Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Brian Beutler: "Dems To GOP: Stop Lying To Seniors That Republican Budget Won't Impact Current Medicare Beneficiaries" (Talking Points Memo)
"What the Republicans are saying -- that this won't affect seniors now, that the cuts are all off in future years -- is flat out false," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). "In the reform bill that we passed, we solved, over time, the problem of the Donut Hole -- the dreaded coverage gap that seniors fall into when their prescriptions can't be paid for any longer. That solution to the donut hole problem gets repealed by the Ryan budget. And that will hit home right away to seniors in Rhode Island and seniors across this country."
Jim Hightower: A MORALLY UNTENABLE CORPORATE SYSTEM
This will seem like a fairytale now, but not so long ago, it was actually possible for CEO pay to constitute "an embarrassment of riches."
Mark Shields: Welcome to the U.S.A.! (Creators Syndicate)
What we do know is that he, the Frenchman, 62, has power, wealth and a ton of global influence. By contrast, she, an immigrant from Africa, is the 32-year-old single mother of a 15-year-old girl.
Michele Hansen: A mysterious rise in water rates (Guardian)
After a fourfold increase in his bill, Alan wanted to know if there had been a mistake. Two months and more than 40 phone calls later, he got his answer.
Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin (Guardian)
How does it feel to have your widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favourite and now the toast of the Cannes film festival? The author of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' explains.
"I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens" by Peter Hartshorn: A review by Robert K. Landers
'I think that there's got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to -- no matter what he's done -- and get help. Help, you understand, none of your law and your justice, but help." Thus did the notorious Boston ward boss Martin Lomasney justify himself in 1908 to investigative reporter Lincoln Steffens. And Steffens, whose exposes of "shameful" graft and corruption in American cities had made him famous, was impressed.
Barry Gilbert: 'My strength is a yarn,' says songwriter and author Steve Earle (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Describing Steve Earle's 'I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive' as a story about a skid row junkie abortionist haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams may work as a dust jacket blurb. But it doesn't begin to reveal the depth of the singer-songwriter's debut novel.
Paul Constant: Dear John (The Stranger)
How Dan Savage Taught a Cartoonist How to Hire Prostitutes.
Charlotte Rampling: 'I know my power' (Guardian)
Her chilly sensuality has hooked directors from Woody Allen to Lars von Trier. Charlotte Rampling talks to Catherine Shoard about her no-go areas, Hollywood 'crap' - and why we might not like her new documentary.
Eric Felten: Disney's Movie Vault: Scarily Creating a Fantasia of Scarcity (Wall Street Journal)
Don't believe it when the entertainment company tells you certain movies will soon be unavailable.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
wrote:
took the day off.
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and seasonal.
NBC blew an affiliate break during 'SNL' on the left coast and up-cut Lady Gaga's 2nd song by about a minute. Yeoweee.
'Jeopardy!'-Winning Computer Delving Into Medicine
Watson
Some guy in his pajamas, home sick with bronchitis and complaining online about it, could soon be contributing to a digital collection of medical information designed to help speed diagnoses and treatments.
A doctor who is helping to prepare IBM's Watson computer system for work as a medical tool says such blog entries may be included in Watson's database.
Watson is best known for handily defeating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV earlier this year. IBM says Watson, with its ability to understand plain language, can digest questions about a person's symptoms and medical history and quickly suggest diagnoses and treatments.
The company is still perhaps two years from marketing a medical Watson, and it says no prices have been established. But it envisions several uses, including a doctor simply speaking into a handheld device to get answers at a patient's bedside.
Watson
Cricket Fear Inspired `Clockwork' Thug
Malcolm McDowell
One of cinema's most stylish psychopaths got his look because Malcolm McDowell happened to have his cricket uniform with him while talking over his "A Clockwork Orange" character with Stanley Kubrick.
They had been pondering just how McDowell's gleefully brutal thug Alex should dress for the 1971 film, which screened Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival ahead of a 40th anniversary Blu-ray release coming May 31.
Typical for Kubrick, who had great love for the blackly comic, they settled on a mash-up that brought an air of perverse gentility to the menacing young hooligan played by McDowell.
"I said, `Well, I've got my cricket gear in the car. We could try that,'" McDowell recalled in an interview at Cannes.
Kubrick loved how McDowell looked in the crisp white uniform and suggested that he wear the outfit's groin protector on the outside, like a giant codpiece.
Malcolm McDowell
Joining Charleston To Bermuda Race
Stephen Colbert
TV's Stephen Colbert is prepared to battle manta rays and men-of-war at sea in the OnDeck Charleston to Bermuda yachting race.
The comedian captains the Spirit of Juno, one of 11 boats leaving from Charleston on Saturday for the 777 mile race.
Colbert crewed on a boat during the race six years ago before "The Colbert Report" went on the air. That boat had mechanical problems and arrived two days after the awards ceremony.
"The most pleasant disaster I have ever been a part of," Colbert remembered Friday. "Last time, I was chaplain and the cook and the morale officer and those all came together at grace. This time I hope I still get to cook. I'm the pharmacist. I've brought the anti-nausea medication."
Stephen Colbert
New Rules For US Travel
Cuba
The forbidden fruit of American travel is once again within reach. New rules issued by the Obama administration will allow Americans wide access to communist-led Cuba, already a mecca for tourists from other nations.
Within months or even weeks, thousands of people from Seattle to Sarasota could be shaking their hips in tropical nightclubs and sampling the famous stogies, without having to sneak in through a third country and risk the Treasury Department's wrath.
"This is travel to Cuba for literally any American," said Tom Popper, director of Insight Cuba, which took thousands of Americans to Cuba before such programs were put into a deep freeze seven years ago.
But it won't all be a day at the beach or a night at the bar. U.S. visitors may find themselves tramping through sweltering farms or attending history lectures to justify the trips, which are meant, under U.S. policy, to bring regular Cubans and Americans together.
Cuba
Oopsy
Judgment Day
With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent.
Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.
Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.
In his latest pronouncement, he had said doomsday would begin in Asia, but with midnight local time come and gone in Tokyo and Beijing and those cities already in the early hours of May 22, there was no sign of the apocalypse.
The Oakland, California, headquarters of the network of 66 U.S. stations, which has international affiliates and had posted billboards around the country warning of a May 21 Judgment Day, were shuttered with a sign in the door that read "This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!"
Judgment Day
NASA Sting
Moon Rock
She promised the moon, for a sky-high price. He wasn't buying.
A woman who tried to sell what she said was a rare piece of moon rock for $1.7 million was detained when her would-be buyer turned out to be an undercover NASA agent, officials said Friday.
The gray rocks, which are considered national treasures and are illegal to sell, were given to each U.S. state and 136 countries by then-President Richard Nixon after U.S. moon missions and can sell for millions of dollars on the black market.
NASA investigators and Riverside County sheriff's deputies detained the woman after she met Thursday with an undercover NASA investigator at a restaurant in Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the sheriff's office said. The investigation was conducted over several months.
Authorities swooped after the two agreed on a price and the woman, whose name has not been released, pulled out the rock.
Moon Rock
Ratted Out By Tattoo
Anthony Garcia
A gang member who was linked to a 2004 murder by an elaborate tattoo on his chest that authorities say memorialized the crime scene was sentenced on Thursday to 65 years to life in prison.
Anthony Garcia, 25, was convicted of murder in April in the January 23, 2004 shooting death of 23-year-old John Juarez outside a liquor store in the Los Angeles suburb of Pico Rivera.
Garcia was first suspected in the killing of Juarez after he was arrested in 2008 for driving on a suspended license and a detective noticed his tattoo, which shows a peanut man being shot by a helicopter outside a store.
Prosecutors say the helicopter represents Garcia, whose gang nickname is "Chopper," and that "peanut" is a derogatory term for a rival gang.
Anthony Garcia
Fate Of Virus Stocks Divides WHO
Smallpox
Health ministers are deeply divided over setting a date to destroy the world's remaining known stocks of live smallpox virus, stored in Russia and the United States, diplomatic sources said Friday.
The two powers say that more research is needed into safer vaccines against the deadly disease eradicated more than 30 years ago. They also seek guarantees that all stocks have been destroyed or transferred to their two official repositories due to fears that the virus could be used as a biological weapon.
But their joint proposal to put off for 5 years any decision on the timing of destruction has run into opposition at the annual meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) -- where the issue has already been on the agenda for the last 25 years.
Many countries say the world's remaining smallpox virus stocks should be eradicated as the disease no longer exists and the virus is lethal. They also say technology exists to develop new vaccines and antivirals without needing to use live virus.
The U.S.-Russian smallpox resolution is formally backed by 19 other countries, including U.S. allies Britain, Canada and Japan as well as several former republics of the Soviet Union.
Smallpox
Most Nuclear Power Plants Off The Grid
Germany
More than three-quarters of Germany's nuclear power plants were offline Saturday due to maintenance work or shutdowns ordered by the government after Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, utility companies said.
Only four of the country's 17 nuclear power plants were online after the energy utility RWE AG took its Emsland plant off the grid Saturday.
Environmentalists accused the utilities of staging simultaneous maintenance shutdowns while threatening blackouts to put pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel's government, which appears determined in the wake of the Fukushima Dai-ichi catastrophe to phase out nuclear power within a good decade.
To compensate, Germany is likely to import more electricity from its neighbors, chiefly from France and the Czech Republic, which both rely heavily on nuclear power.
Germany, Europe's biggest economy, stands alone among the world's leading industrialized nations in its determination to ditch nuclear power and replace it with renewable energies.
Germany
In Memory
Bill Hunter
Bill Hunter, the archetypal working class Australian of a multitude of movies including the quirky trio "Muriel's Wedding," "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and "Strictly Ballroom" has died of cancer, his manager said Sunday. He was aged 71.
The prolific star of Australian movie and television screens with a distinctively broad and gravelly accent and an authoritative no-nonsense style remained an actor in demand until the end. He recently narrated a two-part television documentary about the floods and cyclone that became Australia's most expensive natural disasters early this year. He plays the legendary Australian racehorse trainer Bart Cummings and a cameo role in two Australian movies to be screened later this year.
He died late Saturday surrounded by family and friends in a Melbourne hospice where he was admitted on Monday, manager Mark Morrissey said. Colleagues who had recently worked with him were surprised he had been sick.
Hunter's weather-worn face has become almost omnipresent on Australian screens since he first appeared as an extra in 1957 in "The Shiralee," British-made movie set in Australia.
His real break into the industry came as a stunt man when Hollywood made "On the Beach" in his hometown of Melbourne in 1959 - a movie about survivors of a nuclear war that starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.
"He watched Gregory Peck do 27 takes and thought: 'A mug could do that,'" Hunter's former wife Rhoda Roberts told Sydney's The Daily Telegraph newspaper last week.
Hunter summed up his own approach to acting during a recent interview to promote his upcoming movie, "The Cup."
"As long as the director told me where to stand and what to say, I was happy. Anyone who says there is any more to it than that is full of (expletive)," Hunter said in a quote released Sunday by his manager.
Australia's National Film and Sound Archive head of film programming Quentin Turnour said Hunter followed in the lineage of unpolished Australian actors Chips Rafferty, who died in 1971, and John Meillon, who died in 1989. Australian audiences loved to see themselves in the laconic and gruff characters with soft hearts that they played, Turnour said.
Hunter was born in Melbourne on Feb. 27, 1940, and raised in rural Victoria state in Australia's southeast. He was the son of a struggling country pub owner who eventually went broke. Hunter told Melbourne's The Sunday Age newspaper in 1994 that he left school at the age of 13 to become a cowboy, known in Australia as a drover, guiding cattle herds across Victoria.
He began building his career in the 1960s in Australian television crime dramas in which he specialized as hard characters who were usually policemen or criminals.
A gregarious hard drinker with an endearing knack of recalling names of people who had expected to be forgotten, Hunter was universally popular in the movie industry in which he became a stalwart with few peers.
An early career highlight came when he played a news reel camera man in the Phillip Noyce-directed movie about the media and politics in Australia in the 1950s, "Newsfront." Hunter won the Australian Film Industry's best actor award for 1978 for the role, the first of three such Australian equivalence of an Oscar that he won.
He also won acclaim for his roles as a doomed army major in Peter Weir's 1981 World War I drama "Gallipoli," a meddling dance judge in Baz Luhrmann's 1992 romantic comedy "Strictly Ballroom," father of the bride in P.J. Hogan's "Muriel's Wedding" and an open-minded mechanic in the company of drag queens in Stephan Elliott's "Priscilla."
Hunter also had minor roles in Luhrmann's 2008 epic "Australia" and in the U.S.-Australian television miniseries co-production "The Pacific" released last year.
He found his most youthful audience as the voice of the dentist who captured the clown fish star of the hit 2003 animated feature "Finding Nemo."
Bill Hunter
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