Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Rolf Dobelli: News is bad for you - and giving up reading it will make you happier (Guardian)
News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.
Paul Krugman: Varieties of Academic Temptation (New York Times)
Again, I'm not saying that crude flacks are absent from the scene. But the temptations that led people astray in these cases were subtler and sadder than that.
Teach the Rich: Why I can no longer face tutoring the progeny of the rich and aspirational (Guardian)
Demanded by the uber-rich and panicking, salaried parents, private tutoring only widens the gap in our education system.
Marina Hyde: Miley Cyrus has bared her breasts, hoping to break free of Disney (Guardian)
As one of Earth's most conspiracy-literate cognoscenti, you already know that the most sophisticated, secretive and powerful facilities in the United States are, in ascending order: 5 Area 51, Nevada.? 4 Nasa, Washington DC.? 3 Dulce Base, New Mexico.? 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.? 1 Cinderella Castle, Disneyland.
Marc Dion: Cry for George Jones (Creators Syndicate)
When I heard that 81-year-old country singer George Jones died, I did not do the only decent thing. I did not leave work, go to a bar and play his music on the jukebox while drinking shots of Jack Daniel's with longneck bottles of Budweiser as a chaser.
Nosheen Iqbal: "Vampire Weekend: 'People tried to pretend we were rich idiots'" (Guardian)
Ezra Koenig may not recognise the press' caricature of his band but, three albums in, they all seem at ease with being divisive.
Lucy Mangan: "Little Women by Louisa May Alcott" (Guardian)
It is, as the author said, "not a bit sensational but simple and true" and the March girls' adventures remain as fresh and delightful as the muffins that greet them when they wake on Christmas day.
Kris Gunnars: The so-called 'health foods' that are probably killing you (io9)
There are so many products on the market these days that are supposed to be good for us - much of it based on zero evidence. Here are 11 commonly touted "health foods" that are actually quite harmful.
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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
Marine layer returned and the temperature dropped 20°s.
Packed House, Prices Cut
Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones rocked a packed house in Los Angeles on Friday on the opening night of their North American "50 and Counting" tour, but only after websites slashed ticket prices and the band released additional cheap seats at the last minute.
The 17-date tour is the veteran British rockers' biggest in six years and follows a handful of dates in London, Paris and New York at the end of 2012 marking 50 years since they burst on to the music scene at London's Marquee Club in 1962.
Days before the show, hundreds of seats were still available and secondary sellers scrambled to unload tickets by slashing prices from the original $250 (160.52 pounds) to $600 (385.26 pounds) price range which had irked many of even the most die-hard Stones fans.
The band also released additional seats at a modest $85 on its official website this week, the only price point that quickly sold out for the May 3 concert.
Rolling Stones
Fans Flock To Scranton
'The Office'
The actors who play Pam, Jim, Dwight and other beloved characters from the popular NBC show "The Office" bade farewell on Saturday to the northeastern Pennsylvania city of Scranton that served as the TV setting for their fictional paper company.
The NBC mockumentary about a clan of quirky cubicle-dwellers at the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. wraps up May 16 after nine seasons, and a crowd estimated at 10,000 attended a "Wrap Party" in Scranton to show their appreciation.
Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, Rainn Wilson and other stars rode in classic convertibles and posed for hundreds of photos as fans thronged around them. The stars later took the stage in front of the Lackawanna County Courthouse and played a concert with The Scrantones, the band that performed the show's theme song.
Fischer teared up as she rode down Linden Street, overwhelmed by the adoring crowds. Krasinski said afterward that he couldn't process it.
"To have this many people coming out of their way, driving from different places, to just see us and just say thank you is totally bizarre. You have a lot of amazing experiences when you have this gig, but there's nothing like people genuinely saying thank you," he said." I don't think we ever realized how many people we had touched."
'The Office'
Benefit Concert
Boston
Boston bands Aerosmith and New Kids on the Block, singer-songwriter James Taylor and country singer Jason Aldean will headline a concert to benefit the victims of last month's Boston Marathon bombing, organizers said on Friday.
The May 30 concert at the city's TD Garden arena is also aimed at showing support for the people of Boston after the bombing that killed three people and injured 264.
Other artists lined up for "Boston Strong: An Evening of Support and Celebration" include singers Jimmy Buffett and Carole King, the band Boston and the J. Geils Band, concert promoters Live Nation and TD Garden said.
All proceeds from the concert will go to The One Fund, which was set up by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Tickets priced from $35 to $285 go on sale on Monday.
Boston
Wedding News
Knightley - Righton
British actress Keira Knightley married her rock musician boyfriend James Righton on Saturday in a discreet ceremony in a French village, regional daily La Provence reported on its website.
Knightley, 28, who was nominated for an Oscar for her lead role in the 2005 film "Pride & Prejudice," got engaged a year ago to Righton, who plays in British indie band Klaxons. The couple has been dating for about two years.
They exchanged vows at the town hall in Mazan in the south of France, where the actress owns a house. Only family and witnesses were present, in line with the couple's low-key romance and few public appearances together.
Knightley - Righton
His "Real Name"
Donald T-rump
Donald Trump (R-Hair Hat) is not amused. After Jon Stewart said that the businessman's "real name" was "Fuckface Von Clownstick" on Wednesday's The Daily Show, Trump lashed out at Stewart and anyone who found the joke funny.
"Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name 'Fuckface Von Clownstick' like they are so original & like no one else is doing it," Trump tweeted Friday.
Stewart's birth name joke on Wednesday actually traces back to a jab Trump made on April 24. "I promise you that I'm much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz - I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow. Who, by the way, is totally overrated," Trump tweeted then.
Trump's tweet of Stewart's birth name garnered many replies from followers, some of whom questioned whether the Celebrity Apprentice boss was anti-Semitic. Proving that he can dish it, but he can't take it, Trump was quite the grump when Stewart did his own name-reveal.
T-rump
The GOP-Fox News Benghazi
Feedback Loop
The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing on Benghazi next week that promises to tell us what really happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The hearing appears to be based, at least in part, on Fox News reports claiming the Obama administration is preventing whistleblowers from revealing what really happened. What really happened in Benghazi is a fascinating question -- between dozens and hundreds of people attacked the American mission twice with mortar fire, killing four Americans, and maybe did it on the orders of al Qaeda. The initial reports of the incident were full of errors. One such falsehood, that the incident began as a "spontaneous" protest over an anti-Islam YouTube video, was repeated by Susan Rice on Sunday news shows, which ultimately cost her the nomination to be Secretary of State.
But no one thinks (or is saying) that any scandals are lurking in the details of what happened during the attacks. The questions the Benghazi-obsessed among the GOP think are scandals are all about what happened before and after Benghazi. The House GOP's main questions are whether the Obama administration should have anticipated the attack and done more to stop it and then, after the attacks, used spin to prevent America from freaking out about a terror attack in the final weeks of a presidential election.
The problem is that while Congressional Republicans are sure that there's something scandalous about Benghazi, they've had little luck convincing anyone other than Fox News and its viewers. But to keep the momentum going - nothing sinks an agenda-driven story more effectively than when nothing new happening - they have created a feedback loop, in which Fox reports something, the Republican-controlled House holds hearings on it, and then Fox reports on those hearings.
On April 29, Fox reported that four officials at the State Department and CIA were being prevented from whistleblowing on Benghazi. Their lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said "people have been threatened… And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA." Toensing is half of a power couple known for leading investigations into Democrats.
Feedback Loop
Citizen Hearing on Disclosure
UFOs
Even as most Americans wonder what planet politicians are from, is it possible that the government is squelching evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth? One former presidential hopeful says yes - and that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top.
Former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) says the White House has helped keep the truth about the "extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet" from the public.
Gravel is one of six former congress representatives who were paid $20,000 by the UFO advocacy group Paradigm Research to participate in a Congressional-style Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington this week, where witness after witness has presented first-hand accounts of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial visits.
Gravel says the strongest accounts of alien encounters are from former military officers, such as retired Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, who testified that UFOs temporarily disabled nuclear weapons on his watch.
Gravel says the media has aided what he sees as a government cover-up by not taking reports of ET encounters seriously.
UFOs
Robot Chicken Team's Couch Gag
Simpsons
Worlds are about to collide in a big way on the season finale of The Simpsons.
Airing on Sunday, May 19 at 8/7c on Fox, the animated comedy has commissioned Seth Green's Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, which produces the cult favorite stop-motion series Robot Chicken, to create a special stop-motion couch gag for the episode. "The Simpsons have been opening that up to a bunch of different artists and a bunch of different content creators to put their spin on The Simpsons couch gag," Green says.
Between their nods to famed street artist Banksy and the critically acclaimed drama Breaking Bad, The Simpsons has continued to make headlines 24 seasons in thanks in no small part to these special intros. "We're really pretty easy with these guest couch gags," The Simpsons executive producer Al Jean says. "We just approach people that we admire and say, 'It just has to have a couch', and 'make what you want.'"
Simpsons
200th Birthday
Soeren Kierkegaard
Danish philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard's work is so dense that he himself lamented: "People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood." So it's something of a surprise that a Danish director has turned his most famous book into a musical for schoolchildren.
As Denmark celebrates the philosopher's 200th birthday on Sunday, Marie Moeller has found her version of `'Either/Or" - featuring strobe lights, rave music and child-size puppets - being performed in schools across the country.
Kierkegaard's esoteric musings, considered the forerunner to existentialism, deeply influenced French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre. But while most Danes have heard of Kierkegaard, and are proud of his influence on Western thought, few ever bother to read him because he's just so difficult.
The bicentennial events begin on Sunday with Denmark's Queen Margrethe expected to attend a church service at Copenhagen's Lutheran Cathedral, where Kierkegaard's funeral was held in 1855. Festivities in Denmark run through Nov. 11, the day he died at age 42. The post office also has issued a special stamp commemorating the anniversary.
Soeren Kierkegaard
Professor Tackles 'Myth' Of Christian Martyrdom
Notre Dame
Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the "myth" of martyrdom in the Christian faith.
Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.
The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.
The controversial thesis, laid out in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.
Moss contends that when Christians were executed, it was often not because of their religious beliefs but because they wouldn't follow Roman rules. Many laws that led to early Christians' execution were not specifically targeted at them-such as a law requiring all Roman citizens to engage in a public sacrifice to the gods-but their refusal to observe those laws and other mores of Roman society led to their deaths.
Notre Dame
New England Pageant
Gerbils
The American Gerbil Society's annual pageant brought dozens of rodents scurrying to New England this weekend for a chance to win "top gerbil."
The Bedford competition called for agility demonstrations in which the gerbils must overcome obstacles and race to the end of a course. Breeders of the small animals vie for coveted ribbons based on body type and agility.
"A male gerbil should be a good, strong, hefty-looking gerbil," said Libby Hanna, president of the American Gerbil Society. "If you are going to think of it in human terms, you might think of a football player - somebody who's big, thick neck, nice, strong-looking male gerbil."
An ideal female gerbil will have a more streamlined appearance that even humans covet, she said.
Gerbils thrive in desert habitats and their growing popularity as pets led authorities in California and Hawaii to make it illegal to keep them since the weather there would make it possible for escaping animals to flourish in wild colonies that would damage crops and native plants.
Gerbils
In Memory
Mike Gray
Mike Gray, who co-wrote the prescient Oscar-nominated screenplay for the nuclear-disaster film The China Syndrome, died April 30 of heart failure at his Hollywood Hills home, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 77.
Gray developed the story for the thriller, which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, after researching the dangers of nuclear power. Twelve days after China Syndrome opened in theaters on March, 16, 1979, a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into a partial meltdown.
In the film, a physicist warns that the "China Syndrome" -- a fictional worst-case result of a nuclear meltdown -- would render "an area the size of Pennsylvania" permanently uninhabitable. The movie became a box-office hit, grossing $51.7 million domestically, even though Columbia Pictures pulled the film from some theaters in the immediate wake of the accident.
"I meant China Syndrome to educate people about what I'd found … that our heavy reliance on nuclear plants hadn't been clearly thought through," Gray, who co-wrote the script with T.S. Cook and James Bridges, told the Chicago Tribune in 1998.
A native of Darlington, Ind., who earned an engineering degree from Purdue University, Gray also wrote, produced and directed for the ABC sci-fi series Starman and produced 13 episodes of the syndicated Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Gray also collaborated with Howard Alk (a cinematographer on D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back) on documentaries including American Revolution II (1969), about the turmoil of the 1960s, and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), about the FBI raid in 1969 in which Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton was killed.
Gray also wrote books including 1992's Angle of Attack, about America's race to the moon, and 1998's Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, about the U.S. war on drugs.
Survivors include his wife, Carol, and son Lucas.
Mike Gray
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