Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Free Photo (Dreamstime)
Girl wearing headphones.
Planet eBook
Classic literature for download as free eBooks.
Tom Danehy: Forget the primary; the retirement of Vern Friedli was last week's big news story (Tucson Weekly)
In a city and state increasingly known for cranks and crooks and freaks and morons, Vern Friedli was a towering figure, a living testament to what could be accomplished through hard work and discipline.
Roger Ebert: The greatest actress in American political history
Sarah Palin lacked the preparation or temperament to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but what she possessed in abundance was the ability to inflame political passions and energize the John McCain campaign with star quality. That much we already knew. What I didn't expect to discover after viewing "Game Change," a new HBO film about the 2008 McCain campaign, was how much sympathy I would feel for Palin, and even more for John McCain.
Romney Edges Santorum in Ohio Cliffhanger on Super Tuesday (Daily Beast)
The frontrunner hangs on to win the big prize while losing Tennessee and Oklahoma to Santorum. Howard Kurtz on why Mitt can't wrap it up.
Anneli Rufus: "Is Gluten Ruining Your Health (Or Are We Way Too Paranoid?)" (AlterNet)
Recent studies connect eating gluten with autism, schizophrenia, lymphoma, lupus, multiple sclerosis, infertility, chronic numbness, severe balance problems and more.
Elizabeth Brow: "What Matters Are Your Values [and Creativity], Not Your Education" (Huffington Post)
What's the most important thing you've learned from your mistakes?
Don't be afraid to take the initiative. If you make a mistake, own up to it and try to fix it. Fear of mistakes prevents a companies, and people, from developing. And it creates bureaucracy and insecurity. As a leader, one should try to inspire people to use their skills. But people hold their skills back if they're afraid of making mistakes. The only area where I'm very strict about mistakes is ethics.
Jane Martinson: "Annie Lennox: 'The world has become more sexualised'" (Guardian)
Annie Lennox on gay men, Rihanna and why the F-word has been devalued.
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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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
BadtotheboneBob
Save the Dolphins!
Reader Suggestion
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson's most amazing fact video
Sharon in Tejas
Thanks, Sharon!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and seasonal.
Damn shame the media has failed to remind everyone that Pigboy is still on Armed Forces Radio.
I'll bet his little 3-day hissy-fit of misogynistic language and video recommendations made things so much more pleasant for our military women.
Talk about a captive audience.
Wanna know the difference between Pigboy & Bill Maher?
You gotta pay if you wanna hear/see Bill Maher. Except for the occasional talk show, or in-concert, it's HB-Only, and that costs extra.
Pigboy is available for free. He's all over my radio, in a variety of time slots.
Why hasn't anyone pulled out the 'what will we tell the children' line on Rush's 3-day hissy?
He's generally broadcast during the day, when children may be listening.
I know this for a fact. Back when the kid was in 4th grade, his teacher would regularly listen to Rush in the classroom.
As it turned out, the teacher was a total asshole (and no longer a teacher), and the kid learned to associated Rush with assholedom.
I wasn't happy when I found out about it, but guess I should be grateful that Rush was only pitching hate, not video recommendations or new vocabulary words for Mr. H's 4th grade.
Inducting Lionel Richie, Etta James
Apollo Theater
Singer-songwriter Lionel Richie and the late Etta James will be inducted into the Apollo Theater's hall of fame.
The ceremony will be held at the historic Harlem theater on June 4.
Past Apollo Legends Hall of Fame inductees include Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Patti Labelle.
Apollo Theater
LIKEME Lighthouse
Chely Wright
When country musician Chely Wright came out as a lesbian, radio stations stopped playing her songs, record sales dropped and venues stopped booking her.
Despite the challenges she's faced over the past two years, the performer known for her hits such as "Single White Female" and "Shut Up and Drive" has no regrets, and she wants to help others facing similar challenges.
LIKEME Organization, a nonprofit group Wright started, is opening a community center in Kansas City this weekend that will serve as a place for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their families and friends to meet up. The location was chosen, in part, because Wright grew up 40 miles away, in Wellsville, Kan.
"This just gives so much hope to these outlying areas, that your major metropolitan area has a gay and lesbian center," said the 41-year-old Wright, who married LGBT activist Lauren Blitzer last summer. "That would have meant everything to me had I been a kid growing up in Wellsville, knowing that there is a beautiful facility in our major city, that that was OK.
The new center, which will be called the LIKEME Lighthouse, is the most ambitious project undertaken by the LIKEME Organization, whose name is a play on the title of her memoir, "Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer." The book and her seventh "Lifted Off the Ground," were released when she came out in May 2010.
Chely Wright
Songwriters Hall of Fame
Bette Midler
Bette Midler's voice has helped make songs like "Wind Beneath My Wings" classics, and now she'll be honored for that gift.
Midler is set to receive the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award at the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 14 in New York. The organization's chairman, Jimmy Webb, says Midler "captivated the world" with her "stylish presentation and unmistakable voice, making each song her own."
Past Sammy Cahn honorees include Dick Clark, Neil Diamond and Tony Bennett.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame is inducting Bob Seger, Gordon Lightfoot, Don Schlitz, Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, and Jim Steinman this year.
Bette Midler
Rowling's Harry Potter Website To Launch In April
Pottermore
J.K. Rowling's long-awaited website for all things Harry Potter will be open for business in early April.
The Pottermore site was announced last year, with a scheduled launch in October. But a statement posted on the site this week says testing was extended after feedback from early users made it "clear that our original platform wouldn't be suitable when millions more users came on to the site."
The site is supposed to offer e-book editions of the seven Potter novels, but Rowling spokesman Mark Hutchinson said Thursday that the sale date for e-books had not been confirmed.
Rowling for years had resisted making her work available in digital form.
Pottermore
Oldest Film Based On Dickens Found
"Bleak House"
An archivist at the British Film Institute has stumbled across a 1901 movie just one minute long which turns out to be the earliest surviving film featuring a character from the works of Charles Dickens.
Bryony Dixon was researching early films of China when she noticed an entry in a catalogue referring to "The Death of Poor Joe", which she realized could refer to a character in Dickens' "Bleak House".
Not expecting to find a film to match the catalogue entry - most movies this old have not survived - Dixon was "astonished" to discover the film was actually in the BFI's collection, albeit under a different title.
The discovery was announced on Friday, just over a month after the bicentenary of Dickens' birth was celebrated around the world.
Before the BFI's latest discovery, the earliest known Dickens film was "Scrooge or Marley's Ghost", released in November 1901. It remains the earliest direct adaptation.
"Bleak House"
Magical Car Flies Again
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Most cars are just that: Four tires and an engine. And then there's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the flying version born of Ian Fleming's imagination and the namesake of the James Bond creator's only book for children.
That's a big driver's seat to slide into, especially when you add Dick Van Dyke in a wildly popular movie written by Roald Dahl, a Broadway musical and a generation or two of Chitty-lovin' parents.
So why did the Fleming family pluck Frank Cottrell Boyce of Liverpool to revive the story nearly 50 years after the original was published? And why now?
He has no idea.
Fleming wrote the original story in three slim volumes for his son, Caspar, only to die of a heart attack on the boy's 12th birthday just before it was published as one book in August 1964.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Pot Should Be Treated Like Alcohol
Marion "Pat" Robertson
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be treated like alcohol because the government's war on drugs has failed.
The outspoken evangelical Christian says he has never smoked marijuana, and he is not encouraging it. But he says the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession.
Robertson appeared to support legalizing pot in a New York Times story that was published Thursday. His spokesman, however, says Robertson supports decriminalizing marijuana, not legalization.
Robertson in 2010 called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions.
Marion "Pat" Robertson
Sheriff's Office Plays To The Camera
Steven Seagal
Actor Steven Seagal and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office are being sued over a 2011 arrest that a Phoenix-area man says was staged for a reality TV show.
Jesus Llovera says Seagal and deputies unlawfully raided his home because they thought Llovera was raising fighting roosters.
Llovera says the birds on his property were for show and not for fighting.
The Arizona Republic reports the Sheriff's Office was participating in the creation of a reality show, "Steven Seagal: Lawman," that followed Seagal's exploits as a deputized officer.
The Sheriff's Office insists in court documents that the use of a tank, a bomb robot and 40 deputies was part of its normal course of duties.
Steven Seagal
Settles Lawsuit
Mario Batali
Celebrity chef Mario Batali and his business partner have agreed to pay $5.25 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged they confiscated a portion of their restaurant workers' tips.
According to court papers filed in Manhattan federal court, the settlement may compensate as many as 1,100 waiters, captains and other staffers.
The settlement must still be approved by a judge.
The lawsuit against Batali and Joseph Bastianich was filed in 2010. It claimed their restaurants had a policy of deducting 4 to 5 percent from the tip pool at the end of each night.
Mario Batali
Company Sues
Pigboy
A Kentucky-based health care company has sued to protect its name after being involuntarily drawn into the backlash over Rush Limbaugh's derisive comments about a Georgetown law student.
Louisville-based Humana, the parent company of Concentra Health Services, filed on Thursday for a preliminary injunction to stop the Preval Group of Portland, Maine from using the name Concentra to market memory aid pills.
Humana said in court filings it received angry phone calls, emails and web postings after an ad for Concentra pills aired on Limbaugh's show Monday. Concentra Health and the Preval Group are not related.
Concentra Health Services, based in Addison, Texas, runs more than 320 medical centers in 40 states offering occupational medicine, urgent care, primary care and physical therapy. The Preval Group is a marketing company that sells the memory pills.
Pigboy
Hacker Worked Full Nights
"Sabu"
One late-night visit by the FBI was all it took for the notorious hacker known as "Sabu" to switch sides and become a valued snitch.
Hector Xavier Monsegur cooperated immediately in June, helping investigators close a net around five other leaders of the international hacking group Anonymous, according to court documents made public on Thursday.
Monsegur sometimes stayed up all night, talking with co-conspirators to help the government build its case, Assistant Attorney James Pastore told a Manhattan federal court judge at a secret hearing days before Monsegur's August 15 guilty plea, the court papers showed.
Monsegur, 28, was arrested at his small apartment in a Manhattan housing complex on June 7, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday in announcing charges against him and five others. The precise time, 10:15 p.m., was revealed in Thursday's court papers.
"Since literally the day he was arrested, the defendant has been cooperating with the government proactively," Pastore told Judge Loretta Preska.
"Sabu"
Treason? No - IOKYAR
Marine Sgt. Gary Stein
Marine Sgt. Gary Stein first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights. Then he declared that he wouldn't follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.
While Stein softened his statement to say he wouldn't follow "unlawful orders," military observers say he may have gone too far.
The Marine Corps is now looking into whether he violated the military's rules prohibiting political statements by those in uniform and broke its guidelines on what troops can and cannot say on social media. Stein said his views are constitutionally protected.
Stein was first cautioned by his superiors at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, in 2010 after he launched his Facebook page, criticizing Obama's health care overhaul. Stein volunteered to take down the page while he reviewed the rules at the request of his superiors.
He said he determined he was not in violation and relaunched the page under the shortened account name Armed Forces Tea Party. Last week, he said his superiors told him he couldn't use social media sites on government computers after he posted the message stating he would not follow unlawful orders of the president.
Stein appears in a dress shirt and tie on his Facebook page but he also describes himself as "a conservative blogger, speaker, the founder of the Armed Forces Tea Party and active-duty, eight-year Marine Corps veteran."
Marine Sgt. Gary Stein
Banda Black Market Suspected
Vanishing Tubas
They've still got their trombones and their trumpets, their cornets and their clarinets.
But the high school marching bands of Southern California are tuba-less these days, and their music directors think they know why.
There's a banda bandit on the loose, they say. Someone, they believe, is breaking into high schools from the east side of Los Angeles to the shores of Manhattan Beach and stealing expensive tubas to supply a fast-growing black market for banda music.
Once little known north of Mexico, banda has become the fastest growing genre of Latino music in the United States over the past 20 years. It is particularly popular in Los Angeles, where musicians gather in places like Mariachi Plaza to offer their services to parties, weddings, quinceaneras and other events.
"Musically, it's appealing because it's so dynamic and colorful and bright," Josh Kun says of the fast-paced, joyous dance music that sprung from the polka tunes that German and French immigrants carried to the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the 19th century.
Vanishing Tubas
In Memory
James T. Ellis
James T. "Jimmy" Ellis, who belted out the refrain "Burn, baby burn!" in a 1970s-era disco hit that's still replayed in modern sports arenas, has died. He was 74.
David Turner of Bass-Cauthen Funeral Home in Rock Hill, S.C., said the frontman for The Trammps died Thursday at a nursing home in the city. A cause of death was not immediately known.
The Trammps released "Disco Inferno" - the song with the popular refrain - in 1976. The song was featured in the iconic movie "Saturday Night Fever," its soundtrack winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978. "Disco Inferno" soared up to No. 11 on Billboard's Hot 100 on May 27, 1978.
Turner said a memorial service will be held Friday in Charlotte, N.C.
James T. Ellis
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