Paul Krugman: When Maestros Cry (NY Times)
So Greenspan was planning to talk to a bunch of monetary cranks with a sideline in anti-gay activism (or maybe it's the other way around). To do so is, of course, his right; to criticize him for his decision, and make fun of his bad judgment, is mine.
Jeff Kelly: 6 Great Movies That Were A Disaster Behind The Scenes (Cracked)
Making movies is hard. It takes hours to film one decent scene, and despite what your buddies with Vine accounts and YouTube channels probably think, there's more to editing than just adding a star wipe to an iMovie that you shot on your spiffy new tablet.
Cork is an impermeable, buoyant material, a prime-subset of bark tissue that is harvested for commercial use primarily from Quercus suber (the Cork Oak), which is endemic to southwest Europe and northwest Africa. Cork is composed of suberin, a hydrophobic substance, and because of its impermeable, buoyant, elastic, and fire retardant properties, it is used in a variety of products, the most common of which is for wine stoppers. The montado landscape of Portugal produces approximately 50% of cork harvested annually worldwide, with Corticeira Amorim being the leading company in the industry.
There are about 2,200,000 hectares of cork forest world wide; 34% in Portugal and 27% in Spain. Annual production is about 200,000 tons; 49.6% from Portugal, 30.5% from Spain, 5.8% from Morocco, 4.9% from Algeria, 3.5% from Tunisia, 3.1% Italy, and 2.6% from France.
Source
Alan J was first, and correct, with:
Portugal.
mj wrote:
I'm pretty sure it's on the Iberian Penninsula
I'm going to guess Portugal, but hedge bets with Spain as a second
possibility.
sandra in maine said:
portugal
Randall replied:
Portugal
here's a Portuguese cork oak:
Deborah responded:
Gonna WAG this - remember the story about Ferdinand the Bull - the one who didn't want to fight? He loved to hang under the cork oak and graze. Cork oaks grow in Spain and Portugal (and naturalize quite nicely in NorCal). So I'm going with Portugal.
No rain over my corner of the Universe, although the Amgen ToC riders were drenched on their way to Santa Clarita.
TGIF!
Jim from CA, retired to ID, replied:
The montado landscape of Portugal produces approximately 50% of cork harvested annually
Delinquent but not suffering Distression Daleo of Diamond Springs, Norcali responded:
Portugal is the home of the corks…Nothing about Portugee people sticking anal-retentive objects up any body orifices today!
DJ Useo answered:
Well played, Marty. I can only guess...Ireland! ;)
MAM, wrote:
Portugal
PS
Plugged Up Lois Of Oregon said:
Portugal is full of fargin' cork soakers! They say it
doesn't kill the trees, but jesus, they are skinning them
alive! It don't bear thinking about. Of course, I'm guilty
of tree-a-side myself. Just got done stacking an entire cord
of oak firewood for next winter, and boy, are my arms tired!
Gotta drive to Corvallis tomorrow to comfort my stressed out
son, who is mightily disappointed with OSU after his genetic
lab research was destroyed by contaminated materials, either
from the distributor or the incompetence of the professor.
Me thinks we be in trouble.
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.
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
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CBS begins the night with a RERUN'NCIS: The 3rd One', followed by a RERUN'CSI: One Too Many', then '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night with a RERUN'The Voice', followed by an hourlong RERUN'SNL' (from 11 January, 1997), with Kevin Spacey hosting, music by Beck.
'SNL' is the SEASON FINALE, hosted by Louis C.K., music by Rihanna.
ABC starts the night with a FRESH'Dancing With The Stars', followed by the FRESH'The Billboard Music Awards: An Insider's Guide', then a RERUN'Shark Tank'.
The CW offers an old '2½ Men', followed by another old '2½ Men', then an old 'Family Guy', followed by another old 'Family Guy'.
Faux has a RERUN'Hell's Kitchen', followed by a RERUN'Bones'.
MY has an old 'Burn Notice', followed by another old 'Burn Notice'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] Top Gear - Season 4 - Episode 3
[7:00AM] Top Gear - Season 4 - Episode 4
[8:00AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares US - Season 1 - Ep 2 - Lela's
[9:00AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares US - Season 4 - Ep 10 - Zeke's
[10:00AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares US - Season 5 - Ep 13 - Cafe Hon
[11:00AM] Doctor Who - Season 8 - Ep 8 - Mummy on the Orient Express
[12:00PM] Doctor Who - Season 8 - Ep 9 - Flatline
[1:00PM] Doctor Who - Season 8 - Ep 10 - In the Forest of the Night
[2:00PM] Doctor Who - Season 8 - Ep 11 - Dark Water
[3:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 15 - Tapestry
[4:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 16 - Birthright (Part 1)
[5:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 17 - Birthright (Part 2)
[6:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 18 - Starship Mine
[7:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 19 - Lessons
[8:00PM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 20 - The Chase
[9:00PM] Orphan Black - Season 3 - Ep 5 - Scarred by Many Past Frustrations NEW
[10:00PM] The Graham Norton Show - Season 17 - Episode 5NEW
[11:00PM] The Graham Norton Show - Season 16 - Episode 12
[12:00AM] Orphan Black - Season 3 - Ep 5 - Scarred by Many Past Frustrations
[1:00AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 15 - Tapestry
[2:00AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 16 - Birthright (Part 1)
[3:00AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 17 - Birthright (Part 2)
[4:00AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 18 - Starship Mine
[5:00AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6 - Ep 19 - Lessons (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has a FRESH'Bravo's First Looks', followed by the movie 'Legally Blonde', then the movie 'Legally Blonde', again.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Tommy Boy', followed by the movie 'Superbad'.
FX has the movie '21 Jump Street', followed by the movie 'Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl'.
History has 'Pawn Stars', another 'Pawn Stars', 'The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved', followed by a FRESH'The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved', then a FRESH'Engineering Disasters'.
IFC -
[6:00AM] WHITEST KIDS U'KNOW
[6:15AM] THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
[8:15AM] THE THREE STOOGES-FROM NURSE TO WORSE
[8:40AM] THE THREE STOOGES-GEM OF A JAM
[9:05AM] THE THREE STOOGES-G.I. WANNA HOME
[9:30AM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-LIVING WILL
[10:00AM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-TIKI LOUNGE
[10:30AM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-IDA LOSES A LEG
[11:00AM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-CHAD'S SLEEPOVER
[11:30AM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-NO MOTORCYCLES
[12:00PM] MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE-BUTTERFLIES
[12:30PM] COMEDY BANG! BANG!-MICHAEL SHEEN WEARS A PLAID BUTTON DOWN AND GREY BLAZER
[1:00PM] MARON-STROKE OF LUCK
[1:30PM] PORTLANDIA-THE STORY OF TONI AND CANDACE
[2:00PM] PORTLANDIA-THE FIANCEE
[2:30PM] PORTLANDIA-HEALTHCARE
[3:00PM] PORTLANDIA-SEA WORLD
[3:30PM] SUPER
[5:45PM] PUNISHER: WAR ZONE
[8:00PM] PREDATOR
[10:30PM] PREDATOR 2
[1:00AM] PREDATOR
[3:30AM] PREDATOR 2 (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:00AM] The Night Listener
[7:45AM] Peggy Sue Got Married
[10:00AM] Behind the Story With the Paley Center-Mad Men
[11:00AM] The Hunting Party
[1:15PM] Repo Man
[3:15PM] This Is Spinal Tap
[5:00PM] Sixteen Candles
[7:00PM] Sixteen Candles
[9:00PM] Any Given Sunday
[12:30AM] We Are Marshall
[3:30AM] A Home at the End of the World
[5:30AM] The Approval Matrix-Golden Age of TV (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'Babylon AD', followed by the movie 'Doom'.
Actor Michael Keaton addresses the audience during the SeriousFun Children's Network event at the Dolby Theatre on Thursday, May 14, 2015, in Los Angeles. Founded by actor Paul Newman in 1988, the network is a global community of 30 camps and programs serving children living with serious illnesses.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
A Russian organization that restored a Soviet-era forced-labor camp as a memorial for the victims of political repression said Friday it is facing legal action aimed at pressuring it to fold.
Viktor Shmyrov, director of the Perm-36 association, said his organization will next week face a 1.5 million ruble ($30,000) lawsuit filed by authorities in the Perm region. The case is related to a dispute over the premises of the former Perm-36 camp, which has been wrested away from Shmyrov's organization.
A surge in state-sanctioned patriotism in Russia has been paired with an official effort to downplay any unsavory passages of Russia's recent past. Positive attitudes toward the Soviet Union's former repressive communist regime, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in particular, have increased under President Vladimir Putin's rule.
Shmyrov said volunteers took over the derelict premises of Perm-36 in 2009 and turned it into a museum that drew visitors from all over the world. The camp, which was built on top of a swamp in the village of Kuchino - 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow - released its last prisoner only in 1988. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
The museum was the only one of its kind in Russia until it was forced to close earlier this year after years of pressure from the authorities.
Singer Carole King, left, performs with saxophonist Tom Scott during the SeriousFun Children's Network event at the Dolby Theatre on Thursday, May 14, 2015, in Los Angeles. Founded by actor Paul Newman in 1988, the network is a global community of 30 camps and programs serving children living with serious illnesses.
Photo by Chris Pizzello
Six abandoned kittens named after the kids in "The Brady Bunch" TV series are getting a nurturing boost from an unlikely source - a male cat with a slight neurological disorder.
The 3-week-old kittens - named Jan, Marcia, Cindy, Greg, Peter and Bobby - have been adopted by Henry, an 8-month-old male cat in the southeast Alaska community of Ketchikan.
"We have Henry playing Alice; it was the perfect match," said Heather Muench, comparing the cat's role to that of the lovable live-in housekeeper on the TV series.
Muench is providing round-the-clock care, both at her home and at her day job, Island-to-Island Veterinary Clinic in Ketchikan.
At home, she's getting lots of help from Henry, a male cat she and her husband adopted from the all-volunteer Ketchikan Humane Society. Henry's disorder affects his coordination, causing him to walk unevenly and preventing him from jumping.
A painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian sold Thursday for $50.56 million at a Christie's auction in New York, the most ever paid for his work.
"Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow and Black," a geometric oil painting made in 1929, sold at an impressionist and modern art auction for more than twice its maximum estimated value, which Christie's said was between $15 million and $25 million.
The simple yet striking painting features a white background with horizontal and vertical lines that traverse the canvas to create squares and rectangles, some of which are filled in red, blue, yellow or black.
The sale comfortably beat out the previous record set for a Mondrian -- $27.59 million for "Composition with Red, Blue and Grey," which was purchased last year.
Actress Roseanne Barr poses upon her arrival for the Life Ball at the airport in Vienna, Austria, May 15, 2015. Life Ball is Europe's largest annual AIDS charity event and takes place at the Vienna city hall on May 16, 2015.
Photo by Leonhard Foeger
In the past three days, Christie's in New York City has sold over $1 billion worth of art, a frenzied spectacle that showcases the world's rising class of uber-wealthy and its appetite for trophy art.
Wednesday's bidding was spirited at Christie's contemporary art auction highlighted by iconic works by Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and others.
The evening sale featured Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Resting," which is considered one of the British artist's most celebrated works. It depicts the ample figure of a reclining woman, every fold, curve and blemish of her naked form revealed. It sold for $56.2 million, including buyer's premium.
Wednesday's auction netted over $658 million, Christie's said.
A genetic analysis of HIV samples taken from about half the people infected in the largest HIV outbreak in Indiana history shows nearly all of them have the same strain of the virus, a finding one health expert says is a sobering reminder of how rapidly HIV can spread among intravenous drug users.
Indiana's state epidemiologist, Pam Pontones, cautioned that the findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are "very preliminary." But she said they suggest that the HIV strain detected in southeastern Indiana's outbreak was introduced there during the past six to 12 months.
As of Thursday, 154 cases of HIV have been confirmed since December in southeastern Indiana - nearly all of them in Scott County, which has been at the center of the HIV outbreak tied to needle-sharing among IV drug users. The county typically sees only about five new HIV cases a year, state health officials said.
For its analysis, the CDC studied HIV specimens from 72 people who have tested positive in the outbreak and found that 69 of them had the same strain, state Department of Health spokesman Ken Severson said.
US director Woody Allen (R) and his wife Soon Yi (L) attend the 'Irrational Man' Party during the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, 15 May 2014. The movie was presented out of competition at the festival which runs from 13 to 24 May.
Photo by Franck Robichon
The last intact section of one of Antarctica's mammoth ice shelves is weakening fast and will likely disintegrate completely in the next few years, contributing further to rising sea levels, according to a NASA study released on Thursday.
The research focused on a remnant of the so-called Larsen B Ice Shelf, which has existed for at least 10,000 years but partially collapsed in 2002. What is left covers about 625 square miles (1,600 square km), about half the size of Rhode Island.
Antarctica has dozens of ice shelves - massive, glacier-fed floating platforms of ice that hang over the sea at the edge of the continent's coast line. The largest is roughly the size of France.
Larsen B is located in the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends toward the southern tip of South America and is one of two principal areas of the continent where scientists have documented the thinning of such ice formations.
Dancers of the Oneida Native American tribe dance group perform a dance during a rehearsal prior to the Karl May Festival Days in Radebeul, eastern Germany, Friday, May 15, 2015. German writer Karl May, author of adventure novels set in the American Wild West as well as in the Orient, lived and worked in Radebeul, a suburb of Dresden.
Photo by Jens Meyer
Amid a worsening drought, California may have inadvertently opened the floodgates for the wealthiest water wasters.
When state officials last week adopted regulations imposing the first-ever mandatory water restrictions on California cities, they allowed urban water agencies to exempt supplies for agriculture use from the cutbacks. That's because farms are not subject to the executive order issued by Gov. Jerry Brown on April 1. Now, some environmentalists fear that will allow owners of lushly landscaped residential estates that sport, say, an avocado grove to escape reductions in consumption that range as high as 36 percent. Those wealthy communities already rank as California's biggest water hogs, consuming 10 times the water per person of some cities.
"The code that defines commercial agriculture is quite broad, and you could drive a Mack truck through this loophole," said Tracy Quinn, a water policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles. "Even large residential landscapes with a few avocado trees or lemon trees where the owner sells a bushel here or there could be deemed commercial agriculture."
If big residential properties are exempted from the reductions and California doesn't meet a mandatory 25 percent statewide cutback in water consumption, regulators could issue further restrictions that would hit lower-income people the hardest, Quinn said.
"That will likely come from communities that already have had to conserve more to offset what is a lifestyle choice for some of the wealthiest Californians," she said.
Boylesque performer Jett Adore from the U.S. performs on stage during the "Yodeling Lederhosen Boylesque Gala" at the Boylesque Festival in Vienna, Austria, May 15, 2015. Picture taken May 15, 2015.
Photo by Leonhard Foeger
Advocacy groups seeking to get the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles to Athens expressed disappointment Thursday after Greece's culture minister said he would not launch a court challenge for the famous collection.
The sculptures, which for more than 2,000 years decorated the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens, were removed more than two centuries ago by Lord Elgin, a Scottish nobleman, and are on display at the London museum.
Culture Minister Nikos Xydakis on Wednesday said Athens would not seek court action against the museum but preferred a "diplomatic route."
Dennis Menos of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures said the decision by the new government in Athens had "devastated the Greek position."
A three week old Red-Bellied Lemur hangs on to its mother at Anna Ryder Richardson's Welsh Zoo in Tenby, Wales, Britain May 15, 2015. The zoo has waited five years for a baby lemur to be born as the animals prove difficult to rear in captivity.
Photo by Rebecca Naden
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