My salad turned out wonderfully. It was like a Noah's arc of a salad - two of everything with a passion flower vinegar and olive oil dressing thickened with a ripe bit of mango and a bit of egg yolk. The whole dinner was very light and everyone was a member of the clean plate club.

When oh when will this team get an owner who truly cares about building and maintaining a solid winning baseball team? You know, someone who will put at least as much energy and money into player recruitment and development as they put into fighting the rooftop owners and cutting  backroom deals with Rahm Emmanuel.

The strategies and tactics of activism: working within or without the system, raising money or raising a ruckus.  The instruction that patient care is really caring for the patient. And, the emotional signature of love, not only toward lovers but also, to strangers--to those who are needy.   And, to learn the dangers of complacency.  As Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) reminded us, through her misjudgment, "no one gets polio anymore."  

The telling of this story reminded me, in a way,  of  the "Titanic", beginning with the passengers enjoying the splendor of the new ship only soon to hit an iceberg.  But unlike the Titanic, lifeboats were not just inadequate, they were missing and calls for help were  ignored, willfully.   However, "Normal Heart" sees a captain emerge to begin , at least, to right the ship.

The HBO movie is well-crafted with a particularly strong performance by Mark Ruffalo, whose character, Ned Weeks, yields a compelling mix of stridency and vulnerability.  Alfred Mollina (the brother, Ben Weeks) represents the torn and tormented family member.  And, off camera, but still in focus, are certain politicians and their frightened minions.  They did not know whether to call a meeting or call a cab.

The disease, the  perverse and diabolic star of the movie, reveals its ghastly course of bodily devastation  (Matt Bomer lost 40 pounds for his role as Felix, the NYT reporter) as well as  just how hard it was to kill otherwise healthy young men.  

The CIA's top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama's surprise visit with U.S. troops.

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the "Chief of Station" in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover -- the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity -- pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Doesn't anyone proofreead anymore with stuff like this?

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That's it. I reached my goal of 365 comics in a calendar year. With about a month to spare. For those of you who have enjoyed and commented on them, I appreciate it more than you know. I'll probably resurrect it, but for now...An Axe Length Away is on indefinite hiatus.

If you like bacon, it's a no-brainer.  I used Vidalia onions - sweet even before being grilled while wrapped in bacon deliciousness - very mellow onion flavor.

Am wondering if I could wrap something else between the onion and the bacon - maybe some blanched garlic?  You could experiment with what you "paint" on the onion before wrapping, too.  Maybe a nice Dijon mustard, or even barbecue sauce.

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Fight. The. Power.

Only catch is that it is going to be expensive. Estimates are $1.35- $2 Million...

I remember seeing the piece at Emin' NY gallery in 1998.. I was floored and immediately wanted to buy it...  but unfortunately I was a little short on cash at the time.. ahahahaa

Made in her council flat in Waterloo in 1998, My Bed is both a found object in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, and a self-portrait. Following a failed romance, Emin went through a period of severe depression accompanied by excessive drinking and bouts of casual sex. One night after a particularly heavy binge, she woke up thinking, "If I don't drink some water I'm going to die."

Crawling back to the bedroom from the kitchen, she looked at her bed and thought: "Ugghh! It was disgusting. And then, from one second looking horrible, it suddenly transformed itself into something removed from me, and something beautiful." She was struck, she told me last week, by "how classical it looked. From a distance, it looked like a painting."

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a law used by Florida and other states that set a strict cut-off, based on IQ test scores, to determine eligibility for the death penalty.

In the wake of the court's earlier ruling that the states may not execute the "mentally retarded," Florida determined that the dividing line would be an IQ of 70.

The defendant in the case at the center of Tuesday's ruling, a convicted murderer named Freddie Lee Hall, had an IQ of 71 -- so the state said he could be put to death.

But the high court, in a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, said such a line is too rigid.

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European politics were jolted as seldom before on Sunday when France's extreme nationalists triumphed in the European parliament elections, which across the continent returned an unprecedented number of MEPs hostile or sceptical about the European Union in a huge vote of no confidence in Europe's political elite.

France's Front National won the election there with a projected 25% of the vote, while the governing socialists of President François Hollande collapsed to 14%, according to exit polls.

In Britain the Nigel Farage-led insurrection against Westminster was also expected by all three main parties to deliver a victory for Ukip in the election, albeit with a lower lead than some opinion polls had been predicting in recent weeks. Turnout in Britain was 36%, higher than at the last European elections in 2009.

Four days of elections across 28 countries returned a record number of MEPs opposed to the EU project. Voters delivered a string of sensational outcomes, according to exit polls, with radical and nationalist anti-EU forces scoring major victories both on the far right and the hard left.

In Greece, Alexis Tsipras led the Syriza movement to a watershed victory for the left over the country's two traditional ruling parties - currently governing in coalition - the New Democracy conservatives and the Pasok social democrats. The neo-fascists of Golden Dawn took about 10%.

Exit polls suggest the nationalist anti-immigrant Danish People's party won by a similar margin in Denmark.

In Austria the far-right Freedom party was projected to take a fifth of the vote. In Hungary, the neo-fascist Jobbik movement took around 15%.

On the hard left, Sinn Féin did well in Ireland, and Die Linke took about 8% in Germany. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) scored an expected easy victory, but the EU's most powerful state, also returned its first Eurosceptics in the form of the Alternative for Germany as well as its first neo-Nazi MEP from the Hitler apologists of the National Democratic party of Germany, according to German TV projections.

Merkel's party dropped several points while the Social Democrats (SPD) made significant gains, narrowing the gap between the two big parties to about eight percentage points.

The election mattered more than ever because the Strasbourg-based parliament has gained greater powers, meaning it will have a strong say in most EU legislation over the next five years and will also shape the outcome of the battle for the most powerful post in Brussels, the new head of the EU executive, the European Commission.

Now, I suppose they were not trying to make her look good, quite the opposite probably.  The film was released in 1950.  Swanson was actually only 51 and Hplden was 32. But the whole thing just raised a bunch of questions in my fevered mind.

Why is it so different now? Is it better beauty science? Better cosmetic surgery?  Better diet and health? Changing stereo types of age aka baby boomers?  All of the above?  A difference in age of less than 19 years in the days of Donald Sterling sort of made the whole thing seem sort of quaint and innocent.

Help me out. I'm feeling a tad Norma Desmondish.

With traumatic injuries, timing in treatment can be the difference between life and death. What if surgeons could hit the pause button, giving them precious additional time to treat the wounds? Suspended animation has been featured in a wide array of fictional films, but could it actually work on humans? The FDA has approved a small study that will allow surgeons at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh to try to suspend human life later this month.

In Hollywood, suspended animation involves freezing solid (or nearly so), thawing at some point in the future when new medical advances have taken place to treat their conditions. This emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR) technique isn't quite so extreme, but it will reduce body temperature to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) by inserting a cannula into the aorta and flushing cold saline into the system. This will slow the blood flow, which will prevent the body from bleeding out (which can be fatal within minutes). The low temperatures will also slow other biological processes as well.

Hall, a Democrat until 2004, is a genial man known for his story telling and constituent services. As a child, he once sold cigarettes to the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.