Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Will Harris: A Chat with Andy Richter, Star of "Andy Barker, P.I." and Co-host of "The Tonight Show"(bullz-eye.com)
Was "Andy Barker, P.I." was too smart for average viewer?: I never try to think that way, just because (then) you go, 'Well, I tried to do something smart and funny, and I guess they want dumb sh*t, so I'll try and write dumb sh*t.'
Anthony Stalter: A Chat with Brooke Long, From "Iron Man 2," former Lakers Girl (bullz-eye.com)
'Deal or No Deal' was the best job I've had. It was very consistent, which is hard to find in L.A. We had a great crew; we had a great family on that set and I'm really sad it's not coming back this fall but hopefully it will be back in the spring.
Simon Hattenstone: The second outing of John Hurt (guardian.co.uk)
He got his big break playing Quentin Crisp in 'The Naked Civil Servant' and now, 34 years later, John Hurt is at it again.
James Earl Jones: Confessions of Big Daddy (guardian.co.uk)
James Earl Jones has been breaking down barriers since the 1950s. As he prepares to star in an all-black 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' he tells Maddy Costa about his absent father, elderly sex - and why his stutter was his salvation.
Roger Moore: Wes Anderson meets Roald Dahl in 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' (The Orlando Sentinel)
"Quirky." "Eccentric." "Whimsical." Critics trot out the synonyms for "playful" and "odd" when talking about Wes Anderson. A 40-year-old director of wistful character comedies peopled with lovable screwballs - "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums" - he brings it all on himself, inviting the label "patron saint of moody hipster comedies" that Newsweek hangs on him.
Will Harris: A Chat with Vik Sahay, Co-star of "Chuck" (bullz-eye.com)
On the Jeffster! performance at Comic-Con: (I was) utterly, utterly blanched with terror. I literally skipped over 'what a great moment' to 'oh, my God, I can't believe I have to do this.' I was just in my own little bubble of horror and panic.
Tom Shone: 'Paranormal Activity' and the myth of the shoestring shocker (guardian.co.uk)
'El Mariachi,' 'Blair Witch,' 'Paranormal Activity' - are super-cheap hits ever quite what they seem?
Richard Roeper: What attracts adults to teen vampire flicks? (suntimes.com)
When it comes to vampires and shape-shifters, and romance between humans and otherworldly creatures, give me the gory, violent, sexy, grown-up madness of "True Blood" over the relatively tame "Twilight" series any time.
Roger Ebert : NOSFERATU (NO MPAA RATING; 1922; A Great Movie)
To watch F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in cliches, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires.
Daniel Bubbeo: Comedian and author Aaron Karo shares his thoughts on being single (Newsday)
Aaron Karo really would like to get married - someday. Maybe even by the time he's 40.
Lewis Beale: Ed O'Neill is married with a child in 'Modern Family' (Newsday)
Ed O'Neill was a hardworking 41-year-old character actor when, in 1987, he was cast as Al Bundy in the Fox TV series "Married ... With Children." The raunchy but hilarious show, which featured the most dysfunctional family on TV, ran for 11 seasons and made O'Neill a star.
Robert W. Butler: Viggo Mortensen went the extra mile to prepare for his role in 'The Road' (McClatchy Newspapers)
One of the many shocks in "The Road," the screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, comes when actor Viggo Mortensen pulls off his tattered, grimy clothing to luxuriate in a waterfall.
The Weekly Poll
New Question
New Question
The "Shady in Red' Edition...
Publisher Harper Collins said Friday that Sarah Palin's memoir sold 300,000 copies its first day, among the best openings ever for a nonfiction book. Its print run already has been increased from 1.5 million copies to 2.5 million... In 2004, Bill Clinton's "My Life" debuted with sales of 400,000 copies. The year before, Hillary Rodham Clinton's "Living History" started at 200,000... The Wingnuts are going bonkers!
Do you consider Sarah Palin a legitimate political threat or merely a ditzy cultural doofus and a rabble-rousing, egotistical, power-broker wannabe?
Send your response to
Results Tuesday
answered:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly sunny, but brisk for these parts.
History Repeating
Right-Wing Rhetoric
Few places have deeper scars from violent invective and verbal incitement than this North Carolina city where people still speak in whispers, embarrassed by the events of Nov. 10, 1898. Wilmington is tragic testament to the fact that social progress is not inevitable and that, left unchallenged, hateful speech and words frequently morph into violence.
Today, talk of an antigovernment revolution has gone mainstream in America. One federal law-enforcement agency has discovered 50 new militia groups, including one made up of past and current police officers and soldiers. While in office, President Bush was the target of roughly 3,000 death threats a year. President Obama is on pace to quintuple that. In this environment, Americans might well reflect on Wilmington's experience 111 years ago.
In 1898, this city was years ahead of the rest of the American South, building an inclusive, interracial political culture. It had a burgeoning black middle class. A new era of hope dawned in North Carolina.
But the losers in the 1896 elections, the white Democrats, sulked on the margins, threatened by political irrelevance. Their sense of entitlement to governance had just been rejected by white progressives and black voters. "Take back the state," became their battle cry.
Right-Wing Rhetoric
Night-Time Theater Returns
Iraq
As the clock strikes 8 p.m. Baghdad time, the curtains sweep apart at the Iraqi National Theater in what actors hope is a return to regular night-time performances 6-1/2 years after the U.S. invasion.
The name of the performance, "He who seeks sweet things must also endure bitterness," reminds the hundreds of spectators of the troubles their country has been through -- and why being able to stage a play in the evening is such a big deal.
The actors wear white in a reference to peace; and the play is about two tribes who feud over a marriage they both opposed only to be united in love and harmony at the end of it.
A sharp drop in sectarian violence in Iraq over the past 18 months has allowed Iraqis to tentatively re-establish normal lives, and nightclubs, country clubs, restaurants and galleries are somewhat cautiously getting back into business.
Iraq
Traffic Reports
Radio
For more than 20 years, Mike Nolan was known to radio listeners as the "eye in the sky." He flew over Southern California freeways in his single-engine plane, reporting on the nation's worst traffic.
These days, he broadcasts about traffic snarls and lurking gridlock without leaving the ground - without even leaving his home in this Los Angeles suburb. Sitting in a chair behind computer monitors and a television, Nolan gathers traffic data and broadcasts live on two radio stations a day.
His return to earth reflects the evolution of the traffic reporting business as a faltering economy forces news operation cutbacks, technology displaces traditional reporters and motorists increasingly rely on cell phones and GPS to monitor live traffic.
Reporters can be hundreds of miles away away from the scene and detail the latest traffic jams to three or four radio stations in the same hour, sometimes using aliases. Rebecca Campbell might report at the top of the hour for the Fox sports station using her own name, then 20 minutes later appear as Toni Jordan on an alternative rock station. For a station popular with Latino listeners, she goes by the name Lena Macias.
Radio
Hip-Hop Diploma
McNally Smith
A professional DJ since 1992, Freddy Fresh (real name Fredrick Schmid) is among the new teachers brought in by McNally Smith College of Music for a hip-hop studies program that school officials say is the first in the nation.
The private downtown St. Paul college - where rapper-actor Ice Cube already funds a scholarship for music technology studies - began the hip-hop program in September and hopes the first students, after completing a recorded project and a live performance, get their diploma certificates at commencement next summer.
College classes on the language of hip-hop or how to work turntables are not new. Berklee College of Music in Boston held its annual Business of Hip-Hop Symposium in October and has had visits from pioneering hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash and rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently hosted a semester-long fall lecture series on hip-hop. Marcyliena Morgan, a professor at Harvard University, founded The Hiphop Archive in 2002.
But McNally Smith is offering a full, 45-credit, three-semester hip-hop program. Courses include "Deejay Techniques," "Diaspora of African Music" and "The Language of Rap and Spoken Word III." The school hopes that hip-hop graduates will then enter McNally Smith's two- or four-year programs, where those students can apply some of their credits, said Cliff Wittstruck, dean of academic affairs.
McNally Smith
Taken Off Jail Furlough
Roger Avary
"Pulp Fiction" co-screenwriter Roger Avary has been removed from a prison work furlough program and locked up, authorities say.
Avary was sentenced in September to a year in jail and five years probation for causing a drunken driving car crash that killed a passenger and injured Avary's wife. News reports say he has been serving his time in a work furlough program.
But on Friday Ventura County sheriff's spokesman Capt. Ross Bonfiglio said the 44-year-old Avary had been locked up in the county jail.
The Los Angeles Times and the Ventura County Star reported that he was removed from the furlough program and jailed after allegedly Twittering about his experiences since being sentenced.
Roger Avary
Evolution Sale
Paris
From entire dinosaur skeletons and fossilized bugs alive more than 400 million years ago, to modern space paraphernalia, there is something for every pocket in a Paris evolution-themed auction next month.
The hundreds of pieces charting life on earth culminate in curiosities from the space age, such as a pair of bright green cloth diapers made for Russian astronauts.
Other eye-catchers include an 8-meter-long Spinosaurus skeleton, complete with its distinctive long spines and sharp-toothed open jaws.
Hand-sized trilobites, marine bugs dating back some 470 million years, are priced at around 2,000 euros ($2,985) each and fossilized dinosaur teeth and small insects can be snatched up for a few hundred euros.
Paris
10,000 In Hiding
African Albinos
The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa's albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to $75,000 selling a complete dismembered set.
Since 2007, 44 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and 14 others have been slain in Burundi, sparking widespread fear among albinos in East Africa.
At least 10,000 have been displaced or gone into hiding since the killings began, according to a report released this week by the International Federation for the Red Cross and Crescent societies.
East Africa's latest albino murder happened in Tanzania's Mwanza region in late October, when albino hunters beheaded 10-year-old Gasper Elikana and chopped off his leg, the report said. The killing left Elikana's father, who tried to defend his son, seriously injured.
African Albinos
Austria to Vegas to Munich
Mercedes 770 K
A car expert says he has tracked down Hitler's favorite Mercedes to a garage near the town that helped the Austrian-born Fuehrer become a German citizen.
Classic cars specialist Michael Froehlich said he found the bullet-proof touring car after charting its postwar travels from Austria to Las Vegas and back to Munich, where Hitler burst onto the political scene with a failed putsch in 1923.
After being commissioned by a Cypriot buyer to find the vehicle, Froehlich discovered it had been bought by a farmer near Braunschweig, where in 1932 local Nazi officials got Hitler a civil servant's job so he could claim citizenship.
The dark blue car, which Froehlich said had spent decades in the basement of the Imperial Palace Casino in Las Vegas, was recently sold by the heirs of a Munich brewing tycoon before he traced it "in under two months" to northern Germany.
Mercedes 770 K
Farts Spark Gas Scare
Pig
A flatulent pig sparked a gas emergency in southern Australia when a farmer mistook its odours for a leaking pipe, according to officials.
Fifteen firefighters and two trucks were called to a property at Axedale in central Victoria state after reports of a gas leak, the Country Fire Service said.
"When we got there, as we drove up the driveway, there was this huge sow, about a 120-odd kilo (265-pound) sow, and it was very obvious where the gas was coming from," said fire captain Peter Harkins.
Harkins said the pig's owner was "a little bit embarrassed to say the least," and it took fire crews a little while to compose themselves.
Pig
In Memory
Mike Penner
Mike Penner, a 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times sports staff, was found dead at his Los Angeles home at age 52. The paper said suicide was the suspected cause of death.
Penner stunned colleagues and readers in April 2007 with a column announcing that he was a transsexual and would become a woman.
"How do you go about sharing your most important truth, one you spent a lifetime trying to keep deeply buried, to a world that has grown familiar and comfortable with your facade?" Penner wrote.
His column became one of the most-read articles on the paper's website and was widely reprinted on the Internet and discussed on sports talk-radio programs.
Under a new byline, Christine Daniels, the writer chronicled the transformation on a blog titled "Woman in Progress." But by October 2008 Penner had quietly gone back to work as a man.
Mike Penner
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