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Gangnam Style - Ohio University Marching 110 (YouTube)
Another remarkable performance from the world-famous Marching 110 of Ohio University.
Ohio State Marching Band is "Out of this World" (YouTUbe)
The OSU marching band tries to top their video game routine with a halftime show featuring dancing aliens, UFOs, time travel, and a dig at Michigan.
Paul Krugman: Pointing Toward Prosperity? (New York Times)
Well, as I've said before, Mr. Romney's "plan" is a sham. It's a list of things he claims will happen, with no description of the policies he would follow to make those things happen. "We will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget," he declares, but he refuses to specify which tax loopholes he would close to offset his $5 trillion in tax cuts.
Andrew Tobias: Jews for Romney. Really?
To note, as the New Yorker did, that 93% of all the gains from the 2009-2010 recovery went to the top 1% - or that, indeed, 37% went to the top one-hundredth of 1% - is not to wage class warfare. It is simply to note that things are out of balance. Governor Romney and his party are committed to throwing them even further out of balance: cutting taxes on billionaires while cutting programs that aid the middle class and the poor. This will not help to heal the world.
Jill Filipovic: The real Republican rape platform (Guardian)
It's no accident GOP candidates can't stop talking about rape: the party view is women are mere vessels subject to men's will.
Froma Harrop: "'Access' to Birth Control Doesn't Count" (Creators Syndicate)
Mitt Romney is running ads explaining that he does not object to birth control. But no one questions his stance that women should have, as the ads say, "access" to contraception. They already do. They also have access to Coach handbags and flights to Acapulco. And that's where the Romney smokescreen, intended to close a gender gap favoring Democrats, needs clearing.
Connie Schultz: Mourdock Is Not Just Indiana's Problem (Creators Syndicate)
So, now rape is a gift from God. Understand, I don't think that, but a man who wants to pick the next U.S. Supreme Court justice does, which is why all of us should care what's happening in Indiana.
Greg Braxton: "Bill Maher: Liberals' Profane Comic in Chief" (Los Angeles Times)
Come election day, Maher, who has labeled Romney a "buffoon," is certain to cast his vote for Obama. But while he believes a second term for the president would be good for the country, a selfish part of him is pulling for Romney. "Nothing would be better for this show," he said, flashing a mischievous grin. "Romney as president would just be a font of comedy material. I mean, this is a guy who lights his cigars with $100 bills. Having him in the White House would be incredibly better for the show."
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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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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hot, windy, and dry - the Santa Ana's have come to town.
Top 25 Worst
Passwords
The website SplashData recently released its list of the most popular Internet passwords for 2012. Because these passwords are the most common, they're also the most vulnerable when it comes to digital security.
Topping the list was "password," which was also the most popular password in 2011 - "123456? was runner-up, followed by the slightly more inventive "12345678."
Other inspired entries included "qwerty," "monkey," "111111? and "password1." Here are the top 10 passwords and their positions relative to the 2011 rankings. The full list is available here.
1. password (Unchanged) 2, 123456 (Unchanged) 3. 12345678 (Unchanged) 4. abc123 (Up 1) 5. qwerty (Down 1) 6. monkey (Unchanged) 7. letmein (Up 1) 8. dragon (Up 2) 9. 111111 (Up 3) 10. baseball (Up 1)
SplashData, a Los Gatos, Calif., company that provides apps for passwords, digital photos and more, compiled the rankings from examining millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers.
Passwords
2012 Prince of Asturias Awards
Spain
The winners of Spain's Prince of Asturias awards have received their prizes from Prince Felipe.
U.S. author Philip Roth won the 2012 literature prize in recognition of his contribution to American literature, but was unable to be present because he is recovering from recent surgery. U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont read words of thanks on Roth's behalf.
Other recipients Friday included Japan's Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of video game Mario Bros, who claimed the communication and humanities award. British biologist Gregory Winter and American pathologist Richard Lerner were distinguished in science and technology research.
Spain national soccer team players Iker Casillas and Xavi Hernandez received the sports award, while Spanish architect Rafael Moneo was honored in the arts category.
Spain
Iranian Dissidents Win
Sakharov Prize
Two Iranian dissidents - a lawyer and a film director - were awarded the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
The European Parliament awarded the prize Friday to Nasrin Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi. Martin Schulz, the president of the parliament, said it was "a message of solidarity and recognition to a woman and a man who have not been bowed by fear and intimidation."
Sotoudeh, a lawyer who represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists following the disputed June 2009 presidential elections, is now in prison herself. Panahi's films are known for their humanist perspective on life in Iran, often focusing on the hardships of children, the poor and women. He won the Camera d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
The other finalists for the prize were Ales Bialiatski, a human rights activist in prison in Belarus, and Pussy Riot, the punk rock group that has criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two of the band's members are in prison.
Sakharov Prize
Civil War Cannonball Found
Philly
A contractor grinding a tree stump in downtown Philadelphia's historic district has made a rare discovery.
Independence National Historical Park officials said Thursday that among the roots of the dead tree, the contractor found what appears to be a cannonball most likely linked to a Civil War recruitment camp that was at the site in 1862.
Park spokeswoman Jane Cowley tells KYW-AM it weighs about 3 pounds and measures roughly three inches across but it's kind of beat up from being underground for about 150 years.
As a precaution, the Philadelphia Police Department Bomb Squad checked out the object and said there was no danger to the public.
Philly
Jail For Tax Fraud
Silvio
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in jail on Friday for tax fraud in connection with the purchase of broadcasting rights by his Mediaset television company.
The 76-year-old billionaire media magnate, who was convicted three times during the 1990s in the first degree before being cleared by higher courts, has the right to appeal the ruling two more times before the sentence becomes definitive.
That process is likely to be lengthy and he will not be jailed unless he loses the final appeal. Even then, because the crime was committed when an amnesty to prevent prison overcrowding was in place, the maximum possible jail time would be one year.
Milan judge Edoardo d'Avossa told a packed court that between 2000 and 2003, there had been "a very significant amount of tax evasion" and "an incredible mechanism of fraud" in place around the buying and selling of broadcast rights.
The court's written ruling said Berlusconi showed a "natural capacity for crime".
Silvio
Struck Utility Pole
Gene Shalit
Television movie critic Gene Shalit faces a charge of driving to endanger after his vehicle struck a utility pole and came to rest against a home in western Massachusetts.
Lenox police say the 86-year-old Shalit told Chief Stephen O'Brien, who was first on the scene of Wednesday afternoon's crash, that he fell asleep at the wheel.
Shalit has received a summons to appear before a clerk magistrate in Southern Berkshire District Court in Great Barrington at a future date.
Shalit, known for his bushy hair and mustache, was unhurt. His vehicle was towed and the home suffered minor damage.
Gene Shalit
Neo-Nazi's Web Posting Not Protected Speech
First Amendment
A white supremacist solicited violence against a juror by posting the man's address, phone number and other personal details on his extremist website, an appellate court ruled on Friday, overturning a lower court's decision to toss the neo-Nazi's conviction on the grounds that his posts were protected by the First Amendment.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago concluded that the posts by William A. White - who gained notoriety in 2008 for seeming to invite the assassination of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the same website - were not subject to the shield that the U.S. Constitution extends to most speech.
Even though White didn't explicitly instruct anyone to attack the juror when he posted the data on the website, the appellate judges said White's loyal readers would have known that was just what he meant in the context of other threats, including against Obama.
The juror White singled out served as the foreman in a 2005 trial that convicted another white supremacist of soliciting the murder of a federal judge in Chicago.
In its unanimous 30-page ruling, the three-judge panel agreed that the First Amendment "protects even speech that is loathsome." But the judges said "criminal solicitations are simply not protected."
First Amendment
Fined For Peace Sign
New York
A woman who was forced to pay an $800 fine for nailing a peace sign to her window frame in violation of zoning regulations sued New York City in U.S. federal court on Friday, claiming the law infringed upon her right to free speech.
Brigitte Vosse, who owns a condominium on Manhattan's Upper West Side, received a ticket from the city's department of buildings for the peace symbol she hung in her living room window for a year and a half.
The city's zoning laws prohibit people from placing signs more than 40 feet above curb level in Vosse's zoning district, according to the lawsuit. But exceptions are made for signs that are placed on buildings whose uses are primarily "of a civic, philanthropic, educational or religious nature."
That demonstrates that the restriction is content-based in violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, the lawsuit claimed.
Vosse, who placed the peace sign in her window to express her opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, paid the fine but left the sign hanging in protest of the law, according to the lawsuit.
New York
Remains Of Ancient Temple
Bali
An archaeologist says a structure that is believed to be the remains of an ancient Hindu temple has been unearthed on Indonesia's resort island of Bali.
Wayan Swantika of the local archaeology agency says workers digging a drainage basin last week in eastern Denpasar, Bali's capital, at first discovered a large stone about 1 meter (3 feet) underground.
Excavation teams have since uncovered a 57-meter (62-yard) structure that is believed to be the temple's foundation.
The find is still being analyzed, but given the shape and characteristics of the materials used, Swantika says he believes it was built sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries. He added that it is also thought to be the largest ancient temple ever discovered in Bali.
Bali
In Memory
Dody Weston Thompson
Award-winning fine art photographer Dody Weston Thompson, one of the founders of the prestigious photographic journal "Aperture," has died in Los Angeles. She was 89.
Thompson favored creating sharp-focus, realistic photographs of natural objects in the style popularized by photography icons Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, both of whom she assisted.
In 1952, Thompson was the second photographer to win the San Francisco Museum of Art's Albert M. Bender Award. Adams was the first.
Thompson was once married to photographer Brett Weston and was a creative collaborator with him. They remained friends until his death in 1993.
Thompson's husband of 48 years, aerospace executive Daniel Michel Thompson, died in 2008.
Dody Weston Thompson
In Memory
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun, a pioneering cultural historian, reigning public intellectual and longtime Ivy League professor who became a best-selling author in his 90s with the acclaimed "From Dawn to Decadence," has died. He was 104.
Barzun, who taught for nearly 50 years at Columbia University, passed away Thursday evening in San Antonio, where he had lived in recent years, his son-in-law Gavin Parfit said.
Praised by Cynthia Ozick as among "the last of the thoroughgoing generalists," the tall, courtly Barzun wrote dozens of books and essays on everything from philosophy and music to baseball and detective novels.
In 2000, he capped his career with "From Dawn to Decadence," a survey of Western civilization from the Renaissance to the end of the 20th century. The length topped 800 pages, and the theme was uninspiring - the collapse of traditions in modern times - yet it received wide acclaim from reviewers, stayed on best-seller lists for months and was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Along with Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and others, the French immigrant was a prominent thinker during the Cold War era, making occasional television appearances and even appearing in 1956 on the cover of Time magazine, which cited him as representing "a growing host of men of ideas who not only have the respect of the nation, but who return the compliment."
In 2003, resident George W. Bush awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, praising Barzun as "a thinker of great discernment and integrity. ... Few academics of the last century have equaled his output and his influence." In 2010, he received a National Humanities Medal.
A scholar's son, Barzun was born in Creteil, France, in 1907 and grew up in a household where Modernism was the great subject and visitors included Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound and Guillame Apollinaire, upon whose knee he once sat. But World War I drove the family out of the country and across the ocean to the United States.
"The outbreak of war in August 1914 and the nightmare that ensued put an end to all innocent joys and assumptions," Barzun later wrote. "By the age of ten - as I was later told - my words and attitudes betrayed suicidal thoughts; it appeared that I was 'ashamed' to be still alive."
Reading consoled him, especially "Hamlet," but he never recovered his early "zest for life." In 1990, he defined himself as a "spirited" pessimist, explaining that he retained a "vivid sight of an earlier world, soon followed by its collapse in wretchedness and folly."
Having learned English in part by reading James Fenimore Cooper, Barzun entered Columbia as an undergraduate at age 15 and was in his early 20s when the school hired him as an instructor in the history department. He remained with Columbia until his retirement, in 1975, and would be long remembered for the "Colloquium on Important Books" he taught with Trilling, with one former student calling Barzun "a towering charismatic figure who aroused the kind of fierce loyalties that the medieval masters must have."
Allen Ginsberg, another Barzun student, once joked that his former professor was a master of "politeness."
Barzun's greatest influence was on the writing of cultural history; he helped invent it. As a student at Columbia he was among the first to integrate the narration of wars and government with the evolution of art, science, education and fashion.
"From Dawn to Decadence," summing up a lifetime of thinking, offered a rounded, leisurely and conservative tour of Western civilization, with numerous digressions printed in the margins. Barzun guided readers from the religious debates of the Reformation to the contemporary debates on beliefs of any kind.
He contributed to such magazines as Harper's and The New Republic and he published more than 30 books, notably "Teacher in America," a classic analysis of education and culture. In the early 1950s, he and Trilling helped found the Readers' Subscription Book Club, a highbrow response to the Book-of-the-Month Club that lasted 12 years.
Barzun also edited many books, including a compilation of short detective stories, and wrote a memorable essay on baseball, in which he advised that "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." Those words eventually made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., for which Barzun later autographed a bat celebrating his 100th birthday.
Barzun had three children with his first wife, Marianna Lowell, who died in 1978. He married Marguerite Davenport two years later. He also is survived by 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, according to his daughter, Isabel Barzun.
Jacques Barzun
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