Recommended Reading
from Bruce
?"Weird Al" Yankovic? - Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me (YouTube)
New song off "Weird Al" Yankovic's latest CD 'Alpocalypse.'
Jim Hightower: The Enronization of presidential politics
In the infamous Enron scandals of a decade ago, unregulated energy hucksters created an array of dummy financial funds so they could evade public scrutiny and perpetrate fraud. To disguise the scams, the funds were given such names as Chewco and JEDI.
Grover Cleveland's Deadly Secret
When Grover Cleveland contracted cancer, it didn't kill his career; it killed someone else's.
Dr. Daniel Seidman: 6 Ways To Reduce Your Stroke Risk (Huffington Post)
Fish is a good source of omega-3-fatty acids, which may reduce the risk of stroke. Minimize frying foods and reduce sweets and sugar-containing beverages. Attempt at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity five or more times per week.
Brendan Kiley: I'm Flattered, Wikipedia
But Seriously, I Don't Know What I'm Talking About.
Simon Hattenstone: 'Shaun Ryder in the Happy Mondays wasn't me. He was a caricature' (Guardian)
The Happy Mondays frontman has survived addiction, attempts on his life and depression. But writing his autobiography has forced him to face up to even more uncomfortable truths about his past. He talks pills, thrills and bellyaches.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: The Last of the Great Crooners (Slate)
Tony Bennett on his long career and what he wishes he'd said to Amy Winehouse.
Nathan Heller: Lady Gaga (Slate)
Pop's leading conservative.
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."
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Reader Suggestions
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny afternoon, but nearly 15° cooler than seasonal.
40th Birthday In Vancouver
Greenpeace
Greenpeace celebrated its 40th anniversary in the city of its birth on Saturday with a workshop on civil disobedience and a plea to Canada to better protect the environment.
Some 200 activists met in Vancouver for events that also included workshops in banner making and tours on the Zodiac boats that the group uses in some of its high-profile campaigns.
Greenpeace, originally called the "Don't Make a Wave Committee," emerged from Vancouver's peace movement and anti-nuclear protests of the early '70s to become a global organization with a 2010 budget of more than $300 million.
In its first mission, on September 15, 1971, the group set off from Vancouver for the Arctic on a chartered ship that they renamed Greenpeace, protesting against a U.S. underground test of a 5.2-megaton hydrogen bomb.
Greenpeace
Gift Suites
Emmy Time
Adults can embrace their inner child with T-shirts by Lotty Dotty featuring the image of a paper doll who comes with her own detachable Velcro clothing to mix and match, changing the doll's outfit to fit the wearer's own personal fashion.
The offbeat shirts are just one of the many items being handed to celebrities at gifting suites in Los Angeles this week in the lead-up to Sunday's Emmy Awards, U.S. television's top honors that bring out A-list Hollywood TV stars.
Gifting lounges have become important marketing tools for companies, and even in the recent gloomy economic climate, the suites open up as a way for established companies and upstarts to gain exposure for new products or reintroductions. In recent years, many have begun to give some proceeds to charities.
By giving their products to celebrities as a "gift," marketers hope consumers will love it enough to use it, get photographed with it, or talk it up on Facebook or Twitter.
Emmy Time
Dead Sea Shoot
Spencer Tunick
About 1,000 Israelis have bared it all in a mass nude photo shoot at the Dead Sea.
The volunteers stripped down Saturday for photographer Spencer Tunick, who has gained fame for his nude group photos in public spaces around the world.
Tunick chose the Dead Sea for his latest project to deliver an environmental message highlighting the plight of the world's lowest and saltiest body of water. The fabled salty lake is dropping nearly 4 feet a year.
The Dead Sea is linked to the sites of the biblical Sodom and Gomorra, and one conservative Israeli lawmaker compared the photo shoot to that ancient debauchery.
But the 43-year-old Tunick has praised Israel as the only country in the Middle East with the freedom for one of his trademark nude shoots.
Spencer Tunick
Toronto Film Festival
"Pink Ribbons, Inc."
Movie slams "pink-washing" in breast cancer
TORONTO (Reuters) - Pink ribbons dumb down the grim realities of treating cancer, and hide the profit-focused core of many high-profile fund-raising events, according to a movie that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this week.
"Pink Ribbons, Inc." takes a detailed look at some of the colorful fundraising events in North America, where women, united in their fight against breast cancer and mostly dressed in pink, cheer their way along scenic routes.
The film questions the priorities of the campaigns and the broad use of the pink-ribbon logo as a fight-breast-cancer addition to products as diverse as T-shirts, toilet tissue and handguns.
Showing at the festival weeks before Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as cancer charities have dubbed October, "Pink Ribbons, Inc." pleads with fund-raisers to think about where the money they raise will go, and asks organizers to be more open.
It questions the logic of focusing on cancer treatment rather than prevention, pointing out that pharmaceutical companies stand to gain if more people use their drugs, and urges more research on the environmental factors that may contribute to breast cancer.
"Pink Ribbons, Inc."
Sues "Dog the Tancredo-Loving Racist Bounty Hunter"
Bobby Brown
Colorado Springs bail bondsman Bobby Brown is suing the creators of the A&E television show "Dog the Bounty Hunter" for more than $75,000 in damages.
The lawsuit filed on Wednesday against A&E, Hybrid Films and D&D Television says Brown appeared in more than 40 shows of "Dog the Bounty Hunter." It says he was paid $6,000 for his contributions but wasn't compensated for each Colorado episode.
KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs reports (http://bit.ly/qooBTN) Brown feels the network and the show's creators used his likeness for their own gain without properly compensating him and made false promises that led him to focus on the show instead of his bail bonds business.
Bobby Brown
Suit Against Stepson
Mickey Rooney
Mickey Rooney is suing his stepson and others on allegations that they tricked him into thinking he was on the brink of poverty while defrauding him out of millions and bullying him into continuing to work.
The 90-year-old actor filed suit Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court. The lawsuit accuses Rooney's stepson Christopher Aber, Aber's wife, Christina, and others of breach of fiduciary trust, elder abuse, fraud and other crimes over the past decade.
"While Chris instilled fear in Mickey and kept him in poverty, Chris took advantage of his unfettered access to Mickey's income," according to the filing. "Chris consistently paid himself a generous salary from Mickey's earnings, took 'advances' on his salary, and spent Mickey's money as if it were his own."
The lawsuit also alleges Christopher Aber bullied Rooney into continuing to work by telling him he would lose his house and his medical benefits if he didn't continue to earn an income.
Mickey Rooney
Exhibit To Open
John Wayne
John Wayne fans will be able to see the eye patch he wore in "True Grit," scripts with handwritten notes and a Golden Globe he won when an exhibition of his memorabilia opens in New York.
The exhibition features 100 items from among 750 scripts, costumes, awards and letters that Wayne's estate is putting up for auction. His American Express card, his personal saddle and the hat he wore for his Oscar-winning role of Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" will also be on display.
The exhibit will be Sept. 23-25 at the Fletcher Sinclair Mansion on 79th Street. The auction will be in Los Angeles Oct. 6-7, but fans can place bids online at the Heritage Auctions website.
Wayne's real name was Marion Robert Morrison. He died in 1979.
John Wayne
Scientists Shocked By Behavior
Gray Whale
Scientists tracking a rare western Pacific gray whale were shocked last winter when the endangered animal left the Asian coast, crossed the Bering Sea and swam south along Alaska, British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest coasts.
Researchers are back in Russia to see whether the feat will be repeated by other Pacific gray whales.
Only about 130 western Pacific gray whales remain and little is known of their winter habits. They spend summers near Russia's Sahkalin Island. They face threats from offshore petroleum development, according to environmental groups.
Researchers last October were limited by foul weather to placing a cigar-size satellite tag on just one whale on the last day of field work. The 13-year-old male was dubbed "Flex." It spent more than two months feeding near Sakhalin Island before moving across the Sea of Okhotsk to the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
On Jan. 3, to the surprise of researchers, it began swimming steadily east across the Bering Sea. Eighty miles north of Alaska's Pribilof Islands, the whale turned south, and swam between Aleutian Islands into the Gulf of Alaska. It continued southeast to shallow coastal waters off Washington and Oregon. Its last confirmed location was Feb. 4 off Siletz Bay, Ore., where researchers believe the satellite tag fell off. The whale had traveled 5,335 miles over 124 days.
Gray Whale
Too Small For South Africans
Chinese Condoms
A South African court has blocked the government from buying 11 million Chinese condoms, saying they are too small, a newspaper reported Friday.
The finance ministry had awarded a contract to a firm called Siqamba Medical, which planned to buy the Phoenurse condoms from China, the Beeld newspaper said.
A rival firm, Sekunjalo Investments Corporation, turned to the High Court in Pretoria after losing the bid, arguing that their condoms were 20 percent larger than the Chinese ones.
Judge Sulet Potterill blocked the deal with Siqamba, ruling that the condoms were too small, made from the wrong material, and were not approved by the World Health Organisation, the paper said.
South Africa has more HIV infections than any country in the world, with 5.38 million of its 50 million people carrying the virus.
Chinese Condoms
In Memory
Eleanor Mondale
Eleanor Mondale, the vivacious daughter of former Vice President Walter Mondale who carved out her own reputation as an entertainment reporter, radio show host and gossip magnet, has died at her home in Minnesota. She was 51.
Family spokeswoman Lynda Pedersen said Mondale died Saturday. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer years earlier.
Mondale had been off the air at WCCO-AM in Minneapolis since March 19, 2009, when she announced that her brain cancer had returned a second time. She had surgery to remove the tumor Aug. 12, 2009, at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a posting on her CaringBridge website declared the surgery a success.
Mondale, the middle of three children born to Walter and Joan Mondale, stumped for her father in his failed campaign to unseat President Ronald Reagan in 1984. She also made calls in 2002 in her father's last campaign, when the former vice president took the ballot slot of Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash just days before the election.
A striking blonde known on the party circuit when she was younger, Eleanor Mondale also attracted gossip. Her dalliance with the late rock musician Warren Zevon was detailed in "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon," a posthumous biography published by Zevon's ex-wife in 2007.
Mondale started as an aspiring actress, with bit parts in TV's "Three's Company" and "Dynasty." She got her start in broadcasting as an entertainment reporter at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis in 1989, but left after only eight months when a Twin Cities magazine was about to publish an article called, "Walter and Joan's Wild Child." The Star Tribune reported that Mondale denied she was forced out.
After stints at Minneapolis radio station WLOL-FM, on cable television at E! Entertainment and ESPN and network TV on CBS' "This Morning," she returned to Minnesota in 2006 to co-host a weekday morning show on WCCO-AM with Susie Jones.
In 2005, Mondale was diagnosed with brain cancer after she suffered two seizures during a camping trip. The tumor nearly disappeared after Mondale had chemotherapy and radiation, but her cancer returned in 2008. She underwent surgery and was able to return to WCCO but eventually had to take disability leave to treat the recurrence.
Mondale was married three times: to Chicago Bears offensive lineman Keith Van Horne, to fellow DJ Greg Thunder and to Twin Cities rock musician Chan Poling of The Suburbs. Mondale and Poling married in 2005, shortly after her cancer was diagnosed, and lived on a farm near Prior Lake in the southern Twin Cities.
Eleanor Mondale
In Memory
Kara Kennedy Allen
Kara Kennedy Allen, the only daughter of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, has died at age 51, a Kennedy family friend said on Saturday.
Kennedy died on Friday evening at a sports club in Washington, D.C., according to an employee at the club who said the club would likely put out a statement next week.
The cause of death was not immediately known. Kennedy was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002 but media reports said she had been in remission. They quoted her brother, Patrick, as saying her heart had given out.
Kennedy was the oldest child of the late Democratic Senator and the mother of two teenage children, a son and a daughter.
A relatively low-profile member of the Kennedy clan, Kara Kennedy sat on the National Advisory Board of the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and on the board of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.
Kennedy accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of her father shortly before his death from brain cancer in 2009.
Kara Kennedy married Michael Allen in 1990. The two later divorced.
She is survived by her two children, her mother Joan Kennedy, and her brothers, Edward Kennedy Jr. and Patrick Kennedy.
Kara Kennedy Allen
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