from Shelf-Awareness

Shelf Sample: Beat the Reaper

This is the way to start the new year–read an outrageous, shocking, darkly humorous thriller, with footnotes, no less. Ever so much better than starting a diet and workout program. AndBeat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316032223/ 0316032220, January 7, 2009) is just the book. Peter Brown is an ER doctor at Manhattan Catholic Hospital, perhaps not the situation one would expect for a guy in the Witness Protection Program. However, hiding out in plain sight from the New Jersey mob, where he used to be a hit man (aka “the Bearclaw”), has worked until the day his past and his present meet in a terminally ill patient. His morning starts like this:

So I’m on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some f***head tries to mug me! Naturally there’s a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It’s cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. “Take it easy, Doc,” he says.

Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I’m not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the f***head can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated plastic green clogs, so he thinks I’ve got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I’ve taken some kind of oath not to kick his f***head ass for trying to mug me.

I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I’m thinking we’re way past that point.

“Okay,” I say, raising my hands.

The rat and the pigeon run away. Chickenshits.

I turn around. It rolls the gun off my skull and leaves my raised right hand above the f***head’s arm. I wrap his elbow and jerk upward, causing the ligaments to pop like champagne corks. 

[ click to continue reading Marilyn Dahl’s review at Shelf-Awareness.com ]

from the Times South Africa

Alcoholic sells flat to barman

AFP

ATHENS — A Greek appeal court has declared void a deal under which an alcoholic traded his apartment to a bar owner in return for free drink for the rest of his life, a newspaper reports.

The agreement concerned an apartment worth 33,000 euros (R423,791) which the 62-year old drinker sold to the bar owner for 6,500 euros (R83,474) with the right to live in it rent-free until he died, according to Eleftherotypia.

A tab of 900 euros (R11,500) was written off and the vendor undertook to provide free drinks for the rest of the drinker’s life.

Four years after signing the deal the toper died and his brother took the case to court.

The court said the terms of the deal had been disproportionate and contrary to decent behaviour as they exploited an individual’s dependence.

[ click to read at The Times SA ]

from the NY Daily News

[ click to read full raunch at NYDailyNews.com ]

from the San Jose Mercury News

Herhold: If Facebook can ban breast-feeding, time we cover up statues

By Scott Herhold, Mercury News

I’ve always been grateful my mother took the time to breast-feed me. It’s a reason why I’ve escaped the worst of my family’s allergies.

Until the flap at Facebook, I never realized how dangerous an environment breast-feeding created, a threat only a little less formidable than the bubonic plague.

Silly me: I didn’t understand that pictures of a mother’s nipple or areola in an infant’s mouth could threaten children. I labored under the false idea it was about food.

You may know the story. A cadre of breast-feeding mothers, backed by legions of online followers, is protesting Facebook’s removal of breast-feeding photos that reveal the nipple or areola.

[ click to continue reading at SiliconValley.com ]

from The Guardian UK

 

[ click to take the whole damn bloody hard quiz at Guardian UK ]

from New Scientist

Why mountains are bad for the ozone layer

• 31 December 2008
• Magazine issue 2689. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

 

“MOUNTAIN waves” in the atmosphere above Antarctica create rare clouds that are helping destroy the ozone layer.

Over the last two decades, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released by human activity have opened a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Key chemical reactions that lead to ozone depletion happen on the surface of rare polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which form high up in the atmosphere. Here, sunlight breaks down the CFCs into products that react to produce chlorine, which in turn decomposes ozone. 

This implicates so-called mountain waves, which are created when an airstream flows over high relief. The waves churn up the air high in the atmosphere and appear to create the temperature variations (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL036629).

[ click to read full article in NewScientist.com ]

from The AP

Indian painter Manjit Bawa dies at age 67

4 days ago

NEW DELHI (AP) — Manjit Bawa, a leading Indian artist whose work highlighted peaceful coexistence, has died. He was 67.

Bawa died at his New Delhi home on Monday after three years in a coma following a stroke, said Ashok Bajpai, a family friend and chairman of India’s National Academy of Art.

 

Bawa studied at the School of Art in New Delhi and worked as a silkscreen painter in Britain, where he also studied between 1964 and 1971.

Often using animal imagery — tigers and lambs sharing the same space — Bawa sought to convey the message that people could coexist with animals in nature, said art critic Ena Puri, who wrote a biography of Bawa.

His canvases were distinguished by their colors — the ochre of sunflowers, the green of paddy fields, the red of the sun and the blue of the mountain sky, she said.

“He was an icon, a person who was completely head and shoulders above his contemporaries,” Puri said.

[ click to read at GoogleNews.com ]

New Year by CONAL FLAHERTY (visit)

from Pop + Politics

Village Voice Fires Three in Editorial, including Nat Hentoff

This just in: Adding to the media meltdown, my former alma mater, the Village Voice, just laid off three more in editorial. [Full disclosure, I was laid off myself for “matters of taste” in 2007]. Among those laid off is Nat Hentoff, who’s been at the paper since 1958, writing about jazz, and later, civil liberties in his weekly long-running column. Fashion writer, Lynn Yaeger, who has worked with the paper over 15 30 years, starting in classifieds, before moving into editorial, was laid off, along with staff writerChloe Hilliard, who was hired under the current editor, Tony Ortega in 2007. We know, we keep saying this, but we continue to be amazed that there is anyone left to lay off.

Nat Hentoff’s Greatest Hits Compilation.

[ click to read at Pop + Politics ]

from the Los Angeles Times

Fitzgerald on film and television

Merrick Morton / Paramount Pictures

LONGING: Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button, and Cate Blanchett is Daisy. Fitzgerald made a rare foray into fantasy with the short story

Before ‘Benjamin Button,’ there were ‘Gatsby, ‘Tycoon’ and more.

By Susan King
December 29, 2008

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magical short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was a hard sell during the early days of the Roaring ’20s, when magazines were hungering for one of the author’s more down-to-earth flapper stories. “Benjamin Button” was a rare foray for Fitzgerald into the fantasy genre — a quixotic tale of a man who was born with the body of an old man and grew younger as the years passed. “Button” finally found a home at Collier’s, which published it on May 27, 1922.

According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald was “probably attracted to this form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make events convincing.”

Fitzgerald became a member of the “lost generation” of novelists and playwrights who came to Hollywood in the 1930s to try their luck — and help their dwindling coffers — at screenwriting. But Fitzgerald’s stint at MGM was short-lived and disappointing. His only screen credit was for co-writing the post-World War I love story “Three Comrades.”

When Fitzgerald collected “Button” in his classic 1922 “Tales of the Jazz Age” anthology, he noted that “the story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial.”

Fitzgerald, who long battled alcoholism, died on Dec. 21, 1940, at the age of 44 at the Hollywood apartment of his lover, Sheilah Graham. Just as Twain had said, the worst part of his life came at the end.

[ click to continue reading at the LA Times ]

 

[ click to visit the World Superhero Registry ]

from the Washington Post

Twice-Sold Tales

Used-Book Business Gets a Brisk, if Fragile, New Life Via Internet 

By Bob Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, December 29, 2008 

“That’s about a million books on those shelves,” Chuck Roberts says proudly.

The owner of Wonder Book and Video is standing in a 54,000-square-foot warehouse in Frederick, waving an arm toward what looks like a combination of the world’s biggest bookstore and a grungy aircraft hangar.

Eight-foot metal and wooden shelves, housing the used books Roberts sells on the Internet, stretch as far as a dust-filled eye can see. Taller, Costco-scale units hold massive, book-filled boxes not yet unpacked. More such boxes, in jumbled heaps, spill into the floor space that remains.

In 1980, when Roberts opened his first used bookstore, he built his own shelves.

“I was my only employee,” he recalls. “So I’d be back there with an apron on, sawing, hammering nails — they didn’t even have screw guns back then — and when the front door would open, I’d take the apron off and go wait on the customer.”

[ click to continue reading at WaPo.com ]

from the NY Times

Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A group of friends skating the pool of a foreclosed home this month in Fresno, Calif. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. More Photos>

By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN

On a recent morning, a 27-year-old skateboarder who goes by the name Josh Peacock peered into a swimming pool in Fresno, Calif., emptied by his own hands — and the foreclosure crisis — and flashed a smile as wide as a half-pipe.

“We have more pools than we know what to do with,” said Mr. Peacock, who lives in Fresno, the Central Valley city where thousands of homes, many with pools behind them, are in foreclosure. “I can’t even keep track of them all anymore.”

In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. Mr. Peacock said his floor and couch were covered by sleeping bags of visiting skateboarders each weekend.

 

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.

“There are more pools right now than I could possibly skate,” Mr. Morgan said. “It’s pretty exciting.” Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for “dead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door.”

[ click to read full article at the NY Times ]

from the BBC

Three children lose mother after late-night bottle attack

Celebration ends in death when glass shatters and slashes 27-year-old’s neck

• Andy Russell
• The Observer, Sunday 28 December 2008
• Article history

A young mother of three children under the age of seven was killed by a shard of glass after a beer bottle was hurled into a pub during Boxing Night celebrations.

Emma O’Kane, 27, collapsed in a pool of blood when the glass slashed her neck as she chatted with friends in the Queen Anne in Heywood, Greater Manchester.

Police said that a man who had been refused entry to the pub after an argument with bouncers a few minutes earlier had thrown a beer bottle into the crowded saloon. The bottle smashed as it hit a pillar near where Ms O’Kane was standing, and glass pierced vital arteries in her neck.

She was with her partner, Michael Shepherd, who was celebrating his 38th birthday, and four friends when she died. Ms O’Kane, who was employed as a barmaid at the pub, lived a mile away with Mr Shepherd and her three children, aged six, two, and one.

Yesterday, as the children played with their Christmas presents, the family spoke of their grief. Mr Shepherd said: “We had all gone out for a drink to celebrate my birthday and went back to the pub where Emma works as a barmaid for one last drink to end the night. I was in the snug room and Emma wandered into the main bar. Everyone knows her in the pub and she was saying goodbye to some of her friends. I heard something and then saw Emma on the floor. I just thought that she had fallen over. But then I realised that she was not moving and that her eyes were open and there was blood all over the place.

“She was staring up at the ceiling - I realised that it was really bad. One bloke went to help her and was holding her hand. People were shouting that someone had thrown something. I tried to revive her by holding her legs up in the air because someone said that would help. I ran for some tissue paper from the toilets and a girl held the tissue paper to her neck. But I think she had lost too much blood. I think she had gone there on the floor of the pub.

[ click to read full article at The Guardian ]

from AFP via Breitbart via Drudge

Organizers strip Mexican beauty queen of title after drug bust

Laura Zuniga, the Mexican beauty queen jailed after she was picked up with an alleged drug cartel leader and heavily armed men, has been stripped of one of her titles, Bolivian organizers said Saturday. Zuniga lost her title as Queen of Hispanic America, said Promociones Gloria, the Bolivian group that organizes the event.

Zuniga “failed to follow the rules of the contest, which state that the winner must display correct behavior, stay away from scandals and bad habits, and be a good example to society,” Tatiana Limpias de Tarabillo, who heads Promociones Gloria, told the Bolivian daily El Deber.

 

Zuniga, 23, was picked up late Monday at a military checkpoint in the western Mexican state of Jalisco while traveling with seven armed men in two vehicles carrying 100,000 dollars in cash. Authorities said they found two AR-15 rifles, three pistols, 633 cartridges and 16 mobile phones in the vehicles.

[ click to continue reading at Breitbart.com ]

from the Washington Post

New Delhi Reclaims Public Space Via Art

Festival Stirs Debate on Growth, Ecology

By Rama Lakshmi

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A23 

NEW DELHI, Dec. 20 — For the past 10 days, residents of India’s bustling capital have found large and often strange-looking objects along their daily paths: a giant steel bucket mounted on a wooden stand, a tree hanging from a crane, a gasoline can made of white tiles, and stretched nylon resembling the long wing of a bird caught between buildings.

“They say this is art, but I do not see anything special in a bucket,” said Virendra Singh, a stocky policeman on guard near the steel bucket, the creation of celebrated contemporary artist Subodh Gupta. “We all have one in our bathrooms to store water.”

Then he turned to look at the exhibit again. “But this is indeed a very, very big bucket,” he said. “Maybe there is something more to it.”

[ click to read full article at WashingtonPost.com ]

from The Guardian UK

Descendant of Louis XIV tries to ban exhibition

• Lizzy Davies in Paris
• The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2008
• Article history

He has seen off the conservatives who accused him of cultural vandalism, and triumphed over fears among sceptics in the media that his riotously kitsch exhibition at Versailles was nothing but a provocative stunt.

But little over the past few months could have prepared the American artist Jeff Koons for the aristocratic rage of Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme.

The formidably foppish Koons critic, who claims to be a direct descendant of Louis XIV, has launched a last-minute legal battle against what he describes as a “mercenary” and “pornographic” stain on his illustrious family’s honour.

He says the exhibition, which is due to close in just over a week, is an attack on the “right immemorial” of all human beings not to see their ancestors disrespected. Undeterred by an initial ruling this week from a judge in Versailles which rejected his plea to ban the installation, De Bourbon-Parme vowed yesterday to take his mission to the council of state, France’s highest administrative court.

“[This will decide] whether, 60 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the respect due to the dead, the right to live without one’s ancestors being debased and without their work being sullied before the eyes of the entire world by a derisory and pornographic exercise … still constitute a basic freedom in France,” he said in a statement.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from The Times South Africa

Creator of Bolt’s victory dance dead

AFP

KINGSTON - David Alexander Smith, the Jamaican entertainment figure who created the dance performed by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt to celebrate his victories, was shot to death at a Kingston bar, local media reported. 

Radio Jamaica said Smith, popularly known as “Ice,” was shot and killed Friday morning at a bar after a brawl with the attackers. Police told the station that robbery was a possible motive, as the attackers reportedly drove off with the dancer’s rental car after the murder.

Smith’s popular “Gully Creepa” dance move was made famous after Bolt, a triple Olympic champion, broke world records in the 200 meters finals at the Beijing Olympics in August. Bolt went on to set a new world record in the 100 meters and was part of the Jamaican team that won the 4×100-meter relay.

The island nation has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with over 1,500 people murdered in 2008, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said in early December.

[ click to read at The Times SA ]