Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Insurance and Freedom (New York Times)
President Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security; conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it's all Kabuki. Since House Republicans will block anything Mr. Obama proposes, his budget is best seen not as policy but as positioning, an attempt to gain praise from "centrist" pundits.
Mark Marqusee: Iain Banks's announcement is a brutal memento mori (Guardian)
Banks paid a heartfelt tribute to the "deeply impressive" care he'd received from the NHS. Countless others dealing with cancer will echo that. His testimony is yet another reminder of how much we stand to lose in the current makeover of the NHS. Even for those it cannot save, the NHS makes possible a death with dignity and minimal suffering. The question is: do we value that service, that final act of care and respect, sufficiently to ensure that it continues to be available to all?
Stewart Lee: I've seen Jesus and thanks to Iain Duncan Smith She's in a bad way (Guardian)
Having seen the face of Christ in a government-run experiment, I can now say with some conviction that the new welfare cuts are morally wrong.
Jonathan Jones: A gloriously crude topless 'jihad' from a Femen activist (Guardian)
Femen deserve the support the Arab spring got. They're giving patriarchy - and mealy-mouthed relativists - a kick up the arse.
Katherine Stewart: Whither America's religious right? (Guardian)
One of the newer sources of potential conflict is the religious right's novel idea of "religious liberty". Religious freedom used to mean freedom from having other people impose their religion on you. Now, it apparently means the freedom to impose your religion on others.
Ted Rall: The Mayors of Brokesville
To Be Young, Technodouchey and Shilly at SXSW.
Henry Rollins: Bored In Hawaii (LA Weekly)
I was loaned some clothes to wear and while I know that it is not for me to be picky, I do feel rather ridiculous in the T-shirts provided to me, which are definitely for a man many years my junior. When I wear stuff like this, I look like I am working undercover or that I have stolen my son's favorite threads. I am adjusting.
Kent Haruf: No country for old men (Independent)
In spare, Cormac McCarthy-like prose, he writes about facing death in modern America. Max Liu talks to an old master.
Bill Maher Slams Paul Ryan, Rand Paul For 'Ruining' Libertarianism: 'I Didn't Go Nuts, This Movement Did' (VIDEO)
"To everyone who keeps trying to shame me about abandoning my Libertarian moorings, my message is this: I didn't go nuts, this movement did. Like when you see a stop light, your reaction should be 'Great, an easy way to ensure we don't all crash into each other,' not, 'How dare the government tell me when I can and cannot go!"
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From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and very windy. Very, very windy.
$25M For Academy Museum
David Geffen
Music and movie mogul David Geffen has kicked in $25 million for a film museum planned by Academy Awards overseers.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Monday that the David Geffen Foundation made the donation for the museum scheduled to open in 2017 next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
It's the largest contribution yet in the academy's $300 million fund drive for the museum.
In recognition, the academy is naming a theater at the facility after Geffen.
David Geffen
BMI's President's Award
Adam Levine
Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine for president? Sort of.
Broadcast Music Inc. announced Monday that Levine will receive the President's Award at the 61st annual BMI Pop Awards on May 14.
The event will be held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. It will also honor last year's top songwriters in pop.
BMI is a music rights management company that represents more than 500,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers.
Adam Levine
Body Exhumed
Pablo Neruda
The body of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, dead nearly four decades, was exhumed on Monday after his former driver said the poet was poisoned under Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.
Neruda, famed for his passionate love poems and staunch communist views, is presumed to have died from prostate cancer on September 23, 1973.
But Manuel Araya, who was Neruda's chauffer during the ailing writer's last few months, says agents of the dictatorship took advantage of his illness to inject poison into his stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.
"We're hoping for a positive result because Neruda was assassinated. Pinochet made an error when he ordered Neruda be killed," said Araya. Results are expected in coming months.
Neruda was a supporter of socialist President Salvador Allende, who was toppled in a military coup on September 11, 1973, nearly two weeks before the poet's death at age 69. Around 3,000 people are thought to have been killed by the brutal 17-year-long dictatorship that ensued.
Pablo Neruda
Breaks Record
Chinese Bowl
A red bowl with a lotus pattern broke the world record for Chinese Kangxi ceramics on Monday, fetching over $9 million after a bidding war won by a Hong Kong ceramics dealer at the last day of spring sales for global auctioneer Sotheby's.
The five days of sales in wine, jewelry, Asian and Chinese art, ceramics and watches, an indicator of China's appetite for luxury goods, are being keenly watched after sluggish economic growth in 2012 and a crackdown on lavish official spending.
The Ruby-Ground Double-Lotus "falangcai" bowl from the Kangxi period of 1662-1722 went for HK$74 million ($9.5 million), handily beating pre-sale estimates of HK$70 million and selling for more than 140 times the price paid three decades ago in a sign of surging demand.
The red bowl with a design of pink and blue lotuses sold for HK$528,000 the first time it went under the hammer at Sotheby's in 1983. In 1999, it fetched HK$12 million.
Chinese Bowl
Rupert Threatens To Pull Signal
Aereo
A top executive with the owner of the Fox broadcast network threatened Monday to convert the network to a subscription channel on cable or satellite TV if Internet startup Aereo Inc. continues to "steal" Fox's over-the-air signal and sell it to consumers without paying for rights.
Although anyone with an antenna can pick up a station's signals for free, cable and satellite companies typically pay stations and networks for the right to distribute their programming to subscribers. Industrywide, those retransmission fees add up to billions of dollars every year. Aereo says it's not subject to those fees.
News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey said whined that not being paid by Aereo jeopardizes the economics of broadcast TV, which benefits from both retransmission fees and advertising.
His remarks came a week after a federal appeals court said Aereo could continue its service despite a legal challenge by broadcasters. Aereo takes broadcast signals for free from the air with thousands of little antennas, recodes them for Internet use and feeds that to subscribers' computers, tablets and smartphones. Plans start at $8 a month, which is much cheaper than a cable package, though the service is mostly limited to broadcast channels.
Broadcasters argue that Aereo is engaged in copyright infringement by retransmitting the signals without permission and payments. But in a 2-1 ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York accepted Aereo's position that the individual antennas meant that Aereo wasn't retransmitting signals, but allowing its subscribers to do what they already could at home with their own antenna and video recorder.
Aereo
Elaborate Internet Hoax
Joel Osteen
Lakewood Church Pastor Joel Osteen was the victim of an elaborate Internet hoax on Monday, in which a fake website was set up to declare that he had left the Christian church due to his "lack of faith."
The website JoelOsteenMinistries.com was no longer working as of late Monday, but a fake Twitter account -- @PastorJoelOsteen - was still working and denied its own inauthenticity. "Nothing fake here," the user tweeted at a specific individual. "The church controls almost all the accts in my name. They've cut off and seized my accts. They're panicking."
The individual(s) behind the hoax also set up a fake website for Osteen's Lakewood church and produced a fake YouTube video.
Osteen, 50, has led Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas since 1999 - succeeding his father as senior pastor. He also has written several books and his ministry is broadcast in over 100 countries around the world.
Joel Osteen
Bravo Cancels 'Kathy'
Kathy Griffin
Like a seasoned comic, Kathy Griffin took a bit of bad news and turned it into stand-up material.
The comedian was gearing up for a Friday performance in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday when she learned that Bravo wasn't bringing back her talk show, "Kathy."
When it came time to take the stage at the Taft Theatre, Griffin found a way to poke fun at the news - although she did bury it into her act, said a review in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
She explained to the crowd at the Taft that she found out "Kathy" wasn't going to be renewed the day before, prompting "boos" from the audience in response.
But Griffin turned it around, "predicting the demise of Bravo," the Enquirer said.
Kathy Griffin
Gone Quickly
CNN's 'The Point'
We'll get to the point quickly: CNN's new prime-time talk show is gone after a week.
CNN described "(Get to) The Point" as a one-week experiment in the 10 p.m. EDT time slot. It featured Donny Deutsch and panelists chewing over the day's news. But the Nielsen Company said it averaged 268,000 viewers last week, or fewer than the 446,000 the network reached in March with a rerun of Anderson Cooper's newscast from two hours earlier.
It took less than a week for the show to be mocked by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. CNN wasn't commenting Monday on reports that its executives are kicking around the idea of reviving the political debate show "Crossfire."
That show left the air in 2005 - after being criticized by Stewart.
CNN's 'The Point'
Trial Postponed In Stalking Case
Alec Baldwin
A New York City trial for a Canadian actress accused of stalking Alec Baldwin has been postponed.
Genevieve Sabourin appeared Monday in a Manhattan court. She rejected a plea deal and hired a new lawyer, so her trial date was postponed until May 13.
Sabourin and Baldwin met on the set of the 2002 sci-fi comedy "The Adventures of Pluto Nash." Baldwin says they had dinner together in 2010.
Authorities say she had implored Baldwin to see and to marry her. They say she sent him emails only days after he became engaged to yoga instructor Hilaria Thomas.
Alec Baldwin
Says Even Wealthy Deserve Justice
Sheldon Adelson
Casino tycoon and GOP super donor Sheldon Adelson (R-Shameless) delivered a business lesson on Monday during testimony in a multimillion dollar breach of contract case.
Wrapping up three days on the witness stand, Adelson told an attentive jury how he had built his $6.5 billion empire in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau.
The reclusive mogul presented a more combative face last week, when he spent nine hours under questioning by the legal team representing Richard Suen.
The Hong Kong businessman is suing Sands for $328 million that he claims he is owed for working behind the scenes to help the company win a Macau gambling license.
He pleaded ignorance about the exact profit Sands has reaped from its four casinos in Macau. But he acknowledged the company has done very well on the former Portuguese island that has become the world's biggest gambling mecca.
Last year, Adelson and his wife donated nearly $100 million to Republican causes.
Sheldon Adelson
2 More Years
'Judge Judy'
Judge Judy is increasing her television sentence by two years.
Judy Sheindlin and CBS Television Distribution said Monday that the feisty former New York state judge has signed on for two more years of "Judge Judy." It is one of the top daytime TV shows, seen by roughly 10 million people each episode.
Her current contract runs through 2015, and the new deal extends her through 2017. That would give her 21 years on the air, which she compared Monday to a winning hand in blackjack. Sheindlin, who is 70, gave no indication that she has plans to retire.
A spokesman had no comment on whether Sheindlin will be getting a raise from her reported $45 million annual salary.
'Judge Judy'
In Memory
Annette Funicello
Annette Funicello, who became a child star as a perky, cute-as-a-button Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, then teamed up with Frankie Avalon in a string of '60s fun-in-the-sun movies with titles like "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "Bikini Beach," died Monday. She was 70.
She died at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Calif., of complications from multiple sclerosis, the Walt Disney Co. said.
Funicello stunned fans and friends in 1992 with the announcement about her ailment. Yet she was cheerful and upbeat, grappling with the disease with a courage that contrasted with her lightweight teen image of old.
The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was just 13 when she gained fame on TV's "The Mickey Mouse Club," a late-afternoon variety show for kids that combined stories, songs and dance routines and ran from 1955 to 1959.
Cast after Disney saw her at a dance recital, she appeared in mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a turtleneck sweater emblazoned with her first name, winning over baby-boom viewers with her wholesome, girl-next-door appeal.
She soon became the most popular Mouseketeer, receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.
When "The Mickey Mouse Club" ended, Annette (as she was often billed) was the only club member to remain under contract to the studio. She appeared in such Disney movies as "Johnny Tremain," ''The Shaggy Dog," ''The Horsemasters," ''Babes in Toyland," ''The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" and "The Monkey's Uncle."
She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess."
Outgrowing the kid roles by the early '60s, Annette teamed with Frankie Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.
The filmmakers weren't aiming for art, and they didn't achieve it. As Halliwell's Film Guide says of "Beach Party": "Quite tolerable in itself, it started an excruciating trend."
The films had songs, cameos by older stars and a few laughs. The 1965 "Beach Blanket Bingo," for example, featured subplots involving a mermaid, a motorcycle gang and a skydiving school run by Don Rickles, and comic touches by silent film star Buster Keaton.
Among the other titles: "Muscle Beach Party," ''Bikini Beach," ''How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" and "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine."
The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the beach-movie genre.
She and Avalon staged a reunion in 1987 with "Back to the Beach." It was during the filming that she noticed she had trouble walking - the first insidious sign of MS.
She wrote of her triumphs and struggles in her 1994 autobiography, "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" - the title taken from a Disney song. In 1995, she appeared briefly in a television docudrama based on her book. And she spoke openly about the degenerative effects of MS.
Funicello was born Oct. 22, 1942, in Utica, N.Y., and her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 4. She began taking dance lessons the following year and won a beauty contest at 9. Then came the discovery by Disney in 1955.
Asked about the revisionist biographies that have portrayed Disney in a negative light, she said, "I don't know what went on in the conference rooms. I know what I saw. And he was wonderful."
In 1965, Funicello married her agent, Jack Gilardi, and they had three children, Gina, Jack and Jason. The couple divorced 18 years later, and in 1986 she married Glen Holt, a harness racehorse trainer.
After her film career ended, she devoted herself to her family. Her children sometimes appeared in the TV commercials she made during the 1970s for Skippy peanut butter.
Annette Funicello
In Memory
Les Blank
Les Blank, an acclaimed documentary maker who focused his camera on cultural corners ranging from blues music, to garlic lovers, to shoe-eating artists, died Sunday at age 77, his son said.
Blank died at his home in Berkeley, Calif. nearly a year after being diagnosed with bladder cancer, Harrod Blank said.
Blank's 42 films earned him a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.
The Florida-born Blank's early documentaries focused on musicians, including 1965's "Dizzy Gillespie" and "The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins," a portrait of the Texas bluesman that won Blank his first wide renown.
He shifted to food with documentaries like 1980's "Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers," and 2007's "All in This Tea."
Blank was known for following his curiosity anywhere. No topic was too strange - or too ordinary. His 1987 film "Gap-Toothed Women" was a series of interviews on the subject spurred by an old high school crush.
But the subject that led to Blank's most memorable work was fellow filmmaker Werner Herzog.
In 1979's "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe," Blank chronicled Herzog's attempt to dine on his boot, the result of a lost bet.
And "Burden of Dreams," Blank's 1982 behind-the-scenes view of Herzog's disastrous filming of "Fitzcarraldo" in the Peruvian jungle, became a classic chronicle of artistic obsession.
"If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams," Blank films Herzog saying in the film. "I don't want to live like that."
Les Blank
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