Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: Please Join My Tantra Yoga Sex Cult (SF Gate)
OMG you guys, have you heard? Yoga is all about ... how to put this gently without scaring the children? It's all about your naughty bits. Your genitals. It's true.
Froma Harrop: "Racial Preferences in College Admissions: Time to Go" (Creators Syndicate)
Working-class whites are considered swing voters, and the president running for re-election is both African-American and a beneficiary of the finest higher education our country offers. Come early fall, the Supreme Court will probably hear a case in which a white student, Abigail Fisher, claims that a race-conscious policy for admissions to the University of Texas violated her constitutional rights.
Andrew Shaffer: PayPal Takes Controversial Stance Against Sex (Huffington Post)
"Most of the stuff on Smashwords is porn," Jonathan Bloom, whose ebook 'Hell Is Above Us' is available on Smashwords, tweeted recently. "I feel like someone trying to sell a homemade quilt on the street next to a line of high-end hookers."
What publishers really mean in their rejection letters (Guardian)
What do publishers mean when they tell would-be writers 'this is too literary for our list'? A Twitter site explains it all.
How Long Will I Live?
Life expectancy calculator.
Russia's Banksy does it for the motherland (Guardian)
Russian street artist P183 is covering Moscow with his politically charged murals - and says he's doing it for a 'strong, educated and cultured homeland.'
Vincent Van Gogh Self Portrait Costume (Neatorama)
redditor beadmandingo spotted Vincent Van Gogh walking around the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras. There's a lengthy discussion in the comment thread about the identity of the performer, who may be a local underground celebrity.
Matthew Pearl: A History of MIT Pranks (Slate)
From homemade torpedoes to purloined police cars.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
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took the day off.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
BadtotheboneBob
RIP: Davy Jones
Marty,
I'd like to go on the record to say that I'm really bummed that Davy has died... and that I liked The Monkees. I liked their show and I liked their music and I make no excuses, nor apologies, for the enjoyment they gave me. They were a big part of my adolescent experience. Despite being a corporate throw together invention, they proved they actually had talent and could succeed with it. Their songs were fun and truthfully told of many aspects of the Americana of the 60's. 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' was an anti-ode to 'suburbia' as ever was. True, they weren't really an authentic part of the counter-culture scene that was sweeping through the younger generation at that time, but not all of the youth were totally part and parcel of that, either. I liked 'I'm a Believer' as well as I did Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction'. Yin and Yang. Good-bye, Davy... I'll meet you at the station.
BttbBob
Thanks, B2tbBob!
Reader Comment
Bankers
unbelievable
Bonus Withdrawal Puts Bankers in "Malaise"
i cannot think of anything to say about this that is not profane
some guy
Thanks, guy!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, but windy and cold (for these parts).
Launches Born This Way Foundation
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga has launched a youth foundation by urging young people to "challenge meanness and cruelty."
The singer spoke Wednesday to a crowd of more than 1,100 students, faculty and invited guests at Harvard University.
Oprah Winfrey, U.S. Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and others joined her in kicking off the Born This Way Foundation. It's named after her 2011 hit song with lyrics that promote self empowerment.
She urges students to do "simple acts of kindness" in their communities to help foster acceptance, tolerance and individuality.
Lady Gaga
Chicago Street Named
Bernie Mac
A sign bearing the name of the late comedian Bernie Mac has been raised over a street in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood.
About 200 people, including his widow Rhoda McCullough, daughter Je'Niece McCullough and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, gathered Tuesday on a corner near the home where he grew up.
Je'Niece McCullough says she hopes renaming the street Bernie Mac Street reminds people "they can do whatever they want to do in life."
Mac, born Bernard McCullough, died in August 2008 at age 50 from pneumonia complications, after suffering from sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease.
Bernie Mac
Childhood Homes To Be Preserved
Lennon & McCartney
The childhood homes of former Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney, where the pair wrote some of their early songs, will be preserved, the government said Wednesday.
Lennon's house in south Liverpool and McCartney's nearby row home will be granted a grade 2 listing, which means they cannot be altered without the permission of local officials, said Britain's Heritage Minister John Penrose.
The decision means the homes of one of Britain's greatest songwriting teams will be protected for generations to come. Their work has long been associated with the northern port city Liverpool, particularly because of songs like "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" that celebrated their childhood haunts.
Lennon lived at a comfortable 1930s duplex house called "Mendips" in 251 Menlove Ave. from 1945 to 1963 with his aunt and uncle after his parents separated when he was five.
McCartney lived in nearby Forthlin Road for nine years from 1955. The two musicians held early practice sessions for their first band The Quarrymen while living at these houses, and wrote The Beatles first number one hit, the raucous "Please Please Me," at Lennon's home.
Lennon & McCartney
Baby News
Samuel Garner Affleck
Ben Affleck is using Facebook to announce the birth of his son with wife Jennifer Garner.
The actor posted on his timeline that he and Garner are "happy" about the arrival of Samuel Garner Affleck, born Feb. 27. He describes the baby as "healthy."
This is the couple's third child and first son. Samuel joins sisters Violet, 6, and Seraphina, 3.
Samuel Garner Affleck
Dropped From First Page Of Google Search Results
'Spreading Santorum'
Rick Santorum may be licking his wounds after a pair of primary losses to Mitt Romney in Arizona and Michigan on Tuesday, but on Wednesday he received some good news about his nagging "Google problem." After years at the top, "Spreading Santorum" -- the Web page created by columnist Dan Savage to protest the former Pennsylvania senator's views on homosexuality -- has dropped in Google search results for "Santorum."
As SearchEngineLand.com editor Danny Sullivan points out, the page -- which mocks the candidate by defining "santorum" as a "frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex" -- no longer appears on the first Google search results page; it's behind Wikipedia pages for Santorum and his campaign's official website. However, the blog it links to -- blog.spreadingsantorum.com -- is sixth. And the Urban Dictionary definition of "santorum," which mimics Savage's definition, along with the anti-Santorum site SantorumExposed.com, remain in the top five.
Savage's site has also been dropped from the first page of searches for "Rick Santorum."
The reason for the change is unclear. But given that Savage's site "originated the sex-related definition of 'santorum'" -- and that Urban Dictionary offers an expanded one -- it's "pretty odd for Google to decide that a different site offering an even more explicit definition should get top billing," Sullivan wrote.
It's worth noting that "Spreading Santorum" tops the searches for "Santorum" on Bing and Yahoo.
'Spreading Santorum'
Obstructed Probe
Rupert
British detectives investigating claims of phone-hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World newspaper in 2006 were impeded by the company's staff and feared violence when they tried to search its offices, police said Wednesday.
News International, the British newspaper arm of Murdoch's News Corp, was also well aware of suspicions the practice was widespread and probably destroyed or hid incriminating evidence about illegal activities, an inquiry into press ethics was told.
The search took place during an original police probe into the illegal accessing of mobile phone voicemails by journalists at the News of the World which led to the jailing of one of the paper's reporters, Clive Goodman, and a private detective.
News International said the practice was limited to one "rogue" reporter until, faced with overwhelming evidence, it admitted last year hacking was widespread with targets ranging from celebrities and politicians to the victims of crime.
Rupert
Rupert's Boy Steps Down
James Murdoch
James Murdoch, son of News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch (R-Evil Incarnate) and head of News International, has stepped down as executive chairman of the embattled British newspaper division, the company announced on Wednesday.
His resignation comes on the heels of the growing U.K. investigation into News International's phone-hacking activities, and less than a week after the division launched a new Sunday tabloid, the Sun on Sunday, which was overseen by Rupert Murdoch himself.
There are at least three open investigations into phone hacking at News International -- the most recent at the Sun. News Corp. says it's cooperating with British authorities. Earlier this month, five Sun staffers were arrested in an ongoing probe into journalists paying for tips from police. More than 20 people have been arrested since the phone-hacking investigation began.
The 39-year-old James was named deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. last March, three months before the phone-hacking scandal erupted. On Wednesday, the company said James would remain in the deputy COO role. Tom Mockridge, News International CEO, will continue in his post and will report to News Corp. president and COO Chase Carey, the company said.
James Murdoch has repeatedly denied direct knowledge of phone-hacking activities at News International. He last testified before a select Parliament committee in November, denying he misled them when he testified in July that he had not been shown an email from former editors at News of the World suggesting the phone-hacking was widespread at the company.
James Murdoch
Trial Begins
'Desperate Housewives'
Actress Nicollette Sheridan was fired from "Desperate Housewives" for standing up to the series' creator after he struck her in the head, her attorney said Wednesday during opening statements in her wrongful termination trial.
Mark Baute said the show's creator and executive producer, Marc Cherry, struck Sheridan hard on the head in September 2008 and fired her after ABC cleared him of wrongdoing. Sheridan is seeking roughly $6 million in damages.
Baute said Cherry acknowledges touching Sheridan, but claims he was tapping her head to give her artistic direction.
The ABC series' stars, Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman and Marcia Cross, could provide some star power to the trial because all are listed as potential witnesses. The trial will also provide a behind-the-scenes look at how a major television show is created, with both sides focusing on when the decision was made to kill off Sheridan's character, Edie Britt.
Baute said Sheridan was waging her case mostly alone, but that two of the show's writers will testify that no decision about eliminating Sheridan's character was made until after ABC concluded its inquiry into the slapping incident.
'Desperate Housewives'
The Perfect Priest
Rev. Marcel Guarnizo
As her elderly mother was dying, Barbara Johnson lay next to her on the hospital bed, reciting the "Hail Mary." Loetta Johnson, 85, had been a devout Catholic, raising her four children in the church and sending them to Catholic schools.
At her mother's funeral mass at the St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., a grieving Barbara Johnson was the first in line to receive communion.
What happened next stunned her. The priest refused Johnson, who is gay, the sacramental bread and wine.
"He covered the bowl with the Eucharist with his hand and looked at me, and said I cannot give you communion because you live with a woman and that is a sin in the eyes of the church," Johnson told ABC News affiliate WJLA.
Larry Johnson said his sister, who has been in a committed gay relationship for 19 years, composed herself enough to give her mother's eulogy, but then he was shocked at what happened next. The priest left the altar, Johnson said, and didn't return until his sister was nearly finished speaking.
Family members added that the priest failed to come to the grave site, and the burial was attended by a substitute priest found by the funeral director.
Rev. Marcel Guarnizo
Auction Brings $3 Million
Oscar Statuettes
Fifteen Oscar statuettes have sold for a total of $3 million at an online auction, the most money made from a single collection of Oscars in a sale by bid, organizers said on Wednesday.
Los Angeles auctioneer Nate D. Sanders said the hot seller of the collection was Herman Mankiewicz's statuette for best screenplay, which he won for co-writing the 1941 film "Citizen Kane" with Orson Welles. The Oscar sold for $588,455.
Welles' own best screenplay Oscar for the movie, which both the American and British film institutes list as the best picture ever made, fetched $861,542 at an earlier Sanders auction in December.
Other statuettes that pulled in high sums included the 1933 best picture award for the drama "Cavalcade," which brought in $332,165, while the oldest statuette in the collection, the 1931 best picture award for "Skippy," netted the third highest total. It sold for $301,973.
Oscar Statuettes
EU Broadcasters Treat Unfairly
Composers
A group representing composers and songwriters is alleging that some of Europe's most prominent broadcasters are coercing them into giving up the copyrights to their work, sharply diminishing their earnings.
The European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, representing 12,000 composers and songwriters, filed a complaint with the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, targeting more than 15 broadcasters and studios, including the BBC, British Sky Broadcasting and ITV.
The complaint targets companies in the Netherlands, France, Italy, the U.K., Denmark and Austria.
At a news conference Wednesday in Brussels, representatives of the alliance said composers are often told they won't be considered for a commission unless they're willing to give up the copyright to whatever music they ultimately create.
The complaint, filed with the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition, alleges that broadcasters and affiliated production companies are abusing their dominant position in the market to suppress competition.
Composers
US Company Gains Rights To Estate
Agatha Christie
Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and other Agatha Christie characters are now under American ownership.
Acorn Media Group announced Wednesday that it had acquired majority ownership of Agatha Christie Limited. The Silver Spring, Maryland-based company now controls rights to the British mystery writer's dozens of novels and plays, including "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Death on the Nile."
Christie's books have sold more than 2 billion copies. The author died in 1976.
Agatha Christie Limited had been controlled since 1998 by Chorion, based in London.
Agatha Christie
Too Ignorant to Know It
Incompetent People
A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.
This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.
With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it "intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.
Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now at New York University, "have done a number of studies where we will give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etcetera. Then we determine their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they've done," Dunning said. "We ask, 'what percentile will your performance fall in?'"
The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn't do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. "For people at the bottom who are really doing badly - those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile - they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. "People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people."
It's not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can rate themselves accurately, they cannot. "They're really trying to be honest and impartial," he said.
Incompetent People
In Memory
Davy Jones
Davy Jones, a former actor turned singer who helped propel the TV rock band The Monkees to the top of the pop charts and into rock 'n' roll history, died Wednesday in Florida. He was 66.
Jones, lead singer of the 1960s group that was assembled as an American version of the Beatles, died of a massive heart attack in Indiantown where he lived, his publicist Helen Kensick confirmed.
Jones was a former racehorse jockey-turned-actor who soared to fame in 1965 when he joined The Monkees and they embarked on an adventure that included a wildly popular U.S. television show. Jones sang lead vocals on songs like "I Wanna Be Free" and "Daydream Believer."
Auditions for The Monkees were held in the fall of 1965, attracting some 500 applicants. Jones - who was born Dec. 30, 1945, in Manchester, England - had stylishly long hair and a British accent that helped with his selection. He would go on to achieve heartthrob status in the United States.
Nonetheless, musical ability wasn't paramount in the casting decisions. While Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork had some musical experience, Mickey Dolenz had been a child actor, as had Jones along with being a jockey in his native England.
The first single, "Last Train to Clarksville," became a No. 1 hit. And the show caught on with audiences, featuring fast-paced, helter-skelter comedy inspired as much by the Marx Brothers as the Beatles.
It was a shrewd case of cross-platform promotion. As David Bianculli noted in his "Dictionary of Teleliteracy," ''The show's self-contained music videos, clear forerunners of MTV, propelled the group's first seven singles to enviable positions of the pop charts: three number ones, two number twos, two number threes."
And though initially the Monkees weren't allowed to play their own instruments, they were supported by enviable talent: Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote "Pleasant Valley Sunday," and Neil Diamond penned "I'm a Believer."
Musicians who played on their records included Billy Preston (who only later played with the Beatles), Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, Ry Cooder and Neil Young.
After two seasons, the TV series had flared out and was cancelled in the summer of 1968. But the Monkees remained a nostalgia act for decades.
According to The Monkees website, Monkees.com, Jones left the band in late 1970. In the summer of 1971, he recorded a solo hit "Rainy Jane" and made a series of appearances on American variety and television shows, including "Love American Style" and "The Brady Bunch."
Amid lingering nostalage for the Monkees, by the mid-1980s, Jones teamed up with former Monkee Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and promoter David Fishof for a reunion tour. Their popularity prompted MTV to re-air The Monkees series, introducing the group to a new audience.
In 1987, Jones, Tork and Micky Dolenz recorded a new album, "Pool It." Two years later, the group received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In the late 1990s, the group filmed a special called "Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees."
Jones is survived by his wife, Jessica, and 4 daughters, Anabel, Talia, Sarah, and Jessica..
Davy Jones
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