Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Hurry up and Forget (Creators Syndicate)
Crack is whiskey times a million, beer times 3 million. Sometimes, you have to drink for 20 years before you become a worthless street bum in urine-soaked pants. You can do it in three months with crystal meth. If someone breaks into my car tonight, it'll be a junkie. If someone breaks into my house tomorrow, it'll be a crackhead. If someone shoots me dead when I leave the newspaper office after next Tuesday's night shift, the guy behind the gun will probably be a drug addict.
Driver Attempts Hit and Run, Gets Blocked in By Other Drivers (Video)
On Monday, a teen driver rear-ended a bicyclist in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He then attempted to flee. A quick-thinking bus driver immediately stopped his bus across both lanes of the road. Another driver cut off any escape to the rear, boxing in the assailant's car.
Lenore Skenazy: Testing Testing (Creators Syndicate)
Rationing or rationality? A panel of doctors from nine different specialty boards has just recommended that doctors stop giving their patients so many tests - and it advises us patients to stop demanding them, too.
Eddie Deezen: The Cover Art of 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
It is the most famous rock album cover of all time: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. One of the many things that still fascinate us about this incredible album is the cover. The concept for the cover was called "people we like."
Henry Rollins: We Are the Aliens, Everyone Else Is Earthling (LA Weekly)
If you spend a lot of time on the road in the touring racket, the whole thing can take on a great degree of strangeness after several weeks. The tour bus -- the "Steel Horse" that Bon Jovi refers to, or, perhaps more apt, the "Kinky Machine" that Hendrix talks about in "Third Stone From the Sun" -- is our transport from city to city. When we step off, we are always the same, but the surroundings are different. We are the Aliens, everyone else is Earthling.
Meghan O'Rourke: The Will To Change (Slate)
Adrienne Rich's death leaves a hole in the culture that can't easily be filled.
Sady Doyle: "Katniss: Heroine of the Great Recession" (In These Times)
"The Hunger Games" is about overcoming poverty in a starkly unequal world. Sound familiar?
Roger Ebert: The best damned film list of them all
Every 10 years, the ancient and venerable British film magazine, 'Sight & Sound,' polls the world's directors, movie critics, and assorted producers, cinematheque operators and festival directors, etc., to determine the Greatest Films of All Time.
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."
wrote:
, who just celebrated the anniversary of his first spanking, replied:
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
BadtotheboneBob
3 Great Lakes
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and way too warm.
American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom
Challenged Books
The more popular "The Hunger Games" trilogy becomes, the more reasons some parents and educators have found to question whether it belongs on library shelves.
For the second year in a row, Suzanne Collins' work was among the most "challenged" books, as reported Sunday by the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. The association defines a challenge as "a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness."
The most challenged works were Lauren Myracle's tween novels "ttyl," ''ttfn," ''l8r" and "g8r," cited for being sexually explicit and "unsuited to age group." Kim Dong Hwa's "The Color of Earth" series was second, challenged for "nudity," ''sex education," being sexually explicit and unsuited to age group.
The library association reported 326 challenges, a slight drop from 348 the year before, although the ALA believes that for every complaint filed several others are unrecorded. The association did not have a number for how many books were actually pulled.
The list included such classics as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" ("insensitivity, nudity, racism, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit") and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" ("offensive language, racism"). Also cited were Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" ("offensive language, racism, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group"), Cecily von Ziegesar's "Gossip Girl" series ("drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit") and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's "Alice" series (nudity, offensive language, religious viewpoint").
Challenged Books
Political Spending
TV Ads
U.S. regulators on Friday proposed a rule that would move television broadcasters' public files to the Internet, making it easier to access information about political spending on TV advertising.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it would host the files on its website, allowing people to easily track information about their local TV stations.
Spending on TV ads is forecast to reach historic levels in 2012 ahead of the U.S. presidential election, as candidates blanket airwaves with commercials promoting their virtues or bashing their opponents.
The flood of political money in part reflects a response to a landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling that ended most restrictions on political donations from corporations and unions.
But finding data on who spent what, and where, is a tricky endeavor. TV stations have been making these records public since 1938, as well as information on other community-related issues like children's programming.
TV Ads
Won't Sing At Fund-Raiser
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand is still backing President Obama's re-election campaign, but she won't be singing for the president on his next fund-raising stop in Southern California.
Published reports had suggested that the singer -- who has lent her lungs to Democrats dating back to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson -- would entertain at a May 10 event to be hosted by DreamWorks Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg. Party officials have set a $2 million goal for the event.
Streisand sang at a fund-raiser for Obama at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 2008, when the president went on to take in $2.8 million from the entertainment industry. The support from Hollywood has dropped off, to $1.5 million in 2011, but party officials hope the election season kick-starts the fund-raising efforts.
Barbra Streisand
Chased Out Jackie Robinson
Sanford, Florida
The year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball, he fled the racist threats of townspeople in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was shot 66 years later.
It was 1946 and Robinson arrived in this picturesque town in central Florida for spring training with a Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. He didn't stay long.
Robinson was forced to leave Sanford twice, according to Chris Lamb, a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who wrote a graphic account of Robinson's brush with 100 angry locals in a 2004 book.
The house where Robinson slept during his brief and furtive stay in Sanford still stands, but there is no historical plaque to record his troubled visit before going on to become a baseball hero and an icon of the U.S. civil rights movement.
"A specter of Jackie Robinson" haunts the city of 53,000 people to this day, said Lamb. "People want to forget it and it shouldn't be forgotten."
Sanford, Florida
Canary In A Coal Mine
Pascal Abidor
A Montreal university student was detained at the U.S. border, held for several hours, interrogated, had his personal belongings searched and saw his computer confiscated for over a week.
What caught the authorities' attention? His doctoral research on Islamic studies, he says.
In a case that has attracted media attention in the U.S., Pascal Abidor has become embroiled in a drawn-out legal battle with the American government - and a poster child for civil-rights advocates defending the right to privacy and due process.
Abidor, a 28-year-old American and French dual citizen, was returning by train to Brooklyn in May 2010 when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent stopped him at the border in Champlain, N.Y.
Abidor said the agents handcuffed him, took him off the train and kept him in a holding cell for several hours. He was grilled over his interest in Islam and past trips to the Middle East, before he was let go at the border. He was able to catch a ride on a bus passing through the border and continue to Brooklyn.
Abidor, who isn't Muslim, said the experience was eye-opening. It was the first such incident in the many times he had passed through the Canadian-American border.
Pascal Abidor
Israel Bars
Günter Grass
Israel declared Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass "persona non grata" on Sunday over a poem in which the former SS soldier described the Jewish state as a threat to world peace.
Grass would be barred from visiting for his "attempt to inflame hatred against the State of Israel and people of Israel, and thus to advance the idea to which he was publicly affiliated in his past donning of the SS uniform," Interior Minister Eli Yishai said in a statement.
The poem, titled "What Must Be Said," was condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has described the Islamic republic's disputed nuclear program as a threat akin to the Holocaust.
Grass's words were also denounced by mainstream political parties in Germany, where any strong condemnation of Israel is taboo because of the of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust.
The author said in a weekend interview that, in retrospect, he would have phrased his poem differently to "make it clearer that I am primarily talking about the (Netanyahu) government."
Günter Grass
'War Crimes'
Secret Memo
A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" interrogation techniques like waterboarding were "a felony war crime."
What's more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were "prohibited" under U.S. law - "even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them."
Zelikow argued that the Geneva conventions applied to al-Qaida - a position neither the Justice Department nor the White House shared at the time. That made waterboarding and the like a violation of the War Crimes statute and a "felony," Zelikow tells Danger Room. Asked explicitly if he believed the use of those interrogation techniques were a war crime, Zelikow replied, "Yes."
Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor's legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that "I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed."
At least one copy survived in the files of the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The State Department has now disclosed it to Danger Room, mostly without redactions - three years after this reporter filed an official request for it.
Secret Memo
Arrested In Miami
Matthew Newton
Authorities say Australian actor Matthew Newton has been released from a Miami jail following a weekend arrest.
A Miami-Dade County jail official says the 35-year-old Newton was arrested Friday evening on charges of resisting police and trespassing on property after a warning. He was released Saturday evening on $2,000 bond.
In 2010, Australian "Transformers" actress Rachael Taylor took out a restraining order against then-boyfriend Newton, accusing him of violently assaulting her while the couple were in Rome. He was dropped as host of a new Australian talent series.
In 2007, he pleaded guilty to assaulting then-girlfriend Brooke Satchwell during a breakup argument. Earlier that year, Newton spent 28 days in a Melbourne rehab clinic that specializes in drug and alcohol issues.
Matthew Newton
In Crosshairs Of Fight Over Lead Bullets
Bald Eagle
Environmental groups say 20 million birds die worldwide each year from eating bits of lead in animal carcasses, because many US hunters use lead ammunition which leaves 3,000 tons of toxic fragments in gut piles and unclaimed kills.
A ban on hunters' use of lead shot for killing waterfowl was passed in the United States in the early 1990s because birds were being poisoned by ingesting the pieces that fell into waterways and ponds.
But the question of whether to do the same for hunters on land has thrust the eagle, the national symbol of America, into a fresh political battle over gun rights and environmental protection.
On one side is the powerful US gun lobby, which disputes science on lead poisoning and insists that any measures to regulate lead ammunition would spell a ban on hunting in all its forms, infringe on gun rights and raise costs.
On the other is a dogged but weary wildlife protection movement that is pressing the Environmental Protection Agency to take steps to regulate the use of lead ammunition in order to protect birds and humans against lead poisoning.
Bald Eagle
Fans & Critics
Thomas Kinkade
To fans and the countless collectors who helped build painter Thomas Kinkade's commercial art empire, his idealized vision of the world usually served as a simple, soothing addition to the living room wall: a soft depiction of a churning seascape or a colorful garden or a cottage brimming with warm light.
Kinkade's vision, and the artworks he prolifically created from it, paid off handsomely for the self-described "painter of light," whose business grew into franchised galleries, reproduced artwork and spin-off products said to fetch at their peak some $100 million annually and adorn roughly 10 million homes.
Kinkade, who died Friday in Los Gatos, Calif., at age 54, embraced his popularity even as he drew less than appreciative attention from those within the art establishment who derided him, at least in part, for appealing so brazenly to the widest possible audience.
Kinkade's art empire included reproductions of his numerous paintings in hand-signed lithographs, canvas prints, books and posters, calendars, magazine covers, cards, collector plates and figurines. As his art drew wider and wider attention, Kinkade didn't shy away.
As word of Kinkade's untimely death spread Saturday, fans flocked to some galleries to buy his work.
Thomas Kinkade
Weekend Box Office
'The Hunger Games'
Film fans are still forking over for "The Hunger Games," which took in $33.5 million to lead the box office for a third-straight weekend.
According to studio estimates Sunday, Lionsgate's "The Hunger Games" raised its domestic total to $302.8 million. It easily out-earned two returning favorites, Universal's "American Pie" sequel "American Reunion" and a 3-D version of the blockbuster "Titanic," released domestically by Paramount and overseas by 20th Century Fox.
Both newcomers opened solidly, though. "American Reunion" pulled in $21.5 million, the lowest haul since the 1999 original but still a decent return for a comedy franchise whose last big-screen chapter came nine years ago.
"Titanic" in 3-D reeled in $17.4 million over the weekend, raising its domestic take to $25.7 million since opening Wednesday. That lifts the lifetime domestic gross of James Cameron's mega-hit to $626.5 million.
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. "The Hunger Games," $33.5 million ($25.5 million international).
2. "American Reunion," $21.5 million ($19.3 million international).
3. "Titanic" in 3-D, $17.4 million ($35.5 million international).
4. "Wrath of the Titans," $15 million ($43 million international).
5. "Mirror Mirror," $11 million ($11.5 million international).
6. "21 Jump Street," $10.2 million ($2.9 million international).
7. "Dr. Seuss' the Lorax," $5 million ($11.8 million international).
8. "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen," $975,000.
9. "John Carter," $820,000 ($2.6 million international).
10. "Safe House," $581,000.
'The Hunger Games'
In Memory
Mike Wallace
"Mike Wallace is here to see you."
The "60 Minutes" newsman had such a fearsome reputation that it was often said that those were the most dreaded words in the English language, capable of reducing an interview subject to a shaking, sweating mess.
Wallace, who won his 21st and final Emmy Award at 89, died Saturday in the New Canaan, Conn., care facility where he had lived the last few years of his life. He was 93.
Wallace didn't just interview people. He interrogated them. He cross-examined them. Sometimes he eviscerated them pitilessly. His weapons were many: thorough research, a cocked eyebrow, a skeptical "Come on" and a question so direct it took your breath away.
He was well aware that his reputation arrived at an interview before he did, said Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and Wallace's long-time producer at "60 Minutes."
"He loved it," Fager said Sunday. "He loved that part of Mike Wallace. He loved being Mike Wallace. He loved the fact that if he showed up for an interview, it made people nervous. ... He knew, and he knew that everybody else knew, that he was going to get to the truth. And that's what motivated him."
Wallace made "60 Minutes" compulsively watchable, television's first newsmagazine that became appointment viewing on Sunday nights. His last interview, in January 2008, was with Roger Clemens on his alleged steroid use. Slowed by a triple bypass later that month and the ravages of time on a once-sharp mind, he retired from public life.
He was equally tough on public and private behavior. In 1973, with the Watergate scandal growing, he sat with top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and read a long list of alleged crimes, from money laundering to obstructing justice. "All of this," Wallace noted, "by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon."
The surly Ehrlichman could only respond: "Is there a question in there somewhere?"
"60 Minutes" pioneered the use of "ambush interviews," with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment - or at least a stricken expression - might be harvested from someone dodging reporters' phone calls. Wallace once went after a medical laboratory offering Medicaid kickbacks to doctors in this fashion.
They were phased out after founding executive producer Don Hewitt termed them "showbiz baloney." ''Finally I said, 'Hey, kid, maybe it's time to retire that trenchcoat,'" Hewitt recalled.
His prosecutorial style was admired, imitated, condemned and lampooned. In a 1984 skit on "Saturday Night Live," Harry Shearer impersonated Wallace, and Martin Short played weaselly, chain-smoking attorney Nathan Thurm, who becomes comically evasive, shifty-eyed and nervous under questioning.
Wallace was hired when Hewitt put together the staff of "60 Minutes" at its inception in 1968. The show wasn't a hit at first, but worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there year after year. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism. It remains the most popular newsmagazine on TV.
In addition to his Emmys, Wallace won five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody awards.
In all, his television career spanned six decades, much of it at CBS. In 1949, he appeared as Myron Wallace in a show called "Majority Rules." In the early 1950s, he was an announcer and game show host for programs such as "What's in a Word?" He also found time to act in a 1954 Broadway play, "Reclining Figure," directed by Abe Burrows.
It was also around then that Wallace did a bit as a TV newsman in the 1957 Hollywood drama "A Face in the Crowd," which starred Andy Griffith as a small-town Southerner who becomes a political phenomenon through his folksy television appearances. Two years later, Wallace helped create "The Hate That Hate Produced," a highly charged program about the Nation of Islam that helped make a national celebrity out of Malcolm X and was later criticized as biased and inflammatory.
After holding a variety of other news and entertainment jobs, including serving as advertising pitchman for a cigarette brand, Wallace became a full-time newsman for CBS in 1963.
He said it was the death of his 19-year-old son Peter in an accident in 1962 that made him decide to stick to serious journalism from then on. (Another son, Chris, followed his father and became a broadcast "journalist". He anchors "Fox News Sunday" on Fox broadcast.)
Wallace had a short stint reporting from Vietnam and took a sock in the jaw while covering the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. But he didn't fit the stereotype of the Eastern liberal journalist. He was a close friend of the Reagans and was once offered the job of Richard Nixon's press secretary. He called his politics moderate.
Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Mass. He began his news career in Chicago in the 1940s, first as a radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as a reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.
He was married four times. In 1986, he wed Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague Ted Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by his son, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates.
Mike Wallace
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