Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Lucy Mangan is sick and tired of people calling Julian Assange a 'hero' (Stylist)
After 2,487 days holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange was finally dragged into the light of day by the Metropolitan Police and arrested. 'Hurrah!' you might think. 'He's going to face the charges of sexual assault in Sweden!' Sweden, from which he fled nine years ago. Sweden, where a British court ruled he should be extradited, only to have Assange dodge that extradition by seeking political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The two women who have variously alleged that he penetrated them while they were sleeping and without using condoms, must be looking forward to the possibility of the cases being reopened and heard. They had refused repeatedly to have unprotected sex.
Hadley Freeman: Kim Kardashian's budding law career takes celebrity hubris to a whole new level (The Guardian)
A-listers have a habit of thinking they are gifted at everything - and not always to other people's benefit.
Hadley Freeman: Trump is visiting Britain - at least we can enjoy Melania's contempt (The Guardian)
From the Queen to the First Lady, leave it to the women around the president to send messages about their true feelings towards the giant man-baby.
Suzanne Moore: Millennial climate protesters have called me out - and I love it (The Guardian)
My empathy for the super-woke youth waxes and wanes, but Extinction Rebellion and the new wave of campaigners have woken me up.
Marina Hyde: Pools, ponds and 40ft aquariums: planning disputes of the stars (The Guardian)
Ed Sheeran's home improvement ideas have run aground. So how does his tale fit in with the four great categories of celebrity planning permission stories?
Alison Flood: Nora Roberts files 'multi-plagiarism' lawsuit alleging writer copied more than 40 authors (The Guardian)
After weeks of anger, bestselling novelist is suing Brazilian author Cristiane Serruya for 'rare and scandalous' level of plagiarism.
Jonathan Jones: "Big tick energy: how a tiny flea created a revolution in British art" (The Guardian)
In 1664, scientist Robert Hooke drew a flea and created the first great work of British art. Without it, perhaps, there would be no Stubbs, Constable and Hirst.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• As Christmas 2009 drew near, Dawn Pflughaupt, age 37, was happy because she was cancer-free. A bone marrow transplant with her brother, Brock Pflughaupt, as donor had cured her leukemia. She had found out that she had leukemia after feeling ill. Dawn said, "I had bruises and was tired, but I thought that was from working in the automotive industry." She worked for Chrysler in Sedalia, MO. She went to the hospital and was at first diagnosed with a viral infection, but soon she received a telephone call. She said, "They told me I might bleed out if I didn't come to the hospital." That was when she learned that she had leukemia. One bad thing was that she had not spoken with most members of her family for over a decade, the result of some bad life choices that resulted in a prison term for her for selling marijuana. She said, "I was a good kid gone bad. I was on the wrong path, and I thought I was big, bad, tough, and strong."?However, Brock, her brother, kept talking to her. She said, "He was always checking up on me, and he always let me know when there was a graduation or wedding." Her father had died in 2005, but the other members of her family rallied around her. Dawn said, "That was hard: Knowing I was sick and I never talked to him before he died." She began chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Her sister, Tara Wolfe, stayed by her side. Dawn said, "We rekindled our relationship, and Tara dropped everything to be with me." Tara volunteered to be a bone-marrow donor for Dawn, but she was not a match. Things were going badly for Dawn, who said, "It was rough and hard. I had no immune system, and I was crying blood and delusional." Brock then volunteered to be a bone-marrow donor for her. Dawn said, "Brock and I are like twins, as much as we look alike." He was a 99.98 percent match, the transplant took place, and it cured Dawn's leukemia. Before the transplant took place, Brock endured a series of injections that turned his platelets into white blood cells. Dawn said, "He was so stiff and sore. He was walking around like the Michelin Man." She added, "He's my hero." Dawn and Brock's mother, Jacqui, said, "I'm not one bit surprised by my son's actions. It's in his DNA." She added, "His father would be so proud." Brock said simply, "That's just what family does." Dawn is now cancer-free: "There are no words to describe how I feel. All I can do to thank Brock is appreciate life and live it to the fullest." The family members are now close. Jacqui said, "Families have ins and outs. Sometimes God taps you on the shoulder, and sometimes He takes a baseball bat to the side of your head. We got the baseball bat." Brock registered for the National Bone Marrow Registry. He said about donating his bone marrow, "It hurt, but it won't deter me from donating again."
• In 2007, Stephen Wilson gave his sister, Andrea, a gift that will help allow her to see her children, Andrew, age 12, and Laura, age 15, grow to adulthood: He gave her one of his kidneys. Both Stephen and Andrea are from Westerhope, Newcastle, England. Andrea, age 42, said, "I'm just so grateful. I am forever in his debt. He's given me a future with my children. We have always been close, but we have a special bond now." Twelve years previously, Andrea's kidneys were damaged during her second pregnancy when she suffered from pre-eclampsia. In 2006, her health began to rapidly fail. Andrea said, "The doctors said my kidneys were failing, and I was put on the waiting list for a transplant. They said the average wait in Newcastle was two years, but they had to find a kidney that was a perfect match and that could take much longer." Every night for eight hours, she was attached to a dialysis machine. She said, "It was really scary. I was getting worried that I wouldn't get one [a transplant]." Family members and friends volunteered to be tested, and Stephen turned out to be a perfect match. Andrea said, "He jumped at the chance to help me. I kept asking him if he was sure and saying he didn't have to, but he was determined to do it." She added, "If it hadn't been for Stephen, I could have waited years and years for a kidney. And the longer you are on dialysis, the more ill you get." Stephen said, "Having one kidney doesn't make me feel any different, but I think me and Andrea are closer now because we went through this together. I have sacrificed part of myself, but after seeing how ill Andrea was and how worried her children were, it's worth it." Andrea said, "I want people to be aware that there is a real shortage of kidneys. You never think about it until it happens to you. But it can happen to any one of us. I feel so lucky that Stephen was there to help me."
• In June 2003, Jennifer, a 33-year-old trial lawyer, impressed her aunt, New York Times syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd, by showing her a scar. The scar was from a liver transplant. Jennifer had donated half of her liver in order to save the life of her uncle, who is Maureen's brother. Maureen called the scar the "most beautiful scar I've seen. A huge stapled gash on her stomach, shaped like the Mercedes logo. A red badge of courage." Living donors are rare, and Jennifer is one of them. If all went well after the transplant, her liver grew back to its normal size, as should the part of her liver that was transplanted into her uncle's body. Maureen was so impressed by Jennifer's courageous act that she filled out a form allowing her organs to be harvested for transplant after her death. After all, she wrote, "If Jennifer is brave enough to do it alive, how can I be scared of doing it dead?"
• "Itis infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms." - Christiaan Barnard
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Hillary reads the Mueller Report! (Bill's there too.) Amusing short video:
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
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Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner
Samantha Bee
TV Academy members got an early look at Saturday night's second ever Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 26, thanks to an Emmy event for "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee" held in West Hollywood.
With a podium where attendees could hold their own non-existent White House press briefing, TBS offered up a simulcast of the dinner as it was filmed in Washington, D.C., making its bid for the awards-worthiness of the event, yes, but also Bee and "Full Frontal" in general.
The Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner was first held in 2017, opposite the traditional White House Correspondents' Dinner and organized as a way to roast President Trump as prior presidents had been roasted in years prior. Bee and TBS redoubled their efforts in 2019, announcing another event in order to support the First Amendment.
"I vowed never to host a NWHCD ever again," Bee said in a February statement, "but the White House Correspondents' Association has left me no choice - it is now up to comedy journalists to take care of real journalists." Proceeds for the event, like in 2017, go to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
"Full Frontal" pulled a ton of guest talent for NWHCD, including Sigourney Weaver in a sketch to start the show, Saweetie performing the series theme song, Bradley Whitford announcing journalism awards like the beautiful silver fox he is, Brandon Victor Dixon teaching Bee about how to call a racist a racist, and Robert De Niro imploring people to support journalists.
Samantha Bee
Breaks Own Box Office Record
'To Kill A Mockingbird'
Aaron Sorkin's Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird is continuing to make waves on Broadway. Producer Scott Rudin announced today that the play based on Harper Lee's classic novel and directed by Bartlett Sher has broken its own one-week box office record for the fourth time. It has now reached a record-breaking gross of $1,756,227 (for the week ending April 28) and still holds the title of the highest weekly gross of a play in the history of the Shubert Organization. This makes To Kill a Mockingbird the highest grossing American play in Broadway history.
The news comes after it was recently announced that To Kill a Mockingbird has officially recouped its entire investment. The stage adaptation has played to capacity crowds since performances began on Nov. 1, 2018. Cumulative gross sales to date stand at more than $57 million.
Set in Alabama in 1934, Lee's story of racial injustice and childhood innocence centers on one of the most venerated characters in American literature, the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels). The cast of characters includes Atticus's daughter Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger), her brother Jem (Will Pullen), their housekeeper and caretaker, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), their visiting friend Dill (Gideon Glick), and a mysterious neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley (Danny Wolohan). The other indelible residents of Maycomb, Alabama are brought to life on stage by Frederick Weller (as Bob Ewell), Gbenga Akinnagbe (playing Tom Robinson), Stark Sands (as prosecutor Horace Gilmer), Dakin Matthews (playing Judge Taylor), and Erin Wilhelmi (as Mayella Ewell).
'To Kill A Mockingbird'
White Nationalists Storm
Bookstore Reading
A small group of white nationalists stormed a bookstore in Washington, D.C., to protest an event for a book on racial politics and how it's impacting lower- and middle-class white Americans.
The group stormed the Politics and Prose bookstore on Saturday afternoon, interrupting a scheduled talk by Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who released his book "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland" this spring.
Videos filmed by those in attendance showed the group standing in a line before the audience chanting, "This land is our land." At least one man was yelling white nationalist propaganda into a megaphone while people in the bookstore booed him.
The man identified the group as "identitarians," a far-right white nationalist group which is linked to Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an extremist group.
Metzl, who is also the director for Vanderbilt's Center for Medicine, Health and Society, was speaking at the bookstore for an Independent Bookstore Day event.
Bookstore Reading
Imperial Succession
Japan
Emperor Akihito's abdication on Tuesday, one of several ceremonies marking the transition to his heir Crown Prince Naruhito, will be a brief, relatively simple and rare event.
The last abdication by a Japanese monarch was in 1817.
Naruhito will become emperor on Wednesday, but his formal enthronement will take place at a more elaborate ceremony in October, to which foreign dignitaries will be invited.
April 30 - ABDICATION CEREMONY (5:00-5:10 p.m.)
May 1 - REGALIA INHERITANCE (10:30-10:40 a.m.)
Japan
If ...
Sally Yates
Former top Justice Department official Sally Yates said on Sunday that if Donald Trump (R-National Embarrassment) were not president, he would have been indicted on obstruction charges in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
Yates, a career federal prosecutor who rose to acting attorney general before Trump fired her in 2017 less than two weeks into his presidency, told NBC's "Meet the Press" the Republican president was shielded by department guidelines that a sitting president should not be indicted.
"I've personally prosecuted obstruction cases on far, far less evidence than this," Yates said. "And yes, I believe, if he were not the president of the United States, he would likely be indicted on obstruction."
Yates told NBC there was a larger question raised by the report, which she said painted a "devastating portrait" of a campaign that welcomed Russian intervention, lied about it and then tried to cover it up.
"Is this the kind of conduct that we should expect from the president of the United States?" she said. "I mean, when the Russians came knocking at their door, you would expect that a man who likes to make a show of hugging the flag would've done the patriotic thing and would've notified law enforcement."
Sally Yates
Lying Liar
False Claims
Donald Trump (R-New Low) has falsely claimed that newborn babies are being legally "executed" during a wild and often incoherent rally speech in Wisconsin.
The US president said mothers who had just given birth were being given the choice of keeping the child or allowing it to be killed.
The claim - demonstrably false - came as he spoke about late-term abortions.
"The baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby," Mr Trump said to a chorus of boos.
He also referred to former FBI officials he has purged from government as "scum", referred to the media as "sick people", and mimicked the accent of King Salman of Saudi Arabia.
False Claims
Politicians Hampered Fire Fight
California
The battle against a devastating November wildfire in Los Angeles County was hampered by politicians asking firefighters to check on certain homes.
The conclusion comes from an after-action review by the Los Angeles Fire Department, which joined Los Angeles and Ventura county departments in battling the November blaze, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
"A significant number of requests by political figures to check on specific addresses of homes to ensure their protection distracted from Department leadership to accomplish priority objectives," the review said.
It didn't provide specifics, the paper said.
Assistant Chief Tim Ernst told the Times that he didn't know which politicians were involved or exactly how those requests affected the firefighting efforts. He provided details from the report during a brushfire training for the department's chief officers last week.
California
Wildly Inaccurate
Viral Image
If you thought that viral image claiming to show a woman's flower-shaped milk ducts looked weird, you would be correct. That's because the image isn't an accurate portrayal of a woman's mammary glands.
In reality, women's milk ducts look nothing like that image. And the petal-like structures that look like a fancy, open umbrella aren't milk ducts (we'll explain what they really are in a moment).
More importantly, in real life, the "petals" wouldn't be arranged so in such a tidy circle.
The image itself went viral this week, when Twitter user @lemonadead posted it on April 21, writing "I just realized I never saw a photo of a female muscle system. This is NOT what I imagined milk ducts to look like."
However, the image isn't a photo as @lemonadead thought, but rather an illustration from an iPad app called Anatomy & Physiology. Moreover, the picture doesn't show the "female muscle system," as the tweet suggests.
Viral Image
Weekend Box Office
'Avengers: Endgame'
The universe belongs to Marvel. "Avengers: Endgame" shattered the record for biggest opening weekend with an estimated $350 million in ticket sales domestically and $1.2 billion globally, reaching a new pinnacle in the blockbuster era that the comic-book studio has come to dominate.
The "Avengers" finale far exceeded even its own gargantuan expectations, according to studio estimates Sunday. The movie had been forecast to open between $260 million and $300 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters, but moviegoers turned out in such droves that "Endgame" blew past the previous record of $257.7 million, set last year by "Avengers: Infinity War" when it narrowly surpassed "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" ($248 million or about $266 million in inflation adjusted dollars.)
"Endgame" was just as enormous overseas. Worldwide, it obliterated the previous record of $640.5 million, also set by "Infinity War." ("Infinity War" didn't open in China, the world's second largest movie market, until two weeks after its debut.) "Endgame" set a new weekend record in China, too, where it made $330.5 million.
Disney now holds all but one of the top 12 box-office openings of all time. (Universal's "Jurassic World" is the lone exception.) The studio is poised for a record-breaking year, with releases including "Aladdin," ''Toy Story 4," ''The Lion King," ''Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" and "Frozen 2" on the horizon.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included.
1. "Avengers: Endgame," $350 million ($859 million international).
2. "Captain Marvel," $8.1 million.
3. "The Curse of La Llorona," $7.5 million.
4. "Breakthrough," $6.3 million.
5. "Shazam!" $5.5 million.
6. "Little," $3.4 million.
7. "Dumbo," $3.2 million.
8. "Pet Sematary," $1.3 million.
9. "Us," $1.1 million.
10. "Penguins," $1.1 million.
'Avengers: Endgame'
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