'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Give small, make a big difference, an edited extract from Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, by Bill Clinton
Because I grew up in a family without a lot of money, in a place where most families had to watch how they spent every penny, I've always respected people who found a way to give when it isn't easy to do. The most astonishing example of this I ever saw occurred in 1995, when Oseola McCarty, an 87-year-old black woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students in financial need.
Jim Hightower: INESCAPABLE TV ADS (jimhightower.com)
I yearn for the good ol' days when a TV was a device under my control. It sat quietly in my home, doing nothing until I beckoned it to perform. And if it blared an annoying ad at me - why, I had the power of the remote to switch channels or hit the mute button. Alas, the TV has now escaped from the home and positioned itself all over today's society to assault us.
Froma Harrop: Children's Health Care in the Age of Bush (creators.com)
Let's design a children's health plan that President George W. Bush might like. The State Children's Health Insurance Program serves working families not poor enough to qualify for Medicare. Bush is dead set against legislation that would raise the number of children covered by SCHIP from 6 million to 9 million.
Glenn McDonald: "PopShots: A Chronicle of Higher Education" (popmatters.com)
A felonious alumnus provides words of wisdom to the graduating class and sepia-drenched remembrances on the way things were at Higbert Community College.
Mark Morford: Britney Spears sucks Blackwater (sfgate.com)
Showdown! White-trash diva versus mercenary war thugs. Who rapes your spirit more?
Alan Alda and the science of living (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)
The American actor has come a long way since M*A*S*H star. It's all in his memoir, he tells John Freeman.
My stepdad, CS Lewis (guardian.co.uk)
Many have written about him, but most saw the author of The Chronicles of Narnia as an isolated scholar. Here his stepson Douglas Gresham remembers a hero.
Joan Acocella: Wild Thing (newyorker.com)
[Rudolf ] Nureyev's mother bought a single ticket to the ballet and sneaked her whole family in, including the seven-year-old Rudolf. He later said that it was that night, as he watched "The Song of the Cranes," a sort of Bashkirian "Swan Lake," that he received the call. In dance biographies, one hears suspiciously often of these thunderclaps, but I think they should be credited if they are soon followed by intense study.
Andy Gill: "Ok computer: Why the record industry is terrified of Radiohead's new album" (arts.independent.co.uk)
Radiohead are the latest - and greatest - band to shun the conventional CD release. Their new album is available online - and you don't have to pay for it.
School's back in session when the HBO comedy special ASSUME THE
POSITION WITH MR. WUHL comes to DVD on October 9th!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and cool.
Mayor Whines
Jena, LA
A video in which rapper-actor Mos Def asked students around the country to walk out Oct. 1 to support the "Jena Six" escaped comment by this town's mayor. But when John Mellencamp sang, "Jena, take your nooses down," he took issue.
Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin said he had previously stayed quiet, hoping that the town's courtesy to people who have visited over the past year would speak for itself. "However, the Mellencamp video is so inflammatory, so defamatory, that a line has been crossed and enough is enough."
Mellencamp's song opens, "An all-white jury hides the executioner's face; See how we are, me and you?" As he sings, images of Jena, the high school and the tree are followed by video from the 1960s, including civil rights marchers, police beatings, and President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King speaking. Still images include one of a protest sign reading, "God demands segregation," a stylized drawing of people in Ku Klux Klan robes and an older image of a black man in shackles, begging.
"I do not want to diminish the impression that the hanging of the nooses has had on good people," McMillin wrote. "I do recognized that what happened is insulting and hurtful."
Jena, LA
Celebrities Call For Justice
Anna Politkovskaya
Over 60 celebrities and dignitaries signed a letter published in the Times newspaper here Saturday calling on Russia to bring the killers of journalist Anna Politkovskaya to justice, a year after her death.
The signatories include Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel peace laureate, British playwright Harold Pinter, United States actress Susan Sarandon and French thinker Bernard-Henri Levy.
Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who wrote groundbreaking reports on human rights abuses in Chechnya, was shot dead in her apartment block a year ago Sunday.
Other figures who signed the letter include Marina Litvinenko, widow of exiled Moscow critic Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned last year in London amid suspicions of Kremlin involvement, and Mariane Pearl, whose journalist husband Daniel was killed in Pakistan in 2002.
Anna Politkovskaya
Posthumous Star
Lew Wasserman
Late movie mogul Lew Wasserman, who helped make many stars over his long career, had a star dedicated to him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Jamie Lee Curtis and studio head Jeffrey "Sparky" Katzenberg were among the relatives and friends of Wasserman who attended the ceremony Friday in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.
Wasserman was the head of talent agency MCA and Universal Studios. During his 59 years with MCA, he changed the face of television by airing feature films and ushering in "movies of the week" and miniseries like "Roots."
In the film world, he created Universal City and its famous studio tour and put Steven Spielberg on the map with "Jaws." He also helped Ronald Reagan get elected to the Screen Actors Guild presidency and the California governorship, and was a major fundraiser for Bill Clinton.
Lew Wasserman
Sex Not A Problem For European TV Viewers
Tom Kapinos
Europeans don't care about sex. Whether it's lusty adultery, underage sex, overage sex, sex by the beach -- they just don't seem to care.
And that comes as joyous news to Tom Kapinos, creator of "Californication," the brashly risque new David Duchovny series on Showtime.
Duchovny's character Hank Moody is struggling through a midlife crisis that manifests itself in oodles of explicit sexual encounters. And that explains why it's on pay cable stateside. But in Europe and some other big TV markets, Hank's hanky-panky has become fair game for free over-the-air broadcasters who are airing the series without cuts.
Kapinos admits to being a little taken aback by the fact that the Irish and British are airing the series without restrictions. He says he is so delighted that nobody seems to care in the least about the grunting and grinding that he'd definitely think about moving across the pond to work. "It never occurred to me before. But wouldn't it be great to have all that freedom open up. It sounds tremendous," he says.
Tom Kapinos
Strike Fears
TV Writers
Talks between Hollywood writers and studios abruptly broke off for the weekend, dimming hopes of averting a strike that could cripple the television industry.
The Writers Guild of America has been in talks since July with studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Negotiations lasted only about an hour on Friday and were not scheduled to resume until Tuesday.
The writers' contract expires Oct. 31. Studios and TV networks have accelerated filming of shows and movies and begun stockpiling scripts in case of a strike. The last strike in 1988 lasted 22 weeks, and losses to the industry were put at $500 million.
TV Writers
Muslims In Space
Guidebook
Malaysia has come up with the world's first comprehensive guidebook for Muslims in space as its first astronaut prepares to go into orbit next week.
The book, entitled Guidelines for Performing Islamic Rites at the International Space Station, teaches the Muslim astronaut how to perform ablutions, determine the location of Mecca when praying, prayer times, and how to fast in space, the Star newspaper reported on Saturday.
The 18-page guidebook will be translated into English, Russian, Arabic and possibly more languages for the benefit of future Muslim astronauts, he said.
Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman, who was the first Muslim in space, had said that although he managed to pray and fast, he was not able to face towards Mecca and could not fully kneel on the ground.
Guidebook
War Over "Rings"
Peter Jackson
It's not quite a battle for Middle Earth, but the war between director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema over profits from "Lord of the Rings" is quickly approaching epic status.
The latest plot twist in the 2-1/2-year saga (just a tad longer than the actual trilogy) is a rare $125,000 sanction against the studio for failing to turn over potential evidence Jackson says could help him prove that accounting tricks cheated him out of tens of millions in profits.
The 40-page, strongly worded ruling by U.S. Magistrate Stephen Hillman says New Line may have destroyed key documents and was "haphazard" in its efforts to track down files and e-mails requested for more than a year by Jackson's legal team. Its "repeated and unequivocal certifications that it has fully complied with the court's discovery orders have been seriously misleading and obfuscatory," the magistrate wrote in the September 18 order.
For a complex entertainment case, where lawyer gamesmanship over access to documents and witnesses is fairly common, Hillman's language and the amount of the penalty are striking. "It's almost unheard of," says litigator Neville Johnson, who frequently tangles with studios. "You rarely see sanctions, and you certainly don't see sanctions that high."
Peter Jackson
Background Checks At Lab Blocked
NASA
A federal appeals court on Friday approved a request by some NASA workers to block a Bush administration directive requiring background checks and access to personal information that they allege amounts to an invasion of privacy.
The employees of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had until Friday to comply to with the directive or faced the possibility of losing their jobs. They would have been required to fill out questionnaires and submit a waiver allowing the investigations.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the emergency temporary injunction requested by the 28 employees after a lower court denied the request Wednesday. The lab, managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, has about 5,000 employees.
Though the court said it wasn't able to go through the many materials filed along with the request, the 9th Circuit conceded that the workers might have a point and issued the order.
NASA
Wedding News?
Anderson - Salomon
In a true quickie wedding, Pamela Anderson and Rick Salomon planned to marry Saturday evening between the former "Baywatch" star's performances on the Las Vegas Strip, a casino representative said.
Anderson planned to squeeze in the nuptials between the 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. shows of "Hans Klok's The Beauty of Magic" at Planet Hollywood resort, casino spokeswoman Amy Sadowsky said. Anderson, 40, is starring as a magician's assistant.
Salomon, 38, is best-known for making a sex videotape with Paris Hilton, his girlfriend at the time, and was previously married to actress Shannen Doherty. Anderson was previously married to singer Kid Rock and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee.
Anderson - Salomon
Canvas Predicted To Fetch $60 Million
Paul Gauguin
A masterpiece by the French post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin showing Tahitian women bathing under mango trees could fetch 60 million dollars at auction in November, Sotheby's auction house said.
"Te Poipoi" ("The Morning"), an 1892 canvas showing Gauguin's two women women bathing in an idealized exotic spot, goes under the hammer at Sotheby's New York on November 7.
Sotheby's in a statement on Friday called it "one of the greatest Tahitian scenes by the artist remaining in private hands" and "part of one of the most illustrious collections ever formed in America" -- that of Joan Whitney Payson.
Paul Gauguin
Imperil Electronics
'Tin Whiskers'
They've ruined missiles, silenced communications satellites and forced nuclear power plants to shut down. Pacemakers, consumer gadgets and even a critical part of a space shuttle have fallen victim.
The culprits? Tiny splinters - whiskers, they're called - that sprout without warning from tin solder and finishes deep inside electronics. By some estimates, the resulting short-circuits have leveled as much as $10 billion in damage since they were first noticed in the 1940s.
Now some electronics makers worry the destruction will be more widespread, and the dollar amounts more draining, as the European Union and governments around the world enact laws to eliminate the best-known defense - lead - from electronic devices.
Typically measuring under a millimeter long, tin whiskers look like errant strands of static-charged hair, erupting in every direction from tin-based materials like solder. Their cause is hotly debated. Other metals also grow whiskers, but not like tin.
'Tin Whiskers'
Receding Ice Displaces
Alaska Walrus
Thousands of walrus have appeared on Alaska's northwest coast in what conservationists are calling a dramatic consequence of global warming melting the Arctic sea ice.
Alaska's walrus, especially breeding females, in summer and fall are usually found on the Arctic ice pack. But the lowest summer ice cap on record put sea ice far north of the outer continental shelf, the shallow, life-rich shelf of ocean bottom in the Bering and Chukchi seas.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, September sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000. Sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return, with a possible ice-free Arctic Ocean by summer 2030, senior scientist Mark Serreze said.
Starting in July, several thousand walrus abandoned the ice pack for gathering spots known as haulouts between Barrow and Cape Lisburne, a remote, 300-mile stretch of Alaska coastline.
Alaska Walrus
Adventurer Completes Circumnavigation
Jason Lewis
He was hit by a car in Colorado, attacked by a crocodile in Australia, detained as a suspected spy in Egypt and survived illness and periods of despair.
On Saturday, British adventurer Jason Lewis finally came home, completing a 13-year, 46,000-mile human-powered circumnavigation of the globe.
The 40-year-old carried his 26-foot yellow pedal craft the last few miles up the River Thames, pushing it across the Meridian Line at Greenwich, where his expedition began in 1994.
"I'm overwhelmed," Lewis told Sky News television after arriving. He struggled for words as he described his feelings at the close of an odyssey that took him around the globe, powered only by his arms and legs - on a bicycle, a pedal boat, a kayak and inline skates.
Jason Lewis
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