If you're tired of hearing about port deals and newspaper chain breakups, read what happens when some really classy people get together for a modest celebration:
Between an ugly feud among Blondie members spilling over onstage and a rancorous letter from the absent Sex Pistols, the latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class did not enter quietly on Monday.
The animosity even made Ozzy Osbourne, inducted with Black Sabbath, seem sedate.
You think the way we do the death penalty here is cruel and unusual punishment? Just consider the way they do it in Japan:
The Japanese government says 75 inmates await execution, living under rules set out in a 1908 prison law and tightened by directives in 1963:
A lot of people will have a lot of reactions to this poll asking Americans what institutions they have confidence in. The thing I noticed: The military, No. 1 at 47 percent (of Americans having a "great deal" of confidence in it); The White House, which directs the military, in the middle of the pack at 25 percent; and the press, which has been unrelentingly negative in its coverage of both, in the bottom five at 14 percent.
If trying to save prisoners' lives is considered abuse, I'd say we're ina PR war we can never win:
More than 250 physicians from around the world are condemning the Pentagon's practice of force-feeding suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a letter in today's edition of the British medical journal Lancet.
Perhaps to start feeling better about myself, given newspapers' fortunes these days, I need to start gloating over others' misfortunes, such as soda makers':
After generations of increasing sales, the amount of soda sold in the United States dropped slightly last year.
[. . .]
Some of the best-known brands were the hardest hit. Coke Classic sales dropped 2 percent and Pepsi was down 3.2 percent.
I remember a time or two in my checkered past, when I incorrectly calculated the equation "condition of bladder plus driving distance left equals time until bathroom is reached," thought, "Oh, who will know?" and pulled the car over to do what needed to be done. Thank God that, 1) I wasn't carrying drugs and, 2) No police were around. I committed an act "injurious to health, or is indecent, or offensive to the senses'' and got away with it.
God, we are pigs, aren't we?
Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child.
[. . .]
Let's just admit it. On some level, we all believe at least a little bit in the rule of three when it comes to celebrity deaths. Whenever one dies, we wonder who the next two will be. Don Knotts, Darren McGavin and Dennis Weaver were just the latest proof.
Gordon Parks did a little bit of everything; he was one of those talented people who found many outlets for his creativity. Some will remember him for his early efforts as a Life magazine photographer, some for his later movie work, including directing "Shaft" and even composing the music for the sequel.
So, if you need to get a crime off your chest, just write a column confessing to it. Everybody knows police don't read the newspapers:
A newspaper columnist who confessed to killing a terminally ill relative has been arrested by police on suspicion of murder. Last month Maureen Messent, 67, used her column in the Birmingham Mail to say that she had given her great aunt, who was stricken by cancer, a fatal dose of morphine more than 30 years ago.
