Andrew Tobias: The President's Speech
Slow but steady, in a deeply thoughtful way that is too slow for some and too fast for others, we are winding down the war the President never would have started in the first place and making the effort to fix the war we could have pursued so much more effectively if we had not focused on Iraq instead.
roger ebert's journal: Put up or shut up
We already know the numbers. Pew finds that 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. A new 'Newsweek' poll, taken after the controversy over the New York mosque, places that figure at 24%. Even if he's not a Muslim, 'Newsweek' finds, 31 percent think it's "definitely or probably" true that Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."
Matt Miller: My Iraq mistake (mattmilleronline.com)
My fellow Americans: I'm a pundit, not a president, but since it's a moment for taking stock of America's role in Iraq, I want to remind you that I blew it.
Brian Palmer: How Does Booze Extend Your Lifespan? (slate.com)
If I'm going to drink for my health, which is the most potent potable? It probably doesn't matter. Early studies suggested that red wine was the best choice, but most people now attribute those findings to confounding variables. A Danish statistician, for example, reviewed supermarket receipts and found that people who buy wine are more likely to buy olives, fruits, and vegetables, while beer drinkers buy more sugar, butter, chips, prepared foods, and soft drinks.
"Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America" by Ira Rutkow: A review by Charles Barber
Throughout his remarkably entertaining account, Rutkow selects telling medical episodes -- the tormenting of colonial surgeon Zabdiel Boylston by a violent mob, who believed that his smallpox inoculations spread disease; President James Garfield's death in 1881 at the hands of his own surgeons, who neglected basic antiseptic techniques in treating his gunshot wound; or doctors' extraordinary measures in 1926 to save Harry Houdini from appendicitis, which were unsuccessful but underscored clinical advances -- to capture the essence of medical knowledge of the day, and place it in a social context.
"Hey, agent, Lulu this!" (lulu.com)
You probably know Harland Williams as an actor in movies such as "Dumb & Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary." Or as the funny guy who stops by to spice up The Late Show and The Tonight Show with his comedic wit. We know him as an author.
Carlin Romano: Will the Book Survive Generation Text? (chronicle.com)
I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors-intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague-that for too many of today's undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.
zEN mAN (observing "Jerry's Kids" PIMP and former funny man Mr. Lewis..threatening to slap young actress Lindsey Lohan for her drug problems and bad behavior....Listen here Jerry ...you touch a hair on her pretty little dyed blonde head (her roots are showing from being in jail) you'll have zEN mAN to answer to...I want her to be able to complete her movie role as Linda Lovelace ("Deep Throat") before you touch her and I have to kick yer fat old ass....learn a little from Marcel Marceau...shut the fuck up!)
Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen's old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott's farm in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health.
Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in southern California. He began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1932 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, "Boysenberries," after their originator. His family's small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott's Berry Farm.
Source
Marian the retired teacher was first, and correct, with:
Walter Knott of the Knott's Berry Farm fame
mj wrote:
Going with the obvious
Someone named Knott. I wonder if that's where Cheech and Chong got the inspiration for the "Dave's Knott here" bit? It's way too early for that kind of silliness.
Alan J answered:
Walter Knott
Uncle Sky replied:
Don Knotts ?
I can see Abbott and Costello doing a bit about this question:
Who was the first to commercially cultivate the Boysenberry in southern California?
Don Knotts..........That's not right.......Yes it is Knott.....No Knott is wrong
No Knott is not wrong.....Knott is right....it is not.....That's what I said....
Knott can not be right....How can Knott be not right?....because it is not
That's what I said...
Jim from CA, retired to ID, responded:
Walter Knott
Sally said:
Before another day of fun-filled activities with my gks, here is my speedy reply: Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in southern California.was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in southern California. that's my answer, and I'm sticking to it!
Wonder if this was taken before he opened his berry farm??
PS: Looks like we missed the bulk of the hurricane! I'm betting on happy (and wet) tomatoes, but a very tired gamma by the time I get home!!
~ Tony in Philly, late to the game today, wrote:
Walter Knott
Rick replied:
Walter Knott?
Charlie answered:
That is Walter Knott, of Berry Farm fame. I visited Knott's Berry Farm regularly as a kid, but never really knew its origins.
Mary said:
Walter Knott. I remember the farm when it was small and fun. It was a great place to meet boys!
MAM wrote:
Walter Knott; in 1920 Walter and Cordelia Knott moved to the then-sleepy
community of Buena Park, Calif. to farm 20 acres of rented land. Today, that
land is part of 160-acre Knott's Berry Farm, America's first theme park and
the 12th most-visited amusement park in the country.
Cordelia and Walter Knott circa 1930
Retired Teacher Ed, who keeps working anyway, said:
Today's trivia question, Who was the first to commercially cultivate the Boysenberry in Southern California?
The Boysenberry was invented by a man named Rudolph Boysen, and marketed by his friend, who started Knott's Berry Farm. The Halloween Haunt is a big deal every year, and a girl I know gets employment as a dead person every year and loves it.
As a heads up to SoCal BCE readers, there is a Labor Day Celebration today, Saturday September 4th, from 11 am to 5 pm at the Santa Ana Zoo, 1801 E. Chestnut Ave. Santa Ana CA 92701. Sponsored by the OC Labor Federation (of which I'm a delegate) it is free and features zoo animals and politicians, if you can tell them apart. Speaking will be CA Assembly speaker John Perez, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, and AG and CA Gubernatorial Candidate Jerry Brown. I'll be working the AFT booth so stop by and give the secret password (Bart says hey . . .)
And, Joe S
(Missing those granddaughters something fierce) replied:
Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the Boysenberry in southern California.
Chevrolet has tapped comedian Tim Allen as the voice of the brand, after more than a year of searching for a new marketing theme. Michigan native Allen's voice, most recently famous as that of Buzz Lightyear in Pixar's "Toy Story" movies, will debut in Chevrolet Cruze commercials that launch Tuesday, General Motors said today in a statement.
CBS begins the night with a RERUN'CSI: The Original One', followed by '48 Hours', then another '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night with a RERUN'Law & Order: Criminal Intent', followed by another RERUN'Law & Order: Criminal Intent', then still another RERUN'Law & Order: Criminal Intent'.
Of course, 'SNL' is a RERUN, with Tina Fey hosting, music by Justin Bieber.
ABC starts the night with LIVE'College Football', then pads the left coast with local crap and maybe an old 'Oprah'.
The CW offers a RERUN'The Vampire Diaries', followed by a RERUN'90210'.
Faux has the traditional 'Cops', 'Cops', and 'America's Most Wanted'.
MY recycles an old 'House', followed by another old 'House'.
AMC offers the movie 'The Cowboys', followed by the movie 'Maverick'.
BBC -
[12:00 PM] The Choir: Boys Don't Sing Revisited
[1:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 3 Trobiano's
[2:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 6 Clubway 41
[3:00 PM] James May's Toy Stories - Ep 4 Bridge
[4:00 PM] Top Gear - Episode 6
[5:00 PM] Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
[8:00 PM] Die Hard with a Vengeance
[10:30 PM] Superman II
[1:00 AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Ep 6 Booby Trap
[2:00 AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Ep 7 The Enemy
[3:00 AM] Star Trek: The Next Generation - Ep 8 The Price
[4:00 AM] The Graham Norton Show - Ep 1 Olivia Newton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne, Ricky Gervais
[5:00 AM] The Graham Norton Show - Ep 2 Anna Paquin, David Mitchell & Robert Webb, Paolo Nutini
[6:00 AM] The Graham Norton Show - Ep 3 Katie Price, Jo Brand, Jackie Collins
Comedy Central has the movie 'Waiting...', 'Futurama', another 'Futurama', still another 'Futurama', and yet another 'Futurama'.
FX has the movie 'Ice Age: The Meltdown', followed by the movie 'The Simpsons Movie'.
History has 'Seven Signs Of The Apocalypse', 'First Apocalypse', and 'Next Nostradamus'.
IFC -
[6:00AM] Requiem
[7:30AM] IFC Short Film Showcase
[8:30AM] Far Harbor
[10:15AM] Manic
[12:00PM] Requiem
[1:30PM] Far Harbor
[3:15PM] Manic
[5:00PM] Requiem
[6:30PM] Darkness
[8:00PM] From Dusk Till Dawn
[9:50PM] Food Party
[10:00PM] Anamorph
[11:45PM] Beyond Re-Animator
[1:30AM] From Dusk Till Dawn
[3:20AM] At the End of the Sentence
[3:30AM] Anamorph
[5:20AM] Monty Python's Flying Circus (ALL TIMES EDT)
Sundance -
[6:30 AM] The Pool
[8:15 AM] Poison Friends
[10:00 AM] In Short 111
[11:00 AM] The Home Song Stories
[12:45 PM] Endless Summer II
[2:40 PM] Madame Tutli Putli
[3:05 PM] The Pool
[4:45 PM] Poison Friends
[6:30 PM] Love Comes Lately
[8:00 PM] MAN SHOPS GLOBE - Scotland (Episode 2, Season 2)
[8:30 PM] MAN SHOPS GLOBE - Australia (Episode 3, Season 2)
[9:00 PM] Iconoclasts
[10:00 PM] A Few Days In September
[12:00 AM] The Wig
[1:50 AM] Sleeping Beauty
[2:00 AM] Iconoclasts
[3:00 AM] A Few Days In September
[5:00 AM] Love Comes Lately (ALL TIMES EDT)
SyFy has fills the night with 'Stephen King's The Stand'.
U.S. director Terry Gilliam poses with his award he received as a tribute to his career at the American Film Festival in Deauville September 3, 2010.Thefestival pays tribute to the career of Gilliam with the screening of his Film Brazil-Director's cut.
Photo by Vincent Kessler
NBC might have summer's most-watched show in "America's Got Talent," but the network's late-night ratings aren't so hot.
"The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" is pulling a smaller number among adults aged 18 to 49, an elusive demographic coveted by advertiser, than when Conan O'Brien hosted the show last year. In fact, this summer is the lowest-rated "Tonight Show" on record, though such feats have become increasingly common on broadcast across the board.
Since the end of the broadcast season in May, Leno is averaging 3.8 million viewers and a 1.0 adults 18-49 rating (each ratings point in that demo equals about 1.3 million viewers). That's a 12 percent improvement in total audience compared with O'Brien, though off 23 percent in the demo and down in both measurements compared with Leno's performance two years ago.
His percentages greatly improve if comparisons begin a few weeks deeper into the summer so "Tonight" is not facing O'Brien's opening weeks hosting the show, though O'Brien is tops in the demo either way.
Sofia Coppola (L), director of film in competition "Somewhere", arrives with her husband, director Spike Jonze during a red carpet event at the67th Venice Film Festival September 3, 2010.
Photo by Alessandro Bianchi
An Iowa State University music professor says the Lady Gaga club anthem "Bad Romance" translates better than you might think into the 110-foot-tall, organ-like instrument known as a carillon.
Video of the pop hit chiming across Iowa State's aim campus has racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. The Des Moines Register reported Friday that professor Tin-Shi Tam (TIN'-she TAM) played it a week earlier after students started requesting it over the summer.
Tam gives daily lunchtime performances on the carillon during the school year, mostly folk songs and traditional arrangements. She sets aside Fridays for requests, and said some other recent favorites have been Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
On the heels of winning the Emmy for outstanding reality series, ABC has given a second-season order to "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution."
ABC has picked up six new episodes of the show from the Ryan Seacrest-produced series, which will begin production this winter for a midseason or summer run.
The first season of the show echoed Oliver's original UK hit, chronicling his overhaul of a West Virginia school lunch program. For the second season, the show will move to Los Angeles and broaden out, helping people of all ages improve their eating habits in schools, homes, workplaces and even restaurants.
The informative and altruistic series drew critical raves during its midseason run, and averaged 5.5 million viewers during a tough Friday time period. Seacrest and Oliver serve as executive producers. .
Director John Woo poses after he received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during a ceremony of the 66th Venice Film Festival September3, 2010.
Photo by Alessandro Bianchi
From the mixture of hurt, anger and embarrassment on his face, Gordon seems like one of the last people who would want to open his life to cameras for a reality television show.
His is one of four stories featured in back-to-back episodes of A&E's feel-creepy "Hoarders," which opens its third season Monday at 9 p.m. EDT. It's the network's most popular series among young viewers, something of a surprise given that it's about emotionally ill people living amid mounds of garbage.
Gordon (A&E doesn't fully identify people who get treatment through their show) lives in a filthy home with his wife and two adult children. There's no running water. The piles of trash are so deep that his wife got trapped in one and needed help to be extricated.
"Hoarders" was a hit from the start at A&E, and last winter's second season saw an audience 10 percent higher than the first, the Nielsen Co. said. It averaged 2.3 million viewers an episode and, in the truest mark of success for a nonfiction cable show, produced imitators such as TLC's "Hoarding: Buried Alive" and "Confessions: Animal Hoarding," on Animal Planet.
Members of the original funk band War say they can't be friends with PepsiCo.
They're suing the soft drink maker for more than $10 million, saying it did not negotiate with them to use their song "Why Can't We Be Friends" in a new commercial.
Even if PepsiCo and its agencies got rights from the music's publishers or anyone else who owns them, attorney Ken Freundlich and his co-counsel Max Sprecher said the company should have negotiated with the artists too.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, some of the group's original members and a relative said they learned the 1975 hit was in the ad for Pepsi MAX only when the commercials launched in July.
Jimmy Wales, from the US, co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia, attends the 'Intelligence on the World, Europe, and Italy' economic forum, at Villa d'Este,in Cernobbio, on the Como Lake, Italy, Friday, Sept. 3, 2010.
Phtob by Luca Bruno
A witness in the Anna Nicole Smith drug conspiracy trial recanted statements Friday that he saw defendant Howard K. Stern give the celebrity model excessive drugs.
Ford Shelley also testified that he never saw Smith abuse drugs, and that he believed her boyfriend-lawyer Stern shouldn't be on trial.
Shelley, whose family provided Smith a house and spent time with her in the year before she died, was a combative prosecution witness.
Shelley had previously suggested to investigators that Stern overmedicated Smith.
Kara DioGuardi is officially out at "American Idol."
After months of speculation, Fox announced Friday that the songwriter who joined the Fox singing competition's judging panel during its eighth season in 2009 was stepping down from her role as a judge.
DioGuardi's exit follows the departures of judges Simon Cowell and Ellen DeGeneres.
Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez are the reported front-runners to join the panel. The show returns to the air in January.
American Hasidic Jewish reggae musician Matthew Paul Miller aka Matisyahu speaks during an interview in Budapest, Hungary, Friday, Sept. 3, 2010. Matisyahuis due to give a concert in Budapest on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010 as part of the Budapest Jewish Summer Festival.
Photo by Zsolt Demecs
Actor Paul Hogan, star of the "Crocodile Dundee" movie trilogy, has been cleared to return home to the United States after he was barred last month from leaving Australia because of a disputed tax bill, his lawyer said Friday.
The 70-year-old Australian-born actor, who currently lives in Los Angeles, arrived in Sydney on Aug. 20 to attend his mother's funeral and was served with an Australian Taxation Office order barring him from leaving Australia until he settles a multimillion dollar tax bill, lawyer Andrew Robinson said last week.
On Friday, Robinson said after a "cordial and cooperative" meeting between Hogan's lawyers and tax officials, an agreement was reached that will allow Hogan to return to the U.S.
Australian tax and crime investigators have fought Hogan in a five-year legal battle in Australian and U.S. courts to investigate evidence he used offshore bank accounts to conceal earnings after his low-budget "Crocodile Dundee" movie became an international hit in 1986.
Actor Chris Klein, who starred in the "American Pie" movies, pleaded no contest to drunken driving and will serve four years probation stemming from his arrest in June, court officials said on Friday.
Klein, 31, also was sentenced to the four days he had already served in a Los Angeles jail and agreed to attend 18 months of alcohol education classes, officials said.
The actor broke into Hollywood's ranks of young actors playing a naive teenager named Chris "Oz" Ostreicher in the 1999 teen sex comedy "American Pie," and he went on to reprise that role in 2001's sequel, "American Pie 2."
He was arrested in the early morning hours of June 16 after police observed his car drifting across lanes on a Los Angeles-area freeway. Klein previously had a drunken driving conviction in California in 2005.
A reveller takes part in Gay Pride parade in Valparaiso city, about 121 km (75 miles) northwest of Santiago September 3, 2010.
PHoto by Eliseo Fernandez
A federal jury has deadlocked on whether Mexican-born actress Fernanda Romero and her husband committed marriage fraud in order to skirt immigration laws.
U.S. District Judge Manuel Real declared a mistrial Friday after jurors told him delibrations had grown hostile and they could not reach unanimous verdicts.
Deliberations began Wednesday after a four-day trial in which Romero and her U.S.-born husband Kent Ross testified in their defense.
They told jurors they were in love when they married in 2005, but that they quickly grew apart. Ross testified he encouraged Romero to seek legal residency based on their marriage.
A German court ruled Friday that Google Inc.'s subsidiary YouTube LLC must pay compensation after users uploaded several videos of performances by singer Sarah Brightman in violation of copyright laws.
The Hamburg state court said the standardized question to users about whether they have the necessary rights to publish material is not enough to relieve YouTube of the legal responsibility for the content, especially because the platform can be used anonymously.
The wording of the court statement appears to be a major blow to YouTube's business model, but Google Germany spokesman Henning Dorstewitz told The Associated Press YouTube will appeal the decision detailed in the 60-page ruling.
YouTube must not publish those videos any more and provide information to settle the amount of compensation in at least three cases in which Brightman videos were uploaded, the court said.
In this Sept. 1, 2010 photo, two goats are stranded on a railroad bridge south of Roundup, Mont. The goats were rescued after nearly two days and are in good condition.
Photo by Courtesy of Sandy Church of the Rimrock Humane Society
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wrote:
(Missing those granddaughters something fierce) replied:
