Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Rediscovering Poverty: How We Cured "The Culture of Poverty," Not Poverty Itself"
By the Reagan era, the "culture of poverty" had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to "defer gratification," or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.
Michael J. Sandel: What Isn't for Sale? (Atlantic)
Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.
Emily Bazelon: "You're a Good Friend to the Ladies, Dad" (Slate)
Garry Trudeau talks to Slate about the reaction to his Doonesbury strip on state-mandated ultrasounds.
Interview by David Weir: Inside the Mind of Best-Selling Erotica Author Selena Kitt (Smashwords)
One of the authors whose work was deeply threatened by PayPal's recent attempt to suppress certain types of erotica was Selena Kitt. We interviewed Selena about her extraordinary success as an indie author and also about her views on the attempts to curb erotica. Most of the interview took place prior to PayPal's decision to overturn their policies. After PayPal reversed their policies, David Weir updated the interview.
Marc Dion: The Tide is Going Out (Creators Syndicate)
The rich guys shoplifted the whole country to stick more of that green money dope into their arms. And you and I, we're buying the store brand and lucky to have it since the layoffs, since the pay cut, since the unpaid furlough, since some caviar-breathed bond trader tied off his arm and shot our pension fund money into his collapsing veins. I hate the stinkin', cheap-ass, dirty, dollar-store country we're becoming. I hate every self-serve inch of it.
Elizabeth Lunday: Grant Wood's American Gothic (Neatorama)
No American artwork has been parodied more than American Gothic. Zombies, dogs, Beavis and Butthead, the Muppets, Lego figures, and even Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton have taken a turn with the pitchfork. But the painting itself is no joke -American Gothic is as recognizable as the Mona Lisa and The Scream.
Roger Ebert: Hey, kids! Anybody here not heard the F-word?
If a director wants to make a film against bullying, it is not for a committee of MPAA bean-counters to tell him what words he can use. Not many years ago, the word rape was not used in newspapers, on television--or in the movies, for that matter. But there is a crime, and the name of the crime is rape, and if you remove the word you help make the crime invisible.
Robbie Collin: "The Hunger Games: review" (Telegraph)
'The Hunger Games' is an essential science fiction film for our times; perhaps the essential science fiction film of our times. Whatever your age, it demands to be devoured.
Farhad Manjoo: Expensive, Useless, Exploitative (Slate)
Why we should celebrate the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition.
Michael Hann: The adult pop smash is a thing of the past (Guardian)
We never get hit songs written and performed by people with a few years under their belts these days. Why not?
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, cold and windy.
Tops Poll
Betty White
Betty White, the 90-year-old queen of comedy, remained the star with the most audience appeal in 2011 while cross-dressing Tyler Perry of the "Madea" films suffered a setback in a new celebrity poll on Thursday.
The survey from Encino, California-based E-Poll Market Research showed "Hot in Cleveland" star White was the most liked Hollywood celebrity in its survey covering calendar year 2011, a spot she also held in 2010. She was followed by Sandra Bullock and Michael J. Fox.
But the percentage of respondents who said they like Perry a lot dropped by 14 points, which the research firm pinned on a "South Park" spoof of the star and controversy surrounding him.
"Parks and Recreation" TV star Aziz Ansari, a stand-up comedian who appeared last year in the film "30 Minutes Or Less," ranked as the biggest gainer on the E-Poll survey.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they liked Ansari a lot, which was up by 16 points from the year before.
Betty White
Video Games Enter Realm Of Art
Smithsonian
They've come a long way since the man who would be Mario set off to rescue Pauline from Donkey Kong and Pac-Man gobbled up as many dots as he could before the ghosts caught up with him.
But really, are video games art?
Absolutely, contends a major exhibition that opened Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington that celebrates gaming's rich creative side and the people behind a medium that's still in full bloom.
"The Art of Video Games" spans the 40 years since video games moved from amusement arcades into homes around the world, evolving in leaps and bounds with ever-more-sophisticated graphics, interactivity and story-telling.
Smithsonian
Portraits Reunited At Museum
Philly
It might be the first time a separated couple got back together thanks to their great-great-great granddaughter.
The attractive young couple is Benjamin and Maria Gratz, or more accurately their portraits, which were painted in 1831 by noted English-born Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully but somehow parted ways an unknown number of years ago.
Benjamin has been hanging for decades at the Rosenbach Museum & Library along with other members of the Gratz family, who were prominent in early Philadelphia's business and philanthropic worlds.
The museum, stumped regarding Maria's whereabouts, expanded their investigation from auction and estate records to the Internet.
Philly
Celebrates 86th Birthday
Jerry Lewis
Jerry Lewis did not turn 86 quietly.
The comedian and filmmaker flew in to New York from Las Vegas for an hours-long celebration Friday night.
It started with an onstage interview at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y, then continued in midtown at the Friars Club, where hundreds gathered to sing happy birthday to Lewis, who added his trademark goofy voice. Wearing a dark blazer and bright red shirt, Lewis sat at a corner table in the club's Frank Sinatra room, with Richard Belzer and Robert Klein among those at his table. His meal included a slice of birthday cake, a three-tiered production decorated with movie stills, a microphone and miniatures of the performer.
Jerry Lewis
The War On Women
Backlog
For over two decades, Carol Bart's untested rape kit collected dust in a police evidence room. Her attacker, who kidnapped her from outside her Dallas apartment and repeatedly raped her at knifepoint, had spent time in prison by coincidence, but not for sexually assaulting Bart.
Bart, now a 52-year-old mother of four, fears that among the thousands of backlogged, untested kits pulled from a Detroit police evidence room are stories of women similarly violated only to be forgotten by a justice system that seemingly has placed its priorities and resources elsewhere.
"Women go to the hospital and their bodies are a crime scene and treated as such," said Bart, who still lives in Texas. "For these kits then to just to sit in a laboratory or in police vaults or wherever they sit, denies victims of sexual assault any opportunity for justice. I just wonder how many more there are?"
According to some estimates, between 180,000 and 400,000 rape kits remain untested nationwide, despite DNA technology that can swiftly link rapists to crimes.
Bart was attacked in 1984, and DNA swabbed during a hospital exam was stored in a rape kit. When the kit finally was tested 24 years later, DNA was added to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System and produced a hit on Joseph Houston Jr.
Backlog
Aims At Clear Channel
Cumulus
Earlier this week, Cumulus Media sent out an email blast to fellow radio station owners with a photoshopped picture of former U.S. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (R-Religiously Insane), promoting him as the conservative talk radio host of the future.
Though the email did not name Rush Limbaugh (R-Pariah), the long-running, top-rated talk radio host whose program is nationally syndicated by Cumulus' rival, Clear Channel Communications, the intent was obvious to some recipients.
"They are going after Rush's affiliates," said one radio company executive who received Cumulus' email and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are positioning Huckabee as the safe, non-dangerous alternative to Rush and saying to station owners, 'If you are looking for conservative content, we want you to consider our guy instead of theirs.'"
That the April 9 launch of "The Mike Huckabee Show" comes amid an exodus of advertisers from Limbaugh's program and an Internet-driven boycott is simply serendipity for Cumulus.
Cumulus
Tug-Of-War Over
Grand Canyon Skywalk
As the muddy Colorado River flows in the plunging depths below, tourists gingerly step onto a glass walkway jutting out over the rim of the Grand Canyon for an experience that gives the illusion of walking on air.
Some pose with arms outstretched for pictures while others ease over a horseshoe-shaped skywalk that is the subject of a bitter tug-of-war between an Arizona Indian tribe on whose ancestral land it was constructed and a developer who spent at least $30 million to build it.
The tiny Hualapai nation, in a bold move that could serve as a test of the limits of the sovereign power of Native American tribes over non-members, exercised its right of eminent domain last month to take over the management of the site and kick out the non-Indian developer.
The dispute over the potentially lucrative Skywalk -- which all agree could draw up to 3,000 visitors a day -- pits the tribe's sovereign rights over a site it sees as its economic lifeblood against a developer's contractual right to manage the attraction for 25 years and share the profits.
The dispute at the heart of the crisis appears to center on specifications including who was supposed to provide infrastructure -- power, water and sewer -- for the project, with both sides accusing the other of acting in bad faith.
Grand Canyon Skywalk
Where They Come From
Bidis
Sagira Ansari sits on a dusty sack outside her uneven brick home in this poor town in eastern India, her legs folded beneath her. She cracks her knuckles, then rubs charcoal ash between her palms.
With the unthinking swiftness of a movement performed countless times before, she slashes a naked razor blade into a square-cut leaf to trim off the veins. She drops in flakes of tobacco, packs them with her thumbs, rolls the leaf tightly between her fingers and ties it off with two twists of a red thread.
For eight hours a day, Sagira makes bidis - thin brown cigarettes that are as central to Indian life as chai and flat bread. She is 11 years old.
Sagira, who has deep brown eyes and a wide smile, joined her family's bidi work when she was 7. At first she just rolled out thread for her older sisters and brother, then she helped finish off the cigarettes, pushing down the open ends. Last year, she graduated to full-scale rolling.
Parents and children roll cigarettes on rooftops, in the alleyways, by the roads. One woman draped in a red shawl in the yard behind Sagira's house breast feeds her baby while rolling. Of the roughly 20,000 families in Dhuliyan, an estimated 95 percent roll bidis to survive.
Bidis
Ex-Pastor Launches New Church
Crystal Cathedral
A Crystal Cathedral splinter church launched Sunday in a rented movie theater in Orange County, with the breakaway pastor urging the congregation not to speak ill of its former house of worship.
Sheila $chuller Coleman, who abruptly announced she was forming the Hope Center of Christ at a worship service last Sunday, told the roughly 100 congregants "not to have harsh words for any other church...there are some people who would try to pit one church against one another, but we are not going to do that. Here at Hope Center, we cheer every other church," the Orange County Register reported.
Coleman was senior pastor at Crystal Cathedral, which her father, Robert $chuller, founded more than 50 years ago. Her departure surprised many, but came amid a financial crisis and personality clashes that have dogged the megachurch over the past year.
Coleman said she's applied for the new church's tax identification number. For the next month, she will hold services at an Anaheim hotel while a permanent location is found.
Crystal Cathedral
Ran South For A Century
Underground Railroad
While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century in the opposite direction.
Stories of that lesser-known "railroad" will be shared June 20-24 at the National Underground Railroad Conference in St. Augustine, Fla. The network of sympathizers gave refuge to those fleeing their masters, including many American Indians who helped slaves escape to what was then the Spanish territory of Florida. That lasted from shortly after the founding of Carolina Colony in 1670 to after the American Revolution.
They escaped not only to the South but to Mexico, the Caribbean and the American West.
And the "railroad" helps to explain at least in part why the lasting culture of slave descendants - known as Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Florida and Georgia - exists along the northeastern Florida coast.
Because there are few records, it's unknown how many African slaves may have escaped along the railroad. But the dream of freedom in Florida did play a role in the 1739 Stono Rebellion outside Charleston, the largest slave revolt in British North America.
Underground Railroad
Weekend Box Office
'21 Jump Street'
Audiences headed back to school for the TV update "21 Jump Street," which opened as the No. 1 weekend movie with $35 million.
Sony's action comedy starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as cops going undercover as high school students took down the animated hit "Dr. Seuss' the Lorax," which had been the top flick the previous two weekends.
At No. 3, Disney's costly sci-fi dud "John Carter" dropped sharply in its second weekend. The Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation took in $13.5 million, down 55 percent from its anemic opening weekend and lifting its domestic total to a measly $53.2 million. "John Carter" reportedly cost $250 million to make.
In narrow release, Will Ferrell's Spanish-language B-movie spoof "Casa de mi Padre" opened solidly at No. 9 with $2.2 million. The Lionsgate release played in just 382 theaters, compared to 3,121 for "21 Jump Street."
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. "21 Jump Street," $35 million ($7 million international).
2. "Dr. Seuss' the Lorax," $22.8 million ($11.6 million international).
3. "John Carter," $13.5 million ($40.7 million international).
4. "Project X," $4 million ($5.6 million international).
5. "A Thousand Words," $3.8 million.
6. "Act of Valor," $3.7 million.
7. "Safe House," $2.8 million ($3.5 million international).
8. "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island," $2.5 million ($5 million international).
9. "Casa de mi Padre," $2.2 million.
10. "This Means War," $2.1 million ($9.2 million international).
'21 Jump Street'
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