Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Adam Kirsch: The Other Socrates
To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy, accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship -- and one of the most democratic.
"The Unexamined Orwell" By JONATHAN RODDEN: Reviewed by Adam Kirsch
If you were to make a list of all the adjectives that have been used to describe George Orwell, the most popular would be ethical ones: words like honest, decent, trustworthy. These are the qualities that have guaranteed Orwell, who died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, such an extraordinary intellectual afterlife.
Noelene Clark: Buffy's toughest 'Season Nine' challenge won't be supernatural (LA Times)
Sarah Michelle Gellar may have moved on from the Hellmouth, playing twins in the new CW show "Ringer," but Buffy is still doing what she's always done - staking (and breaking) hearts.
Scott Kenemore: Nice Try (Slate)
Why the 'Poets & Writers' MFA rankings are a sham.
Paul Constant: All Creatures Great and Weird (The Stranger)
The thing about being a giantess is that it hurts all the time. Ana Swift, the tallest woman in the world and the center of a new novel called Among the Wonderful, is always in physical pain…. Debut novelist (and Seattle native) Stacy Carlson puts us inside Swift's creaking, enormous body and walks us through all the rituals that it requires-nightly soaking of her legs and a daily rebuilding of her normal-sized bed, which collapses under her weight-to simply exist.
Morris Dickstein: The Catch in "Catch-22" (Daily Beast)
Joseph Heller's iconic novel "Catch-22" set the political and moral agenda of the last 50 years with its hilarious cynical viewpoint. Morris Dickstein on how we still haven't escaped or really heard the novel's message.
Terence Davies: "'Kind Hearts and Coronets' is one of the greatest comedies of world cinema" (Guardian)
This is one of the finest comedies ever - and it's all thanks to the man who plays its well-bred villain.
Stephanie Theobald: Girls will be boys (Guardian)
'Tomboy,' a new film about a girl who passes herself off as a boy to her friends, brings back memories for one former tomboy.
Buck Henry remembers John Calley (LA Times)
The famed producer liked making movies with people whose talent he admired, and they reciprocated because he was a hoot to be around.
Daniel Engber: Who Killed 3-D? (Slate)
A box-office whodunit.
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
More 'June Gloom' in September.
Here's a Complete List of Emmy 2011 Winners
Fox Cuts From Emmys
Alec Baldwin
Leonard Nimoy was a last-minute sub for Alec Baldwin on the Emmy Awards opening because of a flap over a joke about News Corp.'s phone hacking scandal.
Alec Baldwin had taped the segment, playing a fictional president of the television academy, with show host Jane Lynch. But Baldwin asked that he be left out when Fox nixed the joke that referenced the hacking scandal in Britain involving the now-closed News of the World tabloid. Both Fox and News of the World are owned by News Corp.
Fox said the network believed it was inappropriate to make light of an issue being taken seriously by the company. The joke reportedly involved Baldwin on a telephone and saying, "Is that you, Rupert?" a reference to News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch, suggesting he was listening in on the conversation.
Baldwin was not at the Emmys because of a previous commitment to attend Tony Bennett's birthday party in New York. He tweeted that Fox killed the joke, "which sucks because I think it would have made them look better."
He also tweeted: "If I were enmeshed in a scandal where I hack the phone of families of innocent crime victims purely 4 profit, I'd want that 2 go away, 2."
Alec Baldwin
Alley Gets Facelift
Tootsie's Orchid Lounge
Country music's most famous alley - a gritty monument to the earthy sounds all around it - is getting a facelift.
The block-long alley is between the historic Ryman Auditorium and Nashville's raucous honky-tonks, where well-fortified patrons are urged to "holler and swaller."
Now it's a place often littered with gray trash cans and cardboard boxes piled atop each other. Grand Ole Opry performers used to walk out the Opry's side door, cross the alley and slip in the back door at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Nashville's legendary honky -tonk.
"It's the most famous 37 steps in that alley," says Jim "The Governor" Hill, Tootsie's general manager. "Tootsie's was the 'green room' for the Ryman."
The alley work, which will cost the city an estimated $300,000, is expected to take up to six months.
Tootsie's Orchid Lounge
Collection Tops $1 Million At Auction
Tony Curtis
Fine art, jewelry and Hollywood memorabilia owned by Tony Curtis -- including the yachtsman jacket he wore in "Some Like It Hot" -- brought in over $1 million on the auction block on Saturday, more than twice the presale estimates.
Curtis, who enjoyed a 60-year career in show business before his death in 2010 at age 85, appeared in more than 100 films and received an Oscar nomination for the 1958 drama "The Defiant Ones." He was an art lover and painter as well.
The estate items on sale at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills featured property Curtis acquired throughout his life, from the time he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II to the 2000s. The presale estimate on the collection was $500,000.
Highlights included the Andy Warhol "Some Like It Hot" shoe lithograph, signed by Warhol to Curtis around 1955, which sold for $53,125; the "Some Like It Hot" yachtsman jacket, which sold for $46,875; and a signed Marc Chagall colored lithograph, which raised $23,125.
Collectibles on offer also included earthenware vases by Pablo Picasso, which fetched $20,625, and a sterling silver cigarette case from the John Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson inauguration, which sold for $6,875.
Tony Curtis
Rejects US Report On Religious Freedom
Vietnam
Vietnam has rejected a U.S. State Department report on religious freedom as biased.
The State Department's report, which covers the period of July-December 2010, says there were continued reports of abuses of religious freedom in Vietnam and that despite areas of progress, significant problems remained.
The report, which was released Tuesday, says some people in Vietnam experienced harassment or repression because of their religious beliefs, particularly those who had not applied for or been granted legal authorization.
On Thursday, Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Luong Thanh Nghi as saying the report continued to have "biased assessments" about religious freedom in Vietnam based on "erroneous" information.
Vietnam
Another Grocery Strike
Southern California
A union representing workers at three major grocery chains in Southern California distributed picket signs Sunday, as the clock ticked toward the end of a three-day notice period required before calling a strike.
Union negotiators intend to keep talking if a resolution appears to be in sight when the period ends at 7:10 p.m. They also stressed that members could keep working beyond that time.
If little progress is made toward settling disagreements over health benefits, negotiators said they will tell members to walk off the job.
The grocery workers have been working without a contract since March, while in discussions with negotiators for The Vons Cos. Inc.; Ralphs Grocery Co., a subsidiary of The Kroger Co.; and Albertsons, owned by Supervalu Inc.
Southern California
Feels Betrayed
Veteran
Michael Giesey spent thousands of dollars in immigration fees to try to keep his German-born wife as a legal resident of the United States. For a while, Giesey thought all the money and time spent on forms and interviews would finally pay off. He and his wife and their 7-year-old daughter were going to be able to stay in Florida and help take care of his brother, a Fort Lauderdale firefighter who was injured on the job.
But an e-mail arrived on July 30 from Citizen and Immigration Services. In it, Marina, Giesey's wife of more than 10 years, was asked to leave the country within 30 days. Giesey, who is 50, was serving in the Air Force while stationed in Germany when he met Marina. He doesn't know what went wrong.
"I feel betrayed by my own country," he said in an interview with The Lookout.
Giesey, a 20-year veteran who served in Saudi Arabia, near the Iraqi border, during the first Gulf War, retired in 2000 while he was stationed in Germany. He had met his wife Marina at a New Year's Eve party two years earlier, and they married in 1999. Marina worked as a nurse in Germany, and Giesey began to work in aircraft maintenance. They had a daughter in 2003, and they planned to stay in Germany for the rest of their lives. "I had pretty much resigned myself to a life there," Giesey says. "I enjoyed it and it was a nice place to live, a beautiful country." (Giesey does not have German citizenship. Because he is married to a citizen, he merely needed to register with the city government to legally reside there. There was no fee.)
Veteran
Myanmar Sentences Journalist
Reporters Without Borders
International press watchdog Reporters Without Borders has condemned authorities in Myanmar for sentencing a journalist employed by an independent news broadcaster to an additional 10 years in prison.
Sithu Zeya, who had worked for the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma, had already been sentenced in 2010 to eight years in jail after he was caught photographing the aftermath of a grenade attack in the country's main city of Yangon.
On Wednesday, a Yangon court sentenced the 21-year-old to 10 more years behind bars on a new charge of circulating material online that could "damage tranquillity and unity in the government" under the country's Electronic Act, Reporters Without Borders said.
The new charge brings Sethu Zeya's total sentence to 18 years.
Reporters Without Borders
Discovered in Mideast
'Nazca Lines'
They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.
They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines - ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru - and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.
Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.
"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.
Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.
'Nazca Lines'
Weekend Box Office
"The Lion King 3D"
It's 1994 all over again, with a re-release of "The Lion King" opening at the top of the box office.
A 3-D version of the wildly popular Disney animated musical earned a surprising $29.3 million in its first weekend in theaters, according to Sunday estimates. The original film made more than $40 million when it opened nationwide 17 years ago.
Last week's No. 1 movie, Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion," dropped a spot in its second weekend. The Warner Bros. viral thriller made about $14.5 million for a total of $44.2 million.
Among the other new releases, the critical darling "Drive" came in at No. 3 with just over $11 million. Ryan Gosling stars as a stoic wheelman in the retro action picture from FilmDistrict.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. "The Lion King 3D," $29.3 million. ($700,000 international.)
2. "Contagion," $14.5 million. ($1.3 million international.)
3. "Drive," $11 million.
4. "The Help," $6.4 million. ($1.1 million international.)
5. "Straw Dogs," $5 million.
6. "I Don't Know How She Does It," $4.5 million. ($800,000 international.)
7. "The Debt," $2.9 million. ($1 million international.)
8. "Warrior," $2.8 million. ($400,000 international.)
9. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," $2.6 million.
10. "Colombiana," $2.3 million.
"The Lion King 3D"
In Memory
Frances Bay
Frances Bay, who tussled with Jerry Seinfeld over a loaf of marble rye and played Adam Sandler's grandmother in "Happy Gilmore" during a career that began in the 1930s, has died. She was 92.
Her cousin Les Berman says Bay died Thursday at a Los Angeles area hospital after being diagnosed with pneumonia.
After working as a radio actress before World War II, Bay married and became a housewife. She returned to acting in the 1970s and her career took off. Bay played Fonzie's Grandma Nussbaum on "Happy Days" and kindly older ladies in shows like "The Jeffersons," ''The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Who's the Boss?"
The Canadian-born actress also was cast by director David Lynch in several films, including "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart."
Fans of "Seinfeld" know her as the tough lady who fought with the show's star over the last loaf of bread.
She has no immediate survivors.
Frances Bay
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