'Best of TBH Politoons'
Dareland
Modern Salaries
SUNDAY NIGHT
Erin Hart
Erin Hart is slated to be on Fox News Network (cable) on Sunday night, March 9th, in the 7 (Pacific), 10 (Eastern) p.m. hour as she opines with a fellow pundit about Election 2008!
Erin's an Obama delegate to the Washington convention on April 5th.
Check for updates at Erin Hart Show.com - where you can post your views, or join in the forum!
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Tom Danehy: The environmental costs of meat production (tucsonweekly.com)
Tom and vegetarians can agree on one thing: The environmental costs of meat production need to be addressed
CATHERINE O'SULLIVAN: After the news surrounding the latest beef recall, Catherine has eaten her last hamburger (tucsonweekly.com)
... the standard for deciding whether an animal is worthy of slaughter is whether it can stand. It's in the best interests of the meat companies to keep all animals, sick or not, on their feet. The methods used to do this include forklifts, repeated electric shocks and spraying water down their noses with high-pressure hoses. Once the animal gets to its feet, it is ushered into the slaughter chute, pronto, before it can go down again.
Jim Hightower: CASHING IN ON PAYDAY LOANS (jimhightower.com)
The Bible tells us that Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple (for charging less, by the way, than we're now assessed on our Visa and Mastercard bills).
Jim Hightower: A REAL STIMULUS PROGRAM (jimhightower.com)
Get ready, get set, stimulate! Washington is about to mail $600 checks to you, me, and nearly everyone else (unless you're poor - then you only get half that).
Naomi Alderman: Moneychangers have set up shop in my temple - a cafe has taken over the library's fiction section (books.guardian.co.uk)
Clearly no one is going to die without a library. They're not sexy. But if we keep on the way we're going, one day they will be gone.
Franklin Schneider: Doing More with Less (washingtoncitypaper.com)
I've been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was
How to write a misery memoir (books.guardian.co.uk)
Yet another tragic autobiography has been exposed as a fraud following rave reviews. John Crace offers tips to writers who want to wring a bestseller out of their dull life story.
Chris Ayres: Why Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel's videos are a YouTube hit (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)
Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel's spoof videos about their sex lives - featuring Matt Damon and a small galaxy of Hollywood stars - are an internet sensation.
'I struggle with evil' (film.guardian.co.uk)
Good guys, bad guys, confused guys - when Forest Whitaker takes a role, he takes it seriously. And as he tells Stuart Jeffries when you've got under the skin of a character, sometimes it's hard to get back out.
Len Righi: Americana artist Sara Cox makes room for career in a crowded life (The Morning Call; Posted on popmatters.com)
Sara Cox doesn't wait for the question she has been asked so many times before - how, as a mother of three, is she able to function as a singer-songwriter, find the time to chat up the media about her music and tour the country?
Katti Gray: Chuck D: Still fighting the power Š digitally (Newsday; Posted on popmatters.com)
What it looked like to rap pioneer Chuck D, who way back became convinced that digital music would be the next big wave, was the record industry's panicked fat cats lighting down to see what they might scavenge.
CHRISTIAN JOHN WIKANE: Inside the Fabulous Funk of the Brand New Heavies (Popmatters.com)
Andrew Levy tells PopMatters how there's no blues in the Brand New Heavies' rhythm since N'Dea Davenport returned.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and warmer.
Guess my hearing is going. Last night had the TV on in the background & there was an ad for KFC.
What I thought I heard was 'Toasted Rats' - turns out it was 'Toaster Wraps'.
Stars Honor In Hollywood
Johnny Grant
Politicians, movie stars and family members showed up at the Pantages Theatre Thursday for a posthumous tribute to longtime honorary Hollywood mayor Johnny Grant.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa praised Grant's efforts in revitalizing Hollywood, as did City Councilman Eric Garcetti.
Grant, who died in his penthouse residence at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel on Jan. 9 at the age of 84, will always be remembered "as the heart of Hollywood Boulevard, the dignified guardian of its gilded prestige and the human shine behind every one of its stars," Villaraigosa said.
Johnny Grant
Visits Vietnam For UNICEF
Tea Leoni
Hollywood star Tea Leoni, visiting Vietnam as a UNICEF ambassador, on Thursday kicked off a campaign to raise awareness about the plight of children suffering disabilities linked to Agent Orange.
Leoni this week visited families and health centres with children suffering birth defects linked to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical in the defoliant that the US military used here during the Vietnam war.
"The (US) public, I think, is not aware of some of the specific dioxin issues," the 42-year-old star of "Deep Impact" and "Jurassic Park 3" told reporters at the end of her five-day visit.
The UNICEF United States Fund aims to raise two million dollars this year and up to five million dollars in coming years to help Vietnamese children with dioxin-linked and other disabilities, said the group's president Caryl Stern.
Tea Leoni
Tightens Rules For Foreign Performers
China
China will be stricter on foreign performers after Icelandic singer Bjork shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" at the end of her concert in Shanghai this week, the government said Friday.
A statement by China's Culture Ministry said Bjork's outburst "broke Chinese law and hurt Chinese people's feelings."
Bjork shouted "Tibet!" after a passionate performance of her song "Declare Independence" on Sunday. The outburst drew rare public attention inside China to Beijing's often harsh rule over the Himalayan region.
The statement, posted on the Culture Ministry's Web site, also said "there is no country that admits that Tibet is an 'independent country.'"
China
Aims To Premiere Next Star Trek Movie
Vulcan, Canada
The town of Vulcan, hidden among oil wells, wheat fields and cow pastures of western Canada, is aiming to host the world premiere of the latest Star Trek movie, a spokeswoman said Friday.
The film, to be released in May 2009, will be the 11th installment of Gene Roddenberry's fictional Star Trek universe, most featuring the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the starship Enterprise crew.
This episode, under the working title Star Trek Zero, will take audiences back to Kirk's early days, before what was chronicled in the original 1960s television series.
Vulcan spokeswoman Dayna Dickens said the town sent a proposal to the film's executive producers at Paramount in September, and was told last month "they are considering it."
Vulcan, Canada
Helped Patient
Rihanna
A leukemia patient in dire need of a bone marrow transplant reportedly has found a donor after Grammy-winning singer Rihanna publicized her case.
"The English language does not have words that are adequate to thank someone for working to save your life," Lisa Gershowitz Flynn of New York wrote in an e-mail to supporters Thursday, People.com reported.
Flynn, a 41-year-old lawyer and mother of two small children, was diagnosed in November 2007 with acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. People.com said last month that doctors had told Flynn she needed to find a marrow donor within four to six weeks.
Rihanna's campaign to help Flynn sparked more than 5,000 calls and e-mails to DKMS, and about 2,000 new donors have registered. It wasn't clear how or when Flynn's 32-year-old donor registered with the organization. Flynn has said she was touched by Rihanna's efforts.
Rihanna
No "Path to 9/11" DVD
Disney
Top brass at Disney were called on Thursday to defend their decision not to release the controversial miniseries "The Path to 9/11" on DVD and to justify CEO Robert Iger's $27.7 million pay package.
"Path," a 2006 ABC miniseries critical of President Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats, was so controversial biased that leading Democrats asked Disney not to air the program. Disney, after making some hasty edits, ran it commercial-free.
At Disney's annual shareholders' meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., one mutual fund portfolio manager said it was high time Disney turned "Path" into a DVD and recouped some of the $40 million it spent on the project.
Disney
New Display
Bodleian Library
A large cash donation to Oxford University's famed Bodleian Library will allow many of its rare books to be put on public display for the first time.
Julian Blackwell is giving the library US$10 million to help redevelop the library in Oxford's historic centre. Blackwell is the president of a bookshop chain that bears his name.
A new exhibition hall will be built and a number of rare volumes will be put on rotating display. They include a Gutenberg Bible and original 13th-Century versions of the Magna Carta declaration of rights.
University leaders say it is the largest ever donation to a university library in Britain. The goal is to begin construction in 2010.
Bodleian Library
Losing Hearing
US Troops
Soldiers and Marines caught in roadside bombings and firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home in epidemic numbers with permanent hearing loss and ringing in their ears, prompting the military to redouble its efforts to protect the troops from noise.
Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terror, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.
"The numbers are staggering," said Theresa Schulz, a former audiologist with the Air Force, past president of the National Hearing Conservation Association and author of a 2004 report titled "Troops Return With Alarming Rates of Hearing Loss."
Hearing damage has been a battlefield risk ever since the introduction of explosives and artillery, and the U.S. military recognized it in Iraq and Afghanistan and issued earplugs early on. But the sheer number of injuries and their nature - particularly the high incidence of tinnitus - came as a surprise to military medical specialists and outside experts.
US Troops
Birthplace Draws Poetry Pilgrims
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound's birthplace is a two-storey white clapboard house surrounded with a wrought iron fence, surrounded again by the high hills of this central Idaho mountain town.
The poet and front man for literary modernism was born in what was then a frontier mining town on Oct. 30, 1885, a bit of accidental history some residents wouldn't mind having expunged due to Pound's radio broadcasts from fascist Italy during the Second World War that led to his being charged with 19 counts of treason in the United States. He also faced accusations of anti-Semitism.
Yet a dedicated few have renovated the house and recently opened it to the public as a cultural centre, with art exhibits and a writer's workshop. Even before that, fans of his poetry - some of whom match Pound's own gigantic stature - had been showing up on the doorstep.
They come to see the birthplace of the poet and writer who was among the earliest to cast off traditional restraints, wrote the book-length poem "Cantos" and whose enormous influence and talent helped others forge a new literary style that reflected shifting social mores at the start of the 20th century.
Ezra Pound
Confidential Files Stolen
MTV
Files containing confidential data on about 5,000 employees at MTV Networks were illegally accessed by someone outside the company, the network told employees on Friday in a memo obtained by Reuters.
When asked for comment on the contents of the memo, MTV said in a statement that the security breach occurred after an Internet connection in an MTV employee's computer was compromised.
Although it was not immediately clear whether the password-protected files were opened, the company notified law enforcement and a credit monitoring company to safeguard the identities of the affected employees, the statement said.
The company declined to provide any information about how many employees were affected or what the nature of the compromised information was.
MTV
Grand Rapids Art Museum
Andy Warhol
There was a dark side to Andy Warhol, whose colourful images of famous people and everyday objects made him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century.
Even before a woman shot and nearly killed him at his studio in 1968, Warhol was fascinated by violent death. It motivated him to create some of his most disturbing works, a number of which will be presented in a three-month exhibition of more than 100 of his prints and paintings at the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
The exhibition "Rapid Exposure: Warhol in Series" opens March 14 and is expected to draw many first-time visitors to the museum's striking, new $75 million home in the heart of Michigan's second-largest city. The concrete-and-glass structure opened in October.
Andy Warhol
Spotted Off Alaska
White Killer Whale
The white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship's crew scrambling for their cameras. The nearly mythic creature was real after all. "I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."
The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near Steller sea lion haulout sites.
It had been spotted once in the Aleutians years ago but had eluded researchers since, even though they had seen many of the more classic black and white whales over the years.
It likely is not a true albino given the coloration, said John Durban, a research biologist at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. That's probably a good thing - true albinos usually don't live long and can have health problems.
White Killer Whale
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