Recommended Reading
from Bruce
When Did You Choose to Be Straight? (YouTube)
A 3-minute YouTube video.
Slideshow: The Funniest Notes To Bad Parkers Ever Written (Huffington Post)
Most of us have been there: you're trying to enter or leave a parking space and can't because of someone else's terrible parking job. Who do these people think they are? Taking up two spaces or jutting your car out into the street just tells the world you don't know what you're doing. Obviously, the best way to handle this is with a passive (or not so passive) aggressive note on the offender's car.
Mark Morford: I am Now Going to Touch Your Junk (San Francisco Gate)
Sweet Jesus, we should have thought of this ages ago. Why didn't we think of this ages ago?
Froma Harrop: The Hard Work of a Downtown Christmas (Creators Syndicate)
NEW YORK CITY - Friday night in the big city, I'm bopping along Fifth Avenue with my brother, and the place is one huge construction site. But this evening's industriousness differs from the usual after-hours midtown work. Guys aren't pouring new cement, climbing out of sewer manholes or replacing air-conditioning systems. They're not unloading truckloads of girders or elevator parts.
Jim Hightower: RADIATING, HARASSING AND MOLESTING FLYERS
Hmmm. Here's a headline that us frequent fliers are not happy to see: "Pilots urged to avoid body scanning."
Jim Hightower: MEET YOUR NEW NEIGHBORHOOD FOOD MARKET
The signature phrase of America's booming good food movement has been expanded from "organic" to "local and sustainable."
Jim Hightower: CORPORATE FLIMFLAMMERS SUCKERING CONGRESS, AGAIN
If you google Google, you might learn that this internet powerhouse once proudly promised to do no evil.
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF: A Hedge Fund Republic? (New York Times)
I'm appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don't care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.
STANLEY FISH: "College Costs, the Sequel" (New York Times)
A follow-up to the column on college costs, from the two authors whose book was discussed last week.
Jessica Olien: Going Dutch (Slate)
Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it.
Julia M. Klein: Paul Rusesabagina (Mother Jones; from 2006)
In the midst of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, when machete-wielding Hutu extremists murdered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days, Paul Rusesabagina turned the hotel he managed in Kigali, the country's capital, into an oasis of safety. His actions, which saved the lives of 1,268 refugees, inspired the 2004 film 'Hotel Rwanda,' in which he was memorably portrayed by Oscar nominee Don Cheadle. But in his recently released memoir, 'An Ordinary Man,' Rusesabagina rebuffs suggestions that he was a hero, saying he was just doing his job.
"An Excerpt From 'On Stieg Larsson'." Larsson-Norstedt's e-mail exchange translated by Laurie Thompson (Wall Street Journal)
Previously unpublished emails show how the author of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" set out to defy the conventions of crime novels.
David Bruce has 39 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $39 you can buy 9,750 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
The Weekly Poll
New Question
And now, in keeping with the Holiday Season theme, I submit fer yer approval...
The 'Scope or Grope' Edition
"Resistance is Futile"
If you don't want to pass through an airport scanner that allows security agents to see an image of your naked body or to undergo the alternative, a thorough manual search, you may have to find another way to travel this holiday season. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also will not be permitted to simply leave the airport. That person will have to remain on the premises to be questioned by the TSA and possibly by local law enforcement. Anyone refusing faces fines up to $11,000 and possible arrest... $11,000 fine, arrest possible for some who refuse airport scans and pat downs - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
If you were (or are) planning to travel this Holiday Season, what's it gonna be?
1.) Scope
2.) Grope
3.) Car, train, bus...
4.) I'm stayin' home, Dagnabbit!
Send your response to
wrote:
answered:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Suggestions
Michelle in AZ
BadtotheboneBob
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Parade rejects Mayflower kin
Lack of explanation riles historical organization
Detroit - You might think an organization featuring the descendants of Mayflower passengers might a natural fit in the 84th America's Thanksgiving Parade. That's precisely what the Society of Mayflower Descendants in Michigan thought. But come Thursday, after being rejected without explanation, the group won't be in the parade down Woodward Avenue.
"We thought this would be a perfect match for our organization," said June Gorman, governor and historian of the group with more than 500 Michigan members. "If it hadn't been for our ancestors, there wouldn't even be a Thanksgiving." ...
Thanksgiving Parade rejects Mayflower kin | detnews.com | The Detroit News
The Wampanoag's Revenge...
Um... June? Aren't you, like, forgetting something? (or somebody?) Isn't there the no small matter of those (much to their dismay as it worked out) who helped your ancestors survive? The Wampanoags? What about them? If it hadn't been for them, you probably wouldn't even be here. STFU, stay home and eat yer damn'd turkey and think about them, would ya now? That's what you really should be thankful for, dagnabbit... Jeesh...
BadtotheboneBob
Thanks, B2tbBob!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and cold (for these parts).
2 Million In First Week
Beatles
The Beatles sold more than two million individual songs and more than 450,000 albums worldwide in their first week of release on Apple's iTunes store, Apple said on Tuesday.
Of the catalog of 13 Beatles studio albums released last week, "Abbey Road" was the top-selling digital album in the U.S. at the iTunes store, landing at No. 6 overall for the week ending Nov 22. "The Beatles Box Set" was No. 10 on the iTunes U.S. album charts for the week.
"Here Comes the Sun" was the best-selling Beatles digital single but did not place in the top 10 for the week, Apple said.
The Beatles catalog was released on iTunes, the world's No.1 digital music retailer, for the first time on November 16, ending years of negotiations between Apple founder Steve Jobs, the Beatles management company and record label EMI.
Beatles
Letters Releases
Saul Bellow
Like the first line of a novel, the idea for a letter could occur to Saul Bellow at any time. The words might have come on a daily walk or during a drive to the grocery store. Perhaps he had just finished a bath, a bubble bath, or awakened in the night.
Bellow, who died in 2005 at age 89, wrote thousands of letters - some in longhand, some typed and single-spaced, and some dictated to his wife and others. "Saul Bellow: Letters" has just been released, roughly 40 percent of a correspondence covering more than 70 years, with friends and opponents on the receiving end including boyhood pals, wives and ex-wives, and writers from Bernard Malamud and John Cheever to Martin Amis and Philip Roth.
In a 1981 letter to Cheever, Bellow praises his fellow artist for showing on the page how he had changed through the act of writing, adding that "nothing counts higher" than "this transforming action of the soul." Bellow himself was a study in progress in his letters, from an impulsive teenager to struggling young writer, hurried middle-aged man and elderly sage, skeptic and literary father figure, to Roth and Amis among others.
Bellow's letters were clearly from the creator of "Herzog," "The Adventures of Augie March" and other novels: critical and self-critical, cerebral and emotional, with a redeeming sense of humor ("to return to sanity in the form of laughter"), an impatience for nonsense and a resigned, poetic eye on mortality. Insisting he was no good at letters, then demonstrating the opposite, he revealed a mind in debate with itself.
Saul Bellow
New Theatre
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company opened its new theatre in the playwright's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday, unveiling the results of a 112-million-pound, three-and-a-half-year revamp to mixed reviews.
The highlight is a 1,040-seat auditorium with a new "thrust" stage, which will be surrounded by the audience on three sides and is intended to be closer to the theatres common in the Bard's time around 400 years ago.
The project cost 112.8 million pounds (178 million dollars, 134 million euros) and includes a new 36-metre (119-foot) viewing tower, a rooftop restaurant and a foyer linking the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to the Swan Theatre next door.
The new stage addresses a problem that has dogged directors since the previous theatre in the central English town was built in 1932, where some members of the audience were up to 27 metres away from the action.
Royal Shakespeare Company
Wins Spain's Cervantes Prize
Ana Maria Matute
Spanish author Ana Maria Matute has won Spain's 2010 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary honor, the Culture Ministry said Wednesday.
Matute, 85, is ranked as one of the country's best post-Civil War writers. Her work often centers on that conflict, which took place from 1936-39.
Among her most popular novels are "Los Abel" (The Abels), "Los Soldados Lloran de Noche" (Soldiers Cry By Night), "La Trampa" (The Trap), which portray the era and atmosphere during the Spanish Civil War.
Known for her lyrical style, Matute's novels deal with the lives of children and adolescents, highlighting with sadness such feelings as betrayal and isolation.
Ana Maria Matute
Hospital News
Billy Joel
Billy Joel is recovering from double hip-replacement surgery.
Joel spokeswoman Claire Mercuri told People magazine Wednesday that the 61-year-old pop star had both hips replaced last week to correct a congenital condition.
She says Joel, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer responsible for such hits as "Piano Man," "Uptown Girl" and "New York State of Mind," is "doing extremely well."
Billy Joel
Baby News
Benjamin Travolta
John Travolta and Kelly Preston will have a new guest at their Thanksgiving table.
A publicist says the couple welcomed a baby boy Tuesday in Florida. They named their new son Benjamin.
Spokeswoman Samantha Mast said in a statement late Tuesday that the couple and their daughter, Ella Bleu, "are ecstatic and very happy about the newest member of the family." The statement says Preston and baby Benjamin "are healthy and doing beautifully."
Benjamin Travolta
Settles Dispute
Gawker
Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's (R-Quitter) publisher, HarperCollins, and a U.S. news and gossip website have reached a settlement after it posted excerpts of her new book before the planned release.
A Manhattan federal judge had ordered Gawker Media's website www.gawker.com to remove 21 pages it had posted online from Palin's second book "America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag," released on Tuesday.
HarperCollins, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, had sued seeking unspecified damages, according to court documents.
"In settling the case, Gawker has agreed to keep the posted material off its website and not to post the material again in the future," HarperCollins spokeswoman Erin Crum said in a statement.
Gawker
Seeks Bail For Appeal
Wesley Snipes
Actor Wesley Snipes is asking a federal judge to allow him to remain free on bail while he pursues a second appeal of his three convictions of willful failure to file income tax returns and his three-year prison term.
U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges on Wednesday ordered prosecutors to respond to Snipes' motion by next Tuesday.
Snipes' bail was revoked last week by Hodges, who ordered Snipes to go to prison to begin serving his sentence because Snipes had lost his appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal.
In the new motion for bail, Snipes' lawyers wrote that they are preparing a fresh appeal of his convictions and sentence to the U.S. Supreme Court. They argue Snipes has a legal right to bail while his appeals continue.
Wesley Snipes
No Alternative But To Sue
Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody says he was reluctantly forced to sue the makers of a thriller film because they failed to pay his full salary.
U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer on Monday blocked the sale or use of Brody's likeness in "Giallo" until the Oscar winner's remaining salary is paid. The judge noted in her ruling that the actor was likely to prevail in his $2 million lawsuit against the filmmakers.
The actor sued Hannibal Pictures and U.K.-based Giallo Productions Ltd. in October, shortly before "Giallo" went on sale in the United States. In a sworn declaration, Brody claimed the filmmakers lied to him about the movie's financing and how much its Italian distribution rights were worth.
Brody said he was grateful for the ruling.
Adrien Brody
Earnings Leak
Disney
The Walt Disney Co.'s early release of its earnings report this month came down to a Dumbo move: The company made the information accessible through an easy-to-guess Web address.
Disney didn't plan on posting the link on its website until after the market closed. But a reporter at Bloomberg News found it with simple Internet sleuthing and reported results about a half-hour before the scheduled release, according to a person familiar with Bloomberg's practices. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The error is using security by obscurity, as they say, which means hiding the data instead of really securing it," said Michael Cote, a software industry analyst with technology research firm RedMonk. "It's like putting your valuables under the bed instead of in a safe."
Six days after Disney's Nov. 11 gaffe, the same set of Bloomberg headline writers in New York pulled a similar trick on data storage company NetApp Inc. and reported the financial results more than an hour before the market closed, when earnings are typically released.
Disney
Color-Code On Track To Disappear
Terror Warnings
Goodbye danger defined as yellow, orange and red. The Homeland Security Department is looking to scrap the five-tiered color-coded terror warning system in favor of a streamlined one with as few as two alerts. The post-9/11, Bush-era system has been criticized as too vague to be useful in communicating the terror threat to the public, either ignored or the butt of jokes.
One option under consideration is to go to two threat levels instead of five: elevated and imminent. When the threat level would change to imminent under the new model, government officials would be expected to be as specific as possible in describing the threat without jeopardizing national security. And an imminent threat would not last longer than a week, meaning the public wouldn't see a consistently high and ambiguous threat level.
The 8-year-old alert system, with its rainbow of colors - from green, signifying a low threat, to red, meaning severe - has become a fixture in airports, government buildings and on newscasts.
Over the past four years, millions of travelers have begun and ended their trips to the sound of airport recordings warning that the threat level was orange, an alert that has become so routine that many now simply tune it out. This could be the last holiday season they hear the monotonous message.
Terror Warnings
Getting Hotter
World's Lakes
A first-of-its-kind NASA study is finding nice cool lakes are heating up - even faster than air.
Two NASA scientists used satellite data to look at 104 large inland lakes around the world and found that on average they have warmed 2 degrees (1.1 degree Celsius) since 1985. That's about two-and-a-half times the increase in global temperatures in the same time period.
Russia's Lake Ladoga and America's Lake Tahoe are warming significantly and the most, said study co-author Simon Hook, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. Tahoe has heated up by 3 degrees (1.7 degrees Celsius) since 1985, while Ladoga has been even hotter, going up by 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius).
Hook and his colleague used several satellites and looked at thermal infrared images of the lakes in winter and summer. They also confirmed the numbers by comparing them to buoy data.
World's Lakes
Cable Nielsens
Ratings
Rankings for the top 15 programs on cable networks as compiled by the Nielsen Co. for the week of Nov. 15-21. Day and start time (EST) are in parentheses:
1. NFL Football: Philadelphia vs. Washington (Monday, 8:30 p.m.), ESPN, 10.81 million homes, 15.03 million viewers.
2. Auto Racing: NASCAR Sprint Cup, Miami (Sunday, 1 p.m.), ESPN, 3.85 million homes, 5.6 million viewers.
3. NFL Football: Chicago vs. Miami (Thursday, 8:30 p.m.), NFL Network, 3.82 million homes, 5.41 million viewers.
4. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.4 million homes, 4.97 million viewers.
5. Movie: "ICarly Movie: iStart a Fan War" (Friday, 8 p.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.278 million homes, 5.02 million viewers.
6. Movie: "ICarly Movie: iStart a Fan War" (Saturday, 8 p.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.273 million homes, 4.94 million viewers.
7. College Football: Wisconsin vs. Michigan (Saturday, 12:01 p.m.), ESPN, 3.272 million homes, 4.01 million viewers.
8. "WWE Entertainment" (Monday, 10 p.m.), USA, 3.22 million homes, 4.65 million viewers.
9. "WWE Entertainment" (Monday, 9 p.m.), USA, 3.2 million homes, 4.86 million viewers.
10. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.11 million homes, 4.32 million viewers.
11. "Walking Dead" (Sunday, 10 p.m.), AMC, 3.09 million homes, 4.75 million viewers.
12. Movie: "Hannah Montana: The Movie" (Friday, 7 p.m.), Disney, 2.96 million homes, 4.59 million viewers.
13. Movie: "ICarly Movie: Go to Japan" (Tuesday, 6:30 p.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.94 million homes, 4.11 million viewers.
14. "The O'Reilly Factor" (Tuesday, 8 p.m.), Fox News Channel, 2.88 million homes, 3.73 million viewers.
15. "Monday Night Countdown" (Monday, 7 p.m.), ESPN, 2.85 million homes, 3.59 million viewers.
Ratings
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