Recommended Reading
from Bruce
It's a Bruce Double-Header! Yesterday's readings experienced an e-mail kerfluffle.
Paul Krugman: Trump and Taxes (NY Times Column)
His personal returns, his shifting policies proposals and how he picked his experts are all mysterious.
Mikita Brottman: Jane Austen's Ivory Cage (American Scholar)
What lies beneath the surface of the grand estates and courtly balls.
Peter Robinson: "Rick Astley: 'I made tea for Bananarama, Dead or Alive, Mel and Kim'" (The Guardian)
After perfecting the art of brewing hot drinks in a studio, pop legend Astley retired at 27. But how much did he make from rickrolling?
Michelle Dean: "Jessa Crispin: 'We're not allowed to say the Paris Review is boring'" (The Guardian)
The editor of Bookslut, which shut down last week, talks to the Guardian about the current state of American literature and its attendant frustrations.
Deborah Orr: Prince, baby, you were much too fast (The Guardian)
I thought for years, because of my fantasy link with Sheena Easton, that Prince was part of my family.
Deborah Orr: "The lesson from the John Whittingdale story: whorephobia has gone mainstream" (The Guardian)
The furore over the culture secretary's dates with a dominatrix shows how toxic - and entrenched - contempt for women who sell sex really is.
Michele Hanson: "Grave-sharing is fine - there's no space for living people, let alone dead ones "(The Guardian)
Graveyards around the world are filling up, so it seems sensible for London to reuse burial spots after 75 years.
Jonathan Jones: It's obscene that Japan found Megumi Igarashi guilty for her vagina art (The Guardian)
The eroticism of shunga suggests Japan is as libertarian as they come. But this new case won't change a country continually swinging between sexual freedom and suppression.
Justin McCurry: Japanese vagina kayak artist found guilty of obscenity (The Guardian)
Megumi Igarashi fined after distributing data that would allow 3D printing of her genitals in order to raise funds for boat.
Marc Dion: Massachusetts Murderer Not a Killer in the Ring (Creators Syndicate)
Over the decades, I've watched fighters in the ring who were or later became professional criminals. Some of them are dead. Some are in jail. A few of them ended up killing someone. It doesn't make me tough. I'd have been afraid to sit next to most of those guys on a bus.
Tom Nicholson: "The Con-Venience: the art shop stocked with decades-old litter" (The Guardian)
In the Forest of Dean, a corner store stocked with old trash is in fact an installation helping to raise awareness of our throwaway lifestyles.
Steve Rose: When it comes to interracial romances, the movies need to catch up (The Guardian)
Almost 50 years after Kirk and Uhura's kiss on Star Trek, there are plenty of parts for black women - provided they want to play blue- or green-skinned aliens ….
Laura Snapes: "Margo Price: 'Country music is about divorce, drinking and jail'" (The Guardian)
The outlaw Nashville singer worried she'd be singing to empty bars her whole life until Jack White heard the songs on Midwest Farmer's Daughter.
David Ferguson: "It's official: employers can't force you to be happy. Hallelujah" (The Guardian)
A US ruling says that that companies aren't allowed to pressure staff to be relentlessly positive. That's good news, because haters can help.
Simon Jenkins: "Books are back. Only the technodazzled thought they would go away" (The Guardian)
The hysterical cheerleaders of the e-book failed to account for human experience, and publishers blindly followed suit. But the novelty has worn off.
Catherine Shoard: Comparing Woody Allen to Polanski or Cosby is lazy and dangerous (The Guardian)
Cannes should not entertain Ronan Farrow's call to bar his father. The accusation against Allen was never pursued.
Lenore Skenazy: 100 Cheers for Beverly Cleary (Creators Syndicate)
Like Ramona the Pest, I'm not perfect. Which is why I am about a month late in sending "Happy 100th Birthday!" greetings to Beverly Cleary, the woman who gave us Henry Huggins, Ramona, Beezus, "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" (my God, how I loved that book), and three generations' worth of joy.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"…ISRAEL REMAINS THE ONLY STATE IN THE WORLD WHICH HAS NO OFFICIAL BORDERS."
AND THE WINNER IS: "RACIST McSHOOTFACE".
DRAG HIM THROUGH THE STREETS UNTIL HIS HEAD COMES OFF!
WHO IS GOING TO WIN?
FIGHT THE POWER! NOW!
THE SAUDIS DID IT!
TEXASS!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
May Gray - overcast morning, sunny afternoon.
LOTR Trivia
Stephen Colbert
If there's one thing that Stephen Colbert is proud of - more so than his shows, his books and possibly even his family - it's his love of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A self-proclaimed Tolkien nerd, Colbert rarely went a week on The Colbert Report without finding some way to tie Middle-earth into one of his segments, but years later, it's coming back to bite him.
On Thursday night's episode of The Late Show, Ryan Gosling told Colbert that his mom wasn't the biggest fan of Stephen's show. At least, she wasn't, until she saw his Tolkien Showdown with James Franco on an episode of The Colbert Report. As a huge fan of the books herself, this totally changed her opinion of the host.
Naturally, Ryan wanted to use this against Colbert in some way, so he asked her if she could think of a question he could asked Colbert on his show that might stump him. In the video, you can see what she came up with.
Mama Gosling is a cheater. Of course it was all in good fun, but if you watch closely, you can see a little bit of Colbert die inside when he realizes it's nothing but a goof. Maybe Ryan's mom will join him to talk Lord of the Rings another time.
Stephen Colbert
"Yellow Cloud" Electric Guitar To Auction
Prince
Prince's iconic "Yellow Cloud" electric guitar is to go under the hammer in Beverly Hills with an opening bid of $30,000, a US auction house said Friday.
It was the singer's instrument of choice during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and its eccentric design went on to form part of the infamous symbol that he adopted as his name during his contract dispute with Warner Bros.
Prince was rarely photographed during the late 1980s without the bright yellow maple wood instrument, complete with a gold-tinted "tune-o-matic" style bridge, tailpiece and machine heads and a distinctive elongated upper horn.
The Yellow Cloud was used in the studio, in videos and at gigs until the neck broke on a French TV show in 1994.
It was repaired but confined to the recording studio and eventually made way for the "Symbol" guitar identified with Prince's later work.
Prince
Americans Have Stopped
Internet
Nearly half of all U.S. Internet users say privacy and security concerns have stopped them from doing basic things online, such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a government survey released Friday.
This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fallout of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities.
The survey showed that nearly 20 percent of the survey's respondents had personally experienced some form of identity theft, an online security breach, or another similar problem over the year before the survey was taken in July. Overall, 45 percent said their concerns about online privacy and security stopped them from using the Web in very practical ways.
The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.
Internet
Fish and Wildlife Drops Legal Challenge
Eagles
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday dropped its legal challenge to an American Indian tribe killing bald eagles for religious purposes on its Wyoming reservation - a move that could clear the way for issuing a federal permit in coming months.
The agency filed notice with a federal appeals court in Denver that it won't continue to appeal a lower court decision allowing the killing.
U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson in Cheyenne previously ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Northern Arapaho Tribe's religious freedoms by denying permission to kill bald eagles - the national bird - on the Wind River Indian Reservation for its annual Sun Dance.
The Northern Arapaho share the reservation with the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, which opposes killing eagles. Johnson stated the First Amendment prohibited the federal government from burdening one American Indian tribe's exercise of religious rights to benefit another tribe.
Eagles
Questionable Behavior With Women
T-rump
Interviews with dozens of women who have worked for Donald Trump or interacted with him socially reveal a pattern of often unsettling personal behavior by the Republican presidential candidate, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The Times, which said it based the article on more than 50 interviews, quoted women who recounted episodes in which he treated women as sexual objects and made comments about their bodies. But some women said Trump had encouraged them in their careers and promoted them within his businesses, often in positions in which women tended to be excluded.
When asked about the unflattering incidents described in the article, Trump either denied that they took place or disputed the details, the newspaper said.
"A lot of things get made up over the years," Trump told the Times. "I have always treated women with great respect."
T-rump
All In For T-rump
Sheldon Adelson
A GOP mega-donor says he is willing to heavily bankroll Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Sheldon Adelson (R-Newtie's Sugar Daddy), the billionaire CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., told Trump in a private meeting last week that he was willing to commit more funds to Trump's campaign than he ever has to any previous campaign - to the tune of $100 million, according to The New York Times.
Because that amount exceeds the limit any individual can donate to a single candidate, Adelson would have to donate to a super PAC supporting Trump's campaign.
Adelson had previously contributed a small sum to Ted Cruz's campaign during the primaries, and had been reluctant to donate more to the party after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on failed Republican candidates in 2012.
Significantly, Adelson said he would scale back his donations to congressional Republicans and put all his money into Trump's campaign, two Republican sources told The New York Times off the record.
Sheldon Adelson
From The Party Of Smaller Government
State-Mandated Mourning
Here's what will happen after a woman gets an abortion in the state of Indiana, starting this July. She will be told, verbally and in writing, that she has the right to choose what she does with her aborted fetus. She will be given a list of her options for disposal, and offered counseling. The fetus does not have to be named, but it will receive its own burial-transit form, just like any dead body. This form will travel with it to a funeral home, where it will be buried or cremated. There won't necessarily be a ceremony; the fetus may not get its own headstone or urn. But it will be laid to rest in the way of a human. Aborted fetuses in Indiana, nearly all smaller than a peapod, will no longer be treated as medical waste.
This is what the state's legislature decided back in March. It passed a wide-ranging bill, making it a criminal offense to dispose of fetal remains in any other way besides burial or cremation, including in cases of abortions, miscarriages, and stillbirths.
Which raises a question: Why would a state create a mourning ritual for no one?
Indiana is not alone in its concern for the final resting place of fetuses. In March, South Dakota made it illegal to use aborted fetal tissue in research, and in April, Idaho and Alabama made it illegal to buy, sell, donate, or experiment on these remains. Tennessee made it illegal for sale. The legislatures of Ohio, South Carolina, and Mississippi have all recently considered burial and cremation requirements, and Arkansas and Georgia already have similar statutes in place. Like many of these other states, Indiana's law effectively prohibits women or health-care facilities from donating fetal tissue for medical research.
For women who miscarry or go through emergency medical abortions, this law creates a mechanism for grieving. Hospitals will provide not only medical advice, but tools for memorializing loss. For others-who may be happy, sad, or indifferent about terminating their pregnancy-the purpose of the ritual is less clear. Perhaps legislators want to peel women's eyelids open, Clockwork Orange-style, and make them confront the meaning of abortion. Perhaps they wanted fetuses to be seen in they way they seem to them: as human.
State-Mandated Mourning
Birth Certificates
Kansas
Kansas is pursuing regulations that would give it one of the nation's toughest policies against allowing transgender people to update their birth certificates, prompting anger from advocates and threats of a lawsuit.
State health department officials contend an existing agency regulation allowing amended birth certificates conflicts with state law and needs to be eliminated. The agency has been pursuing changes for months and could impose them within six weeks.
The department's revised rules would allow a change only if a person or his or her parents could document that the gender was incorrectly recorded at the time of birth.
Three transgender rights advocates called on the department to abandon its proposed changes during a hearing Thursday. The National Center for Transgender Equality says only Idaho and Tennessee have legal policies against changing gender listings on birth certificates, though Ohio also is not allowing it.
Conservative Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's administration is pursuing the change amid scrutiny of a new law in North Carolina requiring transgender people to use public bathrooms, showers and changing rooms that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate. The U.S. Justice Department and the state's governor sued each other this week.
Kansas
Stops Fish From Smelling Predators
Bleached Coral
More than 90 percent of the 1,400-mile-long Great Barrier Reef is suffering from coral bleaching due to climate change. As oceans warm, reefs slough off algae that protect corals.
While corals only cover about 1 percent of the ocean's floor, they serve as critically important habitat for about a quarter of the world's marine species. Now scientists are starting to discover how coral bleaching is affecting creatures that depend on reefs for their survival.
Researchers at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, have been studying how fish react to large coral bleaching events, finding that the smell left by dead coral hampers the ability of fish to detect predators. Their study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"Baby fish use chemical alarm signals released from the skin of attacked individuals to learn the identity of new predators," Mark McCormick, a marine ecology professor at James Cook University, said in a statement.
Bleached Coral
In Memory
Madeleine Lebeau
Madeleine Lebeau, the luminous French actress who played Yvonne, the jilted lover of Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine who wells up during the patriotic singing of "La Marseillaise" in the immortal film Casablanca, has died. She was 92.
Lebeau, who later portrayed an actress named Madeleine in another classic, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), died May 1 in Estepona, Spain after breaking her thigh bone, her stepson, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist Carlo Alberto Pinelli, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lebeau is widely believed to be the last surviving cast member from Casablanca. Not too long before making the film, she herself had escaped Nazi-occupied France with her then-husband, actor Marcel Dalio.
In the 1942 Warner Bros. drama, Yvonne and Rick had a one-night stand, and when she makes another pass at him while drowning her sorrows at his nightclub, he spurns her and has the bartender take her back to her apartment. Later, she returns to the nightclub arm in arm with a German soldier.
When a group of German soldiers begin belting out "Die Wacht am Rhein," Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) leads Rick's house band in response with a stirring rendition of "La Marseillaise." All the patriots in the club, including Yvonne, join in to sing the French national anthem, and they drown out the Germans in a memorable "duel."
Lebeau is teary-eyed in two full-screen close-ups and yells "Viva la France!" in her final, passionate line. Like her, many of the actors in the memorable scene were refugees from Europe, and they drew on real emotions.
Her husband Dalio played the croupier Emil in Casablanca after appearing in such films as Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game.
Madeleine Lebeau
In Memory
Katherine Dunn
Writer Katherine Dunn, who was famous for her novel "Geek Love," died at her Portland, Oregon home Wednesday. She was 70.
Dunn's 1989 book "Geek Love" told the story of a house full of circus sideshow performers. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and became a best-seller.
In addition to writing books, Dunn was also a journalist for numerous publications, including The Oregonian, Willamette Week, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Vogue and Playboy, according to her son, Eli Dapolonia.
Dunn was born Oct. 24, 1945, in Garden City, Kansas, and moved to Oregon as a child.
Her first two novels, "Attic," which was published in 1970, and "Truck," published in 1971, came out while she was traveling in Europe, where she also gave birth to her son.
Shortly after, Dunn moved to Portland and raised her son while working various jobs including waitress, bartender, boxing reporter and columnist.
She wrote the boxing book, "School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms," for which she won the 2004 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Award.
Her boxing coverage was collected into an anthology in 2009 called "One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing." Dunn began boxing training in her 40s, and in 2009, made the news for fighting off an assault by a man less than half her age.
In addition to her son, Dunn is survived by her husband Paul Pomerantz. The two first met at Reed College and married in 2012 after reconnecting.
Katherine Dunn
In Memory
Joe Temperley
Scottish-born baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley, a former member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and a founding member of Wynton Marsalis' Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, has died at age 86.
Temperley died Wednesday in New York City after battling cancer, said JALC public relations director Zooey T. Jones.
"For someone from another country and culture to exhibit the depth of belief that animated his sound was, and still is, truly miraculous," Marsalis said in a JALC statement announcing Temperley's death.
Born in 1929 in the Scottish mining town of Lochgelly, in Fife, Temperley moved to London when he was not quite 20 after successfully auditioning to play tenor sax in Tommy Sampson's popular band. He gained prominence in Britain after switching to baritone sax when he joined Humphrey Lyttelton's band in 1958.
In 1965, he moved to New York where he became the first Scottish musician to make a big impact on the American jazz scene, performing and/or recording with Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Joe Henderson and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. He was invited to join the Ellington band in 1974 after he played at the funeral of the band's long-time baritone saxophonist Harry Carney.
Temperley spent nearly a decade in the Ellington band, run by son Mercer Ellington. In 1988, Marsalis invited several Ellington alumni, including Temperley, to perform in an all-star big band for an Ellington tribute. That band evolved into the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Temperley recorded several albums under his own name, including "Sunbeam and Thundercloud" with pianist Dave McKenna (1996) and "Double Duke" (1999).
As an educator, he taught at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music and served as a mentor for the Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra in Scotland.
Joe Temperley
In Memory
Darwyn Cooke
Darwyn Cooke, the comic book artist best known for his richly imaginative work on DC superheroes and noir crime stories, has died. He was 53.
Cooke's wife, Marsha Cooke, says he died Saturday morning at his home in Florida following a battle with lung cancer.
Cooke famously reimagined the Justice League members in 2004 with a signature retro style in "DC: The New Frontier."
His other work included gritty adaptations of Richard Stark's "Parker" novels, a modern interpretation of Catwoman and the "Solo" graphic novel series, which earned Cooke an Eisner Award, which is considered the Oscar of the comics world.
The Toronto, Canada-born artist also worked as a storyboard artist on the 1990s shows "Batman: The Animated Series" and "Superman: The Animated Series."
Darwyn Cooke
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