'TBH Politoons'
Thanks, again, Tim!
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly overcast day.
Missed the march. We have an on-going project of trapping feral cats down at the shore. For the last 2 years, one (fertile) feral female could not be caught. Well, this morning, she finally
was nabbed, and the kind foks at Cat-Nippers provided the voucher. Graycee is now fixed, with a clipped ear, & recuperating in the pantry. She'll be returned to her shoreline home in the morning.
The Blah3.com link above will take you to some pictures from NYC yesterday - they were taken by American Stranger, himself, so you're not likely to see them anywhere else.
Tonight, Sunday, as is tradition, CBS starts the evening with '60 Minutes', and then a FRESH 'Becker', which is followd by the half
hour that CBS refuses to fill with anything other than RERUNs - tonight, it's a RERUN 'Raymond', and then a FRESH
made-for-tv movie 'Open House'.
NBC opens with 'Dateline', then a FRESH 'American Dreams', followed by a FRESH 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent',
and then a FRESH 'Kingpin'.
ABC has a FRESH made-for-tv movie 'The Music Man', followed by a FRESH 'Dragnet'.
The WB has the weekly RERUN 'Gilmore Girls', then a FRESH 'Charmed', followed by the
Series Finale of 'High School Reunion'.
Faux opens the night with a FRESH 'King Of The Hill', then a RERUN 'Simpsons', followed by
a FRESH 'Simpsons' (the 300th episode), followed by another FRESH 'Simpsons', then
it's a 'special' - 'Married....With Children Reunion'.
UPN has the usual RERUN 'Enterprise', and then 'Stargate SG-1'.
Anyone have any opinions?
Or reviews?
(See below for addresses)
Peter Seeger sings at an anti-war protest outside United Nations headquarters, Saturday, Feb 15, 2003 in New York to protest a possible U.S.- led attack on Iraq, part of a day of global protests. The crowd stretched for 20 blocks along First Avenue, where
the demonstrators were permitted to gather after the city, citing security issues, refused to allow a march past the United Nations. The crowd wound up spilling over to Second Avenue, where they were joined by police officers in riot gear and on horseback.
Photo by Shawn Baldwin
Expelled By U.S.
Iraqi Journalist
The U.S. government expelled an Iraqi journalist who covers the United Nations for the official Iraqi News Agency, saying he is "harmful" to the security of the United States, the journalist and U.S. officials said Friday.
The announcement came as Iraq informed Fox News that its four staff members in Baghdad would have to leave the country.
Allawi, who has reported from the United Nations for the past two years, said he received the expulsion letter signed by Deputy U.S. Ambassador Patrick Kennedy at his Manhattan home on Thursday.
The letter said that he and his family, including his five children, had 15 days to leave the United States.
Iraqi Journalist
The Information One-Stop
Moose & Squirrel
Man With An Opinion
Felix Dennis
Maxim publisher Felix Dennis has no patience for ill-informed greenies telling him how to live his life. "All religions are methods of control. Eco-nazis are another form of Jesuit priests," he tells the Times of London. "They have built an enormous industry which they now have to support." Dennis blames the rise of tree-hugging zealotry on Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which he calls "the most deeply flawed book in the history of mankind." As far as Felix is concerned, "No one knows whether mankind has had one iota of effect on heating up the atmosphere or whether it's just a cyclical pattern." To those who disagree, Dennis tells the London paper, "I'm not remotely interested in your wretched and pathetic prognostications of gloom." Dennis, 55 years old and worth $500 million, bought 50,000 acres of land in England where he plans to plant a forest for public use, but it has nothing to do with eco-consciousness. "I'm not planting his heartland forest with my ill-gotten gains for the benefit of human beings. I'm doing it entirely for egotistical reasons. I want 50,000 acres called the Forest of Dennis."
Felix Dennis
Donating $5M to Morehouse College
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey will donate $5 million to Morehouse College, the school announced.
The talk show host's pledge came just as Morehouse launched its largest-ever fund-raising campaign, hoping to receive at least $105 million by 2006.
Winfrey, who had previously donated $1 million to the historically black college, is the school's top donor to date.
President Walter Massey said Morehouse will use the money to offer more scholarships, upgrade the campus and ultimately make it more competitive with top colleges.
Oprah Winfrey
"The Oprah Winfrey Show"
Morehouse College Web site
Mexican protesters demonstrate under Mexico City's Angel of Independence monument, against a possible U.S.-led attack on Iraq, February 14, 2003. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix today presented a new report on Iraq and his inspectors' search for weapons of mass destruction.
Photo by Henry Romero
The Dead, James Brown & Allman Brothers
Bonnaroo Music Festival
The surviving members of the Grateful Dead, singer James Brown and the Allman Brothers will headline the 2003 Bonnaroo Music Festival.
More than 30 acts have been confirmed to perform at the June 13-15 event in Manchester. Last year's festival drew more than 70,000 music fans to the Middle Tennessee town in Coffee County, and organizers expect up to 80,000 this year.
The biggest headache of last year's festival was heavy traffic getting to the 600-acre site. There will be a temporary exit from Interstate 24 this year
Bonnaroo Music Festival
Bonnaroo Music Festival Web site
Tickets Auctioned for Massachusetts Charity
Bruce Springsteen
Just how much will somebody pay to see the Boss?
A working-class suburb of Boston is going to find out Tuesday — and officials hope it's a lot.
Two tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert are going to be auctioned by radio station WZLX-FM, with the money going to Somerville's youth programs.
The tickets — valued at $500 and donated by the Winter Hill Bank — are for a Wednesday night gig at the Somerville Theater. The Boss is performing two nights to help raise funds for DoubleTake magazine,
a publication devoted to fiction, poetry and documentary work.
The city is trying to make up for $3 million in state aid cuts. Recreation services for children were particularly hard hit.
Bruce Springsteen
Out On DVD Before Series Ends
'Kingpin'
NBC has decided to release its new crime drama "Kingpin" on DVD even before the heavily promoted series about a Mexican drug lord finishes its limited six-episode prime-time run.
The network said on Friday it would release all six episodes of "Kingpin" on DVD on Feb. 16, two days before the show ends its scheduled run.
NBC said the "Kingpin" DVD would include behind-the-scenes footage, cast interviews and explicit footage not seen on broadcast TV. The show, about a Mexican drug lord and his family, has been characterized by
many as network TV's answer to HBO's violent but popular crime drama "The Sopranos."
'Kingpin'
In The Kitchen With BartCop & Friends
Baca Allows Blake Interview
Barbara Walters
The sheriff's department approved a request by TV journalist Barbara Walters to interview actor Robert Blake, who has watched two defense attorneys quit his murder case after disagreeing over whether he should grant TV interviews.
Sheriff Lee Baca agreed to let Walters speak with the former "Baretta" star, who has pleaded innocent to charges he murdered his wife, 44-year-old Bonny Lee Bakley. The interview is scheduled for Monday at the Men's Central Jail.
Baca told the Los Angeles Times on Friday he was swayed by Walters' argument that she had conducted jail interviews in the past. Baca, in reversing his decision, said he didn't realize that camera crews had access to the jail and its celebrity inmates before he took office.
"It had been done before and did not cause a great headache to the system," Baca said. "I thought I should allow it."
Blake's current lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., said Friday he would stand by Blake even though he strongly disagrees with his client's decision.
Barbara Walters
Actors Martin Sheen, left, and James Cromwell join demonstrators on Hollywood Boulevard to protest the possible war in Iraq in Los Angeles, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003.
Photo by Lucy Nicholson
Renewed Calls For Death
Salman Rushdie
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have renewed a call to kill Salman Rushdie, whom Iran condemned to death 14 years ago for allegedly insulting Islam in a prize-winning novel.
The hard-line Guards, Iran's main fighting force, said in a statement that the fatwa — or Islamic edict — issued by the late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was "irrevocable," the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported late Friday.
Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie on Feb. 14, 1989, ordering Muslims to kill the novelist because he had allegedly insulted Islam in his best-selling novel, "The Satanic Verses."
In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support the fatwa, but at the same time the government said it could not rescind the edict as, under Islamic law, that could be done only by the person who issued it. Khomeini died in June 1989.
Khomeini's 1989 fatwa sent Rushdie into hiding under police protection, but didn't stop him from writing more novels. In 1990, Rushdie published an apology and reiterated his respect for Islam.
Salman Rushdie
Code Pink Women's Pre-emptive Strike for Peace
Mighty in Pink
by Liza Featherstone
It's not easy to be warm and fashionable at the same time," smiled Nina Human of Atlanta, who, ensconced in a billowing pink scarf, was succeeding admirably. It was a sunless late afternoon in January, and Human was at the
Women's Peace Vigil in front of the White House, protesting the Bush Administration's impending war on Iraq. Human has never protested anything before, but she has spent many sleepless nights worrying about this war. She
learned about the vigil, organized by the Code Pink Women's Pre-emptive Strike for Peace, on the web. "I told my husband and my boss: 'I'm going,'" she said.
The name Code Pink is, of course, a clever spoof on the Bush Administration's color-coded terrorism alerts. The idea grew out of the observation of organizers--including Starhawk, Global Exchange's Medea Benjamin and Diane Wilson
of Unreasonable Women--that women were leading much of the current antiwar organizing and that more women than men opposed the war on Iraq.
Code Pink is part of a rising tide of creative and memorable feminist antiwar activism. In early January a group of Point Reyes, California, women spelled out PEACE on a beach with their naked bodies, protesting Bush's "naked aggression."
A few weeks later and many degrees colder, a group of New York women did the same. The Lysistrata Project, named for the Aristophanes character whose name means "she who disbands armies" (Lysistrata organized Athenian and Spartan women in
a sex strike in order to get men to stop making war), is working to make the connections between peace and reproductive freedom. The Raging Grannies, a guerrilla theater group with origins in the Canadian antinuclear movement, have also been
a vibrant presence. These activists are joined by established international groups like Women in Black and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Historically, women's resistance to militarism has taken many forms--and ideas about it have varied. In her 1938 treatise Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf argued that as a woman, she had no reason to be patriotic, as the state denied her equal
property and citizenship rights. She wrote, "If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting...to procure benefits which I have not shared...in fact,
as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."
For the rest, Mighty in Pink
Meets Fire Investigators
Aretha Franklin
Singer Aretha Franklin has met with prosecutors investigating an arson fire that destroyed her $1.8 million mansion in suburban Detroit.
Franklin appeared Friday with her attorney, Saul Green, and answered every question asked of her during the 2 1/2-hour meeting, prosecutor Deborah Carley said.
Prosecutors have stressed that Franklin is not a suspect in the Oct. 25 fire that destroyed the 10,000-square-foot home in Bloomfield Township, about 20 miles northwest of Detroit.
Aretha Franklin
Formerly 'The Vidiot'
Executives Debate Name Change
AOL Time Warner
AOL Time Warner Inc. executives, at a retreat to discuss turnaround strategies, hotly debated whether to drop "AOL" from the corporate name, as the world's largest media group tries to rebuild its business, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday.
AOL Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons has said the company has no plans to change the name.
Investors and some executives have been advocating for months to drop "AOL" from the group's name as the America Online division, once viewed as the crown jewel, has dragged down overall growth.
The meeting comes as AOL Time Warner's management tries to regain credibility on Wall Street, repair relations among its ranks, cut its $26 billion debt load, and find ways to build momentum for a turnaround.
One decision reached at the retreat was to rule out a combination of its CNN news channel with Walt Disney Co.'s ABC News, saying that a combination would be too problematic to pursue.
AOL Time Warner
Actor and activist Ossie Davis speaks near the United Nations headquarters, Saturday, Feb 15, 2003 in New York to protest a possible U.S. - led attack on Iraq, part of a day of global protests. Millions of protesters - many of them
marching in the capitals of America's traditional allies - demonstrated Saturday against possible U.S. plans to attack Iraq.
Photo by Shawn Baldwin
Early Photos Shown in D.C.
Margaret Bourke-White
Best known as a pioneering woman photographer for her harrowing shots of World War II, Margaret Bourke-White shows a different facet of her talent in an earlier time — commercial photos from plow blades to women peeling onions at a soup cannery.
"The Photography of Design" opened Saturday at the Phillips Collection. It covers Bourke-White's career until 1936, when she was 32. That was the year publisher Henry Luce hired her as one of four photojournalists for a new project: a newsphoto magazine called Life that started with a sale of 5 million copies.
Bourke-White died in 1971 at 67. Much of her work in the years between appeared in Life and another Luce magazine, Fortune.
The new show, which runs until May 11, is mostly a selection of commercial photos done with an artist's feeling for patterns in two dimensions. It contrasts with the work of photographers who use the magic eye to explore objects in depth.
Bourke-White took pictures of typewriter keys, factory chimneys, the patterns of Cleveland's Terminal Tower. For the first issue of Fortune, her assignment was the processing line at the Swift meatpacking plant, photographing hogs hanging by their hind legs.
Her career changed radically when Fortune sent her to Germany, and she went from there to Moscow. She took some of the first pictures of the Soviets' vast industrialization program of the 1920s and 1930s, the early Stalinist years.
Margaret Bourke-White
Man Wraps Entire House In Plastic
Paul West
Warnings from the Department of Homeland Security to get duct tape and plastic prompted a Connecticut man to wrap his entire house in plastic, according to a Local 6 News report.
Paul West said that he'd rather be safe than sorry.
So he bought hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting, batten boards, stapleguns, and ladders, to seal up his Winsted home.
"I just have all this energy from tension and anxiety and I don't know what to do with it," West said."Basically, I'm doing what the government says we should do. I may be doing
it a little more energetically than some folks, but I'm trying to be pro-active rather than reactive."
"My wife's not happy, but she puts up with it," West said. "My kids think it's a good thing to do."
Man Wraps Entire House In Plastic
See the video
Hundreds of anti-war protesters coordinated by a group called Peace on the Beach form a face with a dove as a peace symbol and the words 'Peace Now' in the sand at Santa Monica, Calif., as part of nationwide demonstrations against the possibility of war against Iraq, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003.
Photo by Mark J. Terrill
Sneaking In Commercials
PBS
Don't expect to see streaking sports fans or dancing pop stars on PBS anytime soon. Still, mounting financial woes have led the Public Broadcasting Service to venture further into the commercial arena.
Sponsors currently can buy 15-second underwriting messages; they will now be allowed to run 30-second underwriting spots in prime-time programming and The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. No more than one minute worth of commercial messages can air at a time, and they cannot interrupt
programming. And PBS' significant restrictions on sponsors' messages remain--for instance, spots may not feature speaking actors, cite price information or include a call to action.
At a PBS board meeting earlier this month in New York, where the new policy passed 28-3, directors voted to limit eligibility for 30-second spots to sponsors that spend at least $2.5 million annually in underwriting fees, but left some allowance for PBS managers to adjust that limit.
The most recent bad news for public television's finances came Feb. 3, when the Bush administration sent Congress a budget that proposes to tighten funding for public broadcasting. Public stations are also facing the multimillion-dollar construction costs that come with establishing digital
service, mandated by May 2004, a year after the deadline for commercial broadcasters.
PBS
Marijuana Mystery Tour
Hokkaido
Hokkaido, the most pristine of Japan's main islands, is going to pot -- literally, according to Tokudane Saizensen .
While crowded Japan has more than its fair share of concrete jungles in the mega-cities of Kanto and Kansai, there's apparently plenty of grass in the northernmost island, both of the backyard variety and of the underground.
So prevalent is cannabis in the north that Marijuana Mystery Tours are all the rage. Piping hot Hokkaido has attracted so many weed fans, it's become known as "Hemp Heaven."
Hokkaido became Japan's hemp haven during the Meiji Era (1868 to 1912), when the plant was grown to use making ropes, military uniforms and other defense-related items. Hemp farms were set up throughout the island and flourished through until the end of World War II.
However, Tokudane Saizensen notes, things changed in 1948 with the enactment of the Cannabis Control Law, which effectively banned the cultivation of hemp, whose use was curtailed anyhow by the importation of imported textiles and creation of other fabrics. The hemp farms disappeared.
But getting rid of the weed wasn't as easy as it seemed. In fact, plenty of fields popped up from the seeds uncollected at the old hemp farms. Cannabis plants grew wild throughout Hokkaido and the plant capable of surviving in even the harshest of conditions spread here, there and everywhere.
Hokkaido's hoochie remained largely untouched, though, thanks to a strong Japanese stigma about drug use and an ignorance of the mystical powers of the plant. That all changed as use of the Internet spread throughout the mid- to late-'90s and the Marijuana Mystery Tours in Hokkaido virtually became one of the island's tourist attractions.
Hokkaido
Hoax Was a Joke
Drake's Brass Plate
It turns out that one of the West's enduring mysteries - a tale of 16th century explorers and a perplexing brass plaque - was a 1930s prank sprung on a university professor by a group of friends.
Tests in the late 1970s proved that the small brass plate with old English inscriptions was not in fact the one left by Sir Francis Drake when he sheltered just north of San Francisco in 1579.
One puzzle remained: just which 20th century pranksters planted the instant-antique in rural Marin County, and then stood aside as Professor Herbert Bolton rushed to tell the world of what he hailed as "one of the world's long-lost treasures."
After 11 years of investigation, a team of Drake enthusiasts says it has unraveled the mystery.
The answer, to be published Tuesday in California History magazine, implicates five of Bolton's acquaintances in a plot spearheaded by a friend, a fellow member of a society of irreverent intellectuals known to mix drinks with their history.
"There's no evidence that they intended to create a hoax that would last," said Ed Von der Porten, the article's lead author. "The evidence is clear that they intended it as a private joke."
Historical records showed that the English explorer and privateer left a brass plate on the California coast, about 30 miles north of San Francisco near Point Reyes.
For years, Bolton beseeched his students: if you ever hear such a plaque exists, find it, bring it to me.
It was the perfect Achilles heel for five plotters intent on hoodwinking the eminent scholar.
For the rest, Drake's Brass Plate
A giant panda plays on a sliding board in the snow at a zoo in Wuhan, China, February 14, 2003. With the natural bamboo forests disappearing rapidly due to economic development, the giant pandas in China are facing a growing threat to its survival in the wild.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
'The Osbournes'
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 4
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 3
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 2
'The Osbournes' ~ Page 1
