'Best of TBH Politoons'
Freshly Updated!
Dick Eats Bush
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
MARY DALRYMPLE: IRS warns against phony debt collectors (AP)
Anyone contacted by a private collection agency has the right, among others, to insist that only the IRS deal with their account. Bennett said he hoped few taxpayers with debts sent to private collectors would opt out.
Joel Stein: Eat Yer Heart Out, Woodstein! (latimes.com)
Groundbreaking investigative journalism from the state GOP convention.
Paul Kurtz: Why I Am a Skeptic about Religious Claims (secularhumanism.org)
Succinctly, I maintain that the skeptical inquirer is dubious of the claims
1. that God exists;
2. that he is a person;
3. that our ultimate moral principles are derived from God;
4. that faith in God will provide eternal salvation; and
5. that one cannot be good without belief in God.
Betty Bowers' Newsletter August 2006 (bettybowers.com)
America, the kid at the UN with ADD, has something new to take its mercurial attention away from the craziness in Iraq: the even crazier John Mark Karr. Talk about snakes on a plane! Finally, a bobble-headed pedophile to make Michael Jackson look, if not blandly benign, at least less heavy-handed with the tattooed eyeliner. We are told that Mr. Karr was in Thailand to have his testicles removed for $1,625. Apparently, he decided that the more cost-effective approach was simply to be a notorious child molester in a maximum security prison. That way, his unwanted balls will be removed by a gang of inmates without charge or handling fee.
Greg Bloom: Do You Have a Minute for ? (inthesetimes.com)
How the canvassing industry is burning out progressive youth
John DeSio: LAUGHING WHILE IT HURTS
A Brooklyn comedian takes his unique schtick online to win a brand new audience.
Play it tough (guardian.co.uk)
She wowed Hollywood with her strong female roles. Now she's tackling Cuba. Charlize Theron tells Charlotte Higgins why she's never afraid of a good fight.
Joel Stein: Elmo Is an Evildoer (latimes.com)
The self-obsessed Sesame Street Muppet is destroying all that is holy on children's TV.
LAWRENCE BIEMILLER: 'Information ... Slightly Coloured by Prejudice' (chronicle.com)
... I want something to look up in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose tattered volumes are out of order on the bottom shelf of the living-room bookcase. The encyclopedia, published by the University of Cambridge and "written by some 1500 eminent specialists drawn from nearly every country of the civilized world," has always been an unlikely highlight of visits here - who comes to Maine to read 95-year-old books when there's a whole lake at the bottom of the lawn? But aficionados rank this edition of the Britannica, the 11th, among the finest encyclopedias ever produced, and it is unmatched as recreation for the mind - an intoxicating blend of unparalleled erudition, unexpected facts, and unreconstructed 19th-century attitudes.
Emily Yoffe: A Visit to My Future (slate.com)
Bingo. 3 p.m. dinner. Leisure World. What happens when I try to live like a senior citizen.
Clear your desk - and make great savings! (guardian.co.uk)
When Northwestern Airlines, a US airline, recently laid off dozens of workers, it didn't send them out into the world alone. Each employee was given a booklet entitled 101 Ways to Save Money. We reprint the first 50 helpful tips below.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
No new flags.
Pink Floyd & Moon Tapes
Peter Clifton
A reel of film held for 20 years in a Sydney vault could unlock the mystery of what happened to the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The reel belongs to Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton, who had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue.
Mr Clifton had ordered the reel in 1979 for a rock film he was making about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon but forgot he had it until seeing a news report on television recently.
It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist.
Few people ever saw the high-quality original images shot at 10 frames a second and beamed back to the Australian tracking station at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory.
Peter Clifton
Vcitims Of Divorce
Adopt-A-Minefield
Former Beatle Paul McCartney has pulled out of a Los Angeles fundraiser for land mine victims because of his impending divorce from wife Heather Mills, the charity said on Thursday.
Adopt-A-Minefield (UK), the British branch of the land mine charity which has both McCartney and Mills as patrons, said the annual event, due to have been on October 11, had been canceled.
In 2005, the event hosted by the couple raised a record $3 million, but the director of the charity played down media reports that McCartney would donate a similar sum to make up for his withdrawal.
Adopt-A-Minefield
Viral-Videos & Wiki-Tweaking
Stephen Colbert
While many of his television brethren have been more wary of YouTube and the Web, Stephen Colbert is urging his fans to make him a viral-video star.
On Aug. 10, Colbert showcased his lightsaber skills in front of a green screen on his Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report." Soon, fans were filling in the background with video, placing the host in the realm of "Star Wars," and posting them online.
Hoping for more videos, Colbert threw down the gauntlet, announcing the "Stephen Colbert's Green Screen Challenge." Already, a number of entries have been rolling in on YouTube, and linked at www.codebot.org/colbert.
Colbert also earlier toyed with Wikipedia.com. Since the online encyclopedia runs on user submissions, it represented a unique place for Colbert to challenge facts with a heavy-dose of truthiness, (his particular brand of truth-from-the-gut).
When fans flocked to Wikipedia to alter articles on elephants, administrators on the site had to protect elephant truth like an endangered species, prohibiting further changes.
Stephen Colbert
Bank Issues Commemorative Coins
Bob Marley
Bob Marley's records long ago went platinum. Now the Bank of Jamaica is releasing commemorative coins in gold and silver with the late reggae superstar's dreadlocked likeness.
The 1,000 coins, produced by the British Royal Mint, are being sold for $100 each, bank spokeswoman Jacqueline Morgan said Wednesday.
Though the coins were intended to mark the 60th anniversary of Marley's birth, which was celebrated in 2005, the bank is just now offering them for sale, said Morgan, who didn't offer a further explanation.
Bob Marley
'Expulsion from the Garden of Eden'
Stolen Painting
The San Diego Museum of Art relinquished an 18th-century painting to the Mexican government Wednesday after it was found to have been stolen from a rural Mexican church.
In July 2000, thieves slashed the canvas of "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" from its wooden frame and removed it from a church in San Juan Tepemazalco in Hidalgo state, U.S. and Mexican authorities said. The museum bought the painting five months later from a private collector for $45,000.
The museum said it was fully reimbursed by the seller, identified by its spokesman as Rodrigo Rivero Lake. Rivero Lake did not immediately respond to a message at his Mexico City gallery Wednesday.
The 71-by-47-inch painting - completed in 1728 by an unknown artist - depicts five vignettes including Adam and Eve tasting the forbidden fruit and Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Stolen Painting
Q Through The Floor
Tom Cruise
On the heels of Paramount Pictures' decision not to renew Tom Cruise's production deal comes word that the Mission: Impossible star's popularity ratings are down. Way down.
According to Marketing Evaluations Incorporated, the company that calculates the Q scores which measure a given celebrity's likeability factor, the public's positive perception of Cruise has fallen by 40 percent, while the negative perception of the actor has jumped a whopping 100 percent.
How did this happen? Let's revisit some of Cruise's most memorable moments over the last year and a half.
For the rest - Tom Cruise
Pageant Returning To Vegas
Miss America
The annual Miss America pageant will be held on the Las Vegas Strip again next year, organizers said Thursday. The crowning will air live on Country Music Television from the Aladdin Resort & Casino on Monday, Jan. 29, organizers said.
The 85-year-old beauty contest jilted its hometown of Atlantic City, N.J., for Las Vegas last year in search of a younger audience, a fresh look and lower production costs.
Pageant organizers have introduced viewer call-in elements in past years, as the contest has struggled to increase viewers and revenue. Last year's return to the basics - a bathing suit, talent and evening gown competition - was welcomed by the army of loyal pageant fans.
The show drew 3.1 million viewers - fewer than one-third the number who watched on ABC the year before, but still a CMT record.
Miss America
Restaurant to Drop Theme
'Hitler's Cross'
The owner of a restaurant named after Adolf Hitler said Thursday he will change its name because it angered so many people.
Puneet Sablok said he would remove Hitler's name and the Nazi swastika from billboards and the menu. He had said the restaurant's name -- "Hitler's Cross" -- and symbols were only meant to attract attention.
Sablok made the decision after meeting with members of Bombay's small Jewish community.
"Once they told me how upset they were with the name, I decided to change it," he said. "I don't want to do business by hurting people."
'Hitler's Cross'
China Mass Produces Paintings
Sweatshop Art
Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.
In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world's cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen's four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container.
Huang Jiang remembers the time when Dafen was really just a village. He came here as the first art-producing entrepreneur 17 years ago. He worked as an errand boy in Hong Kong before he started copying famous art works. Then he crossed the border into China, resolved to open up the first workshop in what was then still a no-man's land. Wages and rent were low, and the port of Hong Kong was close by. "When I arrived in 1989, there was nothing here besides dirt roads and bamboo," the now 60-year-old businessman remembers. "It was like Siberia for factory owners."
Sweatshop Art
Widow of Pluto's Discoverer
Patricia Tombaugh
The widow of the astronomer who discovered Pluto 76 years ago said Thursday she was frustrated by the decision to strip it of its planetary status, but she added that Clyde Tombaugh would have understood.
"I'm not heartbroken. I'm just shook up," Patricia Tombaugh, 93, said in a telephone interview from her home in Las Cruces.
Clyde Tombaugh was 24 when he discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1930. He spent months meticulously examining images of the sky, looking for a planet observatory founder Percival Lowell theorized was affecting the orbit of Uranus. Lowell was wrong - Pluto is too small to affect giant Neptune's orbit - but Tombaugh found it anyway.
Tombaugh, who died in 1997, had fought off other attempts to relegate Pluto, but his widow said this time he probably would have endorsed the change, now that other planetary objects have been discovered in the Kuiper Belt, the belt of comets on the edge of the solar system where Pluto resides.
"He was a scientist. He would understand they had a real problem when they start finding several of these things flying around the place," Patricia Tombaugh said.
Patricia Tombaugh
In Memory
Maynard Ferguson
Jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, known for his soaring high notes and for his hit recording of "Gonna Fly Now," which lent the musical muscle to the "Rocky" movies, has died. He was 78.
Ferguson's four daughters, Kim, Lisa, Corby and Wilder, and other family members were at his side when he died.
Born into a musical family in Montreal, Ferguson began playing the piano and violin at age 4, took up the trumpet at 9 and soloed with the Canadian Broadcasting Company Orchestra at 11, then quit school at 15 to pursue a career in music.
The next year he was leading his own dance band, the first of a number of big bands and smaller ensembles he eventually fronted in a career that produced more than 60 albums and three Grammy nominations.
As with many esteemed jazz players, mainstream success largely eluded Ferguson. But he scored a Top-10 hit with his version of "Gonna Fly Now," and the single spawned a gold album and a Grammy nomination in 1978.
Ferguson moved to the U.S. at age 20, playing in big bands - including Jimmy Dorsey's - and performing solo in New York City cafes. He then joined Stan Kenton's orchestra, where his shrieking, upper-register trumpet formed the backbone of the group's extensive brass section.
In 1956 he formed the first of several 13-piece orchestras known for the crisp vigor of their horns. They helped launch the careers of such jazz notables as Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, Bob James, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul.
In the late `60s and `70s, he created a musical niche by rearranging pop and rock songs - "MacArthur Park" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," for example - for big bands.
Born in Montreal on May 4, 1928, Ferguson said his most important musical influences were Louis Armstrong and his mother, a violinist with the Ottawa Symphony and later a school administrator.
Maynard Ferguson
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
