Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Kate Kellaway: "Martin Creed interview: 'Art is anything used as art by people'" (Guardian)
The Turner prize winner reflects on the point of a piece of A4 paper and broccoli on the eve of his Hayward retrospective.
Robert T. Gonzalez: Has National Geographic lost its mind? (io9)
What concerns me is the editorial decision by the National Geographic Society - one of the largest, most well-respected non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world - to give bullshit pseudoscience* a foothold by granting it a full-page spread, front and center, on the cover of one of its publications, only to do a half-assed job of clarifying things within the article itself.
Aaron Short: 6 Insane Easter Eggs Buried in Famous TV Shows (Cracked)
#6. Community's Hidden Jokes Span Across Years, and Networks
Charlie Jane Anders: Here's Judi Dench as Titania in a Trippy Midsummer Night's Dream (io9)
Here she is as Titania, wearing what looks like green bodypaint (and/or a bodystocking). Above, you can see her scenes with Ian Richardson's Oberon.
Can You Guess The Classic Novel From Its First Sentence? (Buzzfeed)
How did Charlotte Brontė make it easier for everyone to breathe? She created Eyre.
Vandalizing Text Books Geek-Style (Geeks are Sexy)
Pictures of funny vandalism.
my 1992 diary
The musing of an early 90s Nebraskan preteen
David Bruce: Wise Up! Books (Athens News)
Author Gail Sausser is tired of reading lesbian novels that have unhappy endings. She strongly prefers a happy ending, and many of her friends are the same way. In fact, one friend always reads the last two paragraphs of any lesbian novel she is considering buying because she wants to make sure it doesn't have an unhappy ending.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
said:
wrote:
answered:
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E. Suggests
David
Thanks, Dave!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Computer problems forced a late loading of yesterday's page. I hate when that happens.
Library of Congress Acquisition
Max Roach
Music and recordings from Max Roach, one of the creators of modern jazz drumming, will be preserved at the Library of Congress, curators and his family announced Monday.
Over the past year, the library has been preparing and organizing Roach's personal collection from his body of work over several decades. The collection includes more than 100,000 items, including 80,000 manuscripts and papers, as well as photographs, music manuscripts and hundreds of sound and video recordings.
Roach worked with other such jazz greats as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to develop the jazz style known as bebop. And beyond the confines of music, Roach was engaged with the civil rights movement.
"He's a major figure, not just in jazz but in American music," said Larry Appelbaum, a music specialist and jazz curator at the library. "Max represented much more than just a musician or even a composer. He was at the nexus of music, civil rights and black power because he was among that wave of socially conscious musicians."
Roach studied music on many levels. He wrote about his disdain for the label of "jazz." To him, it represented "the worst of working conditions for an artist." He didn't want to be reduced to a stereotype or cliche, curators said.
Max Roach
Newbery & Caldecott Prizes
Children's Books
Kate DiCamillo's "Flora & Ulysses," a comic superhero tale featuring a deadly vacuum cleaner and a mighty squirrel, has won the John Newbery Medal for the year's best work of children's literature. Brian Floca won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for his illustrations in "Locomotive," a story of the early years of train travel that Floca also wrote.
Markus Zusak of "The Book Thief" fame received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement. Brian Selznick, whose "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" won the Caldecott in 2008 and was later adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese, was chosen to give the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, scheduled for 2015.
Marcus Sedgwick's "Midwinterblood" received the Michael L. Printz Award for best young adult book. Rita Williams-Garcia's "P.S. Be Eleven" won the Coretta Scott King Book Award for the best African-American book. The King award for illustration went to Bryan Collier and "Knock Knock: My Dad's Dream for Me."
Also Monday, the Pura Belpre Award for best Latino book was given to Meg Medina for "Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass," in which teenager Piddy Sanchez confronts bullying at her new school. The Belpre prize for illustration went to Yuyi Morales' "Nino Wrestles the World."
Kirstin Croon-Mills' "Beautiful Music for Ugly Children" won the Stonewall award for best children's book about the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender experience. The Stonewall award for best young adult story was given to "Fat Angie," by e. E. Charlton-Trujillo.
Children's Books
Claims There Are No Gays
Sochi Mayor
The mayor of Sochi has added a bizarre twist to the gay rights saga enveloping the Winter Olympics by claiming that not a single gay person lives in his city.
With the controversy surrounding Russia's "gay propaganda" law continuing to rage, Anatoly Pakhomov made comments to BBC television program Panorama that will do nothing to shift the country's reputation away from being unenlightened on LGBT rights.
"It is not accepted here in the Caucasus where we live," Pakhomov said. "We do not have them in our city."
When pressed about Sochi's apparent lack of any gay residents, Pakhomov reportedly snapped: "I am not sure, but I don't bloody know any," according to the BBC.
Sochi Mayor
New Daytime Schedule
MSNBC
MSNBC said it would launch two new programs in its daytime schedule, including one hosted by Ronan Farrow, a Rhodes scholar and former Obama foreign policy official whose celebrity lineage has drawn much scrutiny.
The network, which has made several prominent shuffles to its daytime and early evening schedules in recent weeks, said it would launch Farrow in an hour-long program starting February 24 at 1 p.m. Joy Reid, a contributor to MSNBC, will host a program at 2 p.m. The two programs that occupied those time slots - "Andrea Mitchell Reports" and "NewsNation with Tamron Hall" - to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., respectively.
In recent months, MSNBC has moved an original hour of early evening host Chris Matthews to 7 p.m., returned Ed Schultz to a daily roost at 5 p.m and filled the 4 p.m. slot of Martin Bashir with Alex Wagner in the wake of controversial remarks Bashir made about free-speech pundit and former U.S. Vice President candidate Sarah Palin (R-Quitter).
MSNBC
Journalist Admits Phone Hacking
Rupert
A former tabloid journalist told Britain's phone hacking trial on Monday that he intercepted voicemails with the knowledge of senior executives - not just at the now-defunct News of the World, whose employees are standing trial, but at the rival Sunday Mirror.
Dan Evans has pleaded guilty to phone hacking while working at both newspapers between 2003 and 2010, and is the first journalist to admit hacking for a paper not owned by News of the World proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
After striking a deal with prosecutors, he gave evidence at the trial of former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson and five others. The defendants deny all the charges.
Evans said he started work at the News of the World in 2005, and was given a list of dozens of names including model Elle Macpherson, former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and king of pop Michael Jackson. He said he was told "to hack the interesting names on there."
He said he had accessed voicemails more than 1,000 times in all while at the newspaper.
Rupert
Sues Gawker Over Leaked Script
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino has filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media claiming copyright infringement after the web site posted a copy of his leaked script, "The Hateful Eight."
Tarantino first voiced his outrage to Deadline Hollywood about the script's leak, declaring he would no longer make the film his next project. A few days later, Gawker posted the script on its site under the headline "Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script."
"Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people's rights to make a buck. This time they went too far," the suit states. "Rather than merely publishing a news story reporting that [Tarantino's] screenplay may have been circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire screenplay illegally."
The suit cites multiple links for downloading the entire screenplay "through a conveniently anonymous URL by simply clicking button links on he Gawker page, and brazenly encourages Gawker visitors to read the screenplay illegally with the invitation to 'Enjoy!' it."
Quentin Tarantino
Thieves Steal Pope's Blood
JP 2
Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John Paul II, a custodian said on Monday.
Dozens of police with sniffer dogs scoured the remote area for clues to what the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana called "a sacrilegious theft that was probably commissioned by someone".
Franca Corrieri told Reuters she had discovered a broken window early on Sunday morning and had called the police. When they entered the small stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing.
In 2011, John Paul's former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, now archbishop of Krakow in Poland, gave the local Abruzzo community some of the late pontiff's blood as a token of the love he had felt for the mountainous area.
It was put in a gold and glass circular case and kept in a niche of the small mountain church of San Pietro della Ienca, near the city of L'Aquila.
JP 2
Movie Tie-In Auction?
Monuments Men
Paintings looted by the Nazis during World War Two and retrieved by the Monuments Men, the Allied group tasked with returning masterpieces to their rightful owners, will be sold at auction on Thursday in New York.
The works, which will go under the hammer during Sotheby's sale of Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture, were among the tens of thousands of works recovered by the art experts whose story is told in the George Clooney film "The Monuments Men," which opens in U.S. theaters on February 7.
"The scale of looting was absolutely extraordinary," said Lucian Simmons, Sotheby's head of restitution. "In France, for example, 36,000 paintings were stolen from institutions and largely from individuals. The Monuments Men managed to recover and return the majority of those," he said in an interview.
Two small paintings in the sale, "La cueillette des roses" and "Le musicien" by the French rococo artist Jean-Baptise Pater, were chosen by Adolf Hitler's air force chief Hermann Goering for his personal collection.
Monuments Men
Foundation Stones Threatened
Hatteras Lighthouse
When the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved 15 years ago, the massive stones that held up the famous beacon were left behind at the erosion-prone spot on the Atlantic.
A nonprofit group paid to have the stones engraved with the names of the 83 light keepers, and the stones were then placed in a circle that became a popular spot for weddings and other events. But as erosion continues to threaten the area and sand from storms such as Isabel and Sandy covers the stones, Hatteras Island residents now want the stones moved to the lighthouse.
"Eventually, if they are not moved, they will probably be washed to sea," said Bruce Roberts, co-founder of the Outer Banks Lighthouse Society, the nonprofit that paid $11,500 to have the 20 or so stones engraved.
The smallest stone weighs about 3,000 pounds, said his wife, Cheryl Shelton Roberts, the society's other co-founder who worked meticulously to make sure each keeper's name was spelled correctly, along with his first year of service. The names include the keepers of this lighthouse and the original one, built in 1803, which no longer exists.
Moving them is no easy job and probably expensive, especially since the Cape Hatteras National Seashore budget is $2 million less than it was in 2010. Instead, the National Park Service says the stones will be uncovered one more time in the spring, making sure they still form a circle, and then will be mostly left to nature's forces.
Hatteras Lighthouse
Locomotive Begins California Farewell Tour
Big Boy
An enormous steam locomotive that has been entertaining train enthusiasts at a California museum for years began a trek of more than 1,200 miles on Sunday with the ultimate goal of putting the engine back on the nation's rails.
The 600-ton Big Boy locomotive left the Pomona fairgrounds on its way to a Union Pacific rail yard in Colton, about 60 miles away, where it will be available for two weekends of public viewing before moving on to Cheyenne, Wyo., for restoration work. The goal is to eventually get Engine 4014 back on the rails, said Union Pacific spokesman Aaron Hunt.
The engine, which weighs 1.2 million pounds when its fuel car, or tender, is included, was one of 25 massive steam engines that began riding the transcontinental rails in 1941.
It pulled heavy freight trains over the Wasatch Mountains between Ogden, Utah and Green River, Wyo., and retired after a 17-year career.
Big Boy
Scientists Decode Genome
Justinian Plague
It's not nearly as well-known as the Black Death, but the sixth-century Justinian plague was just as deadly, wiping out an estimated 30 million to 50 million people in only two years as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia and Europe.
Now an international team of researchers, including Canadian disease detectives, have determined the two pandemics resulted from distinct strains of the bacterium that causes plague.
Using tiny fragments of DNA extracted from the 1,500-year-old teeth of two Justinian plague victims buried in Germany, the scientists were able to reconstruct the genome of the strain of Yersinia pestis that caused the AD 541-543 pandemic - making it the oldest pathogen genome decoded to date.
While the Justinian strain flared up periodically over the next hundred years to cause subsequent outbreaks, it eventually died out, said Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist who directs the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University.
The strain that caused the Black Death, ravaging half the population of Europe eight centuries later, was a distinct form, which re-emerged in the late 1800s and spread worldwide, he said.
Justinian Plague
Prototype Was Round?
Noah's Ark
A small clay tablet, covered in ancient cuneiform carvings, has been described as "one of the most important human documents ever discovered."
These are the words of Irving Finkel, a curator of the British Museum, according to the Associated Press . Finkel, an expert in cuneiform inscriptions, translated the tablet after the owner brought it in to the museum. Acquired shortly after World War II, it contains an account of a great flood, and a man who received divine instructions to build a large boat to rescue all the animals, who were to be loaded 'two by two'.
This is a very familiar tale to many, of course. It describes the story of Noah, from the Old Testament, who was warned of an impending flood that would wash away the wickedness of humanity, and told to build an ark and gather two of each animal in the world. It also appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem that predates the Biblical account, where a man named Utnapishtim is warned by the god Ea of a great flood and told to build a large boat, sealed with pitch and bitumen, and to gather his family and the animals of the field to be saved. This newest version tells it a slightly different way, and even provides a new detail that apparently has never been seen before - the 'ark' was round!
"It was really a heart-stopping moment - the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat," Finkel told the Associated Press. "That was a real surprise."
Noah's Ark
New County Fair Contests
Colorado
Colorado's Denver County is adding cannabis-themed contests to its 2014 summer fair. It's the first time pot plants will stand alongside tomato plants and homemade jam in competition for a blue ribbon.
There won't actually be any marijuana at the fairgrounds. The judging will be done off-site, with photos showing the winning entries. And a live joint-rolling contest will be done with oregano, not pot.
But county fair organizers say the marijuana categories will add a fun twist on Denver's already-quirky county fair, which includes a drag queen pageant and a contest for dioramas made with Peeps candies.
The nine marijuana categories include live plants and clones, plus contests for marijuana-infused brownies and savory foods. Homemade bongs, homemade roach clips and clothing and fabric made with hemp round out the categories.
Judges will look only at plant quality, not the potency or quality of the drugs they produce. Other contests - patterned after Amsterdam's famed Cannabis Cup - already gauge drug quality and flavor.
Colorado
In Memory
Helga Sandburg Crile
Helga Sandburg Crile, an author and the youngest of three daughters of poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, has died at her home near Cleveland. She was 95.
The Fioritto Funeral Service says Crile died at her Cleveland Heights home on Sunday night. Her family says she had been in failing health.
Crile published 17 books, including novels, memoirs and poetry. She also typed manuscripts for her Pulitzer Prize-winning father, who dedicated several books to her and wrote poems in her honour.
Her survivors include a son, a daughter and two step-daughters. The funeral home says a memorial service will be held in the spring.
Helga Sandburg Crile
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
