| Hillary Stuns--Four Theories
I'm as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win. Mystery Pollster has his work cut out for him. But I'm confident that soon enough there will be so many powerful explanations for what now seems an out-of-the-blue event that it will appear to be overdetermined. It's important to memorialize this moment of utter stupefaction. That said, here are four possible factors: .
Wild Card -- Tuesday PM
For those keeping score at home, there was a good reason why Duane Hagadone pulled his memorial garden request in December. He woulda gotten clobbered at the polls. On Dec. 15, two days before he pulled the request, internal polling for the library bond showed the downtown garden proposals failing 72% to 28% (outta 756 replies). This, while the poll showed the library passing with 63% and the public safety bond with 56%). And you were wondering why The Duane didn't want to risk an advisory vote?
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*I visited the Ron Rankin Veterans Memorial Plaza this p.m., and I'm certain The Ronfather woulda been pleased. You don't get the impact of the eagle statue, donated by the Rankin family, from photos. It's huge. And the new war mural of the kneeling Marines at Fallujah ... well, you can't visit the plaza without feeling as though you're on holy ground.
Peter Carey an Australian in New York
You can crash and burn after a year's work. I'm writing a book now, and it's scary still because even though I've been through stages of being immensely pleased with it, I also, at times, don't know what I'm doing." Despite the limited time the narrative spends there, His Illegal Self offers us the most substantial view yet of Carey's adopted city. The book opens in New York and, for the first time, Carey has written a novel that includes American main characters. Most surprisingly, his narrator has a finite knowledge of Australia. Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, His Illegal Self explores life in privileged Manhattan and in subversive, underground America. It also takes in Australia at a time, Carey writes, when "Queensland was a police state run by men who never finished high school".
Univision Battle With Televisa Places Programs in Jeopardy
A long-running feud between Univision Communications and the Mexican broadcaster that provides most of its programming is headed for a showdown in a federal court in Los Angeles. If Univision loses, it could see many of its prime-time shows yanked. While a dispute over royalty payments is the source of the current dispute, tensions between the two companies date back to bad blood between Univisions former chief, A. Jerrold Perenchio, and the late Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, who felt he got a bad deal in 1992 when the two men negotiated the original contract. If the Mexican company, Grupo Televisa, wins and pulls its programming, Univisions enterprise value could be chopped by more than $1 billion. The lawsuit centers on a program license agreement, or PLA, between Televisa, the dominant broadcaster in Mexico, and L.A.s Univision, the dominant Spanish-language TV network in the U.S.
Talk of the Town: Happy birthday, Oscar!
So, Oscar will celebrate his 80th birthday this Sunday and some of the writers will actually be attending his party since the Writers Guild of America strike has ended and the dust is starting to settle in Tinseltown.With any luck, your favorite movie will walk away with the golden prize, but as in the past, some of the best pictures never receive Best Picture Oscars. A prime example would be "Citizen Kane."Though it was nominated in nine categories in 1941, "Citizen Kane" won only Best Original Screenplay for Orson Welles and Herman J.Mankiewicz.According to the folks at filmschoolrejects.com, it was rumored that whenever the film's name was mentioned, guffaws were heard around the room because the powerful newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, on whose life the film was alleged to be based, threatened voters with the old adage, "You'll never work in this town again." An interesting note: Kane's editor was future Oscar-winning director Robert Wise.
Dead Zones Off Oregon and Washington Likely Tied to Global Warming ...
It was a good amount of crabs," Pazar said. "But they were dead, or dying or very, very weak. Those that we managed to keep alive didn't survive for long." The fishermen called Oregon State, which dispatched a boat of researchers to investigate. "It was a big mystery," Lubchenco said. "We didn't know what was killing them." Fishermen found other oddities. As they pulled up their crab traps, they found baby octopuses, about the size of silver dollars, inching their way up the lines toward the buoys floating on the surface. "I'd tell my crewmen, be careful with these cute little things," said Dennis Krulich, a longtime fishermen in Newport. "Peel them off the rope, and we'll put them back." Only later did he realize that these babies were coming up from oxygen-depleted waters that hover near the seafloor, climbing to save their lives.
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