David L. Ulin: The printed page is alive and well, but e-books are here to stay (Los Angeles Times)
E-books, after all, are the story in publishing this year, with more than 7 million iPads sold in the eight months since the device went on sale in April, joining millions of Kindles, Sony Readers, Kobos and Nooks. Just a week or so ago, Google launched Google Editions, an e-book retailer designed to compete with the iBook and Kindle stores.
Roger Ebert's Journal: The Ten Best Foreign Films of 2010
35 Shots of Rum". Two couples live across the hall in the same Paris apartment building. Neither couple is "together." Gabrielle and Noe have the vibes of roommates, but the way Lionel and Josephine love one another, it's a small shock when she calls him "papa."
Steven Zeitchik: Ryan Gosling's instinct for the eclectic comes naturally (Los Angeles Times)
He's played a Jewish neo-Nazi, a crack-addict schoolteacher and a man who falls in love with an inflatable doll.But suggest to Ryan Gosling, an independent-film poster child for the better part of a decade, that he chooses roles for their complexity rather than their commercial appeal and he'll wave you aside.
David Bruce has 39 Kindle books on Amazon.com with 250 anecdotes in each book. Each book is $1, so for $39 you can buy 9,750 anecdotes. Search for "Funniest People," "Coolest People, "Most Interesting People," "Kindest People," "Religious Anecdotes," and "Maximum Cool."
Well, then, Poll-Fans... Let's do our own '2010 Year in Review' thing, eh?
Be-damn'd to all those other corporate media lists, I'm sayin'... I'm thinkin' we can do it better, Dagnabbit! (Or, at least have us some more fun at it and all...)
Everything and everybody is fair game... People, events, TV shows, Movies, Books, Music, Weather, inanimate objects... you get the idea, right?
The Great Gazoo is a character from The Flintstones animated series. He first appeared on the show on October 29, 1965. The Great Gazoo was voiced by Harvey Korman.
Because Gazoo is introduced into the show midway through the final season and is considered quite an absurd character, being a futuristic alien that appears in the middle of the Stone Age, he is often cited by fans and critics of the show as being an example of the show's having "jumped the shark*."
Source
Marian was first, and correct, with:
The Flintstones
mj said:
It would have to jump a sharkasaurus
Since it was the wont of the Flintstones to append saurus to animal names to make them sound prehistoric.
Alan J wrote:
The Flintstones
Jim from CA, retired to ID, replied:
The Great Gazoo is a character from The Flintstones animated series.
Leigh in Arizona responded:
I believe it was The Flintstones. (I didn't even look it up, I am so sure!)
Adam answered:
Oh, The Flintstones!
The Great Gazoo was played by the great Harvey Korman.
Happy New Year everyone!
VB in Ohio replied:
The Flintstones.
Charlie responded:
I must have watched that, but I had forgotten. The Flintstones.
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img src="great-gazoo1b_moz.jpg" width="369" height="298" alt="" border="0">
Sally said:
I am not at all familiar with the TV show, "Jump The Shark," but I do recall that Great Gazoo, was the floating green alien that befriended Fred and Barney in the final season of The Flintstones.
Mechadave answered:
The Flintstones animated series was the one that featured the green spaceman Gazoo. That 1965 storyline predated the infamous Happy Days shark jump by many years.
You can't really say it was that ridiculous though, since The Flintstones featured cave men who rode dinosaurs and would be right at home in a Creationist "museum." Some of the exhibits show prehistoric man alongside dinosaurs that were extinct millions of years before the first humans walked the earth. They even let their kids ride a plastic Dino with a horse's saddle.
Maybe the Governor of Kentucky was brought up on that cartoon?
MAM wrote:
'The Flintstones' The Great Gazoo first appeared on the show on October 29, 1965. He was voiced by Harvey Korman.
BttbB replied:
The Flintstones... and I remember when he appeared I thought it was a pretty weird thing...
And, Joe S took the day off.
*Jumping the shark is an idiom used to denote the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines or unlikely characterizations. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline.
The phrase jump the shark comes from the climactic scene in "Hollywood," the third part (written by Fred Fox, Jr.) of a three-part episode opening the fifth season of the American TV series Happy Days in September 1977. In this story, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler), wearing swimming trunks and his leather jacket, jumps over a confined shark, answering a challenge to demonstrate his bravery. The series continued for nearly seven years after that, with a number of changes in cast and situations.
Jon Hein explained the concept as follows: "It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it 'Jumping the Shark.' From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same."
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CBS starts the night with '60 Minutes', follwoed by a FRESH'CSI: The 2nd One', then a FRESH'Undercover Boss', followed by a RERUN'CSI: The 2nd One'.
NBC fills the night with LIVE'Sunday Night Football', then pads the left coast with local crap and maybe an old 'Dateline'.
ABC begins the night with a FRESH'America's So-Called Funniest Home Videos', followed by a FRESH'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition', then a FRESH'Desperate Housewives', followed by a FRESH'Brothers & Sisters'.
The CW offers an old 'Friends', followed by another old 'Friends', then the movie 'January Man'.
Faux has an old 'The Office', followed by 'American Idol: Welcome Home'< then a RERUN'Simpsons', followed by a RERUN'Cleveland Show', then an hourlong RERUN'Family Guy'.
MY has an old 'How I Met Your Mother', followed by another old 'How I Met Your Mother', then an old 'The Closer', followed by another old 'The Closer'.
AMC offers the movie 'Executive Decision', followed by the movie 'Swordfish'.
BBC -
[6:00 AM] The Graham Norton Show - Ep 7 Alanis Morrisette and Dame Edna Everage
[7:00 AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 1 La Parra de Burriana
[8:00 AM] Ramsay's Best Restaurant - Ep 4 British
[9:00 AM] Top Gear - Episode 1
[10:00 AM] Goldfinger
[12:30 PM] Diamonds Are Forever
[3:00 PM] Dr. No
[5:30 PM] From Russia With Love
[8:00 PM] Goldfinger
[10:30 PM] Diamonds Are Forever
[1:00 AM] Dr. No
[3:30 AM] From Russia With Love (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has all 'Real Housewives Of Atlanta' all night.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Good Luck Chuck', followed by the movie 'The Heartbreak Kid'.
FX has the movie 'The Waterboy', followed by the movie 'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story', then the movie 'The Waterboy'.
History has 'Ax Men', another 'Ax Men', followed by a FRESH'Ax Men', then a FRESH'Top Gear'.
IFC -
[6:00 AM] Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
[7:30 AM] The Neon Bible
[9:05 AM] Water
[11:00 AM] The Last Metro
[1:15 PM] The Neon Bible
[2:50 PM] Water
[4:45 PM] The Whitest Kids U'Know
[5:15 PM] The Whitest Kids U'Know
[5:45 PM] The Whitest Kids U'Know
[6:10 PM] Monty Python's Flying Circus
[6:40 PM] Monty Python's Flying Circus
[7:10 PM] Monty Python's Flying Circus
[7:45 PM] The Grid
[8:00 PM] The Ice Storm
[10:00 PM] Arrested Development
[10:30 PM] The Whitest Kids U'Know
[11:00 PM] Pan's Labyrinth
[12:30 AM] Apocalypto
[3:30 AM] The Order
[5:45 AM] The Grid (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[7:20 AM] Oss 117: Cairo - Nest Of Spies
[9:00 AM] Big Ideas for a Small Planet
[9:30 AM] Big Ideas for a Small Planet
[10:00 AM] Fighting Goliath -- Texas Coal Wars
[10:40 AM] The Wednesdays
[11:00 AM] GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS - Great Expectations
[11:30 AM] GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS - Out of the Closet (Episode 7, Season 1)
[12:00 PM] THE COMEBACK - Valerie Gets a Magazine Cover (Episode 11, Season 1)
[12:30 PM] THE COMEBACK - Valerie Shines Under Stress (Episode 12, Season 1)
[1:00 PM] The Father of My Children
[3:00 PM] In A Day
[4:25 PM] The Wednesdays
[4:50 PM] Oss 117: Cairo - Nest Of Spies
[6:30 PM] Wendy and Lucy
[8:00 PM] Cousin Bette
[10:00 PM] Lady Chatterley
[12:45 AM] GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS - Great Expectations
[1:15 AM] GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS - Out of the Closet (Episode 7, Season 1)
[1:45 AM] THE COMEBACK - Valerie Gets a Magazine Cover (Episode 11, Season 1)
[2:15 AM] THE COMEBACK - Valerie Shines Under Stress (Episode 12, Season 1)
[2:45 AM] Cousin Bette
[4:45 AM] Wine and Cupcakes
[5:00 AM] Wendy and Lucy (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has fills the night with 'Stephen King's The Stand'.
Pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, left, chats with Myanmar's actor Kyaw Thu during her visit to 'Kyaw Thu Art Zone' gallery Saturday, Jan. 1, 2011 inYangon, Myanmar. Kyaw Thu is banned from shooting by military government as he had donated alms to Buddhist monks at Shwedagon pagoda during their protest in September 2007 in Myanmar.
Photo by Khin Maung Win
British and U.S. scientists say they've compiled the most comprehensive list of land plant species ever published - a 300,000-species strong compendium that they hope will boost conservation, trade and medicine.
The list, drawn up by researchers at Kew Gardens in London and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, is intended to help resolve one of botany's most basic problems: Figuring out which plants go by what name.
Some plants have been labeled differently by researchers operating in different countries over the past century, while in other cases the different variants of the same plant have been erroneously identified as belonging to different species. There are also cases in which plants names' have been applied mistakenly, or just misspelled.
Although a rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, scientists say that attaching different labels to the same plant can rob researchers of the chance to get the information they need.
The plant compendium aims to clear up that confusion by putting all the various names in one place - and sorting out which ones apply to which plant. To that end researchers in the U.S. and Britain have been scooping up existing databases - with names such as GrassBase and iPlants - and combining them with checklists from organizations such as the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families and The International Legume Database and Information Service.
Kew's final list carries more than 1 million scientific names, of which 300,000 are accepted names for plant species. Another 480,000 are additional names, or synonyms, for those species. The rest are unresolved - they could apply to a previously identified plant, or they could describe a different organism altogether.
New Year's fireworks explode at midnight over Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, Jan. 1, 2011. The Lebanese capital celebrated the new year with various fireworksdisplays throughout the city.
Photo by Bilal Hussein
The Web may seem like the land of something for nothing. Free video. Free news. Even free tools such as word processing and spreadsheets.
But almost two-thirds of adult Internet users in the U.S. have paid for access to at least one of these intangible items online, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Whether people will pay for different types of material on the Web is among the most pressing questions facing media companies in the 21st century.
The survey found that among people who paid for content, the typical user spent about $10 a month. However, there are some extremely high-end users, such that the average among those who have paid for content is about $47 a month. That includes subscriptions and individual files downloaded or accessed.
The survey of 755 Internet users in the U.S. was conducted Oct. 28-Nov. 1 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Japanese whalers shot water cannons at anti-whaling activists on Saturday, the conservationist group's founder claimed, hours after the activists tracked down the hunting fleet in the remote and icy seas off Antarctica.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is chasing the fleet in the hopes of interrupting Japan's annual whale hunt, which kills up to 1,000 whales a year. The two sides have clashed violently in the past, including last year, when a Sea Shepherd boat was sunk after its bow was sheared off in a collision with a whaling ship.
On Saturday, Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson was talking to The Associated Press by telephone from his ship when he said the whalers suddenly began blasting one of his group's inflatable boats with a water cannon.
New Zealand-based Glenn Inwood, spokesman for Japan's Tokyo-based Institute of Cetacean Research, which sponsors the whale hunt, said he had no comment.
A Sotheby's employee poses with a letter signed by Queen Elizabeth I with regards to the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots, at Sotheby's in LondonDecember 6, 2010. The letter is in a collection of 40 which are expected to fetch
Photo by Suzanne Plunkett
The United States and Venezuela are starting the year without ambassadors in Caracas and Washington due to an intensifying diplomatic dispute that is likely to persist and boost President Hugo Chavez's long-standing antagonism.
Both sides have shown firmly entrenched stances and no willingness to compromise in the past week as the U.S. government revoked the Venezuelan ambassador's visa in response to Chavez's refusal to accept the chosen U.S. envoy.
It is unclear what concrete effects those actions could have on U.S.-Venezuela relations. Diplomats from the two countries have already long had reduced contacts due to antagonism fed both by Chavez's condemnations of the U.S. and also by the State Department's criticisms of deteriorating democracy in Venezuela.
"Much of the cooperation between the United States and Venezuela in recent years has involved lower-level and lower-profile individuals and agencies than the ambassadors, so the immediate fallout will be limited," said Shannon O'Neil, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The rate of teen births in the U.S. is at its lowest level in almost 70 years. Yet, the sobering context is that the teen pregnancy rate is far lower in many other countries. The most convincing explanation is that contraceptive use is much higher among teens in most Western European countries.
Last week, U.S. health officials released new government figures for 2009 showing 39 births per 1,000 girls, ages 15 through 19 - the lowest rate since records have been kept on this issue.
That's close to the teen birth rate for Romania, Turkey and Bulgaria in 2007, the latest numbers available from the World Bank, which collects a variety of data gauging international development.
The teen birth rate for Western Europe and a few other countries is dramatically lower. In the United Kingdom it's 24 per 1,000 girls. In traditionally Catholic Ireland, it's 16 and in Italy it's 5. France's rate is 7 per 1,000. Canada's rate is under 13, Sweden's is under 8, Japan's is about 5, and in the Netherlands it's close to 4.
The disparity has existed for decades. Several experts say the reason mostly has to do with more realistic approaches to birth control.
Members of the Merry Makers New Year's Brigade make their way up Broad Street during the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia, Saturday, Jan. 1, 2011.
Photo by Matt Rourke
At state parks across the nation, this is the toll of the deepening budget crisis and years of financial neglect: crumbling roads, faltering roofs, deteriorating restrooms.
Electrical and sewer systems are beginning to give out, too, as are scores of park buildings, some of them built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. In a few places, aging bridges have been detoured and tunnels blocked off because of falling debris.
The tough economy has made money scarcer for administrators at some of the country's most treasured public spaces who have been forced to postpone maintenance and construction projects, creating a huge backlog of unfinished work that would cost billions of dollars to complete.
Park managers say they try to funnel money to the most urgent needs. Others have received help from private groups or volunteers to tackle work they cannot afford to finish on their own.
Fantasy Trophy winning float 'Galactic Expedition' by Cal Poly Universities moves along Orange Grove Boulevard during the Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif.,Saturday, Jan. 1, 2011.
Photo by Jason Redmond
Some users of Microsoft Hotmail are starting off the new year scrambling to get back e-mails of old. A chorus of frantic users has posted complaints on Microsoft's online forum that all of their messages have disappeared.
"Please help me get them back," wrote one user under the moniker 'Zacgore' in a post dated Saturday. "All my kids' info and pictures are in there!"
Others complain that the majority of the e-mail in their inboxes was sent to their deleted mail folders instead. It is unclear from the posts how widespread the problem is. The free Web-based e-mail service is the world's most used with about 360 million users globally, according to comScore Inc.
Windows Live support technicians have said in numerous threads that the Hotmail team is aware of the problem and working on a fix.
A pet rabbit is dressed as Santa Claus at a photo event to celebrate Christmas and the Year of the Rabbit at a pet rabbit shop in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, December 21, 2010. The year 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit on the Chinese zodiac calendar.
Phorto by Kim Kyung-Hoon
You have reached the Home page of BartCop Entertainment.
Make yourself home, take your shoes off...
Go ahead, scratch it if it itches.
The idea is to have fun.
Do you have something to say?
Anything that increased your blood pressure, or, even better, amused or entertained?
Do you have a great album no one's heard?
How about a favorite TV show, movie, book, play, cartoon, or legal amusement?
A popular artist that just plain pisses you off?
A box set the whole world should own?
Vile, filthy rumors about Republican hypocrites?
Just plain vile, filthy rumors?
This is your place.
wrote:
took the day off.
