Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Dear Old Times (Creators Syndicate)
My mother will be 88 years old on Sunday. I will be 60 next May. My father died 30 years ago. I am an only child. I live near my mother, a two-minute drive. She uses a walker and cannot drive or leave the house alone. She is forgetful. She lives alone.
Froma Harrop: Clinton Will Be Fine. Trump? Never (Creators Syndicate)
A friend 15 years older than Hillary Clinton recently came down with a mild pneumonia that sounds just like hers. Five days later, he was on a ladder pruning trees. The doctor wanted more rest, but he's fine. And so will Clinton be.
Lucy Mangan: In praise of Matilda, Roald Dahl's most inspiring heroine (Stylist)
Could you love anyone who did not love Matilda? The book and the eponymous heroine, a bookworm whose frustration and anger at her neglectful family and bullying headmistress manifest as telekinetic powers that eventually provide justice for all, are both among Roald Dahl's best.
SARAH BIDDLECOMBE: Quentin Blake on the importance of pictures (Stylist)
"I never get drawer's block: that's just for writers."
SEJAL KAPADIA POCHA: The greatest wisdom from Roald Dahl books for all moments in grown-up life (Stylist)
The last line of the last children's story Roald Dahl ever wrote (The Minpins) is one hard to forget: "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
Clive James: 'Mickey Rooney hammed it up rotten as Puck' (The Guardian)
Young male actors should still take note of how Rooney observed the pentameter in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Deborah Orr: The driving mentality is what really killed Lee Martin (The Guardian)
Those who repeatedly use their phone behind the wheel need something stronger than safety campaigns.
Jonathan Jones: Someone please give Alec Baldwin a history of art lesson (The Guardian)
Warhol only makes sense as a whole. Bleckner, too, is an artist whose work is all of a piece and part of a great chain of delicate variations. The same luscious sensibility pervades his entire oeuvre. When you buy his art you buy a mood. Quite apart from who is right in this lawsuit, Baldwin has completely misunderstood the lyrical art of Bleckner. But there's one good thing about the case: it will make an excellent artist more widely known.
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responded:
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE DOUCHE BAG GETS A DEUTSCH BOMB!
SAVE THE DANCING CHICKEN!
WE HAD BETTER STAND TOGETHER OR WE'LL ALL FALL APART!
BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER.
LITTLE MISS FLINT!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Regardless of what's going on, the one site I make sure to visit every day is Digby's Hullabaloo
Urges Backers Against Third-Party Vote
Bernie
Bernie Sanders is urging his supporters not to vote for a third-party candidate in November because doing so might deny Hillary Clinton the support she needs to defeat Donald Trump.
Sanders is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress and was Clinton's opponent in the Democratic primary. But he says trying to buck the two-party system in this particular presidential election is too risky.
In an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Sanders said anyone casting a protest vote should imagine four years of Trump as president.
He added: "Let us elect Hillary Clinton as president, and the day after, let us mobilize millions of people around the progressive agenda" adopted as part of the Democratic platform.
Bernie
Nat Geo's Climate Change Docu-Series
David Letterman
David Letterman transforms into a more overtly environmentally conscious (and beardier) television personality by tackling clean energy in the National Geographic
The project is Letterman's first on-air showing since he left Late Night in 2015.
The series, now in its second season, features celebrity hosts who are dedicated to fighting global warming. Producers of the series David Gelber and Joel Bach said they sought out Letterman because they could see his enthusiasm talking about clean energy and felt "he's definitely invested in this issue."
In his episode, Letterman will travel to meet with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other important figures to talk about making clean energy a reality.
The episode featuring David Letterman, titled "Into The Light," will air Oct. 30.
David Letterman
Belgian Brewery's Pipeline
Bruges
A Belgian brewery is turning on the taps of a pipeline buried beneath the medieval city of Bruges to transport its beer to a bottling plant some 3 km (2 miles) away.
Four years in planning and five months in construction, the Halve Maan (Half Moon) brewery will officially open a pipe that will rid the historic city center and its tight cobbled lanes of beer-laden trucks weighing more than 40 tonnes.
The brewery bid farewell on Thursday to the last of those trucks, one of between 10 and 15 per week, from streets designed for a horse and cart and now packed with tourists.
The brew master, five generational lines down from founder Henri Maes, said he could have moved the brewing to beside the bottling plant built in 2010 and kept the old site as a museum. But he wanted to retain the beers as products of the old city.
Before World War Two, the city had some 30 beer makers, but Halve Maan is the last of the old guard left and on a site where an earlier "Halve Maan" brewery operated 575 years ago.
Bruges
Interview Draws 2,324% Increase in Twitter Hate
Fallon
How much did viewers hate Jimmy Fallon's interview with Donald Trump on "The Tonight Show" Thursday? About 2,324% more than they normally hate his work.
Social-media analytics company Canvs found that Fallon's sit-down with the Republican presidential candidate drew a massive emotional reaction on Twitter. The company, which analyzes social-media data from Nielsen, detected 22,152 emotional responses generated by Thursday evening's "Tonight Show" - a reaction volume 627% higher than the average for previous season-three episodes of the late-night talker. Of all "Tonight" tweets captured by Nielsen on Thursday, 43% expressed some emotional response.
Of those emotional responses, 20.2% expressed "love," with the number of "love" responses up 240% from the season-three average. But although it accounted for only 12.3% of all emotional responses, "hate" conquered "love" in terms of growth, with the "hate" reaction volume up 2,324% from the rest of season three.
Other emotional responses measured by Canvs were "good" (17% of responses; 752% increase from the season-three average volume), "dislike" (16% of responses; 2,708% volume increase), and "crazy" (6.3% of responses; 284% increase in volume).
Fallon has been widely derided for his softball interview with Trump, in which he failed to challenge the candidate on any of his recent outlandish statements. During the appearance, Fallon thanked Trump for providing the show with so much good material to crack jokes about, and engaged in a gag in which he mussed the candidate's hair.
Fallon
Trust Women South Wind Women's Center
Oklahoma
Despite facing some of the nation's strictest anti-abortion laws, a Kansas-based foundation opened a new facility in Oklahoma City - the first new abortion provider in the state in 40 years.
The Trust Women South Wind Women's Center welcomed the first patients last week to its clinic on the city's south side. Six licensed physicians are providing services there, including abortions, OB-GYN care, family planning, adoption and emergency contraception.
"If you look at this part of the country, there is a lack of access to reproductive health care, and frankly a lack of access to health care across the board," Trust Women's founder and CEO Julie Burkhart said Friday. "It's hard for women who want to give birth to find OB-GYNs to help them deliver their babies."
Trust Women says Oklahoma City was the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. without an abortion provider, and the state's last clinic opened in 1974. The only other abortion providers in the state are in Norman and Tulsa.
Trust Women opened its first clinic in Wichita, Kansas, in 2013 following the shooting death of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, with whom Burkhart worked for seven years.
Oklahoma
Docs Detail Damage
Trail of Tears
The U.S. Forest Service has ripped up a portion of the Trail of Tears in the Appalachian Mountains, reopening wounds for Native Americans who consider sacred the land where thousands of their ancestors died during their forced migration westward.
The man-made trenches and berms were discovered last summer but the details about how it happened and those responsible hadn't been publicly identified. In documents obtained recently by The Associated Press, the Forest Service acknowledged that an employee approved construction along a ¾-mile section of the trail in eastern Tennessee without authorization, an embarrassing blunder for an agency that was supposed to be protecting the trail for future generations.
The $28,500 in contracting work done in 2014 involved using heavy equipment to dig three deep trenches called "tank traps" and a series of 35 berms. It was meant to keep out all-terrain vehicles and prevent erosion, but agency officials now say it was done in violation of federal laws.
The portion of the damaged trail lies near Fort Armistead, one of the stops where Cherokees were held during their forced migration West in the 1830s. This part of the trail follows the first commercial road across the mountains in that region, the Unicoi Turnpike, which in turn followed the course of an ancient Native American trail.
When the Forest Service dug up portions of the trail on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest in March and June 2014, it didn't even own the land, although it was planning to purchase it, according to Forest Service documents obtained by The Associated Press. The documents were provided to AP by the environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and authenticated by the Forest Service.
Trail of Tears
Pink Panty Sheriff Criticized
Arizona
The sheriff of metro Phoenix came under new criticism Friday from a political foe for his investigation of President Barack Obama's birth certificate on the same day that Republican nominee Donald Trump relented on his claim that the president wasn't born in the United States.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R-Pink Panties) has long questioned the president's American citizenship, launching an investigation in 2012 that remained open as late as two months ago. He once sent a sheriff's employee to Hawaii as part of the investigation and earned praise from Trump for his efforts. Arpaio defended the investigation by saying people in the county had requested it.
His opponent in the November election attacked Arpaio over the investigation Friday, saying the volunteer posse members who conducted the probe could have been used in other ways that could have actually made the community safer.
The sheriff has said his volunteers found probable cause that the president's long-form birth certificate was a computer-generated fake and questioned whether a selective service card completed by Obama in 1980 was a forgery. No arrests stemming from the investigation were ever made.
Arpaio initially said no taxpayer money would be spent on the investigation and that it would be funded through donations to the posse. But he later promised to use the donations to reimburse the county for some costs after it was revealed that he had sent a sheriff's employee to Hawaii as part of the case.
Arizona
'Political Rick-Roll'
T-rump
CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Friday used a popular internet meme to describe a stunt Donald Trump pulled on the press, saying the Republican nominee for president managed to "Rick-roll" journalists into giving free media coverage to the real-estate mogul's new hotel in Washington, DC.
Trump hinted early in the morning that he would make a "major" announcement about his thoughts on President Barack Obama's birthplace, sending the media into a frenzy and resulting in wall-to-wall cable news coverage before the event.
When the campaign event finally commenced, however, Trump instead trotted out a group of decorated military veterans who lauded the Republican presidential nominee for over 20 minutes. Trump then very quickly said he believed Obama was born in the US.
Tapper compared the move to "Rick-rolling," a late-2000s viral prank in which people would pretend to share real links that would instead send those who clicked on them to the music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
"While these American heroes are people who we should all show reverence and respect - they're much greater men than Rick Astley - it's hard to imagine this as anything other than a political Rick-roll," Tapper said.
T-rump
Top 20
Global Concert Tours
The Top 20 Global Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows Worldwide. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
1. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band; $6,702,268; $102.59.
2. Beyonce; $5,786,526; $112.58.
3. Guns N' Roses; $5,562,718; $111.40.
4. Paul McCartney; $3,815,218; $124.41.
5. Kenny Chesney; $2,465,077; $76.50.
6. Dead & Company; $1,933,119; $76.06.
7. The Tragically Hip; $1,850,692; $81.23.
8. Sting / Peter Gabriel; $1,603,375; $112.19.
9. Justin Bieber; $1,551,310; $98.27.
10. Rod Stewart; $1,547,043; $110.09.
11. Zac Brown Band; $1,222,091; $54.47.
12. Iron Maiden; $1,128,671; $70.44.
13. Lionel Richie; $1,016,495; $87.23.
14. Dixie Chicks; $969,259; $67.34.
15. Luke Bryan; $962,387; $51.76.
16. Dave Matthews Band; $923,583; $58.09.
17. Mumford & Sons; $923,006; $56.03.
18. Andre Rieu; $894,178; $77.26.
19. The Cure; $852,850; $58.12.
20. Paul Simon; $794,934; $96.49.
Global Concert Tours
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