'Best of TBH Politoons'
PURPLE GENE'S WEIRD WORD OF THE WEEK
SYZYGY
"SYZYGY"
ON LINE DEFINITION: The alignment of two or more celestial bodies (as in the Sun and the Moon)...The allignment of objects, ideas or events that are either similar or opposite.
ON THE STREET: The unusual alliance of often opposite or differing entities.
IN A SENTENCE: Suzy Q is so synergistic that she synthesized a sizeable syzygy of similar minded simpletons to a synizesis.
WORD ODDITY: Syzygy is the only word in the English language that has 3 "Y's" in it.
(Read BartCop Entertainment and learn a useless new word each Tuesday)
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Jim Hightower: THE COALITION GOES HOME (jimhightower.com)
The "willing" are waning. Remember George W's assertion in 2003 that he was not rushing off to war in Iraq on his own whim? No, no, he cried, lookie here, I've got this big international "Coalition of the Willing" backing me all the way! Actually, his coalition was mostly a sham from the start.
Jim Hightower: THE HEDGE-FUND BLUES (jimhightower.com)
You think the poor people in New Orleans have it bad, or the people in Iraq, or the people of Darfur? Well, you haven't known real suffering until you've felt the pain of a small group of Americans said to be experiencing a living hell. I speak, of course, about hedge fund executives.
John Pilger: Who's Afraid of Michael Moore? (commondreams.org)
In Sicko, Michael Moore's new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject "socialised medicine" as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were "anti-American".
Roger Ebert: Shut Up and Sing (Rated R; 3 1/2 stars)
Maybe Natalie Maines' real problem was with her timing. On March 10, 2003, in the first days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she told a London audience, "I'm ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." It took two weeks for that wisecrack to make it back home, but then it unleashed a perfect storm: Her group, The Dixie Chicks, had been the most popular female singing group in history, but suddenly disappeared from the playlists of virtually every country radio station in the land. Their #1 single, "Traveling Soldier," dropped 47 percent in sales in one week. Many of their fans were vocal in their opinion that she should not have an opinion. Not long after, George W. Bush staged his premature "Mission Accomplished" photo-op.
Beth Quinn: Halloween costumes have gone to the dogs (recordonline.com)
I've decided not to dress the dogs up for Halloween. This wasn't a hard decision. I've never dressed Tom and Huck for Halloween, primarily because they aren't any good at wearing things, not even the occasional bandage.
Katie Peoples: Kittredge Cherry Presents Controversial Art in New Book (curvemag.com)
We take a look at Kittredge Cherry's Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More and how queer interpretations of Christian art are popping up all over the place these days. ..
We Love Monica Nolan's Pulp Fiction (curvemag.com)
We have a chat with writer Monica Nolan about her latest book, Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, a tribute to 1950s and '60s pulp fiction with a lesbian twist.
Sandra Bernhard: Bisexuality and savage wit (news.independent.co.uk)
For years Sandra Bernhard has scandalised America with her bisexuality and savage wit. And she's not letting up on her latest tour, hears Julian Hall.
Michael Jensen: J. K. Rowling Says "Harry Potter" Character is Gay (afterelton.com)
Friday night, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling revealed that Albus Dumbledore, mentor to the world-famous boy wizard and Hogwart's headmaster, is gay. According to AP sources, during a question and answer session before a full house at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Rowling made the surprise revelation when a fan of the books asked the author whether Dumbledore would ever find "true love".
The Top 11 Lesbian/Bi Moments in Sci Fi and Fantasy (afterellen.com)
From "Alien" to "Battlestar" to "Xena" and more. ["Buffy" is No. 2.]
The 5-Minute Interview: Bill Nighy, Actor (news.independent.co.uk)
'Women think my handshake is some sort of vulgar proposition.'
sent this:
Reader Suggestion
Bong Hits 4 Jesus
DARE Generation Diary: Bong Hits 4 Jesus - The Game
And soon to be a major motion picture!!!....REALLY!!!
Vic
not quite in Alaska
Thanks, Vic!
Reader Comment
Re: Maricopa Co., AZ
Michelle, the Queen of Queen Creek (formerly of Gilbert) sent this link -More Arpaio/Thomas shenanigans
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money on private lawyers to pursue cases against people and organizations he and Sheriff Joe Arpaio politically oppose.
Thomas has paid Wilenchik and Bartness, the company he worked for immediately before taking office, at least $320,000 for legal services related to a range of opponents and high-profile political cases, according to county records.
Other political opponents of Thomas and Arpaio who have been the subject of legal work by outside counsel include immigration rights activists We Are America and the state's top legal enforcement official, Attorney General Terry Goddard, as well as the West Valley View newspaper.
Since January 2005, Thomas' office has hired about 50 private law firms to handle county legal work at a cost of nearly $13 million, according to records.
Thanks, again, Michelle!
Reader Comment
Re: The Office Collar
Hello Marty,
Do you Remember Yesterday?
When you had that link to The Office Collar
Well, that was a great link!
The Mother Website is just amazing!
I've been in advertising for over 20 years, and was blown away by all the clever people out there!
I spent hours at that website.
Thanks, Take Care
KevKev in Apache Junction, Arizona
Thanks, KevKev!
And, you're welcome!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hot, dry and windy.
Santa Ana's are blowing, fires are burning, and sinuses are draining. Ack.
Quill Award
Al Gore
Former Vice President Al Gore will receive a second Quill award on Monday at the third annual event that was created to bring glamour and Oscar-style red carpet extravagance to the world of publishing.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Gore's "The Assault on Reason" won the Quill award for the history/current affairs/politics category -- the same award he won last year for his book "An Inconvenient Truth."
Other winners include Cormac McCarthy, who took the general fiction award with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Road," Walter Isaacson, who won the biography/memoir award for "Einstein: His Life and Universe," and Nora Roberts, who won the romance award for "Angels Fall."
Amy Sedaris won the humor award for "I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence," Diane Setterfield will be awarded the debut author Quill for "The Thirteenth Tale" and Laura Lippman won the mystery/suspense/thriller award for "What the Dead Know."
Al Gore
Awards Appearance
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert will make his first public appearance in New York next month since falling ill in summer 2006.
The veteran Chicago film critic will receive a special tribute during the 17th annual Gotham Awards on November 27, organizers said Monday.
Ebert, who is recovering from cancer and a burst carotid artery, has long been absent from his weekly television show with Richard Roeper, but continues to review movies for the Chicago Sun-Times. He has made a number of appearances at screenings and festivals since he first emerged at his own Overlooked Film Festival in Illinois last April.
Roger Ebert
Apples & Oranges
Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were "not that terrible" when compared with attacks by the IRA in Britain.
"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais.
"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said in an interview published Sunday.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. About 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were maimed in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which caused most of the deaths, disarmed in 2005.
Doris Lessing
Originals To Be Auctioned
Banksy
Ten original works by English graffiti artist Banksy, including an image of Lenin on roller skates and an elephant carrying a large bomb, are predicted to fetch up to $600,000 Wednesday at an auction.
The artist, who does much of his work on exterior walls, rarely offers originals for sale. A previous sale in April at Bonhams auction house included just four.
Banksy specializes in humorous titles. The bomb-bearing elephant is titled, "Heavy Weaponry," and the image of Lenin on inline skates is subtitled, "Who Put the Revolution on Ice?"
Banksy refuses to give his real name, which has been variously reported as Robert Banks or Robin Banks.
Banksy
Czech Republic's State Award for Literature
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera has won the Czech Republic's State Award for Literature for the first publication of his novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in his former home country.
Kundera wrote a letter to Culture Minister Vaclav Jehlicka expressing thanks for the award, which includes a $15,700 prize, the ministry's spokeswoman Marcela Zizkova said Monday.
Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929. Since 1975, he has been living in France where he published his books, including "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "The Art of the Novel" and "Immortality." He was granted French citizenship in 1981.
Milan Kundera
CBS Cancels
'Viva Laughlin'
The music has stopped for "Viva Laughlin," an offbeat song-and-dance drama that drew such low ratings it was canceled by CBS after two airings.
Even having film star Hugh Jackman ("X-Men") aboard as executive producer and cast member couldn't save the series. It was the second cancellation of the young season, after CW's "Online Nation," and the first scripted show to be yanked.
"Viva Laughlin," based on the hit British series "Viva Blackpool," debuted last Thursday with 8.4 million viewers - a pittance compared to the 21.2 million viewers that watched the CBS show preceding it, top-rated "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."
Moving to what was intended as its regular time slot, 8 p.m. EST Sunday, "Viva Laughlin" dropped to an estimated 6.8 million viewers. The show starring Lloyd Owen as a small-time gambler caught up in a murder investigation drew mostly drew largely poor reviews.
'Viva Laughlin'
Fans Snub Downloads
Sex Pistols
Music weekly NME may have failed in its campaign to make the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" a No. 1 single 30 years after it first missed the target, but EMI still regards its accompanying vinyl reissue program as a success.
Boosted by endorsements by such Sex Pistols devotees as Foo Fighters, Klaxons and the Beastie Boys, an NME campaign urged fans to buy the track as a download via iTunes and 7digital.com, or as part of the series of vinyl 7-inch Pistols singles issued on the EMI and Virgin labels in replica artwork, exactly as they were in 1976 and 1977.
"God Save the Queen" peaked at No. 2 in the United Kingdom in the week of the monarch's silver jubilee, ostensibly outsold by Rod Stewart's "I Don't Want to Talk About It"/"The First Cut Is the Deepest" amid dark rumors that the "establishment" had kept it from the top spot.
No such maneuvers were required this time, as "Queen" peaked at an anticlimactic No. 42. But, while downloads underperformed, EMI noted that it was the best-selling vinyl single of the week, with sales of some 3,100.
Sex Pistols
Museum Questioned
Georgia O'Keeffe
The financially faltering Fisk University is seeking a quick ruling on whether it can sell a 50 percent stake in a 101-piece collection of artworks donated by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949.
But first the college will have to overcome the protests of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which has tried to force Fisk to forfeit the entire collection to it.
Saul Cohen, president of the museum's board, said Fisk has violated O'Keeffe's wishes by not displaying the collection and by trying to sell off artworks.
O'Keeffe in 1949 divided the bulk of her late husband Alfred Stieglitz's nearly 1,000-piece collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and photos among six institutions. The artworks given to Fisk included O'Keeffe's own 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building - Night, New York" and works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Britain's Insane Nanny State
Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor said he is sick of Britain's "ludicrous nanny state" rules, which he said might force him to quit the country, in an interview to be published Tuesday.
The Scottish actor, who played the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, blasted the rise of security cameras and London's congestion charge, which forces drivers to pay to enter the city centre.
McGregor recently completed a 15,000-mile (24,000-kilometre) motorcycle adventure, riding the length of Africa with best friend and fellow actor Charley Boorman.
"Our trip opened my eyes to how insane the rules are in Britain -- CCTV cameras everywhere, congestion charge -- a ludicrous nanny state.
"If anything drives me out of the country it will be that -- not tax, I don't earn enough."
Ewan McGregor
Arrested After Fight
Nathaniel Marston
Nathaniel Marston, who plays a doctor on ABC's "One Life to Live," has been released without bail following his arraignment on assault and other charges in an altercation in midtown Manhattan.
Marston, 32, attacked three men with a crate around 4:30 a.m. Sunday at 10th Avenue and 45th Street, says a felony complaint filed in Manhattan Criminal Court.
The complaint charges that Marston struck one man on the hand; hit another in the back of the neck, causing bruising and swelling; then caused the third man to be hospitalized with a broken leg.
Marston plays Dr. Michael McBain on "One Life to Live." He previously played Eddie Silva on the CBS daytime soap opera "As the World Turns."
Nathaniel Marston
Emory Professor
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama was formally installed as a professor at Emory University on Monday as Tibetan monks wearing moon-shaped yellow hats chanted and played cymbals, gongs and horns.
The exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, whose face is recognized around the world, now is the bearer of a faculty ID card.
Later, in an address to a crowd of thousands at Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, the Dalai Lama called the U.S. the world's "greatest, most powerful" democracy and said it should send more members of the Peace Corps, instead of soldiers, to other countries to spread democracy peacefully.
"The concept of war is outdated," he said. "Through war, through violence, you cannot achieve what you want."
Dalai Lama
BBC Under Fire
Iggy Pop
Britain's broadcasting watchdog criticized the BBC Monday after ageing rock wildman Iggy Pop used the expression "Paki shop" on live television.
Pop made the comment during an interview after playing a set at the Glastonbury Festival in June, telling BBC 2 about how much he enjoyed walking around north London.
"The beauty of being me is that you can wear expensive clobber and you can walk down Camden High Street at a Paki shop..." he said, in rambling comments late at night.
The presenters did not say anything about it at the time, but the BBC issued an apology the following day, saying Pop was probably not aware that the expression had passed out of "polite usage" in the last 30 years.
Iggy Pop
Sits On Air Safety Survey
NASA
An unprecedented national survey of pilots by the U.S. government has found that safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits.
NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million federal safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since shutting down the project more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge its survey data publicly.
Last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers. Congress on Monday announced a formal investigation of the pilot survey and instructed NASA to halt any destruction of records. Griffin said he already was ordering that all survey data be preserved.
NASA's survey, known officially as the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service, started after a White House commission in 1997 proposed reducing fatal air crashes by 80 percent as of this year. Crashes have dropped 65 percent, with a rate of about 1 fatality in about 4.5 million departures.
NASA
Sioux City Embraces Airport Code
SUX
City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier - SUX - and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.
The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned Web site - www.flysux.com.
Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives - GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY - but airport trustees turned them down.
SUX
In Memory
Vincent DeDomenico
Vincent DeDomenico, co-inventor of Rice-A-Roni, whose catchy TV jingle paid homage to San Francisco and made the pasta dish known to every baby boomer, has died. He was 92.
Along with his brothers, DeDomenico, the son of Italian immigrants, created the packaged side dish of rice and pasta for their San Francisco-based family business. "The San Francisco treat" became known in the 1960s through TV commercials that featured the city's cable cars.
In the 1930s, he and his brothers were running their parents' pasta business in San Francisco's Mission District. They got to experimenting in a test kitchen with recipes combining long-grain white rice, broken pieces of vermicelli and chicken broth. The dish evolved from a recipe one of their wives had originally gotten from a landlady.
Rice-A-Roni, as it came to be called, became a national brand in the 1960s. The brothers sold the Golden Grain Macaroni Co. to Quaker Oats in 1986 for $275 million. By then the company also included such products as Ghirardelli Chocolate.
In later years, DeDomenico bought 21 miles of railroad track in Napa Valley and several vintage passenger cars, creating a tourist attraction called the Napa Valley Wine Train.
Born in San Francisco in 1915, one of six children, DeDomenico went to work for his father's pasta company as a salesman while taking night business classes at Golden Gate College.
Vincent DeDomenico
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