Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: "The Keurig Kold: A new way to hate the planet" (SF Gate)
You! A reminder: Capitalism hates you. Capitalism hates you, and also your kids, your planet, your heart and your blood, your future and your dreams and any trite, laughable sense you might have of love and peace in a balanced, sustainable world.
Mark Morford: "Shooting up America: Guns are a national disgrace" (SF Gate)
Guns are unparalleled, really; they are small masterpieces of precision engineering, one of humanity's most deliberate, perfectly designed tools. There is simply no denying a gun's intention, no possible misunderstanding of its reason for existing.
Mark Morford: "Sex and T-shirts: The strange demise of American Apparel" (SF Gate)
Levi's are now made in China. Ditto the Radio Flyer Red Wagon. Most Barbie dolls are stamped out in Indonesia and China. Those all-American Rawlings baseballs used by MLB? Sewn in Costa Rica. Chuck Taylors? Made in China, Thailand and India, bro. And of course, all those little American flags you see being waved at American political rallies and Fourth of July parades? You guessed it: made in China.
Henning Mankell: 'Eventually the day comes when we all have to go' (The Guardian)
The late Wallander author, who died this week, was writing in the Guardian about life with cancer. In his final entry, he reflects on fearful nights lying awake as the 'cold winds sweep in.'
Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies (BBC)
Speaking to the Telegraph in 2011, he said: "I wanted to show how difficult it is to be a good police officer. But after, I think, the third novel, I spoke to this friend of mine and asked what sort of disease I could give him. Without hesitating, she said: 'Diabetes!' So I gave him diabetes and that made him more popular. "I mean, you could never imagine James Bond giving himself a shot of insulin, but with Wallander it seemed perfectly natural."
'Dear Mrs James Bond' … Ian Fleming's letters (The Guardian)
Golfers, vicars, gun experts, even Noël Coward: 007's creator corresponded with them all - defending everything from Bond's scrambled egg addiction to his moral decay.
Radu Alexander: 5 Elaborate Hoaxes That Were Motivated By Petty Revenge (Cracked)
#5. Jonathan Swift Pranks A Guy By Spending A Year Pretending He's Dead
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wrote:
said:
, has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Irony?
Wouldn't it be ironic?
Will we see Obama tried for war crimes while Darth Cheney and Moron Bush get off without being held accountable?!
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Sadly, with the House full of republican catamites, it actually seems feasible.
The only thing they're good at is wasting our money while fluffing their corporate sponsors.
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hot, dry and windy. Perfect fire weather.
The New Benghazi
Planned Parenthood
The Republican-led House voted Wednesday to create a special panel to investigate Planned Parenthood and its procurement of fetal tissue as the GOP continued pressing an issue that has galvanized conservatives since secret videos surfaced this summer.
The near party-line vote was 242-184, as Democrats dismissed the probe as a wasteful political exercise by the GOP. It was unclear if Democrats would participate in the committee's work.
Republicans said the committee was needed to examine whether Planned Parenthood is breaking laws or misusing taxpayer money. Four other congressional committees are already investigating the women's health organization, three in the House and one in the Senate.
Democrats likened the new House panel to one Republicans created last year to investigate the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state at the time, and Democrats say that committee was designed to hurt her prospects as a Democratic presidential candidate. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., now trying to replace the retiring John Boehner, R-Ohio, as speaker, seemed to suggest as much stated in a TV interview last week.
Planned Parenthood
Gets 30 Days
Steve-O
"Jackass" star Steve-O was sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail for climbing at least 100 feet up a crane in Hollywood in a protest against SeaWorld that drew dozens of emergency responders.
Steve-O, whose real name is Stephen Glover, received the sentence after pleading no contest to misdemeanor trespassing and illegal use of fireworks, Los Angeles City Attorney's spokesman Frank Mateljan said.
Glover said in a statement the sentence makes sense because "if your goal is to make a statement about captivity, you may as well get yourself locked up!"
Glover, 41, scrambled up the crane Aug. 9 at a construction site on Sunset Boulevard. Once at the top, he lit fireworks and inflated a large killer whale balloon emblazoned with "SeaWorld Sucks."
Steve-O
Detained In Montreal
Randy Quaid
American actor Randy Quaid has been arrested again and is scheduled to appear before the Immigration and Refugee Board in Montreal on Thursday.
The circumstances behind the arrest - his second in Montreal this year - are unclear, but his Canadian wife, Evi, tweeted late Tuesday that her husband had been detained.
Immigration and Refugee Board spokesman Robert Gervais said Quaid will have a detention review hearing before a board member Thursday afternoon, a routine procedure that occurs typically within 48 hours of someone being detained.
A Canada Border Services Agency spokeswoman was unable to provide any further details on Wednesday about the detention.
Randy Quaid
McKinley Mac Renamed
Denali Mac
The extra-large sized McKinley Mac available at Alaska McDonald's restaurants will now be marketed as the Denali Mac.
The change comes after President Barack Obama in August renamed Mount McKinley to its traditional Athabascan name of Denali ahead of his three-day visit to the state.
A local McDonald's owner, Scott Cunningham, tells Soldotna, Alaska, radio station KSRM that new promotional materials are being created for the Denali Mac, which has two quarter-pounders between the buns instead of regular hamburgers.
Changing the name of the mountain has left many McKinley-monikered businesses in Alaska contemplating name changes after the president's surprise announcement.
Denali Mac
The Price Of Republican Bigotry
Hazleton, Pennsylvania
The mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania on Wednesday said the city will seek a ten-year payment plan after being ordered by a court to pay $1.4 million to lawyers who sued the city over a 2006 ordinance targeting illegal immigrants.
Mayor Joseph Yannuzzi said that if agreed to by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiff lawyers, the payment plan would allow the city of 25,340 to avoid the tax hikes and layoffs it would otherwise need in order to pay the legal fees.
In 2006, Hazleton's City Council, at the prodding of then-mayor Lou Barletta, passed an ordinance barring local businesses from hiring illegal immigrants and landlords from renting housing to them. Barletta is now a U.S. Representative.
ACLU lawyers originally asked for $2.8 million in legal fees. But Judge Munley cut that amount by half because the lawyers did not prevail on all their claims.
Munley rejected a 14-year payment plan proposed by Hazleton's lawyer, Kris Kobach, a national activist against illegal immigration who is also the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas. Kobach did not respond to a request for comment.
Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Pro-Pedophilia Priest
Father Gino Flaim
Italy's Roman Catholic Church on Wednesday fired a priest who said he could "understand" how pedophilia by clergy could occur because some children yearned for affection.
The diocese of Trento, in northern Italy, said Father Gino Flaim, 75, was removed from his position at a parish and was banned from preaching.
"Unfortunately there are children who seek affection because they don't get it at home and then if they find some priest he can even give in (to the temptation). I understand this," Flaim said in an interview on the private La 7 network on Tuesday.
Asked if the children were in some way responsible, he replied: "In many cases, yes."
Father Gino Flaim
Disaster Plan Developed
St. Louis
Beneath the surface of a St. Louis-area landfill lurk two things that should never meet: a slow-burning fire and a cache of Cold War-era nuclear waste, separated by no more than 1,200 feet.
Government officials have quietly adopted an emergency plan in case the smoldering embers ever reach the waste, a potentially "catastrophic event" that could send up a plume of radioactive smoke over a densely populated area near the city's main airport.
Although the fire at Bridgeton Landfill has been burning since at least 2010, the plan for a worst-case scenario was developed only a year ago and never publicized until this week, when St. Louis radio station KMOX first obtained a copy.
Landfill operator Republic Services downplayed any risk. Interceptor wells - underground structures that capture below-surface gasses - and other safeguards are in place to keep the fire and the nuclear waste separate.
Directly next to Bridgeton Landfill is West Lake Landfill, also owned by Republic Services. The West Lake facility was contaminated with radioactive waste from uranium processing by a St. Louis company known as Mallinckrodt Chemical. The waste was illegally dumped in 1973 and includes material that dates back to the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.
St. Louis
Widespread In High School Sports
Brain Trauma
Football is a dangerous sport. Even with the best protective gear, sprained knees, pulled muscles and an occasional broken bone are part of the game. But seven years of research into the impact of head trauma in high school players points to new dangers that parents will find extremely alarming.
More than half of the players participating in the trials showed signs of altered neurological function and dramatic changes to the wiring and biochemistry of their brains, according to a series of studies published by the Purdue Neurotrauma Group. They focused their research on pre-concussive head injuries which up until now went largely ignored due to lack of symptoms such as dizziness or disorientation associated with a concussion.
"It's not just the neurons that get damaged, it's the glial cells, it's the vasculature," said Eric Nauman, Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University.
"Basically in football and woman's soccer about half the team is experiencing these kinds of things, these kinds of changes. Some of them heal and some of them don't by the time they start playing their next season and that was the thing that really got us nervous," he added.
Brain Trauma
Glass Bridge Cracks
China
Thrill-seeking tourists in China got more than they bargained for when cracks appeared in a glass-bottomed walkway suspended 1,080 meters (3,540 foot) over a canyon, reports said.
Images showing small cracks in the "skywalk" built around a mountain, which opened just two weeks ago, spread on social media along with doubts over its safety.
The cracks resembled "winter frost on a window pane", the report said, and were apparently caused by a dropped stainless steel cup.
But the incident at Yuntai mountain in the northern province of Henan "doesn't affect safety", park officials were quoted as saying.
The glass made up of three layers is supposedly capable of supporting up to 800 kilograms (1,763 pounds) per square metre, they said.
China
In Memory
Gail Zappa
Gail Zappa, wife of Frank Zappa and executrix of the Zappa Family Trust, has died. She was 70. A cause of death has not been revealed, though TMZ reported she had had a long battle with lung cancer. Zappa, "departed this earth peacefully at her home . . . surrounded by her children," according to a statement from the Zappa Family Trust.
After her prolific husband died of prostate cancer in 1993, Gail kept Frank's recordings in the public, putting out dozens upon dozens of posthumous albums and judiciously licensing his image where appropriate. Earlier this year, the Zappa family announced that the couple's son Ahmet would be taking the reins on the Trust.
Gail, whose full maiden name was Adelaide Gail Sloatman, was born on January 1st, 1945, the daughter of a nuclear weapons research physicist with the U.S. Navy, according to Zappa biographer Barry Miles. She lived with her family in London as a teenager and got a job as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development rather than attend college. She met Doors frontman Jim Morrison at a very young age, in kindergarten, since they both had high-ranking naval officials for fathers; Frank once told a story that she hit Morrison over the head with a hammer. She eventually moved to New York, where she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the mid-Sixties and immersed herself in the music scene before hitchhiking to Los Angeles with a friend.
In Los Angeles, Gail met and befriended future Runaways manager Kim Fowley, and recorded an album with him billed to Bunny and Bear; Miles noted that she was "Bear." She met her husband-to-be when she was the secretary at the Sunset Strip mainstay the Whisky-a-Go-Go. In his autobiography,The Real Frank Zappa Book, the artist called her a "fascinating little vixen," with whom "it took a couple of minutes, but I fell (don't laugh) in love."
They started living together and married in a "severely ridiculous civil ceremony" in 1967. Frank recounted the ceremony comically in the book, stating that Gail was nine months pregnant at the time, and that he didn't have a wedding ring and that she still didn't have a wedding ring at the time he wrote the book, which came out in 1989.
The couple had four children - Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva - over the course of their marriage, which lasted until Frank's death. The composer recalled affectionately in his book that it was her idea to name their son Dweezil, after a "funny-looking little toe" she had. "I thought then, and continue to think today, that Dweezil is a nice name," Frank wrote. "Fuck the nurse if she didn't like it."
After setting up the Zappa Family Trust, Gail issued 38 albums between 1994 and 2015 of previously unreleased music that Frank had recorded. This year's Dance Me This was billed as Frank's final album and is significant for being his 100th record.
Gail Zappa
In Memory
Billy Joe Royal
Billy Joe Royal, who scored a hit with "Down in the Boondocks" in 1965 and toured nearly continuously in the next 50 years, has died, his agent said on Wednesday. He was 73.
Royal, a Georgia native who recorded pop and country hits, died on Tuesday morning in his sleep at his home in Morehead City, North Carolina, said Brent Taylor, booking agent for the artist.
Taylor said Royal was enjoying touring and last performed on Sept. 24 at the Gwinnett County Fair in Lawrenceville, Georgia, before going home to rest and spend time with his daughter, Savannah Royal, a university student.
Taylor said Royal was scheduled to perform in Mississippi and Louisiana in December. Taylor was mapping out 2016 tours of Europe and Australia for the singer, who was afraid of flying.
Royal was performing on the "Georgia Jubilee" radio program when he met Joe South, who wrote "Boondocks." The song reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965 for Royal, whose other hits included "I Knew You When" and "Cherry Hill Park."
After his pop career faded, Royal signed with Atlantic Records, recording "Burned Like a Rocket," "Till I Can't Take It Anymore" and other country hits.
Billy Joe Royal
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