Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Lazy Jon Stewart (Times New Roman)
Oh, dear. Jon Stewart took on the platinum coin, and made a hash of it - he faceplanted, as Ryan Cooper says. What went wrong? Jon Chait says that he flunked econ, but that's just part of it. He also flunked law, politics, and just plain professional.
John Hawkes: 'To be a good actor, I need to be invisible' (Guardian)
John Hawkes has no interest in money, being famous or giving interviews. He'd better get used to all three, writes Carole Cadwalladr.
Pat Gallagher: "Dick Van Dyke -- At 87, Life is Better Than Ever!" (Huffington Post)
Q: I guess you've done just about everything in your career that you've wanted to do. What's missing?
A: I've won several Emmys, a Tony and a Grammy so maybe somebody will let me have an Oscar, and then I'll have a full set. (Laughs)
How to Speak Flanders
"Nedward "Ned" Flanders, Jr. may be one of the most iconic neighbors in television history. The reoccurring character from The Simpsons is famous for his compassion, his evangelical spirituality, but maybe above all else the funny way he talks. You have to hand it to voice actor Harry Shearer and the writers of The Simpsons, they really have developed a vocabulary of their own."--Neatorama
Nicholas Carr: Don't Burn Your Books-Print Is Here to Stay (Wall Street Journal)
The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing. Readers still want to turn those crisp, bound pages.
BUT NEVER A LOVELY SO REAL (Believer)
DESPITE HIS LITERARY BRILLIANCE AND HUMANIST RESOLVE, NELSON ALGREN WAS THE TYPE OF LOSER THIS COUNTRY JUST CAN'T STOMACH
The Seeds: Full Album (YouTube)
All songs written by Sky Saxon except where noted.
Adele: Full Concert (YouTube)
iTunes Festival London 2011.
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, clear and colder.
Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award
Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster came out without really coming out, and suggested she was retiring from acting without exactly saying so, in a long, breathless and rambling speech at Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards.
Foster took the stage as this year's winner of the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, which had been announced previously. But her acceptance speech was anything but predictable as the veteran actress seized control of what is every year a noisy, boozy ballroom; the crowd of A-listers quickly quieted down as it became apparent that she had something serious and important to say.
The 50-year-old Oscar-winner, who's been protective of her private life and reluctant to discuss her sexual orientation, was coy at first, suggesting she had a big announcement that would make her publicist nervous. Then she stated: "I'm just going to put it out there, loud and proud ... I am, uh, single," pausing for dramatic effect before that last word. "I hope you're not disappointed that there won't be a big coming-out speech tonight. I already did my coming-out about a thousand years ago."
Foster joked that celebrities are now expected to reveal they're gay "with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show. ... You just might be surprised but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child. Please don't cry, because my reality show is so boring."
Foster thanked Cydney Bernard, a production manager whom she identified as her former partner of 20 years and with whom she has two sons.
Jodie Foster
Women Pry Open Door
Video Game Industry
When video game developer Brenda Brathwaite Romero started her career in the 1980s, she could count the number of female developers in the industry on one hand.
Today, many "Women in Games" roundtables she attends are filled to capacity with new faces. The 46-year-old, sometimes referred to as the longest-serving woman in the video game arena, jokes that these days one can even encounter long lines for the ladies' room at the Game Developers Conference, one of the industry's largest gatherings.
With women comprising just over 1 in 10 in the video game workforce, the industry has a reputation for being among the most testosterone-fueled of the traditionally male-dominated technology sector. But thanks to the mobile revolution, industry executives say that's changing.
The number of women hired by game companies has tripled since 2009, according to recruiting firm VonChurch, based on over 350 placements it has made in digital gaming firms like CrowdStar and GREE.
Video Game Industry
America's Newest National Park
Pinnacles National Monument
Pinnacles National Monument in California was signed into law as the United States' 59th and newest national park, now bearing the name Pinnacles National Park.
The new park, with its spectacular rock formations, beautiful spring wildflowers and group of endangered condors, is a popular tourist attraction, located in the Gabilan Mountains east of central California's Salinas Valley, according to a statement from the Department of the Interior. The park encompasses 27,000 acres of wild lands.
The stunning rock formations, called pinnacles and from which the park gets its name, are the remnants of half an ancient volcano, worn down by erosion over the eons. The matching half of the volcano lies 195 miles (314 kilometers) to the southeast, on the other side of the San Andreas Fault. (The 1976 discovery that the halves were connected showed the degree of offset along the fault.)
More than 30 miles (48 kilometers) of trails lead to the park's various geological formations, which are popular with climbers.
The park was first designated as a national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. The Pinnacles National Park Act calls out the importance of the various ecosystems found in the park, the unique geological setting, and the historical and cultural significance it has to Native American groups and early American explorers and settlers, the Interior statement said.
Pinnacles National Monument
States Rights
Bolivia
Bolivia on Friday said it had been re-admitted to the U.N. anti-narcotics convention after persuading member states to recognize the right of its indigenous people to chew raw coca leaf, which is used in making cocaine.
President Evo Morales had faced opposition from Washington in his campaign against the classification of coca as an illicit drug.
The leaf was declared an illegal narcotic in the 1961 U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, along with cocaine, heroin, opium and morphine and a host of chemical drugs.
Bolivia withdrew from the convention a year ago and said it would not rejoin unless coca chewing was decriminalized.
Bolivia
Credit Card Block
Vatican't
A senior Vatican official says he is "truly surprised" that the Bank of Italy ordered credit card payments suspended in the tiny city-state and insists the Vatican has taken adequate measures to fight money laundering.
The Vatican has been cash-only since Jan. 1 after Italy's central bank compelled Deutsche Bank Italia to stop providing electronic payment services to the Holy See. That has meant visitors to the Vatican Museums - they numbered 5 million last year - and the Vatican post office have had to pay cash for tickets and any other transactions.
It's an inconvenience that, if left unchanged for long, could eventually affect the Vatican's bottom line, given the critical role museum revenues play in the Vatican City State's finances. For example, in 2011 museum revenues amounted to €91.3 million, helping the Vatican City State post a budget surplus of €21.8 million.
The Bank of Italy said in a statement this week it had no choice but to order the block because the Vatican has no banking regulatory framework or EU-recognized alternative for anti-money-laundering purposes. The bank said it realized, during a routine search, that Deutsche Bank had never obtained authorization to install the so-called POS (point-of-sales) machines in the Vatican and that "any other European supervisory authority would have behaved in the same way, in compliance with community law."
Vatican't
Personal Courtroom Drama
Patricia Cornwell
For more than two decades, crime writer Patricia Cornwell has famously dramatized the life of a fictional medical examiner in her best-selling books. Now, she has her own personal drama unfolding in federal court.
Cornwell, a wildly successful author through her novels about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is suing her former financial management firm and business manager for negligence and breach of contract, claiming they cost her and her company millions in investment losses and unaccounted for revenues during their 4˝-year relationship.
The Boston trial has opened a window into the life of the intensely private Cornwell, who has had to listen from the front row of the courtroom while a lawyer for the management firm described her spending habits for the jury: $40,000 a month for an apartment in New York City, $5 million for a private jet service, $11 million to buy properties in Concord, Mass.
Cornwell fired the firm after discovering in July 2009 that the net worth of her and her company, despite having eight-figure earnings per year during the previous four years, was a little under $13 million, the equivalent of only one year's net income. She also claims in the lawsuit that Anchin had borrowed several million dollars, including mortgages for property and a loan for the purchase of a helicopter, and had lost millions by moving her from a conservative investment strategy to high-risk without her permission.
Patricia Cornwell
Offers Reward
Tyler Perry
Filmmaker Tyler Perry is offering a $100,000 reward for information in the decade-old case of two men who went missing after separate encounters with a sheriff's deputy in southwestern Florida.
Perry joined the Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP president and CEO Ben Jealous at a news conference Thursday in Naples to discuss the missing-person investigations of Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos.
Santos and Williams disappeared three months apart in the Naples area in 2003 after crossing paths with Collier County Sheriff's Deputy Steven Calkins. He was never charged but was fired the next year.
Perry said the media was not paying enough attention to missing-person cases involving minorities. Williams was black and Santos was an illegal immigrant from Mexico.
Investigations by local, state and federal authorities went nowhere. Calkins, who is white, denied doing anything more than dropping off the young men at different convenience stores. He was never charged but was fired after he stopped cooperating with investigators.
Tyler Perry
Upstairs Plumbing
Pompeii
The residents of the ancient city of Pompeii weren't limited to street-level plumbing, a new study finds. In fact, many in the city may have headed upstairs when nature called.
Most second floors in the Roman city are gone, claimed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79. But vertical pipes leading to lost second stories strongly suggest that there were once toilets up there, according to a new analysis by A. Kate Trusler, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Missouri.
"We have 23 toilets that are connected, that are second-story preserved, that are connected to these downpipes," Trusler told LiveScience on Friday (Jan. 4) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle, where she presented her research.
Trusler became interested in Pompeii's latrines six years ago while doing fieldwork in the city. Previous researchers and works on Pompeii often stated that there was a toilet in almost every house. But Trusler found that statement confusing. Walking around the city, she said, it was clear that some spots were chock full of homes with private latrines, while other areas seemed to be toilet deserts.
So Trusler decided to conduct a plumbing survey of sorts, mapping latrine and downpipe locations around the city. One residential district, known to archaeologists as Region 6, does indeed have toilets on the ground story of almost every home, she said. But other blocks have few toilets. In total, 43 percent of homes in the city had latrines on the ground floor, Trusler found.
Pompeii
Weekend Box Office
'Zero Dark Thirty'
"Zero Dark Thirty" hunted down the top spot at the box office - and easily won it.
Sony Pictures' Osama bin Laden raid drama nabbed first place with $24 million in its first weekend in wide release, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Open Road Films' horror parody "A Haunted House" starring Marlon Wayans debuted in second place with a solid $18.8 million. The Warner Bros. mobster drama "Gangster Squad," starring Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling as off-the-books police officers battling a mob boss played by Sean Penn, opened below expectations in third place with $16.7 million.
Overall business this weekend came in at $142 million, up more than 7 percent from the same period last year, when the Mark Wahlberg thriller "Contraband" led the box office with $24.3 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. It marks the third strong weekend for Hollywood after seven consecutive weekends when business was down over last year.
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. "Zero Dark Thirty," $24 million.
2. "A Haunted House," $18.8 million.
3. "Gangster Squad," $16.7 million.
4. "Django Unchained," $11 million.
5. "Les Miserables," $10.1 million.
6. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," $9 million.
7. "Lincoln," $6.3 million.
8. "Parental Guidance," $6.1 million.
9. "Texas Chainsaw 3-D," $5.1 million.
10. "Silver Linings Playbook," $5 million.
'Zero Dark Thirty'
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