Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Will Oremus: "Get Rich Quick: Become a Teacher" (Slate)
How a freelance Web developer made $453,000 posting lectures online.
Shelly Palmer: iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify or iHeartRadio: Which Streaming Music Service is for You?
When Apple unveiled iTunes Radio, it jumped into a saturated market: music streaming. Much like the options you have when you want to watch a movie or TV show online, there are many places you can go to get your Radiohead fix. But not all music services are created equal, and they don't all have the same goals. From Pandora to Spotify to iTunes Radio (and everything in between), which are worth your time, money and ears?
Matthew Yglesias: Can Austin Stay Weird As It Grows? (Slate)
Basically all the artsy stuff that was in Manhattan when I was growing up seems to be gone, but it just hopped over the East River into Brooklyn and Long Island City rather than migrating to Toledo. It's entirely possible that the music scene will become de-centered and more peripheral without actually vanishing.
Interview by Caroline Sullivan: "How we made Cut (the Slits)" (Guardian)
The Slits' Viv Albertine and producer Dennis Bovell recall how the punk pioneers' debut LP was helped along by spoons, nudity, matches and mud.
June Thomas: Still So Excited (Slate)
Pedro Almodóvar returns to comedy, but he's still angry about politics.
Sarah Barker: Marathon Everyman (Slate)
Yuki Kawauchi is a world-class athlete, a full-time government clerk, and a Japanese national hero. Could he change the way we think about running?
David Bruce: Wise Up! Scientists (Athens News)
Abstract thinking is very difficult. Sir David Attenborough had an uncle who was a mathematician. One of his students asked him, "How long can you think for?" Sir David's uncle replied, "I sometimes manage two or three minutes." And the student said, "I've never managed more than 90 seconds."
Eric Yosomono and Drew Anderson: 6 Images That Ruined the Lives of People They Made Famous (Cracked)
#6. The White Guy at the 1968 "Black Power" Olympics Photo
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
is taking some time off.
wrote:
took the day off.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Nick Suggests
Popsicle Stick House calculator
We had some fun
as kids making popsicle stick houses, so we thought why not make a
calculator to see how many it would take to make your house at home (or
any house):
Nick
Thanks, Nick!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Team Coco
Conan
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Much warmer with a heaping helping of humidity.
Most Powerful Celebrity List
Forbes
After two years as a runner-up, Oprah Winfrey was named the most powerful celebrity on Wednesday by Forbes, heading the six women and four men who make up the top 10.
It was the fifth time the former talk show host who runs her own TV network has headed the annual ranking of 100 celebrities.
Singer Lady Gaga came in second, followed by director/producer Steven Spielberg and singers Beyonce and Madonna.
Spielberg, with earnings of $100 million in the last year, was the top man on the list, ahead of rock star Bon Jovi at No. 7, Swiss tennis champion Roger Federer, who makes $400 million each year from ten sponsors, at No. 8, and Canadian-born singer Justin Bieber, the youngest member of the list, at No. 9.
Although only 23, sixth-place singer Taylor Swift, made the list for the first time and rounded out the top 10 along with Emmy-award winning TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Forbes
Please Kill It Again, Jon
'Crossfire'
CNN said Wednesday that it is bringing the political debate show "Crossfire" back on the air this fall with Newt Gingrich (R-Philandering Hypocrite) as one of the combatants.
The former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate will be one of the four regular hosts of the program, taking the conservative side along with commentator S.E. Cupp of The Blaze. Stephanie Cutter, a former campaign spokeswoman for President Barack Obama, and Van Jones, a Yale-educated attorney and advocate for green projects, will speak from what passes as the left.
The original aired on CNN from 1982 until 2005, and its alumni list reads like a Washington who's who - Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Geraldine Ferraro, Lynn Cheney, James Carville, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson among them. It was essentially killed by Jon Stewart.
"The Daily Show" host appeared on "Crossfire" in 2004 and got into a bitter fight with Carlson, with Stewart calling the show "partisan hackery" that did little to advance the cause of democracy. When then-CNN U.S. President Jon Klein cancelled it a few months later, he said he was essentially siding with Stewart.
'Crossfire'
Charity Song For Boston
Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond visited Boston in the days following the marathon bombings and left convinced he should do something to help.
The result is "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)," a new patriotically themed song Diamond will release through iTunes and Amazon on July 2. All proceeds from the song will go to benefit the Boston One Fund and the Wounded Warriors Project.
Diamond returned home and began work on "Freedom Song." He said in a phone interview it took about six weeks to write and record.
He will perform the song live for the first time July 4 in Washington, D.C., at a Washington Nationals-Milwaukee Brewers baseball game and during PBS' "A Capitol Fourth," broadcast from the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol.
Neil Diamond
Dress Sells For $188K
Liz Taylor
The gown that an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor wore for her first wedding to hotel heir Conrad "Nicky" Hilton Jr. has fetched 121,875 pounds ($187,931) at a London auction.
Christie's director Nicolette Tomkinson said Wednesday's sale price, more than double the highest estimate, reflected the gown's significance in the history of film and fashion.
Taylor wore the cream-colored, seed pearl-encrusted satin dress - complete with waist-cinching built-in corset - to the first of her eight weddings in May 1950. Hundreds of guests including Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire turned up, and studio MGM boasted that "more stars than there are in heaven" attended.
Taylor and Hilton divorced months later, and the actress went on to wed seven more times. She died in 2011, aged 79.
Liz Taylor
Free Speech Shield
Scientific Articles
Authors and publishers of controversial scientific articles, and the companies sponsoring those articles, won broad free speech protection from a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said statements of scientific conclusions on matters open to scientific debate, and which are published in a research article, cannot result in damages associated with defamation.
It also said companies may promote excerpts from such an article so long as readers are not misled about the conclusions.
While statements about contested scientific hypotheses are in principle "matters of verifiable fact," for purposes of the First Amendment they are closer to matters of opinion, Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.
The decision is a defeat for ONY Inc, an upstate New York company that had sued Cornerstone Therapeutics Inc, Italy's Chiesi Farmaceutici SpA, several doctors and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Scientific Articles
Retiring Most Chimps
NIH
It's official: The National Institutes of Health plans to end most use of chimpanzees in government medical research, saying humans' closest relatives "deserve special respect."
The NIH announced Wednesday that it will retire about 310 government-owned chimpanzees from research over the next few years, and keep only 50 others essentially on retainer - available if needed for crucial medical studies that could be performed no other way.
The NIH's decision was long expected, after the prestigious Institute of Medicine declared in 2011 that nearly all use of chimps for invasive medical research no longer can be justified. Much of the rest of the world already had ended such research with this species that is so like us.
What's unclear is exactly where the retiring chimps, which have spent their lives in research facilities around the country, now will spend their final years. NIH said they could eventually join more than 150 other chimps already in the national sanctuary system operated by Chimp Haven in northwest Louisiana. In that habitat, the chimps can socialize at will, climb trees and explore different play areas.
But NIH officials said currently there's not enough space to handle all of the 310 destined for retirement. They're exploring additional locations, and noted that some research facilities that currently house government-owned chimps have habitats similar to the sanctuary system.
NIH
IKEA Founder Returns
Ingvar Kamprad
Ingvar Kamprad, founder of furniture company IKEA, announced on Wednesday he plans to return home to Sweden 40 years after leaving the country to escape its high taxes.
Kamprad, 87, said he would return from Switzerland before year-end and settle down on a farm outside of Almhult, a southern Swedish town where he founded IKEA 70 years ago and put Swedish "flat-pack" furniture on the global map.
Kamprad, who built IKEA from a shop in his garden shed selling watches and Christmas cards, is today one of Europe's wealthiest men. He left Sweden in the 1970s in protest of the country's high taxes, setting up residence in Switzerland.
But Sweden's center-right coalition government has chipped away at the country's generous welfare system during its nearly two terms in office, trimming income taxes and abolishing a wealth tax.
Ingvar Kamprad
"Medical Repatriation"
New Jersey
Sixty-nine-year-old Wladyslaw Haniszewski had lived in the U.S. for about 30 years. But when the New Jersey resident fell into a coma he awoke to find himself in his native country of Poland.
The New York Daily News reports that Haniszewski fell victim to a growing phenomenon in which uninsured immigrants are deported by U.S. hospitals that do not want to get stuck paying for their treatment.
"Imagine being carted around like a sack of potatoes," said Polish Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, who argues that Haniszewski was placed on a chartered flight while still unconscious, never giving his consent to being shipped to a hospital in a country he had not lived in for decades.
The practice of medical repatriation has reportedly become increasingly common. One immigration advocacy group told The Associated Press in April that it has documented at least 800 cases of individuals being deported from hospitals without consent over the past six years in at least 15 states. However, the actual number is believed to be much higher because of the significant number of cases that go unreported.
There is an ongoing debate over the legality and morality of medical repatriation. Under U.S. law, hospitals are required to gain patient consent, from either the individual directly or an immediate family member, before having the individual deported. The federal government is not directly involved in the cases and does not pay for the cost of deportation. In April, "Colbert Report" host Stephen Colbert weighed in on the controversy, saying sarcastically, "It's totally unregulated, so hospitals avoid all the red tape usually involved in shipping the unconscious."
New Jersey
California Auction
Elvis' Cadillac
Elvis Presley's Cadillac, Steve McQueen's old truck and prescription sunglasses worn by John Lennon are among hundreds of items once owned by celebrities that are scheduled to be auctioned in California next month.
The Mecum Auction Company said Wednesday it will be displaying and auctioning about 2,000 pieces of celebrity-related memorabilia in Santa Monica, Calif. on July 26-27.
Elvis' Cadillac is among several vehicles being auctioned, including a 1969 Chevrolet C/10 Baja race truck and two motorcycles owned by McQueen, a motorcycle owned by Dennis Hopper, and cars that belonged to Frank Sinatra, Ringo Starr and Bette Davis.
Mecum says items with ties to John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson, Roy Rogers, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Reynolds and Gene Kelly also will be auctioned.
Elvis' Cadillac
Out Of Quarantine
Mally
Mally the monkey, Justin Bieber's former pet, has emerged from quarantine at his new German home three months after the pop star brought him to the country.
The 6-month-old capuchin monkey moved Wednesday into a new enclosure at the Serengeti Park in Hodenhagen, in northern Germany.
Mally was transferred to the zoo last month from a Munich animal shelter where he had been since being seized by German customs March 28.
Bieber failed to produce the required vaccination and import papers after arriving for a European tour. Mally's ownership was transferred to the German state May 21.
Mally
Computer For Sale
'WarGames'
Good news for anyone looking to buy a computer capable of starting World War III. One of the computers used in the 1983 film "WarGames" is going up for sale, IT World reports.
"WarGames," the classic hacker flick starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, told the story of a high school student and computer genius (Broderick) who hacks into a military computer that controls the U.S. nuclear missile supply.
Todd Fischer, who owns the computer, spoke via email to Yahoo News about the 8080 computer, keyboard, and noisy modem. With the exception of the dual disk drive (remember those?), all the props are still in working condition.
Fischer said he takes great pride in having contributed to the scene in which Broderick's character "inserted a floppy disk into an original 8" floppy drive to initiate the 'War Dialing' sequence that connects with W.O.P.R."
'WarGames'
In Memory
Alan Myers
Alan Myers, the former longtime drummer for the band Devo, best known for "Whip It," has died after a battle with brain cancer. He was 58.
Myers died Monday in Los Angeles, where he lived, Devo spokesman Michael Pilmer said Wednesday.
Myers was the band's drummer from 1976 to 1985 during Devo's heyday. The group was formed in Akron, Ohio, in the early 1970s by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, and introduced themselves to the world in 1977 by making a spastic version of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."
Casale told The Associated Press on Wednesday that without Myers, Devo never would have reached the heights it did, calling him the best drummer he has ever played with.
He called Myers "the human metronome."
"People watching him thought we were using a drum machine," Casale said. "Nobody had ever drummed like that."
Casale described meeting and playing with Myers for the first time in 1976. After their first session ended, Casale - who had been facing away from Myers - turned around to see the drummer standing on one leg with his eyes closed, practicing the meditative Chinese martial art of Tai Chi.
"I thought, 'Man, this guy really is Devo. He fits right in,'" Casale said, adding that Tai Chi was one of the drummer's greatest passions. "Some bands would be doing drugs and drinking. Alan would find quiet places backstage and do a full session of Tai Chi."
Alan Myers
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