Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Candid Portraits of Iconic Personalities from the '70s and '80s (flavorwire.com)
Click through for a candid look at an enthusiastic John Travolta right before he became a star in 'Saturday Night Fever,' a married Cher and Gregg Allman, a young Steve Jobs, and more.
David Frum: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 (Huffington Post)
A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach's Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews. "You will behave, won't you?" Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: "Do you have a kosher menu?"
Why pretend we know everything? It's time to embrace uncertainty (Guardian)
It is certainty that we need to worry about, as extreme ideologies prosper in these uncertain times, writes Suzanne Moore.
Andrew Tobias: Would You Like Another $13,000 A Year In Your Pocket?
What we need to do . . . other than moving back toward a balance that would begin getting that $13,000 a year into middle-class pockets . . . is to put Americans to work modernizing our infrastructure with projects that will serve us well for 20 and 50 and 100 years. Projects that can be financed cheaply now, when the cost of borrowing is low and contractors are eager for work. And all that stands in the way are the Republicans.
Connie Schultz: The Ever-Devolving Mitt Romney (Creators Syndicate)
Poor Mitt Romney. The Republican presidential candidate has changed everything but his gender to appease his new best friends on the far right. He used to be pro-choice; now he's anti-choice. He used to support gay rights, but now he's against those, too. He's also against the health care plan he signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. Which means Mitt Romney opposes even Mitt Romney.
Steven Morris: "Rhys Morgan: 'They are trying to silence me'" (Guardian)
A 17-year-old schoolboy from Cardiff is proving an unlikely but effective opponent of powerful organisations pushing miracle cures for serious diseases.
Brian Crecente: For the Right Price These Gamers Will Die For You (kotaku.com)
This story starts, as so many great ones do, with a classified ad: "I will take bullets for you," it read. And he did.
Forks Over Knives - Official Trailer (YouTube)
The feature film Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.
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
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast with a little rain.
Witnesses Testify
Bradley Manning
Bradley Manning, the suspected source of the largest leak of classified U.S. documents in history, spent his 24th birthday in military court on Saturday listening to investigators detail how they pieced together the case against him.
Manning was a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq when he is alleged to have illegally downloaded massive data files from the military's classified network and became a source for anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
U.S. officials say WikiLeak's successive data dumps last year, including sensitive diplomatic cables, endangered national security and Manning faces charges including aiding the enemy which could send him to prison for life.
Manning, wearing military fatigues and dark-rimmed glasses, was led into courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, uncuffed on the second-day of pre-trial hearings. He listened intently as prosecutors attempted to show they had enough evidence to go to trial under a general court marshall.
Bradley Manning
Parade Honors Japanese-American WWII Vets
Hawaii
Hundreds of Japanese-American veterans of World War II were honored Saturday with a parade in Honolulu - nearly 70 years after they volunteered to fight for their country even as the government branded them "enemy aliens."
About 200 veterans rode in convertibles, troop carriers and trolleys past a cheering crowd of tourists, family and local residents. The event celebrates the Congressional Gold Medal the veterans received last month.
Thousands of Japanese-Americans served in World War II even as the government viewed them with suspicion because their ancestors were from the country that bombed Pearl Harbor. Some on the mainland enlisted from internment camps, where the federal government had imprisoned 110,000 Japanese-Americans.
Two-thirds of the Japanese-Americans who served were from Hawaii. Many others were from California, Oregon and Washington state.
The medal recognizes the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion which together saw some of the most brutal fighting in the war as the soldiers pushed their way through Italy, France and Germany.
Hawaii
'What Color Is Pepper Spray?'
Police Brutality Coloring Book
Forty-six artists, including Shepard Fairey, have contributed black-and-white artwork to the Police Brutality Coloring Book, a 48-page DIY publication inspired by incidents of violent police action against Occupy Wall Street activists.
"I wasn't directly involved with the movement, but I had been down there a few times and was sympathetic to the cause," said Police Brutality Coloring Book creator Joe "Heaps" Nelson in an interview with Wired.com. Then it turned out that Chelsea Elliott, one of four women pepper-sprayed during a Sep. 24 protest march in Manhattan, was a friend of a friend of the New York artist.
The incident, and others like it, spurred Nelson into action. "I am outraged at how the police are treating people," he said, "and moral outrage is not my default setting. And then when I saw that guy at Cal Davis [University of California at Davis campus police Lt. John Pike] calmly spray those kids in the face, I knew I had to do something."
The Police Brutality Coloring Book is the latest artistic blast to come out of the Occupy movement, a lingering protest that's seen urban campers hunkering down in public spaces and occasionally clashing with police. Some of the more notorious incidents of apparent police brutality have been captured on video, with clips quickly going viral on the internet.
Police Brutality Coloring Book
$1M At Auction
Michael Jackson
The contents of the home where Michael Jackson lived with his three children before his death in 2009 have sold for nearly $1 million at auction.
The president of Julien's Auctions was still tallying the totals Saturday after the daylong auction, which brought in nearly triple the company's pre-auction estimate of $200,000 to $400,000.
Among the highlights were a chalkboard inscribed with a message from Jackson's children, which sold for $5,000, and an armoire upon which Jackson wrote a message to himself on the mirror, which fetched $18,750.
The headboard from the bed where the pop star died at age 50 was removed from the sale at the family's request, but the rug that was beneath the bed sold for $15,360. The estimate had been $400 to $600.
Michael Jackson
Occupy Activists Stake Camp At Obama Office
Occupy Des Moines
Occupy Des Moines activists on Saturday vowed to shut down President Barack Obama's campaign offices and set up a camp outside they plan to maintain around the clock.
"We have every intention to keep this place closed down until we are satisfied," said Frank Cordaro, an activist and founder of the Catholic Worker group in Des Moines.
A handful of activists went to Obama's nondescript office in a downtown strip mall after larger rallies to mark the three-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. They had hoped to read a statement demanding Obama cut military spending by half and "dismantle our U.S. military empire ... so we can create jobs, balance the budget, meet our peoples' needs here and help the human community to heal our dying planet."
"This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. This is about the whole system being against us. The corporate elites own all of the politicians and they set the agenda," Cordaro said. "What we are doing here is trying to win back our bought-and-sold political empire. We need to dismantle it because there is no difference between George Bush and Obama."
Occupy Des Moines
Pulling Ads Sparks Protest
Lowe's
Protesters descended on a Lowe's store in one of the country's largest Arab-American communities on Saturday, calling for a boycott after the home improvement chain pulled its ads from a reality television show about five Muslim families living in Michigan.
About 100 people gathered outside the store in Allen Park, a Detroit suburb adjacent to the city where "All-American Muslim" is filmed. Lowe's said this week that the TLC show had become a "lightning rod" for complaints, following an email campaign by a conservative Christian group.
Protesters including Christian clergy and lawmakers called for unity and held signs that read "Boycott Bigotry" and chanted "God Bless America, shame on Lowe's" during the rally, which was organized by a coalition of Christian, Muslim and civil rights groups.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Detroit Democrat and the first Muslim woman elected to the Michigan Legislature, said it was "disgusting" for Lowe's to stop supporting a show that reflects America - the conservatives, liberals and even "the Kim Kardashians" in the Muslim community, she said.
A local rabbi extended his support to clergy at the protest and local Arab Americans, saying he and other Jews would have been at the protest had it not fallen during the Jewish Sabbath.
Lowe's
Bitter Row
Big Corn Vs. Big Sugar
Big Corn and Big Sugar are locked in a legal and public relations fight in the US over a plan to change the name of a corn-based sweetener that has gotten a bad name.
The fight began last year when Corn Refiners Association, a trade association, proposed changing the name of high-fructose corn syrup to merely "corn sugar."
But the sugar industry argued this change would be a bitter pill for US consumers and would only add to the confusion about a sweetener that has drawn criticism by some health advocates.
Sugar producers have filed suit alleging the corn industry has spent $50 million in "a mass media rebranding campaign that misleads the consuming public by asserting falsely that HFCS is natural and is indistinguishable from the sugar extracted from sugar cane and sugar beets."
The lawsuit, which seeks an end to the ads using the term "corn sugar," states that use of the corn syrup increased over 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990 and that this rise "bears a strong temporal relationship to the growth in American obesity."
Big Corn Vs. Big Sugar
Customs Seize Iran-Bound Radioactive Metal
Russia
Russia's customs agency announced Friday it has seized pieces of radioactive metal from the luggage of an Iranian passenger bound for Tehran from one of Moscow's main airports.
Iran's semi-official news agency ISNA confirmed that material had been seized from the luggage of an Iranian passenger in Moscow about a month ago, but denied it was radioactive.
Russia's Federal Customs Service said in a statement that agents found 18 pieces of metal, packed in steel pencil cases, at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after a radiation alert went off. It said the gauges showed that radiation levels were 20 times higher than normal.
Spokeswoman Kseniya Grebenkina told The Associated Press the luggage was seized some time ago, but did not specify when. The Iranian wasn't detained, she said, and it was not clear whether he was still in Russia or not. She did not give his name. The pieces contained Sodium-22, she said, a radioactive isotope of sodium that could be produced in a particle accelerator.
Kelly Classic, a health physicist at the United States' renowned Mayo Clinic, said: "You can't make a nuclear bomb or dirty bomb with it."
Russia
Deemed Most Annoying Word
"Whatever"
Do you want to kill a conversation? Try saying "whatever."
Words like "you know" and "like" might be irritating to hear, but for the third year in a row, it's "whatever" that holds the most power to annoy, according to an annual survey by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.
Nearly four in ten adults named "whatever" as the most annoying verbal filler in casual conversation, while one in five adults had similar disdain for "like" and 'you know."
The telephone survey of 1,026 adults nationally had a margin of error of three percentage points.
"Whatever"
In Memory
Cesaria Evora
Cesaria Evora, who started singing as a teenager in the bayside bars of Cape Verde in the 1950s and won a Grammy in 2003 after she took her African islands music to stages across the world, died Saturday. She was 70.
Evora, known as the "Barefoot Diva" because she always performed without shoes, died in the Baptista de Sousa Hospital in Mindelo, on her native island of Sao Vicente in Cape Verde, her label Lusafrica said in a statement on its website. It gave no further details.
Evora retired in September because of health problems. In recent years she had had several operations, including open-heart surgery last year.
She sang the traditional music of the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa, a former Portuguese colony. She mostly sang in the version of creole spoken there, but even audiences who couldn't understand the lyrics were moved by her stirring renditions, her unpretentious manner and the music's infectious beat.
Evora's international fame came late in life. Her 1988 album "La Diva Aux Pieds Nus" ("Barefoot Diva"), recorded in France where she first found popularity, launched her international career.
Her 1995 album "Cesaria" was released in more than a dozen countries and brought her first Grammy nomination, leading to a tour of major concert halls around the world and album sales in the millions.
She won a Grammy in the World Music category of the 2003 awards for her album "Voz D'Amor".
Evora was born Aug. 27, 1941, and grew up in Mindelo, a port city of 47,000 people on the island of Sao Vicente, where sailors from Europe, America, Africa and Asia mingled in what was a lively cosmopolitan town with a fabled nightlife.
Evora was 7 years old when her father died, leaving a widow and seven children. At 10, with her mother unable to make ends meet, she was placed in an orphanage.
At 16, when Evora was doing piecework as a seamstress, a friend persuaded her to sing in one of the many sailors' taverns in her town. As her popularity grew, she was also rowed out into the bay to sing on anchored ships.
She received no pay - just free drinks. She used to smile when she recalled her fame as a heavy cognac drinker. And she sadly recalled the exact day - Dec. 15, 1994 - she had to give up drinking for her health's sake.
Evora didn't think much of her international stardom and she went back to Mindelo whenever she could. She rebuilt her childhood home, turning it into a 10-bedroom house where friends and family often stayed over, and she always made sure she was home for Christmas.
A heavy smoker for decades, Evora was diagnosed with heart problems in 2005. She suffered strokes in 2008 and in September 2011, when she announced she was retiring.
She had a son and a daughter by different men but never married. Family details were not immediately available.
Cesaria Evora
In Memory
Larry Rickles
Larry Rickles, an Emmy Award-winning producer and the son of comedian Don Rickles, died Saturday in Los Angeles of respiratory failure due to pneumonia. He was 41.
The younger Rickles earned an Emmy in 2008 as a producer on HBO's Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, which was named the outstanding variety, music or comedy special of the year. The documentary, which was directed by John Landis and included home movies, also earned his father an Emmy for outstanding individual performance in a variety or music program.
Born in Los Angeles on May 12, 1970, Larry Rickles worked in production on a number of network sitcoms early in his career. In 1996, he was accepted into the writers workshop program at Warner Bros., and the following year he became a writer on the CBS hit sitcom Murphy Brown.
In addition to his father, Rickles is survived by his mother Barbara and his sister Mindy. The family has asked that donations be made to Children's Hospital Los Angeles.
Larry Rickles
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