'Best of TBH Politoons'
PURPLE GENE'S
PORTA-POTTY POETRY
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Frank Greve: "The new key question: How happy are you? (McClatchy Newspapers)
WASHINGTON - Is it time to offer day care for ailing older parents to give their care-giving children a break? Time for much bigger incentives for carpooling? Time to extend maternity and paternity leave substantially?
Mark Morford: Black Friday Die Die Die (sfgate.com)
America's most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!
Bill Press: The Death Of The Religious Right (Tribune Media Services)
No matter who becomes the next president of the United States, the American people have already won a great victory - with the total disintegration of the once all-powerful religious right.
Garrison Keillor: MERRILY WE SAIL ALONG OVER THE DEEP BLUE SEA (Tribune Media Services)
The sudden rise of Mike Huckabee in the Republican jousts is a cool plot turn, one that makes you lean forward and turn up the sound. ... You watch him field questions for a few minutes and the man's appeal is pretty clear. He comes off as a real person, not a caricature: he sounds like a guy talking to you, not a stiff with a set of applause lines.
Jim Hightower: BUSH'S HOLLOW SUPPORT FOR VETERANS (jimhightower.com)
Once again, George W has done a little tap dance on the heads of American veterans.
Norman Solomon: How the Media Fuel Class Warfare
Media outlets aren't just giving short shrift to organized labor. The avoidance extends to unorganized labor, too.
REX REED: Review of "Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis" by Ed Sikov (scotsman.com)
THE LAST TIME I SAW BETTE DAVIS, she was in her dotage, the painful ravages of cancer and a paralysing stroke cruelly evident. We had tea in a Manhattan hotel room, and she admitted her two favourite words were "What's next?". Her days in front of a camera were gone, but with her flaring nostrils and incendiary nicotine butts, and still walking like an anchovy, she slashed the air with one parting shot: "You have not seen the end of Bette Davis!"
Len Righi: They Might Be Giants opt for something else (The Morning Call [Allentown, Pa.]; Posted on popmatters.com)
Another engaging oddity is "Contrecoup," written by Linnell at the request of Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The amusing saga of a man who is brain damaged on the romantic rebound contains three words lexicologist McKean considers imperiled - contrecoup, limerent and craniosophic.
Len Righi: Billy Joel revisits 'Allentown' (The Morning Call [Allentown, Pa.]; Posted on popmatters.com)
Billy Joel sounds shocked-shocked!-when he is told that Tuesday was the 25th anniversary of the release of "Allentown" as a single.
Beverly C. Lucey: I Was a Teen Aged Creep (irascibleprofessor.com)
Parents; you take a risk when you send your kids off to college, especially if your kids will be the first generation in your family to go. You might not recognize the person who comes back home.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and seasonal.
One of our neighbors, a union electrician for the Port of Long Beach, stopped by to ask if we needed any work
done.
He said that homeland security has put a major clamp on the port, insisting all cargo has to be inspected, and causing at least a 30-mile line of ships down the coast, past Newport, waiting to be offloaded.
This official clamp down has had the additional effect of slowing things in the port to the point that his hours have been cut from a 5-day week to a 1-day week.
Must be another front in the war on Christmas.
Canceled Over Strike
Democratic Debate
A televised debate set for next month among the Democratic presidential candidates will be canceled to avoid a potential conflict with striking Hollywood screenwriters, a source close to organizers said on Wednesday.
The decision by the Democratic National Committee came after several candidates said they would refuse to cross picket lines of the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike against major film and television studios since November 5.
A debate among eight Democrats running for the White House had been scheduled for December 10 at the CBS Television City studio in Los Angeles, where striking writers have been routinely picketing.
Democratic Debate
Support US Strike
European Writers
European film and TV writers demonstrated Wednesday in support of their striking U.S. colleagues.
Several dozen writers rallied in front of the headquarters of Britain's main union federation holding red-and-black placards saying: "We Support the Writers Guild of America."
Mark Burton, a British writer whose credits include "Madagascar" and "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," said the issue at stake was "how you pay creative artists in the digital world."
"Producers see an opportunity to seize more territory for themselves," said Burton, a WGA member whose American projects are on hold.
European Writers
Won't Attend Nobel Ceremony
Doris Lessing
British writer Doris Lessing will be unable to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in literature on Dec. 10 due to back problems, the Nobel Foundation said Wednesday.
Instead, the $1.5 million prize will be presented to the 87-year-old Lessing in London, it said.
Doris Lessing
Returns As Hook
Henry Winkler
Henry Winkler has returned to the UK to play Captain Hook in panto for a second year.
But he described the job as "the most gratifying and one of the most difficult jobs of my career".
He said: "Remember, if you do Broadway or the West End, you do eight performances a week.
"This is 12 performances a week. I literally watch my brain turn into cream cheese. You see it happen, about the ninth performance and then I'm good on toast. By the 12th (performance) I'm really a great spread."
Henry Winkler
Exceeds 1 Million Books
Digital Library
Nearly a decade ago, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project with an astonishingly lofty goal: Digitize the published works of humankind and make them freely available online.
The architects of the project said Tuesday they have surpassed their latest target, having scanned more than 1.5 million books - many of them in Chinese - and are continuing to scan thousands more daily.
"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," said Raj Reddy, a computer science and robotics professor at the university who spearheaded the project.
Digital Library
Sells For $18.5 Million
Faberge Egg
A rare enamel-and-gold Faberge egg that had been in the Rothschild banking family for more than a century sold for record-setting $18.5 million at auction Wednesday.
The sale of the translucent pink egg topped with a diamond-studded cockerel was a record for a Faberge work of art, Christie's auction house said.
Faberge created more than 50 eggs for Russia's imperial family, though not all survive.
The Rothschild Faberge Egg is one of no more than 12 such pieces known to have been made to imperial standards for private clients, Christie's said.
Faberge Egg
New Software Detects Web Interference
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.
The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.
"People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP," said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.
The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Kevin's Special Exemption
Tribune Co.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday he had proposed granting media group Tribune Co a temporary exemption from U.S. media ownership rules, removing an obstacle to a leveraged buy-out of the company.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (R-Rupert's Fluffer) said he proposed to the other FCC commissioners that the agency grant the waivers for a period of two years, or six months after the end of all litigation connected to the ownership rules.
Tribune Co.
Losing Ground On Literacy
4th-Graders
U.S. fourth-graders have lost ground in reading ability compared with kids around the world, according to results of a global reading test.
Test results released Wednesday showed U.S. students, who took the test last year, scored about the same as they did in 2001, the last time the test was given - despite an increased emphasis on reading under the No Child Left Behind law.
On the latest international exam, U.S. students posted a lower average score than students in Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy and Sweden, along with the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario.
In 2001, only three countries were ahead of the United States.
4th-Graders
Receives Gallic Honor
James Ivory
James Ivory has several ideas he would like to bring to the screen next, the filmmaker said Tuesday night before being honored with the Trophee des Arts at a black-tie dinner gala.
The Trophee des Arts pays tribute to artists who have promoted a better understanding between the French and American peoples.
The annual awards gala raises funds for cultural and educational programs of the French Institute Alliance Francaise. Last year's honoree was Charlie Rose.
James Ivory
2-Day Auction
Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne and her rock star husband Ozzy are selling some 600 items from their former Beverly Hills mansion in a two-day auction starting on Friday in hopes of de-cluttering their lives and possibly pocketing $1 million.
Almost all the pieces are from the British-born couple's Beverly Hills home, featured in the MTV reality show, "The Osbournes." Sharon and Black Sabbath heavy metal front man Ozzy, who married 25 years ago, moved out in July.
The auction is planned for Friday and Saturday at the Gibson Guitar Showroom in Beverly Hills.
Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne
Opens To Public
Nazi Archive
After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in Germany were unsealed Wednesday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past.
The files entrusted to the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been used until now to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.
Inquiries were handled by the archive's 400 staff members in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen. Few outsiders were allowed to see the actual documents, which number more than 50 million pages and cover 16 linear miles of gray metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders spread over six buildings.
Nazi Archive
Fighting A Landmark
Charles Bukowski
The hard-drinking, foul-mouthed writer Charles Bukowski once described himself as a guy who wouldn't walk away from a brawl.
Now it's up to fans of the gutter poet to take up the fight to have his beaten-down bungalow turned into a civic monument over the objections of the property's owners, who claim he was a Nazi sympathizer.
"The great books that really started him on his career - that all happened on De Longpre," said Neeli Cherkovski, author of "Bukowski: A Life" and a friend of the writer. "It was where Charles Bukowski became the voice of Los Angeles."
But the owners, who tried to sell the bungalow court as tear-down for $1.3 million, are poised to fight the proposal before a city commission Thursday based on allegations that Bukowski had Nazi leanings.
Charles Bukowski
What Climate Change
Chikungunya Fever
An outbreak in Europe of an obscure disease from Africa is raising concerns that globalization and climate change are combining to pose a health threat to the West.
Nearly 300 cases of chikungunya fever, a virus that previously has been common only in Africa and Asia, were reported in Italy - where only isolated cases of the disease had been seen in the past.
While the outbreak was largely the result of stronger trade and travel ties, some experts believe it is a sign of how global warming is creating new breeding grounds for diseases long confined to subtropical climates.
"This outbreak is most important as a warning signal," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a climate change expert at the World Health Organization. "Climate change affects the breeding of every mosquito on earth."
Chikungunya Fever
Hidden Dangers
Porn Sites
Online pornography hunters' Internet adventures are already fraught with danger from malicious code many porn sites use to commandeer visitors' machines or steal personal data.
Now comes a scheme some researchers say amounts to extortion: One site's threat to disable visitors' computers with relentless pop-up ads if they don't pay for a subscription they were automatically signed up for after a free trial.
The threats, reported this week by researchers at security vendor McAfee Inc.'s Avert Labs, affect people who visit the Web site and download software to access a free three-day trial membership.
Visitors do get free access for three days, but the download includes code that then generates a stream of pop-up windows, when the user is online and offline, demanding payment of roughly $80 for 90 days' worth of additional access.
Porn Sites
Prime Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for Nov. 19-25. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
1. "Dancing with the Stars" (Monday), ABC, 22.85 million viewers.
2. NBC Sunday Night Football (Philadelphia Eagles at New England Patriots), NBC, 21.81 million viewers.
3. "Dancing with the Stars" (Tuesday), ABC, 20.96 million viewers.
4. "Desperate Housewives," ABC, 18.64 million viewers.
5. "NCIS," CBS, 17.34 million viewers.
6. "House," Fox, 16.89 million viewers.
7. "60 Minutes," CBS, 16.13 million viewers.
8. "Criminal Minds," CBS, 15.88 million viewers.
9. "CSI: Miami," CBS, 15.83 million viewers.
10. "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," ABC, 15.03 million viewers.
11. "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 14.75 million viewers.
12. "CSI: NY," CBS, 14.56 million viewers.
13. "Samantha Who?" ABC, 14.38 million viewers.
14. "Grey's Anatomy" (Thursday), ABC, 14.11 million viewers.
15. "Two and a Half Men," CBS, 13.91 million viewers.
16. "Cold Case," CBS, 12.98 million viewers.
17. "Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick," NBC, 12.91 million viewers.
18. "Bachelor: After the Final Rose," ABC, 12.30 million viewers.
19. "Brothers and Sisters," ABC, 12.25 million viewers.
20. "Without a Trace," CBS, 12.21 million viewers.
Ratings
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