'Best of TBH Politoons'
PURPLE GENE'S WEIRD WORD OF THE WEEK
TURDUCKEN
"TURDUCKEN"
ON LINE DEFINITION: A Cajun concoction served at Holidays consisting of a boned chicken stuffed inside a boned duck stuffed inside a boned turkey.
ON THE STREET: Chef Paul Prudhomme perfected the original Louisiana roast...but NFL Coach and sportscaster, John Madden popularized the fowl feast....but long ago the French created the "Roti Sans Pareil" (Roast without equal) with 17 creatures stuffed inside one another.
IN A SENTENCE: My good gastronomic buddy got deathly sick from his Thanksgiving dinner....he had "PigTurDuckEnBit"...which has a pig on the outside and a rabbit in the end...he said he was barfing big rings of meat ...for hours.
(Read BartCop Entertainment and learn a useless new word each Tuesday)
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Beth Quinn: Readers find common ground in shared despair (recordonline.com)
I discovered something both wonderful and sad this past week. The wonderful part is that I heard from scores of readers who share my stunned disbelief that Americans haven't staged a rebellion against President Bush. The sad part is that most of them feel isolated in their despair over America's lethargy. And for those who want to be heard, there is no leader, no rallying point, no place to say we want our country back. But they should know they aren't alone. That's why I'm using this space today to let you hear each other.
More reader comments on President Bush (recordonline.com)
I am filled with outrage. I am outraged over people telling me in glossy fliers that my school taxes are only going up 3.5 percent and then getting a 21 percent increase.
Paul Krugman: Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis (nytimes.com)
The financial crisis that began late last summer, then took a brief vacation in September and October, is back with a vengeance.
Richard Shaw: WaMu: Executive Privilege Trumps Shareholder Interests (seekingalpha.com)
There is something terribly wrong with the misalignment of shareholder (owner) interests and management (employee) interests these days. This example at WaMu is just that: an example - one of far too many examples. We hope institutional investors (or class action attorneys) who have the muscle would figure out a way to force realignment of the interests of those who own and those who manage public companies.
Jim Hightower: BLACK-ROBED CORPORATISTS (jimhightower.com)
Do you feel as sorry for corporate executives as I do?
Andrea Grimes: "$30,000 Millionaires: Douchebags in the Mist" (Dallas Observer)
Is the man who spends more money than he makes in an attempt to appear wealthy and desirable myth or fact? We venture into the Dallas jungle to find out.
Tim Dowling: A saint with the powers of Superman (guardian.co.uk)
Saints don't ordinarily make good comic book heroes. Their super powers were rarely suited to heroics.
Jonathan Jones: Who's buying these Old Moosters? (guardian.co.uk)
The truth is very few people really like art. This is the dirty secret that makes a living for artists such as Caroline Shotton.
Elizabeth Fox: Review of "Making Money, by Terry Pratchett (popmatters.com)
This sense of humor is the driving force in Making Money, infusing each sentence with jokes and puns. When Pratchett's not having fun with the quirks of the species he creates, he's cracking jokes about politics and skewering the ridiculous social nuances of the not-quite-ordinary cityfolk. On a single page, he can employ intellectual puns and dabble in potty humor, and his special knack for taking everything extra-literally provides endless amusement.
MICHAEL FRANCO: Here's the News, and All of It Is Good: An Interview with Mick Jones (popmatters.com)
The ex-Clash artist returns with a new outlook and a new means of spreading his music, but the rebelliousness remains. Jones talks to PopMatters about his new project Carbon/Silicon.
Ted Rall Online
Hubert's Poetry Corner
Rudy's Foiled Love Nest Tryst
Your tax dollars at work - and, at play?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and warm.
New Christmas Song
Billy Joel
Billy Joel has broken his self-imposed retirement from pop for the second time in a year, but he'd almost rather you didn't know that.
The second new Joel-penned single since his last pop album, 1993's "River of Dreams," is called "Christmas in Fallujah" and hits iTunes December 4. There are two major differences between it and the classics that have made him one of the best-selling artists of all time. First, there's no piano on it, and second, there's barely any Billy Joel on it, either.
Instead, for what Joel says is a first, he's written a song expressly for another singer, a 21-year-old Long Island native named Cass Dillon. Joel tells Billboard the inspiration for "Fallujah" was partly born of letters he's received from service personnel overseas, but also simply from years of the realities of war.
The song came to him quickly, Joel says, as did the realization that he wasn't the guy to record it. "I thought someone with a young voice should be singing this, someone just starting out in life," he says. "Plus, you know, I'm 58 years old. My voice isn't the voice I was thinking of when I was writing; I was thinking of a soldier, someone of that age."
Billy Joel
Call For Darfur Action
Writers
A group of prominent writers, including Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer, accused European and African leaders on Tuesday of political cowardice by failing to put the Zimbabwe and Darfur crises high on the agenda of a key summit this weekend.
Germany's Grass and South Africa's Gordimer were joined by Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, also a Nobel laureate, and former Czech president Vaclav Havel, a playwright.
The letter was released by the non-governmental organization Crisis Action. A spokesman for the group said it would be published in a number of African and European newspapers.
Writers
Hint They May Return
Siegfried and Roy
Four years after retiring, illusionists Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn say they may just reappear.
The German-born performers' long-running "Siegfried & Roy" production ended in October 2003 when Horn was critically injured on stage by a tiger.
"A good magician never lets the cat out of the bag," Horn told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday for a story about the pair's possible return to show business. "Act surprised when you hear about it."
Siegfried and Roy
'Trust Me' Means 'Fuck You'
Leno
A day after they learned that they would be laid off, employees of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" have received news that might ease the blow.
Leno has decided to pay his non-writing staff out of his pocket through next week, sources said Saturday. That could be extended if the writers' strike is not resolved by then.
According to several staffers, tensions at "Tonight Show" have been mounting for weeks, and matters weren't helped by news that other late-night hosts have been preserving the jobs of their non-writing staffs or paying those who had been laid off. Conan O'Brien confirmed Thursday, for example, that he would pay the salaries of at least 50 non-writing "Late Night" staffers out of his own pocket on a week-to-week basis.
Insiders said the source of the sudden hostility toward Leno is a conference call he held shortly after the WGA strike began.
"He was on speaker phone," a staffer said. "There were 80 of us. He told us not to panic. He said to trust him. He said: 'I can't get into details, but nobody will miss a car payment or lose their house. We're family. Trust me. I'm going to take care of this.' But that was the time we should have been looking for new jobs."
Leno
Writers Deserve To Prevail
Sandra Oh
Sandra Oh may look every inch the Hollywood star, stylishly dressed Monday in head-to-toe black save for a chunky grey knit shawl, but get her talking about the ongoing screenwriters strike in Hollywood and her Canadian sensibility comes blasting through.
"There are some Canadian crew members on 'Grey's Anatomy' and myself and the Canadian crew are talking about the strike in a way that is much more socialist-based than the Americans," the 36-year-old actress said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "We get the point. We're like: 'Absolutely you have to strike.' This is the most important industry strike ever. It speaks tremendously to how the media is run globally now, and the rights of thousands and thousands of workers. I am really hoping that the producers come to the table and are fair to the writers."
Oh was in town Monday to be honoured by the Women in Film and Television organization with this year's CTV International Achievement Award for her work.
Sandra Oh
Manuscript Page Takes $35,400
Napoleon
A single manuscript page from a love story written by Napoleon Bonaparte sold at auction in France on Sunday for $35,400, an auction house said.
The item up for sale was the first page of the final draft of Napoleon's 1795 short novel "Clisson and Eugenie," said the Osenat auction house, based in Fontainebleau outside Paris.
The novel, never published in Napoleon's lifetime, was loosely based on the author's brief romance with Desiree Clary, the sister of his brother's wife.
Napoleon
Monthly Event
Bohemian Carnival
The DNA Lounge was a real circus the night The Mutaytor came to town. The band looked like a bunch of clowns. Young contortionists folded their limbs like fortune cookies above and around the stage.
There were no complaints from the 500 or so cognoscenti who paid $20 each to watch acrobats and aerialists on ropes perform to a live percussive beat.
Once a month, the techno dance club hosts the Bohemian Carnival, an informal gathering of troupes from the Bay Area's underground circus scene and a bellwether of a subculture trend taking hold in a city near you.
Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and possessed of an advanced sense of the absurd, young adults who got their first taste of trapezes, tightropes and red noses at Burning Man or other indie art festivals are joining a growing number of small, alternative circuses with Big Top dreams.
Bohemian Carnival
How Do You Make A Bigot Whine?
Michael 'Savage' Weiner
A conservative radio talk show host sued an Islamic civil rights group on Monday for copyright infringement over the organization's use of a portion of his show in which he called the Quran a "book of hate."
Michael 'Savage' Weiner said the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, violated his rights by wrongfully using a 4-minute segment of his Oct. 29 "The Savage Nation" show in a letter-writing campaign directed against talk radio advertisers. Audio from the show remained on CAIR's Web site Monday.
A CAIR spokeswoman, who said the audio was not a four-minute segment, but a series of clips separated by beeps, called the suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, "bizarre, sloppy and baseless."
The suit alleges CAIR is not a civil rights group, but a political organization funded by foreigners with ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups. CAIR denies those claims, saying it opposes terrorism and religious extremism.
Michael 'Savage' Weiner
Nepotism Time
Pat Robertson
Pat Robertson is turning over his duties as chief executive officer of the Christian Broadcasting Network to his son but will remain chairman, the 77-year-old religious broadcaster announced Monday.
Robertson said he told CBN's board that it was time for him to pass on some of the duties he has held since he founded CBN in 1960 and that during the weekend the board had unanimously elected Gordon Robertson to replace him.
The board also appointed Gordon Robertson to be vice-chairman of the board. He will head CBN's efforts to expand into all phases of digital communications, the Virginia Beach-based CBN said in a statement.
Gordon Robertson holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from Washington & Lee Law School.
Pat Robertson
Admits Ad Service Tracks Logged-Off Users
Facebook
Facebook has confirmed findings of a CA security researcher that the social-networking site's Beacon ad service is more intrusive and stealthy than previously acknowledged, an admission that contradicts statements made previously by Facebook executives and representatives.
Facebook's controversial Beacon ad system tracks users' off-Facebook activities even if those users are logged off from the social-networking site and have previously declined having their activities on specific external sites broadcast to their Facebook friends, a company spokesman said via e-mail over the weekend.
Although according to the spokesman Facebook does nothing with the data transmitted back to its servers in these cases and deletes it, the admission will probably fan the flames of the controversy engulfing Beacon, which has been criticized by privacy advocates.
The Facebook spokesman did not initially reply to a request for further explanation on how the Beacon action gets triggered if a user is logged off from Facebook, when the social-networking site's ability to track its users' activities should be inactive.
Facebook
Goes After Knievel's Money
Shelly Saltman
Of all the bones Evel Knievel broke over the years, the costliest may have been the left arm of a PR man by the name of Shelly Saltman.
Saltman won $12.75 million in damages against Knievel after the motorcycle daredevil attacked him with a baseball bat in 1977 in a rage over a book Saltman had written about the showman.
With interest, the still-uncollected sum has grown to more than $100 million by Saltman's estimate, and he intends to try to collect it.
"We are going hot and heavy after his estate," Saltman told The Associated Press after Knievel died Friday at 69. "What he tried to do to me and how it hurt my family, I'm owed that."
Shelly Saltman
Ending Pay Phone Business
AT&T
Top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Monday it plans to end its dwindling pay phone business by the end of 2008, as more consumers use mobile phones.
The move affects AT&T pay phones in the company's previous 13-state service area, including California and Texas. BellSouth Corp, which AT&T acquired late last year, has already exited the pay phone business in its nine-state service area.
The use of pay phones has been declining in much of the developed world due to the popularity of mobile phones. But some complain that ending pay phone service restricts low-income, low-credit consumers' access to communications.
AT&T
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