Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Willie Sutton Wept (New York Times)
What are the three things you need to know about the current budget debate?
Jim Hightower: CORPORATE AMERICA'S IDEA OF PATRIOTISM
Corporate America has been given a wealth of tax breaks, regulatory favors, and absurd levels of subsidies in recent years, amassing a stash of cash that now tops $2 trillion. But they adamantly refuse to invest that in American jobs and communities.
"'The Hemlock Cup': By BETTANY HUGHES": Reviewed by Troy Jollimore
The execution of Socrates casts a long shadow over Western history.
"Buddhism through American Women's Eyes" by Karma Lekshe Tsomo: A review by Chris Faatz
"Buddhism through American Women's Eyes" gathers essays from several Buddhist women representing traditions ranging from Tibetan to Zen to Shingon in a full-on attempt to show how Buddhism is applicable right now, in the present moment, to everything we do, to all the choices we make, and in all the relationships into which we enter.
Claire Dedere: One Weird Cinderella Story (Slate)
What is Allison Pearson up to with her portrait of David Cassidy fandom?
SCOTT TUROW, PAUL AIKEN and JAMES SHAPIRO: Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? (New York Times)
Literary and creative talents often remain undeveloped unless markets reward them.
Sasha Watson: The Girl Who Wanted Revenge (Slate)
In a new memoir, Stieg Larsson's longtime partner settles scores and positions herself as the Millennium saga's rightful guardian.
Alex Clark: The lost art of editing (Guardian)
The long, boozy lunches and smoke-filled parties are now part of publishing's past, but has rigorous line-by-line editing of books been lost too, a casualty of the demands of sales and publicity?
"The Scoundrel and the Optimist" by Maceo Montoya: A review by Zach Czaia
It won't take long for the reader of Maceo Montoya's first novel, 'The Scoundrel and the Optimist,' to realize that the author is writing against the grain of much of modern fiction. His preoccupations -- first love, the relationship between father and son, the redemption of a "lost soul" -- seem to come from a different era. Readers accustomed to novels more self-conscious about their form and structure might even be tempted to dismiss Montoya's first book as simply old-fashioned, out of touch. This would be a mistake.
"American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee" by Karen Abbott: A review by John G. Rodwan Jr.
In "American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Time of Gypsy Rose Lee," Karen Abbott claims "Gypsy Rose Lee is a brand before branding exists," intending praise. She means the Seattle-born stripper who rose to fame in the 1930s was ahead of her times in her ability to cultivate a public image and attain fame.
Carolyn Kellogg: Steve Martin finds an audience of art lovers (Los Angeles Times)
If the events concerning Steve Martin on a certain November 2010 night in New York City hung over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Thursday, they did so not as a dark cloud, but as a punching bag.
Kathleen Vanesian: A 'New Times' Art Critic Reconnects with Underground Comic Icon Joyce Farmer, the Person Who First Inspired Her to Be One (Phoenix New Times)
California artist and fabled '70s underground cartoonist Joyce Farmer was using raw meat to make a statement decades before Lady Gaga ever dreamed of showing up at a music awards show in a designer gown made of the smelly stuff.
David Bruce has 40 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $40 you can buy 10,000 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
wrote:
took the day off.
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Rain followed by more rain.
Readers To Pick Cover
Rolling Stone
Getting on the cover of Rolling Stone has long been a musician's dream -- Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show even wrote a hit song about it.
"Wanna see my picture on the cover. Wanna buy five copies for my mother. Wanna see my smilin' face on the cover of the Rolling Stone," goes the 1973 song penned by Shel Silverstein.
Now the magazine is holding a contest to let its readers choose which of 16 unsigned bands should feature on the cover of Rolling Stone later this year.
Readers are being asked to vote online at rollingstone.com/choosethecover or at AOL?s Music Page at music.aol.com/blog/rollingstone.
Rolling Stone
Courageous California Congresswoman
Jackie Speier
After stunning colleagues by recalling that she once had an abortion, Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California made clear Friday that the procedure was not something she welcomed and was done because the baby was not going to survive.
Speier, first elected in 2008, took to the House floor on Thursday evening during a debate over stripping funding to Planned Parenthood. A previous speaker, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., read a graphic description of a dilation and evacuation abortion, which is done in the second trimester of a pregnancy. He said the doctor "literally hacks that baby to death."
Speier, 60, then discussed her own experience that took place in the early 1990s. Her spokesman said it was something she had done once before when she served in the California Legislature.
"That procedure that you just talked about was a procedure that I endured," Speier said. "I lost the baby. But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest as you have that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."
"The fetus slipped from my uterus into my vagina and could not survive," Speier said. "Today some news reports are implying that I wanted my pregnancy to end, but that is simply not true. I lost my baby."
Jackie Speier
US, Canada Prepare
Bird Count
Tens of thousands of people in the United States and Canada will this week rediscover the original meaning of "twitter" and "tweet" as they take part in the Great Backyard Bird Count.
The organizers of the bird count -- the Audubon Naturalist Society, Bird Studies Canada and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology -- are hoping to break the participation record set last year, when more than 97,000 checklists were sent in from across North America, reporting 602 species and 11.2 million individual bird sightings.
Participants in 2010 saw more than 1.8 million American robins as well as the first red-billed tropicbird in the history of the 14-year count. The rare bird was spotted near San Diego, in southern California.
The avian census has also charted the dramatic spread of the Eurasian collared-dove, which was reported in eight states in 1999 and in 39 last year.
Bird Count
Dramatic Changes
Oscars
The Oscars are entering the world of virtual reality.
This year's Academy Awards telecast is taking a radical departure from past years. Producers of the February 27 show are abandoning the concept of a traditional set. Instead, they will rely on a series of "projections" to give the show a constantly changing look.
"Our design this year is actually going to reflect more content than you would usually expect of an awards show of this type," producer Don Mischer told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview with fellow producer Bruce Cohen in the Kodak Theater. "We're using our environment to take us to different places, different times, and it will change dramatically. The look will change from act to act."
"We're doing six or seven scenic transitions during the show, but they are each sort of a different concept," Cohen explained. "In other words, one might be a scene from a film, one might be a more specific time in history, one might be a specific event, one might be a specific genre. The hope is that we briefly leave the Kodak in 2011 -- not literally, but metaphorically -- and take the audience, both in the room and on television, to a specific time and place."
Oscars
Pa. Judge Guilty
Mark Ciavarella
A former juvenile court judge who sent thousands of children to detention centers was convicted Friday of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of the for-profit lockups, in what prosecutors said was a "kids for cash" scheme that ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed 4,000 juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he sentenced young offenders without regard for their constitutional rights.
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and Conahan of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities' co-owner.
A federal jury in Scranton convicted Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 27 counts, including extortion. He is likely to get a prison sentence of more than 12 years, according to prosecutors - who revealed after the verdicts that a reputed mob boss turned informant helped them make their case.
Ciavarella insisted the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money - a position he defiantly clung to even after he was convicted of a charge, racketeering, that federal prosecutors often use to go after mobsters.
Mark Ciavarella
Danish Supreme Court Deals Blow
Christiania
The Danish Supreme Court on Friday gave the government the green light to take control of a largely self-governing Copenhagen neighbourhood that was occupied by hippies four decades ago.
The Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision from 2009 saying the roughly 900 residents of Christiania have no irrevocable right to use the former naval base.
The decision ends a six-year-long legal battle and means the government can go ahead with plans to "normalize" the neighbourhood and tear down scores of ramshackle homes built without permits.
Residents say they will resist any attempts to evict them from the neighbourhood, which has become a major draw for tourists curious about its counterculture lifestyle and liberal attitude toward soft drugs like cannabis.
Christiania
Coffin Exhumed For Faithful
Pope JP2
Faithful attending the beatification of Pope John Paul in Rome will be able to pray before his coffin, which will be exhumed for the event, the Vatican said on Friday.
The Vatican also warned the faithful around the world not to fall prey to fraudsters, particularly on the Internet, who are selling tickets to the beatification ceremony on May 1.
Italian authorities and Church officials say perhaps more than a million people may attend the mass at which John Paul, who died in 2005, will be declared a blessed of the Church and move one step closer to sainthood.
The ceremony in St Peter's Square, one of several over three days, will hark back to the funeral of the charismatic pope, which was one of the biggest media events of the new century.
Pope JP2
Taken Off Air At Riviera
Jim Gray
The American cable television network broadcasting the Northern Trust Open has removed one of its reporters from this week's coverage following a confrontation with a player's caddie.
According to Golf Channel, reporter Jim Gray was pulled off the assignment because of the way he reacted to the two-stroke penalty imposed on American Dustin Johnson during Thursday's opening round.
Johnson was penalized after arriving late for his teeoff time at Riviera Country Club and later told reporters his caddie Bobby Brown had given him the wrong information.
According to Brown, Gray asked Johnson as the player was walking to the 14th tee to explain why he had been late for his scheduled start. At the end of the round, Brown scolded Gray for speaking to a player out on the course during competition.
"In order not to provide further distraction, we've decided to remove Jim from this particular assignment," Golf Channel spokesman Dan Higgins said in a statement Friday.
Jim Gray
Royal Botanical Gardens Bats
Sydney
A colony of 22,000 bats may be coming to a neighbourhood near you after an Australian court served the flying foxes with an eviction notice and allowed the government to chase them away with loud industrial noise.
The court ruled that the grey-headed flying foxes, the largest bats in Australia, could be driven out of the Royal Botanical Gardens in the heart of Sydney as the colony grew too big and threatened hundreds of rare and protected trees.
But conservation groups say the gardens are a critical roosting habitat for the bats, listed as a "vulnerable" species by the government, and, if chased away, they have few places to go other than the city.
The gardens say the bats, in their 20 years at the park, have destroyed dozens of trees and several hundred are now in danger so they have no time to waste.
Sydney
In Memory
Lamar Fike
Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis Presley's famed inner circle called the "Memphis Mafia" who had a long career in the music industry, has died. He was 75.
Fike, who was suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, died Jan. 21 at a hospital in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, said his son, James Fike, 45, of Atlanta.
James Fike said his father held various roles with Presley, including as a lighting director, bodyguard and managing Presley's music publishing group. After Presley's death in 1977, James Fike said that his father continued to work as an entrepreneur in the music business in Nashville, Tenn., in music publishing, managing artists and brokering music and memorabilia deals.
James Fike said that his father, a great storyteller, would recall when Presley and the "Memphis Mafia" would decide they needed a cheeseburger somewhere and hop on their plane to take them to whatever city they chose.
Fike was among five members of the group dubbed the "Memphis Mafia" who incorporated the name in the early 1990s.
Fike was born in Cleveland, Miss., on Nov. 11, 1935. He was preceded in death by a daughter, Joan Fike. In addition to James Fike, he is survived another son, John Fike, of Nashville, Tenn. A memorial service is set for Feb. 26 in Mart, a town about 25 miles east of Waco.
Lamar Fike
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