'There's humour in the darkest places' (books.guardian.co.uk)
Author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's last year, has just donated half a million pounds to research into the disease. As he tells Stuart Jeffries, he's not about to give up without a fight.
Hands off our music! (music.guardian.co.uk)
Bands such as the Jam and the Smiths were at the forefront of the resistance to Thatcherism in the 1980s. Twenty years later, Tory leader David Cameron lists them as among his favourite acts. Is nothing sacred, asks John Harris.
Len Righi: Second MySpace tour metes out Justice (The Morning Call; Posted on popmatters.com)
Ask Xavier de Rosnay how he stays in creative rhythm with Gaspard Auge, his partner in white-hot French electronic dance act Justice, and he doesn't miss a beat: "We dislike the same things," replies the 25-year-old de Rosnay in heavily accented English made all the more difficult to comprehend by the variety of noises filtering through his cell as he strolls New Orleans' French Quarter.
Tim Whitaker: Nicole Atkins Rides a Wave (philadelphiaweekly.com)
Two years ago Atkins, 28, was named an artist to watch by Rolling Stone, where she was described as "a laid-back Jersey girl who was equally into hair metal and her grandmother's Johnny Cash records."
Mark was first, and correct, with:
Well, then there now -- Lonesome George would be my guess.
Steve B was second, saying:
I don't how I know this but it was George Gobel who was married to Spooky Ol' Alice.
Alan J answered:
George Gobel
Leo replied:
It was "Lonesome George" Gobel.
Charlie responded:
Don't remember it too well, but I think it was
D: George Gobel
mj answered:
I remember the show
But not all the details. I'm pretty sure it was Lonesome George, D
Sally said:
George Gobel "D" was married to "Spooky Ol' Alice" and brings back some fond memories for me. :)
PS Not much time to write today, as I live in the Tri-state area of NY, NJ, and Connecticut AKA The Titillating Land of, "Governors Gone Wild..." And, only here could otherwise respectable newspapers pass for Tabloids (today). Apparently, the NEW Governor of NY, is being accused of procuring government jobs for his gal-pals... While I'm indignant (snicker, snicker) I Gotta get back to those hot, hot papers...
Jim responded:
I finally got one!
Gobel
Tony In Philly said:
Spooky Ol' Alice (like my neighbor) was wife of George Gobel
Carolyn G replied:
I seem to remember George Gobel saying that.
Marian the Teacher answered:
George Gobel
That MadCat, JD wrote:
GROWING OLD IS LIKE COMING DOWN OFF OF BAD LSD. FLASHBACK!!!!!!!!! THAT WOULD BE GEORGE GOBEL.
CBS opens the night early with LIVE'NCAA College Basketball - First Round', then pads the left coast with local crap.
On a RERUNDave (from 2/6/08) are Eli Manning, Vince Vaughn, and A Fine Frenzy.
On a RERUNCraig (from 1/24/08) is Ringo Starr.
NBC begins the night with a FRESH'Deal Or No Deal', followed by a FRESH'Celebrity Apprentice', then a FRESH'Lipstick Jungle'.
Scheduled on a FRESHLeno are John Edwards, Leslie Mann, and Nada Surf.
Scheduled on a FRESHConan O'Brien are David Schwimmer, Drake Bell, and Yael Naim.
Scheduled on a FRESHCarson 'The Scab' Daly are Chad Johnson and Tristan Prettyman.
ABC starts the night with a FRESH'Miss Guided', followed by another FRESH'Miss Guided', then a FRESH'Lost', followed by a FRESH'Eli Stone'.
On a RERUNJimmy Kimmel (from 3/4/08) are Janet Jackson, Jackie Mason, and Todd English.
The CW offers a FRESH'Smallville', followed by a RERUN'Reaper'.
Faux has a FRESH'Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?', followed by a FRESH'Don't Forget The Lyrics!'.
MY fills the night with the movie 'In The Army Now'.
A&E has 'CSI: The 2nd One', 'The First 48', followed by a FRESH'The First 48', then a FRESH'Crime 360'.
AMC offers the movie 'The Karate Kid', followed by the movie 'Raising Helen', then the movie 'The In-Laws'.
BBC -
[12:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 1 La Parra de Burriana;
[1:00 PM] Cash in the Attic - Episode 1;
[2:00 PM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 26 Newark 9;
[2:30 PM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 27 Derby 33;
[3:00 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 1;
[3:30 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 2;
[4:00 PM] You Are What You Eat - Episode 16;
[4:30 PM] You Are What You Eat - Episode 17;
[5:00 PM] My Family - Ep. 9 Auto Erotica;
[5:30 PM] Coupling - Ep 3 Unconditional Sex;
[6:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 5 Sandgate;
[7:00 PM] BBC World News America;
[8:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 1 Ruby Tates;
[9:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 2 The Fenwick Arms;
[10:00 PM] BBC World News America;
[11:00 PM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 1 Ruby Tates;
[12:00 AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 2 The Fenwick Arms;
[1:00 AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 1 Ruby Tates;
[2:00 AM] Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - Ep 2 The Fenwick Arms;
[3:00 AM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 5 Buxton;
[3:30 AM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 6 Chessington;
[4:00 AM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 26 Newark 9;
[4:30 AM] Bargain Hunt - Ep. 27 Derby 33;
[5:00 AM] Cash in the Attic - Ep. 38 Jones;
[5:30 AM] Cash in the Attic - Ep. 39 Brown;
[6:00 AM] BBC World News. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Bravo has 'Make Me A Supermodel', 'Top Chef', another 'Top Chef', and a FRESH'Make Me A Supermodel'.
Comedy Central has 'Scrubs', another 'Scrubs', last night's 'Jon Stewart', last night's 'Colbert Report', 'Futurama', 'South Park', another 'South Park', and a FRESH'Lil' Bush'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJon Stewart is Alex Kingsbury.
Scheduled on a FRESHColbert Report is Dean Kamen.
FX has the movie 'Spawn', followed by the movie 'American History X', then the movie 'American History X', again.
History has 'Modern Marvels', 'Gangland', followed by a FRESH'Gamgland', and 'Cities Of The Underworld'.
IFC -
[07:35 AM] The Princess and the Warrior;
[10:05 AM] L'Auberge Espagnole;
[12:15 PM] Being John Malkovich;
[02:15 PM] The Princess and the Warrior;
[04:35 PM] L'Auberge Espagnole;
[06:45 PM] The Assassination of Richard Nixon;
[08:30 PM] Basilisk #11;
[09:00 PM] The Burning;
[10:35 PM] Habit;
[12:35 AM] Ravenous;
[02:20 AM] IFC News: 2008, Uncut;
[02:30 AM] The Burning;
[04:05 AM] Habit. (ALL TIMES EST)
SciFi has fills the night with 'Stephen King's The Langoliers'.
Sundance -
[05:00 AM] Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon;
[06:30 AM] I'm Not Rappaport;
[09:00 AM] Episode 1: Season's End;
[10:00 AM] Stagedoor;
[11:30 AM] Opal Dream;
[01:00 PM] Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon;
[02:30 PM] I'm Not Rappaport;
[05:00 PM] L'Avventura;
[07:30 PM] The Guys;
[09:00 PM] Episode 3;
[10:00 PM] Episode 1: Eddie Vedder + Laird Hamilton;
[11:00 PM] Ray LaMontagne, The Zutons, Shawn Colvin & Nerina Pallot;
[12:00 AM] Episode 3;
[01:00 AM] Episode 1: Season's End;
[02:00 AM] Episode 3;
[03:00 AM] Episode 2: Mikhail Baryshnikov + Alice Waters;
[04:00 AM] Episode 6;
[05:00 AM] Loggerheads. (ALL TIMES EST)
From left, actress Natalie Dormer, actor Peter O'Toole and Jonathan Rhys Meyers attend the world premiere of the second season of Showtime's 'The Tudors', Wednesday, March 19, 2008 in New York.
Photo by Evan Agostini
The capital's famous cherry trees are primed to burst out in a perfect pink peak about the end of this month. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom till around April 5.
In central California, the first of the field skipper sachem, a drab little butterfly, was fluttering about on March 12. Just 25 years ago, that creature predictably emerged there anywhere from mid-April to mid-May.
And sneezes are coming earlier in Philadelphia. On March 9, when allergist Dr. Donald Dvorin set up his monitor, maple pollen was already heavy in the air. Less than two decades ago, that pollen couldn't be measured until late April.
What's happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring "green-up" is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line. In much of Florida and southern Texas and Louisiana, the satellites show spring coming a tad later, and bizarrely, in a complicated way, global warming can explain that too, the scientists said.
For one night, Maysville will be Hollywood along the Ohio River, thanks to George Clooney.
The 46-year-old actor-director will visit the northern Kentucky town Monday night for a special screening of his new movie, "Leatherheads," his father, Nick Clooney, said Tuesday.
Clooney, who won an Oscar for his role in "Syriana," grew up in the town of Augusta, about 16 miles west of Maysville.
The setting has special significance for the Clooney family. In 1953, "The Stars Are Singing," starring Rosemary Clooney, George Clooney's aunt, premiered in Maysville.
Singer k.d. Lang performs Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at the Starbucks Corp. annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. Lang's music is sold in Starbucks stores.
Photo by Ted S. Warren
A "Battlestar Galactica" prequel series may be in the works, but the show won't be taking the big-screen route like other sci-fi franchises that have gone before.
"I think the series works best as an ensemble TV drama," said Ronald D. Moore, an executive producer of the Sci Fi Channel hit, which will end this year after four critically acclaimed seasons. "If it translated into a feature it would be a different animal."
At its "upfront" presentation to advertisers Tuesday in New York, the Sci Fi Channel said that it has green-lighted a two-hour pilot for "Caprica," which is set 50 years before the events in the departing "Battlestar." It hails from the "Battlestar" masterminds Moore and David Eick.
Robin Williams will guest star on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," but don't expect him to bring laughs to the NBC crime drama.
Williams is playing an "engineer whose life has gone terribly wrong" and who faces serious repercussions, series spokeswoman Pam Golum said Tuesday. The episode, which films later this month, is scheduled to air April 29.
The "Special Victims Unit" episode with Williams, titled "Authority," is the show's 200th, Golum said.
Ken Perkins, 85 who served with the Marines during World War II, joined about 50 others in demonstrating against the war in Iraqi, at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday, March 19, 2008. The protestors gathered on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq calling for its end.
Photo by Rich Pedroncelli
Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Prods. has signed a development deal with Kirstie Alley for TV projects. It's unclear whether the deal might include a syndicated daytime talk show or a program for Winfrey's new cable channel.
Winfrey helped launch other daytime talk shows, including "Dr. Phil" and "Rachael Ray." Both hosts appeared frequently on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" before getting their own shows.
Alley also has been on multiple episodes of "Oprah," including a November 2006 appearance that generated headlines after she donned a bikini to flaunt her 75-pound weight loss.
CNN's Anderson Cooper was back at work Wednesday after minor surgery two days earlier to remove a cancerous mole from underneath his left eye.
There was no indication the skin cancer had spread, spokeswoman Shimrit Sheetrit said.
"I hadn't planned on mentioning this," said Cooper, 40. "But I still have stitches and you'll no doubt notice them. ... Don't want you to think I got into a fistfight with Charlie Rose."
A $1 million offer to the call girl linked to former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was rescinded because she'd already shot footage for "Girls Gone Wild." Now it might be the video maker who will lose out.
A lawyer for Ashley Alexandra Dupre, now 22, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Dupre was 17 when the footage was filmed. After hearing from her attorney, the company said the video's Internet release will be delayed.
"Girls Gone Wild" founder Joe Francis originally reached out to Dupre, offering $1 million for her to appear in a non-nude spread for his company's new magazine and a chance to join the "Girls Gone Wild" tour bus.
But on Tuesday "Girls Gone Wild" employees found archived footage of Dupre filmed in 2003, and Francis retracted the offer.
Members of CODEPINK, including co-founder Medea Benjamin, right, take part in an Iraq War demonstration outside the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in Washington, Wednesday, March 19, 2008, during a protest on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq.
Photo by Jose Luis Magana
For most visitors to Central Park, the public bathrooms are a facility of last resort, visited only in desperation after consuming one too many cups of coffee. They're dark and creepy, filled with spiders, foul odors and puddles of questionable origin.
But for Irish director and playwright Paul Walker, the damp, the chill and even the smell are all part of the experience - the theatergoing experience.
His prize-winning play, "Ladies & Gents," is a noir thriller performed entirely in the covered men's and women's bathrooms in Central Park's Bethesda Terrace.
The action takes place near the sinks and urinals; the audience stands, clustered in front of the row of stalls. Each of the two pieces that comprise the play runs simultaneously in both bathrooms, and it doesn't matter the order in which they are seen; the audience splits in half and switches facilities at intermission.
Rare-book lovers, museum buyers and fans of Napoleon flocked Wednesday for a chance to bid on a rich archive on the emperor, put up for sale by former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin.
Some 335 books and letters, collected over the past three decades, were up for auction after Villepin -- a poet and historian in his spare time -- decided it was time to "turn the page" on the Napoleon era.
Several rare volumes sparked fierce bidding battles, with a manuscript decree signed by the early 19th-century emperor snapped up for 28,000 euros (44,000 dollars) by France's National Archives.
The overall collection was expected to raise well over its estimated value of 400,000 euros.
A rare photograph by Edward Weston, once owned by Ansel Adams, will be among the highlights of a photography auction spanning from early daguerreotypes to iconic 20th century images.
The April 8 sale at Sotheby's New York also includes a copy of Man Ray's "Champs Delicieux," a volume of 12 gelatin silver prints of the artist's earliest Rayographs, a process in which a three-dimensional object is placed on photographic paper and exposed to light.
"Leeks," Weston's close-up of three leeks arranged in a row, had passed from his son Brett to photographer Gerry Sharpe and then to Adams. The photo is characteristic of Weston's stark images of vegetables, nudes and sand dunes.
The sale also will include photos by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz. The total sale is expected to bring $3.6 million to $5.6 million.
Screaming sports coaches and cutthroat tycoons have it wrong: Nice guys do finish first, a new study suggests.
The Harvard University study involved 100 Boston-area college students playing the same game over and over - a punishment-heavy version of the classic one-on-one brinksmanship game of prisoner's dilemma. The research appears in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
In Nowak's experiment, the students played more than 8,000 games of prisoner's dilemma, using dimes to reward and punish. The normal game of prisoner's dilemma gives two players two options: cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, each ends up winning a dime. If both defect, each gets nothing. If one cooperates and the other defects, the cooperative player loses 20 cents and the defector wins 30 cents.
Nowak then added a "costly punishment" component. A player could choose to punish someone who didn't cooperate. That penalized the non-cooperative person 40 cents, but the other player had to pay a dime to mete out the punishment.
When Nowak compared how much money people earned or lost in the long run, there was a noticeable correlation between punishment and overall money. The players who punished their opponents the least, or not at all, made the most money.
A school wall painting from Dresden, Germany entitled, "The five most important breeds of human" is seen here in this undated handout picture released March 19, 2008. The painting is included in a new exhibition exploring stereotypes about Jews, Asians, Muslims, Communists, blacks, gays and other groups typecast by the public and in the media which is called "Typical! Cliches about Jews and others." and opens at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on Thursday.
Actor Ivan Dixon, who brought the problems and promise of contemporary blacks to life in the film "Nothing But a Man" and portrayed the levelheaded POW Kinchloe in TV's "Hogan's Heroes," has died. He was 76.
Dixon died Sunday at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte after a hemorrhage, said his daughter, Doris Nomathande Dixon of Charlotte. He had suffered complications from kidney failure, she said.
Dixon, who also directed scores of television shows, began his acting career in the late 1950s. He appeared on Broadway in William Saroyan's 1957 "The Cave Dwellers" and in playwright Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking 1959 drama of black life, "A Raisin in the Sun." In the latter, he played a Nigerian student visiting the United States, a role he repeated in the film version.
In 1967, Dixon starred in a CBS Playhouse drama, "The Final War of Olly Winter," about a veteran of World War II and Korea who decided that Vietnam would be his final war. The role brought Dixon an Emmy nomination for best single performance by an actor.
In 1973, he directed the film "The Spook Who Sat by the Door," a political drama based on a novel about a black CIA agent who becomes a revolutionary. He also directed the 1972 "blaxploitation" story "Trouble Man."
Born in 1931 in New York, Dixon graduated in 1954 from North Carolina Central University in Durham.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 53 years, Berlie Dixon of Charlotte, and a son, Alan Kimara Dixon of Oakland. At Dixon's request, no memorial or funeral is planned, the family said.
Philip Jones Griffiths, a photojournalist who spent years traveling across Vietnam to capture the effects of the war on its people, died Wednesday. He was 72.
Jones Griffiths was perhaps best known for his book "Vietnam Inc." - described as one of the most detailed studies of any conflict.
"If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn't have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan," linguist and author Noam Chomsky said of "Vietnam Inc."
Jones Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales, and studied pharmacy in Liverpool. His career as a photojournalist began with a part-time job for Britain's Guardian newspaper. In 1961, he began shooting full time as a freelancer for The Observer newspaper.
He shot his first war photos in Algeria in 1962 before moving to Central Africa. He eventually ended up in Asia and joined Magnum as an associate member in 1966, beginning five years documenting the Vietnam war.
A photo provided by the Chicago Zoological Society's Brookfield Zoo shows Zhana, a 4-year-old Bactrian camel with her newborn, unnamed male calf on March 15, 2008, in Brookfield, Ill. The calf, weighing approximately 110 pounds was born Feb. 28 and is the 12th Bactrian camel birth at the zoo. Zhana was born at the Tautphaus Park Zoo in Idaho and arrived at Brookfield on a breeding loan in 2006.
Photo by Jim Schulz
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