaysia Concert Will Go On
Gwen Stefani
Gwen Stefani will not wear revealing costumes during her Aug. 21 concert after Muslim students protested her sexy outfits and steamy performances.
Show organizer Maxis Communications Bhd. said the 37-year-old singer will follow the local code of ethics for foreign artists, which bans the unnecessary baring of skin.
Under the official guide to performing in Malaysia, a female artist must be covered from the top of her chest to her knees. No jumping, shouting or throwing of objects onstage or at the audience is allowed. Performers cannot hug or kiss, and their clothes cannot have obscene or drug-related images or messages.
Gwen Stefani
New Bio
Steve Goodman
Clay Eals wanted to write a biography on star-crossed folk singer Steve Goodman that people wouldn't be able to put down. Instead, he produced a book that, at 778 pages, is so huge that it's hard to pick up.
"I think Goodman would have liked that," Eals says, laughing at a comment one early reader of the book made to him. After all, he points out, the subject of "Steve Goodman: Facing the Music" barely stood 5 feet tall and might have struggled to juggle a telephone book.
"Facing the Music" holds a lot of words for a guy who lived only 36 years and had just one hit song, albeit a modern American classic, "City of New Orleans."
But then the diminutive Goodman, who captivated audiences by doing everything from slapping out the instrumental "Dueling Banjos" on his face in uncanny detail to donning a cowboy hat nearly as big as he was to sing the ultimate country music parody, "You Never Even Call Me by My Name," packed a lot of living into those years.
His source list reads like a who's who of country, folk and pop music, with a dash of politics thrown in. Among those who filled him in on Goodman were Jimmy Buffett, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, John Prine, John Hartford, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Steve Goodman
UC Riverside
Sci-Fi Heaven
UC Berkeley has the world's premiere collection on Mark Twain - and Yale an unmatched trove of rare medieval manuscripts. But for research on Capt. Kirk, Frankenstein or Harry Potter, nothing tops the 110,000-volume Eaton collection at UC Riverside, the world's largest library of science fiction, fantasy and horror books.
"It's like going to Graceland if you're an Elvis fan," said Drew Morse, a creative writing professor who made the pilgrimage to Riverside from Ohio last summer to study rare poetry by "Fahrenheit 451" author Ray Bradbury.
As appreciation for the literary qualities of science fiction has grown in recent years, the UC Riverside collection has emerged from an academic ghetto. No institution had ever stockpiled science fiction like this, or subjected itself to such an internal clash over the worth of the genre.
Even public libraries had considered the books disposable literature, mainly because early science fiction was published almost exclusively in paperback. But a handful of professors and a librarian at UC Riverside saw something else, and started building.
Sci-Fi Heaven
Triple Legal Fees
Laura Albert
Author Laura Albert must pay nearly $350,000 in legal fees, triple the amount a jury said she owes a production company for duping it with a novel supposedly based on the life of a prostitute named JT LeRoy, a judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Kaplan said in an order Monday it was reasonable for Albert and her company, Underdogs Inc., to pay legal fees that are triple the $116,500 that a jury in June found she owes Antidote International Films Inc.
Lawyers for Antidote had asked for $850,000 in fees and $214,000 in expenses. The judge awarded the Antidote lawyers $279,175 in fees and $70,325 in expenses, totaling $349,500.
Laura Albert
Bounty Hunter's Case Closed
Duane 'Dog' Chapman
A Mexican judge has ruled to close the criminal case against bounty hunter and TV reality star Duane "Dog" Chapman, but state prosecutors have appealed the decision, officials said Thursday.
In the July 27 ruling, Judge Jose Alberto Montes said the statute of limitations has expired on the case, said Guillermo Diaz, assistant prosecutor for the state of Jalisco, where Puerto Vallarta is located.
Chapman was arrested in September by U.S. authorities on a Mexican warrant stemming from his 2003 capture of fugitive convicted rapist and Max Factor cosmetics heir Andrew Luster in Puerto Vallarta. Bounty hunting is illegal in Mexico.
State prosecutors, however, want to continue pursuing Mexico's request to have Chapman extradited, Diaz said. The courts are expected to rule on prosecutors' appeal in coming months.
Duane 'Dog' Chapman
Celebrespawn Sued
Sean Stewart
Rod Stewart's son has been sued by a man who claims Sean Stewart beat him up at a Hollywood nightclub last year.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles by Daniel Refoua, accuses Stewart of assault, battery, false imprisonment, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The lawsuit comes about two months after Stewart, one of the stars of the A&E reality show "Sons of Hollywood," was arrested in a separate attack on a couple outside a Hollywood Hills party.
Sean Stewart
Busy Baptist
Tommy Tester
A Baptist minister has been charged in Tennessee with indecent exposure and driving under the influence.
Police said 58-year-old Tommy Tester of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly relieving himself in front of children at a car wash.
A report also accuses Tester of offering police officers oral sex and says an open bottle of vodka and empty oxycodone prescription bottle was found in his car when Tester was arrested Friday.
Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM, also in Bristol. WZAP issued a statement asking for prayers and saying Tester has been suspended during an investigation.
Tommy Tester
Rated Deficient
70,000+ Bridges
More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
That works out to at least $9.4 billion* a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
It is unclear how many of the spans pose actual safety risks. Federal officials alerted the states late Thursday to immediately inspect all bridges similar to the Mississippi River span that collapsed.
In a separate cost estimate, the Federal Highway Administration has said addressing the backlog of needed bridge repairs would take at least $55 billion. That was five years ago, with expectations of more deficiencies to come.
70,000 Bridges
*$2 billion a week is spent on Iraq.
In Memory
Tommy Makem
Irish singer, songwriter and storyteller Tommy Makem, who teamed with the Clancy Brothers to become stars during the folk music boom, has died of cancer. He was 74.
The Irish-born Makem, who came to America in the 1950s to seek work as an actor, grew to international fame while performing with the band The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. The brothers, also from Ireland, were Tom, Liam and Paddy Clancy.
Armed with his banjo, tinwhistle, poetry, stagecraft and his baritone voice, Makem helped spread stories and songs of Irish culture around the world.
After touring for about nine years as The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, he struck out on his own, but he remained friends with the brothers. Tom Clancy died in 1990 and Paddy in 1998.
Back in the 1950s, Makem and his friends, saw their first few albums - "The Rising of the Moon" and a collection of drinking songs - as a fluke.
A young Bob Dylan was one of the folk singers who got to know Makem and the Clancys during the early 1960s.
"Topical songs weren't protest songs," Dylan wrote in his memoir "Chronicles Volume One." "What I was hearing pretty regularly, though, were rebellion songs, and those really moved me. The Clancy Brothers - Tom, Paddy and Liam - and their buddy Tommy Makem sang them all the time."
Even while battling cancer, he was maintaining a performance schedule, and he visited Belfast last month to receive an honorary degree and returned to his native Armagh.
Tommy Makem
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