Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman's Blog: The Contribution Scam (New York Times)
David Cay Johnston has a terrific piece up about the nonsense of comparing government workers to private-sector counterparts by claiming that the government pays for more of their benefits.
Paul Krugman: Leaving Children Behind (New York Times)
Guess who pays when states call for fiscal austerity.
Scott Burns: A Few Words on the Emperor's Clothes (assetbuilder.com)
At last, Democrats and Republicans have something in common!
Joyce Wadler: The $200 Microhouse (New York Times)
A HOUSE tour is the highlight of a visit with a proud homeowner, but when one drops in to see Derek Diedricksen, who makes playful micro-shelters out of junk, it is less so.
Rosemary hates my new hall colour (Guardian)
Rosemary says my new hall looks 'like a psychiatric hospital'. Why can't she say something normal like 'Yuk'? She has to say something that keeps me awake at night, writes Michele Hanson.
DICK CAVETT: How Do You Open for a Mind-Reading Horse? (New York Times)
An early brush with showbiz fame, in post-World War II Nebraska.
Paul Duguid: Do you love books? (Times)
Jacques Bonnet does (he can't stop buying them) - but what's the future for the book business?
"I Love a Broad Margin to My Life" by Maxine Hong Kingston: A review by Helen Zia
Her grown son Joseph reads all her work and asks, "Don't write about me." She writes, "Okay I won't do it anymore" and later tells how when he was young she once gave him an entire bag of marshmallows so she could have 20 minutes to write.
Mark Lawson: Ad breaks - they're not just natural (Guardian)
Commerical breaks can now last for six minutes - but little thought has been given to the effect this will have on the shaping and pacing of programmes.
Roger Ebert: Review of "Poetry" (3 ½ stars)
There is perhaps something in the river. It floats closer on the current. It is the body of a young woman. "Poetry" opens with this extended shot, so that our realization can slowly grow. Then we meet an old woman named Mija. She learns from her doctor that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. It is difficult to be sure what effect this news has. She continues with her life.
Paul Constant: "Ke$ha: Queen of the Lizards" (The Stranger)
In the Valley of the 14-Year-Old Hookers.
George Varga: "Anthony Davis at 60: Jazz, Opera and Beyond" (Creators Syndicate)
For the past several decades, University of California at San Diego music professor Anthony Davis has consistently broken new ground as one of the nation's foremost jazz-and-beyond pianists and as a composer of cutting-edge operas, symphonies and choral and chamber works.
David Bruce has 41 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $41 you can buy 10,250 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
Hubert's Poetry Corner
"The Queen's Speech"
wrote:
said:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Suggestions
Michelle in AZ
Reader Recommendation
MAM
Appropriate for the day after the Oscars . . . 150 Movie Lines & Catch-Phrases:
A celebration of various lines and catch-phrases from the history of film, past and present.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Back to sunny and seasonal.
Cast Announced
'DWTS'
A boxing great, a model who survived an Indian Ocean tsunami and a grown-up "Karate Kid" will be hoofing it on the 12th season of "Dancing with the Stars."
Welterweight champ Sugar Ray Leonard, model Petra Nemcova and Ralph Macchio of the hit 1984 karate movie will be among 11 celebrity contestants when the ABC show returns March 21.
The cast was announced Monday by "Dancing" hosts Tom Bergeron and Brooke Burke in segments that aired during an episode of ABC's "The Bachelor."
Also hitting the dance floor will be actress Kirstie Alley; Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward; professional wrestler Chris Jericho; "Loveline" radio show co-host Mike Catherwood; onetime rap prodigy Romeo (former Lil' Romeo); Chelsea Kane of Disney Channel's "Jonas"; talk show host Wendy Williams and reality star Kendra Wilkinson.
'DWTS'
Missed One
Opossum Picks
Heidi, Germany's cross-eyed celebrity opossum, came up one pick short of perfectly predicting top awards at the Oscars, incorrectly tipping "127 Hours" to win best picture, which instead went to "The King's Speech."
The 2-1/2-year-old opossum correctly predicted Natalie Portman ("Black Swan") to win best actress and Colin Firth ("The King's Speech") as best actor during a series of appearances on the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" show on U.S. broadcaster ABC last week.
Heidi, who lives at the Leipzig Zoo in eastern Germany, attempted to duplicate the success of Germany's oracle Octopus Paul, who correctly tipped each of Germany's matches in last year's soccer World Cup, as well as the final between Spain and Netherlands.
Heidi became a star in Germany when her photo appeared in the mass-circulation newspaper Bild in December, but her international following has blossomed, including a Facebook following of about 320,000.
Opossum Picks
TV Land Orders Third Season
"Hot in Cleveland"
TV Land has ordered a third season of "Hot in Cleveland," a comedy starring Wendie Malick, Jane Leeves, Valerie Bertinelli and Betty White.
The cable network's first original sitcom, "Hot in Cleveland" has been averaging a solid 3.2 million viewers per episode. The show was nominated at the recent SAG Awards for ensemble in a comedy series and for White's performance.
"Hot in Cleveland"
Charity Donation
Nelly Furtado
Singer Nelly Furtado said on Monday that she will give away $1 million she received to perform in Italy for the family of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Furtado, a Canadian singer whose hits include "I'm Like a Bird" and "Promiscuous," used the website Twitter to disclose her plans for the $1 million.
"In 2007, I received 1 million$ from the Qaddafi clan to perform a 45 min. Show for guests at a hotel in Italy," she wrote. "I am going to donate the $"
A spokeswoman for Furtado could not be reached to say which group Furtado plans to designate for her donation.
Nelly Furtado
Meltdown Continues
Charlie Sheen
Actor Charlie Sheen escalated his war of words with his former "Two and A Half Men" employers on Monday, demanding a pay rise as his lawyer threatened legal action over canceled episodes of the top-rated comedy.
Sheen, whose erratic behavior has put the future of his show in jeopardy, boasted on Monday morning chat shows about his partying lifestyle and said he was tired of pretending he is not "a total frigging rock star from Mars."
ABC News and celebrity website Radaronline had Sheen's blood and urine tested, and revealed no drugs in his system for the past 72 hours. "I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available because if you try it once, you will die," he said in the ABC interview.
The last time he took drugs, which he estimated to be about a month to six weeks ago, Sheen said he was "banging seven gram rocks and finishing them because that is how I roll."
He was now bored with drugs, he said, but boasted about his old partying ways. "The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them just look like droopy-eyed armless children."
Charlie Sheen
Government A Ponzi Scheme
Bernie Madoff
Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme.
"The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators.
Madoff did an earlier New York Times interview in which he accused banks and hedge funds of being "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme to fleece people out of billions of dollars. He said they failed to scrutinize the discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.
He said in the New York magazine interview the Securities and Exchange Commission "looks terrible in this thing," and he said the "whole government is a Ponzi scheme."
Bernie Madoff
Judge May Delay Trial Of Doctor
Michael Jackson
The judge handling the involuntary manslaughter case against Michael Jackson's doctor indicated Monday he might delay the trial in what would be a defeat for defense lawyers anxious to get on with the proceedings.
"I am extremely distressed about the state of this case and whether the defense is prepared for trial and its obligations to Dr. Murray," Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor said.
Prosecutors urged the judge to delay the scheduled March 24 start of jury selection, and Pastor asked them to present case law on the matter Wednesday, when he ordered defendant Conrad Murray to appear in court.
The doctor, who has pleaded not guilty, has been absent from the past few hearings under a waiver that allowed him to continue working at his clinics in Texas and Nevada.
Michael Jackson
Loss For 2010 More Than Triples
Live Nation
Live Nation Entertainment Inc., the concert promoter that merged with Ticketmaster last year, said Monday that its net loss in 2010 more than tripled as concert attendance fell and ticket sales for other events also slumped.
Global ticket sales are seen posting a slight increase this year at best, as the concert industry recovers but labor disputes in the NBA and NFL loom on the horizon.
The company's net loss for the fourth quarter hit $124 million, or 72 cents per share, ballooning past the combined $104 million in losses it reported for the first nine months. The company said it booked $40 million in impairment charges in the final quarter on two venues and an artist deal even though the decline in ticket sales slowed.
The net loss in the three months to Dec. 31 reversed a net income of $479,000, or a penny per share, in the same quarter a year earlier.
Live Nation
"Big Short" Author Sued
Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis, best-selling author of "The Big Short" about the mortgage meltdown, has been sued for defamation by an asset manager featured in the book.
Other targets in the lawsuit are Lewis' publisher W.W. Norton & Company and prominent hedge fund manager Steven Eisman of FrontPoint Partners LLC in Connecticut, one of the sources for Lewis' book.
Wing Chau and his firm Harding Advisory LLC believe Lewis made "false and defamatory" statements in the book "and want to redress that wrong," according to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday and made public on Monday.
Lewis and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company said they had not yet been served with the complaint.
Michael Lewis
Paging Dr. Mengele
Medical Testing
Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.
U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States - studies that often involved making healthy people sick.
An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.
Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.
Medical Testing
Weekend Box Office - Revised
'Hall Pass'
Coming in a very close second in its third weekend of release was Disney's animated 3-D feature "Gnomeo and Juliet," with $13.4 million.
The top 10 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:
1. "Hall'Hall Pass' Pass," Warner Bros., $13,535,374, 2,950 locations, $4,588 average, $13,535,374, one week.
2. "Gnomeo and Juliet (3-D Animated)," Disney, $13,400,130, 3,037 locations, $4,412 average, $74,334,236, three weeks.
3. "Unknown," Warner Bros., $12,571,282, 3,043 locations, $4,131 average, $42,976,450, two weeks.
4. "I Am Number Four," Disney, $11,016,126, 3,156 locations, $3,491 average, $37,723,940, two weeks.
5. "Just Go With It," Sony, $10,532,244, 3,544 locations, $2,972 average, $78,787,066, three weeks.
6. "Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (3-D)," Paramount, $9,387,250, 2,810 locations, $3,341 average, $62,963,741, three weeks.
7. "Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son," Fox, $7,623,276, 2,821 locations, $2,702 average, $28,647,519, two weeks.
8. "The King's Speech," Weinstein Co., $7,339,759, 2,386 locations, $3,076 average, $114,231,030, 14 weeks.
9. "Drive Angry (3-D)," Summit, $5,187,625, 2,290 locations, $2,265 average, $5,187,625, one week.
10. "True Grit," Paramount, $1,947,092, 1,222 locations, $1,593 average, $167,132,442, 10 weeks.
'Hall Pass'
In Memory
Jane Russell
Jane Russell, the busty brunette who shot to fame as the sexy star of Howard Hughes' 1941 Western "The Outlaw," died Monday of respiratory failure, her family said. She was 89.
Although Russell made only a handful of films after the 1960s, she had remained active in her church, with charitable organizations and with a local singing group until her health began to decline just a couple weeks ago, said her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield. She died at her home in Santa Maria.
Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, put her onto the path to stardom when he cast her in "The Outlaw," a film he fought with censors for nearly a decade to get into wide release.
With her sultry look and glowing sexuality, Russell became a star before she was ever seen by a wide movie audience. The Hughes publicity mill ground out photos of the beauty in low-cut costumes and swim suits, and she became famous, especially as a pinup for World War II GIs.
By that time she had become a box-office star by starring with Bob Hope in the 1948 hit comedy-Western "The Paleface."
Although her look and her hourglass figure made her the subject of numerous nightclub jokes, unlike Monroe, Rita Hayworth and other pinup queens of the era, Russell was untouched by scandal in her personal life. During her Hollywood career she was married to star UCLA and pro football quarterback Bob Waterfield.
Her only other notable film was "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," a 1953 musical based on the novel by Anita Loos. She and Monroe teamed up to sing "Two Little Girls From Little Rock" and seek romance in Paris.
She was born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., and the family later moved to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Her mother was a lay preacher, and she encouraged the family to build a chapel in their back yard.
Despite her mother's Christian preachings, young Jane had a wild side. She wrote in her 1985 autobiography, "My Paths and Detours," that during high school she had a back-alley abortion, which may have rendered her unable to bear children.
For many years she served as TV spokeswoman for Playtex bras.
As she related in "My Path and Detours," Russell's life was marked by heartache. Her 24-year marriage to Waterfield ended in bitter divorce in 1968 (they had adopted sons Thomas and Robert, and daughter Tracy.)
That year she married actor Roger Barrett; three months later he died of a heart attack. In 1978 she married developer John Peoples, and they lived in Sedona, Ariz., and later, Santa Barbara. He died in 1999 of heart failure.
Jane Russell
Quotes:
"I have always been a Republican, and when I was in Hollywood long ago, most of the people there were Republican. The studio heads were all Republican, my boss Howard Hughes was a raving Republican, and we had a motion picture code in those days so they couldn't do all this naughty stuff. We had John Wayne, we had Charlton Heston, we had man named Ronald Reagan, we had Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Clark Gable.
"These days I am a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist." (2003)
Source
In Memory
Annie Girardot
French actress Annie Girardot, who performed in over 100 films from the 1950s on, died in Paris on Monday after a long battle with Alzheimer's, her family said. She was 79 years old.
Born in Paris on October 25, 1931, Girardot trained as a nurse before becoming a stage actress. Jean Cocteau said she had "the most beautiful post-war dramatic temperament."
Her first silver screen performance was in Andre Hunebelle's "Thirteen at the table".
In 1969 she starred as a prostitute in Luchino Visconti's "Rocco and his brothers," playing alongside French star Alain Delon and Italian actor Renato Salvatori, also her future husband and father to daughter Giulia.
In 1977 she won the Best Actress Cesar, France's equivalent to an Oscar, for her role in Jean-Louis Bertucelli's "Doctor Francoise Gailland."
Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented in Nicolas Baulieu's film "Life is like that".
"I've always gone to the market myself, done my shopping, my housework. I've never been a velvety star," she wrote in 1999.
Annie Girardot
In Memory
Suze Rotolo
American artist Suze Rotolo, most famous for her three-year relationship with singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, has died, her friend and Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman said.
He wrote in his blog that the 67-year-old died "after a long illness, at home in her Noho (New York) loft and the arms of her husband of 40 years, Enzo Bartoccioli."
Rolling Stone magazine credited Rotolo with being the muse behind some of Dylan's early love songs, including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time"
Her left-wing background also meant she played "a huge role in Dylan's political awakening," Rolling Stone added.
Rotolo was photographed with Dylan on the cover of his 1963 album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," and her 2009 memoirs were titled "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties."
She was 17 years old when she began dating Dylan in 1961. In the song Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, he wrote: "I once loved a woman, a child I'm told/I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul."
After three years the couple split, and Rotolo went on to marry Italian film editor Bartoccioli whom she met on a trip to Italy in 1962. They had a son named Luca.
Rotolo was described as an intensely private person and for years refused to discuss Dylan in interviews. But she agreed to be interviewed in Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary about the singer, "No Direction Home."
Suze Rotolo
In Memory
Eddie Kirkland
An 88-year-old blues legend known as the "Gypsy of the Blues" was killed in Florida when his car turned into the path of a Greyhound bus.
Eddie Kirkland was traveling southeast on U.S. Highway 98 in Crystal River, north of Tampa, about 8:30 a.m. Sunday when he tried to make a U-turn in front of the bus, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The bus, which was traveling northwest, pushed Kirkland's Ford Taurus about 200 yards before the vehicles stopped.
Kirkland was flown to Tampa General Hospital, where he later died.
Thirteen passengers were on the bus, which was being driven by 67-year-old James Smith of Tallahassee, the Highway Patrol said. No one on the bus was injured.
According to his website, Kirkland, who lived in Macon, Ga., performed Saturday night at the Dunedin Brewery in Dunedin, the final stop in a four-city swing through Florida in February. His tour was to pick up April 8 in Pensacola.
Born in Jamaica, and raised in Alabama, Kirkland eventually moved to Indiana before he settled in Detroit. He polished his blues sound and toured for 7 1/2 years with John Lee Hooker. He moved to Georgia, became a bandleader for Otis Redding and performed with a variety of artists, including Little Richard, Ben King, Ruth Brown and Little Johnnie Taylor.
Eddie Kirkland
In Memory
Darryl Morden
Darryl Morden, a respected music journalist whose 30-year career included writing concert reviews for the Hollywood Reporter for nearly two decades, died of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Friday. He was 52.
In addition to covering hundreds of concerts for THR, Morden contributed articles or reviews to such publications and websites as Music Connection, Cashbox, Grammy Magazine, AOL, CD Now, Bam, Down Beat and Seventeen. Since 2005, he had been senior editor and senior staff writer for the Buzzine magazine and website. A devoted fan of superheroes and science fiction, he penned articles about comics and graphics, home video, books, novels and, of course, music.
He also was a producer for Movie Tunes from 2005-09 and penned bios, stories and marketing materials for companies including Sony-BMG, Rogers & Cowan, Univision, Premiere Radio Networks, Westwood One, Launch Radio Networks, Curb Records, Examiner.com and CultureBlog.
The Hollywood native began his career in 1981, working as a writer for ABC-Watermark on Casey Kasem's American Top 40, the most successful program in radio history. By 1988, he was associate producer for AT40, then hosted by Shadoe Stevens, and was head writer and associated producer of special programing projects for ABC Radio Networks.
Morden began covering concerts for THR in 1992, reviewing rock, pop, R&B and country acts ranging from Bruce Springsteen and Radiohead to the Blind Boys of Alabama and Chuck E. Weiss to such pop divas as Britney Spears, Beyonce and Lady Gaga. He also covered several Coachella festivals.
In November 2001, he was so moved by U2's performance at Staples Center in Los Angeles -- which included an unforgettable tribute to the victims of the September 11 attacks -- that he wrote an unsolicited pro bono review for The Hollywood Reporter. His last review for the paper was Carrie Underwood at the Hollywood Bowl in October.
Morden is survived by his wife, Barbara, and son Declan. In lieu of flowers, donations of any kind to help offset medical expenses can be sent to: Morden Medical Fund, 4733 Radford Ave. No. 4, Valley Village, CA 91607.
Darryl Morden
In Memory
Gary Winick
Gary Winick, an independent filmmaker who crossed over into the mainstream with romances such as "Letters to Juliet" and "13 Going on 30," died on Sunday after a battle with brain cancer. He was 49.
Winick had fought cancer for some time, and it metastasized throughout his body, his manager Rosalie Swedlin told the Hollywood Reporter. After his first surgery, he went on to direct Amanda Seyfried in "Letters to Juliet," which was released last May.
His other directing credits included "Charlotte's Web," starring Dakota Fanning; "Bride Wars," starring Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson; and "13 Going on 30," starring Jennifer Garner.
Winick started out as a director and producer on the indie side. In 1999, he founded InDigEnt, which went on to produce 19 independent films over the next 10 years, including Winick's "Tadpole," which he sold to Miramax for $6 million at the 2002 Sundance film Festival. His funeral will be private, but a memorial service is being planned.
Gary Winick
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