Japanese gangster offered $1 million for visa that would allow liver transplant at UCLA: Desperate for a liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center, the leader of Japan’s third-largest organized crime group offered as much as $1 million to potential intermediaries to help him obtain a U.S. visa, according to several people who said they were solicited for assistance. [LA Times]
The last survivor: But for a handful of Americans post-polio syndrome was literally all-encompassing. They had the worst kind, bulbo-spinal, which destroyed the nerves which controlled their breathing. An iron lung had to breathe for them and they ended up spending whole lives inside a gigantic mechanical jelly roll. Dianne Odell was the last of them. [Mercator]
Novelist begins hunger strike over Bhopal: Indra Sinha, author of Animal’s People, has begun a hunger strike in New Delhi to protest the neglect of Bhopal disaster survivors. [Guardian]
June 13th, 2008 at 9:56 am
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Dymaxion Man - The visions of Buckminster Fuller: Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. [New Yorker]
From Mr Average … to superman: In 16 weeks, Craig Davidson, a Canadian novelist, transformed himself into a hard-as-nails hunk by injecting illegal steroids. He loved his new body - but not the hideous side-effects. In this graphic account of being a ‘roider’, he recounts his hellish journey. [Guardian]
Cancer patient wins £5,000 bet: A terminally ill man, who was told he had a few months to live after being diagnosed with cancer, collected £5,000 from the bookmakers yesterday. [Guardian]
In China, he builds bridges with music: The New York Philharmonic may have played Pyongyang, but they’re not the only ones using the tip of the orchestra to break diplomatic ice. On May 7, Conductor Yu Long and the China Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) traveled to Vatican City to play a special concert for Pope Benedict XVI. [CSM]
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 am
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India is floored by homecoming of The Great Khali: The return of The Great Khali - a 7ft 3in (2.21m), 30st (190kg) professional wrestler - to his native India from the United States where he plies his trade, has created a level of hysteria usually reserved for Bollywood idols and cricketing heroes. [Times]
Bird-watcher: Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of “Moose the Mooche” and “Swedish Schnapps.” [New Yorker]
The last ‘Parandero’: Troubadour Nabor has kept alive the ‘paranda’ sound – Spanish guitar backed by local instruments and a West African beat – for decades in his Belize village and through recordings. [CSM]
May 13th, 2008 at 10:09 am
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No Way to Treat a Lady: “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey played a risky game in catering to Washington’s power brokers with her upscale escort service. Her suicide, this month, marked a tragic—and not unexpected—end for a complicated woman who believed she was unfairly victimized. Having talked to Palfrey for months and spoken with her mother after her death, the author tells the whole story. [Vanity Fair]
Luis Posada Carriles, a terror suspect abroad, enjoys a ‘coming-out’ in Miami: A dinner with 500 fellow Cuban exiles honors the militant and former CIA operative, now 80 and still wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges. [LA Times]
Oil in the Family: In 1935 oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, known as the richest man in America, created what would become a multi-billion-dollar trust for his descendants. Three generations later, a lawsuit by his free-spending great-grandson is shaking the foundations of that mighty family fortune. [Vanity Fair]
May 7th, 2008 at 9:30 am
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Two Comedians Battle for London: One candidate is a former Trotskyite and sounds like a markets guru. His rival has lots of jokes, but little political experience. Londoners will have a tough time choosing a mayor on Thursday — but at least they have been thoroughly entertained by Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. [Spiegel]
9-Year-Old Boy Finds $265,000 Medieval Treasure Trove: A nine-year-old Swedish boy and his grandfather have found a hoard of 13th-century coins while treasure hunting on a battlefield. Just the silver in the coins alone is estimated to be worth a whopping $265,000. [Spiegel]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:53 am
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From Haiti to L.A., the tangled tale of George Laguerre, owner of TiGeorges’ Chicken: It’s a tangled tale. Dreams of Hollywood figure in it, and the 1984 Olympics, and a Haitian grandmother’s determination that her family was going to live in America, whether they wanted to or not. Laguerre grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in Port-de-Paix, where his father was a coffee grower. In the beginning, except for his grandmother, who ran a restaurant in the back of her grocery, no one in the immediate family thought of emigrating. [LA Times]
The phenomenal Slavoj Zizek: Slavoj Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. The son of Slovenian Communists, and the representative on earth (so to speak) of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been travelling the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club. He is outrageous, provocative and entertaining. He was, he tells us, tempted to suggest for the dust jacket of one of his books: “In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders”. [TLS]
April 24th, 2008 at 9:49 am
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In Chicago’s streets, a thriller shot in a single take: That’s because this 20-year-old, first-time director is making his kidnap drama in a single take – without any editing. Once the camera starts rolling, it’s nonstop action through the streets of Chicago – including a race down Lake Shore Drive and a two-mile chase sequence on foot – until the final scene 85 minutes later. [CSM]
Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Solvent: On the other hand, except for the mortgage on this house, the Giffelses have no debt. This is not only because they have done so much of the renovation themselves, but because they do not have and never have had credit cards. Their feeling, anachronistic as the servants’ call button in their dining room, is that if you don’t have the money for something, you don’t buy it. It is for this reason that none of the six fireplaces in their house are functional: they do not have the money to fix them. If this sounds extremely practical, you should know that the story of the Giffelses and the falling down house is as romantic as they come, tied up with not just the love of a house, but the love of a city. [NYT]
April 18th, 2008 at 10:00 am
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Schoolboy corrects Nasa calculations: Nasa has been outsmarted by a German schoolboy who corrected its estimates of the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, it was reported today. The German Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten newspaper said 13-year-old Nico Marquardt came across the Nasa miscalculation after conducting a study as part of a regional science competition. [Guardian]
Author for the Lonely Planet Guide to Colombia Thomas Kohnstamm admits he never set foot in the place: The travel writer who wrote part of the Lonely Planet Guide to Colombia has admitted that he never visited the country. Thomas Kohnstamm says that he was in San Francisco at the time. “They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” he told The Australian Herald Sun. So he “got the information from a chick I was dating who was an intern in the Colombian Consulate”. [Times]
April 16th, 2008 at 9:34 am
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Penniless artist auction makes £2m: He spent his youth in a hostel for the elderly and his adulthood living in warehouses with alcoholics and an embalmed tramp. He was fascinated by metaphysics, death and green linoleum, and painted jealousy, orgasms and still life. When the impoverished artist died of a heart attack in August 2002, he had only £12 to his name and owed the Inland Revenue millions more. He was 60 years old, with a mistress and 11 children from seven partners. He had no bank account. [Times]
A Japanese craftsman’s one-man Olympic boycott: The maker of iron shots favored by elite shot-putters refuses to produce any for the Beijing Games to protest China’s Tibet policy. [LA Times]
April 14th, 2008 at 10:11 am
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My repudiation was a sham: SALMAN Rushdie has confessed that he pretended to “embrace Islam” in the hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him. The author issued a statement in 1990 to defuse the row about his novel The Satanic Verses, which had provoked Muslims across the world. He claimed he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, in an interview to be broadcast next month, Rushdie claims his reversion to the religion of his birth was all a “pretence”. [Australian]
Heart transplant man dies like suicide donor: A heart transplant recipient who married the former wife of the heart donor, has committed suicide in the same way as the donor did. According to scientists, there are more than 70 documented cases of transplant patients taking on some of the personality traits of the organ donors. [Telegraph]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s loudest recluse: Typically, it was Natalia Solzhenitsyn who has given the latest insight into her husband, Aleksandr. At 89, he is working frantically to complete the 30 volumes of his collected works, she says. He is frail, can barely walk and hasn’t left his Moscow house for five years, but he continues to write, determined to continue to disseminate his views on repression in the Soviet Union. [Times]
Inside the revolution: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is Iran’s premier female film director. For 20 years she has quietly challenged the status quo in her homeland. [New Statesman]
April 8th, 2008 at 11:12 am
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