'TBH Politoons'
Thanks, again, Tim!
Entertainment Report
Alex's
Conservatives find something new to bitch and moan about
Disney has again come under attack from conservatives as a result of the
decision by its Miramax unit to back Michael Moore's (Bowling for
Columbine) next documentary, Fahrenheit 911. On Wednesday, Steve Wood, who
operates the Republican website GOPUSA.com, took note of the fact that
some conservatives are talking about boycotting Disney products and
cancelling vacations at the Disney theme parks, "and I'd have to say that
we will certainly think twice now about spending our hard-earned money at
Disney, knowing that it might be used to support someone like Michael
Moore. ... Disney has every right to fund Michael Moore, but we also have
every right to take that into consideration when we choose how to spend
our disposable income." Wah, wah, wah
~~ Alex
Thanks, Alex!
Michael Dare!
Selected Saturday Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
'June Gloom' seems to be starting a bit early, but that's OK. Means the mornings are overcast & as the day progresses, the sun will eventually appear.
Stopped by Reptiles Unlimited for the weekly supply of fresh crickets.
The Alaskan grandmother is off on a trip to France. She's also a life-long republican who believes chimpy doesn't fart, or curse & knows Jeebus personally. For once, I'm looking forward to stories on her return.
Tonight, Saturday, CBS opens the evening with another 'The Price Is Right Million Dollar Spectacular', followed by the Season Finale of 'The District', and then
the Season Finale of 'The Agency'.
NBC, which has thrown away this night all year, continues to do so with a RERUN 'The Most Outrageous Game Show Moments 5', followed by a RERUN
'Law & Order', and then a RERUN 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'.
The only thing FRESH on NBC tonight is the Season Finale of 'Saturday Night Live' - Dan Ackroyd hosts & Beyonce Knowles provides the music.
ABC regurgitates - er - RERUNs 'Tim Allen Presents: A User's Guide To Home Improvement', followed by the movie 'Charlie's Angels'.
The WB has the movie 'While You Were Sleeping'.
Faux has the usual 'Cops', followed by 'Cops', and then 'America's Most Wanted'.
Season Finale of 'MAD TV'.
UPN here has baseball, with the Marlins visiting Rupert's Doggers.
Anyone have any opinions?
Or reviews?
(See below for addresses)
Free Tickets
Jenna & The Stones
It's only rock 'n' roll, but questions are being raised about eight Rolling Stones concert tickets totaling $2,533 for President Bush's daughter Jenna.
On Thursday Bush released the financial disclosure form for himself and his family for 2002, reporting a net worth of at least $8.8 million and up to $21.9 million.
In the filing, Bush reported accepting six Rolling Stones concert tickets from the boss of Sony Entertainment at the time, Tommy Mottola, and two Stones tickets from the Secret Service detail in Austin, Texas. They were for his daughter Jenna.
"Jenna is a fan of the Rolling Stones and expressed interest in buying some tickets to the concert. Mr. Mottola then offered to give them to her as a gift," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
He went on to explain that the other tickets were birthday gifts for Jenna from her personal agents.
Jenna & The Stones
Celebrity Jamie Farr watches his shot off the first tee of the National Golf Club of Kansas City course Friday, May 15, 2003, in Parkville, Mo. Farr is playing in the Bayer Advantage Celebrity Pro-Am. This is the only celebrity pro-am on the Champions Tour this season.
Photo by Orlin Wagner
Sent Greetings & gifts
Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson sent greetings and gifts to the runaway Texas lawmakers.
Fifty-one Texas Democrats were holed up at a hotel in Ardmore, Oklahoma -- beyond the authority of Texas law enforcement.
They'd been absent from the state House all week, denying the body a quorum and bringing House business to a standstill. They were protesting a Republican-backed congressional redistricting bill that would increase the number of G-O-P-dominated districts at the Democrats' expense.
A few of the Democrats say they received red bandanas and whiskey from Nelson. The Texas singer also sent a note saying: "Way to go. Stand your ground."
Willie Nelson
The Information One-Stop
Moose & Squirrel
Hoboken Names Post Office
Francis Albert Sinatra
Just over five years after the death of this Hudson County community's most famous native son, local and federal officials gathered Friday to rename the main post office in honor of Francis Albert Sinatra.
Postmaster Arthur Tate helped the singer's daughter, Nancy, unveil a bronze plaque that will be affixed to the building on River Street.
"My Dad has his picture hanging in every restaurant, dry cleaner and bar in town. I'm not sure he'd want his picture hanging in the post office," she said.
"I have to tell you, although Daddy was very respectful of the U.S. Postal Service, he wasn't one of their best customers. He was taught by a certain group never to write anything down."
Francis Albert Sinatra
Skiers perform aerials during the opening of Europe's largest indoor ski centre inside a vast entertainment and retail complex constructed by U.S. developer Mills Corporation in Arroyomolinos, outside Madrid May 16, 2003. The 1.4 million square foot (130,000 square metre) complex near Madrid, called 'Madrid Xanadu', has 220 shops and restaurants as well as a 15-screen cinema, indoor go-karts and bowling. Its centrepiece is an 820-foot-long (250-metre) ski slope, lined with 100 fake pine trees which will allow skiers and snowboarders to be able to slalom down pristine man-made snow amid artificial fir trees and rocks and imagine they are in the Alps even on a scorching hot Madrid day.
Photo by Paul Hanna
Creates Video Game
U.S. Army
The U.S. Army has found a powerful new weapon in training soldiers for the dirty and dangerous business of urban warfare: video games.
For the past year, the Army has been handing out free games as part of its recruiting efforts, but in the coming months it will also turn to a video game to train squad leaders in real-life combat tactics.
The combat simulator, which Santa Monica, California-based Pandemic showed off for reporters at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, puts players at the head of two light-infantry teams locked in a running firefight in a vaguely Middle Eastern city.
In developing the game, which is now being spun off as a mass-market release titled "Full Spectrum Warrior, Pandemic said it was careful to fictionalize details of the game's setting and to make sure that the U.S. soldiers acted with discipline and professionalism.
Separately, the U.S. Army said that more than 1.1 million people have gone through "basic training" in its "America's Army" personal computer game, which debuted at the Expo in Los Angeles last year.
U.S. Army
Man With An Opinion
Wim Wenders
German film director Wim Wenders said he was wondering whether to pack his bags and leave the United States because of the poisonous "almost McCarthyist" atmosphere there.
Wenders, who lives in the United States and was at the Cannes film festival to present his new film "The Soul of Man", said "right now I really feel like it" when asked whether he wanted to leave the country.
There was an "almost McCarthyist" response to critics of resident George W. Bush's administration, he said. "Perhaps I should stay," Wenders said. "I don't know, I'm split about it."
Wenders previously quit New York in the early 1980s and gave back his "green card" working and residence permit because of anger over the administration of former US president Ronald Reagan.
Wim Wenders
(ich liebe Wim)
Renting 'Self-Destructing' DVDs
Disney
This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours.
That is the warning The Walt Disney Co will issue this August when it begins to "rent" DVDs that after two days become unplayable and do not have to be returned.
Disney home video unit Buena Vista Home Entertainment will launch a pilot movie "rental" program in August that uses the self-destruction technology, the company said on Friday.
The discs stop working after a change in color renders them unreadable. They start off red, but when they are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
The discs work perfectly for the two-day viewing window, said Flexplay Technologies, Inc., the private company which developed the technology using material from General Electric Co.
Disney
Director Lifts Veil on Afghanistan
Samira Makhmalbaf
A 23-year-old Iranian woman on Friday gave the French Riviera jetset a grim reminder of how harsh life is for the less fortunate, with a new film she said shows the truth about Afghanistan today.
Already an acclaimed director, Samira Makhmalbaf's latest work is a sobering depiction of the struggle for survival in the aftermath of Taliban rule, with many still homeless and hungry, and women still repressed.
"Through this movie I try to correct the wrong information given about Afghanistan by the media," said Makhmalbaf, a vivacious woman whose self-confidence breaks every stereotype.
"TV stations give the idea that America went in like Rambo and saved Afghanistan. I tried to show the hidden world between the past and present generation," she told a news conference.
It plays on Makhmalbaf's experiences with men who, despite the end of the Taliban's ultra-strict regime, turn to the wall and beg God's forgiveness if they glimpse an unveiled woman.
"The Taliban went over a year ago but 90 percent of women still wear the burka because they fear they will return. Men have been taught since birth that women are inferior," she said.
For a bit more, Samira Makhmalbaf
In The Kitchen With BartCop & Friends
On-The-Job-Training
Jesse Ventura
A smiling, sympathetic Jesse Ventura made his first appearance on MSNBC, reporting on the story of a California mother who saved the life of a stranger.
"Tonight you are going to see the kind, gentle Jesse Ventura on 'Hero of the Week,'" he said Thursday night during a five-minute segment on the "Lester Holt Live" show. "I can warn you in the future I won't always be so kind and gentle."
With a few minor stammers, Ventura reported on the story of Cindy Lightner, an American Airlines flight attendant who discovered a woman who wasn't breathing on a Costa Mesa, Calif., playground last month and performed CPR until help arrived.
Ventura, dressed in a suit, interviewed Lightner from Twin Cities Public Television in downtown St. Paul. With frequent nods and fidgety hands, he seemed a little nervous.
Ventura will continue doing short segments as MSNBC eases him into his own show, said MSNBC President Erik Sorenson.
Jesse Ventura
Five Pallas' kittens snuggle with each other in a cat bed Friday morning, May 16, 2003, in the Children's Zoo Nursery at the San Diego Zoo. The Zoo's animal care staff stepped in as foster parents to care for a total of six kittens, who were born on May 5, when their mom showed inadequate interest in nursing. The Pallas' kittens, three males and three females, are fed a kitten milk replace daily in the Children's Zoo nursery. Guests at the Zoo can see the young siblings conduct a host of behaviors including climbing, playing and cuddling.
Photo by Ken Bohn
Baby News
Brooke Shields
Baby makes three for Brooke Shields and hubby Chris Henchy.
The 37-year-old thesp, who posed preggers for the cover of Vogue's April issue, gave birth to a girl at a New York City hospital Thursday morning. It's a first child for the former Suddenly Susan star and Henchy, a former writer-producer for ABC's Spin City.
While Shields spends time bonding with baby, Henchy is headed back to work as the scribe of ABC's new Notting Hill-esque romantic comedy I'm with Her, based on his real-life marriage to his superstar wife. Gilmore Girls dad David Sutcliffe stars as a high school teacher who falls in love with a movie star, played by Meet the Parents' Teri Polo.
Brooke Shields
Portrait Hung At College
Peggy Lee
Peggy Lee's portrait now hangs in the Reiland Fine Arts Center at Jamestown College.
The photographic portrait was a gift from Lee's family, presented when she was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Jamestown College three years ago.
Lee, who was born in Jamestown, grew up in Jamestown and Nortonville, a small town to the north, and graduated from Wimbledon High School.
Peggy Lee
Peggy Lee Web site
Jamestown College Web site
War Dog Needs Waiver
Help Fluffy
A war dog needs rescuing.
An Iraqi dog named "Fluffy," adopted by a Special Forces sergeant who
trained him to detect mines in Iraq, is in imminent danger of being
destroyed.
The pooch--a German shepherd mix whose owner, Sgt. Russell Joyce, was
sent back to the States--has become the victim of American red tape.
Joyce, who lives in Fort Bragg, N.C., was part of the 3rd Special Forces
Group assigned to Mosul and was having difficulty requisitioning a dog
when the Iraqis brought him Fluffy, which "most probably had been
abused." Fluffy was shot twice during operations. The snag is that the
dog has yet to be qualified as a military working dog.
"This dog was on a mission and he saved the lives of human beings," said
Iain D. Pedden, a Marine Corps second lieutenant from Chicago, who
alerted his pals at the city's Animal Care and Control Unit about the
dog's plight.
"It's really quite a story," Pedden said. "But due to bureaucratic
issues, the chain of command is planning to destroy this dog as opposed
to permitting him to return to the States and be adopted by Sgt. Joyce,
his military handler."
For the rest, Help Fluffy
Thanks, Tim H!
Formerly 'The Vidiot'
Wants Deposition Secret
Michael Jackson
An attorney for Michael Jackson has asked a federal court to keep secret the location of the pop star's deposition in a copyright lawsuit next week.
Saying the deposition could create a media frenzy, Stephen Fardy, one of Jackson's attorneys in the case, requested in U.S. District Court in Hammond that the time and place be kept from the public.
Jackson, who also has requested to pick the location, will be deposed Wednesday in Indianapolis in a lawsuit accusing the Jackson Five and others of infringing the trade name of Ripples and Waves, another Gary band from the 1960s, and two of their songs.
Fardy also asked to keep the transcript of the deposition sealed, bar media from the deposition room, and prohibit recording devices other than those the court reporter and videographer use.
Michael Jackson
Divers install a bronze title plaque on the USS Spiegel Grove, May 16, 2003, off Key Largo, in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The decommissioned U.S. Navy ship received worldwide attention when it sunk prematurely and rolled over May 17, 2002. Subsequent salvage efforts put the ship on its side three weeks later. The plaques delineate names of 500 contributors who purchased $250 commemorative medallions to help sponsor the 2002 sinking of the former Navy Landing Ship Dock. The ship is the largest ever intentionally sunk to create an artificial reef.
Photo by Stephen Frink
Another Setback
Barry White
Soul singer Barry White, battling kidney failure since last fall, suffered a new health setback on May 1 with a speech-impairing stroke, his daughter revealed on Friday.
The stroke also affected the right side of White's body, but the 58-year-old entertainer is otherwise in "great spirits" as he waits for his condition to stabilize enough to undergo a kidney transplant, daughter Shaheara White told reporters at a news conference in Los Angeles.
White, a native of Galveston, Texas who grew up in Los Angeles, was honored this week in a resolution adopted by the L.A. City Council to name a recreation center for him.
Barry White
Artist Prepares Town For Close Encounters
Rauma, Finland
It would be a shame to be emotionally unprepared on the day that aliens finally pay us a visit from outer space, according to Slovenian artist Igor Stromajer.
Stromajer, in an art project opening Saturday, hopes to prime the Finnish town of Rauma for close encounters of the emotional kind, which could include hugs and kisses, but also trauma.
He is persuaded that aliens are not the cold unfeeling creatures many science fiction films depict them to be, but have feelings, like everybody else.
And so over the past three months, through questionnaires to residents and practical workshops in kindergardens, schools, the town hall and the local university, he has readied the town for accepting aliens, emotions and all.
Rauma, Finland
JFK Mimic
Vaughn Meader
Like most Americans who were alive at the time, Vaughn Meader remembers the exact moment when he heard that President John F. Kennedy had been killed.
Meader, who got rich quick impersonating the president on a wildly successful comedy record album, was climbing into a cab in Milwaukee to go do his Kennedy spoof at a Democratic Party event on Nov. 22, 1963.
"Did you hear what happened to Kennedy in Dallas?" Meader recalls the cab driver asked. Meader, figuring he was about to hear yet another Kennedy joke, replied, "No, how does it go?" An instant later, he heard on the radio the president was dead.
Inextricably linked to Kennedy, Meader would never be the same.
Suddenly, poking fun at the much-beloved president wasn't funny anymore. His record — and a just-finished sequel — was pulled from the shelves. Bookings evaporated and his show biz friends quit calling. He was 27.
For 40 years, Meader has walked an uneasy line between distancing himself from "the Kennedy stuff" and using his one-hit-wonder status to revive his original music and comedy. The musician and songwriter has a small following of loyal fans, but to most people he'll never be more than an answer to a trivia question.
For a lot more, Vaughn Meader
Ends Exile
Rod McKuen
It would be all too easy to dismiss Rod McKuen as a has-been and an old fogy.
After all, the poet, composer and singer just turned 70 at a time when young rappers and nubile singer-songwriters rule the roost in what passes today for performance poetry.
For good measure, McKuen, who is emerging from nearly a decade of self-imposed isolation due to depression, thinks rap is "crap" and young people today don't have the work ethics of their elders.
McKuen, who has been a voice for his generation, be it the Beats in the 1950s or the Hippies during the Vietnam era, is still articulating the thoughts and fears of those people who, like him, became parents and are now grandparents.
"Getting old is like masturbation. You don't have to dress up any more, and you only have to please yourself," McKuen said. "You only have to prove things to yourself.
Snowy-haired and bearded as he was in his 40s, the man who has written some 1,500 songs credits this activism on behalf of older people with giving him new purpose in life. That, along with Prozac, helped him emerge from a long period of self-imposed exile from public life.
"I never left the yard in three years and for five years I didn't answer the phone," said McKuen, sipping a martini in a Manhattan hotel.
For the rest, Rod McKuen
In Memory
Dame Wendy Hiller
Dame Wendy Hiller, one of Britain's finest actresses and George Bernard Shaw's chosen leading lady, has died at age 90.
Hiller, who had a 50-year career as a stage star and Oscar-winning film actress, died Wednesday at her home in Beaconsfield, west of London, her family said. The cause of death was not announced.
A tall, handsome woman with regal bearing and a rich, distinctive voice, Hiller in later life was frequently cast in aristocratic roles that suited her natural hauteur.
She achieved fame early in her career as a girl from the slums in the 1934 Manchester Repertory production of "Love on the Dole."
Playing that role in London, she caught the eye of George Bernard Shaw who cast her as Eliza Doolittle in "Pygmalion" — both on stage in 1936 and on screen two years later.
She was at home in roles which required a peppery, wry quality, whether as Shaw's pert heroines or as the imperious traveler in Sidney Lumet's film of "Murder on the Orient Express."
That style served her well in playing Oscar Wilde's inimitably snobbish Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest" in 1987 and a year later as the elegant Southern-Jewish widow in "Driving Miss Daisy."
While projecting great warmth in person, on stage and screen she could be forbidding. Her stage persona always seemed too knowing, even skeptical, to play either the innocent or the ingenue.
Wendy Hiller was born Aug. 15, 1912, and reared in the northern city of Manchester, where her father was in the cotton spinning business. He thought her Lancashire accent might harm her marriage prospects, so he sent her to a school in Bexhill, south of London, to learn to speak like a proper lady.
She joined the Manchester Repertory Theater at age 18, and four years later won the lead in "Love on the Dole." It was a hit which carried her to London and Broadway, and led to Shaw's offer of leading roles in theater festival productions of "Pygmalion" and "Saint Joan" in 1936.
"Love on the Dole" brought happiness as well as fame — in 1937 she married Ronald Gow, a stage-struck schoolmaster who had adapted the play from Walter Greenwood's novel. Gow died April 27, 1993.
Following her appearance in Anthony Asquith's film version of "Pygmalion," Hiller starred in 1941 in Shaw's "Major Barbara," one of her most memorable film roles.
She remembered Shaw as "awfully polite, a dear gentleman."
"I didn't appreciate it at the time," she told The Associated Press. "When you're young, you're stupid. If someone had said to me, `Will you play "Saint Joan" with six rehearsals?' and then halfway across the Atlantic came the cable, `Would I play "Pygmalion" as well?' I mean I'd have a sort of nervous collapse now. Then, I didn't ...
"I was unbelievably lucky," she said. "Shaw and his wife Charlotte were so kind to me, and I remember sensing that they would have been far more warm and intimate if I hadn't been so shy and nervous.
"They had no children, no grandchildren. Years later, I realized that GBS and Mrs. Shaw were holding out hands of friendship to me. But I was young and stupid, and felt one mustn't intrude on those outstretched hands."
She won a best supporting actress Academy Award for her role in "Separate Tables" (1958) and was made a dame — the equivalent of a knight — in 1975.
Her 1987 performance as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" won raves from critics.
Hiller is survived by a son and a daughter. A funeral service is planned at Amersham Crematorium on May 27.
Dame Wendy Hiller
A newly-born Guizhou golden monkey plays with her mother in the Beijing Wildlife Garden, Friday, May 16, 2003. It is the first case of successfully propagating Guizhou golden monkeys under artificial feeding outside its provenance. Guizhou golden monkeys, with an amount of merely 100, inhabit broad-leaf forests with an elevation of 1,700 meters at Fanjing Mountains in southwest China's Guizhou Province.
Photo by Liu Yu
'Ark of Darkness'
"The Ark of Darkness", a Political/Science-Fiction work, in tidy, weekly installments (and updated every Friday).
'The Osbournes'
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 4
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 3
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 2
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 1
