The Thursday Poll
The question was:
Last Sunday in an interview with CBS, Senator Obama said that an increase in troops, "...two Brigades, perhaps three..." is necessary in Afghanistan. Are you in favor of that escalation? (three brigades is approximately 15,000 soldiers)
Results:
Opposed - 4
Comments of note...
I say: "Read my words; NO MORE WAR!"
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3 brigades to Afghanistan is just meaningless, it will prolong the inevitable.
In Favor - 4
Comments of note...
Yes, I grudgingly support an "escalation" of troops in Afghanistan I hopes that the effort can finally take out the 9/11 terrorists and capture bin Laden.
----
Whatever he does I will support him
----
Yes, at least two brigades more need to be sent to Afghanistan, to quell the Taliban comeback and to find Osama bin Laden.
Well, 50/50... I thought it would be more opposed, but ya never know...
Now! Let's be a little more upbeat, ya think? I'm working on a humorous poll, but it's not quite done (I need some graphics), so.... How about the Emmy's?
The Current Question:
What's your choice for the best Drama Series?
'Boston Legal'
'Damages'
'Dexter'
'House'
'Lost'
'Mad Men'
Pretend like yer practicing for November and get out and vote! Thanks!
BadtotheboneBob
Send your response, and a (short) explanation, to BadtotheBoneBob ( BCEpoll 'at' aol.com )
Here's a complete list of the Emmy Nominations - 2008
TOMORROW!
Erin Hart
Please join Erin Hart as she fills in on the afternoon drive on AM760 Progressive Talk in Denver
tomorrow from 3pm to 6pm (pdt) | 4pm to 7pm (mdt) | 5pm to 8pm (cdt) | 6pm to 9pm (edt).
Senator John McCain, visits Colorado and the Dalai Lama in Aspen. He dared Obama to go abroad and now complains. . . .
Senator Barack Obama looks more and more like a Commander in Chief as he rocks the houses of Europe; and does very well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Did Obama's trip increase his stature? It must have, because attacks coming out of the McSame camp sound truly pathetic.
Is McCain REALLY gaining in the polls in CO and other battleground states, and what does that mean at this stage?
For more information check out Erin Hart Show
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Barbara Ehrenreich: The Suicide Solution (huffingtonpost.com)
Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to debt. If you can't pay your debts and if, in addition you're no longer needed at the workplace, then there's no further point to your existence.
Ted Rall: RECESSION, YEAR 8 (news.yahoo.com)
John Williams, an economic consultant who publishes the monthly newsletter "Shadow Government Statistics," calculates that "inflation is actually running at an annualized rate of 9.95 percent." Inflation has been rising since 2002.
Leonard Doyle: Free College for Poorest Students Puts Ivy League to Shame (Independent UK)
Berea University in rural Kentucky is one of the wealthiest colleges, but it accepts the poorest applicants and gives them a free education.
Hugh Hamilton: George Bush is Batman (huffingtonpost.com)
Did Andrew Klavan see the same film as the rest of us? The one in which Batman's actions are completely manipulated by the Joker until the very end?
Will Lawrence: "George Lucas: Mr Emperor strikes back" (timesonline.co.uk)
Star Wars made a fortune and transformed an industry. Now Lucas brings us Clone Wars, an animation with familiar faces.
Sarah Silverman's UK charm offensive (timesonline.co.uk)
America's best-kept comic secret, foul-mouthed stand-up Silverman, is hitting cinemas. Political correctness be damned.
RODGER JACOBS: "Bleeding on the Page in the Middle of a Nervous Breakdown: Willy Vlautin's Northline " (popmatters.com)
Willy Vlautin loves the damaged people that most of us would go out of our way to avoid.
Jeffrey Barg: The Angry Grammarian (philadelphiaweekly.com)
Words we miss.
Alan Brownjohn: Amis & Amis (timesonline.co.uk)
The family firm produced disparate results - but is either writer any good?
Mark Stryker: Dixieland jazz captured cornet player's heart - for a lifetime (Detroit Free Press)
Tom Saunders was 9 when his destiny came roaring through the record player.
Dorian Lynskey: 'I couldn't have handled success' (guardian.co.uk)
Why does singer-songwriter Randy Newman think the biggest joke is on him?
The Story of Stuff, with Annie Leonard (20-minute video)
"Did you know that for every garbage can of stuff we put out at the curb, 70 cans of garbage had to be disposed of to make the stuff that became your one garbage can of stuff?"--Andrew Tobias
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and cooler than seasonal.
TV's Loss Is Web's Gain
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert is gone from "At the Movies," but he's an increasingly influential figure in the new dominant realm of film criticism: the Web.
Ebert last week announced he was leaving the long-televised show he began with Gene Siskel - by its earliest incarnation - in 1975. The 66-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning critic hadn't been on the show since 2006, sidelined, if only to a certain extent, by a battle with cancer that has left him unable to speak.
But he's continued to write reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and this year began blogging on the newspaper's Web site: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert. His online musings, labeled a "journal," should be bookmarked by all film buffs.
That Ebert should find a home on the Web is fitting. Though many factors made "At the Movies" the influential hit it was, perhaps none was as important as their "thumbs up, thumbs down" verdicts. (Ebert shares a trademark on the thumbs with the widow of his late co-host.)
Roger Ebert
Leaves Politics For Music
Gilberto Gil
Gilberto Gil, Brazil's globally renowned singer and composer, announced Wednesday he has resigned his job as culture minister to return to music, after four and a half years in the post.
Gil, 66, told a media conference he had proffered his resignation to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had accepted it.
"I feel like I have come full circle and I want to remove myself. I felt a big pressure on my artistic work that was accumulating," Gil said.
Gil has more than 40 albums to his name, spanning his evolution from Bossa Nova through Tropicalismo to funk and soul.
Gilberto Gil
Newport Music Festivals
NPR
Music fans unable to attend the Newport folk and jazz festivals will be able to listen to some concerts online.
NPR Music, part of National Public Radio, announced Wednesday that it would stream select performances from both festivals online, as well as archive the free webcasts and make them available on-demand for future use.
The venerable folk festival - best know as the place where Bob Dylan went electric in 1965 - runs Friday through Sunday. The jazz festival, headlined by Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock and Sonny Rollins, is set for the following weekend.
This year's folk festival boasts an eclectic lineup of artists that transcend the confines of traditional folk, such as Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Trey Anastasio, the Black Crowes, Jimmy Buffett and reggae performers Stephen and Damian Marley.
NPR
Graphic Novelist
Phoebe Gloeckner
Graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, whose depiction of sex and childhood traumas has courted controversy, is now contributing to a book about the largely unsolved murders and disappearances of hundreds of women near the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez.
Due out later this year, "I Live Here," which is funded by human rights group Amnesty International, also tells the stories of women and child refugees from places such as Chechnya.
Gloeckner worked as a medical illustrator but always drew comic strips and began publishing graphic novels in 1998.
On the sidelines of the recent "Semana Negra" literary festival in Spain, she spoke to Reuters about future plans, censorship and the conflict between genre and mainstream fiction.
The interview: Phoebe Gloeckner
Tracked Olympics
Antikythera Mechanism
An astronomical calculator, considered a technological marvel of antiquity, was also used to track dates of the ancient Olympic games, researchers have found.
Experts from Britain, Greece and the United States said they have detected the word "Olympia" on a bronze dial, as well as the names of other games in ancient Greece on the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism.
The 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism was recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1901 near Antikythera, a small island off Greece's south coast.
Its insides look like a clock. About 30 bronze gears were cranked to calculate phases of the moon, eclipses and other celestial information specific to a certain date. Results were displayed on dials on the front and back of the mechanism.
Antikythera Mechanism
Pecked By Puffin
Gordon Ramsay
Scottish celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay admits he thought he was a "goner" when he fell off a cliff in Iceland while hunting puffins to cook on TV.
Ramsay was treated at his hotel for a leg gash he sustained during the incident on the Westman Islands. He later went to London's Cromwell Hospital where he received three stitches for a puffin bite he sustained on his nose, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.
Ramsay reportedly slipped and fell into freezing water as he climbed down a 280-foot drop while filming footage for his show "The F Word."
Gordon Ramsay
Portrait of Woman Revealed Beneath Painting
Vincent van Gogh
A previously unknown portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh has been revealed in a high-tech look beneath another of his paintings, it was announced today.
Scientists used a new technique to peer beneath the paint of van Gogh's "Patch of Grass." Already it was known there was something there, likely a portrait of some sort. Van Gogh was known to paint over his work, perhaps as much as a third of the time.
Behind the painting, done mostly in greens and blues, is a portrait of a woman rendered in browns and reds.
The new technique is based on "synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy" and is said to be an improvement on X-ray radiography, which has been used to reveal concealed layers of other famous paintings. The new method measures chemicals in the pigments. Specifically, mercury and the element antimony were useful in revealing the woman's face.
Vincent van Gogh
Colludes With Chinese On Internet Censorship
International Olympic Committee
Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday.
Persistent pollution fears and China's concerns about security in Tibet also remained problems for organizers nine days before the Games begin.
China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have this week complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked.
Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based media watchdog, said it was increasingly concerned that there would be many cases of censorship during the Olympics.
International Olympic Committee
Jailhouse Snitch
Lou Pearlman
Lou Pearlman, the former boy band promoter and entrepreneur turned federal inmate, has taken another career turn: police informant.
Pearlman went to authorities with information about a 19-year-old man accused of killing an off-duty Orlando, Fla., police officer in a botched robbery, court documents released Wednesday show.
The 54-year-old founder of the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync said that while in jail, he heard Davin Smith admit fatally shooting Alfred Gordon.
Pearlman is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to four counts for running a $300 million stock and investment scam. He was transferred from the Orange County Jail to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta earlier this month.
Lou Pearlman
Jewelry Company Sues
Wyclef Jean
The company founded by the New York businessman known in the hip-hop world as "Jacob the Jeweler" has sued Wyclef Jean, claiming he owes money for watches and jewelry he bought.
Jacob and Company Incorporated says in Manhattan court papers filed Tuesday that the hip-hop star bought several items between March 2002 and January 2006 for $765,100. The company says Jean still owes $319,680, despite "repeated demands for payment."
The company's founder, Jacob Arabov, was sentenced in June to 2 1/2 years in federal prison for lying to investigators of a multistate drug ring.
Wyclef Jean
Another Day, Another Lawsuit
Ed McMahon
A New York lawsuit claims Ed McMahon owes lawyers more than $275,000 for handling his daughter's divorce.
The suit says the former "Tonight Show" sidekick and his wife hired Hartman & Craven and the Sarcone Law Firm to represent his daughter, Linda Schmerge. It was filed Wednesday in Manhattan, where she lives.
McMahon's attorney did not return a a telephone message Wednesday.
Ed McMahon
Quietly Entering Market
Nano-Foods
Those consumers already worried about genetically engineered or cloned food reaching their tables may soon find something else in their grocery carts to furrow their brows over -- nano-foods.
Consumer advocates taking part in a food safety conference in Orlando, Florida, this week said food produced by using nanotechnology is quietly coming onto the market, and they want U.S. authorities to force manufacturers to identify them.
Nanotechnology involves the design and manipulation of materials on molecular scales, smaller than the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye. Companies using nanotechnology say it can enhance the flavor or nutritional effectiveness of food.
New consumer products created through nanotechnology are coming on the market at the rate of 3 to 4 per week, according to an advocacy group, The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), based on an inventory it has drawn up of 609 known or claimed nano-products.
Nano-Foods
Religiously Insane
Anthony Hopkins
Police believe a body found in a small-time evangelist's home freezer is his wife and a mother of eight, and arrested him on a murder charge as he preached at a south Alabama church. Anthony Hopkins, 37, was being held in the Mobile County jail Wednesday awaiting a bond hearing and appointment of an attorney.
Police said no one reported 36-year-old Arletha Hopkins missing, even though she hadn't been heard from in three years. The body was discovered covered in a freezer in a utility room during a police search of the home in Mobile after a relative of the preacher contacted police.
Mobile Police Chief Phillip Garrett said Hopkins was arrested Monday night at at a revival in Jackson, a town in rural Clarke County where he has roots. The pastor of Inspirational Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, Beverly Jackson, told reporters that Hopkins told her he was a single parent because his wife had died in childbirth.
Garrett said Anthony Hopkins, the father of six of the eight children, has been charged with rape and sodomy in a separate case involving the female relative and could face more charges related to another relative.
Anthony Hopkins
Saudi Religious Police Ban Pets
Cats & Dogs
Saudi Arabia's religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women, an official said on Wednesday.
Othman al-Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known as the Muttawa, told the Saudi edition of al-Hayat daily that the commission has started enforcing an old religious edict.
He said the commission was implementing a decision taken a month ago by the acting governor of the capital, Prince Sattam bin Abdul Aziz, adding that it follows an old edict issued by the supreme council of Saudi scholars.
The 5,000-strong religious police oversees the adherence to Wahabism -- a strict version of Sunni Islam, which also forces women to cover from head to toe when in public, and bans them from driving.
Cats & Dogs
Washing Up In Brazil
Penguins
Penguins from frigid waters near the bottom of the world are washing up closer to the equator than ever before, Brazilian wildlife authorities said Wednesday.
Adelson Cerqueira Silva of the federal environmental agency said that about 300 penguins have been found dead or alive in recent days along the coast of Bahia state, better known for sunbathers in bikinis than for seabirds native to Antarctica and Patagonia.
I
ts capital of Salvador is roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) closer to the equator than Miami is and temperatures in the current Southern Hemisphere winter are in the mid-70s (low 20s centigrade).
"This is unheard of. There have even been reports of penguins washing up as far as Aracaju," Silva said, referring to a beachside state capital even closer to the equator.
Penguins
Bloomers Sell For $9,000
Queen Victoria
A pair of Queen Victoria's bloomers, with a 50-inch waist, were snapped up for $9,000 by a Canadian buyer at a central England auction Wednesday.
Auctioneer Charles Hanson said Queen Victoria's underpants belonged to "a very big lady of quite small stature with a very wide girth." She was said to be 5 feet tall.
The handmade knickers - which date back to the 1890s - bear the monogram "VR" for Victoria Regina. They are open-crotch style, with separate legs joined by a drawstring at the waist, a popular style in the late Victorian era.
The royal drawers belonged to a family in western England whose ancestor was a lady-in-waiting for the queen.
Queen Victoria
Cable Nielsens
Ratings
Rankings for the top 15 programs on cable networks as compiled by Nielsen Media Research for the week of July 21-27. Day and start time (EDT) are in parentheses:
1. "The Closer" (Monday, 9 p.m.), TNT, 5.32 million homes, 7.06 million viewers.
2. NASCAR Sprint Cup (Sunday, 2 p.m.), ESPN, 4.89 million homes, 6.67 million viewers.
3. "Saving Grace" (Monday, 10 p.m.), TNT, 3.50 million homes, 4.57 million viewers.
4. "Monk" (Friday, 9 p.m.), USA, 3.45 million homes, 5.06 million viewers.
5. "Best of Hannah and Miley" (Saturday, 8 p.m.), Disney, 3.43 million homes, 5.86 million viewers.
6. "Burn Notice" (Thursday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.39 million homes, 4.76 million viewers.
7. "WWE Raw" (Monday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.34 million homes, 4.96 million viewers.
8. "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" (original) (Sunday, 9 p.m.), USA, 3.31 million homes, 4.32 million viewers.
9. MLB: Yankees vs. Red Sox (Sunday, 8:58 p.m.), ESPN, 3.18 million homes, 4.23 million viewers.
10. "In Plain Sight" (Sunday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.18 million homes, 4.17 million viewers.
11. "Psych" (Friday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.13 million homes, 4.48 million viewers.
12. "The Next Food Network Star" (Sunday, 10 p.m.), Food, 3.11 million homes, 4.51 million viewers.
13. "WWE Raw" (Monday, 9 p.m.), USA, 3.06 million homes, 4.49 million viewers.
14. "iCarly" (Friday, 8:30 p.m.), Nick, 3.03 million homes, 4.45 million viewers.
15. "Army Wives" (Sunday, 10 p.m.), Lifetime, 2.98 million homes, 3.64 million viewers.
Ratings
In Memory
James Fenwick Lansdowne
James Fenwick Lansdowne, one of Canada's renowned wildlife artists whose works have been exhibited around the world, has died. He was 71.
His family says Lansdowne died in Victoria on July 26. Born in 1937 to British parents in Hong Kong and raised in Victoria, Lansdowne was taught to paint by his mother, an accomplished artist trained in traditional Chinese watercolour techniques. His family moved to Canada at the end of the Second World War.
Lansdowne's works were exhibited regularly around the world since his first show at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1956, when he was 19. Some of the museums include the Tryon Gallery, London, the Natural History Museum, Beijing, and the Smithsonian, Audubon House and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in the U.S.
After visiting one of Lansdowne's first exhibits, John A. Livingston, the former executive director of the Audubon Society of Canada, was quoted in 1964 as saying the artist "has achieved the most remarkable wedding of scientific truth and artistic feeling I have ever seen."
Lansdowne was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.
Lansdowne is survived by his wife, Helen, son, Tristram, and daughter, Emma.
James Fenwick Lansdowne
The Gallery of James Fenwick Lansdowne
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