Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Tubalr
"You punch in an artist name, then pick either "only" (to play only that artist's videos) or "similar" (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora's concept, mashed up with YouTube's music video archive."--Neatorama
Paul Krugman: Music for the New Year (New York Times)
As regular readers know, for me this has been the year of terrible macroeconomic policy and wonderful stuff from YouTube; music, especially as performed live, has been a big comfort in these very uncomfortable times.
Honest Logos (flickr.com)
Viktor Hertz' Honest Logos.
Marc Dion: Getting Crunk with Congress (Creators Syndicate)
You can just say, "I met her in the club," and your friends will probably know you mean the club nearest to your apartment.
Farhad Manjoo: 2011 Was a Terrible Year for Tech (Slate)
All our devices got more complicated. And they won't get simpler anytime soon.
Terry Savage: New Online Tool Revolutionizes Bill Paying (Creators Syndicate)
The U.S. Postal Service estimates that businesses mail nearly 48 billion account notices, statements, offers and bills to their customers every year. Online bill payment cut into the volume of mail, as we all have learned to click and pay. But here comes the next step: online bill presentment!
L.V. Anderson: The 'New York Times' Discovers It's Virtually Impossible To Keep Weight Off (Slate)
With New Year's and its attendant resolutions just around the corner, articles about weight loss are cropping up in all the usual places (i.e., everywhere you look).
Charlyn Fargo: A Real Goodbye to That Extra Weight (Creators Syndicate)
OK, so we've all heard about yo-yo dieting and its harmful effects. Is it even worth trying to lose weight if we know we might put it back on again? Go ahead and make that New Year's Resolution to get rid of those 10 pounds you gained. New research on 3,000 participants (that's enough to be credible) in the National Weight Control Registry finds it is possible to lose weight and keep most of it off.
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
Sunny and summery.
Stolen Monkey Returned To SF Zoo
Banana Sam
A monkey stolen from the San Francisco Zoo has been returned in good health after a man found it in a nearby park and coaxed it into a backpack, police said.
The primate named Banana Sam was found on Saturday at Stern Grove park, which is about a mile from the zoo, said San Francisco police Officer Carlos Manfredi, a department spokesman.
Banana Sam was stolen from the zoo sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning. The gate to the cage containing Banana Sam and 17 other monkeys was breached and at least one hole was made into the cage itself, Manfredi said.
The man who found Banana Sam called authorities, and officers transported the animal back to the zoo, police said.
Banana Sam
High Court Reverses Estate Ruling
Rosa Parks
A decision by the Michigan Supreme Court will remove two attorneys from overseeing the estate of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, a lawyer said Friday.
In a brief order, the court ordered a Wayne County judge to stick to an agreement that puts Parks' friend, Elaine Steele, and a former judge, Adam Shakoor, in charge.
Parks left almost all her estate to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, whose purpose is to teach young people leadership and character development.
When Parks' nieces and nephews challenged the estate, a judge appointed John Chase Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr. as fiduciaries. Steven G. Cohen, an attorney for the institute, has accused them of eating up more than $200,000 through fees.
The Supreme Court did not comment directly about the performance of Chase and Jefferson, but its order scratches many decisions by Wayne County Judge Freddie Burton Jr., who put the men in charge, Cohen said.
Rosa Parks
Hospital Lures Rural Doctors
Ashland, Kansas
The hospital had lost the last doctor in a succession of those who came to the remote Kansas town and left again. A sole physician assistant kept watch over the 24-bed facility and its adjacent nursing home. It was on the verge of closing.
Then officials at the Ashland Health Center, seeking to reverse the drain of talent symptomatic of what happens across rural America, embraced an unorthodox approach to bring doctors back.
All employees, from maintenance people to physicians, get eight paid weeks off each year that they can use to do missionary work in other countries. The idea: people willing to care for the sick and suffering in developing nations might be content to do the same in a town of 855 people, more than two hours away from the nearest Starbucks.
The public hospital began advertising that benefit - which employees can use for other volunteer work or any purpose they choose, not just mission work - in Christian publications and at Catholic-run medical schools. Today, the hospital has a chief medical officer, a medical technologist, a nursing director, a nurse practitioner and other staff drawn by its so-called mission-minded recruiting. It's now looking for nurses, a dentist and a physical therapist.
"I was not surprised by the differences between rural Kansas and rural Zimbabwe. What surprised me were the similarities," said the hospital's 32-year-old administrator, Benjamin Anderson, who has been the catalyst for the program. "I am not saying rural Kansas is the same as a developing country, I am simply saying rural Kansas and rural Zimbabwe struggle with some of the same challenges - they just look different."
Ashland, Kansas
Stalk UK
Metal Thieves
For years a bronze statue of Alfred Salter sat on a bench looking out on a quiet bend of the River Thames, a memorial to a doctor who dedicated his life to a London district once infamous for Dickensian levels of poverty and disease.
Now the bench is empty after his statue fell victim to a wave of metal thefts sweeping Britain, threatening artworks and ravaging infrastructure as thieves seek to capitalise on soaring metal prices and a cash-in-hand scrap industry.
Memorial plaques and artworks are unsentimentally lumped together with electrical cables and drain covers in the hunt for illegal metal, which police say costs Britain hundreds of millions of pounds each year and kills two thieves a month.
The borough was also the site of another metal theft earlier this month, from a public park where only two stumps remain of a valuable artwork by renowned British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The local government called the theft part of a "sickening epidemic."
Metal Thieves
10 Good Years
Flight Safety
Boarding an airplane has never been safer in the U.S., but there are still some corners of the world where flying is risky, including Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia.
The past 10 years have been the best in the country's aviation history with 153 fatalities. That's two deaths for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights, according to an Associated Press analysis of government accident data.
The improvement is remarkable. Just a decade earlier, at the time the safest, passengers were 10 times as likely to die when flying on an American plane. The risk of death was even greater during the start of the jet age, with 1,696 people dying - 133 out of every 100 million passengers - from 1962 to 1971. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.
Sitting in a pressurized, aluminum tube seven miles (11 kilometers) above the ground may never seem like the most-natural thing. But consider this: You are more likely to die driving to the airport than flying across the U.S. There are more than 30,000 motor-vehicle deaths each year, a mortality rate eight times greater than that in planes.
Flight Safety
More Dead Blackbirds
Beebe, Arkansas
Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down on a town in central Arkansas last New Year's Eve after revelers set off fireworks that spooked them from their roost, and officials were reporting a similar occurrence Saturday as 2012 approached.
Police in Beebe said dozens of blackbirds had fallen dead, prompting officers to ban residents from shooting fireworks Saturday night. It wasn't immediately clear if fireworks were again to blame, but authorities weren't taking a chance.
Officer John Weeks said the first reports of "birds on the streets" came around 7 p.m. as residents celebrated the year's end with fireworks in their neighborhoods.
He said police were working with animal control workers and others to remove the birds and determine a death count.
Beebe, Arkansas
Tea Baggers With Peyes
Jerusalem
Holocaust survivors are outraged over a Jerusalem demonstration in which ultra-Orthodox Jews wore Star of David patches and uniforms similar to those the Nazis forced Jews to wear during World War II.
Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered Saturday night to protest what they say is a nationwide campaign directed against their lifestyle.
The practices, which call for strict separation of the sexes, are rejected by mainstream Israelis as religious coercion.
At the protest, one child's hands were raised in surrender - mimicking an iconic photo of a terrified Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial called the use of Nazi imagery "disgraceful," and several other survivors' groups and politicians condemned the acts.
Jerusalem
Afghanistan
Sahar Gul
A 15-year-old Afghan girl was brutally tortured, beaten and locked in a toilet by her husband's family for months after she refused to become a prostitute, officials said Saturday.
Sahar Gul was in critical condition when she was rescued from a house in northern Baghlan province last week, after her neighbors reported hearing Gul crying and moaning in pain.
According to police in Baghlan, her in-laws pulled out her nails and hair, and locked her in a dark basement bathroom for about five months, with barely enough food and water to survive.
Running away from an abusive husband or a forced marriage are considered "moral crimes," for which women are currently imprisoned in Afghanistan.
Some rape victims have also been imprisoned, because sex outside marriage, even when the woman is forced, is considered adultery, another "moral crime."
Sahar Gul
"Injection Disposal"
Ohio
Ohio has suspended operations at five deep-well hazardous fluid disposal sites after a series of 11 earthquakes in Youngstown last year including one on Saturday with a magnitude of 4.0, officials said on Sunday.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources said it was halting operations at five Mahoning County wells owned by Northstar Disposal Services LLC as a precaution, citing concerns of a possible link between well activity and the quakes.
Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan and Canada, according to the U.S. Geological Survey web site. The largest and best known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado, where in 1967 a 5.5 magnitude earthquake followed a series of smaller quakes.
Ohio Department of Natural Resources deputy director Andy Ware said Northstar won the right to drill in the area in March 2010 and began drilling in mid-summer. The injection disposal started in December 2010 and the first earthquake occurred in 2011. A representative for Northstar could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
There are 177 disposal wells currently in operation in Ohio. The Mahoning County well is 9,000 feet deep and is used to dispose hazardous fluids, injecting fluid that cannot be disposed of in landfills into sandstone well below groundwater level.
Ohio
Carrot To The Rescue
Missing Ring
A Swedish woman who lost her wedding ring 16 years ago was flabbergasted when she found it again, around a carrot growing in her garden, media reported Saturday.
Lena Paahlsson had taken off the white gold ring before a Christmas baking session with her daughters in 1995, but it had disappeared from the kitchen counter where she placed it.
After looking everywhere, and even pulling up floorboards in the search, Paahlsson and her family, who live on a farm in northern Sweden, had given up on seeing the ring again, she told the Dagens Nyheter daily.
That was until October this year, when she was picking the last carrots in her garden and suddenly found one with her ring glimmering around it.
The family thinks the ring must have fallen into the sink back in 1995 and been mixed with potato peels that were composted or fed to the sheep, since all the soil in the garden comes from composted vegetables and sheep dung.
Missing Ring
Weekend Box Office
"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"
Tom Cruise's new mission remains impossible to beat at the box office.
Studio estimates Sunday placed "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" in the No. 1 spot for the second-straight weekend with $31.3 million. With a $134.1 million domestic total, it's the first $100 million hit with Cruise in the lead role since 2006's "Mission: Impossible III."
The Paramount release led a solid New Year's weekend as Hollywood managed fair business to end a sluggish year on a more promising note for 2012. Domestic revenues closed out at $10.22 billion for 2011, down 3.4 percent from 2010's, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.
Still, movie admissions were down sharply for the second year in a row. Factoring in higher ticket prices, domestic attendance slipped to 1.28 billion in 2011, off 4.2 percent from 2010 admissions and the smallest audiences Hollywood has had since 1995, according to Hollywood.com.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," $31.3 million.
2. "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," $22.1 million.
3. "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked," $18.3 million.
4. "War Horse," $16.9 million.
5. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," $16.3 million.
6. "We Bought a Zoo," $14.3 million.
7. "The Adventures of Tintin," $12 million.
8. "New Year's Eve," $6.7 million.
9. "The Darkest Hour," $4.3 million.
10. "The Descendants," $3.7 million.
"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol"
In Memory
Yaffa Yarkoni
Yaffa Yarkoni, a singer who belted out wartime songs only to become a critic of the Israeli military late in life, died Sunday after a battle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 86.
Yarkoni went from entertaining soldiers as a wartime songbird to criticizing the Israeli military's treatment of Palestinians during their uprising last decade. After chiding the military in 2002, Yarkoni was branded a traitor by soldiers' families, received death threats and had a gala tribute to her career canceled. A group of artists held an alternative event to support her freedom of expression.
The furor arose when she made comparisons between an Israeli military operation in the West Bank and the Holocaust.
"We are a nation that went through the Holocaust. How can we do things like this to another nation?" she told Israel's Army Radio.
In an interview she gave to The Associated Press following those remarks, Yarkoni said she was tired of war, of dead young men and heartbroken mothers.
"I am tired. For 51 years I am singing about Israel all over the world, telling stories about how it was before - the first war, the second war, every war. War, war, war. They call me the singer of wars. I don't like this name. I want to be the singer of Israel," she said.
Yarkoni's songs tell of Israel's pioneering days following the 1948 war that led to its creation, a war in which she served as a radio operator. For years, the khaki-clad Yarkoni was a fixture at Israeli army bases as she entertained soldiers, and many of her songs became classics that still resonate with Israelis and are performed at remembrance day ceremonies.
Yarkoni faded from the public stage over the past decade, and in the end, her powerful music obscured her contentious statements. Upon word of her death, tributes from Israeli politicians across the spectrum poured in, and her music filled radio airwaves.
In a statement, her family said Yarkoni would be buried alongside her husband at a Tel Aviv cemetery. She is survived by three daughters, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Yaffa Yarkoni
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