Recommended Reading
from Bruce
"What is Aging?" (YouTube)
Why do we grow old? Integrative Biologist Joao Pedro de Magalhaes explains what aging is and how we can extend our lifespan.
Mark Morford: Meditation for the Damned (SF Gate)
You guys! Great news: Researchers have identified a new, fifth kind of boredom.
Tom Danehy: A classic from the Danehy vault (this week in 1999!) on sweeps week and speed traps (Tucson Weekly)
Ratings sweeps month usually brings out the worst in local TV news as the stations try to grab viewers with lurid and shocking stories. You get your sleaze ("What's it like to be a stripper?"), complete with meticulously edited backlit footage of naked hoochie mamas dancing badly to disco music. Then there are the shock value stories ("You could have something deadly in your bed!!"), which turn out to be a report on how sleep apnea might cause a stroke 30 years down the road.
Andrew Tobias: The Circus is Over
Shortly after assuming the papacy - or perhaps as he was headed to the swearing in - the Pope was given a tour. A Vatican steward, opened the double doors of an enormous closet and gestured grandly to show his Holiness the raiments he would wear for the various holidays and occasions. To which the Pope allegedly responded: "Close it up. Take it away. The circus is over."
Eddie Deezen: Famous Names and Nicknames (Neatorama)
Jerry Lewis' nickname in high school was "Id" (short for "Idiot").
Greg Volk: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football (Neatorama)
After 18 players died on the field, the president decided it was time to change the game.
Boyfriend Pillows
For Chinese women who are single and not loving it.
Matt Hoyle's Comic Genius: Portraits of Funny People (Neatorama)
Joan Rivers - We had just finished the shoot with Joan and she was leaving with her entourage and you could tell they all got along great. She said "Matt, watch this," and she lifted up her handbag and dropped it. Before it could hit the ground one of her male assistants dove in and caught it. Not missing a beat, Joan continued walking. Class!
Ben Wedeman: Meet the disfigured man whose embrace with Pope Francis warmed hearts (CNN)
A few years ago Vinicio Riva boarded a public bus in the northern Italian town of Vicenza. He went toward the nearest vacant seat but before he could sit down the man in the adjacent seat snapped, "Go away! Don't sit next to me."
David Bruce: Thanksgiving Good Deeds (Athens News)
About Thanksgiving of 2009 ["Mormon Red Death"'s] wife was shopping at Aldi's, where she saw a mother with three teenage daughters. They were shopping carefully and in small amounts. Mormon Red Death wrote, "The mom with 3 teenage daughters was going through their list and getting just enough to have a small Thanksgiving meal." His wife could tell that this family needed money for a better and bigger Thanksgiving meal, so she walked over to the mother and said, "I couldn't help but overhear. Here is $50 - have a happy Thanksgiving." Later, she told her husband that the looks on their faces were "confused" but also "grateful."
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD should be back shortly.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny but damp.
UN Refugee Agency Unveils
Palestinian Archive
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has unveiled a trove of pictures and film captured over more than 60 years chronicling the collective memory of those who fled or were forced into exile.
Established in 1949 to help Palestinian refugees who lost their homes when the state of Israel was created a year earlier, UNRWA has digitised the archive and put it on display in east Jerusalem.
More than half a million negatives, prints, slides, films and videocassettes collected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency show men, women and children eking out new lives in refugee camps across the Middle East.
Called "The Long Journey," a collection of the works has been on display at the Al-Ma'mal Centre in east Jerusalem since Thursday.
Palestinian Archive
Gain Traction
'Preferred' Pronouns
The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them - she, he or something else.
It's an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the "shes" and "hers" that dominate the introductions are keeping third-person company with "they," ''ze" and other neutral alternatives meant to convey a more generous notion of gender.
"Because I go to an all-women's college, a lot of people are like, 'If you don't identify as a woman, how did you get in?'" said sophomore Skylar Crownover, 19, who is president of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be mentioned as a singular they, but also answers to he. "I just tell them the application asks you to mark your sex and I did. It didn't ask me for my gender."
On high school and college campuses and in certain political and social media circles, the growing visibility of a small, but semantically committed cadre of young people who, like Crownover, self-identify as "genderqueer" - neither male nor female but an androgynous hybrid or rejection of both - is challenging anew the limits of Western comprehension and the English language.
Though still in search of mainstream acceptance, students and staff members who describe themselves in terms such as agender, bigender, third gender or gender-fluid are requesting - and sometimes finding - linguistic recognition.
'Preferred' Pronouns
'Featured Collection'
Ripley's
Where's a Black Friday shopper to turn for a 19th century vampire killing kit?
Believe it or not, the item is part of the Black Friday madness at the Ripley's Times Square Odditorium. It will set you back about $25,000.
A shrunken head is a comparative bargain - just over $19,000.
The thoughtful gift-giver might prefer a taxidermy Albino giraffe. The price tag is about $1.7 million. Gift-wrapping is not included.
Already shopped out? No problem. The "featured collection" is being offered until Dec. 24.
Ripley's
Something For Everyone
Themed Cruises
Have a hobby or interest? There's a cruise for that.
From fans of the show "Dancing with the Stars," to heavy metal music; baseball fanatics and self-confessed geeks, here's a selection of themed cruises headed to the seas in 2014, as curated by Cruisecritic.com.
Knitting Cruise
Those passionate about the art of knitting will find like-minded hobbyists on an Ama Waterways cruise themed exclusively on stitching. Hosted by Barry Klein, who's been called one of the "top 10 influential men in the world of knitting," the cruise will sail the Danube from Prague to Budapest. The itinerary will showcase the latest in luxury yarns, fashion trends, and classes on new stitching techniques.
Dancing with the Stars at Sea
Fans of the reality TV competition "Dancing with the Stars" can pretend they're the stars of their own show while cruising the Caribbean or Alaska on Holland America's MS Nieuw Amsterdam. In addition to sailing with some of the stars of the show like Kym Johnson, Tristan MacManus, Sabrina Bryan and Carson Kressley, the cruise also features dance classes and competitions.
70,000 Tons of Metal
Unapologetic head bangers will unite on the Majesty of the Seas sailing the Caribbean with bands like Victory, Satyricon, and The Haunted. Billed as the world's largest heavy metal cruise and open-air stage at sea, the cruise also includes all-night karaoke for budding metal artists.
Themed Cruises
Red Square
Louis Vuitton
Workers on Friday began to dismantle a giant Louis Vuitton trunk that triggered an outcry after it was erected on Moscow's iconic Red Square.
The brown suitcase-shaped pavilion measuring nine metres in height by 30 metres in length (30 feet by 100 feet) and covered in the luxury brand's signature golden "LV" stencilling was put up as a publicity stunt nearly two weeks ago.
But many tourists and ordinary Russians complained it was blocking views of most landmark sites, the Communist Party was outraged by its proximity to Lenin's tomb, and preservationists stressed that Red Square is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Following days of furious media commentary and after the Kremlin, which has official jurisdiction of the square, said it had not granted permission for the structure, it was ordered dismantled.
Dozens of workers and six cranes surrounded the trunk around mid-day Friday, unscrewing the huge brass-like clasps and rolling up the soft covering that stretched over its metal frame.
Louis Vuitton
Utah Issue
Rock Toppling
A state legislator wants to make desecration of Utah's natural geologic wonders punishable by prison and a heavy fine because authorities aren't finding a charge serious enough to use in the case of two former Boy Scout leaders accused of toppling one of the unique rock formations at Goblin Valley State Park.
Rep. Dixon Pitcher, R-Ogden, said "there just isn't much" in state law for use against the October toppling made infamous by a YouTube video. One Scout leader films the other pushing over a mushroom-shaped sandstone pillar and then they and another companion cheer and high-five.
They claimed it might have been ready to fall and kill a visitor. The rock formation they toppled was eroded from sandstone deposited about 170 million years ago, parks officials have said.
"We have nothing to deal with this type of desecration," Pitcher said. "We can deal with graffiti, people who would cut down a tree, who do general vandalism, but we don't have anything to deal with people who actually destroy geologic formations or antiquities in the parks. We have nothing to put the fear of God in them."
It isn't clear whether a garden-variety-level charge of criminal mischief applies to destruction of a natural object. The vandalism law has been used against people who carve graffiti or their names into the arches of southern Utah because officials could derive a value from erasing the damage, Emery County Attorney David Blackwell said.
Rock Toppling
Economist Challenges Idea
Aging Farmer Crisis
Agriculture economists have long warned that farmers are getting old and staying on their land longer, delaying the turnover to a younger generation. But an Ohio State University professor argues that those fears are overstated and the United States likely will have little problem replacing aging farmers as long as business is good, as it has been for the past decade.
Others aren't so sure, saying while they agree with OSU agriculture economist Carl Zulauf's assessment that concerns about the unquestionably aging farmer population remain valid and create uncertainty about who will produce the nation's crops in the future.
Zulauf contends that just like in the 1970s, farm prosperity will draw more young workers into farming. And prosperous the business is: This year, net income from U.S. farms is expected to reach a record $131 billion. Farm wealth has also reached record levels, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with farm asset values rising 7 percent this year to a record $3 trillion.
On average, farmers are about 15 years older than the broader U.S. workforce, Zulaf said, but noted in his October report that this age difference hasn't changed since the 1980s and that the average age of farmers is increasing at the same pace as U.S. workers generally.
Aging Farmer Crisis
Posts Cost Jobs
Social Media
Job candidates who share their religious affiliations on Facebook and Twitter could have a more difficult time finding work, new research suggests.
A study from Carnegie Mellon University revealed that while there are a number of personal questions employers are not legally allowed to ask during the interview, job candidates who post those details on social networks are opening themselves up to potential hiring discrimination.
"Our experiment focused on a novel tension: the tension between the law - which, in the United States, protects various types of information, making it risky for certain personal questions to be asked during interviews - and new information technologies, such as online social networks, which make that same information often available to strangers, including interviewers and employers," said Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy and one of the study's authors.
While the majority of organizations don't use social networks as part of their hiring process, researchers found that those that do tend to be biased against some applicants.
Social Media
The Kind Most Likely to Seek Revenge
Bosses
Managers placed in charge for the first time in their career are more likely to be vindictive toward employees who make mistakes, new research suggests.
A study by researchers at the University of Kent and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the University of Adelaide in Australia revealed that people who are not accustomed to holding power are more likely to be vengeful when placed in charge compared with experienced power holders, who were found to be more tolerant of perceived wrongdoing.
Mario Weick, a researcher at the University of Kent and one of the study's co-authors, said the results provide a firm indication of the relationship between power and revenge.
"Power is not simply good or bad; it affects different people in different ways," Weick said. "Our studies highlight some of the negative effects power can have on people who are less accustomed to being in charge."
In all four experiments, the participants who had been exposed to power and were not accustomed to having it sought more revenge than self-assured individuals who tended to exercise power more frequently. However, no difference in vengefulness was found in the group of participants who were not exposed to power.
Bosses
In Memory
Paul Walker
Paul Walker, the star of the "Fast & Furious" movie series, died Saturday in a car crash that killed two people north of Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 40.
Walker died Saturday afternoon, Ame Van Iden told the Associated Press.
A statement on the actor's Facebook page said he was a passenger in a friend's car, and that Walker was in the area to attend a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department said that deputies found a car engulfed in flames when they responded to a report of a collision in the community of Valencia. Two people who were found in the car were pronounced dead at the scene.
The Santa Clarita Signal reports a red Porsche crashed into a light pole and tree and burst into flames.
Walker was working on "Fast & Furious 7" at the time of his death. He also starred in the suspense drama, "Hours," which is set for release this month.
Paul Walker
In Memory
Elwood
A New Jersey canine that was crowned the world's ugliest dog in 2007 and later became the topic of a children's book preaching acceptance has died. Elwood was 8.
His owner, Karen Quigley, says the Chinese crested and Chihuahua mix died unexpectedly Thanksgiving morning. The Sewell resident said Elwood had been dealing with some heath issues in recent months but appeared to be doing well.
Elwood was dark colored and hairless - save for a puff of white fur resembling a Mohawk on his head. He was often referred to by fans as Yoda, or E.T., for his resemblance to those famous science-fiction characters.
Elwood won his crown at the annual ugly dog contest at the Sonoma-Marin County Fair in California a year after he had finished second.
Quigley had rescued Elwood in 2005, when he was about nine months old.
"The breeder was going to euthanize him because she thought he was too ugly to sell," Quigley has said.
After garnering the ugly dog title, Elwood became an online darling and developed a worldwide fan base. During his life, he appeared at more than 200 events that helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for animal rescue groups and non-profit animal organizations.
Elwood
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