Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Can I Take Naked Pictures of You? (Creators Syndicate)
Ladies, take it from a guy who has spent thousands of hours drinking, fighting, working and talking with guys. If you let a guy take naked pictures of you, he will show them to other guys.
Lucy Mangan: Roseanne Barr raised the sitcom bar. Shame no one's done the same since (Guardian)
I've been rewatching Roseanne, 25 years on. And though it still makes me whoop with laughter, it also shines a light on how far we haven't come in an entire quarter-century.
Mimi Ferry: "Experience: I found a message in a bottle from my dead daughter" (Guardian)
'It felt like discovering buried treasure. It was a beautiful message for a mother to get.'
Anonymous: "What I'm really thinking: the mother of an anorexic" (Guardian)
'We hover anxiously outside bathroom doors asking her to keep talking so we know the food she has eaten is not vomited up.'
Oliver Burkeman: "This column will change your life: stop rating your whole self" (Guardian)
Faced with life's most agonising dilemmas, about love, work, ethics and the rest, it's perversely liberating to be reminded that the answer to the question "What should I do?", seen from the perspective of the cosmos, or world history, is usually, "You know, it doesn't really matter all that much."
Terry Savage: Persistence (Creators Syndicate)
As we start this fall season, which many (including myself) intuitively take as the start of the year, a leftover from our school days, it's time to set new goals, or revive old ones. You'll never reach your goals if you don't set them - and start out, trying as hard as possible.
Charlyn Fargo: Healthy Carbs (Creators Syndicate)
New research finds that there are healthy carbs and then there are not so healthy carbs - aka refined carbs. Bottom line, it's the type of carbohydrate that is important in optimal health. The refined carbs - such as white bread, sugary beverages, snack foods and baked items - have been linked to health problems.
Hillery Alley: 4 People Whose Good Luck Defied the Laws of Reality (Cracked)
#4. Woman Buys Two Lottery Tickets by Mistake, They Both Win
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bit cooler.
Winners
Creative Arts Emmy Awards
On a night when "Behind the Candelabra" dominated, Bob Newhart won the first Emmy of his 50-year career; Carrie Preston, Melissa Leo, Dan Bugatinsky won guest acting awards
Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn were named Outstanding Reality Show Hosts at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sunday, while "Undercover Boss" was named Outstanding Reality Program.
Bob Newhart has won the first Emmy of his more than 50-year career, for his guest role on "The Big Bang Theory."
Creative Arts Emmy Awards
Bigger Spotlight
TV Composers
Composers for television shows don't usually get the same critical recognition as those composing soundtracks for films, but an increase in viewers "binge-watching" shows has led to a brighter spotlight on TV's musical backdrop.
Emmy-nominated Robert Duncan, who scored "The Last Resort," a TV show about a U.S. nuclear submarine crew, said that viewers who watch several episodes of a show in a row on platforms such as Netflix were changing the art form of television soundtracks.
"Times are changing," he said. "TV's becoming more cinematic and there's an expectation for the music to follow suit."
Canadian-born Duncan, whose career was jump-started by a prestigious Hollywood composing workshop in 2001, also worked a series composer for "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." Now he is represented by the same agency that works with top composers such as Oscar-winner John Williams, who scored "Star Wars."
TV Composers
'Back to the Future' Makeovers
DeLorean
It may not time travel, but the DeLorean sports car is finding its way into the future.
People are spending thousands of dollars to have DeLoreans outfitted to resemble the one that starred in the 1985 movie "Back to the Future" starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.
About 9,000 DeLorean DMC-12 cars were produced from 1981-82 before the original company went bust. About 6,500 are believed to still exist, easily recognizable with their boxy, stainless steel bodies and gullwing doors.
The current brand owner, DeLorean Motor Co. of Huntington Beach, handles everything from oil changes to full reconstructions. But as the 30th anniversary of "Back to the Future" approaches in 2015, there's been an increase in requests to recreate the movie's iconic car, according to the Orange County Register.
Each replica costs about $45,000. Passengers can punch in a "destination time" on the control panel and pull a lever to activate the pulsing lights of the time circuit. The parts are recreated using military surplus and other equipment, such as a jet engine oil cooler.
DeLorean
Wedding News
Teigen - Legend
John Legend is officially off the market.
The R&B crooner's representative says Legend married model Chrissy Teigen on Saturday at the Villa Pizzo in Lake Como, Italy.
Legend, 34, and Teigen, 27, were engaged in 2011.
Legend has won nine Grammy Awards. He released his fourth solo album, "Love In the Future," last week.
Teigen has modeled for Sports Illustrated and is the host of the Vh1 reality competition show, "Model Employee." She also has a food blog.
Teigen - Legend
NY Trial
Huguette Clark
She had wealth few could boast and used it to finance a life few would choose - an heiress to the fortune of the founder of Las Vegas spending 20 years voluntarily in New York hospital rooms.
Now Huguette Clark's reclusive existence is about to be scrutinized in a Manhattan courtroom, where jury selection is due to start Tuesday in a civil trial over her will. With an estimated $300 million at stake, the case broaches questions about aging, caregiving and the line between encouraging gratitude and extracting gifts.
Clark's distant relatives say hospital executives, a nurse, a lawyer, an accountant and others in her small circle induced a dependent, fragile woman to give them millions of dollars during her lifetime and in her will. The beneficiaries say she was a sharp-minded, strong-willed, munificent person whose decisions were as deliberate as they were unusual.
Signed when the childless Clark was 98, the disputed April 2005 will largely left her estate to arts charities, her nurse and a goddaughter. It provided nothing for her relatives, who were the main beneficiaries of a will she'd signed just six weeks earlier.
Clark's father, U.S. Sen. William A. Clark, made a Gilded Age fortune from Montana copper mines, a Utah-to-California railroad and sales of land around a whistle stop dubbed Las Vegas.
Huguette Clark
Pro-Bee
Canada
The Canadian federal government is trying to quell growing worries about pesticide dust killing millions of bees by introducing changes for crop farmers, but some beekeepers call it a "Band-Aid" solution.
Health Canada's agency responsible for pesticide regulation on Friday released a list of actions it plans to take next spring to try to mitigate troubling losses at apiaries from insecticides used at nearby farms.
"We have concluded that current agricultural practices related to the use of neonicotinoid treated corn and soybean seed are not sustainable," a press release from Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency states.
Since 2009, Quebec beekeepers have suffered pesticide-related issues with their colonies, but concern around the issue heightened after an unusual number of bee deaths near corn fields were reported across Ontario last spring.
Seventy per cent of the dead bees tested came up positive for neonicotinoids, a pesticide used to coat many seeds before planting.
Canada
Prices Up
Chocolate
Chocoholics may have to dig deeper to pay for their favorite treat this festive season as sweet makers face sky-high prices for cocoa butter, the special ingredient that gives chocolate its melt-in-the-mouth texture.
Increased demand from Asia's expanding middle class and a turnaround in sales in big consuming countries have seen butter prices nearly double to more than $7,000 a tonne from $4,000 a tonne six months ago.
With supplies tightening and demand showing no sign of slowing ahead of the Christmas and New Year period, some chocolate makers may have little choice but to pass on the increased costs to consumers.
In the secretive industry, which has only a handful of big players, chocolatiers tightly guard the recipes that distinguish their products, and are equally cautious on prices.
Barry Callebaut, the world's biggest industrial chocolate maker which sells to Unilever, Nestle, Mondelez and Hershey Co, indicated that price adjustments were sometimes inevitable.
Chocolate
Bubble Trouble Hits Hong Kong
Jade
Prized as a magical imperial stone, jade is a status symbol of the super rich in Asia, but rocketing prices in the top-end of the market have left traders in Hong Kong struggling to find buyers.
With the cost of high-quality raw jade and jade products surging repeatedly in the past eight years, prices tags are now becoming prohibitive and experts predict the bubble must soon burst as buyers are stepping back.
Driven up by the appetite of wealthy Chinese, the rising cost of jade is also being fuelled by fears of a shortage in supply from Myanmar, the key source.
Jade holds mythical properties in China, where it is believed to ward off evil spirits and bring better health.
With no international pricing system, values have been increasing since 2005 as the newly-rich in China have bought up jade products. Seen as a classier option than gold, it has become a status symbol.
Jade
Seismic Speed Trap
Midwest
A seismic speed trap that stretches from Missouri to Virginia suggests a hotspot scorched the Midwest during the Mesozoic Era, a new study finds.
Hotspots are scalding plumes of hot rock rising toward Earth's surface from the mantle, the layer that sits under Earth's crust. Though tectonic plates constantly shift, hotspots are homebodies, stuck in pretty much the same spot for their entire lives, scientists think.
When continents trundle across hotspots, the plumes burn their bottoms, like a cold plate passed over a flame. For the first time, scientists have spied one of these warm trails under North America's midriff, according to a study published today (Sept. 15) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The study authors think the hot zone lines up with rare rocks called kimberlites in Kansas and Kentucky. The deep-seated heating also accounts for thinning of the crust and intrusions of magma along the New Madrid rift during the Mesozoic, the researchers said. The New Madrid rift is a seismic zone in the central Mississippi Valley that split open in the Early Cambrian period and reactivated during the Mesozoic. During the winter of 1811 to 1812, three powerful earthquakes in the rift shook New Madrid, Mo., and rattled buildings as far away as New York and Washington, D.C.
Because kimberlites speckle the Midwest, for decades geologists have suggested North America glided over a hotspot as it marched westward for the past 100 million years. Though the Kansas and Kentucky kimberlites are diamond-free, in Canada and Africa, diamond-bearing kimberlites bubbled up above hotspots. The magma that creates kimberlites travels hundreds of kilometers in mere days, exploding violently once it reaches the surface. It's as if the Earth farts diamonds.
Midwest
Teleported Across Computer Chip
Bits of Information
Quantum mechanics allows for some very strange things, like the teleportation of information and computers that can break even the toughest codes.
Recently, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich made a step toward building a working quantum computer by teleporting bits of information across a computer chip. The results of the study were detailed Aug. 15 in the journal Nature.
Creating such a circuit is an important milestone, said Benjamin Schumacher, a professor of physics at Kenyon College in Ohio. "Everybody really knows if you are ever going to make a real quantum computer, it must be solid state," said Schumacher, who was not involved in the new research. "Solid state" refers to computers built with single-piece transistors - with no moving parts and with components that are self-contained. Almost every electronic device is built with solid-state electronics.
Previous teleportation experiments have used lasers to transport quantum information between photons. But that isn't as practical for building real computers. Solid-state circuits, on the other hand, are a well-known field and computer chip manufacturers have decades of experience in miniaturizing them, Schumacher said.
In new experiment, the scientists took advantage of a property of quantum physics called entanglement to teleport the quantum bits, called qubits. When two particles interact, they form a connection - they are entangled - so that an action performed on one affects the other, even when they're separated by great distances. In addition, no matter how far apart they are, if you know the state of one particle, you instantly know the state of the other.
Bits of Information
Weekend Box-Office
"Insidious: Chapter 2"
Moviegoers had an appetite for fright this weekend, sending "Insidious: Chapter 2" to the top of the box office.
The haunted-house horror sequel debuted in first place with $41 million, more than tripling the opening take of the 2010 original.
Another newcomer, Relativity Media's Robert De Niro-Michelle Pfeiffer crime caper "The Family," opened in second place with $14.5 million. That bumped last week's champ, "Riddick," to third.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be released on Monday.
1. "Insidious: Chapter 2," $41 million ($5 million international).
2. "The Family," $14.5 million.
3. "Riddick," $7 million ($9.6 million international).
4. "Lee Daniels' The Butler," $5.58 million ($2.5 million international).
5. "We're the Millers," $5.4 million ($9 million international).
6. "Instructions Not Included," $4.25 million.
7. "Planes," $3.06 million ($10.7 million international).
8. "One Direction: This Is Us," $2.4 million.
9. "Elysium," $2.05 million ($8.5 million international).
10. "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters," $1.82 million ($7.8 million international).
"Insidious: Chapter 2"
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