From BBC News:
Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that comprehend sarcasm - honestly.
By comparing healthy people and those with damage to different parts of the brain, they found the front of the brain was key to understanding sarcasm.
A part of NewMexiKen’s brain that remains dangerously unshrunk.
From New Scientist:
It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.
NewMexiKen’s brain has shrunk so much from stress and depression that there’s no hope for me, but maybe it isn’t too late for you laid back, happy people.
were born in Corbeil, Ontario, Canada, 71 years ago today. Together, the five girls, at least two months premature, weighed about 14 pounds. They were put by an open stove to keep warm, and mothers from surrounding villages brought breast milk for them. Against all expectations, they survived their first weeks. Watch video.
According to the CBC:
When the quints are still babies, the Ontario government takes the sisters from their parents, apparently to protect their fragile health, and makes the girls wards of the state. For the first nine years of their lives, they live at a hospital in their hometown that becomes a tourist mecca called “Quintland.” The Ministry of Public Welfare sets up a trust fund in their behalf with assurances that the financial well-being of the entire Dionne family would be taken care of “for all their normal needs for the rest of their lives.”
Between 1934 and 1943, about 3 million people visit Quintland. The government and nearby businesses make an estimated half-billion dollars off the tourists, much of which the Dionne family never sees. The sisters are the nation’s biggest tourist attraction — bigger than Niagara Falls.
After nine years and a bitter custody fight, the girls rejoined their family.
There is still a mystery surrounding what happened to the money the Ontario government placed in a trust fund for the quints, though it’s believed that most of the funds went to pay for the many employees of “Quintland.”
In 1998 the surviving quints were awarded $4 million by Ontario.
Emilie died in 1954, Marie in 1970 and Yvonne in 2001. Annette and Cecile live near Montreal.
NewMexiKen has a vague memory of seeing the Dionne quints on display (so to speak) at the Michigan State Fair when I was a little kid. Perhaps only four were there, depending on when it was.
HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. - After 35 years in prison for stealing a black-and-white television set, Junior Allen is a free man.
Allen, 65, walked out of prison Friday, ending a case that attracted widespread attention because he remained in jail while other inmates convicted of murder, rape or child molestation were released.
“I’m glad to be out,” Allen told supporters outside Orange Correctional Center. “I’ve done too much time for what I did. I won’t be truly happy until I see a sign that says I’m outside of North Carolina.”
Allen was a 30-year-old migrant farm worker from Georgia with a criminal history that included burglaries and a violent assault when he sneaked into an unlocked house and stole a 19-inch black-and-white television worth $140.
Some state records say Allen roughed up the 87-year-old woman who lived there, but he was not convicted of assault.
Instead, he was sentenced in 1970 to life in prison for second-degree burglary. The penalty for the offense has since been changed to a maximum of three years in prison.
Why Do They Hate Us? by Mark Fiore. [Video animated cartoon]
Dana Stevens at Slate takes a look at Empire Falls so maybe we won’t have to. The review is titled “A River Runs (Very Slowly) Through It - Empire Falls is a genteel, beautifully acted bore,” and begins:
Now that sweeps month is over and the big network shows have had their season finales, the quality-TV baton passes back to the cable networks. Empire Falls, a nearly four-hour-long adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo, premieres this weekend in two parts on HBO (Saturday and Sunday at 9 p.m. ET). Directed by Fred “A dingo ate my baby” Schepisi, Empire Falls is one of those HBO prestige projects, like last year’s Angels in America or The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, that movie actors have been jostling each other to be cast in (perhaps in part because the shooting and promotion schedules for television are less punishing).
The cast list is as crammed full of goodies as a gift bag at an A-list Hollywood party: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Aidan Quinn, Philip Seymour Hoffmann … and that’s just in the major roles. Every crossing guard in this movie seems to be played by a well-known and gifted actor, including Estelle Parsons as a crusty bartender and the wondrous Teresa Russell, too long absent from the screen, as a sexy waitress. Yet despite a half dozen near-perfect performances, Empire Falls never quite catches fire, perhaps because it’s scripted by Richard Russo himself, who makes the fatal mistake of turning great swaths of his 500-page novel into a third-person voice-over narration.
isn’t until Monday (coinciding this year with May 30, the date on which the holiday was long celebrated), but NewMexiKen thought some history of the day might be in order. This from the Library of Congress:
In 1868, Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order Number 11 designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
The first national celebration of the holiday took place May 30, 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. Originally known as Decoration Day, at the turn of the century it was designated as Memorial Day. In many American towns, the day is celebrated with a parade. …
In 1971, federal law changed the observance of the holiday to the last Monday in May and extended it to honor all soldiers who died in American wars. A few states continue to celebrate Memorial Day on May 30.
Today, national observance of the holiday still takes place at Arlington National Cemetery with the placing of a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the decoration of each grave with a small American flag.
is 60 today. Fogerty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 with Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“In 1968, I always used to say that I wanted to make records they would still play on the radio in ten years,” John Fogerty, former leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, said on the eve of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In retrospect, Fogerty got all he wished for and more. Three decades later, Creedence’s songs - including “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Green River” - endure as timeless rock and roll classics. Under Fogerty’s tutelage, Creedence Clearwater Revival defined the spirit and sound of rock and roll as authentically as any American group ever has.
CCR’s cover of “I Heard It Through the Grape Vine” isn’t too bad either.
In his great book The Heart of Rock & Soul, Dave Marsh tells us:
Creedence Clearwater started out in the late fifties as just another Northern California high school band, formed by Fogerty, his brother Tom, and a couple of friends, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford. (They were called, among other things, the Blue Velvets and the Golliwogs.) They got a chance at recording for Fantasy, basically a jazz label, only because it happened to be in the neighborhood and the boys had found jobs in the warehouse. They got the kind of record deal you’d expect from that situation, one in which the label not only didn’t have to pay much in royalties but also controlled their song publishing rights.
Somewhere along the way, out of their own avarice and some bad judgment, Creedence was convinced to invest its royalties in an offshore banking tax dodge. Several Fantasy executives also poured money into the scam. Unfortunately, the bank they chose was a Bahamian shell called the Castle Bank, which went down in one of the great financial swindles of the century, leaving Creedence short more than $3 million and with huge overdue payments to the IRS (which stepped in for its bite once the scheme crashed).
Bitter, John Fogerty sued everybody including Fantasy. For the best part of a decade, he litigated but made no music. Meantime, his songs and records continued to generate huge income for Fantasy (which took its profits and produced, among other things, the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Fogerty was still pissed when he finally made another record, Centerfield, in 1985. The final track on each side was an unmistakable slug at Fantasy owner Saul Zaentz: “Mr. Greed” and “Zanz Kant Danz.” Zaentz, apparently feeling as vindictive as Fogerty, sued for libel, asking $142 million damages, then charged Fogerty with infringing on a Fantasy copyright-”Run Through the Jungle.”
Centerfield’s first track, and its first single, was “The Old Man Down the Road.” Everybody who heard it remarked on its amazing similarity to “Run Through the Jungle.” And so Fantasy sued Fogerty for royalties plus damages for plagiarizing his own song!
Amazingly enough, the case actually went to trial and in the fall of 1988, John Fogerty spent two days on the witness stand with a guitar on his lap, explaining “swamp rock” and its limitations to a jury. Pressed about the similarity between the two songs, he finally snapped, “Yeah, I did use that half-step. What do you want me to do, get an inoculation?”
Even if Fantasy did, the jury didn’t. They acquitted him in early November 1988, and, having proven his skills in running through the modern jungle, John Fogerty went back to making his new record. Which he vowed would sound not approximately but exactly like Creedence.
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Well, I spent some time in the mudville nine, watchin’ it from the bench;
You know I took some lumps when the mighty casey struck out.
So say hey willie, tell ty cobb and joe dimaggio;
Don’t say “it ain’t so”, you know the time is now.
Oh, put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today;
Put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be centerfield.
[Originally posted by NewMexiKen on May 28, 2004 — age updated.]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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