Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: Sex rehab! Is it right for you? (sfgate.com)
Sweetheart! Babydoll! You right there! Are you into moaning? Soft sighs? Furtive groping in the night?
Will Durst: It's Hard to Mock Obama -- So a Humorist Pines for the Hilarity of the Bush Years
For political comics, George W. Bush was the equivalent of the political comedy Full Employment Act -- for eight wonderful years.
JON MOOALLEM: Can Animals Be Gay? (nytimes.com)
Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: "They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn't assume that what you're looking at is a male and a female."
Froma Harrop: Reading in Black and White (creators.com)
Such is our gadget obsession that the launch of a new electronic reader has set off a death match between two new-media gorillas, Apple and Amazon.com. Apple's iPad seeks to end the Amazon Kindle's domination of the market for devices that let you download books and read them on a screen.
Anne Lamott: 20 Questions (popmatters.com)
Anne Lamott's hard-luck novels are impressive chronicles of family strife punctuated by bad (but often entertaining) behavior. Everyone in Lamott's books is sort of screwed up, but she stocks them with a humor and core decency that make them hard to resist. ... She tells PopMatters 20 Questions how life can be just as quirky as fiction; take Jar Jar Binks, George Bush, and a rickshaw driver in New Delhi, for example.
"The Wayward Bus" (Penguin Classics) by John Steinbeck: A review by Jeremy Garber
It has been noted elsewhere (even somewhat extensively) that The Wayward Bus is one of Steinbeck's lesser or minor works. While it, indeed, may not be as well known as some of his other novels, it's a resounding piece of literature, one which surely ranks among his best.
George Varga: Stephen Stills: Long May He Run (creators.com)
Stephen Stills is the only musician to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in one year - 1997 - when he was honored as a founding member of the still-active Crosby, Stills & Nash and the long-defunct Buffalo Springfield.
Stephen Brook: "Krissi Murison: 'I have always loved the chase of finding new bands'" (guardian.co.uk)
Krissi Murison on the challenges of editing NME magazine.
Harvey Sachs: Beethoven Visits Cleveland (theamericanscholar.org)
In 1958, the Colossus speaks to an 11-year-old boy.
Sam Leith: The unstoppable rise of Russell Brand (guardian.co.uk)
Eighteen months ago, the comedian's career seemed on the edge of collapse. Now he's on the verge of international stardom. So what went right?
roger ebert's journal: The ecstasy of the filmmaker Herzog
I saw "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" for the first time in a defrocked Lutheran Church in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, which Milos Stehlik had taken over for his newly-born Facets Multimedia. "It is a film you must see," he told me. "Bring a pillow. The pews can get hard."
Joanna Lumley: 'I'm a happy person. But injustice I loathe' (guardian.co.uk)
She's uniquely posh and 'as vain as a cat,' but Joanna Lumley makes a formidable crusader, finds Simon Hattenstone.
David Bruce: Free Pro Same-Sex Civil Marriage Article for Media (lulu.com)
Free Download.
You have my permission to print this 2,463-word opinion piece for free in newspapers, magazines, or journals, or to post it for free on the Web.
Hubert's Poetry Corner
"Eyes of Fern Holland"
Remembering Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller.
She too had THOSE eyes - just like another Cherokee!
The Weekly Poll
New Question
The 'Banning the Burka' Edition...
Belgium may be the first European country to ban the full-covering Islamic veils from being worn in public... The Belgian parliament's home affairs unanimously backed a proposal to ban the so-called burka and niqab, two forms of the Muslim veil covering the entire body and face. If the law is enacted, women who wear this in public would be fined 15-25 euros and may face a jail sentence of up to seven days.
EUobserver / Belgium moves towards banning the burka
Would you support or oppose such a ban here in the US? (and why?)
A.) Support ______
B.) Oppose ______
C.) WTF? I gots more important things to worry about, dagnabbit! _______
Send your response to
wrote:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Suggestion
Futurama
BadtotheboneBob
Solar Plane
Solar plane prototype in first test flight
A prototype solar-powered plane has made its first full test flight - coming closer to the goal of using solar energy to fly around the world. The Solar Impulse, with a wingspan similar to that of a super-jumbo jet but weighing the same as a saloon car, took off from a Swiss airfield...
BBC News - Solar plane prototype in first test flight (with video)
Thanks, B2tbBob!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Back to having a heat wave.
Attacks US Policy On Sudan
Mia Farrow
US actress and UNICEF envoy Mia Farrow lashed out Wednesday at the "spectacularly naive" policy of President Barack Obama's administration on Sudan, days before landmark elections.
Obama's envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, said at the weekend after meeting members of the election commission that he was confident the April 11-13 polls would be as "free and fair as possible."
But Farrow wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that: "No one in Sudan believes the elections will be anything approaching free or fair."
The 65-year-old actress noted that Obama as a presidential candidate had raised the hopes of a desperate people by referring to the situation in the war-torn western province of Darfur as "genocide."
Mia Farrow
Protests School Budget Cuts
Megan Fox
Megan Fox and her sometime boyfriend, actor Brian Austin Green, are protesting California school budget cuts in a new video online.
In a video posted Wednesday on the comic Web site FunnyorDie.com, Fox urges viewers to "call, write and annoy the governor until he cries for his mommy."
She says more than $17 billion has been cut from state educational programs over the past two years, and Green says the "terminators in Sacramento" plan to cut another $2.5 billion.
Fox and Green's 3 1/2-minute video had been viewed more than 66,500 times by Wednesday afternoon.
Megan Fox
Songwriters Hall of Fame
Phil Ramone
Music producer Phil Ramone, who has created hits with Billy Joel and Paul Simon, will receive the Howie Richmond Hitmaker Award at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Awards on June 17 in New York.
Ramone, a 14-time Grammy Award winner, has also worked with top artists like Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen.
Phil Collins will receive the Johnny Mercer Award at the event. Other inductees include Leonard Cohen, Jackie DeShannon, David Foster, Johnny Mandel, Philip Bailey, Verdine White, Larry Dunn, Al McKay and Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White.
Ramone is also an Emmy winner. His biggest hits include Joel's "Uptown Girl" and "Tell Her About It."
Phil Ramone
"The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade"
George Carlin
A collection of writings and artwork by George Carlin is coming next year, courtesy of the comedian's widow.
"The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade" will be released by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Gallery says the book will be illustrated by Wade and will include notes, letters and postcards by Carlin, who died in 2008 at age 71.
Wade and Carlin had been married since 1998.
George Carlin
New Rules
Scrabble
Scrabble lovers are unscrambling the momentous news that the board game will for the first time allow proper nouns, and even words spelled backwards.
Distributors Mattel say they are launching Scrabble Trickster in Britain this summer -- and allowing a heavy dose of the unthinkable.
"The makers of Scrabble have confirmed that they are making plans to change the rules for the first time to introduce new challenges to the game for a special edition," Mattel said in a statement.
The new game will not be sold in the United States, where rival Hasbro, not Mattel, owns the rights to Scrabble. Mattel has the rights everywhere outside North America.
Scrabble
Rules Aren't Changing
More Scrabble
Scrabble purists can relax. News of a new version of the classic word game that Mattel plans to sell in the United Kingdom allowing proper nouns set off waves of dismay across the Internet. But the official rules fans know and love aren't changing.
Scrabble Trickster, due out in July in the U.K. only, will allow proper names such as city or celebrity names.
Other twists include playing words backwards or playing words unconnected to others on the board, Mattel said.
The game is a limited edition and will not replace the original Scrabble in the U.K. or the United States.
More Scrabble
Vs. Kanye
Marion "Suge" Knight
A rap music smackdown looms in a federal courtroom between oft-troubled impresario Marion "Suge" Knight and controversial star Kanye West over a shooting at a star-studded Miami Beach party.
Knight, founder of Death Row Records and promoter of some of rap's biggest acts, was shot in the right leg in August 2005 by a still-unknown assailant at the ultra-trendy Shore Club. West was hosting the party before the MTV Video Music Awards held that year in Miami.
No one has ever been arrested, and like many other shootings in the rap world, police found few witnesses although the club was packed with partygoers, including celebrities Jessica Alba, Eddie Murphy, The Black Eyed Peas and Paris Hilton. At least six shots were fired, police said.
More than four years later, Knight is claiming in a lawsuit that West and the Shore Club's owners failed to provide security necessary to keep out people with weapons. Knight's attorney, Marc Brumer, said Tuesday that Knight had $200,000 in medical bills from a gunshot that shattered his femur and will seek total damages of well over $1 million.
Marion "Suge" Knight
Pleads Not Guilty
Richard R. Finch
A music producer and member of KC and the Sunshine Band has pleaded not guilty in Ohio to charges he had sexual contact with teenage boys.
Richard R. Finch appeared in Licking County Common Pleas Court on Tuesday. He was arrested last month and faced 16 charges relating to sexual conduct with teen boys.
Magistrate Mattie Klein doubled Finch's bond to $500,000, and ordered him not to have contact with the alleged victims or anyone under 18 years old.
Finch is a former bass player for the band and a seven-time Grammy Award winner. He is being held in the Licking County Jail.
Richard R. Finch
Unbiased Or Unbalanced?
Rupert
In an address last night to the National Press Club, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch ripped into the New York Times as a media outlet with "an agenda" focused on "anything Mr. Obama wants." Murdoch, who owns Fox News and the Times' primary competitor the Wall Street Journal, then fielded a question from the audience about Fox News' own reputation for advancing a conservative agenda - and lately the conservative, grass-roots Tea Party movement - in its coverage, Murdoch waved off the allegation.
"I don't think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party," he said. "We have both sides in our news shows, our politics or whatever. We have Democrats and Republicans and whatever."
But while Fox News' head cheerleader was trumpeting his network's objectivity and slinging scorn at liberal bias he sees in the rest of the media, Fox News' coverage and its connection to the activist right has been drawing flak from some prominent national conservatives.
Yesterday, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who is strongly identified with both the fiscal- and social-conservative wings of the GOP, wound up cautioning some conservative constituents at a town hall gathering not to "catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good."
Other conservatives who are closer to the traditional GOP mainstream have lately raised similar red flags about Fox's broader political impact. David Frum, the former American Enterprise Institute fellow who was recently let go in the wake of a widely circulated blog post he wrote criticizing GOP legislative tactics on health care reform, has said that "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we're discovering that we're working for Fox."
Rupert
Pay Wall For Propaganda
More Rupert
News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch (R-Greed Is Good) said Tuesday that Google and Microsoft's access to his newspapers could be limited to a "headline or a sentence or two" once he erects a pay wall around his titles' websites.
Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for The Kalb Report, also said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties beginning with The Times of London.
The News Corp. chief said "we're going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories propaganda for nothing."
Murdoch also said he reads The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post each day "because I'm going to be responsible for them." He said he reads "a lot" of the New York Times," but rarely reads The Washington Post although he "probably should."
More Rupert
Told To Stop Using English
China TV
Basketball without "NBA"? The state of the economy without "GDP"? This could be the new reality for television viewers in China, as Beijing has reportedly curbed on-air use of English abbreviations.
China Central Television and Beijing Television told the state-run China Daily that they had received notification from the government to avoid using certain English abbreviations on Chinese programmes.
Broadcasters will now be asked to give the Chinese equivalent for such phrases as NBA (National Basketball Association), GDP (gross domestic product), CPI (consumer price index) and WTO (World Trade Organisation).
Last month, Huang Youyi -- a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a body that advises lawmakers on political matters -- proposed tougher measures to keep English from polluting Chinese.
China TV
Colorado Judge Fired
Judge James Kimmel
A longtime Colorado judge has been fired after issuing an arrest warrant for a teenager over an overdue library DVD.
Municipal Judge James Kimmel issued the warrant after 19-year-old Aaron Henson failed to show up in court Jan. 14 over the overdue DVD, "House of Flying Daggers." On Jan. 25, police stoped the teen for speeding and held him for nearly eight hours after discovering the warrant.
Henson had moved and didn't received the summons to court. The teen said he had packed the DVD in a box, and returned it about a week before Henson issued the warrant. The library notified the judge the DVD was back.
The Littleton City Council fired Kimmel, a judge for nearly 30 years, at its meeting Tuesday night. Kimmel declined to comment to The Denver Post.
Judge James Kimmel
Incident At John Lennon Airport
Liverpool
Police have arrested two women at an British airport after they reportedly tried to smuggle a corpse onto a flight.
Police said Tuesday the women were detained at Liverpool's John Lennon airport "on suspicion of failing to give notification of death" of a 91-year-old man.
The BBC and other British media reported that the women placed the man, a relative of theirs, into a wheelchair and covered his face with sunglasses in a bid to get him aboard a flight to Berlin.
The women, aged 41 and 66, were detained Saturday and have been released on bail. They have not been charged and police say inquiries are continuing.
Liverpool
Sold At Auction
Blue Diamond
A rare 5.16-carat blue diamond sold at auction for 6.4 million US dollars in Hong Kong on Wednesday, confirming Asia's fast-growing taste for the precious stone.
London's famed Moussaieff Jewellers paid more than the 5.9-million-dollar expected price tag for the pear-shaped stone, the first blue diamond from the celebrated De Beers Millennium Jewels Collection to appear at auction.
But the world per-carat record for a blue diamond remains the 10.5 million dollars paid by a Hong Kong property tycoon for a seven-carat blue diamond in Geneva in May last year.
In December, a five-carat chickpea-sized vivid pink gem set a per-carat world record price for a diamond when it fetched 10.8 million dollars at an auction in Hong Kong.
Blue Diamond
2 More Gone
Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.
Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.
The park's glaciers have been slowly melting since about 1850, when the centuries-long Little Ice Age ended. They once numbered as many as 150, and 37 of those glaciers eventually were named.
The latest two to fall below the 25 acre threshold were Miche Wabun and Shepard. Each had shrunk by roughly 55 percent since the mid-1960s. The largest remaining glacier in the park is Harrison Glacier, at about 465 acres.
Glacier National Park
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by the Nielsen Co. for March 29-April 4. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.
1. "Dancing With the Stars," ABC, 22.97 million.
2. "American Idol" (Tuesday), Fox, 21.85 million.
3. "American Idol" (Wednesday), Fox, 20.49 million.
4. "NCAA Basketball: West Virginia vs. Duke," CBS, 15.82 million.
5. "Dancing With the Stars Results," ABC, 14.28 million.
6. "The Mentalist," CBS, 14.11 million.
7. "CBS NCAA Basketball Bridge," 14.04 million.
8. "Castle," ABC, 13.86 million.
9. "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 13.35 million.
10. "Undercover Boss," CBS, 13.18 million.
11. "Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains," CBS, 11.26 million.
12. "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 10.98 million.
13. "NCIS," CBS, 10.9 million.
14. "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 10.2 million.
15. "Lost," ABC, 10.13 million.
16. "Cold Case," CBS, 10.1 million.
17. "Law & Order: SVU," NBC, 10.08 million.
18. "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 9.87 million.
19. "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 9.8 million.
20. "Modern Family," ABC, 9.51 million.
Ratings
In Memory
Christopher Cazenove
Actor Christopher Cazenove has died after a "valiant battle" with septicaemia, his family said.
The British actor was best known for his role as Ben Carrington in the glamorous 1980s soap opera Dynasty.
The actor, who was born in Winchester, Hampshire, first found fame as Charlie Tyrrell in the 1970s mini-series The Duchess of Duke Street.
The Old Etonian went on to play The Baron in the television adaptation of Jeffrey Archer's novel Kane & Abel and Captain Preston in the Second World War drama Jenny's War, both released in 1985.
Cazenove later played Edward Hargreave in the 1990 film 3 Men and a Little Lady, the sequel to Three Men and a Baby. He also played John Thatcher, the father of the late Heath Ledger's character William Thatcher, in the 2001 film A Knight's Tale. Cazenove returned to UK television in 2001 when he played Assistant Deputy Police Commissioner Row Colemore in Judge John Deed and Urquart Sav in Fun at the Funeral Parlour.
He was married to Poldark actress Angharad Rees for more than 20 years and they had two sons, Linford and Rhys. Linford, the elder of the two, died in a car crash on the M11 in Essex in 1999 aged 25.
Christopher Cazenove
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