First downer here is that the writer starts out with the lamest goof on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" album title. You just want to slap him. But it gets worse. This is a real phenomenon, where an artist demonstrates that he or she can conquer ANY field. It's really prominent with actors, who are good at EVERYTHING, but there are musicians who pull this shit too. The freewheeling artistic style of Bob Dylan, who has drawn on a variety of sources in creating his music and has previously raised questions of attribution in his work, is once again stirring debate — this time over an exhibition of his paintings at the Gagosian Gallery on the Upper East Side.
When the gallery announced the exhibition, called “The Asia Series,” this month, it said the collection of paintings and other artwork would provide “a visual journal” of Mr. Dylan’s travels “in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea,” with “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.”
But since the exhibition opened on Sept. 20, some fans and Dylanologists have raised questions about whether some of these paintings are based on Mr. Dylan’s own experiences and observations, or on photographs that are widely available and that he did not take.
A wide-ranging discussion at the Bob Dylan fan Web site Expecting Rain has pointed out similarities between several works in “The Asia Series” and existing or even well-known photographs — for example, between a painting by Mr. Dylan depicting two men and a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph of two men, one a eunuch who served in the court of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi.
Observers have pointed out that a painting by Mr. Dylan called “Opium,” which is used to illustrate a Web page for the “Asia Series” exhibition on the Gagosian site, appears to be closely modeled on a picture by Léon Busy, an early-20th-century photographer.
Separately, Michael Gray, in a post on his blog, Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, points out that a painting by Mr. Dylan depicting three young men playing a sidewalk board game is nearly identical to a photograph taken by Dmitri Kessel.
Mr. Gray, an author who has written extensively about Mr. Dylan’s work and its artistic influences, writes on his blog:
“The most striking thing is that Dylan has not merely used a photograph to inspire a painting: he has taken the photographer’s shot composition and copied it exactly. He hasn’t painted the group from any kind of different angle, or changed what he puts along the top edge, or either side edge, or the bottom edge of the picture. He’s replicated everything as closely as possible. That may be a (very self-enriching) game he’s playing with his followers, but it’s not a very imaginative approach to painting. It may not be plagiarism but it’s surely copying rather a lot.”
Fruit juice, often considered one of our 'five-a-day', could actually boost the risk of colorectal cancer, Australian researchers have found.
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The large load of sugars carried by most fruit juices make them a potential risk, according to researchers writing in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
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While total fruit and vegetable intake can cut the risk of colon cancer, they discovered that increased fruit juice consumption was linked to an increased risk for rectal cancer.
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Those who drank more than three glasses of fruit juice daily were more likely to develop rectal cancer in particular.
One possible explanation, they wrote, was that many of the beneficial substances found in fruit were actually lost during the commercial process of making juice.
The owners of Ice Cream Family Corner and Sandwiches at the busy intersection of South Pine Avenue and Southwest 17th Street say their two-month-old business is getting creamed because passers-by have mistaken their white-hooded ice cream cone mascot for a KKK protester.
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Liza Diaz, who manages the store ..., said an employee at the bank where she does business told her a co-worker was so frightened by the white dollop patrolling the street corner that she called her husband crying and refused to drive through the intersection.
"One (customer) told me, ‘I had to think twice before coming in here because I thought it was KKK,' " Diaz said.
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Close up, the costume looks nothing like the white-hooded Klan garb that evokes such strong emotions. Its fluffy white top, flecked with colored sprinkles, curls slightly at its peak, and it sits atop a brown waffle cone.
But the costume tends to sag around the wearer's shoulders, and the waffle cone is mostly obscured by the sign the mascot holds in front of him. So to a motorist who gets only a glance cruising past at 40 mph, it can — and apparently does — look like a menacing Klansman.
Although this corner location has been a graveyard for eateries over the years, mostly because getting into and out of the parking lot can be tricky, Liza Diaz believes the costume is to blame for the rocky road the shop finds itself on. The clientele, she said, melted away right after the mascot hit the street. Indeed, just before lunch Monday, there wasn't a soul in the store except for a handful of employees.
This story reflects a simple but sad fact about humanity. When something happens that DEFIES explanation people will COME UP with an explanation whether it makes sense or not. This goes back to the Bible. Trying to explain the world. You look around and say "in six days God created the world." Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? A man who died near a fire had "spontaneously combusted", a coroner in Ireland has ruled.
Michael Faherty, a 76-year-old pensioner in Galway, died at his house three days before Christmas last year in circumstances that had baffled investigators, the Irish Times reported.
Forensic experts said the death had not been caused by a fire in Faherty's fireplace, and that no accelerant had been found, nor was there evidence of foul play.
Faherty had been found lying on his back with his head near the fireplace, in the sitting room, but fire fighters said the blaze had not spread from the hearth.
Coroner Ciaran McLoughlin, who researched the matter heavily before giving his verdict, said he had never encountered such a case in his 25 years working in the region.
He said a book on forensic pathology noted that such reported cases were almost always near an open fireplace or chimney.
"This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation," the BBC reported him as saying.
Bed bugs do not transmit disease or cause illness — but the insecticides used to kill them do. A total of 111 illnesses associated with bed bug-related insecticides were reported in seven states between 2003 and 2010 (mostly in the last three years), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday. Most cases of poisoning were not severe, but the data included one death.
That case involved a 65-year-old woman in North Carolina who died in 2010. After she complained to her husband about bed bugs, the CDC report said, he saturated the interior of their home, including the baseboards, walls and the area around the bed, with the insecticide Ortho Home Defense Max. He then applied a different product, Ortho Lawn and Garden Insect Killer, to their mattress and box spring. Neither insecticide is registered for use against bed bugs, the CDC said.
That day, the couple also released nine cans of Hot Shot Fogger in their home. Two days later, they reapplied the insecticides and unleashed nine more cans of Hot Shot Bedbug and Flea Fogger. The woman then applied the pesticide Hot Shot Bed Bug and Flea Killer directly to her arms and chest, and doused her hair with it before covering her head with a plastic cap.
Two days later, her husband found her unresponsive. She was taken to the hospital where she remained on a ventilator for nine days until she died. The woman had had a history of health problems, including kidney failure, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and depression, the CDC report said. She had been taking at least 10 medications at the time of her death.
I enjoyed this one and found it buried in my mailbag from awhile ago. Kids are wonderful and so cute but there are times THEY CAN DRIVE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND! So what do you do when they act up? A lot of parents I see solve this problem by doing absolutely nothing while their kids run amok like they have Earth all to themselves. Others flip out and I've even seen a few hit their kids in public, including a memorable occasion at Disney World where I was able to point and say to my kids, "now you guys think about what a wonderful dad I am." Every once in awhile you can use someone else's misfortune to your advantage (not that it really changed my kids or their attitude in any real way - as soon as you don't buy a $15 lollipop you're Hitler to them).A man accused of throwing his 7-year-old son overboard during a sightseeing cruise around California's Newport Harbor says he and the boy were just "horse playing" and talked about jumping in the water together.
"I was not trying to kill my son. We were playing in the shallows," Sloane Briles told KTLA-TV on Tuesday. "I discussed it with him. We'd jump in together and just thought it would be funny, ha ha."
Two of 85 people who were on the Sunday afternoon tour saw things differently. In 911tapes released Tuesday, the passengers expressed shock and disgust after seeing Briles toss the boy into the water.
"I'm on a boat tour called the Queen and there's a man who just threw his son overboard," a woman told an Orange County sheriff's dispatcher.
"This man has been bad on our whole trip and he's swimming back to our boat now," she said.
Sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said Briles, 35, was on the tour with his girlfriend and two sons from a previous marriage. Amormino said they got into an argument and Briles threatened to toss the boy into the water if he didn't stop crying.
Staff members on the 42-foot boat said Briles told the boy he needed to toughen up then threw him into the water five feet below, said Charlie Maas, who oversees the tour company.
Someone on the boat threw the boy a life ring, and he was safely rescued, uninjured, by another boater. The father also jumped in to save him before swimming back to the tour boat.
Another 911 caller said she thought Briles was "drunk and violent."
Briles was taken into custody for child endangerment and resisting arrest. He denied witnesses' accounts that the boy was crying and said he had never hit his son.
His girlfriend told the New York Daily News that he was only "roughhousing" with his son as he often does and regretted his "stupid" judgment.
The President of the United States was saying this to Tony Bennett while sending in the troops? Whoa! In a way I understand it. You can't always tell the truth, but if you were talking to Tony Bennett, he's like truth serum. He really is a better singer than Frank Sinatra. If you don't believe me listen to "Just In Time," LOUD. He's totally got more range and pure vocal chops than Old Blue Eyes. Tony Bennett sings pop music like it's opera. It sounds like he was recorded in an elevator shaft but the vinyl records they made in the 50s still sound better than the digital push button shit they make today. Tony Bennett is under fire for telling Howard Stern that President George W. Bush admitted to him that the Iraq War was a mistake. The 85-year-old singer visited Stern’s satellite radio show on Monday to promote his new album of duets, and he shared his encounter with the then-president from the 2005 Kennedy Center honors. “He told me personally that night, he says, ‘I think I made a mistake,’” Bennett said, referring to the Iraq War.
A spokesperson for Bush told NBC News that “This account is flatly wrong … President Bush never said that to Tony Bennett or anyone else.”
Bennett, who fought in Germany during World War II and considers himself a pacifist, also holds America’s foreign policy responsible for the attacks on 9/11. “But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett said, when asked how the U.S. should fight terrorism. “They flew the plane in, but we caused it. Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”
A Ukraine dumpling-eating contest to find the person who could eat 10 of the dough balls most quickly went horribly wrong when the 77-year-old champion keeled over and died.
The winner, Ivan Mendel, had just won his prize, a one-litre jar of sour cream, when he began to feel ill.
"The old man got sick and fell to the ground," an unnamed witness told Interfax news agency. "The ambulance arrived when he was already dead. The doctor said that he probably choked on vomit."
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Dumplings, known in Ukraine as vareniki, are a staple of the regional diet; they are usually stuffed with mushrooms, potatoes or cherries. Organisers of the contest said the dumplings they used – filled with potatoes – had been frozen and packaged and bought from a local supermarket.
Organisers struck back at accusations that the contest had killed the man, saying Mendel had eaten just 10 dumplings in all. He ate them, reportedly, in half a minute.
"A 77-year-old pensioner ate his portion more quickly than his opponent," Viktor Khalamovsky, one of the contest organisers, told Interfax. "He won a prize for that – a jar of sour cream. What happened to him after his victory, the organisers don't know."
Just a few months ago Gwyneth Paltrow had a new cookbook out. Since her record deal fizzled, she seems to be more into writing, and next up is a diet book. Of course this emaciated bitch has never had a weight problem, and she doesn't know any more about dieting than say...acting...but NOTHING can stop her from weighing in (ha) on EVERY subject under the sun. Gwyneth Paltrow Weight Loss Diet Program - Isn't amazing how all of the celebrities you see have a celebrity diet plan for weight loss to maintain their weight. Some of them are shapely and healthy looking, and look good on camera. Others look like they haven't eaten in weeks, like they just got back from the famine in Ethiopia for a few weeks. Like they had been starving themselves to lose weight, and that is probably what they have been doing. You see it in all the tabloids, this person lost 100 pounds again, this one gained 100 pounds, and then lost 150 pounds. Some are not as dramatic; this one lost 40 pounds and is a television spokesperson, because the previous celebrity diet spokesperson gained the weight back. The fact is they may be starving themselves to lose weight, fasting like they are going through a famine.
Celebrities make dieting look so easy, don't they? One month they're on the cover of US Weekly for gaining too much weight and the next they're headlining the "sexiest beach bods" story. It is true that seriously overweight people can lose large amounts of fat in a quick amount of time, because of the large fat content in their cells. But those that are only a few pounds overweight, losing 40 pounds in a month, is not only starvation, it is malnutrition and can have serious side effects. Our body weight can fluctuate day to day and the best diets take the weight off gradually, the way it came on.
Celebrities do not have secrets about dieting. They are normal people like the rest of us but, unlike most of us, they have people working for them such as diet advisors and personal trainers. Celebrity diets involve a level of commitment and dedication which we struggle with. The best celebrity diets involve eating sensibly and limiting our calorie intake. Having these factors in mind will allow you to have safe and easy weight loss that will provide you with short term and long term consistent results.
This is great because he is apologizing but NOT apologizing. "I'm sorry BUT she's a whore." That's basically what's going on here. "I did have an inappropriate relationship, but she was a gold digging maid and I'm sorry for the ERROR but it did not involve VIOLENCE only a failing on my part but really SHE'S A LIAR but I'm sorry to my wife for doing this but SHE'S TRYING TO GET MY MONEY finally I am so sorry for the fact that SHE'S A WHORE. This other woman who is accusing me of doing this is ALSO A WHORE. Thank you." Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, acknowledged Sunday his sexual encounter with a New York hotel maid was a "moral failing" on his part, but didn't involve violence, constraint or aggression.
In his first interview since his May 14 arrest over sexual assault accusations, Strauss-Kahn told France's TF1 television channel what happened between him and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, "was not only an inappropriate relationship, but more than that, it was an error."
Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist politician who was widely considered a top contender in next year's presidential race until the case broke, said "it was a failing, a failing vis-a-vis my wife, my children and my friends but also a failing vis-a-vis the French people, who had vested their hopes for change in me.
"I think it was a moral failing and I am not proud of it. I regret it infinitely. I have regretted it everyday for the past four months and I think I'm not done regretting it," he said at the start of the 20-minute interview. Much of the exchange came off as staged, with Strauss-Kahn appearing calm and unruffled throughout and not surprised by the questions.
Strauss-Kahn's initial contrition was peppered with anger at his accuser, a Guinean immigrant who maintained he attacked her after she came into his room at New York's Sofitel hotel to clean.
He said the New York prosecutor concluded "Nafissatou Diallo lied about everything — not only about her past, that's of no importance, but also about what happened. The (prosecutor's) report says, it's written there, that 'she presented so many different versions of what happened that I can't believe a word.'"
Strauss-Kahn suggested that financial motives might have been behind Diallo's accusations.
He also dismissed as "imaginary" separate claims by a French writer that he tried to rape her during a 2003 interview, again insisting "no act of aggression, no violence" had taken place between the two.
The writer, Tristane Banon, has maintained she and Strauss-Kahn tussled on the floor during an interview in an empty apartment, with the politician trying to open her jeans and bra and putting his fingers in her mouth and underwear.
New York prosecutors dropped all criminal charges against him in the Diallo case last month, though Strauss-Kahn is still facing a lawsuit brought by the maid.
Asked whether he had any intention of returning to politics, Strauss-Kahn said he would "take time to reflect" and rest first.
"But all my life was consecrated to being useful to the public good," he said, adding "we will see."
Despite all our problems, America may be producing better morons than ever. And more of them! Here's a story about one of our best and brightest morons right here. A man zapped by a stun gun-toting Cowboys fan says his assailant instigated the upper deck fracas by showing more respect for Dallas' colors than the red, white and blue.
Leroy McKelvey insulted former President George Bush, jabbered during a moment of silence for 9/11 victims and sat during the national anthem at MetLife Stadium last Sunday, Ian Cummings told the Daily News.
"It was the most disrespectful thing I had ever seen," said Cummings, 46, of Farmingdale, L.I.
Cummings said the F-bombs started flying in Section 324 when McKelvey, in a Cowboys jersey, arrived and immediately bad-mouthed the former President.
A former Marine at the end of the aisle took offense, and words were exchanged - but the bad feelings really escalated during a moment of silence for the 3,000 victims of 9/11.
"As that happens, the guy starts going, 'C'mon, let's get the game started,'" Cummings said. "I was kinda shocked. I looked around to make sure everybody heard what I heard."
The final straw: McKelvey was sitting and chatting on a cell phone during "The Star Spangled Banner," according to Cummings.
"The Marine leans over and says, 'You sit during the national anthem, you f---ing this and that. Don't come back this way,'" Cummings said.
McKelvey's son insisted his father meant no disrespect to anyone when he stayed in his seat.
"My father's 59, he's got high blood pressure," said Leonard McKelvey, better known as DJ Charlamagne Tha God. "He did stand at first, but he got dizzy."
When McKelvey tried to leave the seats just before halftime, Cummings acknowledged busting his chops.
"I'm like, 'You couldn't get up before, and now you want me to get up?'" he said. The next thing Cummings knew, he heard the sound of electricity and saw the flash of blue light from the stun gun.
"It hurt," he said. "He got me in the back of the neck. I felt my body shake, and did a header right over the seats in front of me."
McKelvey also zapped the ex-Marine and a third man before he was subdued. The victims all suffered minor injuries.
Cummings, who is considering a lawsuit over the attack, blames lax security as much as McKelvey.
"I said to my friend, 'The patdown is a joke. I've been more uncomfortable in a crowded elevator,'" he said. The NFL announced this week that full-body patdowns are now mandatory at all stadiums.
The younger McKelvey said his father is feeling better - except about all the negative attention.
"He's good," said Leonard McKelvey. "The main thing that bothers him is people painting him like he's part of Al Qaeda, sneaking a stun gun in the stadium. It's crazy."
If the death of this dwarf saved the life of just one badger, he shall not have died in vain. A DWARF porn star who was Gordon Ramsay's double has been found dead in the most bizarre of circumstances, according to UK tabloid The Sunday Sport.
Percy Foster's 107 centimetre (3'6") body was discovered in a badger's den in Wales.
The report says the 35-year-old was found, "deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing program."
Investigators have not ruled out the possibility of suicide, according to the report.
In a recent interview Foster spoke of his excitement about his growing career as Ramsay's double.
"Porn lookalikes get more money than normal actors. Dwarf lookalikes are as rare as hen's teeth and so can command top dollar.
"I've already ordered a new BMW and a diamond-encrusted Soda Stream," he said.
