Recommended Reading
from Bruce
2012 Presidential Election: Volunteer for Barack Obama's Campaign (YouTube)
You should be with us in 2012, join now: ?http://my.barackobama.com/threeyearvid
Michael Moran: The Reckoning Begins (Slate)
Thanks to a catastrophic series of decisions by presidents of both parties that radically deregulated our financial system and arrogantly dismissed the "lessons of Vietnam" as dusty, irrelevant history, the United States has shortened the period during which it will remain the dominant power in the 21st century.
Mark Morford: Don't Homophobes Don't Google (SF Gate)
Woe to you, oh modern card-carrying homophobe. For it can't be easy to be you right now, what with all the terrifying changes taking place, all the dramatic sexual upheavals and flagrant displays of "unnatural" love being hurled like exotic sushi in your plain hamburger face these days. Oh, you poor dear.
Froma Harrop: Andy Rooney was Really Real (Creators Syndicate)
It was odd becoming a personal friend of Andy Rooney so late in his life and so far into my own. I'd seen him on "60 Minutes" for all 33 years, first while sitting on the rug in my parents' house. Through one of Andy's close friends and neighbors, I actually got to know him 10 years ago. To answer the question, "Was Andy really like that?" I say, "Yes, totally."
Decca Aitkenhead: "Johnny Depp: 'I'm not ready to give up my American citizenship'" (Guardian)
The 'Rum Diary' star on his love of Europe, flying by private jet and why he can't stop smoking.
Patrick Goldstein: "Clint Eastwood talks politics: Who's the Democrat he voted for?" (LA Times)
Hollywood may be a town of la-la-liberals, but when it comes to individual careers, it's a business with a nakedly conservative embrace of free-market principles. The hit makers are the toast of the town. The flopmeisters can't get anyone to return their calls. Eastwood had his biggest hit ever as a filmmaker with 2008's "Gran Torino." But his last two films, "Invictus" and "Hereafter," were disappointments. So if "J. Edgar" is a stiff, Eastwood will be skating on thin ice.
Margaret Wappler: It's 'Crazy Clown Time' with David Lynch (LA Times)
The iconic director, whose debut solo album is out this week, talks jamming, electric music, working with Karen O, drinking beer and the origin of that 'Crazy' title.
5. Science Fiction / Double Feature 2011.10.31 - Craig Ferguson (YouTube)
How's this for a collaboration-Neil Gaiman, his wife and member of the Dresden Dolls Amanda Palmer, electronic guru Moby and Stephin Merritt from The Magnetic Fields stop by the Late Late Show and played Science Fiction Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show!
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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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
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Bad Reporter
Hi Marty.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny but cool.
A big happy birthday to my favorite Seattle blogger!
Quits Oscars
Eddie Murphy
Eddie Murphy has bowed out of his gig as host of the Academy Awards, following pal Brett Ratner's decision to leave the show as producer because of an uproar over a gay slur.
The news of Murphy's departure came Wednesday, a day after Ratner quit as producer of the Feb. 26 show.
Ratner left amid criticism of his use of a pejorative term for gay men in a question-and-answer session at a screening of his action comedy "Tower Heist," which opened last weekend and stars Murphy and Ben Stiller.
Eddie Murphy
Newest Academy Awards Producer
Brian Grazer
Brian Grazer has stepped onto the Academy Awards merry-go-round.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday that the veteran producer has signed on to produce next year's Oscar show after previously named producer Brett Ratner abruptly resigned.
Ratner departed the show Tuesday following uproar over a gay slur, and the host he chose, Eddie Murphy, resigned earlier Wednesday.
Academy president Tom Sherak said Grazer will join co-producer Don Mischer, who was named producer alongside Ratner in August.
Brian Grazer
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Morgan Freeman
Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman is taking home a new prize - a lifetime-achievement honor at the Golden Globes.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Wednesday that Freeman will receive the group's Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 69th annual Globes ceremony on Jan. 15.
The 74-year-old Freeman is a five-time Oscar nominee who won the supporting-actor prize for 2004's "Million Dollar Baby." Freeman's Oscar nominations include best actor for 1989's "Driving Miss Daisy," for which he won a Golden Globe.
Freeman made his big-screen debut as an extra in 1965's "The Pawnbroker," and his film work remained modest over the next two decades.
Morgan Freeman
Letter Sells At Auction
Harper Lee
A letter signed by Alabama author Harper Lee regarding her award-winning book "To Kill a Mocking Bird" has been sold at auction for $9,518.
Nate D. Sanders Auctions of Los Angeles says the typed letter was sold Tuesday.
In the letter, Lee responds to a fan who asked where the book's Maycomb County is located. She tells the fan that the county is in her heart.
The letter was written in 1960 and includes a hand-drawn outline of Alabama with Maycomb County written across the north central part of the state.
Harper Lee
Star On Hollywood Walk O' Fame
Shakira
Singer Shakira became the first Colombian artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday, joining Latin stars Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera on the famed street.
"I would like to dedicate this to the Latin community in the U.S., a community that restlessly works and dreams and dreams and works everyday to make this a better country," said the singer to fans gathered on the iconic Hollywood Blvd. sidewalk to see the singer unveil her star.
Shakira, 34, rose to fame in Latin America in the 1990s with her album "Pies Descalzos" and singles such as "Donde Estas Corazon" and "Estoy Aqui." Her second official album, "Donde Estan Los Ladrones?" garnered international success with singles such as "No Creo" and the Arab-inspired "Ojos Asi."
The singer has won two Grammys and was nominated for her collaborations with Beyonce on the single "Beautiful Liar" and Wyclef Jean on "Hips Don't Lie."
Shakira
Returning To New York City
"Comedy Awards"
Comedy elite like David Letterman, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Will Ferrell, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Louis C.K. turned out for last year's inaugural Comedy Central "Comedy Awards," and the network has announced the show will return to New York in 2012.
The second annual "Comedy Awards" show will tape at the Hammerstein Ballroom on April 28, and debut on the network on May 6.
Nominees for the awards will be selected by the awards' board of directors -- which includes Chris Rock, James Burrows, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Colbert, Stewart, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Conan O'Brien and Ray Romano.
Winners will be voted on by 1,500 members of the "comedy community," which includes performers, writers, directors, producers and comedians, while fans will nominate and cast votes for online-only awards categories.
"Comedy Awards"
Hospital News
Zsa Zsa
Zsa Zsa Gabor has been rushed to a Los Angeles hospital after another health scare.
Publicist John Blanchette says the 94-year-old actress was taken by ambulance to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on Wednesday after her feeding tube became loose. Blanchette says Gabor's husband Frederic von Anhalt noticed bleeding in her stomach where the tube came unattached
Gabor has been hospitalized repeatedly since falling out of bed and breaking her hip in July 2010. She had a leg amputated in January.
Zsa Zsa
Cop Admits Bribes
Rupert
former British police officer says he was paid by News of the World to spy on 90 people, including Prince William, over an eight-year period.
The officer, Derek Webb, told the BBC that he began working for the News International-owned tabloid in 2003 as a private detective. Webb said he did surveillance for the paper until July, when the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal exploded.
I was working for them extensively on many jobs throughout that time," Webb said. "I never knew when I was going to be required. They [would] phone me up by the day or by the night … it could be anywhere in the country." The surveillance assignments were made by "several NOTW journalists, Webb said.
Among Webb's targets: Prince William, Prince Harry's ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy, former British attorney general Lord Goldsmith and the parents of "Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe.
According to London's Guardian, Webb was also paid "to run covert surveillance on two lawyers representing phone-hacking victims in an operation to pressure them to stop their work."
Rupert
Credibility Fading
Rupert, Jr.
Contradicted by key former executives and challenged by his company's ex-lawyers, James Murdoch is expected back for a second grilling in Britain's Parliament Thursday over the phone hacking scandal that has shaken his father's media empire.
Although the senior News Corp. executive has long insisted he knew nothing of the culture of criminality whose exposure has been called "Britain's Watergate," mounting evidence suggests otherwise and one observer who follows the phone hacking scandal said Murdoch would be likely to have to make some kind of concession.
James Murdoch has repeatedly insisted that he was blind-sided by the scandal at what was once his company's most powerful tabloid.
Revelations that journalists routinely intercepted the voicemails of public figures, including celebrities, politicians, police, and even crime victims sent shock waves across the British establishment, forcing the closure of the News of the World and scuttling its parent company's multibillion pound (dollar) bid for full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
Murdoch's company had long insisted that the practice had been limited to a single rogue journalist, royal editor Clive Goodman, who had been jailed for phone hacking several years earlier. But in dramatic testimony to parliamentarians on July 19, Murdoch acknowledged that had never been true.
Rupert, Jr.
Ads Banned
Dakota Fanning
Britain's Advertising Standards Authority has banned a magazine advertisement for a fragrance featuring teenage actress Dakota Fanning because it "could be seen to sexualize a child.
The ASA's ruling means the campaign cannot appear in publications again in its current form.
"We understood the model was 17 years-old but we considered she looked under the age of 16," the ASA said in a ruling published on its website Wednesday. "We considered that the length of her dress, her leg and position of the perfume bottle drew attention to her sexuality," it added.
The advertisement, which appeared in glossy magazines ES Magazine and the Sunday Times Style magazine, was for fashion designer Marc Jacobs' "Oh, Lola!" fragrance, which is produced and distributed by Coty UK.
Dakota Fanning
Another Auction
Michael Jackson
After Michael Jackson's death on June 25, 2009, the gated mansion at 100 North Carolwood Drive where the pop star lived with his three children while preparing for his comeback concerts became part media camp, part Jackson tribute ground.
Hundreds of tearful fans left cards, flowers, balloons and handwritten notes in front of the three-story home resembling a French chateau, while dozens of reporters jumped at any development in the death investigation. Anyone coming in or out of the property was bombarded with questions.
Now, as Dr. Conrad Murray sits in a jail cell awaiting sentencing for involuntary manslaughter in Jackson's death, the contents of the home - including the queen-size bed where Jackson took his last breath - sit neatly on display, just as they were, awaiting the auction block.
"We want to preserve the history of these items," said celebrity auctioneer Darren Julien, president of Julien's Auctions, which next month will sell the various antique furnishings, paintings and sculptures that surrounded the King of Pop in his final days.
Located on a leafy corner in the posh Holmby Hills neighborhood, the Carolwood home where Jackson lived from December 2008 until his death is separately up for sale. The house and its furnishings were leased to Jackson while he and his family lived there.
Michael Jackson
Sales Rise For Novel Pulled By Publisher
"Assassin of Secrets"
Here's an unusual way to boost sales: Have the publisher withdraw a novel because it contained passages lifted from other authors.
A day after Q.R. Markham's "Assassin of Secrets" was pulled by Little, Brown and Company, readers are apparently hurrying to snap up remaining copies. The book's ranking jumped on Amazon.com from 62,924 on Tuesday afternoon to 174 on Wednesday afternoon, making it the online retailer's No. 2 "Mover & Shaker."
The book was released Nov. 3 with an initial printing of 6,500, but within days Little, Brown learned that Markham had lifted material from James Bond novels and numerous other sources. A planned second book from Markham also has been cancelled.
Markham's real name is Quentin Rowan, a 35-year-old resident of Brooklyn and an investor in the Brooklyn-based Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers.
"Assassin of Secrets"
Special Rate For Taxpayers
$800,000
McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg reports that the U.S. government detention center in Guantanamo Bay is arguably the priciest prison in the world, with taxpayers shelling out $800,000 per year for each prisoner housed there . There's still no plan in place to close the prison, which still contains 171 detainees.
More than 600 previous Gitmo detainees have been transfered to other countries since the center opened in 2002.
$800,000
NYC Exhibition
Brooklyn Museum
A major exhibition focusing on gay-themed art that includes a film of ants crawling on a crucifix opens next week at the Brooklyn Museum, an institution known for presenting edgy and bold artworks that in the past included a painting of the Virgin Mary that incorporated elephant dung.
"A Fire in My Belly" is a film by the late David Wojnarowicz that was pulled from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., when the exhibition was shown there last year. The ant scene angered some in Congress and the Catholic League called the work sacrilegious.
It is one of more than 100 pieces in "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," the first major museum exhibition to explore how gender and sexual identity have shaped American art.
Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman said Wednesday that the museum wanted to present the exhibition "clearly because it's such an important aspect of American art in the 20th century."
Brooklyn Museum
In Memory
Bil Keane
Bil Keane's "Family Circus" comics entertained readers with a simple but sublime mix of humor and traditional family values for more than a half century. The appeal endured, the author thought, because the American public needed the consistency.
Keane, who started drawing the one-panel cartoon featuring Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their parents in February 1960, died Tuesday at age 89 at his longtime home in Paradise Valley, near Phoenix. His comic strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers across the country.
Jeff Keane, Keane's son who lives in Laguna Hills, Calif., said that his father died of congestive heart failure with one of his other sons by his side after his conditioned worsened during the last month. All of Keane's five children, nine grandchildren and great-granddaughter were able to visit him last week, Jeff Keane said.
Jeff Keane has been drawing "Family Circus" in the last few years as his father enjoyed retirement.
Although Keane kept the strip current with references to pop culture movies and songs, the context of his comic was timeless. The ghost-like "Ida Know" and "Not Me" who deferred blame for household accidents were staples of the strip. The family's pets were dogs Barfy and Sam, and the cat, Kittycat.
"We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment," Keane said. "On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can't tell what you're going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family."
Even with his traditional motif, Keane appreciated younger cartoonists' efforts. He listed Gary Larson's "The Far Side" among his favorites, and he loved it when Bill Griffith had his offbeat "Zippy the Pinhead" character wake up from a bump on the head thinking he was Keane's Jeffy.
Keane responded by giving Zippy an appearance in "Family Circus."
Born in 1922, Keane taught himself to draw in high school in his native Philadelphia. Around this time, young Bill dropped the second "L'' off his name "just to be different."
He worked as a messenger for the Philadelphia Bulletin before serving three years in the Army, where he drew for "Yank" and "Pacific Stars and Stripes." He met his wife, Thelma ("Thel"), while serving at a desk job in Australia.
He started a one-panel comic in 1953 called "Channel Chuckles" that lampooned the up-and-coming medium of television. (In one, a mom in front of a television, crying baby on her lap, tells her husband: "She slept through two gun fights and a barroom brawl - then the commercial woke her up.")
He moved to Arizona in 1958 and two years later started a comic about a family much like his own. Keane and his wife had a daughter, Gayle, and sons Glen, Jeff, Chris and Neal - one more son than in his cartoon family.
Thelma Keane died of Alzheimer's disease in 2008 and was the inspiration for the Mommy character in the comic strip.
Bil Keane
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