Recommended Reading
from Bruce
HOW TO PICK UP A GIRL AT THE GYM (YouTube)
Literally.
The Most Amazing Juggler in the World Needs Only One Ball (YouTube)
Incredible concentration and precision. Performer: Mister Babache
Adrian Humphreys: Officer who killed himself after tragic rescue attempt denied spot on police memorial (National Post)
"When he came home, I opened the door and the man I was married to was gone," said Mrs. Adamson. "He walked in the door but he never returned. He died a slow death. He was never the same."
Michael Vitez, "Tattoo artist is a key to post-mastectomy recovery" (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Vinnie [Myers], 50, started out in Army boot camp tattooing serpents on soldiers. In the last decade, in a wonderfully American evolution, he has become almost a folk hero in the breast cancer world, saluted and admired by doctors and patients alike.
He has perfected the three-dimensional nipple tattoo, restoring a final mark of femininity to at least three women a day, who have come from as far as Saudi Arabia and Brazil to Vinnie's Tattoo Parlor in a strip shopping center 30 miles west of Baltimore.
Farhad Manjoo: Make More Stuff, and Make It Thinner (Slate)
The new iPad mini reveals that Tim Cook's Apple is a better company than the one Steve Jobs left behind.
Luke McKinney: 5 Music Videos That Justify the Existence of the Internet (Cracked)
Good music is a thought transfusion, wirelessly injecting moods from another brain into yours. It's a sonic emotional override, hacking the brain by directly accessing the pattern-recognition systems which make up our personality the same way pipes and wires make up an engine.
Maggie Koerth-Baker: 10 Places to See Before They Die (Neatorama)
When it comes to the following tourist destinations, the trick will be getting there before the wrecking ball does.
Mike Newman: 10 DOCUMENTARIES EVERY GUY SHOULD SEE (Cool Material)
Most of the time we'll flip on a movie to relax and zone out for a bit. We'll watch something with a sweet car chase or a sexy female lead to kill a couple of hours. There are occasions, however, when we want to learn something when we break out the popcorn. That said, it doesn't mean the film has to be boring. These are 10 documentaries every guy should see.
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David Bruce's Blog
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 Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David Suggests
Air Traffic Control Towers
Thanks, David!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, hot and dry.
Plays Fan's Birthday In Seattle
Billy Idol
A Seattle man says that having Billy Idol play his 26th birthday party made for the greatest night of his life.
Michael Henrichsen spent two years persuading the British rock icon to play his party, and it finally paid off at the packed Showbox SoDo club Friday.
Henrichsen's '80s cover band even got to play the opening act.
Idol told The Associated Press that Henrichsen's effort stood out from other fan requests because of his campaign involved four "Billy Idol Aid" charity concerts that raised $13,000 for the Northwest Harvest food bank and the American Red Cross. Idol says that agreeing to play Henrichsen's party in Seattle might help fans see another side of him.
Billy Idol
Expanded Neon Museum Reopens
Las Vegas
In a city known for detonating buildings past their prime, Las Vegas' Neon Museum stands alone in its zeal for salvaging the blinking, glowing memories of Sin City's past.
The museum that once consisted of a dirt lot with a handful of retired motel and casino signs is stepping up to the big leagues, unveiling a visitors center Saturday and lighting up its large outdoor collection to allow night tours soon.
The museum was founded in 1996 as a way to rescue old signs when buildings were demolished or remodeled. It has amassed some 160 signs, most housed in the Neon Boneyard just outside downtown on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip.
The hour-long guided tours that wind through the two-acre boneyard - and sell out weeks in advance - offer a visual history of Las Vegas. There's the museum's oldest sign: a 1930s relic that once marked a restaurant frequented by Boulder Dam construction workers. It's an entry point into the story of how that public works marvel shaped the southern Nevada economy, and how businesses relished the end of Prohibition.
Las Vegas
From Fullback To Figaro
Keith Miller
Keith Miller was a bruising fullback out of the University of Colorado who never quite made it to the National Football League. He has, however, become a star at the Metropolitan Opera.
How Miller made the unlikely transition from football to the pinnacle of opera is an all-American story of reinvention, made all the more amazing by the fact that he had no formal musical training when he set out to become a singer.
"This is the real thing, this is the juice," says the 38-year-old Miller. "Instead of a number, you're a character, but the spirit of competition is the same, and you do it for the love of the art versus the love of the game."
It began almost by chance in 1994, while still at Colorado, when he took his girlfriend to see a traveling production of the Broadway musical "The Phantom of the Opera." He was so enthralled that tears rolled down his face. He bought a CD and learned the songs.
Keith Miller
UK Lawmakers Line Up
Richard III
British lawmakers are sparring over what may be left of Richard III.
No one is certain yet that remains dug up last month at a Leicester parking lot are those of the monarch immortalized by William Shakespeare for his willingness to trade his kingdom for a horse.
It may take months for DNA testing to determine if the body is the king's, but that hasn't stopped lawmakers in Parliament from sparring over the remains for their valuable tourism potential.
The team that excavated the bones has identified a direct descendant of Richard's elder sister - a 17th great-grand-nephew - and obtained a DNA swab for possible matching with any bones found at the site.
"Let's see if it is him first," said Lin Foxhall, head of the university's School of Archaeology and Ancient History. "What we have is a really convincing candidate on the basis of circumstantial evidence. This is just not certain."
Richard III
Protector Of Perverts & Pedophiles
Vatican't
The Vatican said Saturday it never would have given Jimmy Savile his papal knighthood had it known of allegations the British TV star was a child sex predator, but that it can't rescind the honor now that he has died.
The Catholic Church of England wrote to the Holy See last week, asking it to consider whether it could posthumously remove the honor awarded to Savile because of the many recent child sex abuse allegations against him. Savile, a much-loved BBC children's television host, died last year at age 84.
The church said its leader, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, made the request because the "deep distress" of his alleged victims and in light of public concerns about his name remaining on the papal honors lists.
But the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's spokesman, told The Associated Press it couldn't rescind the knighthood awarded to Savile because there simply is no permanent register from which to strike it. The names of people who receive the knighthood don't appear in the Holy See's yearbook and that the honor dies with the individual, Lombardi said.
Vatican't
The American Way
Prejudice
Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.
Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.
In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.
Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.
The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).
Prejudice
$5M Campaign Gift
Mystery Firm
A shadowy Tennessee company donated more than $5 million to a prominent conservative super political action committee days after establishing itself.
So who's behind one of the largest batches of election contributions this year? There's a questionable trail.
Campaign finance reports filed late Thursday show that the political committee, FreedomWorks for America, received seven donations totaling $5.28 million from Knoxville-based Specialty Group Inc. The money, which accounted for about 90 percent of FreedomWorks for America's donations during the first 15 days of October, is helping pay for TV ads supporting conservative candidates for federal office.
An Associated Press review of Tennessee business records showed that Specialty Group filed its incorporation papers on Sept. 26, less than a week before it gave several contributions to FreedomWorks worth between $125,000 and $1.5 million apiece. The Specialty Group appears to have no website detailing its products or services. It is registered to a suburban Knoxville home.
Specialty Group's opaque contributions provide another example of the marked changes to the campaign finance system, in which corporations and individuals can spend unlimited sums of money to support candidate. Major donors, including those to a super PAC benefiting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have been caught routing significant donations through corporate entities, effectively cloaking their identities.
Mystery Firm
Wins Case
Lawrence Taylor
NFL Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor has won a lawsuit that tried to hold him accountable for having sex with a 16-year-old girl in a New York hotel room.
The jury returned its verdict Friday after hearing testimony from the now-19-year-old woman and Taylor.
The former New York Giants linebacker acknowledged that he had sex in 2010 with a prostitute. He denied, however, that he ignored obvious signs she was a teen runaway in distress.
The woman had claimed that an abusive pimp forced her to have sex with Taylor for $300. She sued Taylor, seeking unspecified damages.
Lawrence Taylor
Makes Threats
Silvio
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Saturday his centre-right bloc may withdraw its support from the government of Mario Monti, a move that could throw Italy into political chaos ahead of next April's national elections.
"We have to recognize the fact that the initiative of this government is a continuation of a spiral of recession for our economy," Berlusconi told a news conference in northern Italy a day after he was convicted and sentenced to four years for tax fraud related to his Mediaset media empire.
The Monti government of non-elected technocrats is supported by the centre-left, the centre-right and the centre. It would lose its majority and have to resign if the entire centre-right, including Berlusconi's PDL party, withdrew support.
Monti took office as prime minister last November when Italy's bond yields were soaring. He has pushed through tax hikes, spending cuts and a pension overhaul to cut public debt which is running at 126 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Silvio
Woman Set On Fire Loses Suit
C-Section
A New York jury has ruled that an obstetrician is not liable for his former patient's abdomen catching fire during a Caesarean section in an incident that left her with a third-degree burn, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The Post-Standard of Syracuse said a jury in Onondaga County state Supreme Court decided the case on Thursday in favor of Dr. Stephen Brown regarding the 2010 surgery at Crouse Hospital.
The fire was the result of a surgical tool igniting an alcohol-based antiseptic applied to the patient's skin, the newspaper said.
In pretrial depositions, four nurses and an anesthesiologist said they were never trained in how to prevent surgical fires when using the antiseptic, the paper said. Reed had alleged that Brown and the nurses failed to follow the manufacturer's recommendation for how to use the antiseptic properly.
C-Section
Blond Girl Beggar Strikes Nerve
Mexico
At a busy intersection, a girl with a high half ponytail looks at you as she begs for coins. There is dirt beneath her fingernails and her pink shirt looks unwashed. The image in the photo could fit thousands of impoverished Mexican children who sell gum or beg for money in the streets, but for one thing: The girl in this picture is blond.
The flurry of internet attention to the photo, and the quick way officials reacted, has renewed a debate about racism in Mexico, a nation that is proud of its mestizo heritage but where millions of indigenous people live in poverty and passers-by often barely notice the dark-skinned children begging in the street.
It started last week when a Facebook user posted a photo of the girl standing next to a rearview mirror on a Guadalajara street. He apparently suspected she might have been stolen because "her parents are brown," and said he had already contacted a welfare agency and state prosecutors.
Tens of thousands shared the photo of the golden-haired, green-eyed girl and dozens commented on it, some thanking him, others complaining the post was racist.
"We need to see a white girl to worry about kidnapping, trafficking of children and child exploitation. I've never seen photos of Indian children or simply dark-skinned kids circulating on the Internet with people asking others to help them," wrote human rights activist Yali Noriega in her blog.
Mexico
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