“In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, ‘We’re all victims of these machines.'”Jeepers, good for Peter Graves.
Of the 68,647 cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 2004 only two referred to Freemasonry and five referred to the Shriners. Courtesy of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and the Yukon (good sports indeed!) comes this fine page of Masonic References in the Comics.
[[wysiwyg_imageupload:2355:]]Wayne Coyne rides the crowd in a big plastic bubble as his band The Flaming Lips kicks off South by Southwest 2010 at the Austin Music Hall.See more nice photos »Photo: Tom Zinn / WENN
Today is the 62nd birthday of singer James Taylor.To read in detail about his early career and how he approached songwriting in those days, read this (text only) Rolling Stone interview from 1979.And here are a few videos:
Via this Seattle Post Intelligencer blog post about a collection of Hugh Hefner letters and cartoons from the 1940s.Before Hugh Hefner founded Playboy magazine, that is.
The New York Post reports that golfer and swinger Tiger Woods has hired on former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.Tiger’s now moved to the post-scandal step of refurbishing his image, after all those gnarly headlines about cheating on his wife, model Erin Norgren, with umpteen waitresses, porn stars and unnamed third, fourth or fifth parties.
Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II back in 1981, has been released from a Turkish prison, according to this article in the Guardian.
Our man Mike Duffy passes along this nice slideshow of Faces Behind Famous Hands.Now you can find out what those hand models look like. Our favorite slide is the one of Pamela Moses, whose hands replaced those of Transformers star Megan Fox in a television ad for Motorola.
Did Branwell Bronte really die standing up?So says Somerset Maugham.We mentioned earlier that Maugham lists Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in his book on the 10 greatest novels of all time. Emily was preceded in death (barely) by her older brother Branwell, and Maugham relates a curious anecdote about his death.
The LA Times blog The Envelope has it all pretty well covered.