Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman's Column: Boring Cruel Romantics (New York Times)
… these people - the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity - aren't technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.
Scott Burns: Couch Potato Investing Turns 20 (Assetbuilder)
This is a birthday celebration. Couch Potato investing is 20 years old! I introduced it in a September 1991 column. If you have not followed this seismic innovation, it is investing as the Big Lebowski would do it- except we didn't have the inspiration of the movie until 1998.
Charlyn Fargo: Fiber to the Rescue (Creators Syndicate)
Three new studies link fiber intake to reduced risk of metabolic syndrome. One in every four Americans are affected by a group of risk factors called metabolic syndrome, which raises their risk for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The risk factors that contribute to metabolic syndrome are high blood pressure; elevated fasting blood glucose; large waist circumference; low levels of the good HDL cholesterol; and high blood levels of triglycerides.
Alex Raynor: Why do people hate hipsters? (Guardian)
Hipster-hate blogs are multiplying online. But who are these much-maligned trendies - and why do people find them so irritating? Perhaps we should learn to love our skinny-jeaned friends instead.
Homa Kaleeli: Revealed - how to master cookery without using recipes (Guardian)
Culinary success is all about choosing the right ingredients and experimenting, says food expert Philip Dundas.
Lucy Mangan: all hail Toryboy, king of the dented tins (Guardian)
'And here is my favourite,' I told him the first time we went to the supermarket together. 'The bargain aisle…'
Don Hill of Georgia: 15-Year-Old Dog Stumbles Onto Hero's Lawn & Both Get Swept Away (care2.com)
… just weeks before I found Roadie, I had lost my mother, and Roadie, without me even knowing it at the time, had helped me through some of the darkest days of my life focusing on him and not the recent loss of my mom. I will never forget him or the special gift he gave me and rarely a day goes by that I don't think of him playing with his ball or my other dogs and walking as fast as he could to try to keep up with them that I don't smile or sometimes still shed a tear.
Patrick Pacheco: "Alan Rickman: Truly, deeply appealing" (LA Times)
Over the years, the British actor has built an impressive gallery of rogues and romantics. To him, it's just storytelling - and a love of language.
David Bruce has 42 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $42 you can buy 10,500 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," "Maximum Cool," and "Resist Psychic Death."
wrote:
, after watching '60 Minutes', answered:
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly sunny but cool.
Chinese Strip Protest
Ai Weiwei
First it was money folded into paper planes that were flown over the walls of dissident artist Ai Weiwei's home. Now Chinese Internet users' latest show of solidarity with Ai has taken the unlikeliest form of protest: mass nudity.
By Monday afternoon, seventy people had posted nude photos of themselves on a website called "Ai Wei Fans' Nudity -- Listen, Chinese Government: Nudity is not Pornography" -- a rare form of protest in a country where public nudity is still taboo.
They uploaded the photos after Beijing police questioned Ai's videographer on Thursday for allegedly spreading pornography online by taking nude photographs of Ai and four women.
Supporters of Ai, whose 81-day secret detention earlier this year sparked an international outcry, say that the questioning over the nude photographs is China's latest effort to intimidate its most famous social critic.
Ai Weiwei
Victims Condemn Intrusion
Hacking
The parents of a murdered British schoolgirl pleaded on Monday for the country's newspapers to curb practices such as phone hacking and covert photography as a public inquiry into media standards turned the spotlight on the celebrity obsessed press.
The disclosure in July that a long-simmering row over phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid had spread from celebrities to a murder victim provoked an national outcry that led to the closure of the newspaper.
Within days, his News Corp group withdrew its bid to buy the 61 percent of broadcaster BSkyB it did not already own; its British newspaper arm News International shut the 168-year-old paper and Prime Minister David Cameron ordered the inquiry.
To a silent court room, Sally Dowler told how she had suddenly become excited during the hunt for her daughter when she realized that phone messages left on Milly's phone were being deleted - thinking, falsely, she was still alive.
Hacking
Saving A Library
Central Falls, RI
The public library in Central Falls that was temporarily closed because of the city's dire finances is expanding its hours again after receiving a donation from actress Viola Davis and a state grant.
The Adams Memorial Library said Monday that it got a $1,000 check from Davis, who grew up in Central Falls. Davis appeared recently in the movie "The Help" and was nominated for an Oscar for her role in 2008's "Doubt."
Actor Alec Baldwin donated $10,000 to the library last month.
The library has raised $61,000 since it was shuttered in July ahead of the city's bankruptcy filing. It reopened part-time with the help of volunteers. Beginning Dec. 1, it will be open six days a week.
Central Falls, RI
Suspends Library e-Books
Penguin
Library patrons hoping to borrow e-books published by Penguin may have to wait.
Citing security concerns, Penguin Group (USA) announced Monday that it had suspended the availability of e-books to libraries. Crime writer Patricia Cornwall, "The Pillars of the Earth" writer Ken Follett and biographer Ron Chernow are among Penguin's many authors. Hardcovers and paperbacks aren't affected by Penguin's decision.
Publishers have been wary of allowing libraries to loan e-books over worries about lost sales.
Simon & Schuster and Macmillan have yet to make e-books available to libraries. HarperCollins has restricted e-books, a policy that angered librarians when announced last year.
Penguin
Hacked By Non-Rupert
Hugh Grant
Actor Hugh Grant said Monday that he believes his phone was hacked by British tabloid the Mail on Sunday - the first time he has implicated a newspaper not owned by Rupert Murdoch in the wrongdoing.
Grant told an inquiry into media ethics that a 2007 story about his romantic life could only have been obtained through eavesdropping on his voice mails.
He said he could not think of any other way the newspaper could have obtained the story alleging that his romance with Jemima Khan was on the rocks because of his conversations with a "plummy voiced" woman the paper identified as a film studio executive.
Challenged as to whether he was speculating about the source of the story, Grant acknowledged that he didn't have any hard proof.
"Speculation? O.K. But ... I'd love to hear what the Daily Mail or the Sunday Mail's explanation of what that source was if it wasn't phone hacking."
Hugh Grant
Funding Dispute Delays
September 11 Museum
The 2012 opening of the Sept. 11 museum at the World Trade Center will be delayed by disputes over redevelopment costs, a person familiar with the construction project said Monday.
The dispute between the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.
The foundation is responsible for the museum's cost while the Port Authority, which owns the site, is paying for infrastructure improvements. Exactly who should pay for each component of the project has been subject to debate, and the dispute responsible for the delay partly centers over $156 million that the Port Authority says the foundation owes.
A memorial at the trade center opened in September on the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks. The museum showcasing artifacts from the attacks was to open on the 11th anniversary next year.
September 11 Museum
Uh-Huh, Sure
T-rump
What's in a name? About $3 billion, if you happen to spell it T-r-u-m-p.
Real estate mogul, reality television star and author Donald Trump estimates his net worth at $7 billion in a forthcoming book.
In his latest tome, Trump, known for promoting everything from his real estate projects to board games, vodka and reality TV shows, spells out his net worth, coming up with a figure billions more than Forbes magazine, which in September put the amount at $2.9 billion.
At $3 billion his biggest asset -- by far -- is brand value, which according to a note "has been established by Predictiv, the highly respected brand valuation company."
In its latest look at his finances Forbes conceded that "yes, Trump remains adamant that Forbes is underestimating his brand value" -- which they put at $200 million.
T-rump
Composer Arraigned
Fernando Rivas
Fernando Rivas, 59, an Emmy-award winning children's music composer, was arraigned on charges of production, distribution and possession of child pornography in South Carolina on Monday, court documents showed.
Rivas, who graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, is a Cuban-born composer, pianist, arranger and producer, according to the American Composers Forum in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Rivas has won two Emmy awards and a Grammy, and has composed music for the television show "Sesame Street" featuring singers including Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan and Cyndi Lauper, a biography on his website said.
He has also composed for the Disney children's show Handy Manny, his website said.
Fernando Rivas
US Returns Stolen Painting
The Flagellation of Christ
An American university returned a 15th century painting to a Berlin museum on Monday, more than six decades after the valuable piece was stolen in the chaotic aftermath of World War II.
The Flagellation of Christ was one of more than a dozen paintings that disappeared from Berlin's Jagdschloss Grunewald museum during the summer of 1945, looted by British and Russian soldiers.
The painting, which originally formed a wing of an altarpiece, was later sold and ended up in the Indiana University Museum of Bloomington.
The university returned the oil-on-oak painting voluntarily to what it called "its rightful owners" after it was first contacted in 2004 by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation which oversees the Jagdschloss Grunewald museum.
The 19.7 inches x 19.7 inches (50cm x 50cm) panel, depicts Jesus, blood-covered and bound to a pillar, surrounded by four men who are beating him with whips. It was created by an unknown artist of the "Cologne School" in the 1480s. Experts consider work attributed to the artist to be the best of the period.
The Flagellation of Christ
In Memory
Shelagh Delaney
Playwright Shelagh Delaney, best known for her 1958 play "A Taste of Honey," has died of cancer, her agent said Monday.
Delaney died Sunday night at her daughter's home in eastern England, said agent Jane Villiers. Delaney was a few days short of her 72nd birthday.
The writer was just 19 when "A Taste of Honey" premiered. The downbeat tale of a young woman's pregnancy following a one-night stand with a black sailor, and her supportive relationship with a gay artist, verged on scandalous at the time, but the play had successful runs in London and New York.
The play, and its subsequent film adaptation, are generally considered to be part of Britain's "kitchen sink realism" movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, which portrayed the gritty reality of working-class life and also included works such as John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" and Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning."
Delaney's immediate inspiration was her dislike of Terence Rattigan's play, "Variations on a Theme." Believing she could do better, she wrote "A Taste of Honey" in two weeks, reworking material from a novel she was writing.
Delaney and the film's director, Tony Richardson, shared BAFTA and Writer's Guild awards for best screenplay for the 1961 film adaptation, which starred Rita Tushingham.
She rebelled against a theater which she saw as portraying "safe, sheltered, cultured lives in charming surroundings, not life as the majority of ordinary people know it."
Her second play, "The Lion in Love," about a difficult marriage between a frustrated man and an aggressive woman, did not enjoy the same success when it opened in 1960. She didn't write for the theater again until 1979, when she revised her BBC-TV series "The House that Jack Built."
In between, she wrote screenplays: "The White Bus," 1966; "Charlie Bubbles," 1968, for which she won a second Writer's Guild Award; and "The Raging Moon," 1970.
She also wrote the screenplay for the 1985 film "Dance with a Stranger," based on the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed for a crime in Britain. She also wrote a memoir, "Sweetly Sings the Donkey," in 1963.
Delaney's early work was rooted in her home town of Salford, an industrial suburb of Manchester.
To live in Salford, she said in a 1960 film by Ken Russell, was to be restless; she compared herself to a tethered horse, eager to be cut free. In Salford, she also found a vitality which infused her writing.
"A Taste of Honey" enjoyed a musical reincarnation in the work of the prominent Manchester band The Smiths. The band's songwriter, Morrissey, lifted many lines from Delaney's play, including: "'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice."
The face of the young playwright features on the cover of The Smiths' 1987 album, "Louder than Bombs."
Delaney is survived by her daughter, Charlotte Delaney, and grandchildren Max, Gable and Rosa Delaney. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
Shelagh Delaney
In Memory
John Neville
John Neville, a British-born Canadian actor and stage director who appeared in the hit TV series "The X-Files," has died. He was 86.
Neville, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died Saturday in Toronto surrounded by family. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where Neville worked as an artistic director in the 1980s, announced his death in a statement over the weekend.
Neville appeared in dozens of movies, television shows and theater productions during a career that spanned six decades.
Perhaps the one that gave him the most prominence came in the '90s when he landed the recurring role of the "The Well-Manicured Man" in the "The X-Files."
Neville was born in England, emigrated to Canada in 1972 and later became a citizen.
John Neville
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