'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: Court approves evil gay agenda (sfgate.com)
Satan's plan to make uptight straight people "really uncomfortable" working out "fabulously," say Bay Area gays.
PAUL CONSTANT: A Young Anarchist's Handbook (thestranger.com)
[Cory] Doctorow's prose is light and explanatory, and it's the explanations that really make the book important: Hidden inside Little Brother is a manual for civil disobedience. It has useful advice for what to do when detained by authorities; information about methods the government employs to track its own citizens; and actual, working tips on how to modify technology to maintain your anonymity.
Gregory Rodriguez: We want a fair shake (latimes.com)
It turns out people will ignore their self-interest in favor of an equitable deal.
Dave Weich: Rita Rudner and Her Little Mind, Looking Around (powells.com)
"I always thought I'd go to the Oscars," Rita Rudner explained, "but only as a stalker."
Mary Kolesnikova: Language that makes you say OMG (latimes.com)
Teens are letting emoticons and other forms of chat-speak slip into their essays and homework.
TOM DANEHY: What will cause Tom's wife to have a breakdown: Tom, or red-light cameras? (tucsonweekly.com)
My wife recently told our kids, "If I have a breakdown, it'll be caused either by Tom or those red-light cameras at River and Oracle."
ROSA BROOKS: Remember 'go outside and play?' (latimes.com)
Overbearing parents have taken the fun out of childhood and turned it into a grind.
Steven Rea: Juliette Binoche had to provide her own dialogue in 'Flight of the Red Balloon' (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
TORONTO - Juliette Binoche, introducing "Flight of the Red Balloon" to audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, described the project as a "life-changing experience."
JOHN FARR: James Stewart: On the Actor's Centennial, His Ten Best Films (huffingtonpost.co)
Viewing the evolution of Hollywood films over time, I tend to place our male movie stars in one of two categories: romantic leads, and what we'll call "everyman" leads.
Tamara Warren: Filmmaker makes a statement about crime in Detroit (Detroit Free Press)
TV news vans regularly circled the block in Al Profit's neighborhood in the 1990s, casting an ominous shadow over a once-vibrant community. A 10-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting. An infant was found stuffed in a trash bag. Chrysler Corp. was moving its world headquarters to the suburbs. There were kidnappings. "Life is a movie in Detroit," the young filmmaker says now in his matter-of-fact tone.
Joseph V. Amodio: Fast chat with stage, screen and TV star Peter Gallagher (Newsday)
Peter Gallagher loves the old alley behind the Broadway theater where he's co-starring with Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand in Clifford Odets' "The Country Girl." Some 30 years ago he was just starting out, appearing on this very stage in his first lead role, Danny Zuko, in "Grease."
CHARLOTTE HILTON ANDERSEN: Heidi Klum Serves Up Venom - With A Swirl of Frosting (huffingtonpost.com)
In my past life as a waitress, there were few customers more irritating than the woman who would order the prime rib with mashed potatoes & creme brulee but then insist that all the fat be trimmed from her meat, her potatoes be made with the skins on and cooked with no butter in soy milk and the creme brulee be fat free with Splenda caramelized on top.
A: George Burns
Purple Gene Recommends
CACTUS CUTIES
PURPLE GENE SAYS:
I JUST FOUND THIS CLIP WHILE SURFING THE YOUTUBES...WOW
I DON'T EVEN CARE IF THEY'RE CHRISTIANS...THEY SURE CAN SING GOOD....
THEY WERE DISCOVERED AT THE CACTUS THEATER IN LUBBOCK TEXAS AND THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE...MADELINE POWELL HAS A GREAT VOICE...
THEY GET A 10 FOR GIVING ME A CHILL!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hot.
`Fahrenheit 9/11' Follow-Up Not A Sequel
Michael Moore
With his follow-up to "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore wants to examine America as an empire, study its standing since the Sept. 11 attacks and present revelations to surprise audiences as much as the first film did.
But he doesn't want to make a sequel.
"To just say it's a sequel is so wrong," Moore told The Associated Press on Friday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met with potential international distributors for the film, due out in 2009.
"It would be easier and safer to make a sequel, if that's all it was, but this isn't about Bush. We all know this. Regardless of who the president is come November, we have a big mess, a big, big mess to be cleaned up, and I don't know whether it can be cleaned up," Moore said. "The toxicity of the spill may be so great that there's nothing we can do about it. If that's the case, where are we now as America and as Americans?"
Michael Moore
Letter Sells For $400K
Albert Einstein
A letter in which Albert Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish" has sold at auction for more than $400,000.
Bloomsbury Auctions said Friday that the handwritten letter sold to an overseas collector after frenetic bidding late Thursday in London. The sale price of $404,000, including the buyer's premium, was more than 25 times the pre-sale estimate.
Bloomsbury did not identify the buyer, but managing director Rupert Powell said it was someone with "a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails."
The letter was written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, a year before Einstein's death. In it, the Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
Albert Einstein
'World's Worst Poet'
William McGonagall
A collection of poems by a Scottish bard dubbed the "world's worst poet" was to go under the hammer Friday, expected to sell for thousands of pounds.
William McGonagall was mocked by literary critics and had food thrown at him during public readings, before dying penniless in an unmarked grave in Edinburgh in 1902.
But his very notoriety means his work has become surprisingly popular, and the collection of 35 poems on sale was estimated to make up to 6,500 pounds.
If the collection goes for its estimated price it would be in the same league as first edition copies of Harry Potter books signed by author J. K. Rowling, according to The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
William McGonagall
Days Numbered
Punch & Judy'
Punch and Judy are vanishing from beaches -- but 70-year-old puppeteer Bryan Clarke is convinced the roustabout shows are no dying art.
Clarke, who still stages his own shows and makes puppets for fellow performers, said "They are so old-fashioned and so old-hat but still conjure up fun for the children. The excitement in the kids is unbelievable."
But the days of Britain's traditional seaside holiday -- with donkey rides, sticks of rock candy, saucy postcards and a plate of cockles and mussels -- may be numbered.
A recent survey of young holidaymakers showed 60 percent considered the seaside holiday to be unfashionable.
Punch & Judy'
Cutting Some Commercials
Faux
Fox Broadcasting said Thursday it would drastically reduce the commercial levels of two upcoming action dramas -- "Fringe" and "Dollhouse" -- in an effort to reinvigorate broadcast television.
Producer J.J. Abrams' "Fringe" will kick off with a two-hour premiere in August. Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse," which only wrapped up its pilot Friday, will be the second project and begin in January.
Calling it "remote-free TV," Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori told advertisers during its "upfront" presentation that broadcast TV needed "a jolt" and a focus on the viewers -- and that "the populist network" was just the company to do it.
Faux
Sheriffs Feed Inmates On $1.75 A Day
Alabama
Back in the day of chain gangs, Alabama passed a law that gave sheriffs $1.75 a day to feed each prisoner in their jails, and the sheriffs got to pocket anything that was left over. More than 80 years later, most Alabama counties still operate under this system, with the same $1.75-a-day allowance, and some sheriffs are actually making money on top of their salaries.
But exactly how much is something of a mystery because state auditors do not have access to sheriffs' private accounts.
How could anyone turn a profit feeding men and women for an entire day on less than the price of a Coke and a bag of Fritos? Sheriffs practice Depression-style frugality and rely on such things as day-old bread, cut-rate vegetables and cheap inmate labor.
Critics charge that Alabama is, in effect, paying law enforcement to skimp on food and may be rewarding sheriffs for mistreating prisoners.
Alabama
Still Working On TV Network
USOC
The U.S. Olympic Committee's aggressive plan to start its own cable network is moving forward, though officials are giving no indications that the network will be on the air before the Beijing Olympics, as the federation had once hoped.
The USOC has secured rights to televise events from more than half the individual sports, but the strategy of bringing them to air has been slow to develop and nobody inside the organization's offices has been willing to provide specifics.
The goal was to increase exposure for Olympic sports, many of which are quickly forgotten once the Olympics end. There was also a long-term hope of making the Olympics a more valuable commodity when negotiations for future network contracts come up. NBC owns the American TV rights through 2012 (at the cost of $2 billion total for 2010 and 2012), and the timetable for bidding for 2014 and beyond has not yet been announced.
USOC
Strip In Pension Protest
Ageing Aussies
Protesting pensioners brought traffic to a stand still in Australia's second largest city on Friday when some stripped to demand more money from the government.
The scantily-clad seniors braved the autumn weather in a 150-strong protest against this week's federal budget, which offered them little despite a 21.7 billion dollar (20 billion US) surplus.
Most at the "Fair Go for Pensioners" rally at the intersection of two major streets in downtown Melbourne kept their clothes on, but several threw convention to the wind and stripped to their underwear.
As bemused police looked on, a bespectacled man stripped to his briefs and socks, while a couple of lively ladies whipped off their tops and paraded in their bras.
Ageing Aussies
Wildlife Numbers Plummet Globally
WWF
The world's wildlife populations have reduced by around a quarter since the 1970s, according to a major report published Friday by the WWF conservation organization.
Marine species have been particularly hard hit as the human population booms, while numbers of birds and, fish and animals have also gone down, said the WWF in a report.
The study comes ahead of next week's UN convention on biological diversity in the former West German capital Bonn, which will discuss aims to achieve a "significant reduction" in the current rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.
The WWF's Living Planet Index, which tracks the fortunes of nearly 4,000 populations of 1,477 vertebrate species from 1970 to 2005, showed an overall decline of 27 percent.
WWF
El Niño Beneficiary
Ferdinand Magellan
The El Niño phenomenon that has puzzled climate scientists in recent decades may have assisted the first trip around the world nearly 500 years ago.
Explorer Ferdinand Magellan encountered fair weather on Nov. 28, 1520, after days of battle through the rough waters south of South America. From there his passage across the Pacific Ocean may have been eased by the calming effects of El Niño, researchers speculate in a new study.
Tree ring data indicate that an El Niño was occurring in 1519 and 1520 and may even have begun in 1518.
Ferdinand Magellan
Long & Short Of It
Icelandic Phallological Museum
Sigurdur Hjartarson is missing a human penis. But he's not worried: four men have promised to donate theirs to him when they die.
Hjartarson is founder and owner of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which offers visitors from around the world a close-up look at the long and the short of the male reproductive organ.
His collection, which began in 1974 with a single bull's penis that looked something like a riding crop, now boasts 261 preserved members from 90 species.
The largest, from a sperm whale, is 70 kg (154 lb) and 1.7 meters (5.58 ft) long. The smallest, a hamster penis bone, is just 2 mm and must be viewed through a magnifying glass.
Icelandic Phallological Museum
Cartoon Research Library
Ohio State
Two major collections of comic and cartoon art are being brought together at Ohio State University to create what's believed to be the world's largest treasury of cartoon art.
The school's Cartoon Research Library said it's acquiring and plans to display the collection of the International Museum of Cartoon Art, about 200,000 works that have been in limbo since the museum's last physical location closed six years ago.
The museum's original drawings for comic books, comic strips and animated cartoons, as well as display figures, toys, collectibles and films, will double the size of the library's cartoon art collection, said library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell.
"It just seemed like a natural wedding," said Mort Walker, creator of the "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois" comic strips, who founded the cartoon museum in 1973. He said the combination with the Ohio State library came about through the museum's long association with Caswell, once a member of its board.
Ohio State
In Memory
Will Elder
William Elder, the illustrator who pioneered the visual style for iconic humour title Mad magazine, has died at the age of 86.
Gary VandenBergh, Elder's son-in-law, told comic world blog Journalista that the pioneering cartoonist died early Thursday morning after having battled Parkinson's disease for several years. DC Comics, which now owns Mad, also confirmed the news in a statement.
Born in New York, Elder studied at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where he met writer and Mad magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman.
After a stint in the army during the Second World War, he teamed up with Kurtzman and Charles Stern to start an art studio that produced comics for several publishers.
In 1952, the duo launched Mad, with Elder creating the satirical, cartoony visuals for the influential title. He would become renowned for his packed panels, crammed full of background gags and jokes he later dubbed "chicken fat."
After they left Mad in 1956, Elder and Kurtzman's new collaborations included short-lived humour magazines such as Humbug and Help! as well as the comic characters Goodman Beaver and Little Annie Fanny, who was created expressly for Playboy and was featured in the magazine for about 25 years.
During his career, Elder also created myriad book and magazine illustrations, advertisements and caricatures. He retired in 1988 and his work was collected in several volumes, including Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art and, most recently, Chicken Fat, released in 2006.
Will Elder
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Will Elder: 1921 - 2008
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