Thanks, again, Tim!
Link from Bruce
Job Tracker
Job Tracker: "Corporations increasingly are shipping U.S. jobs
overseas, with America's middle-class hardest hit. Since January
2001, the nation has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, and some
studies say 14 million white-collar jobs could be sent overseas in
the years ahead. Unfair trade deals and large tax breaks often
encourage corporations to export jobs overseas. To find out which
jobs in your community have been exported or lost due to trade: Enter
your ZIP code" here:
Reader Comment
Re: McDonald's?
Marty,
I thought you lived in Los Angeles. Why do you eat at those shitty places, when you have In'n'Out, a true S. Cal 'good' fastfood alternative to the corporate junk at McD's. In'n'Out cuts its own potatoes for fries, bakes its own buns, and has the same menu they had in my youth, and they are family owned, and not franchized. What's not to support?
But if you have to eat at one of those places, Carl's Jr. is still superior. I even prefer Jack in the Box to McD's. I liked a Big Mac thirty years ago, but that's before they decided to fill their product with cheaper substitutes for the original food value.
~ Paul
Hi Paul -
I hear what you're saying about 
.
I'd love a
and 
at the moment, but...
In-N-Out is across town, and a pain to get to that hour of day.
Besides, have another complicating factor.
A few years back the kid got sick the night he'd had In-N-Out. It was the flu & not their food, but, there's no convincing him. So, at least for now, it's not on our list.
A Note From Nancy
DEJA VU
OK...........the drill is the same.......soon Jeanne will visit and the power will go off with her............we choose again to stay here...shutters are up, anything "flyable" has been safely put away (we hope).............this one could be "interesting" because the tree root systems are so saturated that they could really come down quickly......also, there is still debris from Frances lining curbs all over the area...........anyway, we have tons of ice in coolers and are hoping for the best........we better have the best winter in history here or I will really be in a foul mood................
Love to all,
Nancy, Tom, birds and dogs............be back on when power gets restored...............maybe we will be lucky and it won't go off? NAH !! At least I have a car charger for the cell phone.
Nancy, Tom, the birds & the dogs are in Florida, battening down their hatches, again. Tim, of
TBH Politoons has also had more fun with hurricanes than necessary.
from Mark
Another Bumpersticker
Reader Suggestion
Suggested Bumper Sticker
Bush/Cheney: Things Only Get Worse
Thanks, Bruce!
Reader Comment
ellen degeneres photo
i thought it might be worth mentioning/adding to your photo of ellen
presenting the cabbage patch kid to be auctioned that the red cross has
been found to have anti-gay hiring practices. i wonder how she dealt with
that inner dilemma?
keep up the great work.
travis g
Great question, travis!
Reader Suggestion
The Happytones
The Happytones had an Internet hit in 2000 with "I Hate Republicans". The band's new CD includes a new version of this tune and presents more excellent political music. Songs on "The Happytones Play Politics" are available to sample and to buy at the band's web site.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
A bit warmer.
Was reading the TV listings and realized KABC has dumped 'The Tony Danza Show' at 2:05am.
There's a vote of confidence...
Lt. Col. Lee Archer, a World War II fighter ace and member of the Tuskegee Airmen, shares a moment with 14-year-old Kenny Roy, left, and 11-year-old Jimmy Haywood during a photo session after the two boys landed their Cessna 172 aircraft at Compton-Woodley Airport in Compton, Calif., after a flight that originated in Vancouver, Canada, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2004. Roy became the youngest African-American to ever fly solo Friday, receiving his license and soloing in Canada where the law allows 14-year-oldsto be licensed; the minimum age in the United States is 16. Haywood became the youngest black male to pilot a plane on a round-trip international flight. A flight instructor accompanied the pair on the trip.
Photo by Reed Saxon
Still Promoting Peace
Jimmy Carter
As he approaches 80, Jimmy Carter could be enjoying retirement - teaching Sunday school, relaxing with family and reflecting on a life that's taken him from the peanut fields of Plains, Ga., to the White House and back. Instead, Carter continues to use his status as a former president to promote peace, health and voting initiatives across the globe at a sometimes startling pace for his age.
"I have been blessed by graduating from the White House at an early age," Carter, who left the presidency at 56, told The Associated Press. "Enough so that I could use the prestige and fame and experience from being president of the greatest nation in the world to have access to leaders and understand the problems that they face."
The majority of the work that Carter does is through the Carter Center - a combination of a presidential library and a "mini-United Nations" he and his wife founded in 1982 on a wooded patch of land in Atlanta.
Carter, whose 80th birthday is Friday, won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago. He has remained active on other fronts as well, from his woodworking shop in Plains to the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Jimmy Carter
Criticial of Journalism, Politics
Carl Bernstein
The primary purpose of politics and journalism should be to serve the good of the people, but they have become dysfunctional, disconnected and have lost touch with their purpose, former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein said today.
"I do not remember a time I felt as unhopeful about politics and journalism as I do now," Bernstein said.
Bernstein, who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s with fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, spoke during today's session of the business breakfast series at Auburn University Montgomery.
Hurrying to be first can cause problems, he said. For example, had more serious questions been asked about the reports in the CBS story about President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard, the story might have been more sound.
And while the CBS story is dominating the news, people are forgetting about the real story: whether Bush actually fulfilled his military obligations, he said.
He also commented on what he called the "astonishing amount of untruth from the White House" and the need for the media to explore it.
For the rest, Carl Bernstein
A general view shows visitors inside the Hacker-Pschorr beer tent at the Oktoberfest in Munich, September 25, 2004. Some six million people are expected to visit 14 enormous tents, each capable of holding up to 10,000 people at a time, drinking some 5.5 million liters (1.453 million U.S. gallons) of beer in the process.
Photo by Alexandra Winkler
Embark on Traveling 'Pageant'
Beastie Boys
The members of Beastie Boys are flashing liquor and cash while betting on a street-level parlor game - with a Jewish twist. Instead of a 40-ounce brew, Adrock throttles a bottle of Manischewitz wine. In lieu of dice, MCA tosses a dreidel as Mike D hangs back with a gold Kiddush cup. Moments later, MCA, the band's self-styled Kung Fu master, chops through a thick stack of matzo bread like Bruce Lee busting through three-ply mahogany.
Now, a string of critical and commercial success behind them, the seasoned rap slingers from New York are taking their summer hit album, "To The 5 Boroughs," on tour.
"We should make it clear that this is not a concert tour, so much as a traveling pageant," says MCA, a.k.a. Adam Yauch. "We tried to gather feedback about the kinds of things that children are into and what came back to us was a pageant, repeatedly."
"We realize people are paying good, hard-earned pageantry cash to see and be part of the pageant, so we try keep the focus on that," Diamond says.
During the Long Beach show, there are sparse references to resident Bush. There's a short video of "Saturday Night Live" alum Will Ferrell portraying Bush-as-idiot. And later, the group dedicates "Sabotage" to the president.
Beastie Boys
Series Explores Jewish Music
Leonard Nimoy
Former "Star Trek" actor Leonard Nimoy is beaming onto the radio. "American Jewish Music From the Milken Archive With Leonard Nimoy" will explore sacred and secular Jewish music from the Milken Archive of Jewish American Music during 13 two-hour episodes on WFMT Radio Network stations and XM Satellite Radio.
The series will air beginning Sept. 30.
"I grew up speaking Yiddish at home in Boston and hearing this music during services at synagogue and at social events where my uncle and four cousins played klezmer music," Nimoy said in a statement Friday. "This program and this music makes me feel very much at home."
Leonard Nimoy
Pledges $1M for Slavery Museum
Bill Cosby
Comedian and actor Bill Cosby pledged at least $1 million for a planned U.S. National Slavery Museum.
Cosby announced Friday he would donate proceeds from 10 concerts to the museum effort, or between $1 million and $1.5 million, museum officials estimate. Cosby sits on the museum's board.
The museum plans fund-raising activities in conjunction with each concert and hopes to raise $20 million, said Ed Wegel, chairman of the museum's capital campaign committee.
Bill Cosby
Keys, Lauper Perform
Great Wall Concert
Alicia Keys, Nellie McKay and Cyndi Lauper brought modern pop music to an ancient setting Saturday, performing for thousands of Chinese fans at the foot of the Great Wall.
Also on the bill were Boyz II Men and vocalist Sylvia Tosun.
Despite the chilly autumn evening, Lauper performed part of her set barefoot. She descended from the stage and into the audience at one point, causing a brief flurry as spectators stood up to see her and Chinese police ordered them to sit down.
Great Wall Concert
Workers stamp mooncakes with the seal of the traditional Leechi Company bakery, Friday, Sept. 17, 2004, in Taipei, Taiwan. It's mooncake time in Taiwan, a season when people give the pastries, resembling hockey pucks wrapped in a golden brown crust, loaded with sweet red bean paste, pineapple, salty duck eggs or other classic Chinese fillings, to family, friends and customers to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the biggest holidays in the Chinese speaking world. The cakes are victims of changing tastes among an increasingly affluent and hip urban population that has developed a taste for Belgian chocolate, almond croissants and Japanese rice pastries. The Leechi bakery, established in Taichung, central Taiwan, in 1894, produces an average of 100,000 during the two-week festival.
Photo by Wally Santana
Air National Guard Honors
Dolly Parton
East Tennessee's own Dolly Parton comes home for a big honor Friday from our men and women in uniform.
She'll now go with members of the Air National Guard's 134th Air Refueling Wing wherever they fly.
"We decided we needed to upgrade nose art on aircrafts," says Colonel Timothy Dearing, 134th Air Refueling Wing.
So the Colonel of the 134th challenged crew chiefs to come up with something that symbolizes East Tennessee.
The chiefs of this KC-135 had a great idea.
"It's a VFW magazine, and her picture we used for the nose art was in there, red white and blue, real patriotic," says Tony Berry, 134th crew chief.
Dolly's plane will soon be off to Europe to refuel aircraft in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton And...
Yusuf Islam
Why did the FBI put Yusuf Islam, the well-known British Muslim, on their "no-fly" list and call him a threat to American security? Was it his slightly too Islamic name? His offensively sharia-tastic beard? Or was it because they'd examined the songs he once sang as Cat Stevens, and discovered numerous lyrics that are oddly suggestive of violence? "Oh I can't keep it in/ I can't keep it in, I gotta let it out" - what's that all about, if not some kind of explosion? In "Moonshadow", amid all the sappy optimism, he sings, "And if I ever lose my legs/ I won't moan and I won't beg" - an obvious insight into the mind of a (frankly rather hopeful) suicide bomber. And hang on a goddam moment, what was the chorus of his second hit back in the Sixties? "I'm gonna get me a gun/ I'm gonna get me a gun/ And all the people who put me down/ Had better get ready to run..." Phew. No wonder they kicked him out.
As the world now knows, Yusuf Islam flew from Heathrow airport last Tuesday with his 21-year-old daughter. They were en route to Washington DC to have meetings with staff from his Small Kindness charity, after which Islam was off to visit Dolly Parton in Nashville to discuss peace projects. But the FBI ordered the captain to make a 600-mile detour to Bangor airport, Maine, where Islam and his daughter were marched off the plane and questioned. He was refused entry into the US and told he'd be put on a plane home to England.
Yusuf Islam
Getting New Vegas Home
Blue Man Group
Blue Man Group is on the move. The show's new home will be a custom-built, 1,750-seat theater at The Venetian hotel-casino, officials announced Thursday.
Blue Man Group is a sort of new-age vaudeville show featuring musicians with makeshift instruments who are equal part performance artists who paint and toilet paper their audience. The show opened at the Luxor hotel-casino in March 2000 and will continue there through Sept. 15, 2005. Blue Man will open at The Venetian in October 2005.
Blue Man Group
Marilyn Manson's Drummer
Ginger Fish
Shock rocker Marilyn Manson's drummer broke his wrist and suffered a slight concussion in a fall from the stage at an event in Germany, organizers said Saturday.
Drummer Ginger Fish was taken to a hospital in Cologne for treatment after the incident Friday night and was released Saturday, the Viva television channel said in a statement.
Fish, whose real name is Kenny Wilson, fell off the stage as the band performed a cover version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" at an award ceremony at the city's Koelnarena. It wasn't immediately clear what prompted the fall.
Ginger Fish
Get Brand Recognition
Product Placements
If you've ever come out of the cinema hankering after a Pepsi, a Whopper burger or a spin in a Mercedes without knowing why, help is at hand.
Branding consultants brandchannel.com launched on Sunday an Internet guide to the frequently bizarre world of movie product placement, the dark art by which consumer companies seek to gain exposure for their brands outside the normal context of ads.
The free-to-use Brandcameo Web Site lists all of the subtle and not-so-subtle product placements from Hollywood blockbusters over the past two years, with some surprising results.
Product Placements
French radical farmer Jose Bove (2ndR) leads a protest followed by supporters during an anti GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) demonstration which resulted in clashes with French police, in a field in the small village of Valddevienne near Poitiers, France, September 25, 2004.
Photo by Georges Bartoli
Accused of Plagiarism
Bryony Lavery
English playwright Bryony Lavery has been accused of plagiarizing passages from a criminal psychiatrist and a magazine writer in her Tony Award-nominated play about a serial killer and his psychiatrist.
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker said they had found at least 12 instances of plagiarism in "Frozen," which earned a Tony nomination for best play this year.
Biographical and thematic details had also been taken from a New Yorker profile Gladwell wrote about Lewis in 1997 and from Lewis' 1998 book "Guilty by Reason of Insanity," the two charged.
Bryony Lavery
For Sale In Sweden
Rembrandt
Flanked by gun-toting guards and security cameras, one of the few Rembrandt paintings not in a museum or private collection goes on public display Saturday and on sale with an asking price of $46 million US.
The 1635 painting, Minerva In Her Study, is one of the most significant to be offered in Sweden. Art dealer Verner Aamell said he'll keep the painting by the Dutch master on display in a private gallery in the capital and let the public view it for four weeks.
Unlike the guards at the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo, those watching over the Rembrandt will be armed. Alarms are in place, and video cameras will run in the gallery 24-hours-a-day.
Rembrandt
Examines Michael Jackson
Yale Conference
Michael Jackson, frequently savaged in the tabloid press, was picked apart by more rarified critics as scholars gathered for a conference on the pop star at Yale University.
Eighteen scholars from U.S. universities discussed sexual, racial and artistic aspects of Jackson's life and music Thursday and Friday in the first academic meeting to study him.
Jackson "in many ways is the black male crossover artist of the 20th century," said Seth Clark Silberman, who teaches about race and gender at Yale. "He has grown up in front of us, so we have a great investment in him, even though some people today may find his image disturbing."
Yale Conference
A model presents a creation as part of La Perla un-dress Spring/Summer 2005 women's collection during Milan fashion week, September 25, 2004.
Photo by Stefano Rellandini
Lonely Pensioner Gets Adopted
Giorgio Angelozzi
A lonely pensioner who turned to Italy's classified pages to find someone willing to "adopt" him as a grandfather is finally heading to his new home and family in northern Italy this weekend.
Giorgio Angelozzi, 80, has lived alone outside Rome with seven cats since his wife died in 1992, but he took the unprecedented step of putting himself up for adoption last month via the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Not satisfied with just running the advertisement, Italy's main daily ran a front-page story about Angelozzi's plight.
Inundated with offers from families across Italy and as far away as New Zealand, Brazil and the United States, the retired schoolteacher has decided to go to live with Elio and Marlena Riva and their two teenage children in Bergamo, northern Italy.
Giorgio Angelozzi
Rare Book
Shakespeare
A British woman is planning to auction a rare edition of a Shakespeare book that she inherited from a distant relative she didn't know existed.
Anne Humphries, a 48-year-old mother of three, was bequeathed a 380-year-old First Folio - the name given to the first printed edition of Shakespeare's collected plays.
Formally titled "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies," the book is dated 1623. About 750 copies were printed but only some 230 are known to survive worldwide; of those, only 15 are believed to be privately owned, said Catriona Finlayson, a spokeswoman for the British Library. The library has five copies of the First Folio.
The book belonged to Frances Cottle, who died in 2002 and left it to Humphries, her closest living relative. It took a genealogist two years to track her down, said Humphries, who lives in Stockport in northern England.
Shakespeare
In Memory
Bill Ballance
Bill Ballance, a radio personality whose bold 1970s talk show tackled relationships and sex and helped pave the way for today's shock jocks, has died at age 85.
Ballance died at home Thursday, according to his son, Jim. He had been in failing health since undergoing quadruple bypass surgery and suffering a stroke in June 2002.
Ballance's "Feminine Forum" became one of the most popular radio shows in Los Angeles within a year of its 1971 debut on KGBS-AM.
Racy and confessional, the show drew many listeners, both male and female, with topics such as "Where did his love go and how did you know it was gone?" and "Are you a red-hot mama?"
"The 'Feminine Forum' was really the forerunner to radio's Tom Leykis and Howard Stern," said Don Barrett, executive editor of LARadio.com. "He had a little sexual content in there. Nobody did that on L.A. radio prior to Bill, but he did it in a very tasteful way."
In the late 1990s, Ballance caused another stir when he sold nude photographs of radio therapist Laura Schlessinger to a company that posted the photos on the Internet.
Barrett said he took the pictures without coercing her during a 1970s affair when Schlessinger was married. He said she lied about the relationship.
Schlessinger, who had been a regular on Ballance's show, was outraged. But in 1998, a judge ruled the images could continue to be posted on a Web site.
After KGBS dropped "Feminine Forum" in 1973, Ballance hosted the milder "Bill Ballance Show." He worked for KABC and KFMB in San Diego before retiring from radio in 1993.
Born in Peoria, Ill., Ballance studied journalism at the University of Illinois and served in the Marines. He had stints on radio stations in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Honolulu.
Bill Ballance
In Memory
Marvin Davis
Billionaire Marvin Davis, a former oilman who sold his 20th Century Fox studios to Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s, died Saturday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 79.
Davis had also owned the Pebble Beach Co. and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Nicknamed "Mr. Wildcatter," he started his road to fortune in oil and gas exploration, later expanding into real estate and the entertainment industry.
Davis bought 20th Century Fox studios in 1981. In 1984, he recruited Barry Diller, then head of Paramount, to run the studio. The following year, he sold Fox to Murdoch and it is now part of the media mogul's News Corp.
Over the years, Davis made attempts to buy CBS, NBC, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Vivendi Universal.
Marvin Davis
Undated picture of a great white shark. A leading environmental group called on Friday for protection for the great white shark and humphead wrasse coral fish, whose numbers have plunged because of overfishing and China's growing appetite for exotic foods.
Photo by Jerome Mallefet
