Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Gabriel Kahn: The Amazon of Higher Education (Slate)
How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.
Sadhbh Walshe: Direct your anger at the greedy rich, not the Wolf of Wall Street film (Guardian)
Bank of America and JP Morgan's CEOs are more productive targets for rage at injustice than a Hollywood blockbuster.
Jane Mulkerrins: "Kevin Kline on Las Vegas: 'Everyone looked so miserable'" (Guardian)
His new movie, Last Vegas, is a geriatric take on the party town stag weekend. He talks about why he'll never return, Hollywood's obsession with youth, and playing Falstaff in a fat suit.
Melt my brain, please: what we want to see in cinemas in 2014 (Guardian)
Fewer superheroes, some singing and a bit more weirdness are just some of the things the Guardian's film critics are hoping to see on the big screen in the next 12 months.
Leo Robson: "More Dynamite: Essays 1990-2012 by Craig Raine - review" (Guardian)
The perils of being a book critic - and two ferocious practitioners, Raine and James Walcott, who deserve our respect.
Rebecca Shaw: What do you mean, a bumburger isn't appetising? (Guardian)
A company has decided to promote its products by picturing a woman's buttocks in an innovative way. Too bad the ad has ruined my appetite for hamburgers forever.
How to properly pronounce "Ghibli" and other fun trivia about the legendary animation studio (RocketNews24)
Two Thousand Thirteen was a year of ups and downs for Studio Ghibli with the release two feature-length films (Kaze Tachinu and Kaguya Hime no Monogatari) and the retirement of their greatest director, Hayao Miyazaki.
It's Not Just You, Murray (YouTube)
Martin Scorsese directed this 16-minute film when he was a student at NYU.
Adam Todd Brown: 5 Sad Ways A&E Became the Walmart of Television Networks (Cracked)
When it comes to things that used to be great but slowly became terrible, cable television network A&E doesn't even make the list. That's because there was nothing slow about their transformation from useful to useless. It practically happened overnight.
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Marty's Soap Box
Google
Over the last few years I've experienced firsthand how google micro-manages online content.
Even though I don't use google advertising, sites that do have contacted me, requesting that I pull a link to their site because google's advertising has decided the link is 'unnatural'.
I've been sent links to the google webmaster rules, and it's pages of tiny print in convoluted language that pretty much says do as we say, or you'll be sorry. Only nastier.
These webmasters are put in a bad place - they have to write to a stranger with a request that will cost that stranger time & money in an effort to save their bottom line.
If I don't comply with their request, google mucks with their advertising $. And also throttles traffic to my site from google search.
I've had dozens of requests, and I'd be lying if I said it doesn't bother me. A lot.
So, I try to avoid google as much as possible, just on general principle.
Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide.
Search DuckDuckGo
~marty
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Partly cloudy, but pleasant.
Still Canadian
Ted Cruz
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz vowed months ago to renounce his Canadian citizenship. It's now 2014, and the Calgary-born Republican lawmaker is still a dual citizen.
"I have retained counsel that is preparing the paperwork to renounce the citizenship," the junior Texas senator, who's eyeing a run for president in 2016, said in a recent interview with the Dallas Morning News.
That's confounding Canadian immigration lawyers. Renouncing Canadian citizenship, they say, is a simple, quick and straightforward process - there's even an online, four-page PDF form on the Government of Canada website to get the ball rolling without the help of lawyers.
The thorny issue of the Tea Party darling's birthplace has been a headache for the senator, given some in the neo-conservative movement have accused President Barack Obama of being born in Kenya - his father was Kenyan, his mother American - and insist he's therefore illegitimately leading the country.
The Cruz affair prompted media wags in his home state of Texas to refer to the anti-immigration lawmaker as a "Canadian anchor baby."
Ted Cruz
Obamacare Is Pro-Insurance Industry
Michael Moore
Michael Moore calls Obamacare both "awful" and "a godsend" in a New York Times op-ed to mark the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act's new insurance exchanges.
He notes that the Affordable Care Act has provided cheaper health insurance for those who needed it, like his friend Donna Smith, who has cancer and was bankrupted by previous health problems.
But he says that the "fatal flaw" with the president's system is that it is a pro-insurance industry plan instead of a single-payer extension of Medicare, which Obama knew he should have pushed for, Moore writes.
"The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions," the filmmaker writes. "In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney's car. And we knew it."
Moore, who previously took on insurance companies with Sicko, his 2007 film about the American health care system, also argues that the "affordable" part of the Affordable Care Act is not true for many people, writing that the cheapest plan available to a 60-year-old couple making $65,000-a-year in Hartford, Conn. will cost $11,800 in annual premiums with a $12,600 deductible.
Michael Moore
Son's Last Name Not RocknRoll
Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet may have chosen an unconventional first name when she decided to name her newborn son Bear, but when it came to the boy's last name, she wasn't messing around.
The Oscar winner, 38, married Ned RocknRoll in December of 2012 and having the baby - who was born three weeks ago - take his last name was never an option.
"It was always going to have my name," she told Glamour U.K., on newsstands now. "Of course we're not going to call it RocknRoll. People might judge all they like, but I am a f*****g grown-up."
Winslet, who was previously married twice and has two children Mia, 13, and Joe, 8, from those relationships, says she feels "so incredibly lucky with this new chapter," but that she is being guarded this time around with Ned, as "there are hardly any pictures [in the press] of us together."
Kate Winslet
Firework Display Breaks World Record
Dubai
Dubai shattered the world record for the largest ever pyrotechnic display on New Year's Eve with a show involving more than half a million fireworks, Guinness World Records said Wednesday.
"Ten months in planning, over 500,000 fireworks were used during the display which lasted around six minutes, with Guinness World Records adjudicators on hand to confirm that a new record had been set," the Guinness website said.
The display spanned 94 kilometres (58.4 miles) of the Dubai coast, which boasts an archipelago of man-made islands and Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower, Guinness said.
Enough fireworks were launched in the first minute of the display to break the previous record, set by Kuwait in 2011 with an hour-long show of 77,282 fireworks.
US firm Fireworks by Grucci designed the display, Guinness said, using 100 computers and 200 technicians to synchronise the pyrotechnics at a reported cost of around $6 million (4.3 million euros).
Dubai
Phoney Tape Spooked British Spies
Thatcher-Reagan
A fake tape of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher arguing over the Falklands War had the British secret services scrambling to identify the culprits, archive files released Friday showed.
The tape, supposedly a telephone recording of then US president Reagan and the British prime minister, was anonymously sent to several Dutch newspapers during the 1983 UK general election.
In the faked exchange about the 1982 Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, Reagan urged restraint while Thatcher wanted Buenos Aires punished "as quickly as possible".
The British punk-rock band Crass admitted making the tape -- but that was only after it was taken seriously enough that the CIA and Britain's MI6 had sought to establish whether the Soviet Union or Argentina was behind it.
A letter sent by a Foreign Office adviser to Thatcher informed her of the tape and who MI6 -- the more common name for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) -- thought was behind it.
Thatcher-Reagan
Garage Sale Painting Sparks Legal Battle
Renoir
A one-of-a-kind Renoir painting the size of a napkin is at the center of an intense legal battle between a museum that claims it was stolen and a Virginia woman who claims she bought it for $7.
The tiny work of art is an 1879 landscape by the Impressionist painter titled "Paysage Bords de Seine."
In court papers filed this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art claims the painting was stolen in 1951. As evidence, the Museum provided a 60-year-old police report, old museum catalogues and a receipt showing that a patron bequeathed the painting to the museum.
In her own court filings, filed last month, Martha Fuqua contests the museum's claim, saying she purchased the painting at a flea market in 2009 for just $7.
Fuqua's brother and former family friends have told The Washington Post the painting had been at Fuqua's mother's home prior to when she claims to have purchased it at a West Virginia flea market.
Renoir
France Mulls Ban
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala
It's caught on like a dance move - one hand pointing downward, the other touching the shoulder with an arm across the chest. But for many, the gesture popularized by a French comic is hateful and anti-Semitic.
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala has a small but faithful following of fans from disparate walks of life. Some are marginalized immigrants from France's housing projects. Some are Muslims. Some are even adherents of the far-right.
But Dieudonne's profile has soared since the gesture, dubbed the "quenelle," went viral in recent months.
To Interior Minister Manuel Valls, it is an "inverted Nazi salute." He is exploring ways to ban gatherings he says threaten public order as a means of keeping the comic from performing.
But Dieudonne, who goes only by his first name, is adamant the quenelle - named for a fish dumpling eaten in some parts of the country - is an anti-establishment sign meaning "shove it."
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala
Destroyed At U.S. Customs
Bamboo Flutes
A Canadian flutist has been left baffled and distraught after U.S. customs agents decided to destroy his traditional, handcrafted Middle Eastern bamboo flutes.
"I am still waiting for that answer," Boujemaa Razgui told CBC Radio's As It Happens, when asked why he thought U.S. Customs and Border Protection would destroy his instruments.
Razgui was flying from Madrid through New York's JFK airport to Boston. It was at JFK airport that officials found his flutes, and after classifying them as agricultural products, destroyed the flutes "in accordance with established protocols to prevent the introduction of plant pathogens into the United States," the border agency told As It Happens in a statement.
Razgui found out his instruments were missing when his instrument case didn't arrive at his home in Brockton, Mass. He rushed to Boston airport to find his flutes, and was given a phone number for the "department of destroying things," as he described the border agency. He phoned the agency and learned that his flutes were gone for good.
Razgui has played the flute for over 40 years and performed at concerts all over the world, including Toronto and Montreal. He insists that he just wants to play his flutes in the time he has left.
Bamboo Flutes
Who Let The Dogs Out?
North Korea
Forget the hangman's noose, the firing squad or lethal injection: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un executed his uncle and a handful of the man's aides by feeding them to a horde of 120 starving dogs, according to a shocking (but unconfirmed) account.
Jang Song Thaek, the former No. 2 official in the secretive regime, was stripped naked and tossed into a cage along with his five closest aides.
"Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called 'quan jue', or execution by dogs," according to the Straits Times of Singapore. The daily relied on a description of the execution in a Hong Kong newspaper that serves as the official mouthpiece of China's government there. More established outlets in mainland China have not repeated the account.
"The entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials," the Straits Times said in a piece published Dec. 24, 2013, but only now getting traction in the United States. Two American national security officials contacted for comment said they had not heard that account, which first appeared in the Wen Wei Po newspaper on Dec. 12, 2013, and declined to vouch for its credibility.
North Korea
Reports Across California
UFO Sightings
Federal authorities said today there has been no "unusual flight activity" in California despite a flurry of reports by civilians in several cities who believe they saw strange lights in the sky on New Years morning.
"I seen like six bright orange colored lights," Kaye Pinlac of Stockton told ABCNews affiliate News 10. "They were almost like in a diamond or triangle shape. It was weird. And so they started just separating." Pinlac captured a video of the lighted object on his iPhone.
More witnesses across California reported similar sightings around the same time, including from Sacramento and Auburn.
The reports came few days after the discovery of a crop circle in Salinas, Calif., which also sparked speculation that were UFO related.
UFO Sightings
Mystery Solved
Dogs
If you're a dog owner, you've probably noticed that some dogs will spin around a few times in a circle before settling in to relieve themselves. Ever wonder why?
Turns out it's because they're trying to align with the Earth's magnetic field, according to new research.
"Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis under calm MF [magnetic field] conditions," according to the findings by researchers in the Czech Republic and Germany. "This directional behavior was abolished under Unstable MF." The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.
To test their theory, scientists had 70 dogs, from 37 breeds, observed over a two-year span. The orientation of the dogs during defecation was cataloged 1,893 times and during urination 5,582 times.
Dogs
In Memory
George Goodman (Adam Smith)
George Goodman, a journalist, business author and award-winning television host who under the pseudonym "Adam Smith" made economics accessible to millions of people, died Friday at age 83.
Goodman's son, Mark Goodman, said his father died at the University of Miami Hospital after a long battle with the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis.
Starting in the 1950s, the elder Goodman had a long, diverse and accomplished career, whether as a founder of New York Magazine, as a bestselling business author or as the personable host of "Adam Smith's Money World."
Known as "Jerry" to his friends, he prided himself on making arcane debates among economists and business leaders understandable, often using an anecdotal or irreverent approach to explain a complicated issue. He has been credited with coining the mocking catchphrase, "Assume a can opener," as a parody of academic jargon.
"Adam Smith's Money World" was a multiple Emmy winner that aired on PBS stations from 1984-1996, with guests including Warren Buffett and then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker. He was also an executive editor at Esquire, a member of The New York Times editorial board and a commentator for NBC television. In recent years, he sponsored a lecture series through the Harvard Club of New York Foundation.
Before his success in the business world, Goodman had written novels and worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He helped adapt his own book, "The Wheeler Dealers," into a 1963 movie of the same name starring Lee Remick and James Garner.
Smith was editing the monthly journal The Institutional Investor when his first nonfiction book, "The Money Game," was published in 1968. Among the year's top sellers, and read for decades after, "The Money Game" offered a colorful take on the financial markets that added a human element to the laws of finance and seemed as influenced by Damon Runyon as by any economic theorist. One popular character was an oversized investment guru known as "Scarsdale Fats."
"The Money Game" was also Goodman's first book as "Adam Smith." He wanted to keep Wall Street from learning his identity - the game was up soon after publication - and accepted a suggestion from founding New York Magazine editor Clay Felker that he name himself after the 18th century economist.
His other books included "Supermoney," a 1972 publication that introduced many readers to a then-little known Buffett; "Powers of Mind" and "Paper Money," which came out in 1981.
George Jerome Waldo Goodman grew up outside St. Louis and was graduated from Harvard University in 1952. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, the forerunner of the Green Berets. He was still in the Army when his first novel, the comic tale "The Bubble Makers," came out in 1955.
He is survived by two children and three grandchildren. His wife, actress Sally Brophy, died in 2007.
George Goodman (Adam Smith)
In Memory
Phil Everly
Phil Everly, who formed an influential harmony duo with his brother, Don, that touched the hearts and sparked the imaginations of rock 'n' roll singers for decades, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan, died Friday. He was 74.
Everly died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at a Burbank hospital, said his son Jason Everly.
Phil and Don Everly helped draw the blueprint of rock 'n' roll in the late 1950s and 1960s with a high harmony that captured the yearning and angst of a nation of teenage baby boomers looking for a way to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day.
The Beatles, early in their career, once referred to themselves as "the English Everly Brothers." And Bob Dylan once said, "We owe these guys everything. They started it all."
The Everlys' hit records included the then-titilating "Wake Up Little Susie" and the universally identifiable "Bye Bye Love," each featuring their twined voices with lyrics that mirrored the fatalism of country music and a rocking backbeat that more upbeat pop. These sounds and ideas would be warped by their devotees into a new kind of music that would ricochet around the world.
In all, their career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. In their heyday between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits.
The two broke up amid quarrelling in 1973 after 16 years of hits, then reunited in 1983, "sealing it with a hug," Phil Everly said.
They were inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the same year they had a hit pop-country record, "Born Yesterday."
Don Everly was born in 1937 in Brownie, Ky., to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers. Phil Everly was born to the couple on Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to from Brownie when Ike grew tired of working in the coal mines.
The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family's radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa.
Their career breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records.
Phil Everly
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