Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Farhad Manjoo: No, I Do Not Want to Pet Your Dog (Slate)
They're lounging in our offices and licking us at our cafés. It's time to take America back.
Neil Gaiman: prepare yourselves - I'm taking over the Guardian Books site
Even as I write this the power is starting to go to my head. I get to edit the Guardian Books site for a day. This is a position of daunting, fairy godmother-like power. Damien G Walter muttered on Twitter that he would like to interview Harlan Ellison, and I waved my editorial wand and it happened. They spoke on the phone. Now I get to find out what they said.
Q&A: Harlan Ellison (Guardian)
When Damien Walter tweeted he'd 'literally kill' to interview the multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman replied 'What if the person you had to kill was … Harlan Ellison?' Here Ellison talks about running away from home, the rights and wrongs of paying to read books and how his job on this planet is annoying people.
Neil Gaiman's top 10 mythical characters (Guardian)
The author of Coraline and The Graveyard Book shares the characters from myths that haunt him, from Loki and Lilith to Coyote.
Alison Flood: Self-published ebook sales reach 20% of genre market (Guardian)
Self-published titles accounted for over a fifth of crime, science fiction, romance and humour ebooks sold in UK in 2012.
Alison Flood: "Philip Pullman: 'Authors must be paid fairly for ebook library loans'" (Guardian)
The writer of His Dark Materials leads a new campaign to address 'underpayment' of writers for digital loans.
Lucy Mangan: "Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson" (Guardian)
The Moomins exist in a land, and are written for an age, where anything can happen without rupturing expectations. Finn Family Moomintroll focuses on a hobgoblin's hat that changes anything put into it into something else; water into raspberry juice, discarded flowers into a jungle that subsumes the entire house. But these folkloric and fairytale elements are tied firmly to the everyday by the details that ring true down the ages and across cultures …
Anita Sethi: "Prunella Scales: My family values" (Guardian)
The actor talks about her long marriage to fellow actor Timothy West, and her two sons, one of whom is also an actor.
Why Nurses Should Rule the World, Part 4 (Not Always Right)
(My mother takes my younger brother and I out to a restaurant for dinner. As we are eating, we witness a car crash in the road. My mother, being an LPN (licensed practical nurse), leaves her meal to rush across the street to offer help. We are seated by an elderly couple right next to a window.)
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
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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 hung around most of the afternoon.
Talk Shifts From Curbing CO2 To Adapting
Climate
Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.
The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It's becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet's wild weather.
It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City's rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition into full focus.
After years of losing the fight against rising global emissions of heat-trapping gases, governments around the world are emphasizing what a U.N. Foundation scientific report calls "managing the unavoidable."
It's called adaptation and it's about as sexy but as necessary as insurance, experts say.
Climate
Gives Record-Breaking Sub to Science
James Cameron
When James Cameron was about 12, he saw the Alvin submersible on the cover of National Geographic and was absolutely captivated by the vehicle's ability to transport ordinary humans to the seafloor. Alvin helped inspire Cameron to pursue a life of exploration and, several decades later, to build his own sub - the Deepsea Challenger - and pilot it by himself to the deepest part of the world's oceans.
Cameron visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) today (June 14), a bastion of marine science here on Cape Cod that operates Alvin (still kicking nearly 50 years after being built). But it was no ordinary visit - Cameron came to donate the Deepsea Challenger, which will now be housed where Alvin used to reside. "What's surreal about this situation … is that it all comes full circle," Cameron said at a ceremony celebrating his gift of the sub to the institution.
Cameron and a team of collaborators in the United States and Australia designed the submarine over the course of seven years. It has many unique features that set it apart from any submersible in the world, such as its unique lighting systems and compact, powerful batteries, whose innovative design will be used in other crafts to further explore the ocean, said Susan Avery, WHOI's president.
"Put some gas in it and go and have some fun, but be back by midnight," Cameron joked as he officially handed off the sub.
James Cameron
Cal State Bakersfield
Merle Haggard
They call him "The Hag," but now Merle Haggard can answer to "doctor" as well.
Haggard was presented an honorary doctorate Friday by California State University, Bakersfield.
The doctor of fine arts honor was conferred during School of Arts & Humanities commencement ceremonies that also celebrated the late Buck Owens.
The university does not bestow honorary doctorates posthumously, so Owens was instead awarded the President's Medal.
The music of Haggard and Owens exemplifies country music's "Bakersfield Sound."
Merle Haggard
Lawmakers Pass Budget
California
California lawmakers passed a $96.3 billion budget on Friday that would spend more on education, health care and other services while setting aside $1.1 billion from the first surplus in years for a rainy day fund.
The spending plan makes changes to the way the state funds education, increasing the base amount spent on all students while funneling more money to districts with children who live in poverty or who do not speak fluent English.
It also restores funds that had been cut from dental programs for the poor in the most populous U.S. state, and for mental health services and assistance for veterans.
The $1.1 billion reserve was part of a deal negotiated with Governor Jerry Brown, who pressed fiscal restraint on the Democratic legislature. It marks a dramatic turnaround from four years ago, when the state was in the red by $16 billion.
California
The War On Women
Rick Perry
Texas Governor Rick Perry has some bad news for Texas women. On Friday afternoon, the one-time presidential hopeful notified legislators that Texas would not join the federal government and 42 other states that have addressed gender-based wage discrimination. Their bill, which installs state-level legal protections similar to those enacted by the federal Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, had a lot of momentum before reaching Perry's desk. Last month the legislation, along with two separate amendements, cleared both of the state's chambers, and it would have made Texas the 43rd state in the Union to have passed such legislation.
Perry's rationale for vetoing the first bill is a bit fuzzy. The Houston Chronicle points out that the governor's staff members have argued that the legislation is unnecessary due to the the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but have refused to speak to reporters when evidence to the contrary is presented. According to The Huffington Post, HB 950 allows litigants alleging wage discrimination to use a state court instead of a federal court (which tends to be a lot more convenient for plaintiffs) and plugs certain holes left open by the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act at the state level. Perry has yet to announce his reasoning behind the veto, which he confirmed to the staff members of two state representatives who sponsored the bill.
The decision to veto places Perry in a vulnerable position against progressive critics who have, rather successfully, situated him and his Republican peers in their "war on women" narrative, which asserts that GOP politicians use their power to marginalize and disempower women. Perry and his staff have worked hard to counter this narrative, as evidenced by a glowing New York Times profile from January that highlights the plurality of women on his staff. (Perry's chief of staff until February was female - a feat yet to be matched by Democratic President Barack Obama, who signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on his ninth day of office but has hired only white men to fill the White House Chief of Staff.) Nor will Perry's veto rally his fellow Republicans, many of whom believe the pay gap between men and women is a myth invented to unfairly cast Republicans as sexist. After all, Perry did not go out of his way to attack the bill's basic premise.
Rick Perry
Wins 3 Daytime Emmy Awards
Kevin Clash
Kevin Clash, the Elmo puppeteer who resigned amid allegations that he sexually abused underage boys, won three Daytime Emmy Awards for his work on "Sesame Street."
Clash won as outstanding performer in a children's series at the creative arts ceremony held Friday night. He shared trophies for outstanding pre-school children's series and directing in a children's series, giving Clash 26 Daytime Emmys for his work on the venerable PBS show.
He played Elmo for 28 years before quitting last November. Clash's lawyer has said that related lawsuits filed against the entertainer are without merit.
The main Daytime Emmys ceremony is Sunday in Beverly Hills.
Kevin Clash
In Steep Decline
Darwin's Frogs
Some of nature's most fascinating fathers may be at risk of extinction.
Male Darwin's frogs swallow their offspring in the tadpole stage, incubate their young in their vocal sacs, and eventually spit out fully developed froglets. Along with seahorses, the frogs are thought to be the only known living vertebrates in which dads take on baby-carrying duties with special sacs that make them look pregnant.
But new research shows that these unique creatures may be vanishing as their habitats in Chile's temperate forests are destroyed.
Charles Darwin first discovered the frogs while traveling in Chile in 1834. Scientists who later studied the mouth-brooding animals found that there are actually two species, naming one Rhinoderma darwinii (Darwin's frog) and the other Rhinoderma rufum (Chile Darwin's frog).
From 2008 to 2012, a team of researchers led by zoologist Claudio Soto-Azat surveyed 223 sites in the frogs' historical range, from the coastal city of Valparaíso south to an area just beyond Chiloé Island. R. rufum has not been seen in the wild since 1980, and despite the recent extensive search effort across every recorded location of the species, no individuals were seen or heard during the four-year survey, the researchers said. R. darwinii, meanwhile, was found in 36 sites, but only in fragmented and small populations, each with likely less than 100 individuals.
Darwin's Frogs
No More Mr. Nice Toy
Lego Figures
Lego, maker of the plastic toy pieces and figures that spawned a global empire, isn't playing nice anymore.
That's the finding of a recent study, which showed that an increasing number of Lego figures' faces are scowling, frowning or snarling rather than smiling.
In the 1970s, when Lego added human figures to their successful line of construction blocks, most of the figures wore happy, contented expressions, The Guardian reports.
But all that started to change in 1989, according to Christoph Bartneck, a social robotics researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and lead author of the study.
Over time, the authors observed a trend: The proportion of happy faces decreased, while the proportion of angry faces increased. Their study will be presented at the First International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction in Sapporo, Japan, in August.
Lego Figures
Animal Clinic Rescue
"Squirrel Kings"
It was a strange sight: six otherwise adorable squirrels with their tails fused together. The "squirrel kings" formation, as it's called, resulted in the rodents connected to each other from behind, unable to escape their bonds and headed for death or dismemberment.
The squirrels were lucky to be discovered by a caring individual who brought them to the Animal Clinic of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan, where employees were able to methodically separate the squirrels from each other without permanently damaging them.
So how exactly did the young squirrels end up physically bound to each other? Dr. Steven Kruzeniski said they were likely all resting near each other in a pine tree when sap dripped onto their tails and fused them together as it hardened and grafted with their fur.
After the squirrels were brought into the clinic, the team of veterinarians sedated them and removed their matted tail fur. During the procedure, the squirrels appeared to rest peacefully, with their mouths hanging open and their forearms curled up. The entire procedure reportedly lasted about 20 minutes.
"Squirrel Kings"
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