The Monday Or Thursday Poll
Question
The current question:
What is the scariest movie you've ever seen?
Anecdotes are welcome...
Send your response to BadtotheBoneBob ( BCEpoll 'at' aol.com )
Fresh poll questions appear on Monday and Thursday, with Monday's results on Thursday, and Thursday's results on Monday.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: It's the Economy Stupor (nytimes.com)
When it comes to the economy, Barack Obama's campaign seems oddly lethargic.
Nat Hentoff: NYC's Black Male Graduation Rates: The Lost Two-Thirds (villagevoice.com)
New York ranks 54th of the 63 largest U.S. school districts for graduating black boys.
Pres. Bush declines to slap Misty May-Treanor's bikinied butt
Then after a good play, in the tradition of female volleyballers, May-Treanor turned, bent over slightly and offered her bikinied rear-end for the 43rd president to slap. "Mr. President," she said, "want to?"
Sheela Lambert: The Man Behind the Hair (advocate.com)
In his most candid interview to date, James Rado the cocreator and original star of Hair discusses the making of the musical and his intimate relationship with collaborator Gerome Ragni-a relationship that inspired the characters of Claude and Berger and consequently changed America forever.
Scott Foundas: An Interview With Woody Allen (villagevoice.com)
Woody Allen is back from his European vacation. Next, he directs Larry David in NYC and Puccini for L.A. Opera.
Trish Bendix: A New Meaning for Lesbian Chic (afterellen.com)
Queer women are challenging the stereotype of the unfashionable lesbian.
Malinda Lo: Notes & Queeries: An Open Mind (afterellen.com)
Early on in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the comic book series that begins after the end of the television show, Buffy is awakened from a magical sleep by a kiss from someone who loves her. That someone is revealed in Issue No. 11, "A Beautiful Sunset," and it turns out to be a fellow slayer named Satsu
Dan Avery: Defying Expectations (advocate.com)
Broadway belle Idina Menzel flies solo with a new album and concert tour.
Charlie Richards: Boy Wonder (advocate.com)
At 27, Nico Muhly is one of classical music's brightest young talents. We catch up with the prodigy as he takes time off from writing his first opera for the Met and hits the road to perform works from his new album, Mothertongue
Mike Farley: A Chat with Emerson Hart, the long-time vocalist for alt-rock band Tonic (bullz-eye.com)
"Sometimes it's fun to just write to write. Not to think, 'Oh, I have to create a masterpiece today for me.'"
zEN mAN Comments
'DYLAN AT THE APOLLO'
HEY MARTY
TO JENCIN'S "DYLAN AT THE APOLLO" IN BARTCOP-E YESTERDAY
The ultimate purpose of the book Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism is to
help spread the ______ ______?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and a bit cooler than seasonal.
Roadie For A Day Auction
The Who
Rockers The Who are offering one lucky fan the chance to roadie for them as part of a new charity auction item.
Bidding for the package, which includes becoming a member of the group's road crew for a day and meeting frontman Roger Daltrey, has reached GBP10,000 in just four days, since the giveaway was posted on auction website eBay.com.
The eBay Giving Works package will benefit California charity K9 Connection, which brings teenagers and homeless dogs together. The students train the strays with a view to getting the dogs adopted by a loving family.
The auction, managed by charity group Auction Cause, continues until August 24.
The Who
Viewers Choice
Memorable Moments
The most memorable moments in television history will be revealed during the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards next month, and it's up to voters to decide which bits should take top honors.
Forty "moments" - 20 dramatic and 20 comedic - are in the running. Comedy contenders include "M-A-S-H," "Mork & Mindy," "Sex and the City" and "The Cosby Show," while "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Miami Vice," "Moonlighting" and "The Sopranos" are among the drama candidates.
The television academy and Emmy show producers came up with the competition and the contenders in honor of the 60th annual presentation of the Emmy Awards. The Emmy telecast will also feature celebrities performing some of TV's most memorable lines over the past 60 years.
Fans can watch clips and vote for their favorite moments online until Sept. 15.
Memorable Moments
Complete List Of Winners - 2008
ALMA Awards
A complete list of winners of the 2008 ALMA Awards:
• Entertainer of the year: America Ferrera
• Humanitarian award: Shakira
• Trailblazer award: Linda Ronstadt
• Performance by a Latino ensemble in a television series: "Ugly Betty," ABC.
• Actor in a television series, drama: Edward James Olmos, "Battlestar Galactica," SciFi Channel.
• Actress in a television series, drama: Roselyn Sanchez, "Without A Trace," CBS.
• Actor in a television series, comedy: Charlie Sheen, "Two and a Half Men," CBS.
• Actress in a television series, comedy: Judy Reyes, "Scrubs," NBC.
• Supporting actor in a television series, drama: Jorge Garcia, "Lost," ABC.
• Supporting actress in a television series, drama: Julie Gonzalo, "Eli Stone," ABC.
• Director of a television series: Linda Mendoza, "Ugly Betty," ABC.
• Writing for a television series: Gloria Calderon Kellett, "How I Met Your Mother," CBS.
• Comedy special: "George Lopez: America's Mexican," HBO.
• Made-for TV documentary: "American Experience: Roberto Clemente," PBS.
• Career achievement award: David Wader, Stage Manager.
• Special achievement in fashion: Narciso Rodriguez.
• Special achievement award: Spanish-language motion picture: "La Misma Luna."
• Special achievement award: Director of a made-for-TV movie: Kenny Ortega, "High School Musical 2," Disney Channel.
ALMA Awards
Coastal Split Widens
Screen Actors Guild
The New York regional board of the Screen Actors Guild demanded on Sunday that the Hollywood union take meaningful steps toward negotiating a new contract by August 25 or bring in a federal mediator.
Sam Freed, a member of the negotiating committee who is also president of the New York board and the union's second national vice president, said that the longer the union waits to make a deal, the more it hurts its members.
The move drew immediate fire from SAG president Alan Rosenberg.
"This advisory motion is not in the best interests of New York Division SAG members or any SAG members across the country," he said in a statement. "It could delay and prolong the negotiations by emboldening management with a false belief that SAG actors are split on the issues."
Screen Actors Guild
Joins 'CSI' Cast
Laurence Fishburne
"CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" has solved the mystery of who will replace departing CBS series star William Petersen: It's Laurence Fishburne.
Fishburne, an Emmy and Tony winner, will be introduced in the ninth episode of the upcoming 10th season, the network told The Associated Press on Monday. He'll play a forensics scientist with a secret.
Fishburne plays a college lecturer and former pathologist who is focused on why people commit acts of violence.
The air date for Petersen's final episode has yet to be determined but will be early next year. Petersen has been with the series since it debuted in fall 2000 and will remain a "CSI" executive producer, the network said.
Laurence Fishburne
Hospital News
Annie Lennox
Former Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox is recovering from spinal surgery after being forced by a back injury to return home early from an AIDS conference in Mexico, the star's Web site said on Monday.
She was flown back to Britain last week and had to be wheeled off the plane in a wheelchair.
"A first I must say! Felt a bit like Elizabeth Taylor," Lennox wrote in her blog. "Some of my plans and schemes have had to be put on hold because there is not much I can do if I can't walk properly."
The injury has also forced Lennox, an AIDS activist, to cancel her appearance on Wednesday at the Edinburgh Festival of Politics where she was due to talk about her AIDS awareness campaign, SING.
Annie Lennox
Hospital News
Joan Hyler
Authorities say Hollywood producer and talent manager Joan Hyler was in critical condition after she was hit by a car Friday night on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California.
Hyler, who has represented Bob Dylan and Madonna and is a former president of the nonprofit Women in Film, was hit as she was heading to a home in the area.
In a posting on the Web site of UCLA Medical Center, her family says she sustained "severe and multiple injuries."
Joan Hyler
Trumps Paul McCartney in Mega-Divorce
Phil Collins
Phil Collins has waved good-bye to marriage No. 3 and hello to a reported $46.68 million divorce settlement which, if accurate, shapes up to be the biggest ever celeb payout in British legal history, trumping even the astronomical amount Heather Mills received-said to be $45.37 million-from Paul McCartney earlier this year.
Collins, 57, and Orianne Cevey, 35, were married for seven years before separating in 2006. They have two children together, sons Nicolas, 8, and Matthew, 4.
It isn't the first time relationship woes have caused a dip in the Genesis frontman's fortunes, with Britain's Daily Telegraph even claiming that divorce settlements have eaten into as much as one-third of his estimated $280 million net worth, nearly $84 million going to his ex-wives.
After taking advantage of technological advances and infamously dumping wife No. 2, Jill Tavelman, by fax back in 1994, he was forced to pay $34 million.
Phil Collins
What Hippocratic Oath
California
California's highest court on Monday barred doctors from invoking their religious beliefs as a reason to deny treatment to gays and lesbians, ruling that state law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination extends to the medical profession.
Justice Joyce Kennard wrote that two Christian fertility doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian have neither a free speech right nor a religious exemption from the state's law, which "imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations."
In the lawsuit that led to the ruling, Guadalupe Benitez, 36, of Oceanside said that the doctors treated her with fertility drugs and instructed her how to inseminate herself at home but told her their beliefs prevented them from inseminating her. One of the doctors referred her to another fertility specialist without moral objections, and Benitez has since given birth to three children.
The law was originally designed to prevent hotels, restaurants and other public services from refusing to serve patrons because of their race. The Legislature has since expanded it to cover characteristics such as age and sexual orientation.
California
Earth Changes
Magnetic Field
Something beneath the surface is changing Earth's protective magnetic field, which may leave satellites and other space assets vulnerable to high-energy radiation.
The gradual weakening of the overall magnetic field can take hundreds and even thousands of years. But smaller, more rapid fluctuations within months may leave satellites unprotected and catch scientists off guard, new research finds.
A new model uses satellite data from the past nine years to show how sudden fluid motions within the Earth's core can alter the magnetic envelope around our planet. This represents the first time that researchers have been able to detect such rapid magnetic field changes taking place over just a few months.
"There are these changes in the South Atlantic, an area where the magnetic field has the smallest envelope at one third [of what is] normal," said Mioara Mandea, a geophysicist at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.
Magnetic Field
Privatizing The Military For Fun & Profit
'Contractors'
The American military has depended on private contractors since sutlers sold paper, bacon, sugar, and other small luxuries to Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War.
But the scale of the use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in US history, according to a new congressional report that may be the most thorough official account yet of the practice.
As of early 2008, at least 190,000 private personnel were working on US-funded projects in the Iraq theater, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) survey found. That means that for each uniformed member of the US military in the region, there was also a contract employee - a ratio of 1 to 1.
In the Korean conflict, the ratio was 2.5 uniformed personnel for each contractor. In Vietnam, the comparable figure was 5 to 1.
'Contractors'
57% Believe
Magical Thinking
When it comes to saving lives, God trumps doctors for many Americans. An eye-opening survey reveals widespread belief that divine intervention can revive dying patients. And, researchers said, doctors "need to be prepared to deal with families who are waiting for a miracle."
More than half of randomly surveyed adults - 57 percent - said God's intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand such treatment.
When asked to imagine their own relatives being gravely ill or injured, nearly 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a hopeless outcome.
Magical Thinking
Business Opts For Downgrade
Vista
San Francisco - When Microsoft stopped selling new licenses to Windows XP on June 30, it gave users and PC makers a "downgrade" loophole so that those who wanted XP could still get it, even though they still had to buy a Vista license.
According to data from the exo.performance.network, 35 percent of Vista-equipped PCs have been downgraded to Windows XP. "That's way out of proportion for even the dramatically unpopular Windows Vista," says Randall C. Kennedy, an InfoWorld contributing editor, whose company Devil Mountain Software developed the Windows Sentinel tool and analyzes the exo.performance.network data. (More than 3,000 PCs are monitored worldwide using the tool, in both the free InfoWorld Windows Sentinel version and in the more extensive version provided to Devil Mountain clients.)
The idea of a downgrade option is nothing new for enterprise licenses, since it can take several years for large organizations to plan out and deploy significant new software, under schedules that bear no resemblance to a vendor's product schedules. But in a twist of this policy, individual users can also "downgrade" to XP from Vista Business or Ultimate (and later restore Vista if they desire at no extra cost). Most major PC makers offer users the option of downgrading to XP on at least some models, typically those sold to small businesses and gamers.
Vista
Workers Celebrate 75 Years Later
CCC
An 18-year-old Harold Mattern welcomed the idea of clearing forest trails and building bridges and dams as a member of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps.
"My father was out of work so I was eligible. I was single and I was out of school and all, and unemployed," said Mattern, now 93. "It was good physical work, good hard work. But we were well-fed and well cared for."
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Emergency Conservation Act, which created the CCC and changed the lives of up to 4 million young men while reinvigorating a struggling nation.
Events are being held across the country to pay tribute to the CCC's work from 1933 to 1942. Statues are being erected in South Dakota, New Mexico and Arkansas. State legislatures in Florida, Virginia, Michigan, Maine and Massachusetts have passed resolutions honoring the CCC. Virginia, West Virginia and Idaho, enacted laws setting aside March 31 of each year for a special day of recognition - the date FDR signed the CCC bill into law.
CCC
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
