Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Video: Henry Rollins on water for Drop in the Bucket Part 1 (YouTube)
Josh Marshall: My Worlds Collide (TPM)
This is a bizarre, ugly turn of events. ... Now, so far, nothing particularly controversial about any of this. But then it took a dark turn. Or perhaps better to say, then the story got into gear with everything else we've seen out of the Walker administration over the last three months.
Jim Hightower: Bank Robbers on the Loose
The popular perception is that bank robbers wear ski masks when doing their jobs, but a lot of modern-day bank robbers are wearing Armani suits and Gucci loafers.
Mark Shields: President Obama, Please Call Colin Powell! (Creators Syndicate)
The strength of a nation, we have learned from painful experience, is measured by that nation's will and resolve to stand together in individual and universal sacrifice for the common good.
Susan Estrich: Up in Smoke (Creators Syndicate)
I quit smoking 25 years ago. Before that, I had tried eight times, and each time I failed. Three things finally got me to quit, cold turkey, forever: ...
David Finkle: "First Nighter: South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone Cheerfully Commit The Book of Mormon to Broadway" (Huffington Post)
There's a respected position on satire that holds if it doesn't offend someone, it's not worth the effort spent perpetrating it.
Roger Ebert: Elizabeth Taylor, a star in a category of her own, dies at 79
Elizabeth Taylor, who was a great actress and a greater star, has died at age 79. Of few deaths can it be said that they end an era, but hers does. No other actress commanded more attention for longer, for her work, her beauty, her private life, and a series of health problems that brought her near death more than once.
Rafer Guzman: "Girl power: Action heroines pack a 'Punch'" (Newsday)
At the same time, Snyder wanted his female characters to embrace certain traditional sexual archetypes - "the nurse, the French maid, the schoolgirl," he says - and simultaneously take control of them. Such archetypes are common in movies with explicit sexual content, he notes, yet "Sucker Punch" seems destined to cause some hand-wringing even though it contains no sex scenes at all.
Paul Constant: "'Paul': Don't Take the Bait, Geeks!" (The Stranger)
Tired references to 'Star Trek,' ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' and 'E.T.' (the alien likes Reese's Pieces! Get it?) get trotted out at the appropriate points, in the hopes that sci-fi nerds will show up to "get" the "joke," but they shouldn't take the geek-bait: Paul is a lazy wank of a movie that exploits nerd culture and gives nothing back in return.
David L. Ulin: Steve Earle explores myth, reality and Hank Williams' ghost in his first novel (Los Angeles Times)
It's tempting to read Steve Earle's first novel, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 256 pp., $26, forthcoming in May), through the filter of pop music; the title comes from a Hank Williams song. Yet while Williams' ghost plays a significant role in the narrative, the motivation, Earle explains, is more complex.
"'No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf' By CAROLYN BURKE": Reviewed by Brooke Allen
Edith Piaf, dead now for nearly fifty years, has become one of France's great national monuments, as lucratively exportable a product as Maurice Chevalier, Claude Monet, and Crêpes Suzettes.
David Medsker: A Chat with Greg Prato, Author of "MTV Ruled the World" (Bullz-eye)
"A lot of the videos at the time took themselves very, very seriously but come off kind of goofy, like Don Henley's 'All She Wants to Do Is Dance.' That video is pretty stupid when you see it now."
David Bruce has 41 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $41 you can buy 10,250 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
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Glenn Beck Contemplates Starting Own Channel
The possibility that Beck-elzebub will exit the Faux News Channel at the end of the year has prompted a big question in media circles: if he leaves, how will he bring his demonically possessed minions with him? Two of the options His Evilness has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web...
Glenn Beck Contemplates Starting His Own Channel - NYTimes.com
What would be an appropriate name for a Beck-elzebub cable channel?
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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
Mostly gray and cold.
Major Labels Join For Compilation
Japan
The four major record labels have joined together to produce an all-star digital album to raise money for disaster-stricken Japan.
"Songs for Japan" will feature Lady Gaga's No. 1 hit "Born This Way," John Lennon's classic "Imagine" and dozens more songs from acts ranging from Adele to Eminem.
The compilation was announced Friday by Sony Entertainment Music, EMI Music and Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. It's available starting Friday on iTunes for $9.99. Proceeds from the 38-track set will go to the Japanese Red Cross Society.
A physical two-disc CD will be available early next month.
Japan
LA Names New School
Jaime Escalante
A Los Angeles-area school has been named for late calculus teacher Jaime Escalante, whose story about pushing underachieving students to succeed was chronicled in the 1988 hit movie "Stand and Deliver."
A ceremony to name the new kindergarten to sixth-grade facility the Jaime Escalante Elementary School was held on Saturday.
The school is a new facility that serves 600 pupils in Cudahy, a suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The family of Escalante, who died a year ago of cancer, attended the ceremony, along with several of his former students.
The Bolivian-born Escalante taught math at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles from 1974 to 1991. He is remembered for his philosophy that every student is capable of high achievement, regardless of their circumstances.
Jaime Escalante
PEN/Hemingway Award
Brando Skyhorse
Brando Skyhorse, author of "The Madonnas of Echo Park," is receiving the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award for a distinguished first book of fiction.
Patrick Hemingway, writer Ernest Hemingway's sole surviving son, and writer Marilynne Robinson is presenting California-based, Mexican-American writer with the award Saturday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
The award is given for "a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction."
The John F. Kennedy Library is the major repository of Ernest Hemingway's works.
Brando Skyhorse
Last Show Is May 25
Oprah Winfrey
The final original episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will air May 25.
Winfrey's Chicago-based Harpo Productions confirmed the date Friday. Winfrey announced live on the show in November 2009 that she would end its run after 25 years. She since has launched cable's Oprah Winfrey Network.
"The Oprah Winfrey Show" has been in reruns for the last few weeks. But Winfrey tweeted Thursday that she was "hard at work planning the final shows" and new episodes would begin April 7.
The final episode brings an end to what has been television's top-rated talk show for more than two decades. It airs in 145 countries worldwide.
Oprah Winfrey
Haves Vs. Have More
Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud
A Saudi prince is the previously unidentified owner of a proposed mega-mansion site that has been the subject of gold-plated protest in the wealthy neighborhoods around Beverly Hills, the property's previous owner said Friday.
Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud - one of the sons of Saudi King Abdullah - in 2009 bought the three adjacent parcels with the famous 90210 zip code in Benedict Canyon, where the massive mansion on Tower Lane that is roughly the size of the famed Hearst Castle is set to be built, movie producer Jon Peters told the Los Angeles Times.
The prince paid $12 million for the 5.2 acre hillside lot, set up a business, Tower Lane Properties Inc. in London, and made lawyers and contractors sign secrecy agreements to hide his identity.
Residents of the neighborhood that is home to Jay Leno, David Beckham and Bruce Springsteen, held a news conference earlier in the week to publicize their objections to the palatial home.
Residents said the compound's size - a 42,681-square-foot house, a 27,000-square-foot villa, a guest house, staff quarters and a gatehouse - doesn't fit in with the neighborhood of stately mansions, with one neighbor complaining that the pool is bigger than his house.
Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud
Burns On Providence River
Russian Sub
Some of the remains of a Russian submarine that was a floating museum before it sank in 2007 burned Friday as it was being disassembled for scrap metal.
Pieces of the 282-foot-long submarine, known as Juliett 484, caught fire shortly before 1:30 p.m. on a barge in the Providence River a few hundred feet offshore, said Joseph Klucznik, fire chief in neighboring East Providence. Three fire boats, from Providence, East Providence and Warwick, got the smoky blaze under control, he said.
The sub was used in the 1990s as a restaurant and vodka bar in Helsinki, Finland, and as a set for the 2002 Harrison Ford movie "K-19: The Widowmaker" before being acquired by the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation, a private, nonprofit group. It was docked in Providence and open to the public as a tourist attraction and museum, but sank during a nor'easter in 2007. After determining it couldn't be salvaged, the foundation sold it for scrap in 2009 to Rhode Island Recycled Metals.
Frank Lennon, who heads the foundation, said there was no fuel on board, but there may have been residual oil in the sub's bilges.
Russian Sub
Paid No Taxes
G.E.
As Washington worries about the United States' growing deficit problem , there's mounting evidence the government is failing to collect taxes from wealthy individuals and corporations. A piece in today's New York Times by David Kocieniewski outlines how G.E. skirted paying any taxes on $5.1 billion in profits in 2010--in addition to claiming a $3.2 billion tax credit.
The main reason G.E. is so adept at avoiding paying taxes, Kocieniewski writes, is because it's compiled an all-star team of in-house tax professionals plucked from the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department, and "virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress."
G.E.-- whose slogan is "Imagination at Work"-- has in-house, Kocieniewski writes, what is considered by many to be the best tax law firm in the world. Their secret to success is a familiar one, though G.E. appears to have perfected it: "fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."
In an interesting twist, President Obama recently asked G.E. CEO Jeffrey Immelt to be his chief outside economic adviser, and the company recently came under fire for being the manufacturer of the faulty reactors that sparked Japan's nuclear crisis in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami.
G.E.
3-D Camera Plan Scrapped
Mars Rover
A high-resolution 3-D camera that "Avatar" director James Cameron was helping to build for NASA's next Mars rover won't fly after all.
NASA on Friday said work on the zoom camera was halted because there wasn't enough time to thoroughly test it before launch.
Cameron last year lobbied NASA to revive a plan to give rover Curiosity a better set of eyes and worked with engineers to build it.
In a statement released by NASA, Cameron said he's confident future missions will benefit from the work he and others invested even if Curiosity won't.
Mars Rover
Dollars From Scents
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor's last acting job was about a decade ago, but her lucrative line of fragrances will likely keep her estate smelling great long after her passing.
Her perfume brand, White Diamonds, remains a best-seller, and combined with other brands Passion and Passion for Men, Taylor's scents brought in an estimated $69 million at retail worldwide last year, according to tracking firm Euromonitor International.
While that's down about a fifth compared to two years earlier, a wave of recollections and renewed interest in her movies could provide a short-term boost to sales. Experts say anywhere from 4 to 15 percent of sales likely flows through to Taylor's estate in the form of licensing royalties.
But White Diamonds, introduced in 1991 has become so popular, with an estimated $61 million in sales, that it is considered to have crossed over from celebrity status to mainstream perfume.
Elizabeth Taylor
In Memory
Geraldine Ferraro
Geraldine Ferraro, who in 1984 became the first woman vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, died Saturday in Boston, a family spokeswoman said.
Ferraro died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was being treated for blood cancer. She died just before 10 a.m., said Amanda Fuchs Miller, a family friend who worked for Ferraro in her 1998 Senate bid and was acting as a spokeswoman for the family.
A three-term congresswoman from the New York City borough of Queens, Ferraro catapulted to national prominence in 1984 when she was chosen by presidential nominee Walter Mondale to join his ticket against incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
In the end, Reagan won 49 of 50 states, the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt's first-re-election over Alf Landon in 1936. But Ferraro had forever sealed her place as trailblazer for women in national politics, laying the path for Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton's historic presidential bid in 2008 and Republican John McCain's choice of a once obscure half-term Alaska governor, Sarah Palin (R-Quitter), as his running mate that year.
Ferraro stepped into the national spotlight at the Democratic convention in 1984 after Mondale selected her as his running mate. Delegates in San Francisco erupted in cheers at the first line of her speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination.
Ferraro sometimes overshadowed Mondale on the campaign trail, often drawing larger crowds and more media attention than the presidential candidate.
But controversy accompanied her acclaim. Frequent, vociferous protests of her favorable view of abortion rights marked the campaign.
Ferraro's run also was beset by ethical questions, first about her campaign finances and tax returns, then about the business dealings of her husband, John Zaccaro. Ferraro attributed much of the controversy to bias against Italian-Americans.
In the years after the race, Ferraro told interviewers that she would have not have accepted the nomination had she known how it would focus criticism on her family.
Ferraro, a supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, was back in the news in March 2008 when she stirred up a controversy by appearing to suggest that Sen. Barack Obama achieved his status in the presidential race only because he's black.
She later stepped down from an honorary post in the Clinton campaign, but insisted she meant no slight against Obama.
Ferraro received a law degree from Fordham University in 1960, the same year she married Zaccaro and became a full-time homemaker and mother. She said she kept her maiden name to honor her mother, a widow who had worked long hours as a seamstress.
After years in a private law practice, she took a job as an assistant Queens district attorney in 1974. She headed the office's special victims' bureau, which prosecuted sex crimes and the abuse of children and the elderly. In 1978, she won the first of three terms in Congress representing a blue-collar district of Queens.
After losing in 1984, she became a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University until an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate nomination in 1992.
She returned to the law after her 1992 Senate run, acting as an advocate for women raped during ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Her advocacy work and support of President Bill Clinton won her the position of ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, where she served in 1994 and 1995.
She co-hosted CNN's "Crossfire," in 1996 and 1997 but left to take on Chuck Schumer, then a little-known Brooklyn congressman, in the 1998 Democratic Senate primary. She placed a distant second, declaring her political career finished after she took 26 percent of the vote to Schumer's 51 percent.
In June 1999, she announced that she was joining a Washington, D.C., area public relations firm to head a group advising clients on women's issues.
Geraldine Ferraro
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