Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Health Care Nightmares (NY Times)
Obamacare is doing just fine. But America is not, thanks to the ugliness brought out into the open by the debate on health reform.
Andrew Tobias: The Stop Hillary PAC
If there's a primary, I will be neutral. Until then, I'm a proud contributor to READY FOR HILLARY. Has the country ever had a potential candidate more prepared and qualified?
Tim Jonze: Abba on drugs, Eminem and why writing great pop is a job for young people (Guardian)
In 1974 Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest. Forty years on, they are one of the best-loved and most respected bands in pop history. Björn Ulvaeus and Frida Lyngstad talk about sadness, jealousy and why they don't rule out recording together again.
Danny Leigh: "The Raid 2's director: 'The nicer the place the more I want to destroy it'"
The Raid, a low-budget Indonesian martial arts thriller, was a surprise hit two years ago. And, bizarrely, it was made by a Welshman. Now back with a sequel, Gareth Evans talks about his unlikely journey from the Brecon Beacons to Jakarta - and explains the secret of his success.
Peter Bradshaw: "The Raid 2 review - Owww! Whoa!" (Guardian)
Gareth Evans's second Jakarta-set martial-arts flick is as astonishing as the first. … Evans opens a family-sized can of whupass in your face, having shaken it up well in advance.
John Cheese: 4 Benefits of Your Job That Are More Important Than Money (Cracked)
As you get older, jobs become more than just a means of paying your public nudity fines and meeting the terms of your probation. They're a vital lifeline to precious commodities that have nothing to do with money, like ...
Jude Morgan: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Shakespeare (Huffington Post)
1. Shakespeare wasn't the only Shakespeare in the theatre. ?His brother Edmund, sixteen years his junior, became an actor in London too, though without making much of a mark. His death at the age of twenty-seven was followed by a funeral in St Saviour's Church, Southwark, which was an expensive one - indicating a local relative with money. Which brings us to...
Eddie Deezen: "Curly of the Three Stooges: The Funniest Guy in the World" (Neatorama)
Curly was rushed to the hospital, not knowing that his movie career was over. Curly's older brother, Shemp, replaced him in the act and in the films. … As Curly was now "retired" and without any income, brothers Moe and Shemp volunteered to give a percentage of their weekly pay to their kid brother. Larry Fine, although not related, immediately offered to give a portion of his salary to his old partner, too.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
wrote:
, said:
answered:
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Michelle took the day off.
David E Suggests
Water Saving Tips
David
Thanks, Dave!
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
Back to sunny and seasonal.
George Polk Journalism Award
Greenwald and Poitras
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the U.S. journalists who reported on spy agency analyst Edward Snowden's leaks exposing mass government surveillance, returned to the United States on Friday for the first time since revealing the programs in 2013.
Greenwald and Poitras flew into New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on the same flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to receive a George Polk journalism award for their reports on how the U.S. government has secretly gathered information on millions of Americans, among other revelations.
Their reporting on the leaks, which began last June, has sparked international debate over the limits of government surveillance and prompted President Barack Obama to introduce curbs to the spying powers of the National Security Agency earlier this year.
Poitras, an American citizen who lives in Berlin, has said U.S. authorities have detained and questioned her dozens of times when re-entering the United States and seized and copied her cellphone, laptop and notebooks.
Greenwald and Poitras
Keeping King Documents
Harry Belafonte
Singer and activist Harry Belafonte will get to keep three of Martin Luther King's documents that the King estate had blocked him from selling.
Lawyers announced a confidential settlement Friday between Belafonte and the estate letting Belafonte retain possession of the documents. No other terms were announced, and the lawyers refused to comment further.
Belafonte sued the civil rights leader's estate in October in federal court in Manhattan after being blocked from auctioning the documents. The papers are an outline of a Vietnam War speech by King, notes to a speech King never got to deliver in Memphis, Tenn., and a condolence letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson to King's wife after his 1968 assassination.
Belafonte's lawsuit said King and his widow, Coretta Scott King, gave Belafonte a number of items. Court papers said Belafonte had held the Vietnam War speech outline since 1967, when King left it behind after working on it in Belafonte's apartment. It said the Memphis speech notes were found in King's suit pocket after he was assassinated. According to the lawsuit, Coretta Scott King offered the notes to Belafonte but he suggested they instead be given to one of King's longest-serving confidants. When that man died in 1979, his widow delivered the notes to Belafonte, it said.
Harry Belafonte
Egypt Trial
Al-Jazeera
Egyptian prosecutors presented their first evidence Thursday to back up charges that three journalists from the Al-Jazeera satellite news network and their co-defendants participated in terrorism, playing to the court an assortment of videos found in their possession. They included news clips about an animal hospital with donkeys and horses, and another about Christian life in Egypt.
Defense lawyers - and even the judge - dismissed the videos as irrelevant, while defendants shouted from the dock that the trial was "a complete joke" and "an embarrassment to Egypt."
The three journalists, award-winning Australian correspondent Peter Greste, Canadian-Egyptian acting bureau chief Mohammed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohammed, are accused of being part of a terrorist group and airing falsified footage intended to damage Egyptian national security. Egyptian authorities accuse Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera of providing a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government has branded a terrorist organization.
"This is a politicized trial and a politicized judge," Fahmy shouted from the courtroom cage where defendants are traditionally held during trials. He said prosecutors had told him privately that he and his co-defendants "are paying the price" for tensions between Egypt and Qatar.
"I want to get out of this place! ... I am going to expose all of this!" he shouted. "There are crimes against humanity taking place. Nothing is right in this system."
Al-Jazeera
Private Letters
Elia Kazan
As he told John Steinbeck, who wrote East of Eden, Kazan struggled to find a male lead for the film adaptation until he saw the then-unknown Dean. Kazan wrote his wife Molly at the same time that "he takes to movies like it was his medium. Like he owned it."
I looked thru a lot of kids before settling on this Jimmy Dean. He hasn't Brando's stature, but he's a good deal younger and is very interesting, has balls and eccentricity and a "real problem" somewhere in his guts, I don't know what or where. He's a little bit of a bum, but he's a real good actor and I think he's the best of a poor field. Most kids who become actors at nineteen or twenty or twenty-one are very callow and strictly from N.Y. Professional school. Dean has got a real mean streak and a real sweet streak.
I had an awful time with the girl. Terrible. The young girls are worse than the young boys. My god, they are nothing. Nothing has happened to them or else they're bums. Abra is a great part. I hope you don't die now. I want to use Julie Harris. Do you think I'm nuts? The screen play depends so on her last scene with Adam and on her strength, that I have to have a real, real actress. I couldn't find one aged twenty. They're nothing. Proms, dresses, beaus and all that, but nothing for my last scene. Finally I made a photographic test of Julie and she looks twenty when her face is in movement, I think. I'll just have to keep her face in movement. She's a marvelous actress. She is not Abra the way we saw her, but jeezuz I was stuck.
One pro thing. She and Jimmy Dean look fine together. They look like People, not actors. I'm real pleased with that part of it. Two people. Dean has the advantage of never having been seen on the screen.
Elia Kazan
Dodgers Channel Shutout
Time Warner
After decades of forcing consumers to pay for channels they don't want, the pay-TV industry is strongly resisting Time Warner Cable's efforts to make subscribers of all its rivals pony up $4 to $5 a month for a Dodgers channel.
All eyes are currently on satellite heavyweight DirecTV, whose 1.2 million Los Angeles customers give it a roughly 30% share of the local pay-TV market, slightly less than Time Warner's estimated one-third market share.
DirecTV says it would be happy to provide the channel to anyone who wants it, but so far has rejected Time Warner's insistence that all customers take it. Dish Network, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse reportedly are standing pat until DirecTV either prevails or caves.
Imagine if Cosmopolitan magazine made subscribers also take Popular Mechanics or if buyers of "The Poky Little Puppy" also had to purchase "Fifty Shades of Grey." That's what pay-TV customers have had to stomach for years.
By next year, the average monthly cable bill will reach $123, or $1,476 a year, according to NPD Group, a market researcher. The typical subscriber, meanwhile, watches only about 17 channels on a regular basis, based on estimates from the ratings firm Nielsen.
Time Warner
Links Fracking To Earthquakes
Ohio
Recent small earthquakes in Ohio were likely triggered by fracking, state regulators said on Friday, a new link that could have implications for oil and gas drilling in the Buckeye State and beyond.
In the strongest wording yet from the state linking energy drilling and quakes, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) said that injecting sand, water and chemicals deep underground to help release oil and gas may have produced tremors in Poland Township last month.
The statement, in which the department announced stricter rules for oil and gas exploration in areas where seismic activity has occurred, comes after a steep rise in earthquakes in Ohio and other areas where intense drilling has taken place.
Last month, drilling and fracking was suspended near the site of two earthquakes in Poland Township in the northeast of the state, 70 miles southeast of Cleveland, the first of which was magnitude 3.0, enough to be felt for miles around.
Ohio
Mammoth Move
Serbia
Serbian archaeologists on Friday used heavy machinery to move a female mammoth skeleton - believed to be one million years old - from an open mine pit where it was unearthed nearly five years ago.
Workers with cranes and bulldozers worked carefully for hours at the Kostolac coal mine in eastern Serbia to transfer the mammoth, known as Vika, to an exhibition area several kilometers away.
Chief archaeologist Miomir Korac told The Associated Press that preparations had lasted several months. He said that archaeologists secured Vika in a 60-ton structure of rubber and sand to avoid any damage.
Serbian archaeologists say Vika is a southern mammoth, or mammuthus meridionalis, one of the oldest species found in Europe, which originated from northern Africa and did not have fur.
Serbia
Road Trip
T.rex
The rare and nearly intact skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex that roamed the earth 65 million years ago set off from Montana on Friday on a cross-country road trip, its first, bound for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
The fossil of the 38-foot-long carnivore, found on federal lands in Montana in 1988, has played a starring role in scientific research at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman since its excavation by paleontologists led by curator Jack Horner.
The seven-ton skeleton of a dinosaur that may have been an opportunistic eater rather than a stone-cold killer is to be mounted at the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibit that will open in 2019 and is expected to attract 8 million visitors a year, Horner said. The dinosaur is on loan to the Smithsonian for 50 years.
The so-called Wankel T.rex - named after Kathy Wankel who discovered it - was about 18-years-old when it died and is considered second for extensiveness and preservation only to "Sue," the famed T.rex at The Field Museum in Chicago, he said. Its gender is not known.
T.rex
International Space Station
Cherry Tree
A cosmic mystery is uniting monks and scientists in Japan after a cherry tree grown from a seed that orbited the Earth for eight months bloomed years earlier than expected -- and with very surprising flowers.
The four-year-old sapling -- grown from a cherry stone that spent time aboard the International Space Station (ISS) -- burst into blossom on April 1, possibly a full six years ahead of Mother Nature's normal schedule.
Its early blooming baffled Buddhist brothers at the ancient temple in central Japan where the tree is growing.
The wonder pip was among 265 harvested from the celebrated "Chujo-hime-seigan-zakura" tree, selected as part of a project to gather seeds from different kinds of cherry trees at 14 locations across Japan.
The stones were sent to the ISS in November 2008 and came back to Earth in July the following year with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, after circling the globe 4,100 times.
Cherry Tree
In Memory
Sue Townsend
British comic author Sue Townsend, who created angst-ridden teenage diarist Adrian Mole and sent Queen Elizabeth II into exile on a public housing estate, has died after suffering a stroke. She was 68.
Townsend left school at 15, married at 18, and by 23 was a single mother of three. She worked in a factory, in shops and at other jobs - and wrote, honing her style for years before breaking through into publication.
Her first novel, "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4," was published in 1982 and was hailed as a comic masterpiece. Written in the voice of a gauche but observant teenager, it fused the acute awkwardness of adolescence with the zeitgeist of Thatcher-era Britain.
The beleaguered teen bemoaning his dull suburban life and pining for unattainable classmate Pandora struck a chord with millions of readers. "I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes from living in a cul-de-sac," Adrian lamented early on.
She said her teenage protagonist "looks at the adult world in cold, stern eyes. He judges them, and they're often found failing."
The book was a huge success, selling more than 20 million copies around the world, and Townsend followed Adrian Mole into adulthood in a series of books, several of which were adapted for the stage, radio or television. The most recent, "Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years," was published in 2009.
Penguin said a 10th Adrian Mole book - with a working title of "Pandora's Box" - had been slated for publication later this year. It was unclear how much had been written before Townsend's death.
Townsend's work combined satire of social injustices and a strong sense of life's absurdity with warmth for her characters - a distinctive combination that won her millions of fans.
Another favourite with readers was "The Queen and I," which envisioned a future in which a republican British government banished the royal family to live among the common people - a situation they coped with surprisingly well.
In later years Townsend, who had diabetes, used a wheelchair and was registered blind. In 2009 she received a transplanted kidney from her son, and she suffered a stroke in 2013.
Townsend is survived by her husband, Colin Broadway, and four children.
Sue Townsend
In Memory
Jesse Winchester
Folksinger Jesse Winchester, an American-born songwriter who established himself in Montreal after dodging the Vietnam War draft, has died of cancer. He was 69.
Winchester was born in Louisiana and raised around the American south, but didn't begin his music career in earnest until moving to Quebec in 1967.
There, he began performing solo in coffee houses around Montreal and the East Coast, earning a reputation for his wry country-folk.
He was a protege of the Band's Robbie Robertson, who produced and played guitar on Winchester's self-titled debut album and brought Band-mate Levon Helm along to play drums and mandolin.
Winchester's second album, 1972's "Third Down, 110 to Go" featured a few tracks produced by Todd Rundgren. Winchester continued to release material at a steady clip until 1981's "Talk Memphis" set off a seven-year break from recording - even though that album contained Winchester's biggest U.S. hit, "Say What."
Although large-scale mainstream success mostly eluded Winchester, his songs were covered by an array of luminaries including Elvis Costello, Anne Murray, Wynona Judd, Emmylou Harris, the Everly Brothers and Joan Baez.
Some of his best-loved songs include "Yankee Lady," "Biloxi," "The Brand New Tennessee Waltz" and "Mississippi, You're On My Mind."
After living in Canada for decades, Winchester moved back to the U.S. early last decade.
In September 2012, artists including James Taylor, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill and Jimmy Buffett performed covers of Winchester's tunes for a tribute album called "Quiet About It."
Winchester reportedly managed to record a final album called "A Reasonable Amount of Trouble," due out this summer.
Jesse Winchester
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