'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Sliming Graeme Frost (The New York Times)
Two weeks ago, the Democratic response to President Bush's weekly radio address was delivered by a 12-year-old, Graeme Frost. Graeme, who along with his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Mr. Bush has vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded that program to cover millions of children who would otherwise have been uninsured. What followed should serve as a teaching moment.
Tom Robbins: The Ad Blitzers' Facade (villagevoice.com)
A city pol sheds her grace on a campaign backer. How unsightly.
Lindsay Shea: After Gaining Financial Savvy, Now She Funds It (womensenews.org)
Lindsay Shea didn't know her own wealth for decades. After mastering her own finances she began funding projects for women, some of which offer financial literacy training to others. Fifth in a year-long series on women funding serious change.
Froma Harrop: Larry Craig May Never Go (creators.com)
Go away, Larry Craig. Republicans badly want their senior senator from Idaho out of the headlines and punch lines. But the man won't go.
Mark Morford: Let us get drunk and meditate (sfgate.com)
Here is your Zen green-tea liqueur and your Enlightenment Visa card. Go forth and levitate.
Joel Stein: Imitating L.A.'s Mr. October (latimes.com)
Former Dodger Kirk Gibson gives a lesson on reenacting his legendary 1988 World Series home run.
'I never met anyone else like Jack Kerouac' (guardian.co.uk)
In the 1950s, Joyce Johnson was the girlfriend of the hottest novelist of the beat scene. But she was also an aspiring writer herself, trying to establish her own voice. She tells Laura Barton why she never could go on the road with the man who has overshadowed her life.
Richard Roeper: Music quality far outpaced by technology (suntimes.com)
Sadly but predictably, an execrable piece of pop by Britney Spears called "Gimme More" is the most popular song in the country right now.
The princess problem (guardian.co.uk)
Pink princess culture is vacuous and sickening, says children's author Mary Hoffman, and young girls deserve more adventurous heroes. So why is her latest book all about princesses?
Commentoon: Aung San Suu Kyi (womensenews.org)
Reader Comment
License plate map
Hi Marty
The map is cool but they made Alaska way too small
Paul
Thanks, Paul!
And when Alaska's too small, you know Texas will be too big. ; )
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Had lots of rain last night - nearly as much as we had all last year.
American Cinematheque
Julia Roberts
Last year, Julia Roberts presented the American Cinematheque award to pal George Clooney. This time it was her turn to receive the honor.
The smile, the laugh and the looks that have become familiar to movie-goers were on full display Friday as Roberts was recognized for her contributions to the film industry. On hand were Tom Hanks, Natalie Portman and Sally Field.
Roberts said she came along at the right time to turn into an A-list actress.
"I think I came along at a kinder time in the business," Roberts said. "It wasn't about fashion, and there weren't so many media outlets, it was just kind of different. You could really cultivate your work a little more gently."
Julia Roberts
Burmese Comedians Seen As Threat
'Moustache Brothers'
As one of Myanmar's most beloved comedy acts, the "Moustache Brothers" have made a living by risking prison every night with their biting parodies of the ruling junta.
But their luck ran out two weeks ago when the military clamped down on anti-government protests that posed the biggest challenge to the regime in nearly two decades.
Security forces on September 25 swept into the ramshackle home where they perform in Mandalay and arrested Par Par Lay -- the most outspoken of the trio, also known as Moustache Brother Number One.
He has been imprisoned twice before -- first for six months in 1990, and then again in 1996 when he and Moustache Brother Number Three, Lu Zaw, were locked up for nearly six years.
This time, Par Par Lay was arrested for joining Buddhist monks who led the anti-government protests here and in other cities around the country.
'Moustache Brothers'
Happy Ending For Looted Painting
Gustave Courbet
For decades, art lovers believed the painting was lost, maybe even destroyed, a casualty of Red Army or Nazi looting in Hungary during the Second World War. But unlike so many other tales of plundered treasures, this one has a happy ending.
Gustave Courbet's sensuous "Nude Woman Reclining" - showing a tousle-haired, sleeping woman in white stockings and little else - is on show starting Saturday at the Grand Palais. It is Paris's first retrospective on the convention-smashing, 19th-century realist master in 30 years. The show heads to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in February.
During the Second World War, the 1862 Courbet nude belonged to great Hungarian collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who also owned the painter's most infamous work, "The Origin of the World," an astonishingly graphic close-up of a naked woman with her legs spread.
But amid wartime looting in Hungary by the Red Army, Nazis and locals, the paintings were stolen from the bank vault where the baron had put them for safekeeping, said Charles Goldstein, a lawyer for the Commission for Art Recovery, founded by the World Jewish Congress.
Gustave Courbet
Chinese Painting Sets Sales Record
'Execution'
A painting inspired by the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests has become the most expensive work by a Chinese contemporary artist ever sold at auction, Sotheby's auction house said.
Yue Minjun's "Execution" sold to a telephone bidder late Friday for $5.9 million, well over its upper pre-sale estimate of $4.1 million. The price includes a buyer's premium.
Sotheby's described Yue's 1995 painting as "arguably the artist's most vehement, candid and politically loaded work."
Recalling Francisco de Goya's "The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid," it depicts figures pointing at others in a mock-execution, in front of a red wall that suggests Beijing's Forbidden City.
'Execution'
N.Y. Hosts
Klezmer Festival
Some of the world's best klezmer musicians gathered Friday in the neighborhood that was once home to poor immigrant Jews for a 10-day festival of the music rooted in their Eastern European cultures.
"This is more klezmer musicians in one place than I've ever seen!" said an excited Theodore Bikel, the 83-year-old folk singer and film, television and Broadway actor.
Bikel joined more than 100 musicans from the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Canada and elsewhere in a parade that kicked off at the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue.
Leading klezmer ethnographer Yale Strom said he organized the gathering in conjunction with the Eldridge Street Project - devoted to preserving the synagogue and its culture - while the older, traditional klezmer artists were still performing.
Klezmer Festival
Unveils Bronze Statue
Juanes
Juanes returned to the small town of his childhood Friday for the unveiling of a bronze statue in his likeness.
The 4,800 residents of Carolina del Principe greeted the 35-year-old Latin rock singer in the town's central park, where the statue, which stands 6 feet, 5 inches tall, was erected. The statue shows Juanes with the long hair of his youth and a guitar slung over his back.
Guarded by heavily armed soldiers, Juanes pointed out places of his childhood and where he played with his heavy metal group before he left the band to pursue a solo career. Later he gave a free concert to the adoring crowd.
Juanes, whose real name is Juan Esteban Aristizabal Vasquez, was born in Colombia's second-largest city of Medellin, but spent much of his childhood in the small agricultural town where his family has lived for generations.
Juanes
Prison In Fatal Crash
Hector Manuel Velazquez-Nava
The man responsible for the Apr. 4 DUI crash that killed filmmaker Bob Clark and his 22-year-old son was sentenced Friday to six years in prison after pleading no contest to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated.
Hector Manuel Velazquez-Nava was motoring north on California's famed Pacific Coast Highway when he admittedly lost control of his 2007 GMC Yukon and slammed into Clark's 1997 Infiniti Q30 sedan, which was in a southbound lane.
Clark, who directed the perennial yuletide favorite A Christmas Story, and son Ariel Hanrath-Clark were pronounced dead at the scene.
Velazquez-Nava, a native of Mexico who authorities said has been living in Los Angeles illegally, was found to have had a blood-alcohol level of 0.24 percent at the time of the crash, three times the state's legal limit.
Hector Manuel Velazquez-Nava
Hits Jackpot At Casinos
Music Business
The music industry is striking it rich at casinos. As casino venues target concertgoers from all walks of life through creative artist bookings, the effort hasn't gone unnoticed by those in the business.
"If you're an agent, you love casinos," says Greg Oswald, a William Morris agent for such acts as Big & Rich, Hank Williams Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd. As new casinos boomed in the past 15 years, "it's found money," he adds.
Most casinos are proactive in booking top-selling rock and pop acts, with the specific intent of drawing younger gamblers. But, as Oswald says, casinos appeal to a broad base of fans, therefore allowing booking opportunities for multiple genres.
For some country acts in particular, casino venues have proved to be a beneficial asset when routing a tour. "Frankly, for a lot of artists in the country business and other genres, it has saved their bacon," Oswald says, adding that many casinos still draw older crowds. In 2007, Kenny Rogers, whom Oswald books, will play 30 casino dates nationwide.
Music Business
On Brink Of Extinction
Spoon-Billed Sandpiper
A rare bird that breeds in a remote Russian province is facing extinction, conservationists warned Friday, after a survey found that the numbers of the spoon-billed sandpiper had dropped dramatically.
Experts from the Britain-based conservation group BirdLife International blamed the decline of breeding pairs in Chukotka province on loss of key feeding sites during their migration from Russia to its wintering grounds in South Asia.
The bird is also fighting a losing battle at its Russian breeding grounds against foxes and dogs that eat the eggs, the group said.
"We've seen a 70 percent drop in the number of breeding pairs at some sites over the last couple of years," said Evgeny Syroechkovskiy, vice president of the Russian group. "If that continues, these amazing birds won't be around for much longer."
Spoon-Billed Sandpiper
We're 41st!
Maternal Death
The United States has a sharply higher rate of women dying during or just after pregnancy than European countries, even some relatively poor countries such as Macedonia and Bosnia, according to the first estimates in five years on maternal deaths worldwide.
The report released by various United Nations agencies and the World Bank on Friday shows that Ireland has the lowest rate of deaths, while several African countries have the worst.
The United States has a far higher death rate than the European average, the report shows, with one in 4,800 U.S. women dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, the same as Belarus and just slightly better than Serbia's rate of one in 4,500.
Just one out of 47,600 women in Ireland die during or just after childbirth, the report found. Bosnia had the second-lowest rate, with 1 in 29,000 women dying during pregnancy and childbirth.
The report, published in the Lancet medical journal, places the United States 41st among 171 countries.
Maternal Death
Cheer Hogwarts Ruling
Indian Potter Fans
Indian fans of Harry Potter books welcomed Saturday a court verdict that gave the go-ahead to organisers of a religious event to build a life-size replica of the fictional Hogwarts Castle.
The Delhi High Court threw out on Friday a claim by author J.K. Rowling that the giant structure constructed in the city of Kolkata infringed copyright.
Organisers now have permission to keep the papier mache and bamboo castle in place until Durga Puja, the biggest Hindu religious event in eastern India, on October 26.
Indian Potter Fans
In Memory
Werner von Trapp
Werner von Trapp, a member of the musical family made famous by the 1965 movie "The Sound of Music," has died, his family said. He was 91.
"The Sound of Music" was based loosely on a 1949 book by his stepmother, Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987. It tells the story of an Austrian woman who married a widower with seven children and teaches them music.
Born in 1915 in Zell am See, Austria, von Trapp was the fourth child and second son of Captain Georg von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead. In the movie "The Sound of Music," Werner von Trapp was depicted by the character named Kurt.
In 1938, von Trapp and his family escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria. After they arrived in New York, the family became popular with concert audiences. The family eventually settled in Vermont.
After the Trapp Family Singers retired, von Trapp helped to found a music school in Reading, Penn., called the Community School of Music.
Several years later he brought his family back to Vermont and eventually settled on a dairy farm in Waitsfield where he farmed with his family until he retired in 1979. He spent the years after his retirement traveling and weaving, spinning, and crocheting.
He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Erika, and six children. He is also survived by three sisters and one brother.
Werner von Trapp
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