Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Laura Bates: The best comebacks to sexist comments (Guardian)
Followers of the Everyday Sexism Project have shared their wittiest responses to sexist abuse - funny, ferocious and not for the faint-hearted.
Tim Jonze: "R Kelly: 'Weak people are the haters'" (Guardian)
He's the multi-million selling R&B star whose life has been dogged by scandal - and he's back with a new album Black Panties. R Kelly talks about the darkest points of his career, why he's an alien and how he doesn't feel sorry for Chris Brown.
Marina Hyde: The Kardashian Christmas cards that reveal the ghosts of Khristmases past (Guardian)
PAGING RICK DECKARD … And so to the latest Kardashian Khristmas Kard, which really ought to be captioned Nine Replicants in Search of a Blade Runner. Set in post-apocalyptic contemporary culture, the image of reality TV's ultimate nuclear family was shot on a $250,000 budget by tedious artiste David LaChappelle, a man who has about as much to say as a photographer as Guy Ritchie does as a film director.
Peter Bradshaw: Frozen - review (Guardian)
Disney's latest is a big-hearted charmer of a family film with terrific musical numbers.
Maxton Walker: Breaking Bad - box set review (Guardian)
Like a Dostoevsky in the desert, this great series charts a decent, slightly pathetic man's tragic descent into moral depravity.
Nosheen Iqbal: "Soul Music: 'Strange Fruit'" (Guardian)
This study of Billie Holiday's famous song and its legacy was a salutary reminder of horrors committed in living memory.
Adam Todd Brown: The 5 Most Undeservedly Hated Famous People of 2013 (Cracked)
It's December, which, among lots of other things, means fans of Internet entertainment should brace themselves for a veritable onslaught of lists of the best and worst things of the year that has almost passed. Cracked does them, and so does just about everyone else.
The World Outside My Window - Time Lapse of Earth from the ISS (YouTube)
"David Peterson put together NASA footage from several ISS missions (much of it recorded by Don Petit) to bring you a breathtaking time-lapse video of Earth seen from space. A list of the locations is available at the YouTube page. Watch it in full screen mode if you possibly can, and look out for comet Lovejoy seen over Australia at 2:03." - Neatorama)
Strange Products (Video)
Terrible infomercials.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly cloudy and on the cold side.
The hot water heater took a dive. Sigh.
Electric Guitar Auctioned
Bob Dylan
Like Elvis' no-hips-allowed appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," or the Beatles' arrival in America, or Woodstock, it is considered one of the milestone moments in rock history: Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
On Friday, the Fender Stratocaster that Dylan plugged in at the festival sold for nearly $1 million - the highest price ever paid for a guitar at auction.
A buyer identified only as a private individual agreed to pay $965,000 at Christie's, including the auction house's fees, for the sunburst-finish electric guitar.
Dylan's legendary performance at the festival in Rhode Island 48 years ago marked his rupture with the folk movement's old guard and solidified his shift away from acoustic music, like "Blowin' in the Wind," toward amplified rock, such as "Like a Rolling Stone."
Christie's had expected the guitar, which was sold with its original black leather strap and Fender hard-shell case, to go for far less, $300,000 to $500,000.
Bob Dylan
'Hobbit' Sequel
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert can out-Tolkien the best of them. His mad Middle-earth knowledge has put to shame such lesser lights as James Franco. The Truthiness Teller knows his Silmarils from his Bombadils - and isn't afraid to rub it in your face.
And it's earned him one heck of a prize.
The host of Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" has an actual role in "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug." If that wasn't enough, Warner Bros. tells Yahoo Movies, that there's a downright proliferation of the Colbert Nation in Laketown.
Director Peter Jackson also snuck Colbert's two sons - John and Peter - into the action, along wife Evelyn McGee-Colbert.
The Colberts all play "Laketown spies" in the film. The location becomes central to the story about two-thirds of the way through the flick as it is the final destination before the dwarves and Bilbo Baggins head into the Lonely Mountain to displace that evil, treasure-hording dragon Smaug. In the town, which floats on an icy lake, the little folk strike a shaky alliance with Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) and have to hang out there for a bit.
Stephen Colbert
Season Cut By 4 Episodes
'Scandal'
ABC says it will air four fewer episodes of "Scandal" than planned this season.
The network on Friday didn't say why it will broadcast 18 instead of 22 episodes. But the decision follows word that "Scandal" star Kerry Washington and her new husband, football player Nnamdi Asomugha, are expecting a baby.
After next Thursday's episode airs, "Scandal" will take a break and then return in late February with the final episodes of season three.
The drama series about Washington, D.C., intrigue is a ratings hit for ABC and earned an Emmy nomination for its lead actress.
'Scandal'
Mural Fetches $209K
Banksy
A mural stenciled on the side of a Hollywood gas station five years ago by the British street artist Banksy has fetched more than $200,000 at a Beverly Hills auction.
The 9-by-8 foot "Flower Girl" artwork sold for $209,000 on Thursday at an auction that featured nearly 100 works by more than 30 artists, according to the Los Angeles Times. The winning bid came from a Los Angeles buyer who requested anonymity.
The mural shows a little girl holding a flower basket under the eye of a surveillance camera planted atop a tall stalk.
The seller of the mural was Eytan Rosenberg, a former gas station owner who allowed a group of three street artists to paint something on the business's white brick wall.
Rosenberg sold the gas station last year and painstakingly removed the artwork and installed it in a sturdy aluminum frame. He and his sister want to use the money from the sale to build a car wash.
Banksy
French Court Allows Auction
Hopi
A Paris court on Friday dismissed an attempt by advocacy group Survival International to block the auction of 25 sacred objects from Arizona's Hopi tribe that has caused outrage.
The sale of the "Kachina" ceremonial masks and headdresses will go ahead on Monday as planned, despite pleas from the Hopi's religious authorities to cancel the auction.
The court battle against auction house EVE echoed another legal saga that erupted in April when French firm Neret-Minet ignored international appeals to halt the sale of some 70 masks that eventually fetched around 930,000 euros ($1.3 million).
Claire David, the judge presiding over the case Friday, said that "while the sale of these cultural objects can constitute an affront to the dignity of the Hopi tribe, this moral and philosophical consideration does not in itself give the judge the right to suspend the sale of these masks which is not forbidden in France".
Hopi
Commerce Über Alles
Eagles
The Obama administration on Friday extended the length of permits that allow wind farms and other operations to accidentally kill protected eagles to 30 years, drawing fire from wildlife conservationists.
The move to offer permits of up to three decades, from a previous maximum of five years, had been urged by the wind energy industry but was attacked by a leading wildlife group as a "stunningly bad move."
The Interior Department said the change in policy would help protect eagles, which can be killed when they collide with wind turbines and other structures, and allow the development of renewable energy and other projects designed to operate for decades.
It is not known many eagles are killed each year at wind farms, which are not required to report eagle deaths. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates wind facilities have caused the deaths of 85 bald and golden eagles nationwide since 1997.
That compares to the 50 to 70 golden eagles that are known to be killed each year by the wind turbine arrays at Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in northern California, according to Doug Bell, wildlife program manager with the East Bay Regional Park District.
Eagles
Moves To Expel Racist
Italy
An Italian court has ruled in favor of the expulsion of ex-Ku Klux Klan leader and former Louisiana politician David Duke from Italy, where he had been living for a year and a half, local police said on Thursday.
Duke, 63, moved to the Valle di Cadore mountain village after being granted a visa to study and write there by the Italian embassy in Malta, said Luciano Meneghetti, deputy police chief in the northern Italian province of Belluno.
Italian police subsequently found that Switzerland had issued in 2009 a travel and residence ban against Duke valid throughout the entire Schengen area, a group of 26 European countries that have abolished internal border controls.
Duke had tried to fight an initial request to leave Italy by lodging an appeal with the Belluno administrative court.
Meneghetti said the court had rejected the appeal and ruled in favor of the expulsion of Duke, whom it considered "socially dangerous for his racist and anti-semitic views".
Italy
Storm Delays Auction
Gene Kelly
Although rain couldn't stop Gene Kelly from singing and dancing, an ice storm has postponed the auction of the Hollywood star's grey wool suit.
Heritage Auctions spokesman Noah Fleisher says accumulated ice cut the power to the auction house, so there's no way the suit Kelly wore as he joyously danced in a downpour in "Singin' in the Rain" can be auctioned as scheduled Friday.
Heritage expects the suit to sell for more than $20,000.
Memorabilia collector Gerry Sola has owned the suit for more than four decades. He bought it for $10 at a 1970 sale of MGM props and wardrobe items.
Gene Kelly
New Stealth Drone
"Area 51"
The US Air Force has secretly developed a new stealth drone for long-range reconnaissance missions that could be operational by 2015, according to a report Friday in an industry magazine.
The unmanned drone, dubbed RQ-180, is currently in the testing phase at the top secret Groom Lake air base in Nevada -- the infamous "Area 51" where the Air Force tested the U2 spy planes in the late 1950s, Aviation Week said.
The new aircraft was reportedly built by Northrop Grumann, the company behind the Global Hawk and the X-47B drones, which landed on air craft carriers for the first time this summer.
The US company may have obtained in 2008 a secret contract on the order of $2 billion to develop the latest drone, according to Aviation Week.
An artistic rendering of the RQ-180 on the cover of the magazine shows a craft with striking resemblance to the X-47B, in particular in lack of rear stabilizer and its so-called "batwing" shape.
"Area 51"
Time Running Out
Bugatti Veyron
Anyone with a Bugatti Veyron on their list of holiday season gifts be warned: only 50 examples of the multi-million dollar hypercar are left and when the final one is sold, production will cease forever.
And with the end of the 450-model production run will come the end of one of the most remarkable chapters in automotive history.
A car born out of an obsession to create the fastest, most luxurious and most exclusive supercar in history, it was the first production car with over 1000bhp, the first to go from 0-100kph in 2.45 seconds and to this day is still the fastest proven street-legal vehicle in existence -- capable of 431kph or 267.8mph. And then there's the price tag, a whopping $1.3 million (€1.2 million) for the 'entry level' EB 16.4.
Yet despite the price, which has climbed significantly as horsepower and top speed have increased in the face of competition, all of the hardtop coupe editions (limited to 300 examples) have found caring owners, as have 100 open-top roadsters, and Bugatti is this week celebrating the sale of the 400th Veyron to a client in the Middle East -- a €2.13 million ($2.9 million) Grand Sport Vitesse 'Jean-Pierre Wimille' special edition, which itself is limited to three examples.
Bugatti Veyron
A Ton Of Butter
Gingerbread House
Holiday cheer in Texas has become even sweeter thanks to a giant gingerbread house that has broken a world record for confectionary construction.
Coming in at 35.8 million calories and covering an area of 2520 square feet, or nearly the size of a tennis court, the 21-foot high gingerbread house in Bryan, Texas, 90 miles northwest of Houston, has been declared the biggest ever by Guinness World Records.
The house, with an edible exterior mounted over a wooden frame, was built by the Traditions Club near Texas A&M University to help raise money for a trauma center at the regional St. Joseph's Hospital.
The Texas creation topped the previous record holder for gingerbread houses, a 36,600-cubic-foot model constructed in Bloomington, Minnesota's Mall of America in 2012.
The recipe is simple. Mix 1,800 pounds of butter (820 kgs), 2,925 pounds (1,327 kg) of brown sugar, 7,200 eggs, 7,200 pounds (3,266 kg) all-purpose flour, 1,080 ounces (31 kg) ground ginger and a few other ingredients, bake and form into panels for mounting.
Gingerbread House
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