Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Terry Moore: How to Tie Your Shoes (TED Talks)
Terry Moore found out he'd been tying his shoes the wrong way his whole life. In the spirit of TED, he takes the stage to share a better way. (Historical note: This was the very first 3-minute audience talk given from the TED stage, in 2005.)
Alison Flood: The underrated books whose reputation you want raised (Guardian)
It's Carter Beats the Devil for me; but which are the titles you always tell people they simply must get into?
Rachel Maddow Show: "'Why we did it' Part 1, US thirsty for energy"
"Guess what: it was all about the oil, after all. (When we went in the only building we protected - not the museums or anything else - was the Oil Ministry.) I love the interviewee who notes that it would have been a lot cheaper - and destroyed far fewer lives (as in . . . none?) - just to buy the oil than to invade and occupy the country for 10 years." - Andrew Tobias
Alexis Petridis: "Youth subcultures: what are they now?" (Guardian)
Mods, punks, soulboys, metallers, goths, hippies: there was a time when young people made it clear what tribe and music they were into by the way they dressed. Not any more.
Tshepo Mokoena: Why I'm taking my Spotify playlist public (Guardian)
By keeping our guiltiest musical pleasures secret, private listening features have forced an entire generation to live double lives.
2Cellos Cover "Thunderstruck" by the rock band AC/DC (YouTube)
2Cellos consists of young Croatian cellists Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser.
SOC2014 PastPresentFuture (Vimeo)
"This wordless sequence is a tribute to awesome movie camera shots from the past hundred yearsand the cameras and operators who shot them. It was created specifically for the Society of Camera Operators 2014 Lifetime Achievement Awards. It left an impression on those who saw it on the big screen there, as it would on anyone who loves the cinema." - Neatorama
Ryan Broderick: Did You Know That High Schoolers Are Sharing Absolutely Adorable #Promposals On Instagram? (BuzzFeed)
Dang, who knew teenagers were so romantic these days?
Alex Santosa: Your Fat is Why Your Brain is So Dumb (Neatorama)
Now here's a good news you can use: turns out that exercise works just as well. When the researchers put the obese mice on a daily treadmill regimen, they noticed that after 12 weeks, these mice have lost significant amount of belly fat and did better on cognitive tests as compared to sedentary mice.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
BartCop
Hello Bartcop fans,
As you all know the untimely passing of Terry was unexpected, even by
him. We all knew he had cancer but we all thought he had some years
left. So some of us who have worked closely with him over the years are
scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. My job, among other
things, is to establish communications with the Bartcop community and
provide email lists and groups for those who might put something
together. Those who want to play an active roll in something coming from
this, or if you are one of Bart's pillars, should send an email to
active@bartcop.com.
So - to let you know what's going on, the guestbook on bartcop.com is
still open for those who want to write something in memory of Bart.
I did an interview on Netroots Radio about Bart's passing
( www.stitcher.com/s?eid=32893545 )
The most active open discussion is on Bart's Facebook page.
( www.facebook.com/bartcop )
You can listen to Bart's theme song here
or here.
( www.bartcop.com/blizing-saddles.mp3 )
( youtu.be/MySGAaB0A9k )
We have opened up the radio show archives which are now free. Listen to
all you want.
( bartcop.com/members )
Bart's final wish was to pay off the house mortgage for Mrs. Bart who is
overwhelmed and so very grateful for the support she has received.
Anyone wanting to make a donation can click on this the yellow donate
button on bartcop.com
But - I need you all to help keep this going. This note
isn't going to directly reach all of Bart's fans. So if you can repost
it on blogs and discussion boards so people can sign up then when we
figure out what's next we can let more people know. This list is just
over 600 but like to get it up to at least 10,000 pretty quick. So
here's the signup link for this email list.
( mailman.bartcop.com/listinfo/bartnews )
Marc Perkel
Thanks, Marc!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, breezy, and a bit cooler.
ASCAP to Honor
Tom Petty
Tom Petty will be honored by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) with the Founders award during the org's 31st annual Pop Music Awards.
The event, which celebrates the songwriters and publishers of ASCAP's most performed pop songs of 2013, will be held April 23 at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles.
He joins past recipients including Ashford and Simpson, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson, Carly Simon, Stevie Wonder and Neil Young.
Grammy-winning band Fun will also receive the ASCAP Vanguard award, which recognizes the impact of musical genres that help shape the future of American music.
Tom Petty
Golden Rule
Gay Pride Parade
The Catholic League will be allowed to march with an anti-gay-marriage banner in New York City's annual gay-pride parade, organizers said on the heels of a St. Patrick's Day parade prohibition on gay-rights signs and subsequent boycott that drew widespread attention.
Parade organizer David Studinski said Thursday he has no problem with Catholic League President Bill Donohue's plan to participate in the June 29 parade.
"His group's presence affirms the need for this year's pride theme, 'We Have Won When We're One,'" Studinski said in a statement. "Straight is great - as long as there's no hate."
Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the gay-rights group GLAAD, said several straight and Catholic organizations have previously marched alongside LGBT groups, according to Newsday.
Gay Pride Parade
3 Sons Create New Song
Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison's three sons are all musicians but never really got to play music with their dad - until now.
Wesley, Roy Jr. and Alex Orbison have helped create a new song by their father that will appear on the 25th anniversary reissue and expansion of Orbison's final album, "Mystery Girl." They found an old vocal track for a song called "The Way is Love" originally recorded on a boombox and were able to reclaim it using technology that had to be created to accomplish the work. They then added new instrumentation with the help of another son of a music legend, co-producer John Carter Cash.
"It really brought us closer together in a lot of ways," said Alex Orbison, 38, who contributed drums and backing vocals to the track. "We were able to finish it up and get it out by Father's Day, too, which was obviously special to us."
"Mystery Girl" will be re-released May 20 with "The Way is Love" one of nine previously unheard songs. Alex Orbison also directed a documentary. Orbison was going through a career renaissance at the time he released "Mystery Girl." The "Oh, Pretty Woman" singer had just earned a new round of attention working with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty in The Travelling Wilburys and was excited about the new album.
Roy Orbison
Italian Nun Becomes Pop Sensation
Italy's "The Voice"
A Catholic nun has become an overnight pop sensation after stunning the jury of Italy's "The Voice" television talent show with her version of the Alicia Keys song "No One".
Sister Christina Scuccia, a 25-year-old Sicilian, bopped about on the stage in her black habit and a large cross necklace on Wednesday night's show, sparking wild cheers from the audience and stunned reactions from the four judges.
The nun, who has an easy smile and is a member of the Ursuline Sisters of the Holy Family, said: "I came here because I have a gift, and I want to share that gift." One of the judges, Italian rapper J-Ax, said he was "moved to tears."
She said she had been inspired to go on the show by Pope Francis, who "told us to come out" of our convents and spread the word of God.
Italy's "The Voice"
Noah's Ark
Bill Hemmer
The whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 remain a mystery, as wall-to-wall cable news coverage enters its 12th day - however, one anchor suggests it might never be found.
Fox News host Bill Hemmer (R-Not All There) made the shocking claim on "America's Newsroom" Wednesday that rescuers' attempts may be in vain as "it took us 2,000 years to find Noah's Ark."
"So, what, it took us 100 years to find the Titanic?" Hemmer asked aviation attorney Salvatore Lagonia. "It took us 2,000 years to find Noah's Ark. Do we ever find flight 370?"
Despite Hemmer's quip, the biblical ship has never been definitively found, though researchers have made guesses as to its whereabouts.
Bill Hemmer
Halts Auction
Paul McCartney
Lawyers for Paul McCartney have stopped the auctioning of clothing and a lyric sketch that were due to hit the block this week. The family of the Beatle's now-deceased housekeeper and nanny, Rose Martin, had put up the items - a cape and a suit once worn by McCartney and a scrap of paper with three lines of lyrics - but the Beatle said that they were not theirs to sell. Martin's family had claimed that McCartney's late wife Linda had given them the apparel three decades ago, according to the Telegraph. They were hoping get £30,000 (about US $49,500) from the auction to give to the housekeeper's grandchildren.
But McCartney and his team said that the items did not, in fact, belong to Martin's family. A representative for Omega Auctions - which is also auctioning the Beatles' Help! jackets alongside a piano McCartney and John Lennon played around that time - said that McCartney's lawyers told the auctioneers that the Beatle would never have given away clothing. Because both Rose Martin and Linda McCartney have passed away, no one can corroborate the truth.
The cape was expected to fetch between £10,000 and £15,000 (approximately $16,500 and $25,000), while the auction house had valued the suit at £10,000. The lyric sheet contained the lines, "Baby, you couldn't have done a worse thing to me, If you'd taken an arrow and run it right through me," and was estimated to garner £1,000 to £2,000 ($1,650 to $3,300).
The auction is going on without the clothing items and includes hundreds of Beatles-related items, and its catalog is online. In 2012, the auction house previously sold Elvis Presley's Bible for approximately $94,000 and offered up the King's stained underwear, though those did not sell. One year prior, it managed to find someone with an extra $31,000 to blow on one of John Lennon's teeth.
Paul McCartney
Recovered In France
Rembrandt
A stolen Rembrandt masterpiece valued at more than $5 million has been found in Nice and returned to its rightful owners after 15 years in the wilderness.
The haunting chiaroscuro oil painting, "Child with a Soap Bubble," was raided from the Draguignan Museum in July 1999 by robbers who slipped in through an adjacent library amid celebrations for the Bastille Day holiday.
Authorities recovered the 17th-century work Tuesday inside a Nice home and returned it to curator Jeanine Bussieres Thursday in an emotional ceremony.
Two suspects have been detained.
Rembrandt
Off-Shoring Animation
DreamWorks
Shrek is heading to Shanghai. DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind the gentle green ogre and the "Kung Fu Panda" movies, is partnering with the Chinese investment fund CMC Capital Partners to build a $2.4 billion entertainment complex in China's business capital, the company said Thursday.
The "DreamCenter" will have a 500-seat IMAX cinema with international film festivals and red carpet events in mind, bars, restaurants and performance venues, the companies said. It will also showcase a "Dream Avenue" live-theater district.
"This will become the world's third great urban center of entertainment and arts alongside New York's Broadway and London's West End," DreamWorks Animation chief executive Jeffrey "Sparky" Katzenberg said in announcing the project in Shanghai.
It's the latest effort by a Hollywood studio to plant a flag in China, whose exploding film development has made it one of the most important foreign markets. Shanghai is also home to the upcoming theme park Shanghai Disneyland, which is set to open in 2015.
DreamWorks
"E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial"
Atari
Organizers say a planned dig into a New Mexico landfill for a rumoured cache of what some consider the worst Atari video game of all time is expected to proceed despite state environmental regulators' concerns.
Fuel Entertainment and LightBox Interactive are seeking to excavate an old Alamogordo landfill that reportedly was a dumping ground for "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" game cartridges.
Jonathan Chinn, an executive producer at Los Angeles-based LightBox, said Thursday that the search hasn't been halted.
"E.T." the video game, inspired by the hit 1982 movie, is said to have contributed to Atari's decline.
Atari
Summer Of 2012
Solar Storm
In the summer of 2012, when all the hype about the supposed Dec. 21 Mayan Apocalypse was really starting to kick into high-gear, it seems that we only barely avoided a real catastrophe, when three solar eruptions in late July combined to produce a solar storm that could have caused chaos if it had hit Earth.
As scientists monitor the sun for any potentially-dangerous space weather events, it's typically the most powerful solar flares - the X-class flares - that get the most attention. These are the ones that throw off powerful blasts of high-energy particles, as well as immense coronal mass ejections which can cause intense geomagnetic storms when they impact on Earth's magnetic field. Both of these effects can take a toll on our technologies, especially on orbiting satellites and spacecraft, but also on power grids and electronics on the Earth's surface.
One of the most famous of these events, known as the Carrington Event, happened in early September 1859, when a solar flare blasted out from the sun that scientists estimate was an X45-class (when the scale of the different levels, C, M and X are typically ranked from 0-9). It was the most powerful solar flare ever recorded. It caused highly-active auroras that extended much farther away from the polar regions than they they usually do, and it disrupted telegraph service across Europe and North America, with some telegraph operators actually getting shocks from their equipment due to the charge the solar storm induced along the telegraph lines.
However, although these really big flares are definitely a threat to us, a new study is saying that we have to start looking at smaller solar flares as potentially being bigger threats, because their effects can combine together to produce something approaching a Carrington-level event. This isn't just speculation or modeling on the researcher's part, though. Such an event happened in July 2012, but it managed to miss Earth by 9 days. That may seem like a pretty wide margin, but 9 days represents only 2.5 per cent of our year, which is cutting it really close.
"Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous," said study co-author Janet Luhmann, a UC Berkeley physicist who is part of the team that works with the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) that detects these eruptions, in a statement.
Solar Storm
Wins Diagram Prize For Oddest Book Title
'How to Poo on a Date'
A guide to coping with an awkward romantic moment has been awarded a prize for the year's oddest book title.
Humorous self-help book "How to Poo on a Date: The Lovers' Guide to Toilet Etiquette" triumphed Friday in the quirky Diagram Prize.
Organizers said the book, published by Prion Press, received 30 per cent of votes in an online ballot. It beat other finalists including "Are Trout South African" and "Working Class Cats: The Bodega Cats of New York City."
Previous winners include "Bombproof Your Horse," ''Living With Crazy Buttocks" and "Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes."
'How to Poo on a Date'
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