Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Penn & Teller Amazing Comb-over (YouTube)
The greatest comb-over in history.
Paul Krugman: Obamacare Fails to Fail (NY Times)
The Affordable Care Act's huge success is largely slipping under the radar.
Alison Flood: Bill Gates creates instant book hit by revealing favourite business reading (Guardian)
Microsoft chief sends sales of John Brooks's collected journalism rocketing on secondhand market and prompts ebook reissue.
Robert Evans, Agustina C.: 5 Things I Learned Sneaking Over the U.S.-Mexico Border (Cracked)
I am originally from Panama, which has an American military presence. A sexy military presence: I was born from an extramarital affair between my mom and a member of the U.S. Air Force. Technically, I should have already been an American citizen, but thanks to a wacky series of adventures, including misfiled paperwork and some mild kidnapping, no citizenship for me. My mother and I decided to sneak into the United States for a chance at a better life, a free education, and one of those sweet Springsteen headbands all people are issued the second they cross into U.S. territory.
Stephen Moss: "John Sessions, comedy pioneer: 'I lost my way'" (Guardian)
He was the king of improv comedy. Now he's playing second fiddle to a dancing dog. What happened? John Sessions talks to Stephen Moss about stage fright, voting Ukip and life after the 'twinkly years.'
James Parker: The Greatest Short Story of All-Time (Slate)
It's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling.
ALGIS VALIUNAS: Fantastic Voyage (Weekly Standard)
The literary (?) career of Jules Verne
Time Travel Lover (Vimeo)
"Elisha Yaffe wrote and starred in this play about time travel. It starts with the usual: boy meets girl, but then someone invents time travel and everything skews out of control. ??If you could check in with the future to see if a relationship is going to work, how far ahead do you want to go? Three weeks? A year? Ten years? Careful, if you look too far ahead, you might not even be there! And who knows what you'll end up regretting if you change even one little thing. This video contains NSFW language."
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
has retired.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
BartCop
Hello Bartcop fans,
As you all know the untimely passing of Terry was unexpected, even by
him. We all knew he had cancer but we all thought he had some years
left. So some of us who have worked closely with him over the years are
scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. My job, among other
things, is to establish communications with the Bartcop community and
provide email lists and groups for those who might put something
together. Those who want to play an active roll in something coming from
this, or if you are one of Bart's pillars, should send an email to
active@bartcop.com.
The most active open discussion is on Bart's Facebook page.
( www.facebook.com/bartcop )
You can listen to Bart's theme song here
or here.
( www.bartcop.com/blizing-saddles.mp3 )
( youtu.be/MySGAaB0A9k )
We have opened up the radio show archives which are now free. Listen to
all you want.
( bartcop.com/members )
Bart's final wish was to pay off the house mortgage for Mrs. Bart who is
overwhelmed and so very grateful for the support she has received.
Anyone wanting to make a donation can click on this the yellow donate
button on bartcop.com
But - I need you all to help keep this going. This note
isn't going to directly reach all of Bart's fans. So if you can repost
it on blogs and discussion boards so people can sign up then when we
figure out what's next we can let more people know. This list is just
over 600 but like to get it up to at least 10,000 pretty quick. So
here's the signup link for this email list.
( mailman.bartcop.com/listinfo/bartnews )
Marc Perkel
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Lovely marine layer.
Web Companies Press FCC
Net Neutrality
Major U.S. web companies on Monday urged regulators to restrict the ability of Internet providers including mobile carriers to strike deals for faster delivery of some web traffic and planned a publicity campaign about the government's proposal.
The Internet Association, which represents three dozen web companies such as Google Inc, Netflix Inc and Amazon.com Inc, made their case in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, which plans to establish new so-called "net neutrality" rules.
The rules guide how Internet service providers (ISPs) manage traffic on their networks, aiming to ensure they do not unfairly limit consumers' access to website and applications.
In its comments on Monday, the Internet Association criticized the possibility of ISPs charging content providers "for enhanced or prioritized access" and called for equal Internet traffic rules for both wired and wireless networks.
Net Neutrality
Politicians Criticize Fox "News" Host
California
Two California politicians have called for a host of Fox News Channel's "The Five" program to resign, saying Bob Beckel's use of the term "Chinamen" was racist.
The pundit is facing criticism for using the word on air last week as well as for suggesting Chinese computer science students come to study in the United States only to pose a security threat.
Judy Chu, a Democratic U.S. congresswoman from California, said on Monday she was deeply offended and that Beckel should go immediately.
A California state senator on Saturday called on Beckel to resign. Ted Lieu, who represents suburban Los Angeles and is running for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat, called himself "one of those 'Chinamen' with 'Oriental' eyes" who immigrated to the United States and majored in computer science.
California
Lone Ranger Outfit Sold At Auction
Clayton Moore
The outfit Lone Ranger actor Clayton Moore wore when making appearances as the character after retiring from television has sold for $195,000 at a Texas auction.
Moore, who died in 1999, played the masked lawman on the ABC television series "The Lone Ranger" from 1949 to 1957.
The auction house says that after retiring from television, Moore made appearances in character at events including fairs. His outfit included a powder-blue shirt and pants, red kerchief, Stetson hat, boots, gun belt and Colt pistols.
The outfit spent more than a decade in the collection of a late Texas businessman whose family offered it at auction.
Clayton Moore
Long-Distance Call
Arecibo Radio Dish
Talk about a long-distance call! Astronomers have stumbled across a mysterious radio signal that appears to have traveled from not just from outside of our solar system - but beyond even our Milky Way galaxy.
The largest cosmic ear in the world, the 305-metre-wide Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico, picked up a momentary burst of radio waves on Nov. 2, 2012. The signal itself was quite modest - nothing more than radio blip lasting only three one-thousandths of a second long. It was so fast that the human ear alone could not detect it, but its ramifications could be huge in the research community.
The same signal had been heard a few times before, but only by the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. Astronomers, however, questioned its origin, thinking that since only that one observatory was hearing it, it must be coming from close to our planet, most likely somewhere within Earth's environment. They thought it could have been an errant communication signal bouncing off the upper atmosphere or a satellite.
"It took a long time for me and for my collaborators to really believe its reality," said Victoria Kaspi, one of the lead investigators in this discovery and astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal in an interview with Yahoo Canada News.
But now that Arecibo has also picked up these mysterious bursts, it confirms to Kaspi and her international team that it indeed has a cosmic origin. The finding are published in the July 10 The Astrophysical Journal and shows that the signal is beaming out from the constellation Auriga, which is visible across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Arecibo Radio Dish
Hollywood Foreign Press Settles Lawsuit
Golden Globes
The organization that puts on the Golden Globe Awards and the company that produces the telecast have resolved their long-standing court battle over rights to the show.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and dick clark productions announced Monday that the 2010 lawsuit has been settled. The terms were not revealed.
The dispute arose after dick clark productions negotiated a deal to keep the Globes show on NBC through 2018. The production company claimed it has the right to work on the show as long as it airs on NBC, but the association argued that it never agreed to those terms.
The president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association says the two organizations will continue to work together. The 72nd annual Golden Globe Awards are set to be presented Jan. 11 and broadcast live on NBC.
Golden Globes
Witness Says
Jesse Ventura
A woman testified Monday that she saw someone punch Jesse Ventura in 2006 at a California bar, contradicting the former Minnesota governor's assertions that the incident described in a slain military sniper's autobiography never happened.
Laura deShazo of Salt Lake City was called as the first defense witness in Ventura's defamation case against the estate of Chris Kyle, who is regarded as the deadliest military sniper in U.S. history.
DeShazo was there for the wake because her brother was on the same SEAL team. While there, she, her sister and her brother's girlfriend posed for a picture with Ventura, which was shown in court and showed him sporting a braided goatee. DeShazo said she later saw Ventura get into a "scruffle with a group of people" and saw a man punch Ventura. She said she doesn't know who threw the punch and didn't know Kyle, but she gave a description that was consistent with him.
But deShazo's testimony conflicted with a sworn video deposition Kyle gave before he was slain in Texas last year. DeShazo said she was "positive" the confrontation happened on the patio at the pub. Kyle said it happened out on the sidewalk. She said she didn't see what else happened and didn't see Ventura go down as Kyle claimed.
"It was a time of mourning for us. A bar fight was not a priority for me," she said.
Jesse Ventura
U.S. Standard
"Back Doors"
U.S. government standards for software may enable spying by the National Security Agency through widely used coding formulas that should be jettisoned, some of the country's top independent experts concluded in papers released on Monday.
Such mathematical formulas, or curves, are an arcane but essential part of most technology that prevents interception and hacking, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been legally required to consult with the NSA's defensive experts in approving them and other cryptography standards.
But NIST's relationship with the spy agency came under fire in September after reports based on documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pointed to one formula in particular as a Trojan horse for the NSA.
NIST discontinued that formula, called Dual Elliptic Curve, and asked its external advisory board and a special panel of experts to make recommendations that were published on Monday alongside more stinging conclusions by the individual experts.
Noting the partially obscured hand of the NSA in creating Dual Elliptic Curve - which Reuters reported was most broadly distributed by security firm RSA - the group delved into the details of how it and other NIST standards emerged. It found incomplete documentation and poor explanations in some cases; in others material was withheld pending legal review.
"Back Doors"
Utah Festival
Element 11
Police in Utah are investigating after a man killed himself by jumping into a 30-foot (9-meter) bonfire during an arts and culture festival on the weekend in the desert west of Salt Lake City, local media reported.
More than 1,000 people were watching as the man ran past safety barriers and leapt into the blaze on Saturday night at the Element 11 event, which has ties to the Burning Man festival held each year in northern Nevada.
The festivities include the construction of giant wooden models, which are then torched. Video taken by a spectator showed the man running into the flames, followed by screams and shrieks as onlookers took in what had happened.
Grantsville Police Lieutenant Steve Barrett told The Salt Lake Tribune newspaper that friends of the 30-year-old said he told him he planned to kill himself by running into the burning effigy, which was shaped like a character from the children's book, "Where the Wild Things Are."
He said security officers at the event, Grantsville firefighters, and individuals in the crowd had been unable to stop the man jumping in, nor rescue him after had.
Element 11
New Hampshire License Plate
'COPSLIE'
The New Hampshire driver who got the state's top court to approve his "COPSLIE" vanity plate could soon be joined on the highways by motorists declaring themselves "BIGTACO," "MAMS" or "KNUCKL."
The state Department of Motor Vehicles resumed processing applications on Monday for customized license plates, following a state Supreme Court ruling in May that found it was using "unconstitutionally vague" criteria to reject plate ideas.
That lawsuit was brought by a man who legally changed his name in 2012 to "human" from David Montenegro, and had proposed a plate reading "COPSLIE." The DMV rejected the plate because it violated its rule against plates that were "offensive to good taste."
The DMV on Monday began using an interim set of standards that have specific restrictions, including references to "intimate body parts or genitals," "sexual or excretory acts or functions," "profanity or obscenity," and "racial, ethnic, religious, gender or sexual orientation hatred or bigotry."
A similar case is playing out in Indiana, where a Superior Court judge found that the motor vehicle division violated free speech rights by rejecting certain plates, such as that of a former police officer who wanted his plate to say "0INK."
'COPSLIE'
In Memory
Nadine Gordimer
South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an unwavering moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustice of apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family said on Monday.
Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a statement from the family said.
Regarded by many as South Africa's leading writer, Gordimer published novels and short stories steeped in the drama of human life and emotion of a society warped by decades of white-minority rule.
Many of her stories dealt with the themes of love, hate and friendship under the pressures of the racially segregated system that ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president.
A member of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), which was banned under apartheid, Gordimer used her pen to battle against the inequality of white rule for decades, earning her the enmity of sections of the establishment.
Some of her novels, such as ""A World of Strangers" and ""Burger's Daughter", were banned by the apartheid authorities.
But Gordimer, a petite figure with a crystal-clear gaze, did not restrict her writing to a damning indictment of apartheid. She cut through the web of human hypocrisy and deceit wherever she found it.
In later years, she became a vocal campaigner in the HIV/AIDS movement, lobbying and fund-raising on behalf of the Treatment Action Campaign, a group pushing for the South African government to provide free, life-saving drugs to sufferers.
Nor did she shy away from criticising the ANC under current President Jacob Zuma, expressing her opposition to a proposed law which limits the publication of information deemed sensitive by the government.
"The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms," she said last month.
The daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish watchmaker, Gordimer started writing in earnest at the age of nine.
A lonely childhood triggered an intense study of the ordinary people around her, especially the customers in her father's jewellery shop and the migrant black workers in her native East Rand outside Johannesburg.
A teenage naivety was eventually replaced by a sense of rebellion and as her talent and reading public grew, her liberal leanings earned her the reputation of a radical.
Eventually the government censors clamped down and banned three of her works in the 1960s and 1970s, despite her growing prestige abroad and her acceptance as one of the foremost authors in the English language.
Gordimer also remained proud of her heritage despite her hatred of apartheid and only once considered emigrating - to nearby Zambia.
""Then I discovered the truth, which was that in Zambia I was regarded by black friends as a European, a stranger," she said. "It is only here that I can be what I am: a white African."
Nadine Gordimer
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