'Best of TBH Politoons'
Reader Suggestion
Mike Smith update
Marty:
Please post this on a future of edition of Bartcop E re
Mike Smith, the lead vocalist/keyboardist of the legendary Dave Clark Five
. He became a quadriplegic after a fall at his home in Spain in 2003. He's definitely had a hard time.
Mike906Update
And what's more, George W. Bush is apparently blameless in this matter....
EJ2E
Thanks, Ed!
OTOH, if stem cell research hadn't ground to a halt in the States 6 years ago, who knows where we'd be.
Not that your man had anything to do with that...
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Steve Forbes: Slick Soluton (forbes.com)
In September Iraq's political leaders agreed to post-pone until 2008 any moves to "carve up" the country into autonomous states. The principal reason for the delay was the ever divisive question of who would control the country's immense oil wealth. Most of the oilfields fall in Kurdish and Shiite areas. The Sunnis are afraid that regional autonomy will mean they will be bereft of their share of the black gold.
Beth Quinn: What now but pain for families of dead soldiers? (recordonline.com)
I am so, so sorry. I'm sorry we have never even seen the coffins their children came home in. I'm sorry the president never once attended a soldier's funeral in some pretense of respect for these young patriots who died with honor. That is his shame and his terrible, terrible sin.
Tim Bousquet: Loan soldiers: Helping the world's poorest citizens, one tiny loan at a time (thecoast.ca)
A former street beggar borrows $100 and buys a cow, and she now earns enough to feed her children by selling milk door-to-door. A tenant farmer borrows $500 and buys the land he's worked for decades; the money he used to pay in rent he now uses to build a house. A peasant borrows $20 to buy a taco stand, and with hard work and more loans, builds a tortilla factory.
Lucy Atkins: Five ways to ... avoid cancer (guardian.co.uk)
We all know the general drill when it comes to cancer protection: stop smoking (smoking causes more than one in four cancer deaths); cut down on booze (alcohol increases your chance of mouth, breast and several other cancers); lose weight (more than 4% of cancers could be avoided in Britain if no one exceeded a body mass index of 25). However, research is advancing all the time. Here are five less well-known anti-cancer strategies:
Michele Hanson: So what if Jagger went on stage a few hours after his father died? What was he supposed to do? (guardian.co.uk)
Mick Jagger's dad died of pneumonia last Saturday and a few hours later Jagger Jr was on stage performing before thousands. Well, so what? What are you meant to do when your parent dies? Jagger had already flown across the Atlantic to sit at the bedside, he'd been told his father was improving, back he went to the States to work, and then his father dies. Why come back to visit a dead father who won't know whether he's there or not, and would have wanted him to carry on performing, anyway?
Borat: The Back Story (andrewtobias.com)
As I was watching the movie, I kept wondering whether some of the players, besides Borat and his Kazakh sidekick, were actors - or at least in on the gag. Because to the extent they were, it would be a little less funny; while, to the extent they really weren't, I would feel embarrassed for them. So I spent some of my brain that should been laughing trying to imagine how this was done. Did the civilians have any clue? Did they sign releases? Well, it turns out that a long-time friend and sometime reader - one of you, that is - was in the movie!
David Bruce: Wise Up! Names (athensnews.com)
During the early 1980s, New Hampshire's Franconia College basketball team played a lot of away games because it lacked a home court. However, the team was perfect for away games because its nickname appeared on the scoreboard of every away court where it played. Franconia College teams are known as the Visitors.
Reader Tip
Goya Painting Stolen
A painting by Spanish master artist Francisco Goya was stolen last week while it was being taken to an exhibition, two museums announced.
The 1778 painting, Children with a Cart, disappeared on its way from Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in Manhattan while in the care of a professional art transporter, the museums said Monday in a joint release.
The painting, which disappeared somewhere in the area of Scranton, PA, would be virtually impossible to sell and therefore has no value on the open market," the museums said. Source
My comment: In Scranton, PA! Not exactly a hot bed of art theives. Sounds like an 'inside job' to me!
MAM
Thanks, Marianne!
Pretty much the 'bending-over-granny-fannies' proudly decorating the front yard art-crowd, as I recall.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they tend to prefer artists they know, not some fancy-schmancy dead Spanish guy.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly sunny and cool.
Raising Money For Katrina
Comic Relief
Comic Relief, the celebrity-studded fundraising telethon for the homeless, is back, after an 8-year hiatus.
Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg will take the stage Saturday to raise funds for Hurricane Katrina victims, capping a weeklong Comedy Festival that began Tuesday in Las Vegas.
The show marks the ninth major telecast of Comic Relief, a 20-year-old institution that held its last major event in 1998. Participating this year are Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, George Lopez and Sarah Silverman. Wayne Brady will host the show's satellite location in New Orleans. It will be broadcast live from Caesars Palace on HBO and, with an 8-second delay for content, on TBS.
Much of the proceeds will go toward building traditional "shotgun" houses in New Orleans' Holy Cross area in the devastated lower Ninth Ward. The narrow, rectangular houses can be built for about $145,000 each and sold to low-income families for about $110,000 by a local nonprofit group, Zmuda said.
Comic Relief
Philanthropists Should Give More
Ted Turner
Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner told a roomful of fellow philanthropists on Monday to "give until it hurts" but said they should keep some extra cash on hand - or, at least what he considers spare change.
"Keep a few hundred million at least, because you never know," Turner told a crowd of about 300 people at the Clinton Presidential Library here. "Things could get really tough."
Turner took some shots at resident Bush and called for more private-sector help in nuclear disarmament as he addressed a conference on philanthropy, hosted by the online magazine Slate.
"I'd rather be here than with a bunch of Nazis planning to kill people or at the Pentagon figuring who they're going to bomb next, Afghanistan or Iraq," Turner said during his talk, presented as a conversation with Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. "At least we're bombing people with funds and good will. If our country used some of the same philosophy in this room, it would be a ... better world than we're living in now."
Ted Turner
Cancels Performance
Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle has canceled a performance scheduled for Thursday at the Comedy Festival in Las Vegas, organizers said Monday without providing further explanation.
The Comedy Festival is put on by HBO and AEG Live. Bill Maher will still perform Thursday, but his show has been moved up by an hour to 9:30 p.m.
People with tickets for Chappelle's show will get refunds.
Dave Chappelle
Renaissance Masterpieces Found
Fra Angelico
Two lost paintings by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico have turned up in a modest house in Oxford in a discovery hailed as one of the most exciting art finds for a generation.
The works -- two panels each painted with the standing figure of a Dominican saint in tempera on a gold background -- are expected to fetch more than 1 million pounds at auction.
They were discovered behind a bedroom door in a terraced house when art auctioneer Guy Schwinge was called in to carry out a valuation after the owner of the house. librarian Jean Preston, died in July.
Fra Angelico
Diseased Tree To Be Felled
Anne Frank
A huge horse chestnut tree fondly described by Anne Frank in her diary about life in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is set to be cut down because it is diseased.
The horse chestnut, estimated to be more than 150 years old, has been in a bad condition for years. It sits in the garden of a canal house on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht that is overlooked by the annex the Frank family hid in, which has been turned into a museum.
"We both looked up to the blue sky, the horse chestnut whose bare branches glittered with droplets, the gulls and the other birds that seemed made of silver as they swooped by. All of this moved us so much that we could not speak," Anne Frank wrote in her diary on February 23, 1944.
The authorities are planning to put a graft of the old horse chestnut, which will be 100 percent genetically similar, in exactly the same spot.
Anne Frank
Toys for Tots Reject
Jesus Doll
A talking Jesus doll has been turned down by the Marine Reserves' Toys for Tots program.
A suburban Los Angeles company offered to donate 4,000 of the foot-tall dolls, which quote Bible verses, for distribution to needy children this holiday season. The battery-powered Jesus is one of several dolls manufactured by one2believe, a division of the Valencia-based Beverly Hills Teddy Bear Co., based on Biblical figures.
Toys are donated to kids based on financial need and "we don't know anything about their background, their religious affiliations," said Bill Grein, vice president of Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, in Quantico, Va.
As a government entity, Marines "don't profess one religion over another," Grein said Tuesday. "We can't take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family."
Jesus Doll
Reality Show Car Crash
Ms. Dynamite
Ms. Dynamite was recovering from a 100-mph crash that occurred during filming of "The Race," a car-racing reality show on Britain's Sky One TV network.
Brian Johnson, lead singer of rock band AC/DC, struck the back of the British rapper's Formula Ford car at Silverstone racetrack in central England on Sunday.
Other contestants included Melissa Joan Hart of TV's "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" and 1980s British pop singer Gary Numan.
Ms. Dynamite
Oh, Canada!
Toronto
The use of medical marijuana has given two Toronto professors the right to something that many students could only dream of -- access to specially ventilated rooms where they can indulge in peace.
The two, at the University of Toronto and at York University to the north of the city, suffer from chronic medical conditions that some doctors say can be eased by smoking marijuana. They are among nearly 1,500 Canadians who have won the right to use the drug for health reasons.
Using human rights legislation, the two petitioned their employers for the right to light up in the workplace. They faced a legal struggle, but the universities eventually agreed.
The government grows the drug in an abandoned salt mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba, and sells it to authorized users at C$5 ($4.40) a gram.
Toronto
Print Fetches Record At Auction
Edvard Munch
A woodcut by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch fetched a record 8.1 million crowns ($1.27 million) at an Oslo auction, auctioneers said on Tuesday.
It was the highest price ever paid for a Munch print and near the record for a print by any artist, experts said.
The 1899 print "Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones" was sold by a Norwegian family at Blomqvist's auction house on Monday to a an anonymous buyer, the house's managing director Martin Biehl told Reuters.
Edvard Munch
Thousands Dying
Bootleg Vodka
A state of emergency has been declared in the Irkutsk region of Siberia after thousands of men and women were hospitalised from drinking "counterfeit vodka". About 3,500 people die every month from alcohol poisoning in Russia, writes Sky News Moscow Correspondent Alex Rossi. But the last few weeks have been especially bad after an unusually strong batch of contaminated spirit was sold across the country.
A large number of Russians drink this "counterfeit vodka". It is cheap. It is very strong. And it is a killer.
Sky News spoke to Vladimir - one of Russia's many alcoholics who admitted he drinks vodka when he can, but more often than not can only afford a technical spirit, such as brake fluid or window cleaner.
He is now being more cautious about what he drinks but walking into Irkutsk General Hospital it is a different story.
Bootleg Vodka
Florida Ballot Stamp Likely A Fake
'Inverted Jenny'
A stamp that initially appeared to be a rare 1918 "Inverted Jenny," used by a Florida voter to mail an absentee ballot last week, is probably a fake, an official with the American Philatelic Society said on Tuesday.
After viewing photographs of the stamp, which turned up on a ballot envelope in Fort Lauderdale, officials with the U.S. stamp collectors' organisation said they found inconsistencies that led them to believe it was a reproduction.
Philatelic Society director Peter Mastrangelo said a preliminary analysis found the thickness of the Florida stamp's paper appeared to be different from that of a real Jenny, the blue colour and the perforations did not match the originals and the stamp bore strong similarities to a known counterfeit.
'Inverted Jenny'
Prime-Time Nielsen's
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for Nov. 6-12. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
1. (2) "Desperate Housewives," ABC, 22.27 million viewers.
2. (4) "Dancing with the Stars," ABC, 21.98 million viewers.
3. (3) "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," CBS, 20.83 million viewers.
4. (5) "Dancing with the Stars Results," ABC, 20.69 million viewers.
5. (1) "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 20.65 million viewers.
6. (7) "NBC Sunday Night Football: Chicago vs. N.Y. Giants," NBC, 19.39 million viewers.
7. (X) "Dancing with the Stars Recap," ABC, 18.16 million viewers.
8. (8) "Criminal Minds," CBS, 17.57 million viewers.
9. (10) "Lost," ABC, 17.15 million viewers.
10. (6) "CSI: Miami," CBS, 16.8 million viewers.
11. (8) "CSI: NY," CBS, 16.78 million viewers.
12. (13) "60 Minutes," CBS, 16.23 million viewers.
13. (X) "House," (Election Night special), Fox, 16.11 million viewers.
14. (X) "CMA Awards," ABC, 15.96 million viewers.
15. (X) "NCIS" (Election Night Special), CBS, 15.44 million viewers.
16. (12) "Without a Trace," CBS, 15.22 million viewers.
17. (25) "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," ABC, 15.10 million viewers.
18. (17) "Cold Case," CBS, 14.77 million viewers.
19. (15) "Deal or No Deal" (Monday), NBC, 14.67 million viewers.
20. (21) "E.R.," NBC, 14.56 million viewers.
Ratings
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