Recommended Reading
from Bruce
HARRY LEWIS: Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms (chronicle.com:80)
Uri Geller, a performer who claims to be able to bend spoons by mental exertion, used the DMCA to demand that YouTube remove a video in which the debunker James Randi exposed Geller's trickery. Recently the Church of Scientology issued 4,000 takedown notices over a period of 12 hours demanding the removal of videos critical of the church, even some lacking any footage on which it holds a copyright. The Web site Chilling Effects documents such abuses, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps fight them.
Walter Tunis: Around the world with Bryan Adams (McClatchy Newspapers)
As has been the case for the bulk of his career, the veteran Canadian rocker Bryan Adams continues to maintain a huge international fan base.
'We've made plenty of mistakes' (guardian.co.uk)
Keane had a string of melancholic hits. Then they had a breakdown - and turned upbeat. They talk to Maddy Costa.
20 QUESTIONS: Casey Driessen (popmatters.com)
Casy Driessen is a rather funky fellow. He wears red shoes. He eats headphones at art museums. Sometimes he channels Vassar Clements.
Portrait of the artist: Hélène Grimaud, pianist (guardian.co.uk)
'I was quite a loner before - playing piano brought me out of myself.'
Rafer Guzmán: Subject of music biopic 'Notorious' was B.I.G.-ger than life (Newsday)
Soul music has "Ray," the Oscar-winning film about the legendary Ray Charles, and country music has "Walk the Line," about Johnny Cash. Punk rock got the biopic treatment in "Sid and Nancy." Even the minor subgenre of post-punk spurred "Control," about the cult figure Ian Curtis. Yet hip-hop, one of the most influential and far-reaching musical idioms in the world, has been overlooked - until now.
Dotson Rader: Leo DiCaprio, Hollywood outsider (timesonline.co.uk)
His childhood was spent in a drug-infested neighbourhood in LA. So why does the star still feel like an outsider?
Gather! How to accept an award the Kate Winslet way (guardian.co.uk)
Hadley Freeman: From the moment she forgot Angelina Jolie as she namechecked her fellow nominees the audience must have known it was a YouTube classic.
Social Security Benefit Calculators
A Satirical Trip Through the Vast Wasteland of Work
Sick Days
The Weekly Poll
Break Time
I'm gonna take a break for a week or two to catch up from the holidays and focus on some personal affairs (mainly relocation closer to my immediate family).
I'll be back soon, I assure you!... Meanwhile, don't let the bastards get ya down!
BadToTheBoneBob ( BCEpoll 'at' aol.com )
Charlie replied:
responded:
Reader Suggestion
The Eagle Lady
Sad News From the "Great Land"
HOMER -- Jean Keene, the 85-year-old "Eagle Lady" whose feeding program draws hundreds of bald eagles and scores of nature photographers to the Homer Spit each winter, died Tuesday evening in her Spit home.
R*I*P The Eagle Lady
Vic in AK
Thanks, Vic!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still hot with single digit humidity.
2009 Inductees
Rock Hall of Fame
Guitarist Jeff Beck, heavy metal band Metallica and vocalists Little Anthony & the Imperials are headed to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the music organization announced on Wednesday.
Singer, songwriter and musician Bobby Womack, hip hop's Run-D.M.C. and country music's Wanda Jackson, along with musicians Spooner Oldham, D.J. Fontana and Bill Black, rounded out the list of 2009 inductees.
The induction ceremony is scheduled for April 4 in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Hall of Fame and Museum are located. The show marks the first time since 1997 that it will be staged in Cleveland after several years in New York.
Rock Hall of Fame
Creates Artwork Celebrating Obama's Message
Robert Indiana
The pop artist best known for his LOVE word sculpture has created a similar public art installation that spells HOPE - in celebration of Barack Obama's message of hope.
Artist Robert Indiana's HOPE is set to be unveiled Thursday at a Manhattan art gallery.
Indiana's publicist says the artist raised more than us$1 million for the Obama campaign by creating HOPE prints, posters, T-shirts and other memorabilia. No decision has yet been made on where the sculpture will be permanently displayed.
The almost two-metre stainless steel sculpture was shown privately during the Democratic National Convention in Denver last August.
Robert Indiana
Singing Bet
'Rocket Man'
Forget all those inaugural concerts. The most pressing musical issue in the nation's capital is whether a stone-face senator from Oklahoma will hit the high notes in "Rocket Man" to pay off a college football bet.
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn is slated to serenade Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida with his very own rendition of Elton John's 1970s classic Wednesday afternoon.
Coburn owes Nelson because the Florida Gators defeated the Oklahoma Sooners 24-14 in last week's BCS title game. Nelson chose "Rocket Man" because he is a former astronaut who flew on the space shuttle Columbia in the 1980s.
If Oklahoma had won, Nelson would have had to sing the title song from the musical "Oklahoma!" It also happens to be the official state song.
'Rocket Man'
More Changes
Motion Picture 'Home'
Hollywood's sprawling retirement community in suburban Los Angeles will close its on-campus hospital by year's end and lay off a third of its staff to avoid bankruptcy in a few years.
The Motion Picture & Television Fund said Wednesday it is phasing out an acute-care hospital and long-term care facility at its Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills to cut operating losses. In 2006, the MPTF closed a critical-care unit at the hospital, also over money issues.
In announcing its hospital phase-out, the Hollywood-supported organization said it would expand community-based services by establishing a network of "community care teams" to coordinate and expand home-based and other medical and social services to entertainment industry retirees.
Some 209 job cuts will accompany the hospital and long-term care phase-outs. The roughly 100 patients residing in the long-term facility will be relocated over the next several months to area nursing homes, but the moves will not affect some 185 residents of MPTF's independent and assisted-living facilities on the retirement campus.
Motion Picture 'Home'
Flinger On The Loose
Monkey
Wildlife officials said a monkey known to throw feces when mad is on the loose in Tampa Bay. Authorities have been trying to capture the primate since Tuesday afternoon, but it managed to evade a bucket truck and tranquilizer dart.
Gary Morse with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says the adult male is thought to have escaped from an unlicensed source. It was last seen in Clearwater.
The monkey is not considered dangerous.
Monkey
Generation Gap
Asterix
The daughter of comic book author Albert Uderzo has accused her father of selling out his most famous creation, the pint-sized Gallic warrior Asterix, by ceding control of the series to his publisher.
France's biggest publisher Hachette Livre took a 60 percent stake in the Asterix books' parent company, Editions Albert-Rene, on Tuesday, days after 81-year-old Uderzo confirmed the series would continue after his death.
The remaining 40 percent stake in the bestselling series remains with Uderzo's daughter, Sylvie Uderzo, who attacked her father's decision in an article written for Thursday's edition of the French daily Le Monde.
The daughter accused her elderly father's entourage of advisers of pushing him into a "180 degree turn" and making him "deny the values with which he brought me up: independence, brotherhood, friendship and resistance."
Uderzo senior has overseen the Asterix books on his own since 1977, when the moustachioed hero's co-creator Rene Goscinny died. Goscinny's daughter Anne has given her consent to the Hachette deal.
Asterix
Crashes Website
Paradise
The chance to be the caretaker of a tiny tropical island in Australia has sparked so much interest around the world that a rush of applications crashed the website advertising the post.
The job, which offers a salary of $105,000 to spend six months on the Great Barrier Reef island of Hamilton, has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of prospective candidates.
An official from the state of Queensland, which is offering the position, said the job was created as an antidote to the global economic slump and was being advertised in 18 countries including the United States and China.
Local media said technicians had to restore the website (www.islandreefjob.com) after it could not cope with the volume of interest and crashed for several hours. Some sections are still not up and running.
Paradise
Removed From Home
Campbell Kids
Three New Jersey siblings whose names have Nazi connotations have been placed in the custody of the state, police said. The children, ranging in age from 3 to under 1, were removed from their home Friday. They drew attention last month when a supermarket bakery refused to put the name of the oldest - Adolf Hitler Campbell - on a birthday cake.
State workers didn't tell police why the children were taken, police Sgt. John Harris said. A family court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
The other two children, both girls, are JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell.
Campbell Kids
Santa Cruz Island
Mammoth Tusk
A complete tusk believed to belong to a prehistoric mammoth was uncovered on Santa Cruz Island off the Southern California coast, researchers reported Tuesday. If the discovery is confirmed, it would mean the tusked beasts roamed 62,000-acre Santa Cruz Island more widely than previously thought.
A graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came across the tusk while working in a canyon on the island's remote north shore earlier this month. Nearby were several rib bones and possible thigh bones, said Lotus Vermeer, the Nature Conservancy's Santa Cruz Island project director.
The Nature Conservancy and a leading mammoth expert will excavate the remains next week and use radiocarbon dating to determine their age.
Santa Cruz Island is the largest of eight islands that make up California's Channel Islands. During the Pleistocene epoch, more than 10,000 years ago, the four northern islands - Santa Cruz, San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Anacapa - formed one big island that scientists call Santarosae.
Mammoth Tusk
In Memory
Ricardo Montalban
Ricardo Montalban, the Mexican-born actor who became a star in splashy MGM musicals and later as the wish-fulfilling Mr. Roarke in TV's "Fantasy Island," died Wednesday morning at his home, his family said. He was 88.
Montalban had been a star in Mexican movies when MGM brought him to Hollywood in 1946. He was cast in the leading role opposite Esther Williams in "Fiesta," and starred again with the swimming beauty in "On an Island with You" and "Neptune's Daughter."
But Montalban was best known as the faintly mysterious, white-suited Mr. Roarke, who presided over a tropical island resort where visitors fulfilled their lifelong dreams - usually at the unexpected expense of a difficult life lesson. "I am Mr. Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island," he told arriving guests.
Montalban had already coined a cultural catchphrase before the show, which ran from 1978 to 1984. As the celebrity spokesman for mid-1970s models of the Chrysler Cordoba, Montalban unwittingly opened himself up to endless imitation when he described the car's optional seats as being "available in soft, Corinthian leather."
More recently, he appeared as villains in two hits of the 1980s: "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" and - in line with his always-apparent sense of humor about himself - the farcical "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad."
Raul Yzaguirre, longtime president of National Council of La Raza, called Montalban "a hero" and noted the actor's contributions to his community. Montalban helped found the ALMA Awards, which honor and encourage fair portrayals of Latinos in entertainment.
In 1970, Montalban organized fellow Latino actors into an organization called Nosotros ("We"), and he became the first president. Their aim: to improve the image of Spanish-speaking Americans on the screen; to assure that Latin-American actors were not discriminated against; to stimulate Latino actors to study their profession.
Montalban was sometimes said to be the source of Billy Crystal's "you look MAHvelous" character on "Saturday Night Live," though the inspiration was really Argentinian-born actor Fernando Lamas.
In 1944, Montalban married Georgiana Young, actress and model and younger sister of actress Loretta Young. Both Roman Catholics, they remained one of Hollywood's most devoted couples. She died in 2007. They had four children: Laura, Mark, Anita and Victor.
Montalban is survived by daughters Laura and Anita, sons Victor and Mark and six grandchildren.
Ricardo Montalban
In Memory
Patrick McGoohan
Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show "The Prisoner," has died. He was 80.
McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama "Columbo," and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel 'Sugar Tits' Gibson film "Braveheart."
But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in "The Prisoner," a sci-fi tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.
McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades.
Born in New York on March 19, 1928, McGoohan was raised in England and Ireland, where his family moved shortly after his birth. He had a busy stage career before moving to television, and won a London Drama Critics Award for playing the title role in the Henrik Ibsen play "Brand."
He married stage actress Joan Drummond in 1951. The oldest of their three daughters, Catherine, is also an actress.
His first foray into TV was in 1964 in the series "Danger Man," a more straightforward spy show that initially lasted just one season but was later brought back for three more when its popularity - and McGoohan's - exploded in reruns.
Later came smaller roles in film and television. McGoohan won Emmys for guest spots on "Columbo" 16 years apart, in 1974 and 1990.
He also appeared as a warden in the 1979 Clint Eastwood film "Escape from Alcatraz" and as a judge in the 1996 John Grisham courtroom drama "A Time To Kill."
McGoohan is survived by his wife and three daughters.
Patrick McGoohan
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