Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Things to Do With Trayvon's Corpse (Creators Syndicate)
Kiss him. Kiss him on the cheek. Like you'd kiss our own boy. Wake him from the nightmare. You can't, can you?
Nathaniel Downes: McDonald's Employee Budgeting Website Reveals How it Enslaves People (Addicting Info)
This person who is working 60 hours per week for minimum wage is also managing to pay $600 per month in rent, $150 per month for a car payment, $100 per month for car/home insurance, $20 per month on health insurance (one wants to know where this miraculously low-costing health insurance can be found), nothing for heating, $100 per month for cable and phone, $90 for electric, and $200 split between savings and any other fixed bill, leaving just over $800/month for any other expense.
Clancy Martin: On Suicide (Harper's Magazine)
And why we should talk more about it.
Alexis Petridis: "Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees: 'I want to keep the music alive'" (Guardian)
Barry Gibb is the last surviving Bee Gee - and he's given up retirement to go back on tour. He talks about the backlash to Saturday Night Fever, his troubled relationships with his brothers and how drugs helped shape their distinctive sound.
Peter Suderman: Save the Movie! (Slate)
The 2005 screenwriting book that's taken over Hollywood-and made every movie feel the same.
Charlie Jane Anders: The Conjuring proves horror movies don't have to be heartless dreck (io9)
The Conjuring, out today, isn't just a strong contender for scariest movie of the year - it's also a surprisingly sweet, even dorky story about a husband-and-wife team of paranormal investigators, and how their love saves them. It's a great antidote to your standard dehumanizing horror movie.
Anil Dash: 10 RULES OF INTERNET (dashes)
Given enough time, any object which can generate musical notes will be used to play the Super Mario Brothers theme on YouTube.
Lewis Black Anti-Texas Ad - Response to Rick Perry (YouTube)
NSFW Language, but you already knew that.
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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
Cool and overcast with scattered showers - quite peculiar for these parts this time of year.
Nirvana In Seattle
Paul McCartney
In Nirvana's hometown, former members of the defining grunge band reunited to join Paul McCartney on stage.
Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic joined the former Beatle before 47,000 fans at Safeco Field during Friday's concert. Guitarist Pat Smear, who played with Nirvana for a tour and an album, also joined the group on stage.
There were no Nirvana songs played though. The group covered Beatles songs and played "Cut Me Some Slack," which it debuted during a benefit concert for Hurricane Sandy relief last year.
McCartney told the adoring crowd that he was in the middle of a "Nirvana reunion."
Paul McCartney
Apollo 11 Rocket Engine Part Recovered
Jeff Bezos
Forty-four years (and three days) after it helped launch the first men to walk on the moon, a huge rocket engine part salvaged from the ocean floor has been positively identified as a historic component of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
"I'm thrilled to share some exciting news," Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos wrote Friday (July 19) on his Bezos Expeditions website. "44 years ago tomorrow [July 20] Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and now we have recovered a critical technological marvel that made it all possible."
In March 2012, the billionaire entrepreneur underwrote a private - and secret - expedition to find and recover the Apollo engines that launched astronauts Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.
In March 2013, Bezos revealed that his team had raised the parts for at least two F-1 engines, but they didn't know if they were from Apollo 11 or one of the 12 other Saturn V rockets that flew between 1967 and 1973, each equipped with five of the engines.
The job of identifying the heritage of the thrust chambers, gas generators, injectors, heat exchangers, turbines, fuel manifolds and dozens of other F-1 engine artifacts fell to the conservation team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas. In addition to their work cleaning and stabilizing the parts for public display, the conservators were tasked with meticulously inspecting and documenting each component.
Jeff Bezos
Ticket Prices Hit Record Highs
Movies
Moviegoers' wallets and pocket books got slammed during the second quarter of 2013 as a steady stream of 3D and IMAX releases drove ticket prices to record levels.
The average movie ticket price hit a new high of $8.38 for the three months ending in June, according to data from the National Association of Theatre Owners. That figure eclipsed the previous record of $8.12, which occurred during the second quarter of 2012.
It also represented a 5.5 percent increase from $7.94 in the first three months of the year.
For the first six months of 2013, the average ticket price evens out to $8.16, which is higher than any previous mark.
Movies
King David-Era Palace Found
Israel
Archaeologists say they've uncovered two royal buildings from Israel's biblical past, including a palace suspected to have belonged to King David.
The findings at Khirbet Qeiyafa - an fortified hilltop city about 19 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem - indicate that David, who defeated Goliath in the Bible, ruled a kingdom with a great political organization, the excavators say.
"This is unequivocal evidence of a kingdom's existence, which knew to establish administrative centers at strategic points," read a statement from archaeologists Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
The IAA announced the finds as a seven-year long excavation at the site is wrapping up. The government agency and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority have halted the planned construction of a nearby neighborhood, hoping to make the site a national park.
Israel
Production Will Be Delayed
'Glee'
"Glee" will return for its fifth season a week later than planned because of the death of series star Cory Monteith, Fox said Friday.
In a statement, the network and "Glee" producers said that "in light of the tragic passing" of the beloved cast member, the decision was made to delay production until early August.
The show's fall return, scheduled for Sept. 19, has been moved to Sept. 26. No further information was available, Fox and producers said.
Fox and "Glee" producers have not publicly discussed how the show will deal with the loss of Monteith, 31, and his character, or if a decision has yet been made on how to proceed.
'Glee'
Priceless Works Up In Smoke
Romania
A development in the case of seven artworks by the likes of Picasso, Matisse and Monet stolen last year from a museum in the Netherlands has art lovers gasping this week at the discovery the paintings might have been incinerated.
A woman from a small Romanian village said she burned the paintings in her wood stove after her son was arrested as a suspect in an elaborate heist at the Kunsthal museum in October.
The stolen masterpieces were by Picasso, Monet and Matisse.If Olga Dogaru's story is true, she destroyed the precious artworks, perhaps seeing only paper, canvas and evidence against her son rather than pieces of cultural history.
The director of the National History Museum, Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, told the New York Times that if she really had burned these paintings, it was "a barbarian crime against humanity."
Romania
Poland's Rebel Priest: Church's 'No. 1 Enemy'
Wojciech Lemanski
He's loved by his congregation but loathed by the archbishop. Rebellious priest Wojciech Lemanski is seen as the church's No. 1 enemy in Poland. His dismissal highlights the deep divide between church authorities and the faithful in this staunchly Catholic nation.
Pastor Wojciech Lemanski stepped up to his small pulpit on Wednesday morning to hold what may be his last sermon at his church in the town of Jasienica near Warsaw. The slender cleric, with his close-cropped gray hair, has become a household name in Poland in recent weeks. Newspapers have run stories about him and he's been a topic of discussion on television in what has been dubbed "Pastor Lemanski vs. the Curia." The case shows that support for the church is even crumbling in devoutly Catholic Poland.
Lemanski, who was ordained in 1987, was never a compliant priest. He repeatedly used his pulpit and his blog to voice his criticism of the church. He has accused the church leadership of not doing enough to oppose anti-Semitic tendencies among Poland's Catholics. He has also critcized the establishment's lenient treatment of clerics accused of sexual abuse, and its fierce rejection of artificial insemination and contraceptives. His vocal criticism drove Henryk Hoser, the archbishop of Warsaw-Praga, to suspend Lemanski last week. But Lemanski wrote the archbishop a letter informing him that he wouldn't budge.
When, on Sunday, three envoys dispatched by Hoser showed up at Lemanski's church, they were quickly surrounded by an angry crowd. "This is our parish," they called out. Lemanski said he still considered himself to be shepherd of his flock according to canonical law. The three clerics finally retreated after they were jeered at and booed. They barely managed to get into their car when the crowd began pushing the vehicle in the direction of Warsaw. After that, the Polish edition of Newsweek ran a cover story describing Lemanski as the "Church's No. 1 Enemy".
Wojciech Lemanski
NOT For The Squeamish
New World Army Screw Worm
A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow.
Thinking she had a routine ear infection caused by a mosquito bite, she sought medical treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, where a consultant noticed maggots in a small hole in her ear-canal.
When flushing the maggots out failed, the medics resorted to surgery and found a "writhing mass of maggots" within her ear, raising concern they could eat into her brain.
The surgery removed a family of eight maggots. Analysis found that a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris's ear.
New World Army Screw Worm
Largest Virus Ever Found
Pandoravirus
The phrase "giant virus" sounds pretty ominous, but that's what's been discovered dwelling underwater by researchers in France. Named Pandoravirus, this monster is the biggest virus ever found, but even with its size and creepy name, is it dangerous to us?
Typical viruses - ones we're used to, like influenza - are really small. Influenza measures about 100 nanometers (nm) across, whereas rabies is a bulkier 180 nm. By comparison, the width of a strand of spider's webbing is about 5000 nanometers wide. Viruses don't have to be big, just big enough to carry their key genetic material. They do their thing by injecting themselves into larger cells and using the cells' own reproductive process to make more viruses.
Now here comes something else entirely, though. This Pandoravirus is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus. So big, you don't need a fancy high-powered microscope to see it. That's not all that's big about it, either. Our familiar flu virus carries about 13 genes, but Pandoravirus racks up an astonishing 2,556! Even more remarkable is that 94 per cent of those genes are completely unknown to science.
You might be wondering why it took so long to discover, if it's so huge. Among its other mysteries, Pandoravirus doesn't look much like other viruses - aside from the fact it's so large, it's more of a blob that most of its relatives. One of the researchers on the team who made this discovery, Jean-Michel Claverie, had actually received a sample of the virus 10 years ago, but he thought it was simply a mislabeled bacteria. He and his team, including wife Chantal Abergel, uncovered the truth of the matter when they got hints of giant viruses from another recent survey. They then obtained sediment samples to test from both seawater near Chile, and freshwater in Australia.
What the team ended up with was evidence of two kinds of pandoraviruses (and, presumably, a lot of dead amoebas).
Pandoravirus
In Memory
Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas, the irrepressible White House correspondent who used her seat in the front row of history to grill 10 presidents and was not shy about sharing her opinions, died Saturday. She was 92.
Thomas, who died at her apartment in Washington, had been ill for a long time, and in and out of the hospital before coming home Thursday, according to a friend, Muriel Dobbin.
Thomas made her name as a bulldog for United Press International in the great wire-service rivalries of old, and as a pioneer for women in journalism.
She was persistent to the point of badgering. One White House press secretary described her questioning as "torture" - and he was one of her fans.
Her refusal to conceal her strong opinions, even when posing questions to a president, and her public hostility toward Israel, caused discomfort among colleagues.
In 2010, that tendency finally ended a career which had started in 1943 and made her one of the best known journalists in Washington. On a videotape circulated on the Internet, she said Israelis should "get out of Palestine" and "go home" to Germany, Poland or the United States. The remark brought down widespread condemnation and she ended her career.
In her long career, she was indelibly associated with the ritual ending White House news conferences. She was often the one to deliver the closing line: "Thank you, Mister President" - four polite words that belied a fierce competitive streak.
Her disdain for White House secrecy and dodging spanned five decades, back to President John Kennedy. Her freedom to voice her peppery opinions as a speaker and a Hearst columnist came late in her career.
The Bush administration marginalized her, clearly peeved with a journalist who had challenged resident George W. Bush to his face on the Iraq war and declared him the worst president in history.
Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" - the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos - and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.
She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."
The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.
She also pushed open the doors for women at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. At her urging, Kennedy refused to attend the 1962 dinner unless it was open to women for the first time. The tactic worked. More than a decade later, Thomas was the first woman to serve as the association's president.
Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.
Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. It was in high school, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.
After graduating from Detroit's Wayne University (now Wayne State University), Thomas headed straight for the nation's capital. She landed a $17.50-a-week position as a copy girl, with duties that included fetching coffee and doughnuts for editors at the Washington Daily News.
United Press - later United Press International - soon hired her to write local news stories for the radio wire. Her assignments were relegated at first to women's news, society items and celebrity profiles.
Her big break came after the 1960 election that sent Kennedy to the White House, and landed Thomas her first assignment related to the presidency. She was sent to Palm Beach, Fla., to cover the vacation of the president-elect and his family.
Bigger and better assignments would follow for Thomas, among them President Richard M. Nixon's breakthrough trip to China in 1972.
When the Watergate scandal began consuming Nixon's presidency, Martha Mitchell, the notoriously unguarded wife of the attorney general, would call Thomas late at night to unload her frustrations at what she saw as the betrayal of her husband John by the president's men.
It was also during the Nixon administration that the woman who scooped so many others was herself scooped - by the first lady. Pat Nixon was the one who announced to the Washington press corps that Thomas was engaged to Douglas Cornell, chief White House correspondent for UPI's archrival, AP.
They were married in 1971. Cornell died 11 years later.
Thomas stayed with UPI for 57 years, until 2000, when the company was purchased by News World Communications, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (R-Arms Merchant/Messiah), leader of the Unification Church.
A self-described liberal, Thomas made no secret of her ill feelings for the penultimate president she covered - the second President Bush. "He is the worst president in all of American history," she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif.
Thomas also was critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, asserting that the deaths of innocent people should hang heavily on Bush's conscience.
"We are involved in a war that is becoming more dubious every day," she said in a speech to thousands of students at Brigham Young University in September 2003. "I thought it was wrong to invade a country without any provocation."
In March 2005, she confronted Bush with the proposition that "your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis" and every justification for the attack proved false.
When Bush began explaining his rationale, she interjected: "They didn't do anything to you, or to our country."
"Excuse me for a second," Bush replied. "They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaida. That's where al-Qaida trained."
"I'm talking about Iraq," she said.
Helen Thomas
In Memory
Mel Smith
Actor and writer
Mel Smith, a major force in British comedy whose evening news parody anticipated the hijinks of hits such as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," has died of a heart attack, his agent said Saturday. He was 60.
Smith shot to fame along with his partner-in-comedy Griff Rhys Jones in "Not the Nine O'Clock News," whose take-down of earnest BBC newscasts, talk shows, and commercials would influence a generation of comedians.
It also featured a generation of comedians, including "Mr. Bean" actor Rowan Atkinson and actress Pamela Stephenson. Smith and Jones' company, Talkback Productions, went to nurse other British comedic greats, including Sacha Baron Cohen's wince-inducing character Ali G and Steve Coogan's hilariously awkward Alan Partridge.
Born in London, Smith was directing plays by the age of six. He studied experimental psychology at Oxford, directing productions at the Oxford Playhouse and performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.
It was after he was invited by producer John Lloyd to join the "Not the Nine O'Clock News" which launched in 1979, that he met Jones, who would join him in comedy partnerships for decades to come, including the sketch show "Alas Smith and Jones," which ran through the 1980s. The pair founded Talkback in 1981, selling the firm in 2000.
Smith directed films including "Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie," starring Atkinson, and Richard Curtis in rom-com "The Tall Guy." His acting credits include the 1987 cult hit, "The Princess Bride."
Agent Michael Foster said Smith died Friday at this home in northwest London. He is survived by his wife, Pam.
Mel Smith
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