Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Let's Not Be Civil (democraticunderground.com)
The point is that the two parties don't just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose. … So let's not be civil. Instead, let's have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so - and take their case to the voters.
Richard Roeper: Is Donald's Trump Birther baloney a vast conspiracy ... to get Obama re-elected? (Chicago Sun-Times)
I love it. Little Obama was born in Indonesia or wherever - and the cover-up began. Calls were placed to a newspaper in Hawaii. Health-care professionals in both locales did their part. Everyone who came into contact with Kid Barry during his formative years was instructed to forget they ever knew him - while people in Hawaii, including two kindergarten teachers, invented memories of knowing the lad. They're all in on it!
Dan Savage: How It Happened (The Stranger)
The Genesis of a YouTube Movement.
Connie Schultz: Ohio - The New Texas (Creators Syndicate)
Last week, bartender Keleigh Rae Bowling had to interrupt a drunken couple having sex on the Skee-Ball table where she works.
Scott Burns: Meditation on McDonald's, Part 2 (assetbuilder.com)
Earlier this morning McDonald's announced that it was going to add 50,000 jobs. That's a 7 percent increase in the number of people already working at its 14,000 U.S. restaurants. The hiring event, online and at its restaurants, is scheduled for April 19th.
Lucy Mangan: There's not much of the NHS left to cut (Guardian)
'With every visit, the spirit of the NHS and the fact that I can lie there without worrying how I am going to pay for every syringe, cotton pad or bandage seems more of a miracle.'
Jonah Lehrer: Is 'Nudging' Really Enough? (Wall Street Journal)
With things like burgers and electricity, we often need a shove.
Dick Cavett: In Defense of Offense (The New York Times)
Network executive: We're afraid some viewers might be offended.
DC: So?
Tracing My Roots and Coming Up With Dirt (Wall Street Journal)
Joe Queenan on finding a few ancestors he'd rather not know about.
David Lazarus: It pays to read fine print on publication subscription notices (Los Angeles Times)
Unauthorized third-party sellers can send consumers official-looking renewal notices but charge much more than the publication itself.
Luc Besson: Why I couldn't give up making films (Guardian)
In his homeland, Luc Besson is regarded as mass market. So what, he tells Steve Rose, even Jean-Luc Godard is really a commercial director.
Henry Rollins: "Henry Reveals the Answer to Crucial Question, 'Who Put the Bomp?'" (Los Angeles Weekly)
Recently I wrote my editor, one Gustavo Turner, and asked if he had any ideas he wanted me to write about. Gustavo sent me an interesting list that I will no doubt be pounding away at soon. The last idea on the list, which he said was only a joke, was a question delivered over two lines: "Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?"
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."
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Comment
Difference between Coulter and Malkin
I believe I have figured out the difference between those two arch-conservative - even fascist - women, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.
First of all, while Ann Coulter, who reminds me very much of one Adolf Eichmann, has said some pretty vicious things in her career as a pundit, Michelle Malkin has done some pretty vicious things in hers - such as posting personal information about war protesters on the 'net.
But the big difference is how they put the information - if you want to call it that - to the masses. Coulter "sells" her venom through her books and her newspaper column. You pay for those.
Malkin, on the other hand, while she also has books and a newspaper column, has something else the Ann Coulter doesn't - a blog. So, while Coulter "sells" her venom through her books and her newspaper column, Malkin "gives it away" through her blog. Yes, I am aware that you have to pay for internet service, but Malkin doesn't charge you to view her blog.
Thus, the difference between the two, which can be summed by a rather offensive saying (here goes nuthin'): A whore sells it, a slut gives it away!
Thanks for letting me vent, Marty!
George M.
Thanks, George!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Coastal Eddy is back for a few days.
Donates Collection
Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt has donated orchestrations, memorabilia and photographs to the University of Arizona's school of music.
The singer's collection also includes manuscripts from Nelson Riddle, with whom Ronstadt had a longtime artistic relationship.
The Arizona Daily Star says the Ronstadt collection joins that of other music greats housed at the Tucson school including Riddle, Artie Shaw, Jo Stafford and Les Baxter.
A Tucson native, Ronstadt attended the university in the 1960s before she left for California and a career in music. She had No. 1 hits in rock and country in a diverse career that spanned the 1970s and 1980s.
Linda Ronstadt
HBO Picks Up Comedy
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is set to play the vice president in a new HBO comedy.
The network said Monday it has ordered the new comedy series, "Veep," and expects it to debut in fall 2012. Louis-Dreyfus plays a former senator who becomes vice president and finds the job is everything she was warned about.
The series was created by Armando Iannucci, who earned an Oscar nomination for writing "In the Loop." He's an executive producer along with Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist.
Said Louis-Dreyfus: "Although everyone says this is a comedy, I don't think there is anything funny at all about me being a heartbeat away from the presidency."
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Snagged For $13,000
William and Kate Pez
A fan from Connecticut has paid 8,200 pounds ($13,360) to win a charity auction of PEZ sweets dispensers in the likeness of Britain's Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton ahead of this month's royal wedding.
PEZ, the Austrian company whose candy dispensers are known around the world, said on Monday it will donate the money to the Starlight Children's Foundation, which cheers up seriously ill children and their families by granting wishes and organizing hospital events.
A spokeswoman said the company chose that charity because Middleton and her family supported it.
The winning bid, one of 33 submitted, falls short of the record $32,000 paid for an Astronaut B model Pez dispenser in 2006.
William and Kate Pez
NY Times and LA Times Each Win Two
Pulitzer Prizes
The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times were each awarded two coveted Pulitzer Prizes for journalism on Monday.
The Los Angeles Times won the public service award for its exposure of corruption in the Californian city of Bell where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves large salaries. The newspaper's coverage led to arrests and reforms.
Los Angeles Times photographer Barbara Davidson won the prize for feature photography for her pictures of innocent victims caught in the crossfire of Los Angeles gang violence.
The New York Times' Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry won the international reporting category for putting "a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia."
David Leonhardt of The New York Times won the commentary award for "his graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions, from the federal budget deficit to health care reform."
Pulitzer Prizes
Vandalism And Threats
"Piss Christ"
A controversial photograph of a crucifix submerged in the urine of New York artist Andres Serrano has been vandalized during an exhibit in Avignon and the museum's employees have received death threats.
"Piss Christ" -- a photograph that sparked an uproar when first exhibited in the United States in 1989 -- was damaged Sunday "with the help of a hammer and an object like a screwdriver or pickaxe," said the Collection Lambert, a contemporary art museum in France's southwestern city known for its theater festival.
Moreover, the three vandals physically threatened three museum guards before fleeing, the museum said in a statement.
A second photograph, "The Church," which depicts the torso of a nun with her hands in her lap, was similarly vandalized.
"Piss Christ"
Former Palin Aide Writing Tell-All
"Blind Allegiance"
When a book is called "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin," you can guess it's not a happy story.
An imprint of Simon & Schuster announced Monday that it had signed up "Blind Allegiance," a long-rumored tell-all by former Palin aide Frank Bailey. The imprint, Howard Books, will release Bailey's book May 24. Excerpts from an early draft were leaked to reporters earlier this year.
Bailey worked with Palin while she was a half-term governor of Alaska and when she was John McCain's running mate on the Republican presidential ticket in 2008.
Howard Books is calling "Blind Allegiance" a "chilling expose." Author Ken Morris and Alaska political blogger Jeanne Devon helped write the book.
"Blind Allegiance"
Mansion Torn Down
The Great Gatsby
Bulldozers razed a storied mansion where F. Scott Fitzgerald partied and which some say inspired his novel 'The Great Gatsby,' leaving just a few chimneys standing on Long Island's Gold Coast on Monday.
The Lands End mansion was built in the early 20th century in Sands Point, New York, overlooking the waters of Long Island Sound. In the 1920s it became the home of Herbert Bayard Swope, the executive editor of the New York World and an acquaintance of many of the luminaries who came to define the Roaring Twenties, including Fitzgerald.
But in recent years it had stood empty, a reminder that fabulously wealthy hedonists known for their decadent parties have found other playgrounds around the world.
"This is the last little bit of this glamour, the Gatsby era, the flapper age, and they're tearing it down," said Monica Randall, who regularly ambled through Gold Coast estates on horseback as a teenager in the early 1960s and later wrote books about the area's gilded homes.
Bert Brodsky, the founder and chairman of a healthcare technology company, bought the Colonial Revival-style mansion in 2004 from Virginia Kraft Payson, a breeder of thoroughbred horses. She wanted $50 million; he paid $17.5 million. Brodsky had hoped to move into the 21,000-square-foot property with its two dozen or so rooms but his family thought otherwise.
The Great Gatsby
Stages Biggest Magic Show Ever
North Korea
Amid a burst of fireworks and a haze of smoke, a burly showman in a white sequined suit and gold lame cape appears with a flourish. Over the next 45 minutes, he appears to make a Pyongyang bus levitate and wriggles free from a box sent crashing to the stage through a ring of fire.
This is magic North Korean-style performed in a show touted as the country's biggest ever and mounted in a city where good, old-fashioned illusion, a dancing bear and a dose of slapstick comedy can still command the biggest crowds of the year.
The country's love for magic is a legacy of the circus traditions they inherited decades ago, during an era of Soviet influence.
North Korean founder Kim Il Sung ordered the creation of the Pyongyang Circus in 1952 in the middle of the Korean War. The tradition of highly technical stagecraft - including the Arirang mass games, where 100,000 performers move in sync in a feat that has come to embody North Korean discipline and regimentation - still dazzles in a country where high-tech entertainment is scarce.
In fact, North Koreans so love magic that two diplomats dispatched to the United Nations had a special request in 1995 of their American hosts: They wanted to go to Las Vegas to see David Copperfield.
North Korea
Was A Day Earlier
Last Supper
Christians have long celebrated Jesus Christ's Last Supper on Maundy Thursday but new research released Monday claims to show it took place on the Wednesday before the crucifixion.
Professor Colin Humphreys, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, believes it is all due to a calendar mix-up -- and asserts his findings strengthen the case for finally introducing a fixed date for Easter.
Humphreys uses a combination of biblical, historical and astronomical research to try to pinpoint the precise nature and timing of Jesus's final meal with his disciples before his death.
Researchers have long been puzzled by an apparent inconsistency in the Bible.
While Matthew, Mark and Luke all say the Last Supper coincided with the start of the Jewish festival of Passover, John claims it took place before Passover.
Last Supper
In Memory
Bijan Pakzad
Bijan Pakzad, a Beverly Hills designer of ultra-luxury clothing, perfume and jewelry, has died.
His son, Nicolas Pakzad, tells the Los Angeles Times that his father suffered a stroke on Thursday and died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
The Times says family members put his age at 67 but public records list it as 71.
Pakzad, who was born in Iran, came to the U.S. in the 1970s and opened a Rodeo Drive boutique.
He boasted that his Bijan label included the most expensive menswear in the world, with suits costing thousands of dollars.
In the 1990s he teamed with NBA star Michael Jordan on a top-selling cologne.
Bijan Pakzad
In Memory
Michael Sarrazin
Canadian actor Michael Sarrazin, known for his role opposite Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, died Sunday in Montreal. He was 70.
He died after a brief illness, with his daughters Catherine and Michele at his side, according to a family spokesman.
He played in The Flim-Flam Man with George C. Scott, Sometimes a Great Notion with Paul Newman, and took on an extraordinary turn in the 1973 television production of Frankenstein: the True Story, as a character who fights for the monster.
More recently Sarrazin appeared in Canadian productions including 1985's Joshua Then and Now, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, and La Florida, in which he played the lounge singer Romeo Laflamme. The film about a Quebec family who buys a motel in Florida to escape the cold winters won the Golden Reel Award for 1993.
Born Jacques Michel Andre Sarrazin on May 22, 1940 in Quebec City, Sarrazin went to eight different schools before dropping out. He worked at a Toronto theatre, on TV and for the CBC in his teen years and then studied at the Actors Studio in New York.
He was noticed by Universal while playing in a historical documentary short for the National Film Board of Canada. Beginning his Hollywood career in 1965, he began in TV series The Virginian and TV movie The Doomsday Flight before starring in the post-Civil War drama Gunfight in Abilene.
After coming to wider notice with The Flim-Flam Man, Sarrazin played a series of hollow-eyed, soulful drifters that seemed to fit the anti-hero ethos of the era.
He played an aimless surfer in 1968's The Sweet Ride and a medical student who shoots up in The Pursuit of Happiness, both opposite Jacqueline Bisset, who was a long-time romantic partner.
He is the Depression-era wanderer who dances with Fonda's cynical character in 1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a role in which he utters few lines, conveying his world-weariness with body language alone. He is also memorable in the title role of the psychological thriller The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, playing a man who relives his past reincarnations.
He moved into more minor roles in the 1980s, including spots on TV's Street Legal, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and in 1996's Deep Space Nine. One of his last films was 2008's The Christmas Choir.
Sarrazin returned to live in Montreal five years ago where he was embraced as one of Canada's and Quebec's great contributors to cinema. He leaves his daughters Michelle and Catherine, sister Enid, sisters-in-law Marguerite Sarrazin and Suzette Couture and his brother Pierre.
Michael Sarrazin
In Memory
Pietro Ferrero
Pietro Ferrero, the CEO of the Ferrero Group holding company that produces Nutella, Tic Tac mints and other confections and a scion of one of Italy's richest families died on Monday after falling from a bicycle while on a business trip in South Africa. He was 47.
Pietro Ferrero was also chairman of Ferrero S.p.A. the Italian branch of the family-run company and the heart of the candy and sweets maker empire.
The company's press office at headquarters in Alba, northwestern Italy, said Ferrero, a cycling enthusiast, was riding a bike on his usual training run on a road in Cape Town when he fell off. It said it wasn't clear what prompted the fall.
With him on the business trip was his father, Michele Ferrero, who turned the company into an international sweets producer and invented successes including Nutella and Kinder in the 1960s and helped make the Ferreros a billionaire family that is now Italy's richest.
Ferrero's namesake grandfather Pietro started the company in 1942, supplying products for a pastry shop run by his wife, Piera, in Alba, in the region of Piedmont. Because it was hard to obtain ingredients for sweets during World War II, the elder Pietro Ferrero decided to exploit something Piedmont had in abundance - hazelnuts - and invented a confection using a sweet paste made from the nut.
The company's line of products went international under the leadership of Michele Ferrero, son of the founder, who was the driving force behind the company's international expansions, starting with Germany in 1956, and then moving into Eastern Europe, Russia and Latin America in the 1990s.
Pietro Ferrero, began working in Ferrero Germany in 1985 after getting a university degree in biology, and then moved to company headquarters in Alba, working on technical and production matters.
At his death he was CEO of Ferrero International S.A., the Luxembourg-based holding group of Ferrero Group, and chairman of Ferrero, S.p.A., the Italian branch of the Group.
The company was proud about what it called its "social enterprises." These are local Ferrero plants in needier areas of the world, including South Africa, India and Cameroon, where local residents are employed and part of the revenue goes to fund education and health care for poor children.
Pietro Ferrero
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