M Is FOR MASHUP
DJ Useo is on holiday.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The Gospel Of Supply Side Jesus… (YouTube)
"Al Franken's animated comic tells the biblical story of Supply Side Jesus - basically, a version of Christ the savior updated to be more palatable for the devout conservative Christians of today. Witness the tale of his radical free-market teachings." - Disinformation
This Little Girl Has Toy Marketing All Figured Out (YouTube)
This young champion of justice is named Riley, and she's sick and tired of all the toy marketing gimmicks that keep girls from buying the superhero toys that they really like.
Interesting Street Art in New Orleans (Imgur.com)
Blue Dog is Road Kill.
Diane Dimond: Layaway Angels (Creators Syndicate)
With no desire to be acknowledged for their gifts, they paid off the accounts of total strangers. Startled clerks obliged by looking up layaways that included children's toys and clothing so as to make sure two recipients were served - the kids, of course, but also the struggling parent who had carefully picked out the meager treasures weeks earlier and had been dutifully paying on the presents ever since.
Andrew Tobias: Listless Liberals
Obama "appointed a magnificent Secretary of State, killed Osama Bin Laden, decimated the top ranks of Al-Qaeda, ended the war in Iraq, brought all those troops home as he said he would, set a timetable to end the war in Afghanistan, helped to inspire the Arab Spring, led the world in toppling Qaddafi - rather more cost-effectively than his predecessor toppled Saddam - restored America's standing among the community of nations, was pictured on the cover of New York Magazine as "The First Jewish President" yet improved our standing with Muslims…."
Jonathan Chait: When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable? (New York Magazine)
If every Democratic president disappoints, maybe there's something wrong with our expectations. Tough love from a fellow traveler.
Franklin Roosevelt's Address Announcing the Second New Deal (FDR Library)
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.
Ted Rall: Who Polices Political Cartooning?
Hard numbers are difficult to come by but the number of full-time professional political cartoonists now hovers around 30. In 1980 there were about 300. A century ago, there were thousands.
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."
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny with a nice breeze.
Tweet Tweaks Tebow
Bill Maher
Comedian Bill Maher drew the ire of Tim Tebow fans and Christians over the weekend after a profane tweet reveling in the Broncos' blowout loss to the Buffalo Bills.
"Wow, Jesus just f***ed #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere ... Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler "Hey, Buffalo's killing them," Maher tweeted.
Tebow, whose team suffered its second straight loss after a six-game winning streak, did not respond to Maher's tweet.
The tweet prompted some to call for a boycott of Maher's HBO show "Real Time with Bill Maher."
Bill Maher
Charlie Brown Parody
Denis Leary
In the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, you may have missed one of the Christmas season's most intriguing - and potentially inflammatory - parody videos.
Comedian Denis Leary's production company, Apostle, posted a Charlie Brown spoof that is sure to cause some laughter, anger and - confusion.
Perhaps Gothamist describes it best as a "very uncomfortable jihadist joke." The premise of the short clip is that Charlie Brown converts from Christianity to Islam. As the video progresses, its themes become increasingly controversial.
Leary also posted an anti-Santa song (another parody, of course) on the same day called "Merry Fu**ing Christmas" (caution: strong language when you click the link - and the video autoplays).
Denis Leary
Ballots Are In The Mail
Oscar Voters
Academy Awards season is officially on. Nominations ballots for the 84th Oscar show have just gone in the mail.
Oscar organizers mailed ballots Tuesday to 5,783 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Ballots are due back Jan. 13, and Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 24.
The Oscar ceremony is set for Feb. 26, with Billy Crystal returning as host for the first time in eight years.
Oscar Voters
AMC Renews For Second Season
"Hell on Wheels"
AMC has renewed its second highest-rated show for a second season.
"Hell on Wheels," which premiered in November, is averaging 3.2 million viewers as it tells the post-Civil War story of Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) as he seeks revenge against his wife's killers.
Bohannon's journey puts him in the middle of construction of the first transcontinental railroad, overseen by greedy Doc Durant (Colm Meaney). Among his fellow citizens in the traveling town of Hell on Wheels are emancipated slave Elam Ferguson (musician/actor Common) and Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott), a recent widow trying to survive in a male-dominated world.
"Hell on Wheels"
Ends Marriage After 16 Days
Sinead O'Connor
Irish singer Sinead O'Connor has ended her fourth marriage after just 16 days, blaming pressure and disapproval from the family and friends of her new husband Barry Herridge.
O'Connor, 46, said on her blog that the marriage went wrong three hours after the Dec 8. ceremony in Las Vegas and that the pair had lived together for only seven days before splitting on Christmas Eve.
"Within 3 hours of the ceremony being over the marriage was kyboshed (ruined) by the behavior of certain people in my husband's life. And also by a bit of a wild ride I took us on looking for a bit of a smoke of weed for me wedding night as I don't drink," the controversial singer wrote.
"The marriage was 16 days. We lived together for 7 days only. Until Xmas eve. And we haven't been awful to each other," she wrote.
Sinead O'Connor
Won't Fight Extradition
Bruce Beresford-Redman
A reality show producer charged with murdering his wife during a Mexican vacation is dropping his extradition fight and will stand trial in Cancun, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Bruce Beresford-Redman's attorney said the onetime "Survivor" producer has decided not to appeal a Los Angeles federal court ruling upholding his extradition to Mexico.
Monica Beresford-Redman, 42, disappeared from a Cancun resort where the couple was vacationing with their two children last year. Her body was found stuffed in a sewer cistern.
If he is convicted of aggravated homicide in Mexico, he faces 12 years to 30 years in a Mexican prison.
His two small children have been placed in the custody of Beresford-Redman's parents with visitation by their mother's sisters.
Bruce Beresford-Redman
Hoax People Cover
Taylor Lautner
People magazine said on Tuesday that a cover apparently featuring "Twilight" actor Taylor Lautner coming out as a gay man was "100 percent fake."
"The cover in question is 100 percent fake. This began as a ridiculous Twitter joke that went viral," said People Magazine spokeswoman Julie Farin.
The fake People cover, dated Jan 7 2012, was circulated on the Internet over the holidays. It featured a picture of Lautner, 19, with text saying "Tired of rumors, the Twilight star opens up about his decision to finally come out."
Social media sites circulated the fake cover, with celebrities like Def Jam's co-founder Russell Simmons tweeting their congratulations to the "Twilight" actor before realizing the hoax.
Taylor Lautner
Hackers To Publish Stolen Emails
Stratfor
Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous group said they are getting ready to publish emails stolen from private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting Inc, whose clients include the U.S. military, Wall Street banks and other corporations.
Strategic Forecasting Inc, which is also known as Stratfor, disclosed over the weekend that its website had been hacked and that some information about its corporate subscribers had been made public.
The hacking group known as Antisec has claimed responsibility for the attack and promised to cause "mayhem" by releasing stolen documents.
"Stratfor is not the 'harmless company' it tries to paint itself as. You'll see in those emails," Anonymous said via Twitter.
The group said it would release those emails once it had finished formatting them for distribution and prepared more than 9,000 "mirrored" copies. Creating that many copies of the file would allow the hackers to distribute it more quickly and also make it more difficult for authorities to shut down servers holding the data.
Stratfor
Russian Ship To Help Iced-In City
Nome, Alaska
A Russian tanker slowed by ocean currents kept to its mission Tuesday of delivering petroleum products to an iced-in Alaska city, even as international red tape thwarted the journey.
The 370-foot tanker Renda was in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday morning was about 740 nautical miles west-southwest of Attu in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. It was encountering currents that had slowed its speed to about 10 mph, the Coast Guard said.
So far, the laws of four nations have had to be considered - Russia, South Korea, Japan and the United States.
Before the tanker can dock at the Dutch Harbor fishing port in the Aleutians to load gasoline, it will need to pass an inspection to operate in U.S. waters. Then it will need a waiver of federal law to load the gasoline and bring it to Nome - that is if it can go through 300 miles of sea ice around the city of about 3,500 people.
Nome normally gets fuel by barge, but a huge storm this fall prevented the last delivery before winter. Now the plan is to have the Russian tanker deliver 1.5 million gallons of petroleum products.
Nome, Alaska
Stones Fall
Colosseum
Italy's culture ministry is investigating reports that bits of rock have fallen from the Colosseum.
Witnesses reported seeing the fallen masonry Sunday. Italian news agency ANSA reported another bit fell Tuesday, but Colosseum director Rossella Rea denied it and blamed the false report on a "psychosis" that occurs every so often that Rome's iconic stadium is crumbling.
Italian environmental group Legambiente has frequently raised the alarm about the precarious state of the Colosseum, charging that auto exhaust fumes and vibrations from vehicles and a nearby subway are damaging the Colosseum's travertine exterior and brick and tufa interior.
A euro25 million ($33 million) restoration, paid for by Diego Della Valle, founder of shoemaker Tod's, is set to begin in March.
Colosseum
Greek Culture In Chicago
National Hellenic Museum
Dolls a Greek woman made during World War II. Ice cream bowls and wooden spoons from a 1940s Greek candy store. Thousands of record albums filled with Greek music.
These items and many other beloved objects and family heirlooms have found their way from around the country to the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, which has a new place to store and exhibit them all, in a four-story 40,000-square-foot environmentally friendly building of limestone and glass that opened in early December.
The $20 million project in the city's Greektown neighborhood, which includes temporary and permanent exhibition space, classrooms, oral history archives, a library and roof patio overlooking downtown, replaces the museum's previous space a few blocks away on one floor of a four-story building.
"This museum became by default the repository for artifacts from the Greek American experience because there was no other place people felt secure donating their items," said Stephanie Vlahakis, the museum's executive director.
National Hellenic Museum
2011 List
Bad Science
From whale sperm to colon cleansers to the shape of a woman's foot when she has an orgasm, celebrities did not disappoint during 2011 with their penchant for peddling suspect science in the world's media.
In its annual list of what it considers the year's worst abuses against science, the Sense About Science (SAS) campaign named reality TV star Nicole Polizzi, Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann and American singer-songwriter Suzi Quatro as top offenders, with their dubious views on why the sea is salty, the risks of cervical cancer vaccines and the colon.
While the review is partly about entertainment, the campaign group stresses it also has a serious aim - to make sure pseudo-science is not allowed to become accepted as true.
The review also highlighted a bizarre quote from TV personality Polizzi, who declared recently: "I don't really like the beach. I hate sharks, and the water's all whale sperm. That's why the ocean's salty."
Simon Boxall, a marine expert and oceanographer dismissed Polizzi's suggestion. "It would take a lot of whale sperm to make the sea that salty," he said.
Bad Science
In Memory
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract painter known for her bold, lyrical use of color who led a postwar art movement that would later be termed Color Field painting, died Tuesday at her home in Connecticut, her nephew said. She was 83.
One of Frankenthaler's most famous works is "Mountains and Sea," a 1952 painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which she created by pouring thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor.
Frankenthaler's death at her home in Darien, Connecticut, followed a long illness, said her nephew, Clifford Ross, a multimedia artist and photographer known for his large landscapes.
Her abstract style helped American art make the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting and influenced such artists as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2002. From 1985 to 1992, she served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Frankenthaler was born on Dec. 12, 1928, on New York's Upper East Side and got her bachelor's degree from Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied with Paul Feely. She studied at Columbia University in New York and took painting classes with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League and also with Hans Hofmann.
Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951 at New York's Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and she was also included that year in the landmark exhibition "9th Street: Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture." Frankenthaler also showed internationally, exhibiting at the International Biennial of Art in Venice in 1966 and in the United States Pavilion at Expo in Montreal in 1967.
Frankenthaler went on to develop a highly personal painterly manner within the abstract expressionist movement. She worked in a wide range of media in addition to paintings on canvas and paper, including ceramics, sculpture, woodcuts, tapestry and printmaking.
Frankenthaler explored a variety of linear components in her oil paintings of the 1950s, but in the 1960s she shifted her focus, embracing acrylic paints to explore open, flat fields of color, evident in the large and glowing 1973 painting "Nature Abhors a Vacuum." Ross said she was never doctrinaire and cheered art from Henri Matisse to David Smith to Willem de Kooning.
Frankenthaler, whose 13-year marriage to the painter Robert Motherwell ended in 1971, also is survived by her second husband, Stephen M. DuBrul Jr.
Helen Frankenthaler
In Memory
Harry Kullijian
Harry Kullijian, a former Northern California city councilman who married Broadway star Carol Channing some 70 years after the childhood sweethearts lost contact, has died on the eve of his 92nd birthday.
Kullijian collapsed at the couple's Rancho Mirage home after suffering an aneurysm, according to family spokesman Harlan Boll. He died Monday at a nearby hospital, Boll said.
Kullijian met Channing while attending middle school in San Francisco, where they dated for a few years before going off to college. The pair lost touch for decades - as Channing became a musical theater hit with her Tony-winning role in "Hello, Dolly," while Kullijian went to war and then local politics. But they never forgot about each other.
In her 2000 memoir, "Just Lucky, I Guess," Channing reflected on her first love, saying the years spent with him were the happiest of her life.
"The leader of the school band was Harry Kullijian. I was so in love with Harry I couldn't stop hugging him," she wrote.
A mutual friend who read the book urged the recently-widowed Kullijian to call Channing. They got engaged two weeks after their reunion and married three months later, when Channing was 82 and Kullijian 83.
Born in Turlock, Kullijian settled in nearby Modesto after fighting in World War II and the Korean War and went into walnut farming and real estate. He served two terms on the Modesto City Council, and then spearheaded a local campaign against pornography.
After he married Channing, the couple formed the Channing-Kullijian Foundation to support arts education in schools, and he took over as her manager. The couple split their time between homes in Modesto and Rancho Mirage.
Kullijian is survived by Channing; his two children with late wife Gerry Amos, John and Leslee; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Harry Kullijian
In Memory
Joe Bodolai
Former "Saturday Night Live" writer Joseph Bodolai has committed suicide in a Hollywood hotel room, the Los Angeles coroner's office said Tuesday.
Coroner's office spokesman Craig Harvey said room service staff found the body of the 63-year-old Bodolai at 1:30 p.m. Monday in a room at Hollywood's Re-Tan Hotel. He checked into the hotel Dec. 19.
Harvey said Bodolai drank a mixture of Gatorade and antifreeze. The death, first reported by celebrity website TMZ, has been ruled a suicide.
Besides writing on 20 episodes of "Saturday Night Live" in 1981 and 1982, Bodolai was the TV producer for 20 episodes of "The Kids in the Hall" Canadian sketch comedy troupe.
Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said there was no suicide note, however Bodolai apparently foreshadowed his suicide online.
The Los Angeles Times cited a lengthy post published Friday on a WordPress blog that appears to be registered to Bodolai. It was titled "If This Were Your Last Day Alive, What Would You Do?" and included Bodolai's accomplishments and regrets.
A message on the Twitter account (at)joebodolai said "Goodbye" and had a link to the blog.
Joe Bodolai dies
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