Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Hadley Freeman: Can the presidential debates turn the US election? (Guardian)
Obama came across as he generally always has done: equipped with a plan, generally calm but occasionally testy, and intelligent if not especially empathetic. Most of all, he came across as disgusted with the competition on which he is forced to waste his time and while that may be an understandable reaction, it is not an especially helpful one.
Tom Danehy: California's recent primaries prove the 'top two' elections system is a bust (Tucson Weekly)
Government by ballot initiative is, at best, a mixed bag, with the occasional modest success temporarily deflecting attention from a steady stream of badly written, poorly focused and mostly unnecessary propositions.
An Open Letter to Ann Coulter
The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night's Presidential debate.
Ian Sample: What are the downsides of winning a Nobel prize? (Guardian)
The money and kudos are hard to grumble over, so what do Nobel laureates moan about most?
Father and Daughter Locked in Nasty Election Fight for President of Their House (Neatorama)
Redditor Aspirin742 and his 6-year old daughter are currently neck-and-neck in the polls to be elected President of their house. The campaigns have resorted to nasty smears that should disgrace both candidates, except that Elissa's accusations are mostly true--at least according to PolitiFact.
Rebecca Keegan: A 'Cloud Atlas' journey for the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer (Los Angeles Times)
As they swept through airports while making their ambitious, risky new movie, "Cloud Atlas," directors Andy and Lana Wachowski got used to answering a surprisingly tough question from customs officials. "They'd say, 'What's your movie about?'" said Andy. "It's about the sum of human experience. They always look up and go, 'Oh, really ...'"
Henry Rollins: Noise Music is the Real Thing (LA Weekly)
One of the most prevalent and undermentioned genres of music is what is known as noise. You can find it all over the world happening in basements, small venues and even some festivals. Often blown off or belittled by critics, the form for the most part goes unheard and unnoticed. I find it much to my liking, and it comprises a large fraction of my listening.
This column will change your life: selfishness (Guardian)
There are times when selfishness is the sensible option, says Oliver Burkeman.
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David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
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Michelle in AZ
Bosko Suggests
Water Towers
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From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Team Coco
Conan
Triumph The Insult Comic Dog video! Triumph visited the debate on Monday. Don't miss the priceless look from John McCain.
*As if that's not awesome enough, Conan did the entire show spray tanned and cornrowed.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and windier.
Calls Out 'Gray-Faced Men'
Tina Fey
The comedian Tina Fey has a serious bone to pick with "grey-faced" men who would have their say on women's reproductive rights. Her comments, surfaced by BuzzFeed, have sparked interest on the Web.
In a talk at the Center for Reproductive Rights' Inaugural Gala last night, the "30 Rock" creator slammed Congressman Todd Akin's definition of "legitimate rape."
The 42-year-old performer, a special guest at the gala, lamented, "I wish we could have an honest and respectful dialogue about these complicated issues. But it seems we can't right now."
The former "Saturday Night Live" star added, "If I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a two-dollar hair cut explain to me what rape is, I'm gonna lose my mind." In an attempt to sum up Akin's "legitimate rape" phrase, Fey gave up, saying simply, "I can't even finish this sentence without getting dumber."
Tina Fey
Long Overdue Grave Marker
Tommy Johnson
Mississippi blues musician Tommy Johnson is finally getting a headstone on his grave, more than a half century after his death.
Johnson was an influential blues singer and guitarist in the 1920s and '30s but was ravaged by alcoholism before dying in 1956.
Singer Bonnie Raitt helped buy Johnson's headstone in 2001, but it's been sitting in the Crystal Springs library because he's buried in a cemetery that's between two privately owned pieces of land. The only road to the cemetery deteriorated, and it took years for Copiah County supervisors to rebuild the road.
On Friday, the Warm Springs Methodist Church Cemetery near Crystal Springs will be rededicated, with Johnson's headstone in place.
Tommy Johnson
1878 Audio Unveiled
Thomas Edison
It's scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world's first recorded blooper.
The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.
The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.
The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year.
A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter.
Thomas Edison
Krewe of Endymion
Kelly Clarkson
Pop star Kelly Clarkson will ride as celebrity grand marshal when the Krewe of Endymion parade rolls on the Saturday before Mardi Gras in 2013.
Clarkson was the first winner of the Fox reality show "American Idol" in 2002. Her hits include "A Moment Like This" and "Because of You."
Clarkson may be upstaged at the Feb. 9 parade by a float organizers bill as the largest and most elaborate in Carnival history.
The super float will be 250 feet long and carry more than 200 riders. Its design focuses on Pontchartrain Beach, the amusement park that entertained generations on the New Orleans lakefront before closing in 1983.
Kelly Clarkson
Kelly Clarkson Endorses Obama
Billboard's Rising Star
Carly Rae Jepsen
Carly Rae Jepsen has had a breakout year, and now she's being rewarded by Billboard, which has named her its Rising Star of 2012.
The "Call Me Maybe" singer will be honored at Billboard's annual Women in Music event, to be held in New York City on Nov. 30. She'll join Katy Perry, who has been named Woman of the Year.
In a statement Thursday, Jepsen says she was influenced by many female artists and hopes to inspire budding musicians the way her heroes inspired her. Jepsen says she is truly honored by the award.
Carly Rae Jepsen
Discovery Gets First Performance
Ludwig van Beethoven
A previously undiscovered musical arrangement by Ludwig van Beethoven was performed for the first time at a British university on Thursday.
The two-minute long piece is an organ harmony to the 1,000-year old Gregorian hymn "Pange Lingua", University of Manchester Professor Barry Cooper told Reuters of the discovery he made while studying a copy of a 192-year-old Beethoven sketchbook.
"Other scholars looked at it without realizing what it was as it looks like a random collection of chords. When I looked at it I saw the series of chords and saw a tune there," Cooper said.
"It's a Gregorian chant that I happen to know so I realized that he'd obviously harmonized the chant and produced a new composition."
Ludwig van Beethoven
Efforts Intensify To Misinform
Dirty Tricks
In Florida, Virginia and Indiana, voters have received phone calls that wrongly told them there was no need to cast a ballot in person on Election Day because they could vote by phone.
In Ohio and Wisconsin, billboards in mostly low-income and minority neighborhoods showed prisoners behind bars and warned of criminal penalties for voter fraud - an effort that voting rights groups say was designed to intimidate minority voters.
And across the nation, some employers - notably David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who help fund the conservative group Americans for Prosperity - are urging their workers to vote for Republican Mitt Romney for president.
"We've seen an uptick in deceptive and intimidating tactics designed to prevent eligible Americans from voting," said Eric Marshall of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who manages a coalition that has a telephone hot line (1-866-OUR-VOTE) that collects tips on alleged voter intimidation.
Democrats have been more vocal in complaining about such antics. They also cite groups linked to the conservative Tea Party movement that are training tens of thousands of people to monitor polling places on November 6 for voter fraud. The controversial plan has been criticized as an attempt to delay or discourage voting.
Dirty Tricks
Goes 'Gangnam Style'
Ai Weiwei
Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is the latest to go "Gangnam Style" - but in a trademark act of irreverence, he's thrown in a pair of handcuffs and a poke at Chinese censors.
In a video posted on YouTube, Ai sports a neon-pink T-shirt, black jacket and dark sunglasses and energetically mimics rodeo-style dance moves made famous by South Korean rapper PSY, whose original video became an Internet sensation.
Ai said he and several friends made the video Wednesday and uploaded it overnight. In one scene, he swings two pairs of handcuffs while dancing. The video also was posted on Chinese websites, but censors apparently had scrubbed it off many of them by Thursday morning.
"Our happiness is constantly being taken away from us, our homes demolished, we are always controlled, passports can be taken away from us, and all these can affect our happiness," Ai said. "However, every morning we have the opportunity to give others something to laugh about. Laughter is important."
The video is titled "Grass Mud Horse Style," in Chinese, a sly insult Ai coined as a stab at the country's Internet censors. The Chinese characters are homonyms for a vulgar slur.
Ai Weiwei
300 Potential Victims Emerge
Jimmy Savile
Disgraced BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile was investigated in the 1980s over an allegation of indecent assault, police said Thursday as they announced that 300 potential victims had come forward so far with abuse accusations against the late TV host.
The twin announcements showed how a sex abuse scandal that is engulfing one of Britain's most venerable news organizations was showing no signs of abating.
Officers have interviewed 130 of the 300 potential victims so far and even more are expected to contact authorities, Commander Peter Spindler, leader of the Scotland Yard inquiry, said Thursday.
The police commander acknowledged he had been stunned by the volume of abuse allegations reported to his team of 30 officers in the three weeks since details about Savile's activities first came to public attention.
Mark Thompson, BBC director-general from 2004 until last month who is now the incoming CEO of the New York Times, is among those facing questions from U.K. lawmakers. Thompson has insisted that he never met Savile, was unaware of rumors about his behavior and had little knowledge of the cancelled expose.
Jimmy Savile
Boys Town
CNN
A CNN.com story headlined "Do hormones drive women's votes?" sparked a social media backlash that lasted for seven hours Wednesday before the network removed the post late that night.
The story, posted in the website's medical and health section Wednesday afternoon, began, "There's something that may raise the chances for both presidential candidates that's totally out of their control: women's ovulation cycles."
The story cited a new study to be published in Psychological Science by Kristina Durante, an assistant professor in the marketing department at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the study's main author. Durante's online surveys of several hundred women led her to conclude that when they are ovulating, single women espouse more liberal beliefs, while married or committed women gravitate toward more conservative views.
(The same journal published a study in October concluding that the more muscular a man is, the more likely he is to support government policies that serve his self-interest, such as low taxes for the rich if he is wealthy.)
CNN
Another Round Of Lawsuits
Anthony Pellicano
Four years after a private eye went to prison for wiretapping phones of the rich and famous on behalf of celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights, his clients are facing hefty bills for his skullduggery.
In the first of more than a dozen lawsuits against Anthony Pellicano's well-heeled clients, a jury last week ruled against the ex-wife of a billionaire philanthropist, awarding $4 million to his three adult children and former personal assistant after she violated their privacy.
The case against the ex-wife, Jacqueline Colburn, is the first to be tried before a jury stemming from a criminal probe that ensnared Pellicano for targeting Sylvester Stallone, Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon and for work he did for others like Chris Rock and an attorney who represented MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian in a child custody battle.
Pellicano, 68, is now serving 15 years in a federal prison in Texas after being convicted in 2008 of racketeering and more than six dozen other counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud and wiretapping. He is scheduled to be released in March 2019.
The evidence showed he dug up dirt on clients' rivals by bribing phone company employees to install wiretapping software and had rogue police officers search databases for personal information. The information was used in hardball negotiations for business disputes, divorces and lawsuits.
Anthony Pellicano
US Returns 4,000 Archaeological Relics
Mexico
More than 4,000 archaeological artifacts looted from Mexico and seized in the U.S. have been returned to Mexican authorities.
U.S. officials displayed the relics at the Mexican Consulate in El Paso before handing them over during a ceremony Thursday.
The National Archaeological Council of Mexico says the items mostly date from before European explorers landed in North America. Council President Pedro Sanchez says they include items from hunter-gatherers in pre-Columbian northern Mexico, such as stones to grind corn, statues, figurines and copper hatchets.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seized some of the relics in El Paso, Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, San Diego and San Antonio. But most were found in the West Texas town of Fort Stockton and included items taken during a 2008 theft at a museum in Mexico.
Mexico
Cesium In Fish Not Declining
Fukushima
Radioactive cesium levels in most kinds of fish caught off the coast of Fukushima haven't declined in the year following Japan's nuclear disaster, a signal that the seafloor or leakage from the damaged reactors must be continuing to contaminate the waters - possibly threatening fisheries for decades, a researcher says.
Though the vast majority of fish tested off Japan's northeast coast remain below recently tightened limits of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in food consumption, Japanese government data shows that 40 percent of bottom-dwelling fish such as cod, flounder and halibut are above the limit, Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, wrote in an article published Thursday in the journal Science.
In analyzing extensive data collected by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, he found that the levels of contamination in almost all kinds of fish are not declining a year after the March 11, 2011 disaster. An earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant's vital cooling system, causing three reactor cores to melt and spew radiation onto the surrounding countryside and ocean.
But the most contaminated fish found yet off Fukushima were caught in August, some 17 months after the disaster. The two greenlings, which are bottom-feeders, had cesium levels of more than 25,000 becquerels per kilogram, 250 times the level the government considers safe.
Fukushima
Arrested For Gun At LAX
Jack Scalia
Police at Los Angeles International Airport say actor Jack Scalia has been arrested after security screeners found an unloaded handgun in his carry-on bag.
Sgt. Belinda Nettles says the 61-year-old Scalia, who had recurring roles on "All My Children," ''Remington Steele" and "Dallas," was arrested Thursday afternoon in Terminal 7.
No further details were released.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Scalia played the role of Nicholas Pearce on "Dallas." The character plunged to his death from a balcony following a fight with J.R. Ewing.
Jack Scalia
Offers $10 Million For Proof Of Bigfoot
Spike TV
Forget Donald Trump's $5 million offer for President Obama's college and passport records - Spike TV has a much more lucrative offer. And it might even be more humorous than Trump's guffaw-inducing "October surprise."
The cable network is teaming with Lloyd's of London for a new one-hour reality show, "10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty." The title pretty much says it all - teams of explorers will go on a grand expedition for proof that Bigfoot - the mythical hairy creature said to roam the forests of America's Pacific northwest and other areas - actually exists.
Should one of the teams accomplish the mission, a $10 million prize - underwritten by renowned insurers Lloyd's of London - awaits.
It would be the largest cash prize in history, in the unlikely event that one of the teams actually comes up with evidence.
Spike TV
Falls From Sky
Shark
Nobody yelled "Fore!" at a Southern California golf course when a 2-foot-long shark dropped out of the sky and flopped around on the 12th tee.
The 2-pound leopard shark was apparently plucked from the ocean by a bird then dropped on San Juan Hills Golf Club, Melissa McCormack, director of club operations, said Thursday.
A course marshal, who makes sure players maintain an appropriate pace, saw something moving around on the tee and went to investigate. He found the shark bleeding with puncture wounds, where it seems the bird had held it in its grasp.
The marshal put the shark in his golf cart and drove it back to the clubhouse.
"We knew we had to get it to the ocean as fast as possible," McCormack said.
Shark
Top 20
Concert Tours
The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America. The previous week's ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
1. (1) Madonna; $5,128,536; $165.55.
2. (New) Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band; $4,882,083; $93.76.
3. (3) Cirque du Soleil - "Michael Jackson: The Immortal"; $2,755,364; $91.94.
4. (New) Justin Bieber; $1,176,505; $76.92.
5. (5) Enrique Iglesias / Jennifer Lopez; $1,046,803; $78.91.
6. (6) "Gigantes Tour" / Marc Anthony / Marco Antonio Solis / Chayanne; $1,042,502; $106.99.
7. (7) Jason Aldean; $730,865; $39.37.
8. (9) "Honda Civic Tour" / Linkin Park; $702,819; $49.66.
9. (8) Zac Brown Band; $684,893; $40.23.
10. (11) Brad Paisley; $618,637; $43.32.
11. (10) Iron Maiden; $584,060; $54.13.
12. (12) Rascal Flatts; $571,078; $39.27.
13. (14) Journey; $522,624; $57.91.
14. (15) Def Leppard / Poison; $507,036; $64.83.
15. (16) Carrie Underwood; $489,821; $59.42.
16. (17) Wiz Khalifa / Mac Miller; $449,346; $27.21.
17. (18) Mumford & Sons; $415,747; $45.39.
18. (20) Florence & The Machine; $393,394; $46.13.
19. (19) "Vans Warped Tour"; $390,060; $29.28.
20. (21) Il Divo; $347,612; $92.64.
Concert Tours
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