'Best of TBH Politoons'
PURPLE GENE'S
PORTA-POTTY POETRY
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Poor Elijah (Peter Berger): Stuck on the Cutting Edge (irascibleprofessor.com)
I've never been a disciple of technology. For me cell phones are multifunctional, multicolor devices that empower millions of us with little worth saying to interrupt other millions of us who ought to have something better to do. I don't want my car to talk to me, I don't want General Motors to know my latitude and longitude, and I don't need a pocket-size liquid crystal New York Times or instant access to thirty-second videos of skateboarding dogs.
Jim Hightower: UNFRIENDLY SKIES (jimhightower.com)
Travel in some primitive parts of the world is a nightmare - passengers are treated like livestock, service is surly, rules are ridiculous, delays are common, and the whole experience is dreadful. Luckily, here in sophisticated America, we have modern airlines - on which passengers are treated like livestock, service is surly, rules are ridiculous, delays are common, and the whole experience is dreadful.
Carlin Romano: History of 'heresy' as artistic triumph (The Philadelphia Inquirer; Posted on Popmatters.com)
"And then he said, which, I guess, was very clever on his part: `You're the only person in the world who could do this!' So I resisted for a while, but then I thought, `What the hell? Why not?'"
FROMA HARROP: The Wizardry of Department Store Windows (creators.com)
A minor mystery of American culture has been the public's enduring fascination with department store windows, especially at holiday time. Though computer-generated images can whoosh us to exotic vistas from the comfort of our laptops, we still line up at the giant glass panes to see dolls creaking their heads as they celebrate Christmas in Edwardian England. Virtual reality has yet to kill living theater, even when the actors are figurines.
SUSAN ESTRICH: Spears' Family Values (creators.com)
The news of little sister's pregnancy, which follows weeks of speculation that Britney, having done such a bang-up job with her oldest two, may again be pregnant, also included mention of the fact that Grandma (who might actually still be of childbearing years herself) has put her book on Christian parenting on hold.
Roger Moore: Tim Burton knew he was cut out to direct `Sweeney Todd' (The Orlando Sentinel; Posted on Popmatters.com)
You'd think you could get a rise out of Tim Burton by pigeon-holing the guy, telling him that the blood-spattered Stephen Sondheim musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" is the movie he was born to direct.
Kyle Buchanan: Bloody Good (advocate.com)
Theater queens can relax. Tim Burton's adaptation of Sondheim masterpiece Sweeney Todd is everything you hoped it would be.
David Benedict: The singalong-a-slasher (film.guardian.co.uk)
Tim Burton took the biggest gamble in his career when he adapted hit stage musical Sweeney Todd for the big screen. The award-winning film, released in the States last week, is already an Oscar frontrunner.
Boxing Day film review: I Am Legend (telegraph.co.uk)
It being Christmas time, our thoughts naturally turn to vengeance, destruction and bloody apocalypse.
Corey Scholibo: The Many Faces of Tori Amos (advocate.com)
Tori Amos closed her world tour in Los Angeles on Sunday night. Arts and entertainment editor Corey Scholibo was there to witness her evolution -- and in the process learn a little bit about his own.
Baron Dave Comments
Sharp-Eyed Sally
Nixon to Ford: "Pardon Me, boy, but I'm the chap who knew to choose you."
Sharp-Eyed Sally correctly spotted a conflation between Nixon and
Ford. Rocky was, indeed, Ford's VP. That whole time period is a bit
of a blur, with crooked presidents coming and going, and crooked VPs
resigning or dying in bed with their secretary. *whew*
TTFN,
Baron Dave
--
"Each day is a gift. But does it have to be a pair of socks?" -- Tony Soprano
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Beautiful sunny day followed by a cold, clear and very windy night.
To Launch Whale Research
Terri Irwin
The widow of TV "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin announced Thursday she will launch non-lethal research of whales in Antarctic waters next year in hopes of showing that Japan's scientific whale kill is a sham.
Tokyo has staunchly defended its annual cull of more than 1,000 whales as crucial for research, saying it is necessary to kill the whales to properly gather information about their eating, breeding and migratory habits.
Environmentalists and anti-whaling nations say the slaughter is commercial whaling in disguise, because much of the meat from the whales ends up being sold commercially.
"We are working with Oregon State University to do formalized research in the southern hemisphere," Terri Irwin told the Nine Network television. "We can actually learn everything the Japanese are learning with lethal research by using non-lethal research."
Terri Irwin
In The Mail
Oscar Ballots
Thousands of Oscar nomination ballots were mailed out Wednesday, heralding the official start of Academy Awards season.
U.S. Postal Service bins overflowed with ballots shipped to 5,829 academy members from the film academy's headquarters in Beverly Hills.
Accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers counted, sorted and numbered the ballots before the massive mail-out. Voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have until Jan. 12, 2008, to return the forms.
Nominees for the 80th annual Academy Awards will be announced Jan. 22. The awards will be presented Feb. 24 at the Kodak Theatre.
Oscar Ballots
ADL Defends
Will Smith
A Jewish group said Wednesday that it accepts Will Smith's explanation that he never praised Adolf Hitler in remarks the star says were misinterpreted.
"We welcome and accept Will Smith's statement that Hitler was a `vicious killer' and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise," Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement.
Smith "took immediate steps to clarify his words" and condemn Hitler, Foxman said.
Will Smith
Tops Product Placement Survey
Tyson Foods
Product placements by Tyson Foods on ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and by Sue Bee Honey and Soft Scrub cleanser on NBC's "The Apprentice: Los Angeles" topped a survey that measured the most effective integrations on television in 2007.
TV analysis firm IAG Research said Tyson's donation of thousands of pounds of meat to a needy family and their community improved viewer opinion of the brand nearly four times more than the average product placement. The Tyson placement measured a 394 on IAG's brand-opinion index; the base line is 100.
When "Apprentice" contestants were challenged to harvest, bottle and sell Sue Bee Honey in a supermarket in February, the integration scored a 368. And when contestants produced webisodes to advertise Soft Scrub a month later, the integration scored a 332.
While integrations generally are believed to be more effective when at least one commercial runs during the shows in which the placements appear, only six of the top 10 integrations aired together with spots.
Tyson Foods
NRA Hires PIs
Hurricane Katrina
The National Rifle Association has hired private investigators to find hundreds of people whose firearms were seized by city police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to court papers filed this week.
The NRA is trying to locate gun owners for a federal lawsuit that the lobbying group filed against Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley over the city's seizure of firearms after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.
The NRA says the city seized more than 1,000 guns that weren't part of any criminal investigation after the hurricane. Police have said they took only guns that had been stolen or found in abandoned homes.
NRA lawyer Daniel Holliday said investigators have identified about 300 of the gun owners and located about 75 of them. Some of them could be called to testify during a trial, he added.
Hurricane Katrina
Sony Cheaps Out
"Judge Hatchett"
"Judge Hatchett" has hung up her robe after eight seasons, but the court show will be back for an additional season with reruns grouped by theme, a spokeswoman for the series' syndicator said on Wednesday.
"Best of Judge Hatchett," presided over by Atlanta jurist Glenda Hatchett, will present weekly topics that could include celebrity interventions or creative sentencing.
A Sony Pictures Television spokeswoman said the show produced its last original episode in September. She declined to say why production ended, and was unable to provide ratings data because of the Christmas holiday.
The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news of the themed reruns, quoted an industry consultant as saying viewers probably would not notice any changes.
"Judge Hatchett"
Stole Phone Idea?
Alexander Graham Bell
A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime - that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell - aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner - got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.
Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999.
The notebook details the false starts Bell encountered as he and assistant Thomas Watson tried transmitting sound electromagnetically over a wire. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876 - when Bell went to Washington to sort out patent questions about his work - he suddenly began trying another kind of voice transmitter. That method was the one that proved successful.
Alexander Graham Bell
Stolen For Scrap
Bronze Sculptures
Police said 30 bronze sculptures were stolen from inside and outside of Joel Fisher's studio in North Troy last month, while Fisher was traveling out of the country.
Fisher, 60, whose art work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the Gallery Shimada in Yamaguchi, Japan, had estimated the sculptures' value at $1 million.
The big break in the case came when the owner of a Hinesburg scrap metal yard called police after seeing a newspaper report about the thefts with a photo of one of the sculptures.
Authorities recovered 23 sculptures weighing a total of about 3,000 pounds from the scrap yard, which paid more than $4,000 for them. Police said more sculptures sold for scrap were being returned from North Adams, Mass. Some of the sculptures weighed up to 800 pounds, Letourneau said.
Bronze Sculptures
Fortune Pledged To Charity
Barron Hilton
Hotel heiress Paris Hilton's potential inheritance dramatically diminished after her grandfather Barron Hilton announced plans on Wednesday to donate 97 percent of his $2.3 billion fortune to charity.
The money will be placed in a charitable trust that will eventually benefit the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, raising its total value to about $4.5 billion, the foundation said in a statement.
Jerry Oppenheimer, who profiled the Hilton family in his 2006 book "House of Hilton," has said Barron Hilton is embarrassed by the behavior of his socialite granddaughter Paris and believes it has sullied the family name.
The foundation supports projects that provide clean water in Africa, education for blind children, and housing for the mentally ill. Its aims, based on Conrad Hilton's will, are "to relieve the suffering, the distressed and the destitute."
Barron Hilton
In Memory
Jeanne Carmen
Jeanne Carmen, the "little country girl" who became a 1950s pinup and actress and hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra and other stars, has died. She was 77.
Born on Aug. 4, 1930, in Paragould, Ark., Carmen picked cotton with her family before running away at 13.
Carmen was still a teenager when she came to New York and, despite having no show business experience, immediately became a dancer in a Broadway show called "Burlesque," with comic Bert Lahr.
She later went into modeling, gaining a measure of success with a series of cheesecake shots in men's magazines. One gig turned into a new career as a trick golfer. On tour with golfer Jack Redmond, she would perform stunts such as hitting a ball out of a man's mouth.
She came to Hollywood while still in her 20s, where she appeared in low-budget movies with such titles as "Guns Don't Argue" and "The Monster of Piedras Blancas."
In addition to her son, Brandon James, Carmen is survived by daughters Melinda Belli and Kellee Jade Campo, and three grandchildren.
Jeanne Carmen
In Memory
Stu Nahan
Stu Nahan, a onetime minor-league hockey goalie who delivered sports reports on Los Angeles television and radio for decades, died Wednesday. He was 81.
In 1968, Nahan began doing nightly sports reports on KABC Channel 7. He moved to KNBC Channel 4 in 1977 and to KTLA Channel 5 in 1988, retiring from television in 1999.
Nahan also appeared in a number of movies and television episodes. After landing a bit part in the 1971 TV movie "Brian's Song," he had a string of movie appearances as a sports commentator, most notably in Sylvester Stallone's series of "Rocky" films.
He also played himself in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), interviewing the character Jeff Spicoli -- played by Sean Penn -- in a dream sequence.
Nahan was also a radio sports talk show host at KABC-AM (790) and most recently worked on Dodger pre- and postgame radio shows on KFWB-AM (980).
In 1956, Nahan landed a play-by-play job on radio with the minor league Modesto Reds. In December of that year he happened to see the first newscast of a new Sacramento television station. Nahan called the station the next day to complain about the sports segment and ended up getting his first job doing nightly TV sports reports on KCRA, an NBC affiliate.
While in Sacramento he was also the host of a children's TV program, appearing as "Skipper Stu." He would show cartoons while piloting his boat, the Channel Tender, accompanied by an octopus puppet, O.U. Squid.
Nahan later moved to Philadelphia to host a children's show as "Captain Philadelphia" on now-defunct WKBS. He also did play-by-play for the Flyers hockey team and Eagles pro football team.
In 1968 Nahan returned to Los Angeles and began doing sports reports at Channel 7. Nine years later he moved to Channel 4 to replace Ross Porter, who left the station to become a play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers.
In 1988 Nahan was hired at Channel 5 to replace Keith Olbermann, who left for KCBS Channel 2. Nahan for awhile continued with his radio work as well.
Nahan's survivors include his wife, Sandy, and four children from a previous marriage.
Stu Nahan
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