Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Roy Lichtenstein Costume
Sarah Hoke Thomson's brilliant Halloween costume brought a Roy Lichtenstein painting to life. The more ambitious among you should try this with Jackson Pollock paintings.
"Crave-a-Lot," Melamed Riley's tribute to White Castle using canned goods
The Cleveland AAF asked area advertising agencies to build a Can Castle constructed of non-perishable items which will later be donated to the Cleveland Foodbank. We knew bigger companies would have no problem bringing in a lot of cans, so our twenty-person agency had to get a little creative to stack up.
Susan Estrich: Giving Thanks (Creators Syndicate)
A few years ago, my ex-husband and I decided, after many years of dividing the kids between us, to share the holiday meal together. We are a family, after all, a family united by the greatest blessing in my life and his, the two children, now both away at college, who mark our finest hour. At first, I thought it would be awkward at the very least. But it is far less awkward than the division and the sadness that marked our Thanksgivings for so many years.
Tom Danehy: The English Catholic Mass is changing-and English-speaking Catholics are shaking their heads (Tucson Weekly)
This weekend, just a couple of days after having joined their fellow Americans in celebrating Thanksgiving, Catholics from all over the United States are going to look to the heavens, arms outstretched, and say in unison, "What in the hell's going on here?!"
Andrew Tobias: Frum Tells It Like It Is
Romney? Not So Much.
Gareth Cook: Free Will and the Brain (Scientific American)
Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, "Who's In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain."
Mark Morford: Hot death of a perfect clock radio (SF Gate)
Hi! Do you like jazz? Do you like radio? Do you like being exactly one hour early for everything for most of the winter and well into early spring? You do? Are you ever in luck!
Simon Doonan: What Is a Fashion Icon? (Slate)
Does Tilda Swinton count? How about Kate Middleton? Nicki Minaj?
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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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Cold, gray and rainy.
London Testimony
JK Rowling
Writer J.K. Rowling and actress Sienna Miller gave a London courtroom a vivid picture on Thursday of the anxiety, anger and fear produced by living in the glare of Britain's tabloid media, describing how press intrusion made them feel like prisoners in their own homes.
The creator of boy wizard Harry Potter told Britain's media ethics inquiry that having journalists camped on her doorstep was "like being under siege and like being a hostage." Miller said years of car chases, midnight pursuits and intimate revelations had left her feeling violated, paranoid and anxious.
The pair were among a diverse cast of witnesses - Hollywood star Hugh Grant, a former soccer player, a former aide to supermodel Elle Macpherson and the parents of missing and murdered children - who have described how becoming the focus of Britain's tabloid press wreaked havoc on their lives.
More than a dozen News of the World journalists and editors have been arrested, and the scandal has also claimed the jobs of two top London police officers, Cameron's media adviser and several senior Murdoch executives.
JK Rowling
Cover Discs To Benefit Amnesty International
Bob Dylan
A sprawling new collection of Bob Dylan cover songs is being released in January to benefit Amnesty International.
The human rights organization said Wednesday that all of the songs on the 4-CD collection will be new or previously unreleased versions, with the exception of Dylan's title cut, "Chimes of Freedom."
The disc, to be released in the U.S. on Jan. 24, is being produced by the same music executives who made a 2007 benefit album for Darfur featuring John Lennon songs.
Participating artists range from 19-year-old Miley Cyrus to 92-year-old folk legend Pete Seeger. Cyrus recorded "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" and Seeger, with a children's chorus, does "Forever Young."
Among the other participating artists: Adele, Cage the Elephant, Dave Matthews Band, Ziggy Marley, Maroon 5, My Chemical Romance, Patti Smith, Sting, Pete Townshend, the Gaslight Anthem and Ke$ha.
Bob Dylan
New Find Sheds Light
Jerusalem
Newly found coins underneath Jerusalem's Western Wall could change the accepted belief about the construction of one of the world's most sacred sites two millennia ago, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday.
The man usually credited with building the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary is Herod, a Jewish ruler who died in 4 B.C. Herod's monumental compound replaced and expanded a much older Jewish temple complex on the same site.
But archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority now say diggers have found coins underneath the massive foundation stones of the compound's Western Wall that were stamped by a Roman proconsul 20 years after Herod's death. That indicates that Herod did not build the wall - part of which is venerated as Judaism's holiest prayer site - and that construction was not close to being complete when he died.
The four bronze coins were stamped around 17 A.D. by the Roman official Valerius Gratus. He preceded Pontius Pilate of the New Testament story as Rome's representative in Jerusalem, according to Ronny Reich of Haifa University, one of the two archaeologists in charge of the dig.
The coins were found inside a ritual bath that predated construction of the renovated Temple Mount complex and which was filled in to support the new walls, Reich said.
Jerusalem
Charities Ask Needy For IDs
Las Vegas
Some Las Vegas charities giving away turkeys and toys this season have started asking families to show state identification cards to get a slice of holiday cheer.
The charities say the controversial move to require Social Security, state identification cards, or birth certificates, was needed to prevent fraud born of desperation in a state at the centre of the country's financial crisis.
Charities cited instances of parents reselling donated bicycles blocks from a charity that gave them away, or families getting several holiday turkeys. Some adults, they said, were showing up for handouts with children from other families.
These are some of the issues Las Vegas-area nonprofit organizations said they were trying to avoid as they geared up for the holiday season in a state especially hard hit by the bursting of the housing bubble.
Unemployment in the state was the highest in the nation in October at 13.4 percent, and Nevada continued to have the country's highest state foreclosure rate.
Las Vegas
Lawmakers To Poke
Jon Corzine
U.S. lawmakers plan to look into the relationship between bankrupt mid-size brokerage firm MF Global Holdings Ltd's former CEO Jon Corzine and the major credit-rating agencies, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
MF Global's credit ratings were cut to junk in the days before its October 31 bankruptcy.
A U.S. congressional subcommittee plans a December 15 hearing with regulators and top MF Global officials to review the firm's collapse. The House Financial Services Subcommittee for Oversight and Investigations has invited Corzine and Bradley Abelow, the firm's chief operating officer.
The Journal, citing its source, said the committee's members plan to look into the interactions between Corzine and rating agencies like Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings and whether their judgment was clouded by the prominence of the former New Jersey governor and one-time head of Goldman Sachs.
Jon Corzine
Gives Up NYC Home
Faye Dunaway
Faye Dunaway is moving on from a fight with a landlord over a New York City apartment - by moving out.
The New York Times reported Wednesday the "Bonnie and Clyde" actress agreed this month to give up her $1,048-a-month apartment.
The newspaper says an agreement filed last week gave her until this past Monday to move out. Her landlord's lawyer tells the newspaper she has.
The landlord sued Dunaway in August, seeking to evict her. The lawsuit said she didn't use the apartment as her primary residence as required by rules that keep the rent stabilized.
Faye Dunaway
Found In Peru
'Alien Skull'
Peruvian anthropologist Renato Davila Riquelme has discovered the remains of an unidentified creature with a "triangle shaped" skull nearly as large as its 20-inch-tall body.
Has the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--the setting for the underwhelming 2008 Indiana Jones vehicle--finally been discovered? Well, don't be expecting a victory lap from Steven Spielberg or George Lucas anytime soon.
The remains are most likely those of a child, though one with an unusually shaped head and frame. But that hasn't stopped local site RPP from interviewing several anonymous Spanish and Russian "scientists" claiming that the remains are actually those of an alien:
Of course, five anonymous scientific authorities citing proof of extraterrestrial life would probably be generating a little more attention if their research had passed some basic scrutiny. Even if the remains are almost certainly those of a person, they are certainly unusual. You can take a look at the gallery of photos here.
'Alien Skull'
In Memory
Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone, an award-winning poet for whom tragedy halted, then inspired a career that started in middle age and thrived late in life as her sharp insights into love, death and nature received ever-growing acclaim, has died in the U.S. state of Vermont. She was 96.
Stone, who for decades lived in a farmhouse in Goshen, died Nov. 19 of natural causes at her home in Ripton, her daughter Phoebe Stone said Thursday. She was surrounded by her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Widowed in her 40s and little known for years after, Ruth Stone became one of the country's most honored poets in her 80s and 90s, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for "In the Next Galaxy" and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for "What Love Comes To." She received numerous other citations, including a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims and a Whiting Award that enabled her to have plumbing installed in her Goshen home.
She was born Ruth McDowell in 1915, the daughter of printer and part-time drummer Roger McDowell. A native of Roanoke, Virginia, who spent much of her childhood in Indianapolis, Ruth was a creative and precocious girl for whom poetry was almost literally mother's milk; her mother would recite Tennyson while nursing her. A beloved aunt, Aunt Harriette, worked with young Ruth on poetry and illustrations and was later immortalized, with awe and affection, in the poem "How to Catch Aunt Harriette."
By age 19, Stone was married and had moved to Urbana, Ill., studying at the University of Illinois. There, she met Walter Stone, a graduate student and poet who became the love of her life, well after his ended. "You, a young poet working/in the steel mills; me, married, to a dull chemical engineer," she wrote of their early, adulterous courtship, in the poem "Coffee and Sweet Rolls."
She divorced her first husband, married Stone and had two daughters (she also had a daughter from her first marriage). By 1959, he was on the faculty at Vassar and both were set to publish books. But on a sabbatical in England, Walter Stone hung himself, at age 42, a suicide his wife never got over or really understood.
In the poem "Turn Your Eyes Away," she remembered seeing his body, "on the door of a rented room/like an overcoat/like a bathrobe/ hung from a hook." He would recur, ghostlike, in poem after poem. "Actually the widow thinks/he may be/in another country in disguise," she writes in "All Time is Past Time." In "The Widow's Song," she wonders "If he saw her now/would he marry her?/The widow pinches her fat/on her abdomen."
Her first collection, "In an Iridescent Time," came out in 1959. But Stone, depressed and raising three children alone, moving around the country to wherever she could find a teaching job, didn't publish her next book, "Topography and Other Poems," until 1971. Another decade-long gap preceded her 1986 release "American Milk."
Her life stabilized in 1990 when she became a professor of English and creative writing at the State University of New York in Binghamton. Most of her published work, including "American Milk," ''The Solution" and "Simplicity," came out after she turned 70.
Her poems were brief, her curiosity boundless, her verse a cataloguing of what she called "that vast/confused library, the female mind." She considered the bottling of milk; her grandmother's hair, "pulled back to a bun"; the random thoughts while hanging laundry (Einstein's mustache, the eyesight of ants).
"I think my work is a natural response to my life," she once said. "What I see and feel changes like a prism, moment to moment; a poem holds and illuminates. It is a small drama. I think, too, my poems are a release, a laughing at the ridiculous and songs of mourning, celebrating marriage and loss, all the sad baggage of our lives. It is so overwhelming, so complex."
Aging and death were steady companions - confronted, lamented and sometimes kidded, like in "Storage," in which her "old" brain reminds her not to weep for what was lost: "Listen - I have it all on video/at half the price," the poet is warned.
Ruth Stone
In Memory
Danshi Tatekawa
Danshi Tatekawa, master storyteller of Japan's traditional "rakugo" comic stories who inspired many comedians, has died at the age of 75, reports said Wednesday.
He died Monday after a long battle with cancer, according to major media, including national broadcaster NHK and Jiji Press.
Tatekawa, whose real name was Katsuyoshi Matsuoka, was known for his sharp tongue, dark humour, and free-spirited ways on and off the stage.
He was a major influence on many Japanese comedians, including Takeshi Kitano, acclaimed filmmaker and comedian, who learned rakugo storytelling under him.
Rakugo is a traditional style of Japanese storytelling, where a lone performer sits on the stage to tell a comic story.
The performer only holds a small fan and a towel-like cloth as props and uses facial expressions and different tones of voice to depict conversations among characters in the tale.
Danshi served as a member of the upper house of parliament in the 1970s, and was named a vice minister in charge of Okinawa development.
Danshi Tatekawa
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