Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Bill Plaschke, "Saudi Arabian girl an unlikely Olympic hero" (LA Times)
With some in her country calling her one of the "Prostitutes of the Olympics," with her country's television network refusing to broadcast the match, with her own neighbors perhaps whispering of her shame, Shaherkani became the first female athlete from Saudi Arabia to compete in an Olympic event.
Robert Deutsch, "Sarah Attar makes Olympic track debut for Saudi women" (USA Today)
Sarah Attar finished last and more than a half-minute slower than her nearest competitor in the women's 800 meters. Yet hundreds rose to give her a standing ovation as she crossed the finish line.
Stacy Conradt: 5 Olympians Who Sold Their Gold Medals (Mental Floss)
You wouldn't know it with all of the hype surrounding the Olympics right now, but there are things more important than winning a gold medal. Just ask these athletes, who had good reason to sell their hard-earned precious metal.
Matthew Yglesias: Tax the Olympians (Slate)
Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama team up for a ridiculous new tax break for Olympic medal winners.
Mark Morford: Well-armed Gay Chickens for Jesus (SF Gate)
Welcome to the bizarre, reverso-world lessons of the NRA, the Christian right, Fox News, the God-fearing and the wildly paranoid. Behold, those who somehow believe, despite all evidence, history and common sense, that only guns prevent more guns. Only hate prevents hate. And only the latent, ongoing threat of violence prevents more violence. Call it "Jesus' lost teaching."
Susan Estrich: Mother's Milk (Creators Syndicate)
News alert: Mitt Romney is raising a lot of money. A whole lot. So much that in the past three months, he's been out-raising the incumbent president, which is no easy feat. So much that the chattering class is beginning to wonder whether the president's team has been spending too much too early, as opposed to saving it for later. What does all this mean? Less than you might think.
Josh Levin: "'It Was America and the Referee Against Us': Why a Bunch of Angry Canadians Are Good for Women's Soccer" (Slate)
"It's a shame in a game like that, which is so important, that the ref decided the result before the game started," said Christine Sinclair, who scored all three goals for Team Canada. "It felt like it was America and the referee against us," declared the losing side's coach John Herdman.
'Robert Hughes was Australia's Dante,' says his friend Peter Carey (Guardian)
Robert Hughes wasn't just a great art critic. He was one of the finest writers Australia has ever produced - the man who told his countrymen who they were. He also carved a mean leg of lamb.
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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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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Day 34
Gulf Fritillary
Came across some Gulf Fritillary larva
on the back fence, so it looks like we'll have a third year of raising butterflies. : )
Click on any picture for a larger version.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hotter. Crankier.
Beastie Boys' Will Bars Ad Use Of Work
Adam Yauch
The Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch rapped that he wouldn't "sell my songs for no TV ad."
His will shows he wanted to make sure that held true after his death.
The will was filed in a Manhattan court this week, three months after his death from cancer at age 47. It says his image, name, music "or any artistic property" he created can't be used for advertising.
Yauch's will leaves his roughly $6 million estate to his widow and daughter.
Adam Yauch
Gaining Ground In Earnings
Women Authors
With yearly estimated earnings of more than $90 million, prolific writer James Patterson is by far the highest earning author in the world but women are gaining ground, according to Forbes.com.
Stephen King, author of "11/22/63" and numerous other books, came in a distant second on the Forbes.com list, earning $39 million, followed by Janet Evanovich, who wrote the Stephanie Plum suspense books and was the best paid woman with a $33 million income.
Jeff Bercovici, of Forbes.com, said most of the names are the list are familiar ones, including Patterson.
But he added that it was a trio of women, Suzanne Collins, E.L. James and J.K. Rowling, who made a big impact.
The full list can be found here.
Women Authors
Bands Donate
Aurora
Motley Crue and Kiss are donating money to support those affected by the Colorado movie theater shootings.
The bands said at their concert in suburban Denver on Wednesday night that they would donate $100,000 to the Aurora Victim Relief Fund.
The fund was set up to help victims and families who were hurt when a man opened fire July 20 at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie in Aurora. Twelve people were killed, and 58 were injured.
Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue and Paul Stanley of Kiss said in a written statement that they hope their gesture will encourage others to give.
Aurora
Film For 50th Anniversary
"Doctor Who"
"Doctor Who" turns 50 years old next year, and to celebrate, BBC Two has commissioned a 90-minute film that will explore the origins of the series, the BBC said Thursday.
"An Adventure in Space and Time" will "tell the story of the genesis of 'Doctor Who,'" the BBC said. "Exploring all aspects of the longest-running science fiction series to date, the special one-off 90-minute drama will also look at the many personalities involved in bringing the series to life."
Doctor Who was first broadcast in November 1963, and has gone through several iterations, with numerous actors playing the Doctor. (Matt Smith, the 11th actor to tackle the role, is the latest.)
"Doctor Who" writer/actor Mark Gatiss penned the 90-minute special, with "Doctor Who" showrunner Steven Moffat and executive producer Caroline Skinner executive producing.
"Doctor Who"
Time and CNN Suspend For Plagiarism
Fareed Zakaria
CNN host and Time magazine contributing editor-at-large Fareed Zakaria was suspended by his employers on Friday after he acknowledged copying material for a recent column he wrote about gun control from another writer.
Time said it was suspending Zakaria for one month, "pending further review," and CNN said it had also suspended him for his journalistic misstep. CNN put no time limit on its suspension.
The sanctions came after Zakaria issued a public apology for borrowing from a recent New Yorker essay about gun control for a column he wrote for Time this week.
"Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 23rd issue of the New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake," Zakaria wrote in his apology.
Fareed Zakaria
Another Classy Conservative
Russia
A senior ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin used an obscene Twitter post to attack Madonna on Friday after the pop star called for the release of three women who face prison over an irreverent performance in Moscow's main cathedral.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, a nationalist politician and former envoy to NATO, posted the tweet after Madonna told a Moscow concert audience the jailed members of punk band Pussy Riot were "courageous" and deserved to be free.
"Every ex-whore tends to lecture everybody with age. Especially during world tours and concerts," Rogozin, who now leads Russia's drive to upgrade the army and defense industry, wrote in a tweet in English.
Rogozin, who some analysts view as a potential presidential candidate in the next election in 2018, did not mention Madonna by name in the English tweet on Friday or a Russian one on Wednesday.
Russia
Tried To Stiff Adelson
Tea Party Nation
A judge has ordered Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips to pay a six-figure hotel bill for a large number of rooms he booked for a tea party rally, which he later cancelled when the event failed to draw enough attendees.
The Venetian Las Vegas Casino Resort alleged that Phillips had reserved 1,637 rooms for the July 2010 event, and then cancelled the reservations just a few weeks before the scheduled date. He did not pay for the rooms.
In a court order last month, which The Tennessean reported Thursday, a judge ruled that Phillips owed the resort $748,000, including the $554,000 hotel bill and $194,300 in accrued interest.
The Venetian lodged its legal claim against Judson Phillips in July of 2011. The hotel makes regular appearances in political news since its owner is billionaire Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.
Tea Party Nation
Estate Shuts Down Websites
Michael Jackson
A Canadian memorabilia dealer who worked with Michael Jackson's mother on a tribute book, and whose websites used the singer's image and music, violated copyrights held by Jackson's estate, a judge ruled on Friday.
A federal judge in Los Angeles granted an injunction blocking entrepreneur Howard Mann from using the websites "michaeljacksonsecretvault.com" and "MJgives.com" and other similar domain names, saying he had infringed the dead singer's intellectual property.
"There is undisputed evidence that (Mann) intended in bad faith to profit from use of Jackson's name, by registering multiple domain names containing his name or the initials 'MJ' to sell Jackson-related products," U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson wrote in his ruling.
The executors of Jackson's estate filed the case against Mann in January 2011, 18 months after the "Thriller" singer's sudden death in Los Angeles from an overdose of the surgical anesthetic propofol.
Judge Pregerson sided with executors, who claimed that the websites run by Mann used copyright protected clips of Jackson's song "Destiny", a logo featuring the self-styled "King of Pop" and art from the posthumous concert movie "This Is It".
Michael Jackson
Gitmo Hit
"Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"
"Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" is experiencing a resurgence - and its emerging fan base gives new meaning to the phrase "captive audience."
The Miami Herald reports that Will Smith's 1990s comedy has become a big hit with the suspected terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, supplanting the "Harry Potter" books as the preferred form of diversion for the inmates.
"I just ordered all six seasons," a librarian at the detention camp told the Herald.
Another popular title among the inmates? The Oxford English Dictionary, as the prisoners attempt to brush up on their language skills while incarcerated. According to the librarian, he's had to order 10 copies of the reference book - nearly one for every cell block of the facility.
"Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"
Sales Drop For 8th Straight Month
Video Games
U.S. retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell for the eighth straight month in July as the industry continued to look ahead toward the release of new equipment to cure its woes.
Overall sales fell 20 percent to $548.4 million, according to research firm NPD Group.
Sales of consoles and portable software - the video games themselves - fell 23 percent from a year earlier to $278 million.
Sales of hardware fell 32 percent to $151 million. Accessories sales bucked the trend, rising 8 percent to $137 million.
Even with the anticipated launch of Nintendo Co.'s Wii U later in the year, NPD predicted full-year sales will be $14.5 billion, down from $17 billion last year.
Video Games
$1.6 Million For An 1873 Dime
"No Arrows" Liberty Seated Dime
A dime made in 1873 has cost someone a pretty penny: It sold for $1.6 million at auction.
An anonymous bidder won the pristine coin, said Chris Napolitano, president of Stack's Bowers Galleries, which auctioned it during an American Numismatic Association convention. With a 15 percent buyer's fee tacked on, the final price for the coin was $1.84 million, he said.
The rare coin was minted in Carson City, Nev., during a one-day run of dimes.
The 1873-CC "No Arrows" Liberty Seated dime was auctioned Thursday night. It's part of the Battle Born Collection, which contained one of every coin struck in Carson City before the mint there closed in 1893.
"No Arrows" Liberty Seated Dime
In Memory
Carlo Rambaldi
Special effects master and three-time Oscar winner Carlo Rambaldi died Friday in southern Italy after a long illness, Italian news media reported. He was 86.
Rambaldi was known as the father of "E.T." He won visual effects Oscars for Steven Spielberg's 1982 extraterrestrial hit, as well as Ridley Scott's film "Alien" in 1979, and John Guillermin's "King Kong" in 1976.
Rambaldi worked on more than 30 films, but was best known for his work on E.T., for which he created three robots, two costumes worn by actors in the scenes when E.T. walked, and gloves for the hands.
Rambaldi, a wizard of a discipline known as mechatronics - which combines disciplines including mechanical, electronic and system design engineering - did not hide a disdain for computerized effects.
Rambaldi was born in 1925 in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1951. While he dreamed of becoming an artist, he was drawn into the world of cinema when he was asked to create a dragon for a low-budget science fiction movie in 1956.
He moved to Rome and found work in television before his first big success, the 1975 Italian horror film "Deep Red." He drew the attention of Dino De Laurentiis, who brought him to Hollywood to work on "King Kong."
Rambaldi had been living for about a decade in the Calabrian city of Lamezia Terme, where he died.
Carlo Rambaldi
In Memory
Mel Stuart
Mel Stuart, an award-winning documentarian who also directed "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," has died. He was 83.
Stuart's documentaries include "The Making of the President 1960," for which he won an Emmy, as well as subsequent explorations of the 1964 and '68 campaigns. Other programs were "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the Oscar-nominated "Four Days in November."
His groundbreaking 1973 film "Wattstax" focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.
But while Stuart's documentaries won acclaim and cemented his reputation, he won a special sort of following with the 1971 musical fantasy "Willy Wonka."
During the 1960s and 1970s, Stuart was associated with David L. Wolper, with whom he established a base of West Coast documentary production at a time when New York filmmakers and TV networks' news divisions dominated the field.
By 1980, Stuart was an independent producer and director whose credits include portraits for PBS' "American Masters" on artist Man Ray and the director Billy Wilder. He was executive producer of the 1980s ABC series "Ripley's Believe It or Not," whose host was Jack Palance.
Airing on PBS in 2005, "The Hobart Shakespeareans" was Stuart's profile of a teacher in inner-city Los Angeles whose fifth-grade class each year performed a play by William Shakespeare.
He produced or directed various dramas including "The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal," ''Ruby and Oswald" and the 1981 TV film "Bill," starring Mickey Rooney and Dennis Quaid, which won a Golden Globe and a Peabody award.
Besides "Willy Wonka," Stuart's theatrical features include the 1969 comedy-romance, "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," starring Suzanne Pleshette and Ian McShane, and, a year later, "I Love My Wife," with Elliott Gould.
A New York native, Stuart attended New York University, where he set aside his early aspirations to be a composer in favor of a career in filmmaking.
Before joining forces with the Wolper Organization, he was a researcher for CBS News' 1950s documentary series, "The 20th Century," which was hosted and narrated by Walter Cronkite.
Besides his daughter, Madeline, an interior designer, Stuart is survived by sons Andrew, a literary agent, and Peter, a filmmaker.
Mel Stuart
In Memory
David Rakoff
David Rakoff, an award-winning humorist whose cynical outlook on life and culture developed a loyal following of readers and radio listeners, has died after a long illness. He was 47.
Rakoff died Thursday after a long illness, Doubleday and Anchor Books announced. The statement did not detail a cause of death, but Rakoff had been open about his battles with cancer.
Rakoff wrote for The New York Times, Newsweek and other publications and was a contributor to public radio's "This American Life." In October, his essay collection "Half Empty" won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His other bestselling books are "Don't Get Too Comfortable" and "Fraud."
Rakoff, a native of Canada who lived in New York, cultivated hipness and ironic distance from his subjects, who usually lived outside the mainstream: American Buddhists who pay for lectures from Steven Seagal; Icelandic elf communicators; Loch Ness monster believers.
An essay in "Fraud," published in 2001, was a memoir of his battle with Hodgkin's disease. Ostensibly the story of his tracking down the sperm sample he banked in Toronto before undergoing chemotherapy 12 years earlier, it begins in typical Rakoff fashion: "I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled."
In an essay last year in The New York Times Magazine, Rakoff wrote about being treated for "a rather tenacious sarcoma around the area of my left collarbone."
In addition to his work in the theater and occasional roles on television, Rakoff appeared in and adapted the screenplay for "The New Tenants," a film that won an Academy Award for best live action short in 2010.
David Rakoff
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