We spent the evening at the Disney Marketplace. Huge crowds. As multi-ethnic as the Star Wars cantina scene though maybe not quite as dangerous.
A DJ on a stage led the young folk in dances to his jams. Lotsa Moms joined in; far fewer Dads. Finished up with The Chicken Dance which got everyone involved. The Chicken Dance cuts across all cultures. The universal dance.
The sun goes down, the lights come up, the magic cranks up a few notches, as if that's possible.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Anyway. . .
These are the pretty blue lights from the waiting line at Soarin'.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
A new movie is titled "The 500 Days of Summer." That's what it looked like on the last day of school, time reaching forward beyond all imagining. There was a heightened awareness in the room as the second hand crept toward our moment of freedom. We regarded the nuns as a discharged soldier does his superior officer. Here had existed a bond that would never be again. We didn't run screaming out the door. We sauntered. We had time. We were aware of a milestone having passed.
With more subscribers than ever flocking to its DVD-by-mail service, Netflix Inc. is one of the few companies to prosper during the worst U.S. recession in 70 years. Yet Netflix CEO Reed Hastings still has something to worry about: an even cheaper DVD rental service run by one of his former lieutenants.
Once just an incongruous experiment amid the burgers and fries at McDonald's restaurants, Redbox has emerged as the largest operator of DVD-rental kiosks, with more than 15,400 vending machines set up to dispense $1-per-day discs in supermarkets and discount stores.
With Redbox opening an average of one kiosk per hour to lure budget-conscious consumers, Hastings is concerned that this upstart might upstage Netflix, whose cheapest mail-order plan costs $5 for two movie rentals in a month.
"By the end of the year, kiosks will likely be our No. 1 competitor," Hastings said in a recent conference call. "There are already more kiosks in America than video stores."
He's the reason adults of a certain age can't stop themselves from finishing the song line beginning "M-I-C-K-E-Y," the force causing untold legions to see marching mops when they hear the rousing strains of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
But the story of Walt Disney the man sometimes gets forgotten in the telling of his legend. Descendants of the 20th-century innovator hope to fix that disconnect with The Walt Disney Family Museum, opening this fall in San Francisco.
"My dad's story is an inspirational story," Disney's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, said. "I want people to understand his character and how he pursued his career."
And have fun.
Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.
People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
"We found skinny people run the highest risk," said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.
Eli Raz was peering into a narrow hole in the Dead Sea shore when the earth opened up and swallowed him. Fearing he would never be found alive, he scribbled his will on an old postcard.
After 14 hours a search party pulled him from the 10-meter-(30 foot-) deep hole unhurt, and five years later the 69-year-old geologist is working to save others from a similar fate, leading an effort to map the sinkholes that are spreading on the banks of the fabled saltwater lake.
These underground craters can open up in an instant, sucking in whatever lies above and leaving the surrounding area looking like an earthquake zone.
We can regulate behavior, but not motivation. We can educate, discuss, persuade, encourage... but when all is said and done, people can only be changed by themselves. . .
* An ethics CPE requirement will not make a person ethical.
* A tax on junk food will not make a person change their lifestyle.
* A financial crisis will not stop people from buying things they can't afford.
President Obama’s choice as chief of protocol for the State Department, a position that carries the status of an ambassadorship, did not file tax returns for 2005 and 2006, errors she corrected last November.
The nominee, Capricia Penavic Marshall, has placed blame for the problem on the Postal Service and on miscommunication between her husband and their accountant.
Ms. Marshall, who was the social secretary in the Clinton White House, notified the Obama administration about the late filings before she was nominated on May 14. She has since provided written answers to questions about the matter from Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, which will hold a hearing on the appointment next Wednesday. The post requires Senate confirmation.
"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money."
Repeatedly in his hourlong speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office.
So far, the first lady has chosen to be a food bank volunteer with an outsize entourage and an education activist with the largest soapbox imaginable. But Michelle Obama also fills a role that is not of her choosing but that may, in fact, be the most influential: She serves as a symbol of middle-class progress, feminist achievement, affirmative-action success and individual style.
And she has done all this on the world stage . . . while being black.
Investigators identified the man found inside a burning car as a local oil and gas executive. They say they still don’t know the answers to the question friends and neighbors are asking: Why did the man die?
State medical examiner’s office officials said Thursday that dental records were used to identify the body of Tony Viele, 54, of Oklahoma City.
The cause and manner of death had not been determined, officials said.
Fire investigators have not determined whether the car fire, which also spread to the house Viele was renting near the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club, was accidental or intentional. But police say foul play is not suspected.
During the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area Realtors bus tour June 18, real estate brokers and business owners saw the progress of the historical Film Row District’s renovation in the 700 block of West Sheridan and Lee avenues.
Local designer David Wanzer gave a presentation on the Film Row District in which he discussed the area’s history as a distribution hub for all major Hollywood studios including Columbia, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, MGM, RKO, United Artists and 20th Century Fox. Area developer Chip Fudge has spearheaded the quest to renovate the area into a mixed-used destination.
Wanzer told the group these are exciting times he says as years of design, planning and now occupancy are coming together. Next, he said, will be the area’s streetscape project.
Bill O'Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: "I'm going to Hell for what I do, and I know it," he's likes to say. O'Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.
A new study by the Brookings Institution reinforces the belief that Oklahoma's economy is one of the country's best at withstanding a recession.
The MetroMonitor report released Wednesday ranked the strongest performing metropolitan areas in the country, and placed Oklahoma City behind only San Antonio. Tulsa was ranked ninth on the list.
The study comes just over a year after Forbes magazine named Oklahoma City the most recession-proof city in the U.S.
Once the province of jam bands and their second-generation hippie fans, Bonnaroo has evolved into a four-day event that echoes rock's happily chaotic, postcorporate world. Beginning last Thursday on a 700-acre farm here some 65 miles from Nashville, close to 80,000 fans gathered to enjoy all sorts of popular music, ignoring the artificial boundaries of genre in favor of singers who can sing, players who can play and composers who can write and arrange. Recordings are OK, these fans seemed to say, but the proving ground is the stage. Gaggles of blissed-out friends flocked from venue to venue -- eight in all -- seeking a shared experience with musicians and their music. Their code: Make magic or we're gone; there's something happening not too far away. . .
. . .With so many festivals in the U.S. and Canada, musicians are often booked to play the same events. Perhaps a new community is forming. The common link, as displayed at Bonnaroo '09: These performers understand how to capture today's rock audience and have the talent to do so. No wonder the four-day festival seemed such a joyous event.
Individual taxpayers who misreport charitable cash contributions they deduct on their tax returns contribute to the tax gap. ... One approach that tends to result in high levels of taxpayer compliance is information reporting to IRS by third parties on taxpayer transactions. GAO was asked to (1) provide information on characteristics of individual taxpayer misreporting of charitable cash contributions, (2) provide information on actions that IRS takes to address misreporting, and (3) evaluate potential benefits and challenges associated with requiring information reporting for charitable cash contributions. ... In email comments on a draft of this report, IRS agreed with GAO's overall conclusion that requiring information reporting for charitable cash contributions may not be an effective way to improve compliance.
TIGTA also recommended that the IRS seek congressional approval to use additional colors on tax returns and instructions to highlight important warnings and information. Congressional approval would be needed because the IRS used multiple colors on the cover of of its 1995 tax packet and received some negative publicity. After that happened, Congress mandated in the Treasury Department Appropriations Act of 1997 that the IRS could use only two ink colors on tax packages. ...
This month, the IRS asked for comments on ways to simplify compliance with rules related to employer-provided cellular telephones. The current law, which has been on the books for many years, is burdensome, poorly understood by taxpayers, and difficult for the IRS to administer consistently. Some have incorrectly implied that the IRS is "cracking down" on employee use of employer-provided cell phones. To the contrary, the IRS is attempting to simplify the rules and eliminate uncertainty for businesses and individuals.
Although some of the proposed changes would add clarity, the current law will inevitably leave widespread confusion among employees and businesses. Therefore, Secretary Geithner and I ask that Congress act to make clear that there will be no tax consequence to employers or employees for personal use of work-related devices such as cell phones provided by employers. The passage of time, advances in technology, and the nature of communication in the modern workplace have rendered this law obsolete.
"We have got the loveliest hotel," Mike said. "I think it's a brothel."
"We left our bags here at the Dingo when we got in and they asked us at this hotel if we wanted a room for the afternoon only. Seemed frightfully pleased we were going to stay all night."
"I believe it's a brothel," Mike said. "And I should know."
"Oh, shut it and go and get your hair cut."
Mike went out. Brett and I sat at the bar.
"Have another?
"Might."
"I needed that," Brett said.
We walked up the Rue Delambre.
"I haven't seen you since I've been back," Brett said.
"No."
"How are you, Jake?"
"Fine."
Brett looked at me. "I say," she said, "is Robert Cohn going on this trip?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Don't you think it will be a bit rough on him?"
"Why should it?"
"Who did you think I went down to San Sebastian with?"
Ernest Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises"
The IRS believes that some percentage of the costs incurred by employees using company-provided wireless devices should count as a "fringe benefit" and thus be subject to taxation. Since workers inevitably end up taking personal calls or emails, the thinking goes, it's only fair that they pay for the privilege. What's next? Maybe a per-cup tax on office coffee, or targeting furtive visits to ESPN or Hulu on the office PC? As one wag put it on the Journal's Web site, "It's like charging for the use of the company washroom."
They were childhood chums. Then they drifted apart, lost touch completely, and only renewed their friendship decades later, when illness struck.
Not so unusual, really.
Except she is Lucy Vodden — the girl who was the inspiration for the Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic classic “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” — and he is Julian Lennon, the musician son of John Lennon.
Billy Collins’ poetry has long been described as “accessible”—a term that has been used as both a compliment and a disparagement. There is no doubt that the simplicity of his language and the applicability of his everyday subject matter make Collins’ poetry interesting and approachable to a wide range of readers. For his devotees, Billy Collins’ brilliance lies in this straightforwardness and its ability to captivate people who are completely unfamiliar with poetry. For his critics, however, his trademark plain language and common themes imply a kind of self-centered superficiality that, while attracting readers, fails in its poetic duty to create new understanding. Good or bad, Collins’ accessibility has brought him commercial success almost unprecedented for a living poet.
Internal Revenue Commissioner Doug Shulman announced on June 4, 2009, in congressional testimony before the House Ways and Means Oversight Committee that the Internal Revenue Service plans to make recommendations by the end of the year to ensure that tax preparers adhere to high ethical standards. At the hearing on the tax filing season and 2010 IRS budget, Commissioner Shulman said the IRS has to ensure “all preparers are ethical, provide good service and are qualified.” The announcement follows IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson’s recommendations to Congress over the past several years that a registration program needs to be created for unlicensed tax return preparers.
The use of company-issued mobile phones could trigger new federal income taxes on millions of Americans as a "fringe benefit," spurring efforts by the wireless industry and others to kill the idea.
The Internal Revenue Service proposed employers assign 25% of an employee's annual phone expenses as a taxable benefit. Under that scenario, a worker in the 28% tax bracket, whose wireless device costs the company $1,500 a year, could see $105 in additional federal income tax.
John Wayne made entertaining movies. That was the point of his career, the key to his success, and the main reason he is remembered. That he was conservative and a man of character is incidental; a few people go to see a movie for the star or the subject matter, but the mass audiences that create a hit come for the story. John Wayne made sure his movies told interesting stories. Thus the way in for those who believe conservatives are forever shut out of Hollywood: Tell good stories. Make movies people want to see. Inform your work with your conservatism (or whatever is in your personality, because that is what will make your movie unique), but create true entertainment. Preachy pictures generally fail: Witness the dozens of recent anti-war movies with a box-office take less than Michael Moore’s annual budget for exercise clothes. John Wayne was not a conservative entertainer; he was an entertainer who happened to be conservative. Being that is how our side will finally gain traction in Hollywood.
The first time I saw him, he was striding toward me out of the burning Georgia sun, as helicopters landed behind him. His face was tanned a deep brown. He was wearing a combat helmet, an ammo belt, carrying a rifle, had a canteen on his hip, stood six feet four inches. He stuck out his hand and said, "John Wayne." That was not necessary.
"One guy that was at home in the night was Batman. He was introduced in Detective Comics number #27 by Bob Kane. I always loved Batman. The way I looked at it, you had to come from another planet to be Superman, but I could be Batman... and you know I tried."
In that respect, there should be a special award for Fox News. Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.
I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.
What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.
"I ran into Ellen Barkin the other day in Walgreens. I was buying socks. I didn't know what size I was... I was just eyeballing them."
"You know I don't usually like to tell people what I'm doing, but I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system. I think it would be good if you're looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like: 'Take a left at the next street... no, a right... you know what - just go straight.' I probably shouldn't do it because whichever way I go I always end up at the same place - on Lonely Avenue"
. . .Hansen has never parroted the company line. As the head of NASA's Weather and Climate Research Program from 1982 to 1994, John Theon was James Hansen's supervisor. Theon says that Hansen's testimony in 1988 was "a huge embarrassment" to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen's predictions. "I don't have much faith in the models," Theon says, pointing to the "huge uncertainty in the role clouds play." Theon describes Hansen as a "nice, likeable fellow," but worries "he's been overcome by his belief--almost religious--that he's going to save the world."
William Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, also describes Hansen's belief in a man-made global-warming catastrophe as "almost religious" and says he "never understood how [Hansen] got such a strong voice" in the debate. Gray's efforts to predict hurricanes also lead him to question Hansen's computer models. "He doesn't have the clouds in right, and he doesn't have the deep ocean circulation," Gray says. "It's a giant scam in my view."
“American Idol” runner-up Adam Lambert has landed the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, where he talks about sex, drugs and his “Idol” experiences.
The 27-year-old singer from San Diego acknowledges in an interview that he’s gay, and says it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
“I’m proud of my sexuality,” he says. “I embrace it. It’s just another part of me.”
The Journal Record next month at its second Beacon Awards event will honor 26 businesses and organizations for their contributions to the nonprofit community.
Four Beacon Award recipients will be selected from the group as the overall winners and announced at the July 9 event in downtown Oklahoma City. Organizations will be recognized in large and small/midsized divisions for their contributions to the nonprofit community. The large business subcategory represents those with more than 100 employees while the small/midsized businesses have fewer than 100 employees.
Large business finalists:
• American Fidelity Assurance Co., Oklahoma City.
• Arvest Bank, Tulsa.
• Bank of Oklahoma NA, Tulsa.
• Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma, Tulsa.
• Chesapeake Energy Corp., Oklahoma City.
• Dean McGee Eye Institute, Oklahoma City.
• Devon Energy Corp., Oklahoma City.
• Diagnostic Lab of Oklahoma, Oklahoma City.
• Francis Tuttle Technology Center, Oklahoma City
• Frankfurt Short Bruza, Oklahoma City.
• Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores, Oklahoma City.
• McAfee & Taft, Oklahoma City.
• MidFirst Bank, Oklahoma City.
• Norman Regional Health System, Norman.
• Oklahoma City Thunder, Oklahoma City.
• Public Service Company of Oklahoma, Tulsa.
Small/midsized business finalists:
• Element Fusion LLC, Oklahoma City.
• The Persimmon Group, Tulsa.
• Principal Technologies, Oklahoma City.
• Saxum|PR, Oklahoma City.
• Scott Sabolich Prosthetics & Research, Oklahoma City.
• Ted Withrow State Farm Insurance, Bethany.
• Third Degree Advertising, Oklahoma City.
The Treasury Department will allow 10 banks to pay back Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO called the money a "scarlet letter," referring to the public backlash and federal scrutiny that came with it, is one of the banks, the news agency said, citing an anonymous source.
Banks have been eager to pay back bailout money almost since the moment they first accepted it. Now the government is deciding which banks can return the cash -- at the risk of setting up a system of winners and losers.
A veteran detective was charged with murder Monday in the slaying of her ex-boyfriend's wife in 1986 — a crime that went unsolved for more than two decades as she rose through the Los Angeles Police Department ranks.
Detective Stephanie Lazarus, 49, could be sentenced to death if convicted of breaking into the victim's condominium on Feb. 24, 1986, and repeatedly biting, beating and shooting the woman.
Lazarus, who joined the force in 1983, was identified as a suspect through a recent DNA match of saliva taken from bite marks on Sherri Rasmussen's body, said Deputy Chief Charlie Beck.
The IRS has filed notice of a $819,848 federal tax lien against Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign for failure to file payroll tax forms, but Kerry on Wednesday blamed an IRS clerical error. Tax Analysts reports that Sen. Kerry released documentation from the Paychex payroll service claiming that the tax forms were properly filed in January 2005 and then twice in 2008 after the IRS assessed the penalties for failure to file the forms.
"You are there." The rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, that great, sandstone-walled, light-filled hall ringed with statues of the great of American history—Jefferson, Washington, proud Andrew Jackson in his flowing cape, Eisenhower, U.S. Grant, his eyes surveying the terrain as if he sees something out there in the wilderness. It's 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 3, 2009, and Ronald Reagan marches in, surrounded by his peers. Actually his newly installed statue is unveiled there, in a ceremony attended by officials of both parties (including the speaker of the House and the leaders of the minority), his wife, Nancy, and a few hundred of his friends, appointees, staffers and cabinet members. It was standing room only.
The mood: mellow, proud and modest with the increased modesty of age. "How lucky was I to walk into history when Ronald Reagan was in the room?" The speeches ranged from the heartfelt to the appropriate, with two (James Baker and Mrs. Reagan) being outstanding. It is usual, after formal ceremonies with their frozen rhetoric, to come away feeling that no cliché was left untouched. In some cases here they were quite thoroughly molested, but no matter. The general feeling was that Ronald Reagan restored America to itself, and that's what people more or less said.
Wait long enough and everything bad for you is good again. Sugar? Naturally better than high-fructose corn syrup. Chocolate? A bar a day keeps the doctor away. Caffeine? Bring it on.
Lard, however, has always been a ridiculously hard sell. Over at least the last 15 years, it's repeatedly been given a clean bill of health, and good cooks regularly point out how superior this totally natural fat is for frying and pastries. But that hasn't been enough to keep Americans from recoiling—lard's negative connotations of flowing flesh and vats of grease and epithets like lardass and tub of lard have been absurd hurdles. But no longer. I'm convinced that the redemption of lard is finally at hand because we live in a world where trendiness is next to godliness. And lard hits all the right notes, especially if you euphemize it as rendered pork fat—bacon butter.
Spending more time on social networks and blogs? You're not alone, with the latest figures showing the number of minutes spent on social networking sites in the United States has almost doubled over the past year.
Nielsen Online, which measures Web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 percent in April from the same month a year ago, but found users were quick to move on and sites could quickly fall from favor.
Nielsen Online spokesman Jon Gibs said a major trend had been the continuing popularity of Facebook, which has more than 200 million active members and has become so mainstream it now hosts Pope Benedict and a list of world leaders.
Look who created these. A lot of those computer guys used to be hippies. Though to be fair they aren't totally hippies. Because if they were totally hippies we'd be going on websites with names like Tapioca Sunshine... wait a second... that's not a bad idea for a name. While I'm playing this next song, I'm going to go and see how my bid is doing. I'm trying to get a thermos on eBay.
I’ve never been the type to throw things at the television screen out of anger. But I’ll admit I did shout something nasty at my TV when I caught Mel Gibson yukking it up with Jay Leno and calling himself “Octo-Mel” since his pregnant girlfriend is carrying his eighth child.
My anger, of course, was directed at Gibson’s hypocrisy. Not so long ago, Gibson was the world’s best-known Traditionalist Catholic, talking about his preference for the old-style teachings of Vatican I (no divorce, no Russian girlfriends while still married). These days, he’s not yet divorced and living the kind of life he preached against. What’s worse is that Gibson seems unrepentant, to use church lingo. Even publicity mongers Jon and Kate Gosselin seemed more chastened when confronted with their alleged indiscretions. And that’s saying something.
In a way it's a quintessentially conservative formula: The extent to which you take personal responsibility for your actions dictates the risks and benefits of your online existence.
I work for United States Steel, at a steel desk. For the past six months I have been transferring data from tens of thousands of index cards to thick fifty-column ledgers. Someday they will have machines to do this, but now I am the machine that organizes the health records of a rolling mill in Ohio. For reasons that it did not share with me, the management has decreed that they be abstracted in a particular form. It is no secret that in tabularization and cross-tabularization many statistical operations are rendered possible, and although after my first day here in January I was bold enough to suggest that instead of using ledgers they put the data on punch cards for key-sorting, they, or rather, he Mr. herman Bleier, had not heard of key-sort, and Mr Herman Bleier said to me, "Ledgers will do."
The Republican National Committee slammed the outing in an "RNC Research Piece": "As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan’s theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills. ... Have a great Saturday evening – even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense. ... PUTTING ON A SHOW: Obamas Wing Into The City For An Evening Out While Another Iconic American Company Prepares For Bankruptcy."
The RNC's Gail Gitcho added: "If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn’t the Presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?”
Posts
All Comments
