Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Taxes at the Top (New York Times)
… the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled "carried interest" tax break. ... Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?
Froma Harrop: How "Downton Abbey" Is More Democratic Than We Are (Creators Syndicate)
Americans may regard this polarized class system - the grandees versus the grunts, with lots of subclasses in between - as foreign to our supposedly democratic culture. … But in one major way, the world of "Downton Abbey" was far less class-stratified than 21st century America: the matter of who fights and dies in wars.
"NOT DISAPPOINTED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA" by JAKE LAMAR (YouTube)
On October 8, 2011, Democrats Abroad France held an event titled "Voices for Obama" at the Nikki Diana Marquandt Gallery in Paris. One of the speakers was the American author Jake Lamar. This clip is a shortened version of his talk.
Will Oremus: The Internet Goes Nuclear (Slate)
Why the anti-SOPA blackouts are working-and why they should never happen again.
Matthew Yglesias: Why Should We Stop Online Piracy? (Slate)
A little copyright infringement is good for the economy and society.
Matthew Chapman: Pirates Stole My Wallet, But Who Cares? (Huffington Post)
I wrote and directed a movie called 'The Ledge.' It took me seven years to get it made. It was in competition at Sundance last year and subsequently made a little money. Far, far less than it should have because if you search the internet for The Ledge Free Download you'll find many places where you can download it for nothing. If you do so, you are not just stealing from me, you are also (by making films less profitable), ultimately stealing from …
Patt Morrison Asks: Diane Keaton (LA Times)
If you're lazily inclined to define Diane Keaton by the crossword-puzzle-sized word "actor," you need to get out more.
Steven Rea: Max von Sydow graces 'Extremely Loud' with silence (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
His voice is deep, sonorous, rumbling with quiet gravitas. Few actors are as readily recognizable by their vocal cords as Max von Sydow, the great Swedish actor who arrived on the international scene in 1957, as a knight who encounters Death - and plays chess with him - in Ingmar Bergman's classic, "The Seventh Seal."
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."
Biggest in width.
Bark as much as 4 feet thick, 50 feet long, branches 100 feet off the ground.
The trees have survived for 2,000 or 3,000 years some even longer.
Some of the largest trees measure 35 feet in basel diameter and up to 300 feet in height.
The tallest standing giant sequoia is 311 feet tall and the tallest redwood is 367 feet tall.
They can grow up to 1 to 2 feet tall per year until its between 200 to 300 feet high, then like people they grow out.
The tree grows at elevations of 6,500 feet.
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Reader Suggestions
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Follow The Money
PIPA/SOPA
Anti-piracy legislation has stalled in the U.S. Congress after an unprecedented online protest prompted some lawmakers to rethink their position on bills that Internet companies have said would compromise the way the Internet works.
Entertainment companies have pushed hard for the legislation, known as PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) in the Senate and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)in the House of Representatives. The bills aim to curb access to overseas websites that traffic pirated content and counterfeit products, such as movies and music.
Internet companies have waged a counter-offensive that has included campaign contributions and lobbying to kill the legislation, which they contend would undermine Internet freedom, be difficult to enforce and encourage frivolous lawsuits.
Google Inc, Facebook, eBay Inc and Amazon.com are part of a larger computer and Internet sector that have spent some $1.2 billion between 1998 and 2011 compared with $906.4 million spent by the television, movie and music industries over the same period.
Following is data on contributions the two sides have made during the 2011-2012 election cycle to lawmakers prominent in the debate on anti-piracy legislation.
Read the list: PIPA/SOPA
Wins Pudding Pot
Claire Danes
Golden Globe winner Claire Danes will be picking up a pudding pot from Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
The student group named Danes on Friday as its Woman of the Year. She'll get a parade and a roast Jan. 26.
Danes won her third Golden Globe on Sunday for her role as CIA agent Carrie Mathison on Showtime's new "Homeland." She won a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild award last year for her work in HBO's "Temple Grandin."
The 32-year-old gained attention at 15 when she won her first Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for "My So Called Life."
Claire Danes
Fetches $7.9M
'Birds of America'
A rare first edition of John James Audubon's illustrated "The Birds of America" depicting more than 400 life-size North American species in four monumental volumes was purchased at auction Friday for $7.9 million.
Christie's auction house identified the buyer as an American collector who bid by phone.
Another complete first edition of "The Birds of America" sold at Sotheby's in London in December 2010 for $11.5 million, a record for the most expensive printed book sold at auction.
The set at Christie's was offered for sale by the heirs of the 4th Duke of Portland. It was accompanied by a complete first edition five-volume set of Audubon's "Ornithological Biography."
Experts estimate that 200 complete first-edition copies were produced over an 11-year period, from 1827 to 1838. Today, 120 are known to exist, with 107 in institutions and 13 in private hands. The book, part scientific and part art, includes 435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 bird species, made from engraved copper plates based on Audubon's original watercolors.
'Birds of America'
Monkey Long Believed Extinct Found In Indonesia
Miller's Grizzled Langur
Scientists working in the dense jungles of Indonesia have "rediscovered" a large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct.
They were all the more baffled to find the Miller's Grizzled Langur - its black face framed by a fluffy, Dracula-esque white collar - in an area well outside its previously recorded home range.
The team set up camera traps in the Wehea Forest on the eastern tip of Borneo island in June, hoping to captures images of clouded leopards, orangutans and other wildlife known to congregate at several mineral salt licks.
The pictures that came back caught them all by surprise: groups of monkeys none had ever seen.
Miller's Grizzled Langur
Company Sued Over Warehouse Fire
Neil Young
A company founded by Neil Young is facing a lawsuit over a fire in the San Francisco Bay Area that authorities say started in a vintage car the rocker had converted into a hybrid vehicle.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that Unigard Insurance Co. sued LincVolt LLC this week, accusing the company of negligence for converting the 1959 Lincoln Continental to run on electricity and a biodiesel-powered generator.
The suit seeks nearly $500,000 that Unigard says it paid to the owner of a building damaged in the 2010 blaze in San Carlos.
Fire officials say the blaze started in the car, dubbed the LincVolt. Young converted the car into a hybrid vehicle in a highly-publicized project to promote fuel-efficiency.
Neil Young
Back, Without a Domain Name
Megaupload
Megaupload, the file sharing website that was shut down Thursday, is back up Friday -- without a domain name.
This new site appears to be based in the Netherlands. You can access the site by here.
After seven people were associated with the file-sharing company were indicted, hacker group Anonymous targeted websites
Megaupload was hosted on leased servers in Virgina, giving federal agents the opportunity to intervene. The indictment was issued Jan. 5.
Megaupload
Shuts Down Shops Selling Barbie Dolls
Iran
Police have closed down dozens of toy shops for selling Barbie dolls in Iran, part of a decades-long crackdown against "manifestations of Western culture," the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported Friday.
Barbie dolls are sold wearing swimsuits and miniskirts in a society where women must wear headscarves in public, and men and women are not allowed to swim together.
A ban on the sale of the Barbies, designed to look like young Western women, was imposed in the mid-1990s. In its latest report, Mehr quoted an unidentified police official as saying authorities confiscated the dolls from Tehran stores in a "new phase" of the campaign.
Authorities started confiscating the dolls from stores in 2002, denouncing what they called the toys' un-Islamic characteristics. The campaign was eventually dropped.
Iran that year also introduced its own dolls - twins Dara and Sara, designed to promote traditional values with modest clothing and pro-family values - but those proved unable to stem the Barbie tide.
Iran
Fire Yields Cache
Gamal El-Zoghby
A single magazine from the 1970s with pornographic images of pre-pubescent girls was enough to get a New York architecture professor arrested after firefighters found it while battling a blaze in his home at the Jersey shore.
Shortly before noon on Tuesday, firefighters received a report that the waterfront home of 76-year-old Gamal El-Zoghby was ablaze. They doused the flames, and were checking for hidden pockets of flame behind the walls by pulling down panels of sheet rock, when the magazine fell from behind one of the panels, State Police spokesman Trooper Christopher Kay said.
He earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan in 1962 and a bachelor's in architecture from Cairo University in 1958. He has been teaching at Pratt Institute since 1969, according to a Web page from the Cypress Architects Association that includes a photo of the house that caught fire on Tuesday.
The fire heavily damaged the upper reaches of the house, which was well-known in the neighborhood for its unusual angular design, fire-engine-red paint and a rooftop beacon. When firefighters arrived at the edge of the Little Egg Harbor, there was heavy smoke and fire enveloping the second floor.
El-Zoghby designed and built the house in the late 1990s.
Gamal El-Zoghby
Farmer Caught Spray-Painting Hawks
New Zealand
A New Zealand farmer has been caught spray-painting hawks in a pinkish-red hue as part of a "prank" on bird-watchers who were hoping to have discovered a new species of bird.
Grant Michael Teahan has been found guilty on two charges of ill-treating an animal, according to the Manawatu Standard.
The mystery began in early 2009, when locals began snapping pictures of the strangely colored hawks and sending them to the local newspaper. It was only after on of the hawks was accidentally hit by a car that the spray-painting ruse was discovered.
An investigation by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) failed to turn up a culprit until Teahan asked his nephew to send a video clip to the media of him catching a magpie in a trap covered in the spray paint. When police seized computers from Tehan's property, they found deleted pictures and video relating to "red hawks."
"Various people got involved, like experts who thought maybe it was a new strain or a new type of bird or whatever, but then feathers were being found and it was obvious somebody was actually painting these hawks," Palmerston North SPCA manager Danny Auger told the Standard.
New Zealand
In Memory
Etta James
Etta James' performance of the enduring classic "At Last" was the embodiment of refined soul: Angelic-sounding strings harkened the arrival of her passionate yet measured vocals as she sang tenderly about a love finally realized after a long and patient wait.
In real life, little about James was as genteel as that song. The platinum blonde's first hit was a saucy R&B number about sex, and she was known as a hell-raiser who had tempestuous relationships with her family, her men and the music industry. Then she spent years battling a drug addiction that she admitted sapped away at her great talents.
The 73-year-old died on Friday at Riverside Community Hospital from complications of leukemia, with her husband and sons at her side, her manager, Lupe De Leon said.
"The bad girls ... had the look that I liked," she wrote in her 1995 autobiography, "Rage to Survive." ''I wanted to be rare, I wanted to be noticed, I wanted to be exotic as a Cotton Club chorus girl, and I wanted to be obvious as the most flamboyant hooker on the street. I just wanted to be."
Despite the reputation she cultivated, she would always be remembered best for "At Last." The jazz-inflected rendition wasn't the original, but it would become the most famous and the song that would define her as a legendary singer. Over the decades, brides used it as their song down the aisle and car companies to hawk their wares, and it filtered from one generation to the next through its inclusion in movies like "American Pie." Perhaps most famously, President Obama and the first lady danced to a version at his inauguration ball.
The tender, sweet song belied the turmoil in her personal life. James - born Jamesetta Hawkins - was born in Los Angeles to a mother whom she described as a scam artist, a substance abuser and a fleeting presence during her youth. She never knew her father, although she was told and had believed, that he was the famous billiards player Minnesota Fats. He neither confirmed nor denied it: when they met, he simply told her: "I don't remember everything. I wish I did, but I don't."
She was raised by Lula and Jesse Rogers, who owned the rooming house where her mother once lived. The pair brought up James in the Christian faith, and as a young girl, her voice stood out in the church choir. James landed the solos in the choir and became so well known, she said that Hollywood stars would come to see her perform.
But she wouldn't stay a gospel singer for long. Rhythm and blues lured her away from the church, and she found herself drawn to the grittiness of the music.
She was doing just that when bandleader Johnny Otis found her singing on San Francisco street corners with some girlfriends in the early 1950s. Otis, a legend in his own right, died on Tuesday.
"At the time, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had a hit with 'Work With Me, Annie,' and we decided to do an answer. We didn't think we would get in show business, we were just running around making up answers to songs," James told The Associated Press in 1987.
And so they replied with the song, "Roll With Me, Henry."
When Otis heard it, he told James to get her mother's permission to accompany him to Los Angeles to make a recording. Instead, the 15-year-old singer forged her mother's name on a note claiming she was 18.
"At that time, you weren't allowed to say 'roll' because it was considered vulgar. So when Georgia Gibbs did her version, she renamed it 'Dance With Me, Henry' and it went to No. 1 on the pop charts," the singer recalled. The Gibbs song was one of several in the early rock era when white singers got hits by covering songs by black artists, often with sanitized lyrics.
After her 1955 debut, James toured with Otis' revue, sometimes earning only $10 a night. In 1959, she signed with Chicago's legendary Chess label, began cranking out the hits and going on tours with performers such as Bobby Vinton, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers.
James recorded a string of hits in the late 1950s and '60s including "Trust In Me," ''Something's Got a Hold On Me," ''Sunday Kind of Love," ''All I Could Do Was Cry," and of course, "At Last."
In 1967, she cut one of the most highly regarded soul albums of all time, "Tell Mama," an earthy fusion of rock and gospel music featuring blistering horn arrangements, funky rhythms and a churchy chorus. A song from the album, "Security," was a top 40 single in 1968.
Her professional success, however, was balanced against personal demons, namely a drug addiction.
It would take her at least two decades to beat her drug problem. Her husband, Artis Mills, even went to prison for years, taking full responsibility for drugs during an arrest even though James was culpable.
She finally quit the habit and managed herself for a while, calling up small clubs and asking them, "Have you ever heard of Etta James?" in order to get gigs. Eventually, she got regular bookings - even drawing Elizabeth Taylor as an audience member. In 1984, she was tapped to sing the national anthem at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and her career got the resurgent boost it needed, though she fought addiction again when she got hooked on painkillers in the late 1980s.
Drug addiction wasn't her only problem. She struggled with her weight, and often performed from a wheelchair as she got older and heavier. In the early 2000s, she had weight-loss surgery and shed some 200 pounds.
James performed well into her senior years, and it was "At Last" that kept bringing her the biggest ovations. The song was a perennial that never aged, and on Jan. 20, 2009, as crowds celebrated that - at last - an African-American had become president of the United States, the song played as the first couple danced.
Her health went into decline, however, and by 2011, she was being cared for at home by a personal doctor.
She suffered from dementia, kidney problems and leukemia. Her husband and her two sons fought over control of her $1 million estate, though a deal was later struck keeping Mills as the conservator and capping the singer's expenses at $350,000. In December 2011, her physician announced that her leukemia was terminal, and asked for prayers for the singer.
Etta James
In Memory
Winston Riley
Winston Riley, an innovative reggae musician and producer, has died of complications from a gunshot wound to the head. He was 65.
Riley died Thursday at University Hospital of the West Indies, where he had been a patient since November, when he was shot at his house in an upscale neighborhood in the capital of Kingston, his son Kurt Riley said Friday.
Riley also had been shot in August and was stabbed in September last year. His record store in Kingston's downtown business district also was burned down several years ago. Police have said they know of no motives and have not arrested anyone.
As a teenager, Riley founded an influential harmony group, The Techniques, which recorded for pioneer producer Arthur "Duke" Reid. Riley also toured with Byron Lee and later gained fame for producing songs such as "Double Barrel" by Dave Barker and Ansell Collins.
Musicologist Kingsley Goodison, who knew Riley for more than 40 years, said he was one of the people responsible for introducing reggae to England.
Riley also is credited with creating the stalag rhythm, which later influenced hip-hop and dancehall. Unlike his contemporaries who shunned dancehall music, Riley embraced contemporary reggae and had several big hits during the 1980s.
Riley is survived by several children and grandchildren.
Winston Riley
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