Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mary Valle: In praise of one-hit wonders (The Guardian)
Why is a truly singular performance - like Gale Hansen's in Dead Poets Society - something to belittle rather than to celebrate?
Samir Mezrahi: The 25 Most Loved One-Hit Wonders Ever (BuzzFeed)
Are you surprised?
Eric Schmeltzer: Congrats, Media. You Just Got Trump'd (Huffington Post)
How did we get here?
Tom Danehy: Tom celebrates 50 years of Star Trek with a confession that he liked "Enterprise"(Tucson Weekly)
The really cool thing is that I typed this entire column with my hands in the "Live Long and Prosper" configuration. And I did so boldly.
Looking So Long At These Pictures Of You: Remembering Wendy Van Leuveren (Tucson Weekly)
On Wednesday, Aug. 31, Wendy took her own life after a mostly-private struggle with mental illness. The death of this beloved mother, partner, daughter, sister and friend came as a surprise to many, as is evident in the numerous posts and comments on the "Remembering Wendy Van L" Facebook page, created on Aug. 31, and had 670 followers as of the evening of Sept. 13.
Andrew Tobias: Trump (Sep 15 Column)
And as we now know used his foundation money to buy a $20,000 portrait of himself and illegally contribute $25,000 to Miami Attorney General Pam Bondi four days before she declined to join other attorneys general in investigating his fraudulent Trump University.
Suzanne Moore: So goodbye, David Cameron - Libya is not the only failed state you are responsible for (The Guardian)
What did Cameron believe? Except that he could, and therefore should, be prime minister? Britain is paying a high price for his dangerous entitlement.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Lumpy
My friend in Alabama shared an article about the new breed of late night comics & politics. In it, they cite Samantha Bee as calling Lumpy a "tangerine-tinted trash-can fire," "sociopathic 70-year-old toddler," "screaming carrot demon" and "America's burst appendix."
Love it.
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"SAVING THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY."
IT'S TIME FOR A CHANGE.
SKELETOR REDUX
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
JUST LIKE HIS DADDY
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Very smelly day - think the skunk did a bit of spraying.
Since none of the kitties stink, figure the skunk let loose on one of the raccoons, and the raccoon is hunkered down under the house.
Ack.
Confidence Hits Fresh Low
US Media
Americans' trust in the media has sunk to a new low, and a bitter presidential race may be to blame, a Gallup survey showed Wednesday.
The poll asking whether the media report the news "fully, accurately and fairly" found just 32 percent of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust, the lowest level in Gallup polling history and eight percentage points below last year.
Gallup began asking the question in 1972, and has polled Americans on a yearly basis since 1997.
Trust and confidence in the media hit its highest point in 1976, at 72 percent following the investigative journalism coverage of the Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, according to the research group. But confidence has been below 50 percent since 2007.
Trust was also low among younger adults: just 26 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 49 said they felt confidence in the media compared with 38 percent of those 50 and older.
US Media
Clooney, Cheadle Urge Action
South Sudan
The leaders on both sides of South Sudan's civil war and their families have profited off the conflict, amassing fortunes through links with bankers, arms dealers and oil companies, according to a report released on Monday by actors George Clooney and Don Cheadle.
At a news conference to present the report, they called on the international community to cut off the leaders' financial flows through tougher sanctions.
The report follows a two-year undercover investigation by The Sentry, a group co-founded by Clooney and fellow activist John Prendergast to look into the financing of African conflicts and comes at a time when the United Nations is threatening to impose an arms embargo against South Sudan's government.
The group said a network of international facilitators stretched from arms dealers in Ukraine to construction companies in Turkey, mining firms in Kenya, and Chinese investors involved in joint ventures in gambling and private security sectors in South Sudan.
According to the report, South Sudan's leader President Salva Kiir, his former deputy Riek Machar and military generals have pilfered state coffers, accumulated an array of luxury homes and cars, and enriched themselves and family members through stakes in oil and other business ventures.
South Sudan
Sexploits Save Galapagos Species
Diego the Tortoise
He's over 100 years old, but his sex life is the stuff of legend. Diego the Tortoise is quite the ladies' man, and his exploits have helped save his species from extinction.
Diego, a Galapagos giant tortoise, has fathered an estimated 800 offspring, almost single-handedly rebuilding the species' population on their native island, Espanola, the southernmost in the Galapagos Archipelago.
"He's a very sexually active male reproducer. He's contributed enormously to repopulating the island," said Washington Tapia, a tortoise preservation specialist at Galapagos National Park.
Diego is a Chelonoidis hoodensis, a species found in the wild only on Espanola.
Around 50 years ago, there were only two males and 12 females of Diego's species alive on Espanola, and they were too spread out to reproduce.
Diego the Tortoise
New Collection
Belgium
A new collection in the psychiatric hospital of Duffel in the north of Belgium makes for a ghoulish sight: around 3,000 preserved brains that were originally saved by a British doctor.
The collection of frontal lobes, hippocampi and other key parts of the brain floating in formaldehyde or fixed in paraffin will be used for research into psychiatric illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia.
British neuropathologist John Corsellis collected and conserved the brains over a period of more than 40 years between 1951 and the middle of the nineties but authorities in London ran out of space.
Now they have come to Duffel, where Manuel Morrens, the director of research at the hospital, and his colleagues will share the collection with the faculty of medicine at the University of Antwerp.
One of the main advantages of conducting research on brains from this era is that they are untouched by certain medications that didn't exist at the time.
Belgium
Sea Ice Shrinks
Arctic
Arctic sea ice this summer shrank to its second lowest level since scientists started to monitor it by satellite, with scientists saying it is another ominous signal of global warming.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said the sea ice reached its summer low point on Saturday, extending 1.6 million square miles (4.14 million square kilometers). That's behind only the mark set in 2012, 1.31 million square miles (3.39 million square kilometers).
Center director Mark Serreze said this year's level technically was 3,800 square miles (10,000 square kilometers) less than 2007, but that's so close the two years are essentially tied.
Even though this year didn't set a record, "we have reinforced the overall downward trend. There is no evidence of recovery here," Serreze said. "We've always known that the Arctic is going to be the early warning system for climate change. What we've seen this year is reinforcing that."
This year's minimum level is nearly 1 million square miles (2.56 million square kilometers) smaller than the 1979 to 2000 average. That's the size of Alaska and Texas combined.
Arctic
Impersonation Of Journalist Valid
FBI
The FBI did not break rules in place in 2007 when it impersonated a journalist to send a teenage bomb-threat suspect a computer link to a fake news article that concealed location tracking software, a government watchdog said on Thursday.
But the undercover activity would only be permissible today with a series of high-ranking approvals stipulated in interim policy guidelines enacted in June this year, the Department of Justice's office of the inspector general found.
The case gained attention in 2014 when documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group, revealed the FBI had posed as an Associated Press editor and sent a link to a spoofed article to the suspect's MySpace account.
By clicking the link, the 15-year-old suspect installed software that sent location data to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Over one week in June 2007, the student emailed bomb threats to employees at his Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington. The suspect was later arrested and pleaded guilty in July 2007 to making the threats.
Media organizations and digital freedom activists condemned the tactics used by the FBI, prompting FBI Director James Comey to defend them in a 2014 New York Times op-ed as "proper and appropriate under Justice Department and F.B.I. guidelines at the time."
FBI
Bets On Macau Revival
Adelson
Billionaire casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson (R-Sugar Daddy) predicted a revival for beleaguered Macau Tuesday as he launched his new Paris-themed mega resort, with the gambling enclave betting its fortunes on mass market tourists.
A corruption crackdown by Chinese President Xi Jinping and an economic slowdown since mid-2014 drove away many mainland high-rollers who had propped up the VIP sector in semi-autonomous Macau -- the only part of China where it is legal to gamble.
The former Portuguese colony has struggled to recover its footing ever since as it comes under pressure from Beijing to diversify away from gambling.
But August saw gaming revenues end a slump that had lasted more than two years, with some analysts putting the rally down to a new raft of resorts trying to entice mass market gamblers and non-gaming tourists.
Adelsons' Sands is hoping to follow the trend with The Parisian, a cavernous casino complex with 3,000 rooms, shopping arcades, restaurants and a water park boasting a "Marie Antoinette" slide.
Adelson
Mammoth Skull
California
Scientists at the Channel Islands National Park, just off the Southern California coast, have excavated a rare and well-preserved mammoth skull fossil from Santa Rosa Island, the park announced Wednesday.
Justin Wilkins, a paleontologist from The Mammoth Site in South Dakota who worked with a team for the past week to unearth the fossil from an eroding stream bank, said the discovery is of high scientific importance.
The fossil was first discovered in 2014 by Peter Larramendy, a biologist from the national park who came across its ivory tusk protruding from gravel sediment in a canyon wall.
Geologists at the U.S. Geological Survey have dated the charcoal samples adjacent to the fossil to about 13,000 years, suggesting the mammal coincided with the age of Arlington Man, the oldest human skeletal remains in North America, also discovered on Santa Rosa Island.
But questions about the species of the mammoth have arisen since the excavation. "It doesn't fit the profile for a pygmy mammoth or their relatives on the mainland," Wilkins told the Ventura County Star, referring to the Columbian mammoth which roamed the continent of North America before migrating to the Channel Islands.
California
Drills Apartment-Style Nests Out of Rock
'Unusual' Bee Species
A newly discovered species of bee does things the hard way, gnawing its nests out of solid rock even when softer dirt is available.
This hard work appears to pay off, however, by providing the bees greater protection from the vagaries of life in the desert Southwest. The species, dubbed Anthophora pueblo, has been found in Utah, in southwest Colorado and in Death Valley in California, where it pocks vertical sandstone rock faces with tiny holes. Though the bees seem to be solitary nesters, they build these rocky alcoves next to one another, like insect apartment-dwellers.
The first hint of Anthophora peublo's existence dates back to the early 1980s, when entomologist Frank Parker - an author on the current study and the former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Lab in Utah - discovered bees nesting in holes dug into sandstone in Utah's San Rafael Desert. Parker chipped out a couple of blocks of sandstone and reared the bees until they emerged from the rock; the nests and bee specimens then sat in a museum collection, unstudied.
There's a cost to burrowing in stone. Older female bees commonly show wear and tear on their mandibles, Orr and his colleagues reported, and it takes more energy and time to dig through sandstone than dirt. However, there's evidence that building nests to last confers benefits to the bees' offspring, which may reuse their parents' tunnels. The bees are also able to hole up in their dwellings and delay emergence for up to four years when times are lean and not many desert flowers are blooming; sandstone probably protects the bees from erosion or flash floods better than dirt during these long quiescent periods, the researchers wrote.
'Unusual' Bee Species
In Memory
Kim McGuire
Kim McGuire, who played Mona "Hatchet-Face" Malnorowski in the John Waters film Cry-Baby, died Wednesday afternoon at a Florida hospital. She was 60.
McGuire was hospitalized on Tuesday with pneumonia, but did not respond to treatment and went into cardiac arrest, her husband Gene Piotrowsky told TMZ.
A GoFundMe page was set up a by a friend on Wednesday night to aid Piotrowsky.
McGuire was born in New Orleans in 1955. Her first role was in 1990's Cry-Baby, starring Johnny Depp as a teen able to cry on command. She also starred that year in the horror thriller Disturbed opposite Malcolm McDowell.
McGuire also appeared in the Mark Frost-David Lynch series On the Air about a group of performers trying to stage a live variety show. She became an entertainment and appellate lawyer, and passed the bar in California and Alabama.
McGuire and Piotrowsky, a TV producer, were living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck the city in 2005. Their home was destroyed and most of their possessions were washed away in the deluge. Shortly after the tragedy, they relocated to Mississippi and then eventually to Naples, Fla.
Kim McGuire
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
