Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Ashley Alman: Turns Out Anti-Union Volkswagen Workers May Have Screwed Themselves And The South (Huffington Post)
The German "co-determination" model mandates works councils, which connect employees to management, at all large German companies. Following the union vote, the head of Volkswagen's works council told German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the automaker would hesitate to expand in the U.S. South.
Tom Danehy: Tom discusses Bob Seger covers, online commenters and the Weekly's anniversary (Tucson Weekly)
On her new solo CD, Jennifer Nettles (of the country duo Sugarland) does a rousing, bluesy version of Bob Seger's "Like a Rock." The lyrics "Twenty years now; where'd they go? Twenty years, I don't know; I sit and wonder sometimes where they've gone" have always had a haunting quality to them. When you change 20 to 30, they become downright maudlin.
Suzanne Moore: I'm sick of awards ceremonies - they simply reflect our culture of entitlement (Guardian)
These formulaic dos have replaced the debutante balls where women all wear long frocks. I haven't worn a full-length dress since I was a bridesmaid.
Nathaniel Rogers and Chris Kirk: Meryl Streep Gets Thanked More Than God (Slate)
Crunching the numbers on a decade-plus of Oscar acceptance speeches.
Tom Reimann: 5 Famous Filmmakers Whose Dream Projects Were Disasters (Cracked)
Hollywood is full of stories about writers, actors, and directors struggling with projects that take forever to get produced but are finally released to critical and commercial success -- films like Garden State, Schindler's List, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. But not every filmmaker's passion project turns out to be Star Wars. More often than not, it's The Chronicles of Riddick, and everyone goes home broke and depressed.
Eddie Deezen: A Few Things You May Know About the Movie Grease (Neatorama)
Sadly, the passing of the great Sid Caesar last week (on February 11) brought back many memories of the movie Grease, filmed way back in the happy, innocent summer of 1977. Sid, who passed away at 91, was the oldest surviving cast member of Grease. Here's a few facts you may not have known about Grease (plus a few of my own memories).
Matthew Yglesias: Why Netflix Is Winning (Slate)
Its shows aren't as good as HBO's, but there's more to business than quality.
Etienne Lavie: OMG who stole my ads
Street artist Mr. Lavie replaces ads in Paris with reproductions of famous works of art.
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Like an extra summer.
Study Shows Link Between Music And Language
Jazz
Jazz musicians are famous for their musical conversations - one improvises a few bars and another plays an answer. Now research shows some of the brain's language regions enable that musical back-and-forth much like a spoken conversation.
The finding, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, is the latest in the growing field of musical neuroscience: Researchers are using how we play and hear music to illuminate different ways that the brain works.
And to Dr. Charles Limb, a saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist at Johns Hopkins University, the spontaneity that is a hallmark of jazz offered a rare chance to compare music and language.
Watching brains on jazz requires getting musicians to lie flat inside a cramped MRI scanner that measures changes in oxygen use by different parts of the brain as they play. An MRI machine contains a giant magnet - meaning no trumpet or sax. So Limb had a special metal-free keyboard manufactured, and then recruited 11 experienced jazz pianists to play it inside the scanner. They watched their fingers through strategically placed mirrors during 10-minute music stretches.
Sometimes they played scales. Other times, they did what's called "trading fours," where the pianist made up four bars, and then Limb or another musician-scientist in the lab improvised four bars in return, and the pianist responded with still new notes. That conversation-like improvisation activated brain areas that normally process the syntax of language, the way that words are put together into phrases and sentences. Even between their turns playing, the brain wasn't resting. The musicians were processing what they were hearing to come up with new sounds that were a good fit.
Jazz
Not A Fan Of Fracking
James Taylor
James Taylor still has Carolina in his mind these days.
The singer-songwriter is starring in a television ad for an environmental group urging North Carolinians to challenge efforts to allow natural gas exploration through hydraulic fracturing in the state where he grew up.
The Natural Resources Defence Council said the ad began running Thursday. A group spokesman would not give a price on the ad buy but said it would run for at least two weeks.
Taylor grew up in Chapel Hill and now lives in Massachusetts. He wrote the 1970s hit "Carolina In My Mind" about his state.
James Taylor
Carnival School Goes Natural
Rio
Wanted: topless Carnival dancers.
It sounds like a simple request in a city known for steamy nightclubs, Bacchanalian beach parties and Carnival parades featuring nude starlets donning only a "tapa-sexo," a leaf-sized patch of fabric that serves, literally, as a sex covering.
But there was a hitch in the recent casting call. The women wanted by Mocidade Independente Padre Miguel, one of Rio de Janeiro's best known Carnival troupes, had to be silicone-free.
In salute to a bygone era, Mocidade wanted Carnival dancers without the globular breasts and "bumbum," or buttocks, that now dominate the annual spectacle, a week-long party meant to purge sin before the Catholic season of Lent.
"It wasn't easy," says Paulo Menezes, the artistic director for the group, one of the 12 top-tier troupes that will march in Rio's Carnival starting on March 2. "Most of the women who want to take part in something like this have all had some surgery."
Rio
Sets New Wind Chill Record
Alaska
Gusting winds blew away Alaska's wind chill record on Valentine's Day (Feb. 14), setting a new low of minus 97 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 71 degrees Celsius). A remotely-operated National Weather Service sensor in Howards Pass, in northern Alaska's Brooks Range, recorded sustained winds of 71 mph (114 km/h) and gusts up to 78 mph (125 km/h) on Friday. The wind chill was calculated from the recorded temperature of minus 42 F (minus 41 C).
Wind chill is a measure of heat loss from the human body, and reflects how outdoor conditions actually feel to people braving the winter weather. Frostbite can strike in less than 5 minutes if skin is exposed in conditions like those in Howards Pass, the Alaska NWS said.
Alaska's previous wind chill record of minus 96 F (minus 71 C) was set at Prudhoe Bay on Jan. 28, 1989. Prudhoe Bay is a coastal town where oil workers process oil and gas extracted from Arctic Alaska's oil fields. Howard Pass is uninhabited and sits at 2,062 feet above sea level (628 meters), according to the Alaska National Weather Service.
Both records were computed using the weather service's "new" formula for wind chill, which was rolled out in 2001. The new formula makes wind chill temperatures warmer than pre-2001 records. For example, the Prudhoe Bay record wind chill occurred with an air temperature of minus 56 F (minus 49 C) and a wind from the west-southwest at 21 mph (34 km/h) gusting to 30 mph (48 km/h), the Alaska NWS said on Facebook. According to the 'old' formula, the Prudhoe Bay record would have registered minus 120 F (minus 84 C).
Alaska
Speaking Of Weenies...
Grover
Grover Norquist's trademark cause is fighting high taxes, but the savvy conservative Republican lobbyist just scored a big win on another front - fighting unions - and he wants more, betting on what he sees as a broad shift in U.S. labor politics.
Fresh from helping to crush a unionization drive at a Volkswagen AG plant in Tennessee, Norquist outlined an anti-union strategy that ties labor to liberals, with the long-term goal of sapping union financial support for Democrats.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, he argued that recent events show Republicans can fight and win against unions. "Not only can you, but if you don't, you're a weenie," he said.
Norquist heads Americans for Tax Reform, famous for its pledge not to raise taxes that it gets many politicians to sign, though the group also has long been active on other issues.
It recently rebranded and reinvigorated its anti-union affiliate as the Center for Worker Freedom, which opposed a high-stakes United Auto Workers' effort to unionize the VW plant in Chattanooga. That effort failed on Friday.
Grover
'Wolf of Wall Street' Connection
Tommy Chong
When the notorious "Wolf of Wall Street" stockbroker Jordan Belfort went to prison for fraud, he at first wasted away his days playing tennis and paying other inmates to do his chores.
But in a strange twist of fate, it was famed marijuana activist and comedian Tommy Chong who inspired Belfort to write his memoirs as part of his restitution.
"I kind of embarrassed him into writing," Chong said while taping an interview with fellow comedian Doug Benson on Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles.
The two men were cube mates (the posh prison did not have actual cells) in a California federal prison, and Chong said he encouraged Belfort to turn his story into a book after listening to the discredited former broker recall his experiences each night when they would talk.
Tommy Chong
Family Fight
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nobel Peace Prize medal and personal Bible must be moved to a court-controlled safety deposit box, a judge ruled on Wednesday as the late civil rights leader's children are engaged in a fight over ownership of his estate.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said once the medal and Bible are moved, "they won't go anywhere until we resolve this matter."
Under the judge's order, both items will be stored in a single bank box and the judge will hold the keys.
His two sons, Dexter and Martin Luther King III, want to sell the Nobel medal and the Bible. Their sister, Bernice King, is opposing the sale.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Sunken Yacht
Wayne Newton
Investigators have concluded that the sinking of a Lake Mead yacht owned by Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton was an accident, a National Park Service official said Thursday.
The Oct. 18 sinking of the 65-foot vessel was traced to the failure of two hoses to drain water from a rear storage compartment, park service spokeswoman Christie Vanover said.
One hose was disabled by a kink, and the other wasn't properly connected, Vanover said.
No one was on the boat and no one was injured when the 1996 Skipperliner, named Rendezvous, became swamped and sank stern-first in 49 feet of water in a slip at the Temple Bar marina on the Arizona side of the Colorado River reservoir.
The vessel and items in it were a complete loss, the park service report said.
Wayne Newton
Men With No Names Charged
Grifters
Six Southern California men have been charged with stealing millions of dollars by offering investments in phoney movies with names like "The Smuggler," federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The men were charged with fraud in two federal grand jury indictments and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted, authorities said. Four were arrested on Thursday and one other man agreed to surrender to authorities, prosecutors said.
The men ran companies that used "boiler room" telemarketing operations to call people around the country and convinced some 140 people to invest nearly $5 million in bogus film projects, prosecutors contend.
One movie initially was called "Marcel" but in 2011 the Alabama Securities Commission filed an order against the company for violating state investment law. The company name was changed and the movie was renamed "The Smuggler" to hide the order from potential investors, the federal indictment alleged.
Grifters
Study Confirms Suspicions
Oilsands
New federal research has strongly backed suspicions that toxic chemicals from Alberta's vast oilsands tailings ponds are leaching into groundwater and seeping into the Athabasca River.
Leakage from oilsands tailings ponds, which now cover 176 square kilometres, has long been an issue. Industry has acknowledged that seepage can occur and previous studies using models have estimated it at 6.5 million litres a day from a single pond.
The soil around the developments contains many chemicals from naturally occurring bitumen deposits and scientists have never able to separate them from contaminants released by industry.
The current Environment Canada study, accepted for publication in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, used new technology to discover that the mix of chemicals is slightly different between the two sources. That discovery, made using a $1.6-million piece of equipment purchased in 2010 to help answer such questions, allows scientists to actually fingerprint chemicals and trace them back to where they came from.
Oilsands
Family Fight Over Photos
Robert Johnson
The son of legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson can keep profits from the only two known photographs of his father, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The case turned on a technicality. The court ruled other family members knew as early as 1990 about the photos and royalty payments. A court declared the son, Claud Johnson, the musician's sole heir in 1998.
Under Mississippi's statute of limitation, the state Supreme Court ruled a legal challenge should have been filed no later than 1994. A lawsuit by other family members over the photos was filed in 2000.
Robert Johnson - who is said to have sold his soul to the devil for prowess on the guitar and whose songs have influenced a host of famous musicians - was destitute when he died in Mississippi in 1938 at age 27. His estate is valuable, partly because of a collection of his recordings that featured a photo of Johnson on its cover and won a Grammy in 1990.
One of the photos is a studio portrait taken of the Mississippi bluesman by Hooks Brothers Studios in Memphis, Tenn. The other photo, known as "the dime store portrait" or "the photo booth self-portrait," was taken by Robert Johnson himself.
Robert Johnson
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