Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: "Conservatives Are (Mostly) Not Libertarians" (New York Times)
Think about it: the modern Republican party may be the party of deregulation and low taxes, but it's also the party of social illiberalism. Someone like Rick Santorum firmly believes that the government has no right to tell business owners what they can do in the workplace, but has every right to tell ordinary citizens what they can do in the bedroom.
Henry Rollins: Stop and Frisk Needs to Stop (LA Weekly)
When a young non-white male is stopped and searched at the whim of a police officer, his idea of personal space, privacy and self esteem are shattered, to say nothing of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. The damage goes deep quickly and stays. Stop & frisk, as well as a tactic, is also an incitement. Not the best thing to engender good conduct and safer communities.
Ted Rall: "Right-Wing Liberals"
I'm not much for sports analogies, but any athlete knows about the home field advantage. It's easier to win if you play your game, not your opponent's. This is even more true in politics. Playing by your enemy's rules is a mug's game.
Susan Estrich: And Just a Little Hillary … (Creators Syndicate)
Obamacare is about to take center stage. Sometimes, listening to the president's attackers and defenders, I think Kool-Aid must be all that's being served in D.C. Hello! Isn't the challenge right now to make the system work as well as it can for as many people as it can? Isn't that what we should talk about: How do we do it, fix it, work it? Not whether the president was right or wrong.
Susan Estrich: Jack Germond and the Good Old Days (Creators Syndicate)
He did not write it unless he knew it to be true. He did not say it unless he actually knew it. He was not in love with the sound of his own voice. He actually knew what he was talking about. He did not make mistakes - at least not any that I remember.
Connie Schultz: How Stupid Do They Think We Are? (Creators Syndicate)
National Right to Life has broken up with Cleveland Right to Life because Cleveland Right to Life wants to amend its mission statement to ban same-sex marriage - in Ohio, mind you, where same-sex marriage is already banned.
Mark Wilson: Firefighter says he waved at police and was handcuffed and threatened (Courier Press; Evansville, Indiana)
Evansville firefighter George Madison Jr. has filed a formal complaint about an Evansville Police Department officer who he said stopped him during a bicycle ride Tuesday afternoon, threatened him with a stun gun and handcuffed him. Madison 38, who also is youth pastor at Memorial Baptist Church, …
Erica Meltzer: Boulder County DA Stan Garnett clears all 17 suspected illegal voters (Daily Camera)
Garnett criticizes Secretary of State Scott Gessler for 'wild goose chases.'
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Gare G
Precious Virgos
Reader Report
Union Fire
Hi Marty
Last Friday Diamond Springs was hit by a 116 acre wildfire (according to the Mt. Democrat, Tea Party) ----just over my back fence! My youngest daughter and her husband got mom and the dogs out to my office on Main St. They saw the smoke from K Mart and got there while I was still talking to her on the phone. All three of my spawn were at my office within 30 minutes. The fire burned 12' of my back fence. The fire was on the Patterson Ranch and burned the over 100 year old Ranch house, Barn and all the out buildings! The fire started right behind Union Mine School, at the new Vocational-Continuation school, Shenandoah. Probably the old toss the 'smoke' into the tinder dry grass. Very Grateful for Firefighters! Here's some pixels:
Dale of Burnt Diamond Springs, Norcali
Yikes! Thanks, Dale!
(Click on any of Dale's pictures for a larger version)
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bit on the humid side.
Honorary Degree
John Goodman
Actor John Goodman says he's learned to be grateful for his blessings, rather than always striving for more.
Goodman was awarded an honorary doctorate degree of humane letters Sunday during at the convocation at Missouri State University in Springfield. He graduated from the school with a fine arts degree in 1975.
He says he originally went to Missouri State to play football but an injury led him to focus on drama. He says he owes his career to the school because its teachers helped him find and pursue his passion.
Goodman, a St. Louis native who has starred in stage, television and film roles, told the students to appreciate small blessings, because "the most important thing you will do in your life is take your next breath."
John Goodman
To Lead Cincy Chicken Dance
George Takei
"Star Trek" actor George Takei will get a chance to show off some special dance moves as he leads a mass chicken dance at an annual Cincinnati festival.
Takei will serve as grand marshal of the city's annual Oktoberfest-Zinzinnati. The 76-year-old actor will lead the chicken dance Sept. 21.
Officials say the weekend festival celebrating Cincinnati's German heritage is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people.
Takei portrayed Mr. Sulu in the original "Star Trek" TV and film series. In recent years, he has built a mammoth following on Facebook.
George Takei
Not Attending Baseball Luncheon
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin will not be attending a baseball luncheon during which she was to receive a "Beacon" award for embodying the spirit of the civil rights movement, The Associated Press has learned.
Franklin, 71, has already canceled several concerts recently because of undisclosed health reasons. In a statement issued Monday by Major League Baseball, the Grammy-winning "Queen of Soul" referred to ongoing "treatment" that prevented her from traveling. Franklin lives in the Detroit area; the luncheon is being held in Chicago on Saturday.
As recently as last week, Franklin had been expected to attend the luncheon.
Franklin and former baseball star Bo Jackson were to be presented "Beacon" awards, which in previous years have been given to Willie Mays and Harry Belafonte among others. Major League Baseball plans to announce at a later date, but before the ceremony, who will accept the award on Franklin's behalf. The "Beacon" luncheon is one of several events marking baseball's Civil Rights Game weekend.
Aretha Franklin
Ashes Scattered At Woodstock
Richie Havens
The ashes of Richie Havens have been scattered across the site of the 1969 Woodstock concert.
Havens was the first act at Woodstock and his performance of "Freedom" was a highlight of the concert. He died in April of a heart attack at age 72.
The Times Herald-Record of Middletown reports that Havens' ashes were scattered from a plane as it flew over the upstate New York field during a ceremony Sunday. About 30 family members attended the event, which drew more than a thousand fans. Actors Danny Glover and Louis Gossett Jr. were among the speakers.
Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the venue built on the Woodstock site, hosted the tribute on the 44th anniversary of the final day of the famous three-day concert.
Richie Havens
Toasted Jaguar On The 101
Dick Van Dyke
Veteran actor Dick Van Dyke, best known for his hit television comedy of the 1960s, survived a car fire unscathed on Monday when a passerby pulled him from the smoldering vehicle before it burst into flames on the side of a Los Angeles-area freeway.
A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol confirmed that the 87-year-old performer was the driver seen slumped over the steering wheel of a Jaguar that was reported to be on fire on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway.
Van Dyke said a group of motorists who stopped to render assistance, one of them apparently an off-duty firefighter, saw him huddled in the driver's seat while he was trying to place a call for help and pulled him out of the car to safety.
"They thought I had passed out so they yanked me out of the car," Van Dyke recounted in an interview with the celebrity news website TMZ.com, saying he had not initially realized that his car was burning.
"It just started making a noise, and I thought I had a flat at first, then it started to smoke, then it burned to a crisp," he said smiling. He added that he was unhurt and got out of the vehicle "long before" it went up in flames.
Dick Van Dyke
2nd Son Surrenders
Hud Mellencamp
The second of rocker John Mellencamp's sons has surrendered for arrest on charges of punching and kicking a 19-year-old man in southern Indiana.
A Monroe County jail officer says 19-year-old Hud Mellencamp was released on bond after being booked early Monday on the felony battery charges. Eighteen-year-old Speck Mellencamp bonded out of jail on those charges Friday.
Authorities say Speck Mellencamp entered the porch of a man's Bloomington home and punched him in the face July 29, believing that man had hit him earlier that evening. Court documents say the brothers and another 19-year-old man "punched, kicked and stomped" the man who suffered facial injuries.
Court records don't list attorneys for the Mellencamp brothers. John Mellencamp's publicist has declined comment. The singer lives near Bloomington, 50 miles south of Indianapolis.
Hud Mellencamp
Munchies Fetch $50 Online
Hempfest
A few eBay users are seeing a money-making opportunity in the free bags of chips that were given out by police over the weekend at Seattle's pot festival known as Hempfest.
An unopened Doritos bag from Hempfest had drawn eight bids by Monday afternoon, pushing the price to $58. One bag listed as "used" was fetching $50.
The nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos were a popular topic surrounding the event because Seattle police distributed them for free along with stickers designed to inform pot consumers about the state's legal pot law.
Officers handed out only 1,000 bags of chips at an event that draws as many as 85,000 people per day.
Hempfest
Secrecy Is Priority
J.D. Salinger
For much of the nine years that Shane Salerno worked on his J.D. Salinger documentary and book, the project was a mystery worthy of the author himself.
Code names. Hidden identities. Surveillance cameras. Until 2010, when "The Catcher In the Rye" novelist died at age 91, only a handful of people were fully aware of what he was up to. Even now, with the release date of the film "Salinger" less than three weeks away, little is known about a production that draws upon more than 100 interviews and a trove of documents and rare photographs, and that promises many revelations about an author who still fascinates millions.
"I have worked more than 200 documentaries in my career and Salinger was the most secretive and the most intense film I have ever worked on," said Buddy Squires, the film's cinematographer and co-producer who has worked on such Ken Burns documentaries as "Jazz" and "The Central Park Five."
The Weinstein Company quickly signed up the movie after seeing it earlier this year, as did PBS, which reportedly paid seven figures and will air the documentary in January as the 200th installment of its "American Masters" series. Simon & Schuster reportedly paid seven figures for the book, which runs 700 pages and was co-authored by Salerno and David Shields.
The film, which opens Sept. 6, is expected to be shown on more than 200 screens nationwide, a high number for a documentary. The book's planned first printing is for more than 100,000 copies.
J.D. Salinger
Auctioned For $27M
Ferrari 275 N.A.R.T. Spider
A rare 1967 Ferrari owned by a North Carolina orphan-turned-millionaire sold at auction for $27.5 million.
The red Ferrari was one of only 10 ever built, and its single-family ownership increased interest in the sale, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The owner, the late Eddie Smith, was a former mayor of Lexington, N.C. He died in 2007 at age 88. Since then, the car has been stored in a specially built garage.
The sale of the Ferrari 275 GTB/4(asterisk)S N.A.R.T. Spider was handled by RM Auctions in Monterey. N.A.R.T. stands for North American Racing Team, a Ferrari-backed venture created in the late 1950s to promote the brand in the U.S.
The 275 N.A.R.T. Spider was featured in the 1968 film "The Thomas Crown Affair," the Los Angeles Times reported.
Ferrari 275 N.A.R.T. Spider
Czech Vinyl Records
GZ Media
When vinyl record sales hit bottom in the late 1980s, managers at Czech record producer GZ Media in a small town near Prague were wondering what to do with their idle record pressing machines.
They decided not to get rid of them and put them in garages at the company's backyard. That was a lucky move.
As vinyl retro-mania started spreading around the world a decade later, the firm dusted off the presses and is now spinning profits on records for the likes of the Rolling Stones, U2, Bob Dylan and David Bowie.
With 7 million records made in 2012 and an expected 10 million this year, GZ Media says it is the world's biggest vinyl record producer, making records for Universal Music Group, Sony Music and now beginning to cooperate with Warner Music.
Vinyl record production accounts for about 30 percent of GZ Media's sales, which reached 1.8 billion crowns ($93 million) last year.
GZ Media
First Fossil Whale Poop Pops Up
Italy
Clumps of squid beaks sticking out of clay in Italy's Umbrian badlands may be the first fossilized ambergris, or whale poo, ever found.
Ambergris is a fatty, waxy-looking substance. Scientists believe sperm whales - the largest toothed predator on Earth - secrete ambergris inside their digestive tracts to protect themselves from sharp objects, like giant squid beaks and fish bones and teeth. And contrary to urban legend, ambergris is actually whale poo, not vomit. Sought after by perfume makers, aged ambergris is like umami for the nose, adding musky depth to scents.
Even though scientists have discovered fossilized feces, called coprolites, from dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mammoths and sharks, no one has reported finding ancient ambergris.
"These structures, derived from the original fossil ambergris masses, represent the first recovery on a global scale, since nothing like [it] has been described before in the scientific literature," lead study author Angela Baldanza, a sedimentary geologist at the University of Perugia in Italy, said in an email interview.
Italy
In Memory
Beatrice Kozera
Beatrice Kozera, the Los Angeles-born woman whose fleeting relationship with novelist Jack Kerouac was chronicled in "On the Road," has died. She was 92.
The woman also known as Bea Franco and to readers as "Terry, the Mexican girl" died Thursday in Lakewood of natural causes, family friend Tim Hernandez said Monday.
Kozera learned only a few years ago that her 15-day relationship with Kerouac in the farmworker labor camps of Selma in 1947 was featured in his famous Beat Generation novel and eventually a movie, Hernandez said.
Hernandez tracked down Kozera while he was researching her story for a book due to be released later this month called "Mañana Means Heaven."
He said he interviewed Kozera several times after finding letters and a postcard she had written to Kerouac at the New York Public Library. He showed them to her family, who recognized her handwriting.
"As far as she was concerned she was a normal, ordinary person who at one point in her life met a man," Hernandez said. "She never knew that this gentleman Kerouac ever became anything."
Kozera spent most of her early years following her farmworker family in California's fields and eventually settled in Fresno.
Beatrice Kozera
In Memory
Albert Murray
Albert Murray, the influential novelist and critic who celebrated black culture, scorned black separatism and was once praised by Duke Ellington as the "unsquarest man I know," died Sunday. He was 97.
Murray died at home in his sleep, according to Lewis Jones, a family friend and Murray's guardian.
Few authors so forcefully bridged the worlds of words and music. Like his old friend and intellectual ally Ralph Ellison, Murray believed that blues and jazz were not primitive sounds, but sophisticated art, finding kinships among Ellington and Louis Armstrong and novelists such as Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway.
He argued his case in a series of autobiographical novels, a nonfiction narrative ("South to a Very Old Place"), an acclaimed history of music ("Stomping the Blues") and several books of criticism. Although slowed by back trouble, Murray continued to write well into his 80s, and also helped Wynton Marsalis and others stage the acclaimed Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts. Millions of television viewers came to know him as a featured commentator in Ken Burns' documentary series "Jazz."
An amiable counterpart to the aloof Ellison, Murray was many men: friend of Ellington and artist Romare Bearden (whose paintings hung in Murray's Harlem apartment); foe of Marxists, Freudians, academics, black nationalists and white segregationists; and mentor and inspiration to Ernest J. Gaines, Stanley Crouch, James Alan McPherson and many others.
Murray often wrote, and spoke, in a jazzy, mock-professorial style, not unlike Ellington's stylized stage introductions. One Murray book was titled "The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement." He declared that blacks should not be regarded as transplanted Africans, but quintessential Americans, practiced in the art of "I-ma-gi-na-tive ex-al-ta-tion."
Interviewed by The Associated Press in 1998, the raspy-voiced Murray defined the blues as "the extension, improvisation and ritualization of the stylization of the beliefs and the feelings and emotions of the lifestyle of a particular culture."
"People want to say the blues is an ailment," Murray said, waving his hand. "Any fool can tell you the blues is good-time music. It's entertainment. It ain't for no church. 'Kill the white folks,' that's not what the blues is about. You see the blues with that stuff, it means some Marxist got hold of that."
Born in 1916, Murray grew up in Magazine Point, Ala., a hamlet not far from Mobile. Like his fictional alter ego, Scooter, he was a boy who simultaneously knew and did not know who he was. At age 11, he learned, accidentally, that the couple raising him was not his parents; his mother had given him up for adoption out of shame for conceiving him out of wedlock. His real parents were educated and middle-class, his adopted ones common folk.
Murray, bright, self-confident and a born improviser, came to see himself as the adventurer-hero of his own life, a "prince among paupers." He left his hometown to study at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where Ellison was an upperclassman, a music major with two-tone shoes who seemed to check out the same library books as Murray did. Murray graduated in 1939, served in the Air Force during World War II and received a master's degree from New York University after returning to the U.S.
While Ellison attained instant fame in the early 1950s with his first novel, "Invisible Man," Murray's turn came more than a decade later, when he was well into middle age. Before publication came the prelude: books read, records remembered, paintings appraised, experiences experienced, what Murray called "the also and the also" of constructing an identity that would reconstruct the identity of American culture.
He finally broke through in the late 1960s, at the peak of the Black Arts Movement, which regarded art as an outlet for protest. Murray ridiculed this and other political art as "social science fiction." Like Ellison, he believed conflict was a given, that life was not a formula to be solved but a dance to be danced.
Murray's belated success had one apparent casualty: his bond with Ellison. The two drifted apart in later years, with friends speculating that Ellison, who never completed another novel after "Invisible Man," resented Murray's good fortune, while Murray tired of being labeled Ellison's protege.
Murray was married to Mozelle Menefee Murray, whom he met at Tuskegee in 1941. They had a daughter, Michele, who performed with the Alvin Ailey dance troupe. Albert Murray wrote the program notes, about which Ailey joked, "Now I understand better what I've been trying to do all these years."
Albert Murray
In Memory
Lee Thompson Young
Lee Thompson Young, who began his acting career as the teenage star of the Disney Channel's "The Famous Jett Jackson" and was featured in the film "Friday Night Lights" and the series "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead Monday, police said. He was 29.
There was no official cause of death, but Young's manager, Paul Baruch, said the actor "tragically took his own life."
Young's body was found at his North Hollywood home by police Monday morning after he failed to show up for work on TNT's crime drama "Rizzoli & Isles," police Officer Sally Madera said. The Los Angeles Fire Department was summoned and pronounced him dead at the scene, she said.
In 1998, Young began starring in "The Famous Jett Jackson," playing a TV action hero who returns to his roots for a less high-profile life. The series ran until 2001.
Young followed it with roles in TV series, including "The Guardian," ''Scrubs" and "Smallville" and in the films "Akeelah and the Bee" and "The Hills Have Eyes II." Young joined "Rizzoli & Isles" when it debuted in 2010.
Young, a graduate of University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, was an as an avid photographer, traveler and student of martial arts, according to his biography.
Lee Thompson Young
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