Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Trump is Right on Economics (NY Times Columnist)
Jeb Bush's attacks on the G.O.P. front-runner are on issues where the Republican voting base and the party's rich donors diverge.
Paul Krugman: Productivity and Pay (NY Times Blog)
… the next time you hear someone claiming that middle-class families have, in fact, seen a big rise in living standards, you should know that to the extent that this is true (which is less than claimed), it's mainly about working more hours. Pay really has almost stagnated despite rising productivity.
Ann Robinson: How long will I live? The answer may be in the genes (The Guardian)
Studies show that brighter people live longer - and the basis is largely genetic. Does this mean that DNA trumps factors such as smoking, diet and exercise?
Luisa Dillner: Should I worry if my child is a goth? (The Guardian)
Although recent research has linked goth culture with a higher risk of depression and self-harm in teenagers, most are perfectly happy. Stigmatising the sub-culture further is not going to be helpful.
Luisa Dillner: Should I worry if my child is a goth? (The Guardian)
First parents had to worry about the emotional fallout of One Direction splitting up. Now they have to fret about what subculture their teens belong to. A study in The Lancet Psychiatry shows that if your child is a committed goth, they are three times more likely to self-harm than other teenagers. Goths come in various forms but the Oxford Dictionary definition is: "A member of a subculture favouring black clothing, white and black makep, and goth music."
Blair Dodge, Matthew Moffitt: 5 Terrifying Secrets Behind Food You Eat Every Week (Cracked)
As all of you know, history is an unrelenting parade of horror and depravity. Why should the history of food be any different? So with that in mind, here are some bizarre and/or nightmarish stories you can share with the family around the dinner table: …
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From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Gare Says...
Mercury Is Going Retro!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Back to way too hot.
There Are 586 Reasons Why You Need to Know About A Little Town in Northwest Pennsylvania
"HitNRun Phase One"
Prince
Prolific pop icon Prince is out with a new album of dance-friendly funk and, in the latest twist to his tortured relationship with the music industry, he is exclusively streaming it.
Called "HitNRun Phase One," a reference to the famously eccentric singer's recent tours where he announces concerts hours before taking the stage, the album out Monday recaptures the vigorous feel of live Prince who remains sprightly at 57.
Prince released the album only on Tidal, in a coup for the streaming service led by rap mogul Jay Z that has struggled to make its mark since a star-studded debut in March.
The immediacy and artistic control of Tidal appealed to Prince, who in the early 1990s wrote "slave" on his cheek and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol to protest label Warner Brothers' control over his copious output.
But his latest move is especially striking as it comes little more than a year after Prince reconciled with Warner, which put out two of his albums simultaneously in September 2014 and agreed to release remastered editions of his earlier work including seminal 1984 album "Purple Rain."
Prince
Snakebite Treatment Running Out
Doctors Without Borders
Doctors Without Borders says the world will run out of one of the most effective treatments for snakebites next year, putting the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk, mostly in developing countries.
In a statement issued on Monday, the medical charity warned that existing stockpiles of the anti-venom Fav-Afrique produced by Sanofi Pasteur will expire in June. The company stopped producing the anti-venom last year and has since switched to MCHmaking a rabies treatment instead.
"We are now facing a real crisis," Dr. Gabriel Alcoba, the charity's snakebite adviser, said in a statement. The aid group, also known by its French acronym MSF, said there would likely be no alternative to replace the Sanofi Pasteur snakebite treatment for at least two years.
A spokesman for Sanofi Pasteur said the pharmaceuticals company was driven out of the market by competitors selling cheaper products, and it announced in 2010 it would stop making anti-venom. Those cheaper drugs are often seen as less effective.
Doctors Without Borders
Deer Devour Hemp Crops
Oregon
Deer got the munchies at an industrial hemp crop in southern Oregon.
The deer got by barbed-wire fencing a couple weeks ago and went through the hemp plants like high-powered mowers, the Grants Pass Daily Courier reported.
"Generally, I don't think they like cannabis. They liked ours, though," said Cliff Thomason, a real estate agent who is the steward of the first industrial hemp crop in Oregon, which was planted near Murphy by Thomason and his partners with Orhempco.
The company planted roughly 1,000 plants in the section the deer got into, and Thomason said there are only about 40 left.
Oregon
Set New Nesting Records
Sea Turtles
Wildlife biologist Doug Hoffman and his two interns kept busy this summer finding, cataloging and protecting a whopping 570 nests that giant loggerhead sea turtles had filled with eggs along the unspoiled beaches of Cumberland Island.
All the hard work seems to be paying off. Researchers say sea turtles rebounded from a slump last year to deliver one of the strongest summer nesting seasons on record on beaches from the Carolinas to Florida.
Preliminary numbers from Georgia show scientists and volunteers counted a record 2,292 loggerhead nests during the season that runs from May through August. It's the fifth season in six years that Georgia has surpassed its previous record.
In Florida, where the nesting season doesn't end until October, turtles are also breaking records. More than 12,000 endangered green sea turtles have dug nests along the beach at the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, said Kate Mansfield, head of the Marine Turtle Research Group at the University of Central Florida. It's a new record for the refuge.
Sea Turtles
Air Force Wants Property
Area 51
The U.S. Air Force is giving an ultimatum to owners of a remote Nevada property now surrounded by a vast bombing range including the super-secret Area 51: Take a $5.2 million "last best offer" by Thursday for their property, or the government will seize it.
The answer: No, at least for now.
The owners, who trace their mining and mineral claims to the 1870s, include descendants of a couple who lost their hardscrabble mining enterprise after the Air Force moved in in the 1940s. Nuclear tests then began in 1951, their mine mill mysteriously exploded in 1954 and they ran out of money to seek reparations from the government in 1959.
The two sides are far apart. And they know condemnation proceedings would lead to a "fair market value" determination that could end up in court for a long time.
The federal government gradually encircled the mine property - totaling fewer than 400 acres - northwest of Las Vegas, making it a private island reachable today only by passing armed guards at security gateposts. The surrounding secure 4,500-square-mile reservation for nuclear testing, military training and other research is almost twice the area of the state of Delaware.
Area 51
Disrupted By "Evil Spirits"
Reed Dance
South Africa's annual Zulu Reed Dance ceremony was disrupted by hallucinating girls who swarmed the country's president, a Johannesburg newspaper reported on Monday.
Teenage girls dancing in the annual cultural festival heard voices and rushed toward the area where President Jacob Zuma and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini were seated during the Saturday ceremony in KwaZulu-Natal province. The president's bodyguards escorted him away from the thousands of colorfully-clad dancers, The Star's front-page report said.
Nomagugu Ngobese, president of a cultural group that trains the young women, heard reports that priests were summoned on Friday, after some dancers began wailing, apparently possessed.
This happened again during the main ceremony on Saturday. Dancers began to hallucinate and scream, causing panic among the crowd of thousands of young women, who scattered in different directions, said Ngobese, who attended the ceremony. They did not run toward the president, she added.
"Now that it has happened within the palace, it seems as if it's something new," said Ngobese, an academic and traditional healer who said spirit possession was common.
Reed Dance
Procedures Reformed
Annulments
Pope Francis has reformed the Roman Catholic Church's cumbersome procedures for marriage annulments, a decision keenly awaited by many couples around the world who have divorced and remarried outside the Church.
The Vatican said on Monday that the pope had written a document known as a Motu Proprio, Latin for "by his own initiative", that changes the way Catholics get annulments.
The details of the document, which is expected to streamline and simplify the procedure, will be released on Tuesday at a Vatican news conference.
The new procedures follow the pope's appointment last September of an 11-member commission of lawyers and theologians to propose reform of the process. The Vatican said at the time that he wanted to "simplify and streamline" the procedure while "safeguarding the principle of the indissolubility of marriage".
Most annulments take place at the local diocesan level. Each decision must be automatically reviewed by a second tribunal even if it is not contested by one of the parties. Reformers argue that step is superfluous and should be eliminated.
Annulments
Use Hawks for Home Security
Hummingbirds
Tiny hummingbird nests, with their coffee-bean-size eggs, are a tempting treat for predators. But a new study finds that hummingbirds have evolved a clever approach to home security: They use hawks as guard dogs.
About 80 percent of the hummingbird nests built in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona are clustered near hawk nests, the researchers said. And location matters: When hummingbird nests are built near hawks, the nests have a daily survival rate of 31 percent. Outside of hawk territory, the daily survival rate drops to a mere 6 percent, one study found.
Harold Greeney, a biologist and the founder and director of the Yanayacu Biological Station Cosanga in Ecuador, and his colleagues first published that finding in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology in 2009. It wasn't the first time birds had been shown to nest near predators for protection, he told Live Science.
"It wasn't anything particularly special until we went back and said, 'Well, we think that we showed that they do better there. The question now is, why?'" Greeney said.
The answer, it turns out, is that nesting hawks provide a "cone of safety" extending downward, Greeney and his colleagues report today (Sept. 4) in the journal Science Advances. Predatory jays that snatch hummingbird eggs avoid this cone to prevent becoming hawk food. (There are records of hawks eating hummingbirds in the wild, but the raptors prefer heartier snacks of large birds and rodents.)
Hummingbirds
Weekend Box Office
'War Room'
Summer blockbusters gave way to the small and highly targeted over a sleepy Labor Day weekend at the box office, with notable performances from the faith-based "War Room" and the Spanish language cartoon "Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos."
Sony's "War Room" fought its way to first place in its second weekend in release, earning $12.6 million across the four-day holiday weekend, according to Rentrak estimates on Monday. The micro-budget family drama, which cost only $3.5 million to produce, has grossed $27.9 million to date.
New release "A Walk in the Woods," debuted in third place, behind previous champ "Straight Outta Compton," with $10.5 million from 1,960 screens. The buddy dramedy based on Bill Bryson's memoir starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte cost a reported $8 million to make and has taken in $12.2 million since its Wednesday opening.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Monday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Rentrak. Final domestic figures will be released Tuesday.
1."War Room," $12.6 million.
2."Straight Outta Compton," $11.1 million.
3."A Walk in the Woods," $10.5 million.
4."Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation," $9.3 million.
5."The Transporter Refueled," $9 million.
6."No Escape," $7 million.
7."Inside Out," $4.5 million.
8."The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," $4.4 million.
9."Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos," $4.4 million.
10."Sinister 2," $4.3 million.
'War Room'
In Memory
Jean Darling
Original cast member of classic comedy short subjects "Our Gang" Jean Darling has died at 93.
She died Friday in Rodgau, Germany where she was living with son, according to Deadline Hollywood, who spotted the story.
Darling's credits also include the original Broadway production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Carousel," and the 2013 silent comedy film "The Butler's Tale."
She is believed to be one of the last actors of the silent film era.
Jean Darling
In Memory
Judy Carne
Judy Carne, the British actress best known for the phrase "Sock It to Me" on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, has died. She passed away after suffering from pneumonia at Northampton General Hospital in the same U.K. town in which she was born in 1939. She was 76.
The daughter of two greengrocers, Carne rose to fame on U.K. television screens in the early 1960s, starring in Danger Man (1961) and The Rag Trade (1961), but soon packed her bags and headed the U.S., just ahead of The Beatles and the so-called British Invasion.
The mid-1960s would see her become a familiar face in American sitcoms, starting with a regular role in Fair Exchange (1963) alongside Eddie Foy Jr., followed by The Baileys of Balboa (1964) and Love on a Rooftop (1966). She also appeared in the popular spy show The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
While promoting Fair Exchange in 1963, Carne met and married then up-and-coming actor Burt Reynolds, and once recollected their first passionate meeting: "We were immediately in love, so we immediately made love. I was engulfed by him, my small body lost in his large frame." However, she claimed Reynolds soon became abusive, and they divorced in 1966.
After a couple of movies, including A Pair of Briefs (1962) and The Americanization of Emily (1964), Carne landed what would go on to be her most popular role. On sketch comedy program Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, which ran from 1968-73, Carne featured in a routine that would end with her saying, "Sock it to me," before being doused with water or otherwise assaulted. She starred in the first two seasons, then returned for occasional appearances.
But the good times didn't last. Toward the end of the 1970s, Carne's experimental drug use turned into fully fledged addiction and, in 1977 and 1978, she was arrested by the police three times. In March 1978, a possible drug overdose saw her rushed to the hospital, and a few months later, she was involved in a near-fatal car crash.
After being released from the hospital with a broken neck, she returned to her hometown of Northampton.
In her later years, Carne resided in the small U.K. village of Pitsford with her two dogs.
Judy Carne
In Memory
Martin Milner
Martin Milner, the affable actor who did his best work behind the wheel on the TV series Route 66 and Adam-12, has died. He was 83.
Milner, whose big-screen career also included roles in the sensational Burt Lancaster films Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Sweet Smell of Success, both released in 1957, died Sunday after a long illness at his home in Carlsbad, Calif., his son, Stuart, told the Los Angeles Times.
Milner was born Dec. 28, 1931, in Detroit. His father was a film distributor for Universal International and Eagle-Lion Films, and his mother was a dancer. The family moved around and he worked as a child actor in local productions in Seattle before the Milners settled in Hollywood when he was 14. He studied with an acting coach and landed an agent, then attended USC.
Milner became friends with Jack Webb when they both had roles in Halls of Montezuma (1950). In 1952, Milner began a two-year stretch in the Army, where he directed training films and served as master of ceremonies for a touring-show unit that was based at Fort Ord in Northern California.
With Milner still in the service, Webb gave him voice work for $75 a day on the radio version of Dragnet, which Milner squeezed in during three-day passes, then had him guest-star on several episodes of Webb's 1952-55 Dragnet series on NBC.
During this period, Milner also appeared with John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Operation Pacific (1950) and in other films like Robert Wise's The Captive City (1952), The Sabre and the Arrow (1953), Francis in the Navy (1955), Pillars of the Sky (1956), Marjorie Morningstar (1958) - in which he portrayed the playwright friend of Natalie Wood - and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion (1959).
He also appeared in and produced the cult classic Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), starring Mamie Van Doren as a professor who once was a stripper.
Later, Milner played the betrayed husband of Patty Duke's character in the 1967 film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls.
Milner also played the first victim in the history of NBC's Columbo series (a mystery author, his Jim Ferris is murdered by Jack Cassidy's Ken Franklin, his writing partner, in the premiere episode that aired in September 1971 and was directed by Steven Spielberg).
During his career, Milner also guest-starred on such TV shows as The Lone Ranger, Slattery's People, The Twilight Zone, The Millionaire, The Rat Patrol and Murder, She Wrote.
Martin Milner
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