Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Boo! (Creators Syndicate)
I'm going to a Halloween party tomorrow night. My wife, Deborah, says we will dress as silent movie stars. I am supposed to shave my beard and wax my mustache into points. She will put a thick layer of white makeup on my face, like the old movie stars used to do. I will wear a black suit.
Froma Harrop: "Yoga Pants: The Fashion Police Go Both Ways" (Creators Syndicate)
I also happen to agree with Alan on the subject of yoga pants (and Speedos). He clearly meant tight yoga pants. Just Google "yoga pants" and check the crude images.
Lenore Skenazy: Children of the Shrinks (Creators Syndicate)
"Great Psychologists as Parents," by David Cohen, looks at 10 towering shrinks and child development experts, from Sigmund Freud to Dr. Spock, and finds that their track record is ... mixed. In fact, the British Cohen told me in a phone interview, the shrinks' odds of raising happy, well-adjusted offspring were "not very different" from the rest of ours.
Connie Schultz: For Children, a Holiday From Divorce (Creators Syndicate)
No matter what you think of that former spouse who hurt you, every child you brought into the family you used to be still wants to love everyone in it. In the absence of abuse, every child deserves to live the essential truth of the human heart: We can never love too many people.
Clive James: 'Hillary should have told Trump at least once to go screw himself' (Guardian)
If Trump loses, we will still not be free of his extravagantly coiffed shadow, because the analysis will begin as to why he lost.
Hilary Clinton: Three Emails (Davidbruceblog)
1) "Bill, no! We are not eating lunch at Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and Taco Bell! Not with your fat *ss!"
Hadley Freeman: If Paddington Bear pitched up today, would anyone give him a warm welcome? (The Guardian)
Britain's self-image is going to need some updating, because 'stout-hearted saviour of those in need' just doesn't seem quite right.
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took the day off.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Temp
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"THE ISRAELI TRUMPESS"
SHUTUP!
TREASON!
HOMOEROTIC MILITIA FANFICTION.
BS!
BS! PART TWO.
"ISSA" AM REALLY THE "HECK" PISSED OFF!
I TOLD THIS REPUBLICAN THAT TRUMP WAS A DUMB ASS.
HE THOUGHT HE COULD CATCH ME. HEE HAW!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Today's close up.
Finally Books President Obama
Bill Maher
Christmas has come early for 60-year-old TV host Bill Maher, as President Barack Obama has finally agreed to appear on his HBO series "Real Time."
The outgoing president will take the chair opposite Maher on Nov. 4, HBO announced late Friday. That's just four days before the general election showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Maher has been formally lobbying for a presidential appearance since January - but let it be known that the popular talking head show had been asking for him the entire time he's held office.
Maher, practically giddy for a guy like him, confirmed the appearance in his own YouTube clip.
"I'm thrilled that the president has - as he did with the country - come through in the end," Maher said.
Bill Maher
Tells Swedish Academy He Accepts Nobel Prize
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has accepted the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy said, adding that getting the prestigious award left him "speechless."
The academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, said Dylan himself contacted them and said "of course" he would accept the prize. Danius told Sweden's TT news agency that Dylan called her Tuesday evening and they spoke for about 15 minutes.
"The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless," Dylan told Danius, according to a statement posted Friday on the academy's website. "I appreciate the honor so much."
It has not yet been decided whether Dylan will attend any Nobel events in Stockholm in December, Danius said.
In an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph posted Friday, Dylan was quoted as saying he "absolutely" wants to attend the Dec. 10 prize ceremony, "if it's at all possible."
Bob Dylan
First Pot Shop Opens
Alaska
Alaska's first marijuana retail outlet opened to a throng of customers Saturday, two years after voters approved allowing people 21 and older to recreationally use pot.
More than 250 people lined up outside Herbal Outfitters in Valdez, store owner Richard Ballow said. Customers came from as far away as Anchorage and Fairbanks, more than 350 miles to the north.
The opening Saturday at "high noon" marks the first time it's legal to buy pot under a voter initiative approved in November 2014. Voter approval made it legal under state law to possess up to an ounce of marijuana outside of a home.
The state's first testing lab, CannTest, opened in Anchorage Monday after clearing regulatory hurdles. It will test cannabis flowers, edibles and concentrates.
In Fairbanks, two marijuana retail stores are planning to open next week after final inspections are completed, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported. A third Fairbanks store plans to open in about one month.
Alaska
150 Years Ago
HG Wells
No writer is more renowned for his ability to foresee the future than HG Wells. His writing can be seen to have predicted the airplane, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, satellite television, and the World Wide Web. His fantastic fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, flights to the moon, and human beings with the powers of gods.
This is what he is generally remembered for today, 150 years after his birth. Yet for all these successes, the futuristic prophecy on which Wells's heart was most set-the establishment of a world state-remains unfulfilled. He envisioned a utopian government which would ensure that every individual would be as well educated as possible (especially in science), have work which would satisfy them, and the freedom to enjoy his or her private life.
His interests in society and technology were closely entwined. Wells's political vision was closely associated with the fantastic transport technologies that Wells is famous for: from the time machine and Martian tripods to the moving walkways and aircrafts in When the Sleeper Wakes. In Anticipations (1900), Wells prophesied the "abolition of distance" by real-life technologies such as the railway. He stressed that since the inhabitants of different nations could now travel toward each other more quickly and easily, it was all the more important for them to do so peacefully rather than belligerently.
Wells's social thinking had its origins in his training as a scientist: Having won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College, London), he was taught biology by "Darwin's bulldog," TH Huxley. His scientific education first stimulated what are now his most famous books, his early scientific romances. From The Time Machine (1895) on, his work was always political, but this dimension was given extra urgency by the catastrophe of World War I. Frustrated by such a spectacle of the failure of human planning, Wells proposed to re-teach the world.
HG Wells
Discordant Meeting
Whaling
The world's whaling watchdog concluded a typically discordant meeting Friday with defeats for both the pro- and anti-whaling camps, and the organisation's very purpose called into question.
After a week marked by a classic standoff between whaling nations Japan, Norway and Iceland on the one hand and mainly Western and South American countries on the other, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) agreed on the need for introspection.
The commission, which turns 70 this year, "has been in a stalemate due to the fundamentally conflicting views on whales and whaling," reads a Japanese request for a working group to find ways of addressing the body's "dysfunction."
Just one example of the sometimes paralysing deadlock was a proposal by whale-watching nations to create a South Atlantic sanctuary, which was voted down on Tuesday by the pro-whaling bloc, as it has been every other time since it was first brought to the commission in 2001.
Anti-whaling nations, in turn, voted for the creation of a body to better scrutinise Japan's annual hunt, conducted under scientific licence but blasted by critics as a commercial meat haul.
Whaling
New Theater
Nixon Library
A former library director said naming a theater at the revamped Richard Nixon Presidential Library museum for a staffer who counted Jewish government workers at Nixon's request sends the wrong message to visitors.
Placing Fred Malek's name on the theater that shows an introductory film about Nixon is "outrageous," Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University and former library director, said on Twitter last week. The new theater is named for Malek and his wife.
Naftali posted the comments shortly after the Southern California museum reopened following a $15 million makeover.
Malek has come under fire for counting Jewish staffers at Nixon's request in 1971. He has since said he regretted doing so.
Malek, a former hotel and airline executive, is on the board of the Nixon Foundation, which raised the money for the museum overhaul.
Nixon Library
Robert E. Lee's HQ Gets Facelift
Gettysburg
Over the decades, the stone house and grounds that served as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's headquarters at Gettysburg sprouted a motel, restaurant and other modern structures that dismayed preservationists and Civil War buffs keen on historic authenticity.
Now, after a $6 million restoration that erased decades of development at the 4-acre site in Pennsylvania, the property looks much as it did in July 1863, when Lee suffered defeat in a bloody three-day battle that turned the tide of the war.
Civil War Trust bought the house and grounds from private owners and completed the restoration of what Lighthizer has called "one of the most important unprotected historic buildings in America." The nonprofit plans to turn the site over to the National Park Service.
The area around the circa-1830s house was the scene of heavy fighting on the battle's first day, and its strategic location atop Seminary Ridge made it an ideal spot for Lee's battlefield headquarters.
The home was left out of Gettysburg National Military Park, then gutted by fire in the late 1890s. By 1921, it had become General Lee's Headquarters Museum, a commercial venture that transformed the surrounding property.
Gettysburg
Recovery Plan Issued
U.S. Northwest
U.S. fisheries managers have unveiled a plan seeking to restore dwindling runs of salmon and trout that migrate 900 miles up the Snake River from the Pacific to spawning grounds in Idaho while leaving intact their greatest barrier - four hydropower dams.
The recovery plan, proposed on Thursday, calls for a myriad of measures to ease the increasingly treacherous passage of spring-summer Chinook salmon and steelhead trout through the Snake, a major tributary of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
The proposal hinges on a combination of efforts that include improving stream habitat, enhancing water quality and installing structural dam modifications along the Snake River system.
Such measures are designed to give newly hatched fish a better chance at making the journey downstream to the ocean and enabling greater number of adult fish returning from the sea to fight their way 7,000 vertical feet back upstream to spawn.
The plan represents the latest effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to stem the decline of the salmon and steelhead runs, ultimately paving the way for their removal from Endangered Species Act protections.
U.S. Northwest
Sotheby Sale
Edvard Munch
A work by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will highlight Sotheby's fall auction of impressionist and modern art.
The auction house expects the painting, "Girls on the Bridge," to sell for more than $50 million on Nov. 14.
The seminal work from 1902 depicts a cluster of girls huddled on the bridge of a country village. It sold in 1996 for $7.7 million and again in 2008 for $30.8 million, each time setting a record for the artist.
In 2012, Munch's work "The Scream," one of the most iconic images in art history, sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby's. It became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, a record that has been broken four times since.
Pablo Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)" now holds that distinction. It sold last year for $179.4 million.
Edvard Munch
In Memory
Norman Brokaw
Norman R. Brokaw, a trailblazing talent agent who represented Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood and other top Hollywood stars, has died at age 89.
Brokaw ascended from the mailroom of the William Morris Agency to become its CEO in 1989. Along the way he helped steer actors to work in the fledgling television industry in the 1950s and later signed politicians such as Gerald Ford and Alexander Haig so they could chart careers after they left public service.
His television plan involved teaming up under-utilized film stars with directors who were skilled at delivering low budget movies within a few days, his family said in a news release. The formula led to the creation of early television series such as "Racket Squad" and "Public Defender."
He later represented the producers behind hit shows such as "The Andy Griffith Show," ''Gomer Pyle," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show."
He also served as Bill Cosby's agent, helping get him cast on "I Spy," which broke television's color barrier. Brokaw went on to craft deals that led to the creation of "The Cosby Show" and the comedian's lucrative work as a pitchman.
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2010 bestowed its Governor's Award on Brokaw, the only agent to receive the honor.
Part of Brokaw's work with Monroe involved driving the actress to auditions and appearances, his family said. After one appearance, Brokaw and Monroe stopped at the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles for dinner where the actress would first meet her future husband, Joe DiMaggio.
His is survived by his wife, Marguerite Longley, three sons and three daughters.
Norman Brokaw
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