Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Froma Harrop: How We Really Feel About Economic Inequality (Creators Syndicate)
Americans don't care much about rising economic inequality, recent surveys suggest. But that's not quite right.
Jessica Luther: "Affluenza: the latest excuse for the wealthy to do whatever they want" (Guardian)
Ethan Couch, a teenager in Texas, killed four people but got off because he comes from a rich family and 'didn't know better.'
Henry Porter: "Deadly conformity is killing our creativity. Let's mess about more" (Guardian)
People's lives would be more fulfilling if they were given greater freedom in the workplace.
Ted Rall: Why Don't Kids Want to Study Engineering? Because Engineering Friggin' Sucks
According to a survey, nearly 90% of 16- and 17-year-olds have no interest in a STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) career.
Barbara Ellen: Wanna shop like common people? More fool you… (Guardian)
John Terry might well have felt at home in a Poundworld store but others should refrain from 'slumming it' in bargain basements when they really don't need to.
Henry Rollins: The Glorious Cold (LA Weekly)
I am still working away here in Toronto on the film He Never Died. We have completed another week and wrapped out around 0230 hours this morning.
Harry Mount: 'The pure pleasure of annoying people' - Peregrine Worsthorne at 90 (Spectator)
The great contrarian on 'fascist voices' around Thatcher, the fate of the public schools, and why he swore on TV.
Mark Shields: Is the Pope Catholic? (Creators Syndicate)
As a practicing - but manifestly imperfect - Catholic, I am pleased Time magazine has named Good Pope Francis its 2013 Person of the Year. Also cheering is the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, which asked people to rate their feelings - "very positive," "somewhat positive," "somewhat negative" or "very negative" - toward the Pope and Catholic Church.
Froma Harrop: About That Biden 'Gaffe' in Tokyo (Creators Syndicate)
We know that about 20,000 pseudo-, semi- and real journalists "cover" Washington. We know that mid-December is slow-time in the nation's capital as the public turns its attention to the holidays. But big news or no, the scriveners tending political websites must still, as they say, "feed the beast" and take it out for a walk three times a day.
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From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and warmer than seasonal.
New Mexico Exhibition
Francisco de Goya
A collection of drawings by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya is part of an international exhibition that's making only one stop in the U.S. That stop is in New Mexico.
"Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain" opened Saturday at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. It will run through March 9.
Museum officials say the exhibition is helping to rewrite the book on Spanish art since it was long assumed that Spanish artists didn't draw much and produced little in terms of prints.
Aside from Goya, the exhibition includes works from Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Zurbaran, Juan Ribalta and Jose de Ribera. A number of them have never been on display before.
Francisco de Goya
Town Defeats Recall Attempt
Rhode Island
Voters in a small Rhode Island town defeated an effort by gun rights activists Saturday to recall four sitting town councilors who had proposed changing the way gun permits are issued.
The rare recall election was prompted by gun rights supporters who said the four Exeter council members ignored their objections to a failed proposal to allow the attorney general to oversee the town's concealed weapons permits.
"This was never a gun rights issue," said Town Council President Arlene Hicks, one of the councilors targeted by the recall. "It started out as a procedural proposal that we made as a council."
Town election officials reported a higher than expected turnout, with 63 percent voting against the recall. Of the town's roughly 5,000 registered voters, more than 1,800 turned out to cast their votes on a snowy Saturday in December for a special election that had drawn national attention from advocates on both sides of the gun control debate.
Rhode Island
Vitamin Deficiency
Gollum
Think kindly of the dragon Smaug. Shed a tear for Gollum. And give an orc a hug.
If only they had tucked into the occasional quiche and salad or a touch of smoked salmon, or had a few sessions on a sunbed. How much kinder history would have been to them.
So suggests an offbeat study, released on Sunday, which concludes that the evil characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" lost their battle against men, elves and dwarves because they suffered from vitamin deficiency.
Shunning sunlight, surviving on a sketchy or unbalanced diet based on rotten meat or (in Gollum's case) the occasional blind fish, they lacked vitamin D, a key component for healthy bones and muscle strength.
The idea is proposed by Nicholas Hopkinson, a doctor at Imperial College London and his son Joseph, in the Christmas edition of the Medical Journal of Australia.
Gollum
Rescuers Struggle To Keep Up With Unwanted Birds
Parrots
Like many a first-time parrot keeper, Marc Johnson had little idea what was in store when he got a bird to keep him company while he worked in his pottery studio.
Back in 1989, the young artist scraped together $600 and bought a blue-and-yellow macaw. The bright plumage soon attracted the attention of passersby, who started bringing other birds for Johnson to take in.
A quarter of a century later, Johnson has given up pottery and runs Foster Parrots, one of the largest wild-bird rescue facilities in the United States. This summer he completed renovations, transforming a chicken farm into a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) sanctuary.
Filled with nearly 500 screaming, squawking cockatoos, macaws, parrots and a variety of smaller birds such as parakeets, cockatiels and love birds, Foster Parrots is thriving. It fields 900 to 1,000 calls a year from bird owners no longer able or willing to keep their pets. A longevity factor comes into play.
Parrots
Heidelberg Project
Detroit
On Detroit's Heidelberg Street, where a local artist turned the shell of a crime-ridden neighborhood into an interactive public art project, visitors coming to see offbeat display are noticing something that's not part of the quirky exhibition: Yellow fire tape.
There have been at least eight fires since early May- the latest last Sunday - leading to questions about who might be targeting the installation known as the Heidelberg Project, and why they want to burn it down.
Founder and artistic director Tyree Guyton and his compatriots vow to carry on, make more art and overcome the assault on his vision, yet worry threatens the whimsy as the fires snuff out building after building.
Now, piles of rubble alternate with the three remaining house installations within the two-block area on the city's east side that's become famous over the years for the exhibition featuring shoes, clocks, vinyl records, stuffed animals and other found or discarded objects.
Guyton, often out working or cleaning up the site, has declined requests to speak with The Associated Press and likewise offered no comment to other media outlets in recent weeks. He told The Detroit News recently that he was "following the advice of the Greek philosopher Socrates: Be quiet and listen."
Detroit
NY Home, In Foreclosure, Goes Up In Flames
Ace Frehley
A suburban New York house owned by former KISS lead guitarist Ace Frehley has gone up in flames.
The Journal News reports that firefighters were called to the stone house in the town of Yorktown Heights late Saturday morning.
The home was heavily damaged, with flames burning through the roof.
The newspaper says the musician had been fighting foreclosure on the property in Westchester County Court.
Ace Frehley
Expands Sonar Testing
Navy
The U.S. Navy plans to increase sonar testing over the next five years, even as research it funded reveals worrying signs that the loud underwater noise could disturb whales and dolphins.
Reported mass strandings of certain whale species have increased worldwide since the military started using sonar half a century ago. Scientists think the sounds scare animals into shallow waters where they can become disoriented and wash ashore, but technology capable of close monitoring has emerged only in about the last decade.
Two recent studies off the Southern California coast found certain endangered blue whales and beaked whales stopped feeding and fled from recordings of sounds similar to military sonar.
The studies involved only a small group of tagged whales and noise levels were less intense than what's used by the Navy. Shy species, such as the Cuvier's beaked whale that can dive 3,000 feet below the surface, have taken years to find and monitor.
Both studies were done by a team of independent scientists as part of a Navy-funded, five-year project launched in 2010 to understand how sonar affects marine mammals.
Navy
4.4-Million-Year-Old Horse
Fossil
Scientists poking around Ethiopia's fossil-rich badlands say they have discovered the first pieces of an extinct species of horse that was about the size of a small zebra and lived about 4.4 million years ago.
The specimens were found in what is now an arid desert. But at the time this grass-eating horse roamed the planet, the region would have been covered in grasslands and shrubby woods - rich grounds for grazing.
Fossilized traces of the horse, which was named Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, were uncovered in the archaeologically rich sites of Aramis and Gona in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley. The region is famed for bearing the world's longest and most continuous record of human evolution. The extinct horse in this study would have actually been alive at the same time the 4.4-million-year-old human ancestor Ardipithecus ramidus, or "Ardi," walked the region.
The animal belonged to a group of ancient horses called Hipparionines, which had three-toed hooves and arose in North America about 16 million years ago before spreading into Eurasia, presumably over a land bridge that once existed between Alaska and Siberia. The researchers say this discovery helps fill in a blank spot in the evolution of horses, before the animals became even better suited for a life in the grasslands, growing taller and developing longer snouts, for example.
Fossil
Weekend Box Office
"Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"
Per studio estimates Sunday, Warner Bros. "Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" was No. 1 at the weekend box office with $73.7 million, besting last weekend's No. 1 film, Disney's animated fable "Frozen."
Melting down to the No. 2 position, "Frozen" earned $22.2 in its third weekend, bringing its impressive overall domestic ticket total to nearly $164.4 million.
Despite its first place position, "Hobbit" fell short of topping its prequel's debut. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," which opened this same weekend last year, gained $84.6 million.
Lionsgate's holiday-themed "Tyler Perry's a Madea Christmas" came in third place with $16.2 million.
The top 10 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Monday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Rentrak, are:
1."Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug," $73.7 million.
2."Frozen," $22.2 million.
3."Tyler Perry's a Madea Christmas," $16 million.
4."Hunger Games: Catching Fire," $13.2 million.
5."Thor: The Dark World," $2.7 million.
6."Out of the Furnace," $2.3 million.
7."Delivery Man," $1.9 million.
8."Philomena," ''$1.8 million.
9."The Book Thief," $1.7 million.
10."Homefront," $1.6 million.
"Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"
In Memory
Joan Fontaine
Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine has died at the age of 96.
Longtime friend Noel Beutel says she died in her sleep in her Carmel home Sunday morning.
Fontaine won an Academy Award as a naive wife in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Suspicion" and also starred in Hitchcock's "Rebecca." Her other films included "The Women," ''Jane Eyre" and "Born to be Bad."
Fontaine was the sister of fellow actress Olivia de Havilland.
Joan Fontaine
In Memory
Tom Laughlin
Actor-writer-director Tom Laughlin, whose production and marketing of "Billy Jack" set a standard for breaking the rules on and off screen, has died.
Laughlin's daughter told The Associated Press that he died Thursday at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Laughlin was 82 and Teresa Laughlin, who acted in the Billy Jack movies, said the cause of death was complications from pneumonia.
"Billy Jack" was released in 1971 after a long struggle by Laughlin to gain control of the low-budget, self-financed movie, a model for guerrilla filmmaking.
He wrote, directed and produced "Billy Jack" and starred as the ex-Green Beret who defends a progressive school against the racists of a conservative Western community. The film became a counterculture favorite and the theme song, "One Tin Soldier," was a hit single for the rock group Coven.
Laughlin was in his mid-30s when he created Billy Jack with his wife and collaborator, Delores Taylor. Billy Jack was half-white, half Native American, a Vietnam veteran and practitioner of martial arts who had come to hate war. Billy Jack was first seen in the 1968 biker movie "The Born Losers," but became widely known after "Billy Jack," the second of four films Laughlin made about him (only three made it to theatres).
"Billy Jack" was completed in 1969, but its release was delayed for two years as Laughlin struggled to find studio backing. He eventually successfully sued Warner Bros. to retain rights and - with no support from Hollywood or from theatre chains - Laughlin made a radical decision: Distribute the movie himself and rent theatres to show it in. He also was among the first to advertise on television and to immediately open a movie nationwide, rather than release it gradually.
Laughlin was born in 1931 and grew up in Milwaukee. He played football for the University of South Dakota (where he met his future wife) and Marquette University, but decided he wanted to become an actor after seeing a stage production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."
His early film credits included "South Pacific," ''Gidget" and Robert Altman's "The Delinquents." Laughlin also was interested in directing and writing and by 1960 had directed, written and starred in "The Proper Time."
Laughlin wasn't only a filmmaker. He ran for president as both a Republican and Democrat and founded a Montessori school in California. He was an opponent of nuclear energy and a longtime advocate for Native Americans and bonded with another actor-activist, Marlon Brando.
He is survived by his wife, a sister, three children and five grandchildren.
Tom Laughlin
In Memory
Peter O'Toole
Known on the one hand for his starring role in "Lawrence of Arabia," leading tribesmen in daring attacks across the desert wastes, and on the other for his headlong charges into drunken debauchery, Peter O'Toole was one of the most magnetic, charismatic and fun figures in British acting.
O'Toole, who died Saturday at age 81 after a long bout of illness, was fearsomely handsome, with burning blue eyes and a penchant for hard living which long outlived his decision to give up alcohol.
A reformed - but unrepentant - hell-raiser, O'Toole long suffered from ill health. Always thin, he had grown wraithlike in later years, his famously handsome face eroded by years of outrageous drinking.
O'Toole began his acting career as one of the most exciting young talents on the British stage. His 1955 "Hamlet," at the Bristol Old Vic, was critically acclaimed.
International stardom came in David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." With only a few minor movie roles behind him, O'Toole was unknown to most moviegoers when they first saw him as T.E. Lawrence, the mythic British World War I soldier and scholar who led an Arab rebellion against the Turks.
In 1964's "Becket," O'Toole played King Henry II to Richard Burton's Thomas Becket, and won another Oscar nomination. Burton shared O'Toole's fondness for drinking, and their off-set carousing made headlines.
O'Toole played Henry again in 1968 in "The Lion in Winter," opposite Katharine Hepburn, for his third Oscar nomination.
Four more nominations followed: in 1968 for "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," in 1971 for "The Ruling Class," in 1980 for "The Stunt Man," and in 1982 for "My Favorite Year." It was almost a quarter-century before he received his eighth and last, for "Venus."
Seamus Peter O'Toole was born Aug. 2, 1932, the son of Irish bookie Patrick "Spats" O'Toole and his wife Constance. There is some question about whether Peter was born in Connemara, Ireland, or in Leeds, northern England, where he grew up, but he maintained close links to Ireland, even befriending the country's now-president, Michael D. Higgins.
After a teenage foray into journalism at the Yorkshire Evening Post and national military service with the navy, a young O'Toole auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a scholarship.
He went from there to the Bristol Old Vic and soon was on his way to stardom, helped along by an early success in 1959 at London's Royal Court Theatre in "The Long and The Short and The Tall."
The image of the renegade hell-raiser stayed with O'Toole for decades, although he gave up drinking in 1975 following serious health problems and major surgery.
He did not, however, give up smoking unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes in an ebony holder. That and his penchant for green socks, voluminous overcoats and trailing scarves lent him a rakish air and suited his fondness for drama in the old-fashioned "bravura" manner.
The honorary Oscar came 20 years after his seventh nomination for "My Favorite Year." By then it seemed a safe bet that O'Toole's prospects for another nomination were slim. He was still working regularly, but in smaller roles unlikely to earn awards attention.
O'Toole graciously accepted the honorary award, quipping, "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot," as he clutched his Oscar statuette.
O'Toole divorced Welsh actress Sian Phillips in 1979 after 19 years of marriage. The couple had two daughters, Kate and Pat.
A brief relationship with American model Karen Somerville led to the birth of his son Lorcan in 1983, and a change of lifestyle for O'Toole.
After a long custody battle, a U.S. judge ruled Somerville should have her son during school vacations, and O'Toole would have custody during the school year.
"The pirate ship has berthed," he declared, happily taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood. He learned to coach schoolboy cricket and, when he was in a play, the curtain time was moved back to allow him part of the evenings at home with his son.
Peter O'Toole
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