Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The Graveyard Of Shelved Ice Cream Flavors (NPR)
When the Ben and Jerry's ice cream company kills a flavor, it's treated with respect - including a burial in the company's "Flavor Graveyard."
The Effects of Gay Marriage
A photo of a dog (that doesn't know the different between "effect" and "affect"), holding a sign in his mouth that says: "I AM A DOG. I SUPPORT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE. IT WOULD EFFECT ME AS MUCH AS IT EFFECTS YOU.
Paul Krugman: The Austerity Agenda (New York Times)
"The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." So declared John Maynard Keynes 75 years ago, and he was right. Even if you have a long-run deficit problem - and who doesn't? - slashing spending while the economy is deeply depressed is a self-defeating strategy, because it just deepens the depression.
Susan Estrich: Law and Politics (Creators Syndicate)
… I got on a plane and flew to Ukraine. This is a beautiful, fascinating, exciting country. It is also a place where you cannot help but realize just what a miracle it is to live in a country where lawyers practice law without fear, where judges are expected to decide based on law and not political ties, where we can worry about the corrupting influence of money rather than old-fashioned and dangerous corruption.
Tom Danehy: Tom has thoughts on the CD 8 special-election candidates (Tucson Weekly)
I can't wait for this thing to be over so they can go back to running respectable hemorrhoid commercials on TV.
Ben Marcus: Living in the end times (New Statesman)
Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (2006) is a good example. Among other things, the book is rigorously free of politics. There are no nations,?no governments. All of that is moot, because in the dusty aftermath of the apocalypse, wouldn't it be? McCarthy, like most of his compatriots, has nothing to say. But he has a great deal to show, and the immense popularity of The Road may have something - aside from the excellence in its telling - to do with its perceived realism, its high degree of plausibility.
Lucy Mangan: "Erotica: better reads than 'Fifty Shades of Grey'" (Guardian)
E L James's novel has got fans' knickers in a twist - but it's not as though it's the first racy read.
Mark Coker: The Scam of Private Label Rights Articles
I suspected I had encountered this breed of vermin before. A quick cut and paste of a random string of text into Google gave me another clue. The exact text string appeared word-for-word in multiple other places on the Internet in articles and blog posts under the names of different authors and publications.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
June Gloom til mid-afternoon.
Relaunched
Green Lantern
Green Lantern, one of DC Comics' oldest and most enduring heroes, is serving as a beacon for the publisher again, this time as a proud, mighty and openly gay hero.
The change is revealed in the pages of the second issue of "Earth 2" out next week, and comes on the heels of what has been an expansive year for gay and lesbian characters in the pages of comic books from Archie to Marvel and others.
But purists and fans note: This Green Lantern is not the emerald galactic space cop Hal Jordan who was, and is, part of the Justice League and has had a history rich in triumph and tragedy.
Instead, he's a parallel earth Green Lantern. James Robinson, who writes the new series, said Alan Scott is the retooled version of the classic Lantern whose first appearance came in the pages of "All-American Comics" No. 16 in July 1940.
And his being gay is not part of some wider story line meant to be exploited or undone down the road, either.
Green Lantern
How a Copy-Paste Fail Rewrote 'War and Peace'
The Nook
Would you trust your e-reader to re-edit Tolstoy? As Fast Company's Neil Ungerleider reports, bloggers discovered that Barnes and Noble's Nook readers contain a universal find-replace on the word "Kindle,"substituting it with "Nook"-even in War and Peace, which, to the best of our knowledge is pretty agnostic about e-readers.
The change that initially tipped off Philip Howard of the Ocracoke Island Journal to the "fix" was a Tolstoy sentence that read, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern."
The Future of the Internet's Kendra Albert noted that the fault actually seems to lie not with Barnes and Noble itself, but with Superior Formatting Publishing, which formatted the Gutenberg Project's public domain copy of the novel and took a shortcut when reformatting its Kindle edition to the Nook. But one imagines that if the mistake were repeated, we'd get some funky stuff happening in our public domain. David Copperfield might read, "For a little while, his eye nooked." Jane Eyre might go, "and it is madness in all women to let a secret madness nook within them." Even the King James Bible might read, "Neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings, and to nook meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually."
The Nook
Turkish Pianist Charged With Insulting Islam
Fazil Say
A Turkish court on Friday formally charged an internationally known pianist and composer with insulting Islamic religious values in comments he made on Twitter.
The court in Istanbul voted to approve an indictment against Fazil Say, who has played piano with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, National Orchestra of France and Tokyo Symphony.
The 42-year-old Turk faces charges of inciting hatred and public enmity, and insulting "religious values." Say, who has served as a culture ambassador for the European Union, allegedly mocked Islamic beliefs about paradise in April.
Meltem Akyol, a lawyer for Say, said the pianist has denied the charges. The trial will be held on Oct. 18, she said.
Akyol said Say's tweets and retweets on social media cannot be considered as public remarks because only people who follow him can see them. In one tweet cited in the indictment, Say said: "What if there is raki (traditional anisette drink) in paradise but not in hell, while there is Chivas Regal (scotch) in hell and not in paradise? What will happen then? This is the most important question!!"
Fazil Say
Son Gets Football Scholarship
Sean 'Diddy' Combs
Justin Combs, the 18-year-old son of hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, will attend UCLA on a $54,000 football scholarship.
It is one of 285 athletic scholarships the university hands out every year.
But it comes at a time when student fees are rising and a year after the university had to use more than $2 million in student fees to cover an athletic department funding gap.
The Los Angeles Times says the senior Combs is worth an estimated $475 million and gave his son a $360,000 Maybach car for his 16th birthday.
Sean 'Diddy' Combs
500 Hacking Claims
Rupert
A lawyer for Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper group says the company could face 500 lawsuits from victims of tabloid phone hacking - far more than have so far been filed.
Michael Silverleaf told a court hearing Friday that "we are dealing with 500 claims, potentially" from people who say their voicemail messages were intercepted by the now-defunct News of the World.
Murdoch's News Group Newspapers has paid millions to settle lawsuits from 60 actors, athletes, politicians and other public figures whose voicemails were hacked by the tabloid.
More than 45 new cases are due to go to court, with claimants including soccer star Wayne Rooney and Cherie Blair, wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Rupert
Paid Off Pedophiles
Benny's Boy
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan authorized $20,000 payments to a handful of sexually abusive priests so they would immediately leave the Milwaukee archdiocese when Dolan was archbishop there nearly a decade ago, a church spokeswoman said on Thursday.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) first announced the payments on Wednesday upon discovering minutes of a March 2003 meeting of the Milwaukee archdiocese finance council meeting. SNAP is demanding full disclosure of all such payments.
Church officials confirmed the payments as approved in the minutes but archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf said she had yet to determine how many priests received them, estimating the number at "a handful, a couple."
The payouts encouraged the abusive priests to voluntarily accept laicization, the process of turning an ordained priest into a lay person.
Dolan has become the face of the Catholic Church in the United States since moving from Milwaukee to New York in 2009, becoming president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2010 and being elevated to Cardinal by the Vatican earlier this year.
Benny's Boy
No Harm, No Foul, Rupert-Style
Chris White
The Fox News Channel producer credited with a four-minute video criticizing President Barack Obama is keeping his job - although he lost a chance to move to CNN.
Fox's executive vice president for programming, Bill Shine, said Friday that Chris White "will remain employed with Fox News." White was credited with the video that aired Wednesday on "Fox & Friends," a segment that was later disavowed by Fox management.
At the time, White had been discussing leaving Fox for CNN. But the day after the video aired, CNN said it would not be hiring him.
Media critics, even some conservative ones, suggested Fox had gone too far by airing an advocacy video during what is supposed to be a news program.
Chris White
Objectivism In Action
"Atlas Shrugged"
Relativity Media and Netflix are being sued for $1.5 million by the copyright holders of the Ayn Rand book "Atlas Shrugged," over claims that Relativity failed to pay a licensing fee.
In the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, Atlas Productions claims that Relativity agreed to pay two installments of $750,000 each in licensing fees, but never paid the first installment, and likely won't pay the second installment.
According to Atlas Productions, Relativity and its RML Acquisitions - which is also named in the suit - "had no intention of abiding by the terms thereof or paying the license fee."
Alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, fraudulent misinterpretation and copyright infringement, Atlas Productions is seeking $1.5 million, plus interest, attorney's fees and court costs. The company is also asking that Netflix be found in violation of the "Atlas Shrugged" copyright, and that Netflix repay "all gains, profits, advantages, and revenues derived from the infringement."
According to Box Office Mojo, "Atlas Shrugged" - which starred Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler - grossed just over $4.6 million, with a production budget of $20 million.
"Atlas Shrugged"
Southern Baptist Plagiarist
Richard Land
The Southern Baptist Convention's ethics chief has been reprimanded and his radio show canceled after he made inflammatory comments about the Trayvon Martin case.
Among other things, Richard Land accused President Barack Obama and other black leaders of shamefully exploiting Martin's death for political gain.
His comments upset many black Southern Baptist leaders, one of whom called for Land's resignation.
The controversy got more intense when a blogger revealed that Land's commentary was copied nearly verbatim from an editorial in the Washington Moonie Times.
After an investigation, the board of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission on Friday reprimanded Land for the comments and the plagiarism. Land, who is the commission's president, has previously apologized for both.
Richard Land
Pens A Mel Gibson Tell-All E-Book
Joe Eszterhas
Joe Eszterhas isn't done with Mel Gibson just yet.
The screenwriter has written "Heaven and Mel," an eBook recounting in colorful detail his relationship with the disgraced director that Amazon will be released on June 6, TheWrap has learned.
"I can't remember ever reading a more haunting, nuanced portrait of a Hollywood superstar in decline," Dave Blum, editor of Kindle Singles, told TheWrap exclusively. "This is an eyewitness account by a gifted storyteller of a man of faith at war with his demons. In the end, the demons win."
Amazon contacted Eszterhas after he released to TheWrap a tape of Gibson ranting violently during a dinner at his home in Costa Rica.
"Heaven and Mel" is part of Amazon's "Kindle Single" program, which allows for publication of short books on an accelerated schedule. It will cost $2.99.
Joe Eszterhas
Armed Heist
Brazil
An armed man in Brazil has heisted an 18-carat gold-plated vibrator selling for $4,000 at a luxury sex shop.
Police say he walked into the Erotica Luxo store in Brasilia, tied up a clerk and took the item from its display case. He stole nothing else.
Store owner Vanessa Baldini tells the G1 news website the robber might get no satisfaction from Wednesday's theft. She says the Swedish-made vibrator has a stainless steel core, making removing any gold plating extremely difficult.
And she notes the robber didn't take the vibrator's charger.
Brazil
In Memory
Dick Beals
The radio and television voice-over star whose work included the animated characters Gumby and Speedy Alka-Seltzer has died in Southern California. Dick Beals was 85.
A friend, Peter Gorman, tells the Los Angeles Times that Beals died in the northern San Diego County community of Vista.
Beals' was the original voice of the title character on "The Gumby Show" in the late 1950s. He also was the unseen pitchman in more than 3,000 commercials for such products as Oscar Mayer and Campbell's Soup.
He often got jobs that called for him to sound like a child because he suffered from a glandular condition, and his voice hadn't changed since elementary school.
Dick Beals
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