'Best of TBH Politoons'
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Astra Taylor: Whatever Happened to the Good Life? (Adbusters; Posted on AlterNet.org)
Americans keep making less and spending more. That lifestyle is contributing to supersized debt and the decline of progressive politics.
Barbara Ehrenreich: "Gap Kids: New Frontiers in Child Abuse" (Barbaraehrenreich.com; Posted on AlterNet.org)
It's enough to make you vomit on your new denim jacket: The Gap has been caught using child slave labor in an Indian sweatshop.
Annalee Newitz: Consumer Biotech
Consumer biotech can measure and alter biological states for the mass market -- which goes much further than the consumer electronics craze over iPhones and Wiis.
Richard Roeper: A humble way for Bush to make amends (suntimes.com)
In a recent column I speculated on President Bush's post-White House plans. What should he do with himself? ... After leaving office, he could tend graves of fallen soldiers.
JOEL STEIN: Ann Coulter Mad Libs (latimes.com)
How easy is it for the conservative provocateur to offend?
DAVID SIROTA: Halloween and the Lead Monster (creators.com)
After feasting on Halloween candy a few days ago, America's children are right about now coming down off their (latest) sugar high. Luckily for parents and schoolteachers, sugar in small doses is fairly harmless. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for lead, which many kids also probably came into contact with during their trick-or-treating.
Froma Harrup: Pols All Twisted Over Tax Reform (creators.com)
Let us bend our yoga-trained bodies into the Salute to the Sun pose. We are praising Charlie Rangel's tax reform proposal. The New York Democrat wants to get rid of the alternative minimum tax, modestly cut taxes for most people and modestly raise them for the super-rich.
CATHERINE O'SULLIVAN: In today's world, maybe stupidity and ignorance aren't so bad after all (tucsonweekly.com)
Stupidity is fashionable. I began to recognize this trend many years ago while watching a beer commercial on television in which a bunch of guys were slobbering into telephones. I couldn't understand why this annoyed me so much, but I think it was one of those stand-out moments, the kind during which you know that trouble is coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Susan Estrich: Halloween Horrors (creators.com)
What happened to Halloween? I mean the Halloween of ghosts and witches, Batman and Robin, devils and fire breathers, and good clean fun? I mean the sense of neighborhood and community, of childhood and innocence, of a special night for kids?
CATHERINE O'SULLIVAN: Julia Sunderlin and Gertie, R.I.P. (tucsonweekly.com)
There's a bouquet of flowers and a laser-printed photo pinned to the fence. A woman and her dog. I will hear all the details later on the TV news: how a couple of drunks going to fetch more beer at 8 in the morning lost control of their vehicle and plowed into them, throwing her 30 feet into a utility pole while her dog died under the wheels of their car. In that moment, life is forever changed along a 50-yard stretch of road.
TOM DANEHY: Beware of the group-dynamics phenomenon known as cascading (tucsonweekly.com)
There is a phenomenon that social scientists refer to as "cascading." It has been around for a long time, but it appears that technology is accelerating the process, leading to a type of hyper-cascading. Here's how it works: Let's say that a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire uses the audience-poll lifeline, on which the audience is almost always right.
Colin Covert: In 'Lars,' Emily Mortimer preaches, and practices, acceptance (popmatters.com)
In "Lars and the Real Girl," English actress Emily Mortimer ("Match Point," "The Pink Panther") plays the title character's pregnant sister-in-law. When he introduces her and his grouchy brother to his new girlfriend, a latex love doll, she is dumbfounded but almost immediately supportive, guiding him through a comic journey back to reality.
Frank Lovece: Q&A with 'Slipstream' director-star Anthony Hopkins (popmatters.com)
Tony Hopkins-hey, that's how he introduces himself-was once just one more respected British actor with more cachet than marquee.
ROGER EBERT: May (A 4-star Horror Film)
"May" is a horror film and something more and deeper, something disturbing and oddly moving. It begins as the story of a strange young woman, it goes for laughs and gets them, it functions as a black comedy, but then it glides past the comedy and slides slowly down into a portrait of madness and sadness. The title performance by Angela Bettis is crucial to the film's success. She plays a twisted character who might easily go over the top into parody, and makes her believable, sympathetic and terrifying.
Fallen Heroes Memorial
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Lots of fog overnight.
Strike Starts Monday
Hollywood Writers
Film and TV writers prepared to go on strike Monday for the first time in two decades to break what has become a high-stakes stalemate with the world's largest media companies over profits from DVDs and programming on the Internet.
Writers Guild of America board members voted unanimously Friday to begin the strike at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time (3:01 a.m. EST) unless studios offered a more lucrative deal with a bigger cut from video sales and shows sold or streamed over the Web.
The first casualty of the strike would be late-night talk shows, which are dependent on current events to fuel monologues and other entertainment.
"The Tonight Show" on NBC will go into reruns starting Monday if last-ditch negotiations fail and a strike begins, according to a network official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person lacked authorization to comment publicly.
Comedy Central has said "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" would likely go into repeats as well.
Hollywood Writers
Hip Hop & The Bone Marrow Registry
Canada
Canada's hip hop community is taking up an unlikely cause - getting a more ethnically diverse group of people onto the national bone marrow registry.
Hip Hop Canada founder Jesse Plunkett says when he learned that the majority of donors on Canada's bone marrow registry were Caucasian, he was concerned that ethnic communities were being left out of treatment options.
So, motivated by a friend's death from leukemia, Plunkett teamed up with Canadian Blood Services to try and reach a larger group of donors.
What started as spreading the message through online groups blossomed into two free concerts - one in Vancouver on Saturday, the other in Toronto next week - to try and raise more awareness.
Canada
Angered By ND Sheriff's Sting
Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne wants an apology from the Cass County sheriff for staging a sting operation in the rocker's name without his permission.
Osbourne claims his reputation was tarnished when Sheriff Paul Laney invited 500 people with outstanding warrants to a phony party at a Fargo nightclub before the rocker's concert with Rob Zombie at a nearby arena. More than 30 showed up and were arrested.
"Instead of holding a press conference to pat himself on the back, Sheriff Laney should be apologizing to me for using my name in connection with these arrests," Osbourne said in a statement.
Sheriff Laney said mentioning Osbourne's name in the invitations was no different than a bar advertising a Super Bowl party by mentioning the teams playing in the game.
Ozzy Osbourne
Commits To More Cartoons
Logo
Logo, the MTV Networks network that targets lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender viewers, has beefed up its animation slate.
The network said Thursday that it has renewed "Rick & Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World" for a second season and given the green light to a pilot from the Jim Henson Co. as well as a shortform series.
Logo plans to air eight episodes of "Rick & Steve" in summer 2008. Meanwhile, Henson's "Tinseltown" and shortform series "Small Talk" will air as part of Logo's "Alien Boot Camp," the programming block for gay animation, comic and sci-fi enthusiasts that airs at 10 p.m. Fridays.
"Tinseltown," which airs Friday, is a 12-minute pilot about a celebrity has-been pig and his manager and life partner. "Small Talk" is about two gay male friends who take witty aim at gay life from the steam room to rehab
Logo
Abu Dhabi Theme Park
Ferrari
Abu Dhabi on Saturday began work on building the world's first Ferrari theme park, another step in the wealthy Gulf emirate's ambition to become a global centre for leisure, sport and culture.
A ceremony was held for the laying of the project's first foundation stone on Yas Island off the coast of the capital of the United Arab Emirates, project developer ALDAR said.
The 250,000-square-metre (62-acre) park is set for completion in 2009.
It will include a motor circuit which is to host the emirate's first F1 Grand Prix in the same year, as well as roller coasters, multi-media theatres and automobile displays, ALDAR said in a statement.
Ferrari
Asks Supreme Court To Review Indecency Case
FCC
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (R-Fox Guarding Henhouse) is appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that undercut the standard the agency uses to define indecency on broadcast television.
At issue is whether the FCC can find that a single utterance can violate its indecency rules.
The FCC filed a petition with the high court on Thursday saying the justices should overturn the June 4 ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York.
The FCC said in its petition to the high court that the appellate ruling should be reversed as it conflicted with a past Supreme Court ruling and is "inconsistent with settled principles governing judicial review of agency action."
FCC
Settles Suit With Golf Club
Sean Connery
Sean Connery has settled his lawsuit against the Sherwood Country Club for an undisclosed sum, according to papers filed in Superior Court on Tuesday.
The settlement put an end to a hearing scheduled for next week at which Connery and his golfing buddies Craig T. Nelson and Joe Pesci were expected to testify.
According to the suit, Connery bought a membership in the club for $35,000 in 1990 with the understanding that the club would use his name to promote the sale of luxury properties surrounding its golf course and that he could retrieve the equity at 80 percent after three years.
Connery left the club in 2004.
Sean Connery
Judge Approves Book Settlement
James Frey
About 1,700 people asked to be reimbursed for buying James Frey's largely fabricated best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," a lawyer said Friday as a judge approved a settlement with disgruntled readers.
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Holwell said the settlement was "most fair, adequate and reasonable." It offered a refund to anyone who bought the book before Frey's falsehoods were acknowledged.
Although Random House set aside $2.35 million in a fund to cover costs related to the lawsuits, advertisements in 962 newspapers and elsewhere drew only the 1,729 claims for reimbursement by the deadline, costing just $27,348.
Another $783,000 will be paid out in legal fees along with $432,000 in costs associated with publicizing and carrying out the settlement.
James Frey
Souvenirs Are Big Business
WTC
The area around the trade centre site is a popular tourist destination and has become an open-air market for everything from Rolex knockoffs and Sept. 11 figurines to photo books showing the destruction of the attacks.
Technically, vendors are barred from the site, but enforcement is difficult. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is responsible for the area surrounding the construction, uses police sweeps to chase off hawkers, says spokesman Steve Coleman.
Indeed, with the Sept. 11 memorial far from completion, there is little educational material around the site - and many tourists buy the photo books before leaving.
Whatever the type of memento, plenty of visitors are willing to buy. Across the street, 22-year-old Gabriel Sanya says he sells about 300 glass figurines of the towers each day, many of them engraved with the image of firefighters raising the American flag after the attacks.
WTC
Celestial Surprise
Comet 17P/Holmes
Comet 17P/Holmes has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.
The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies but can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper.
Until Oct. 23, the comet had been visible to modern astronomers only with a telescope, but that night it suddenly erupted and expanded.
Scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas.
Comet 17P/Holmes
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