In the run-up to the EU referendum, the Guardian hosted two focus groups in Brighton and Knowsley that shone a light on the impending vote. Sessions organised by the research organisation BritainThinks told a story of voters who were confused, distrustful of politicians and deeply concerned about immigration.

A picture emerged from discussions both in Merseyside and on the south coast of a battle in which the remain campaign’s focus on the economy was not sticking while the £350m claim of the out camp was getting through.

Related: One month after the referendum, are predictions of Brexit blight coming true?

It was clear that voters had lost faith in politicians, whose integrity appeared to fall further during the referendum campaign, with leavers arguing it was the rich and “unaffected” who were most likely to back the status quo. They were also upset about the intervention of President Obama. Remainers, on the other hand, regarded Brexiters as xenophobic.

On 23 June, Britain voted to leave the European Union. In the month that followed, how did those same voters react in the aftermath of the most momentous vote in the country’s political history?

Brexit – the first weekend

Much like the rest of the country, the Guardian focus group voters woke up after the Brexit vote to an explosion of powerful emotions. An overwhelming sense from leavers was anger at the way they were being portrayed.

“To hear what the remain camp are calling the leave voters is dreadful. They are calling us stupid, uneducated, racist. It’s disgusting. And the fact that they are calling for a further referendum is diabolical,” said one woman who voted leave in Knowsley.

Another called on people to respect democracy. “I would equate it to a football match between two teams and when one team loses they wait outside for the other team’s supporters and beat them up because they won,” she said.

A third woman on Merseyside said she felt low about comments from younger people that the older generation had let them down. She said her son was furious and she questioned her decision but concluded that Britain would have to navigate a “few rocky roads” but eventually would be fine.

For remainers, there was sadness and confusion. “A few skilled – and almost universally posh – politicians managed to connect and lead this anti-establishment tsunami into a direction that has no hope of solving the problems they daily experience,” said one man from Brighton.

One woman added: “Why would they want to take away the opportunities for their children and grandchildren to possibly work or study abroad when they are older? Why would they want their children to live in a country that is intolerant, unequal and that will now probably suffer a horrific recession whilst being an easy target to terrorists ... I’m baffled!”

David Cameron had announced his resignation; Boris Johnson had already pulled out of the Tory leadership race, making Theresa May a clear favourite; Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was destabilised by an attempted coup; and there was a spike in race hate crime.

Britain had entered a tumultuous period with massive instability in Westminster leaving many people still unsure about what the 23 June vote would actually mean.

For remainers in the focus groups, there was a glimmer of hope that something might still change. “I think we should all go for a re-vote and I bet you would see the decision overturned, I can’t believe how many politicians are quitting their posts,” said a man in Knowsley who voted remain.

“Apparently some people think that article 50 won’t actually go ahead and we won’t leave the EU but will try and negotiate a better deal. I like this idea but wonder if we are just in denial,” added a woman in Brighton.

Related: Brexit: EU considers migration ‘emergency brake’ for UK for up to seven years

But leavers were left angry by the outpourings of the 48%. “I’ve just read that hundreds of young people have taken to the streets of London in protest of the Brexit vote which makes a mockery of democracy but they obviously feel strongly about the decision. I feel that the country is going to be divided for a long time to come,” said a leave voter in Knowsley.

They were also at odds over the issue of Johnson’s decision not to stand for the Tory leadership. One leaver from Merseyside said that despite her stance, she agreed with a Facebook post that was a scathing attack on Johnson.

“He rallied everyone to leave the EU and now he doesn’t want to face the consequences of what he has done. This too makes me feel really angry – bring us to our knees then desert a sinking ship,” she said. Another said she found him “quite endearing if a little bonkers”.

The voters also talked about the rise in the number of racist incidents. “I saw a YouTube blog about racism and Brexit. I am feeling quite guilty that my vote is involved with this but my intention was never racist, it was merely worry and concern towards monitoring and capping something maybe the government should have prioritised earlier,” said one woman.

A man in Brighton, who voted remain, said: “I’m noticing a lot of racist and xenophobic incidents being posted on my social media. I seriously believe the EU referendum has made some people more xenophobic and confident to challenge people of their intentions to remain in this country.”

Some remain voters involved in the focus groups were still holding on to some hope about what might happen, but there was an overwhelming feeling that Britain needed to move on from the referendum. The number of Westminster resignations had left participants unimpressed, with deep levels of distrust in politicians, and some had started to feel uncertain about the economy.

“I’ve seen a few articles today about the low value of the pound. It does make me feel quite worried for the future of our economy if it doesn’t bounce back. Feeling more and more like we’ve made a really bad decision,” said one remain voter, while another said it “reeks of recession”.

Related: Theresa May will soon have to decide which Brexit to take | Martin Kettle

But there was no great sense of buyers’ remorse among leave voters, with most standing by their decision. One admitted to being worried, but said it was the right decision: “I’m surprised at the amount of scaremongering and nasty people around. A bit of fear sure does bring out a bad side in some people and we’ve really seen that. All in all … it’s shown that the public really do have a voice.”

Another said they felt “surprisingly optimistic”. Although one leaver, from Brighton, admitted to feeling a “little isolated” after so many friends voted remain: “It makes me question if I did the right thing.”

Young remain voters felt nervous about the divisiveness that appeared to have exploded, and about racist rhetoric. One said: “I think that there isn’t really a way you could have voted to leave without being closed minded and at least a little anti-diversity and that makes me sad for our country.

“Little hidden racists have come out of the woodwork,” added another who felt “disgusted, horrified, saddened and angry”.

But one leave voter echoed others by arguing it was about immigration concerns and not racism, saying it was great to have a “mixed culture society” but reasonable to be worried about numbers.

There was a debate about why Britain voted to leave, from a remainer who said the working classes were “manipulated”, to others who said people were misguided if they thought leaving would solve their problems.

But one leaver said the referendum had taught them that in Britain “we can fight for what we believe is right for us and we are not scared to make a change even if it does mean we’ll have to make sacrifices along the way”.

Some remainers hoped there was a chance of staying in the EU, but felt it was a risky path. “This morning I saw the EU flag hanging from someone’s balcony. I liked the sentiment but fear that despite people saying we won’t actually leave we will probably have to or there will be riots from all those people who voted leave.”

Another said: “I want another referendum and I want it now. Let’s get back to the EU and work with our neighbours for a better United Kingdom!”

But the more common voice from leavers was to say that things were now settling down and there was a task to get on with. One said: “Things seem to be calming down a bit, people are discussing the Brexit result as if they have accepted it and are moving on to the next stage.”

Summary: Research by BritainThinks has followed the thoughts of leave and remain voters in two areas of the UK since the EU referendum


Q: It amazes me how often well intentioned people donate stained, worn out and damaged clothing to nonprofit organizations. A recent example: a friend accepting donations for Dress for Success here in Denver got push back from a donor who arrived with sacks of dirty, outdated clothing. Nonprofits don’t have the staff or financial resources to clean and repair clothing donations. Could you give your readers some guidelines?—PK, Denver

A: I have always wondered how people had the nerve to dump their dried-out furs, mildewed sneakers and other unwearable discards to a nonprofit organization, which then has to go to the expense to sift through all that trash.

Some organizations will accept used clothing donations, regardless of their condition. Before you donate, check online where most charities spell out what used clothing and other goods they will accept. Of course, smaller charities with limited resources are likely to be more stringent. For example, Dress for Success in Denver, furnishes clothing for people in need to wear to job interviews and work. Suitable donations include clean, pressed gently worn business attire, including suits, blazers and dresses—delivered on hangers—as well as handbags and accessories.

Other nonprofits, such as Goodwill Industries, accept clothing donations of worn textiles of any condition. Goodwill staffers sort the clothes, sending suitable garments to its sales floors, selling the rest to textile recyclers, with the proceeds going to support local programs to help people in need.

Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles, a trade association, estimates that about 45% of recycled clothes are sent abroad to regions such as West Africa, where there is a robust resale marketplace for used clothing.

Astonishing fact: The U.S. generates an estimated 25 billion pounds of textile waste a year from clothes, bedding, draperies and other sources, amounting to about 82 pounds per U.S. resident. Only about 15% gets donated or recycled. The remaining 85%—70 pounds per person—goes into our landfills, according to the Council for Textile Recycling.

Write to Teri Agins at askteri@wsj.com

Summary: Clothing donations are always needed, but there’s steps to take so you don’t create problems for others.


Missouri mother Tina Wells Louden poses with an urn containing her daughter's ashes. (Facebook/Tina Wells Louden)

A grief-stricken Missouri mother has shared a photo of herself with an urn containing her late daughter’s ashes in a bid to make “drug dealers see” the human cost of addiction.

In a post to the Heroin KILLS You Facebook page on August 15, Tina Wells Louden shared a photo of herself resting her face against the rim of an urn, inscribed with her daughter’s name, Ashley N. Shannon, and birth and death date.

“To my daughter's drug dealer, this is how I spend my daughter's birthday now... how do you live with yourself? That's all I wanna know,” she wrote.

The post comes more than three years after 24-year-old Ms Shannon died from a heroin overdose, following a five-year battle with her addiction, local broadcaster KSDK reported.

Ms Louden told KSDK her post has led to a string of messages from addicts and their families.

She said she is hopeful her post will inspire change in readers.

“We live through this pain, every birthday, every holiday, it’s not the same. Part of our heart is gone,” Ms Louden said.

“Maybe it would change somebody.”

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016


09/15/2016 AT 01:15 PM EDT

She's trying to give you more!

says that while she appreciates complimentary fan nicknames like "Godney" and "The Holy Spearit," the titles can feel a little weird.

"That's just how the fans are – and I don't want to let them down," she tells British music magazine

. "At the end of the day we're all human and we all make mistakes. It's really flattering but I don't know if I can set my bar that high!"

Spears understands, though, that her decades in the spotlight have led many fans to feel like they've grown up with her. Her pop dominance has been steadfast – asserted, again, through ninth studio album

Of her continued success, Spears, 34, tells

, "I try not to analyze it too much. I love what I do and I think that helps because it speaks for itself when I perform."

"Seeing other artists continue to do this kind of thing inspires me too," she adds. "Because sometimes I'm like, 'What am I doing? Like, I could be a teacher.' But then I see other people doing it too and I'm like, 'Well, you know, it's probably all they've known for so long, so it just kind of makes sense.' "

is different than any of Spears' previous musical outings, she says. "Honestly, this is the first project where I've really been hands-on. I was really specific about who I worked with and I've been learning to say no."

And saying no involved Spears breaking free of her usual people-pleaser nature, instead, becoming "really selfish."

"I made sure this album was everything I wanted it to be," Spears explains to the magazine.

When she's not focused on her own sound – and her hit Las Vegas show,

– Spears likes to check out the competition.

's 'Lemonade,' " she reveals. "I'm a little late on that, but it's good, really angry, a really hardcore album. There are moments where you feel the light, airy Beyoncé but most of the time it almost feels like a therapy album. I respect that. She's an artist, and that's what she needs to touch on at this moment in her life."

To read the full Spears interview, download your free digital edition of

Summary: Britney Spears tells NME she never wants to let her fans down – which is why the nicknames "Godney" and "The Holy Spearit" bring the pressure


The boat belonging to missing fisherman Norman Bale has been found. (9NEWS)

The boat of a missing mud-crabber has been found partially submerged near Dixon Island, off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia.

Recreational fishermen discovered the boat floating with just the bow visible around midday, WA Police said in a statement.

There was no sign of the vessel’s missing owner, Norman Leslie Bale.

Mr Bale, 52, has been missing since he set off alone in a dinghy from Back Beach boat ramp, 5km east of Karratha, on Friday.

WA army crew searched for Mr Bale using Zodiac boats this morning. (9NEWS)

A police boat is now at the scene and is expected to tow the boat back to the mainland.

The search for Mr Bale continues with aircraft and boats expected to focus on a smaller search area.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016


Activision Blizzard Inc. reports third-quarter earnings after markets close on Thursday, a day before the release of the next installment in its hit “Call of Duty” series. Here are the key points to watch:

EARNINGS FORECAST: Activision Blizzard is expected to report adjusted profit of 42 cents a share, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, compared with 21 cents a year ago. Those results exclude certain items Wall Street thinks aren’t a regular part of business. Activision Blizzard last quarter said it...

Activision Blizzard Inc . reports third-quarter earnings after markets close on Thursday, a day before the release of the next installment in its hit “Call of Duty” series. Here are the key points to watch:

EARNINGS FORECAST: Activision Blizzard is expected to report adjusted profit of 42 cents a share, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, compared with 21 cents a year ago. Those results exclude certain items Wall Street thinks aren’t a regular part of business. Activision Blizzard last quarter said it expects to report a profit of 6 cents a share under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.

REVENUE FORECAST: Adjusted revenue is expected to rise to $1.57 billion, according to Thomson Reuters, from $1.04 billion a year earlier. Activision Blizzard last quarter said it expects GAAP revenue of $1.49 billion, compared with $990 million a year ago.

—FOCUSING ON GAAP: Like rival Electronic Arts Inc., Activision Blizzard is paring back on reporting adjusted figures. The change comes in response to criticism from the Securities and Exchange Commission over companies’ use of metrics that don’t comply with U.S. accounting rules. Under GAAP, revenue from certain online-enabled games is deferred for however long companies think players will use them—about six to nine months. Activision Blizzard has said it would provide guidance on how to factor in deferrals to come up with adjusted figures.

—GROWTH DRIVERS: A major expansion last year to the hit multiplayer shooter “Destiny” generated record digital sales on Sony Corp. ’s PlayStation 4 console. Activision Blizzard expects less revenue from the franchise this time around, as it released a smaller expansion with a lower price tag. Analysts still think overall revenue will climb because of surprisingly robust sales of an expansion in the aging “World of Warcraft” franchise, plus strength in its popular new team-based shooter “Overwatch.”

—KINGLY CONTRIBUTIONS: Recently acquired King Digital Entertainment added $691 million to revenue in the first half of the year, in line with analysts’ expectations. The “Candy Crush Saga” developer had two of the top 15 grossing mobile games on app stores world-wide in the third quarter, according to industry tracker SuperData Research Inc. King may discuss its experiments with in-game advertising on the earnings call.

—BULLISH INVESTORS: Shares are up 19% from a year ago. Investors may be reacting to announcements about the growing “Overwatch” player base and recent e-sports initiatives, said Andrew Uerkwitz, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. For example, Activision Blizzard in October said “Overwatch” had more than 20 million players, suggesting it is as popular as the blockbuster “Call of Duty” franchise. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, meanwhile, dished at a Vanity Affair event that the company is creating a competitive “Overwatch” league.

—WHAT’S AHEAD: With a competitive holiday season afoot, analysts expect conservative guidance for the final quarter. The next “Call of Duty” game, due out Nov. 4, will share shelf space this holiday season with other big-budget war titles, including EA’s “Battlefield 1” and Ubisoft Entertainment SA ’s “Watch Dogs 2.” On the plus side, a new “Skylanders” game won’t face off against Walt Disney Co. , which discontinued its top-selling “toys to life” game “Infinity.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Summary: Activision Blizzard reports third-quarter earnings after markets close on Thursday, a day before the release of the next installment in its hit “Call of Duty” series. Here are the key points to watch.


Wayfair Inc., the Boston-based home furnishing retailer, is not explicitly named as the show’s sponsor in previews of the show.

Boston-based home furnishings e-retailer Wayfair Inc. and A&E Television Networks will soon air a new TV series merging two of the nation’s favorite pastimes: watching TV and online shopping.

The two companies announced Wednesday the co-creation of a new show titled, “The Way Home,” an hour-long program featuring do-it-yourself renovations and home improvements using products solely available from Wayfair.

Nancy Go, Wayfair’s vice president of brand marketing, said the show is an advertising first: uniting television and e-commerce in a TV format that encourages viewers to visit the company’s website.

“This is the next generation of the Home Shopping Network and the Today show,” Go said. “This is a whole new kit and kaboodle.”

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The series will be hosted by interior designer Evette Rios and “life-style expert” Megan Colarossi, who recently finished filming the 10-part series in New York. Go said the hosts will offer tips for saving time and money on home projects and customers will be able to shop live sales events on Wayfair.com following the broadcast.

Wayfair is not explicitly named as the show’s sponsor in previews of the show, which has the look and feel of a morning talk show. Wayfair said it will be clear that viewers can go to the website to purchase items, which can be shipped free by Wayfair.

“We wanted to tell our stories about our products,” Go said.

The show also includes traditional commercials, though none from Wayfair. Go did not know who had bought that airtime.

The industry publication Adweek, which first wrote about the new program, called it the network’s “most ambitious branded content push yet.”

The series will premiere on Oct. 22 at 11 a.m. on the Lifetime channel.

Summary: The show is an advertising first: uniting TV and e-commerce in a format that encourages viewers to visit the company’s website.


When it comes to food, the principles of supply and demand do not always apply. Food is about the senses, and its value is determined by something less rational. Rarity may put a special gloss  and price  on some foods, but so will fashion and the perennial need for new flavors.

For example, monkfish was once considered trash fish in New England. In the 1970's, it was rumored that unscrupulous scallop processors would cut rounds from the tails, bleach, bread and freeze them and sell them as ersatz scallops. Then American fishery stocks began declining at the same time that interest in Continental cuisine was growing. "As people became more worldly and looked up to France as the guiding light with food," said Jasper White, the chef and owner of Summer Shack, which has four locations in the Northeast, "people started taking monkfish seriously." Some began calling it "poor man's lobster." (If you poach monkfish and sniff the liquid, you'll understand why.) It now sells for up to $20 a pound in New York City.

Better the poor man's lobster than the blind man's scallop.

Lobster, in fact, was once an East Coast staple of those in debt. When the food writer and former Times reporter Nancy Harmon Jenkins was young, her mother would dismiss her complaints about her family's thriftiness by saying: "Poor, child! Why, we were so poor when I was growing up that all we had to eat was salt fish and lobster." In the early 20th century, impoverished Mainers subsisted on what was at hand, choking down that lobster.

"The reality is that it's subsistence if you can get it," said Sandra Oliver, the editor of Food History News. "It's a valuable food if you can sell it."

Fashion has always been a powerful and unwieldy influence on a food's value. It was less than a century ago that New York's top restaurants served terrapin  a small turtle  as if it were foie gras. And even 20 years ago the idea of paying to eat sea urchin seemed as ridiculous as paying for bottled water.

Likewise, there was a time in Italy when white truffles were eaten as a vegetable, like peas. And in Russia, caviar was once used to clarify broth.

Leeks have had more ups and downs than Al Gore. In Rome, they were prized by Nero, who ate them to improve his singing voice. Later, in Britain, they came to symbolize the proletariat: in Jane Grigson's "Vegetable Book," a salad of leeks dressed with vinaigrette and chopped egg was called "poor man's asparagus." But by the early 20th century, leeks were revived once more, this time by a French chef in America, who put them into a chilled potato soup, added cream and sold them under the more palatable guise of vichyssoise. Now they're just sort of. . .leeks.

A nifty name can change a food's fortunes (which may explain why the suet-and-raisin pudding that the British call spotted dick has never taken hold here). Before squid became calamari, fishermen would often leave it on the docks for the sea gulls. The Patagonian toothfish didn't seem toothsome until it became Chilean sea bass. And stocks of dogfish were nearly wiped out not once but twice, though only after the fish became known first as rock salmon and later as Cape shark.

Then there is the bell-cow effect. Jasper White, who had grown up being told to throw back the spiny sea robins that fouled his lines (actually, to kill them first, then throw them back), learned that the fish were an essential flavor component in bouillabaisse and eventually added them to his pot. "That was four summers ago," he said. "We were buying it for 40 cents a pound." A handful of Boston chefs followed suit. "Within two years, they got it up to $2 a pound."

Short ribs took a similar rags-to-riches path. As steaks became cheaper and more widely available in the 1970's, lesser cuts like short ribs, which are fatty and require long cooking, were nearly driven out of the market. For years almost no one ate them  which put the cut in a perfect position to be rediscovered by Mario Batali and a few other top chefs who would elevate their menu price into the realm of a luxury food.

Chefs have been spinning peasant fare into gold for centuries. Darra Goldstein, the editor of Gastronomica, observes that the charlotte  a layered confection that originated in the 18th century  was "a pudding of leftovers." In the early 19th century, the chef Antonin Carême gave it a makeover. He swapped the bread for ladyfingers and added cream, and soon it was being served on bone china.

Some lowly foods may always remain a bargain. A recipe for "poor man's pudding" in "The Fannie Farmer Cookbook" contains nothing more than rice, milk, molasses, cinnamon, salt and butter. (No rich woman would have her cook use an unrefined sugar like molasses in her pudding.) In the 1970 revised edition of "The James Beard Cookbook," Beard featured virtually the same recipe (without crediting Farmer), but even he couldn't turn it into the next pot de crème.

The only true luxury foods remain those that are actually scarce: wild Atlantic salmon, hand-harvested oysters, wild herbs and game. Though hard to find, these delicacies are available to all comers in the wild, if you know where and how to procure them. But since most of us don't, we'll happily, even blindly, spend our savings on them  and apparently anything else deemed delicious, novel and valuable.

Salt 1 ¾ pounds monkfish, cut into 3-inch pieces 1 ½ cups chopped celery 1 ½ tablespoons sliced scallions 1 ½ tablespoons sliced chives 1 teaspoon chopped tarragon 1/3 cup mayonnaise 1 tablespoon lemon juice Zest of one lemon Freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons butter, softened 4 hot-dog rolls.

1. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer, add the monkfish and poach for 8 to 10 minutes, or until fully cooked. Drain, then remove the dark veins and membrane and discard. Pull the monkfish into bite-size pieces and place them in a large bowl.

2. Add the celery, scallions, chives, tarragon, mayonnaise, lemon juice and zest. Season with salt and pepper. Blend until the fish is evenly coated with the dressing.

3. Butter the cut sides of the hot-dog buns and toast either under a broiler or in a nonstick pan over medium heat. Fill each roll with a helping of monkfish salad. Serves 4.

Leeks have gone in and out of favor throughout history. Here I've prepared them as I might the more esteemed asparagus: blanch the leeks, then slather them with butter mixed with pungent anchovy (another looked-down-upon ingredient).

Salt 6 thin leeks, trimmed, halved lengthwise and washed 4 tablespoons butter, softened 4 anchovy fillets, drained 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon chopped basil 1 tablespoon chopped shallot 1 teaspoon lemon juice, plus more to taste Freshly ground black pepper.

1. Using cooking twine, tie the leeks into two bunches. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the leeks and cook until tender, 6 to 8 minutes. Drop into ice water to stop the cooking. Drain, then press out excess water on a towel. Set cut-side up in a large baking dish.

2. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place the butter, anchovies, parsley, basil, shallot and lemon juice in a large bowl. Mash with a fork or potato masher until well blended and the anchovies have dissolved into a paste. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

3. Spread the butter mixture over the cut sides of the leeks. Bake for 5 minutes or until warmed through. Squeeze over more lemon juice, if you like. Serves 4.

4 cups milk 1/2 cup white rice, rinsed 1/3 cup molasses 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 tablespoon butter, cut into pieces, and more for buttering dish.

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the milk, rice, molasses, salt and cinnamon. Pour into a buttered pudding dish. Bake for 3 hours, stirring 3 times during the first hour to prevent the rice from settling. At the last stirring, add the butter. Serves 4. Adapted from ''The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book 1896'' by Fannie Merritt Farmer.

Summary: Blue-chip ingredients from humble stock (or the rise and fall of dogfish).


Posted Jun 20th 2006 2:01AM by TMZ Staff

Keanu Reeves now says money means nothing to him. He's quoted in an article published saying "...I want to enjoy life and not stress myself building my bank account."

Here's the deal about Keanu's deals. Reports are that he made $15 mil for the last two Matrix movies, plus I might add 15% of the gross.

Speaking of gross, Reeves statements ring a little less than real. I can tell you he owns a pretty amazing house with incredible views in the Hollywood Hills, on a street tour guides call "hunk alley." His neighbors are Toby and Leo and the price tags on the homes each exceed $7 million.

As for Keanu's crib, he's spending a huge chunk of change completely renovating it. Keanu tells contactmusic.com. he lives "simply, mostly out of a suitcase in hotels."

Well a friend of mine lives near the house Keanu is renting while his house in under construction, and the buzz is that he's dropping 15 g's a month for the rental. My friend sees him all the time driving in and out on his motorcycle.

Keanu says "good health is much more important" than money. Clearly he's right. It's just so easy to sound like a vagabond when you're enconsed in the hottest neighborhood in L.A. Not a big deal, I suppose. Just a little irksome.


Monday, August 5th 1996, 2:00AM

THERE is one mind-blowing moment in every life, says Linda Reid, and for her, it came in a small-town nightclub in Georgia where she was vacationing.

"There was this belly dancer," she says. "I'd never seen one, and all I could think was, 'This I gotta do.' "

That was six years ago, and here she is, little cymbals on her fingers, barefoot, wearing a flimsy green and silver outfit glittering with sequins, and ready to perform something called a zill dance.

Reid is an English teacher by day, and by night is one of six members of Caring Caravan, a volunteer troupe that takes belly dancing to senior citizen centers and nursing homes.

"They tell us we make a nice change from the violin players and sing-alongs," says Pamela Pearce, a writer and co-founder of the group.

This weekend, they entertained at an annual dinner-dance sponsored by the nonprofit Project FIND, which runs five West Side senior centers, a homeless drop-in site and three senior citizen residences.

Last weekend, it was Ronald McDonald House, a temporary home on the upper East Side for boys and girls battling cancer.

Pearce and co-founder Stella Grey, a commodities broker-turned-criminal justice researcher, were a bit uneasy about the Ronald McDonald gig. They weren't sure that something so exotic would appeal to the kids.

But when the Caring Caravan hit the floor, all shimmies and shakes, bare feet and bellybuttons, tambourines and veils, the kids clapped and yelled. A few even tried a few slinky steps of their own.

Afterward, Pearce wasn't really surprised. "Who doesn't like belly dancing?" she says.

Pearce speaks with missionary zeal about the pleasures and artistic role of belly dancers. "They're not just sequined hussies," she says. "They are classical artists."

None of the six members has any ancestral ties with the Middle East, the historic home of belly dancing, but all have adopted stage names that sound like a night in the Kasbah Pearce is "Kismet," Grey is "Paschia."

The other members of the troupe, recruited by Pearce and Grey, include Kristen Reimer, a photographer who lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; B.G. Bally, a Manhattan housewife, and Joan Engel, who lives in Jersey City and describes herself as a canine behavioralist.

"Our slogan," says Pearce, is 'Shimmying in service to the community,' and we're the ultimate volunteer project."

The group's performances are a mix of solos that combine high art and hootchy-kootchy with some historical touches, ranging from Cleopatra complete with toy asp to Little Egypt, who reputedly introduced belly dancing to Americans in 1893 at the World's Fair in Chicago. As tradition dictates, Caring Caravan performs in skimpy, spangled outfits dripping with silver, gold and glittery sequins, chains and tiaras.

There are a couple other belly dancing groups around the city, but, Grey says, Caring Caravan is the only one she knows that performs regularly. One fairly regular engagement is at Le Figaro Cafe in Greenwich Village.

It started about three years ago with Pearce, a belly dancing fan from childhood "my first Halloween costume was a harem girl outfit."

She was taking dancing lessons when she met Grey, who became hooked on belly dancing during a vacation in Morocco in the early '80s.

"Pamela and I decided to recruit some other dancers and get serious," Grey says.

The troupe's first gig, in December 1993, was at the Daughters of Jacob Geriatric Center in the Bronx. Soon the word got around and the invitations started coming in.

"Of course, some people think it's all just bump and grind," says Grey, "and there's some truth to that. But it's very artistic bump and grind."

Summary: THERE is one mind-blowing moment in every life, says Linda Reid, and for her, it came in a small-town nightclub in Georgia where she was vacationing. "There was this belly dancer,"she says. "I'd never seen one, and all I could think was, 'This I gotta do.' "That was six years ago, and here she is, little cymbals on her fingers, barefoot, wearing a flimsy green and silver outfit glittering with sequins,


Friday, June 24th 2005, 1:10AM

AFTER THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. (212-239-6200). Elaine May has written three one-act comedies about life today.

ALL SHOOK UP. Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway (212-307-4100). Built around a collection of Elvis Presley tunes and set

in a town that's changed

forever when a young man

AVENUE Q. Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). Singing, dancing

and lusting puppets that you'll never see on kids' TV.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St. (212-307-4100). Disney's animated cartoon comes to life.

BROOKLYN, THE MUSICAL. Plymouth Theatre, 236 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). Closes Sunday. Known for

the leather lungs of Eden

Espinosa and its use of

CHICAGO. Ambassador Theatre, 219 W. 49th St. (212-239-6200). Charlotte d'Amboise stars as Roxie Hart and Brenda Braxton

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG. Hilton Theatre,

213 W. 42nd St. (212-307-4100). The star of this

1968 Dick Van Dyke movie

is Chitty itself, but Raul

Esparza and Erin Dilly lead the carbon-based cast.

227 W. 42nd St. (212-719-1300). Kate Burton stars as a wife who trades her husband's fidelity for financial security in a comedy written by W. Somerset Maugham.

Theatre, 249 W. 47th St. (212-239-6200). Norbert Leo Butz and John Lithgow are an ill-matched pair of con men on the French Riviera

DOUBT. Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St. (212-239-6200). Did the young priest commit an unspeakable

offense with a student in this 1964 Bronx parochial school? Performances by Cherry Jones and BrÃan F. O'Byrne add to the emotional impact.

Minskoff Theatre, 200 W. 45th St. (212-307-4100). Harvey Fierstein is Tevye,

and Andrea Martin is his wife, Golde, in this revival.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. (212-239-6200). Closes July 17. Jessica Lange and Christian Slater head a revival of the Tennessee Williams memory play.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. Royale Theatre, 242 W.

45th St. (212-239-6200). David Mamet's morality play set in a real estate sales

office gets a gritty revival with Liev Schreiber, Alan Alda, Gordon Clapp, Tom Wopat and Jeffrey Tambor.

Theatre, 250 W. 52nd St. (212-307-4100). The rock

'n' roll story of Tracy Turnblad, a big girl with big dreams and bigger hair. Bruce Vilanch is her mom.

JACKIE MASON: FRESHLY SQUEEZED. Helen Hayes

Theatre, 240 W. 44th St. (212-239-6200). Who knew one man could find enough funny new things to fill his

Marquis Theatre, 211 W. 45th St. (212-307-4100). Robert Goulet has a final kiss with his partner Gary Beach in this Jerry Herman revival. Closes Sunday.

THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. Vivian Beaumont Theater,

150 W. 65th St. (212-239-6200). Love blooms in

Florence for an American girl and an Italian boy in this new

musical with a brilliant score by Adam Guettel.

THE LION KING. New Amsterdam Theatre, 214 W. 42nd St. (212-307-4100). After nearly eight years, it's just possible you can get tickets to Julie Taymor's production.

MAMMA MIA! Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway (212-239-6200). The musical that launched the juke-box craze, this is ABBA's greatest hits woven in a

story of a single mother and her daughter's wedding.

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT! Brooks Atkinson Theatre,

256 W. 47th St. (212-307-4100) Hal Holbrook returns as the white-shirted humorist in the show he originated in 1954. Closes Sunday.

Theatre, 225 W. 44th St. (212-239-6200). Faithful

to the movie version of "The Holy Grail" - until God tells King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table to put on a Broadway show.

MOVIN' OUT. Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St. (212-307-4100). Billy Joel's music and Twyla Tharp's choreography follow friends through two decades.

Theatre, 138 W. 48th St.

(212-239-6200). An elderly couple makes a last trip to their summer home in Maine. Closes Sunday due to illness of star James Earl Jones.

OPERA. Majestic Theatre, 247 W. 44th St. (212-239-6200). Now in its 18th year and within months of passing "Cats" as Broadway's longest-running show.

to the music of the night.

PILLOWMAN. Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). A writer whose

stories match actual child murders is questioned by police in this drama starring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum.

THE PRODUCERS. St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St. (212-239-6200). Of course Max Bialystock lies, cheats and swindles little old ladies. He's a producer!

RENT. Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St. (212-921-8000). In its 10th year, this musical of "La Boheme" is set in the East Village.

Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). The ensemble cast includes Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole and Rebecca Gayheart, but Frances Sternhagen gets most of the laughs.

DESIRE. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. (212-719-1300).

Closes July 3. Natasha Richardson is Blanche and John C. Reilly is Stanley in this

SWEET CHARITY. Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). Christina Applegate plays hopelessly romantic taxi dancer Charity Hope Valentine in the revival of the Cy Coleman musical.

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE. Circle in the Square, 50th St., between Broadway and Eighth Ave. (212-239-6200). Can you spell success? How about Tony?

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Longacre

Theatre, 220 W. 48th St. (212-239-6200). Kathleen Turner was born to play Martha, but the revelation is Tony winner Bill Irwin as George.

WICKED. Gershwin Theatre, 222 W. 51st St. (212-307-4100). Ben Vereen plays the Wizard in this Stephen Schwartz musical about the lives of two girls from Oz.

Stages, 340 W. 50th St. (212-239-6200).

THE AWESOME '80S PROM. Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (212-352-3101).

BLUE MAN GROUP. Astor Place Theatre, 434 Lafayette St. (212-254-4370).

BRITS OFF BROADWAY. 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (212-279-4200).

Atlantic Theater Co., 336 W. 20th St. (212-239-6200).

Stages, 340 W. 50th St. (212-239-6200).

HURLYBURLY. 37 Arts, 450 W. 37th St. (212-239-6200).

PERFECT, NOW CHANGE. Westside Theatre, 407 W. 43rd St. (212-239-6200).

Theatre Downstairs, 407 W. 43rd St. (212-239-6200).

MANUSCRIPT. Daryl Roth Theatre, 101 E. 15th St. (212-239-6200).

MENOPAUSE: THE MUSICAL. Playhouse 91, 316 E. 91st St. (212-307-4100).

THE MUSICAL OF MUSICALS: THE MUSICAL!

Dodger Stages, 340 W. 50th St. (212-239-6200).

Julia Miles Theater, 424 W. 55th St. (212-239-6200).

ORSON'S SHADOW. Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. (212-239-6200).

THE PARIS LETTER. Laura Pels Theater, 111 W. 46th St. (212-719-1300).

TERRORISM. Harold Clurman Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St. (212-279-4200). Thru Sunday.

Summary: GO! THEATER. On Broadway, Off Broadway & Everything In Between! BROADWAY AFTER THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. (212-239-6200). Elaine May has written three one-act comedies about life today. ALL SHOOK UP. Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway (212-307-4100). Built around a collection of Elvis Presley tunes and set in a town that's changed forever when a young man arrives on a motorcycle. AVENUE Q. Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. (212-239-6200). Singing,


The second season premiere of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills dealt with the suicide of cast member Taylor Armstrong's estranged husband, Russell Armstrong head on.

Although Bravo opted against pushing back the new season after Armstrong's suicide on Aug. 15, the show devoted the first few minutes to showing the reactions of the various other housewives and their husbands.

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills will keep original premiere date

"In the last two weeks after I heard about the news of Russell's suicide, I feel I've been on an emotional rollercoaster," Adrienne Maloof told the cameras in a somber segment filmed on Aug. 29. "This is the time when all the women should get together and find a way to help support each other."

The various cast members gathered at Maloof's house and shared their reactions to the news. The housewives also discussed the speculation about the various reasons why Armstrong might have taken his — namely the importance of financial status in the 90210 zip code. "It was too much pressure," Kyle Richards said. Bravo President: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills will be re-edited

Lisa Vanderpump and Camille Grammer also discussed the women's lack of a bond with Russell, who in the first season was depicted as distant and reserved in comparison to his more fun-loving wife. "I think a lot of us have some guilt about not seeing this coming," Richards said, tearing up. "For me, it's very hard to move forward because it is such a tragic situation and so many people have been left hurt by it."

However, Richards noted, "Life goes on. It has to." And so, after a quick note explaining that the season was shot prior to Russell's death, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills quickly returned to its regularly scheduled programming of dress shopping, dinner parties and lots of drama.

Lawyer: Russell Armstrong to be cremated, ashes to be divided

The only noticeable cut made to the premiere episode (an early version was sent to critics prior to Russell's suicide) was a segment in which Taylor was seen shopping for lingerie in hopes of spicing up her and Russell's sex life. However, Taylor's discussion of her and Russell's marital problems and subsequent therapy sessions remained in the episode. Russell never originally appeared in the Season 2 premiere, so it is still unknown exactly what his presence will be in future episodes.

What did you think of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season premiere? Do you think the show handled Russell Armstrong's suicide in the right way? Should Bravo have pushed back the new season? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

View original Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Premiere Confronts Russell Armstrong's Suicide Head On at TVGuide.com


Apr 14th 2011, 16:33 by G.F. | SEATTLE

THE most dubious phrase in English after "act natural" is "trust me". A party asking for trust without offering a reason why is probably untrustworthy. And yet the internet's entire security ecosystem relies on precisely that reasoning. Browsers believe in the integrity of secured websites based on other unknown parties' word. In these complicated times such implicit trust may be misplaced. Thankfully, work is afoot to change how trust is assigned, and it cannot come too quickly.

A month ago, this Babbage extolled Democratic Senator Charles Schumer's exhortations to major web companies to make secure connections the default method for users. This would keep malicious parties from hijacking sessions with social media and other sites on open networks, especially Wi-Fi hot spots.

Commenters suggested your correspondent was naive, and perhaps rightly so. The encryption used by secure websites relies on tenuous relationships. Critics noted that the system that validates the integrity of a protected connection may already be subverted by nations and individuals. In fact, a breach of security at Comodo, a firm that creates security documents for websites, among its other businesses, revealed just how weak the system is. Allegedly, an Iranian cracker was able to issue himself—through a Comodo affiliate—valid certificates for domains at Skype and other firms.

When a surfer connects to a site that uses something called SSL/TLS, the only worldwide standard used to initiate and encrypt connections, a web server provides information that the surfer's browser is meant to check. The information comes in the form of a certificate, which is counter-signed by third parties known as certificate authorities (CAs). (Private web and other communications use variants of this approach; its strength can be ratcheted up, too.)

CAs are, in turn, signed off on by browser makers and operating-system (OS) designers—some browsers consult an internal list of CAs and others turn to a list embedded in the OS. In either case, the system uses detail provided by the CA to confirm that the certificate is legitimate. But what does legitimate mean, in this context? Well, just that a CA says it is legitimate. In other words, "trust me". Currently, any CA in the world may vouch for the authenticity and integrity of a certificate for any domain name in the world, as it pleases.

Many governments have indirect or direct ties to some of the hundreds of CAs approved by Microsoft (OS and Internet Explorer), Apple (OS and Safari), the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) and Google (Chrome). Democracies like Britain or the United States might formerly have adopted a hands-off policy on such matters. But shell games with certificates can, in principle, be used to intercept nominally secure data. Worse still, such ploys are often undetectable. But not all countries are democracies. And even those can sometimes be a little too prying.

SSL/TLS certificates are scoped to a specific name at a domain, such as www.economist.com. When a secure URL is entered or clicked in a browser, the operating system converts this name into a machine-readable address like, for The Economist, 64.14.173.20, using the decentralised domain-name system (DNS) to handle the query. However, DNS can easily be subverted: a home computer can be infected with a virus which rewrites the queries before they get to the DNS server and diverts them to a malicious site; at the other end of the scale, a sovereign can mislead all the machines connected anywhere in a given country. (This is routine at Wi-Fi hotspots. After you connect to most such networks and try to view a page, your browser is redirected to a "splash" page for logging in or accepting usage terms. The DNS request is intercepted and rewritten by a device on the venue's network.)

The secure web infrastructure was designed in part to defend against this. The browser may be tricked into connecting to a server designed to extract your identity or intercept communications, but the browser will see the wolf under the sheep's clothing. It will alert the user and hinder him from connecting to a server that lacks a certificate, issued by some CA, for the domain it claims to be representing. But if a valid certificate can be obtained, neither the user nor the browser have any idea that they have been hijacked.

These issues are well known to the boffins who run the parts of the internet most users never need to know about. Stephen Schultze, the associate director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, says that a number of changes in how people apportion trust could alleviate the most severe risks of the present system.

First, browser and OS makers ought to prevent CAs from issuing certificates willy-nilly, but so far have not been serious about it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other OS and browser firms may offend governments in countries in which they do business by not accepting all certificates as valid from CAs with sovereign or nepotistic ties, and limiting them to validating specific country domains (such as .cn or .uk). But Mr Schultze says these firms may stiffen their resolve after recent breaches, which affect their own businesses and give the heebie-jeebies to their customers. At the very least, CAs may be subject to stricter vetting (and perhaps auditing) to be included on approved lists.

Second, browsers could offer tools that resemble ad blockers or spam blacklists that would allow non-expert users to avoid connections to illegitimate sites that seem to have been validated. Along these lines, Google announced on April 1st that it had assembled, and would update a global almanac of SSL/TLS certificates. It retrieves security data routinely while indexing the web. These data could be consulted by browsers or third-party plugins to sniff out unusual changes in security documents and warn users—or simply prevent a connection.

Finally, a comprehensive solution would let domain owners confirm that the names and machine numbers issued by a given CA are kosher. Under DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), a standard being developed by Mr Schultze and others at the Internet Engineering Task Force, a browser retrieves a certificate from a web server, but checks with the DNS whether the certificate is in fact the one that was issued to a given domain owner. So, though a CA will still provide a validation step, the domain owner will have had to give it the thumbs up first. To prevent malevolent fiddling the DNS infrastructure itself needs to be secured, too. A long-running effort to do this, known as DNSSEC, hit a key milestone in 2010 and may have enough pieces in place soon to be usable. This is important because DANE would be incomplete without it.

Whilst all current browsers must be updated to take advantage of DANE, the new system can coexist with the old, and a gradual transition can be made. Browser plug-ins could bridge the gap before browser makers build in DANE, too. Those that want the added robustness of the new system—whether individuals, companies, or governments—may accelerate the adoption of updated browsers as DANE becomes available.

These moves do not provide total assurance that what your browser is told about an internet site's identity and security is true. Trust, but verify—and verify again.


From left: Blake Shelton, Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine

will premiere Sunday – right after the

– it won't be until night two that the coaches

, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine will perform a rocking Prince medley.

The two-hour show will also feature more blind auditions as the coaches build their teams and prepare to go head-to-head in a full season of NBC's hit singing competition.

Just don't expect to see a slew of bad singers.

"We all told them we're not signing up for this show if it's about ridiculing someone or mocking talent," Aguilera told reporters this month.

"This show is about artist development," added Green.

Prepared to defend his winning title, Levine, who coached season 1 winner

, says the level of talent this year "is pretty high, so you can be honest and say, 'This isn't your best,' rather than they suck."

Summary: The singers will perform a medley by the rock icon on night two of the show's auditions


LOS ANGELES – Britney Spears was nowhere to be found at Paris Hilton’s TYKU-sponsored Studio 54-themed birthday bash at her private residence on the weekend, however her boyfriend/agent Jason Trawick was pretty comfortable at the party without her – maybe a little too comfortable.

“Jason arrived with a male friend, but was definitely enjoying himself until DJ Mr. Best, threw on Britney Spears' song ‘Toxic,’” an insider told Pop Tarts. “When the song came on the first thing out of Jason’s mouth was ‘OMG I hate this song!’ His friends all laughed and continued to talk, but he interrupted them by saying, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying over her voice.’ He wasn’t laughing.”

SLIDESHOW: The Lovely and Talented Britney Spears

And after slamming his girl’s music, Trawick continued to party – even when other peeps asked if he was going to leave soon he replied “Nope, I’m all good” before eventually being one of the last out the door around 3 a.m.

Spears and Trawick have been dating since early last year, and despite all the rumors that the pop princess was desperate for the William Morris agent to put a ring on it, an inside source said that it was really Spears’ dad Jamie that was pushing the relationship due to Jason’s “good influence” on his troubled daughter.

But let’s go back to Hilton for a moment – seriously, the girl threw herself about half-a-dozen birthday parties in different cities over the last ten days to celebrate turning 29. Goodness knows what it will be like this time next year!

And surprise surprise, at this final party, Hilton spent the evening twirling and whirling from the stripper pole she has installed in the “club” room in her house.

“Paris was having a really good time, at one point later in the night; she had a quick outfit change and came right back to continue dancing the night away. Hayden (Panettiere) was there with a group of girls and was also dancing up a storm,” dished our insider. “Hayden was dressed up in a slightly trampy looking gold-sequined dress with long dark wavy auburn hair and dramatic peacock eyelash extensions.”

Guests enjoyed Vita Coco and Ciroc-tinis and gathered in her dining room to toast & sing Happy Birthday to the heiress. We’re also told that Hilton’s beau Doug Reinhardt followed her around the entire evening, as did another male admirer and former flame.

“Brandon Davis was following Paris and Nicky around like a puppy dog and was pretty intoxicated,” said another partier.

Summary: Sources overhear Jason Trawick dissing Brit's music in public.


"It's really exhausting, and I find all the hoopla around it extraordinary," the fortysomething married mother of two teenage boys says in an interview with USA TODAY at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the nation's capital. "But it's great to meet people who really love the books, just to say thanks, if nothing else, and just exchange a few words. I really enjoy that."

Thousands of fans have lined up in Miami, Chicago and Philadelphia to have copies of Fifty Shades autographed since James' book tour began in late April.

And it's not just books she's signing. Fans are asking her to sign gray neckties, T-shirts, even iPads, Nooks and Kindles. Police officers, she says, laughing, have had her autograph handcuffs.

Despite all the fan enthusiasm, James (whose real name is Erika Leonard) says the depth of her newfound fame and fortune hasn't sunk in. "It's very strange," she says, brushing her brunet bangs off her forehead. "It's just that everything has happened so quickly. It's like it's happening to someone else. They've just been shipping out books like nobody's business."

And that's no overstatement. The erotic novels, about a virginal college student named Anastasia who enters a submissive sexual relationship with Christian Grey, a handsome young billionaire, were first published by a small Australian publisher last May, largely as e-books.

They became such hot properties — dubbed "Mommy porn" by some wags — that Vintage, a division of Random House, bought the rights.

In April, Vintage's paperback editions began selling here. In less than a month, Vintage has sold 3 million copies (digital and print) of the trilogy.

Fifty Shades of Grey, first in the series, is No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, a spot it's held for two weeks. They are best sellers in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and nearly three dozen other countries will be selling them in translation soon.

All the attention, James says, is sometimes overwhelming. "In New Haven (Conn.), I went into a room and there were about 1,000 women in there, and they all started applauding, and I started to cry. The response has been so extraordinary, so no, I'm not used to it yet. Part of me loves it, but I'd rather be at home writing."

James, a former BBC production executive, is beginning to understand what people like about the books.

"It's a combination of things. Fundamentally, people like a good love story. That's it," she says. "They like the sex as well. They love Christian Grey, a complicated, damaged, talented man. He's very capable and strong and domineering but broken. So he's a fixer-upper. I mean, it's a fantasy — the whole book — and so they bought into it and suspended their disbelief. Gone on a vacation really."

Stella Lee, 27, of Baltimore brought her husband, Nelson, with her to James' book signing at the Bethesda, Md., Barnes & Noble last week.

While waiting in line to meet James, she laughs and reveals she has read the series five times. "There's so much talk about the S & M, but it's just so romantic. The love between the characters is so endearing. I just love Christian Grey."

Robin Preston, 50, of Alexandria, Va., also waiting to have her books signed, says the series "consumed" her. "I fell in love with the characters. I'm not much of a fiction reader, but this kept my interest. I could not put them down."

And how James came to write her famous erotic trilogy is equally fantastic.

After reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, about a high school girl who falls in love with a handsome vampire, James began writing fan fiction about Edward and Bella, the Twilight protagonists.

But it was far less chaste than anything Meyer ever wrote. "It was very sexy," James says, and the story of Christian and Anastasia is basically that fan fiction. "I had to tone it down and alter certain bits of it for publication, but fundamentally, it's the same sort of story."

Fever-pitch excitement for the novels heated up more after Universal and Focus Features bought the movie rights. As for who she thinks would be the perfect on-screen Christian and Anastasia, James will say only, "I'm keeping very quiet about all of that."

She's also deflecting questions about whether she and her husband have experience with domination — "I've a little bit of experience, but I think that's mostly between me and my husband" — and says most of her research for the books was done on the Internet, "but also just thinking things through in my head."

She also knows she's influencing the sex lives of her fans.

"Yes, oh, God, yes. They say: 'You've really spiced up my marriage. Thank you very much, and my husband thanks you, too.' Of the thousands of e-mails I get, that's the main tenet. I get so many lovely e-mails. I think it's great. I say go for it. I think that's wonderful."

But she's not, she says, "making any huge statements" about lifestyle. "It's about having fun. What people get up to in the bedroom is entirely their own thing, and as long as it's safe, sane and consensual — those are the watch words of the BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) community — who are we to judge?"

Summary: But the sudden popularity of her erotic trilogy can be a bit overwhelming for the British author.


By Anatole Broyard DOWN AND OUT IN CAMBRIDGE. By Douglas Fairbairn. 300 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $14.95.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES used to be about successes, and now they're often about failures, which may be more interesting. Our fiction has so accustomed us to failure that we feel almost uneasy reading about success, as if it were the pursuit of the vulgar, and failure a long, profound meditation. There is even a suggestion in some books that it takes will and moral courage to fail.

In ''Down and Out in Cambridge,'' charm is one of the byproducts of failure. In living by his wits, the unsuccessful protagonist develops soft and agile qualities. His life is made up of inchoate metaphors, which a successful man would have aggressively overborne.

Mr. Fairbairn's autobiography is probably modeled after George Orwell's ''Down and Out in Paris and London,'' his most literary book. Orwell was a cheerful failure in that book, having quaint, bemused, ironic adventures, and this is what Douglas Fairbairn does too.

As a boy he had the kind of harrowing and happy life that only American childhoods seem to offer, moving from one house to another in the small towns of Depression-haunted Florida, watching his idle, handsome father punt a football on the empty beaches, wetting his bed until he was 14 in a protest that he never understood, and then seeing his mother helplessly deranged by illness.

When his mother died, his father's good humor died with her, and he threw his son out. There was nothing for Mr. Fairbairn to do but go to Harvard, and once at Harvard he was inevitably suspended for drunkenness. After that he returned to Florida and worked for two years on a line gang for a utilities company.

This show of penitence got him readmitted to Harvard, and he began to hang around in the Lampoon building, where he did covers for the magazine. Mr. Fairbairn also wrote 100 pages of a novel; and once that he had received an enthusiastic letter from an editor in a New York City publishing house, he immediately sat down and began revising all the life out of his manuscript. Though he never advanced beyond the 100 pages, the letter from the publisher became his credentials, his credit card and his bad conscience.

When he was expelled from Harvard again, he began to live in the Lampoon building, where there were no facilities, where he slept on a couch in the Ibis Room, covered with Inverness capes left over from theatricals, and robbed the cash box for food. He had his first love affair with a rich Radcliffe girl named Moran, who would say after their lovemaking: ''Well, I'm all done. How about you?''

Mr. Fairbairn was elected president of The Lampoon, even though he was no longer formally attached to Harvard, and George Plimpton came to live in the Lampoon buiding too. He is pictured as tossing a sock repeatedly in the air, trying to hang it on a petrified blowfish suspended from the high ceiling.

Like Orwell, Mr. Fairbairn worked at menial jobs, as a busboy, for example, and a loader of sugar. He passed a month in a Boston hospital as a paid subject in some kind of nutritional study, then took a job as a deckhand on a yacht, where he spent his evenings watching old movies starring Turhan Bey, Sonny Tufts and Dane Clark. As anyone could see, he was stockpiling irrelevancies, practicing disconsolateness, preparing for his future as a writer.

On another yacht he went to Cannes, France, where for awhile he was disturbed by the ''strident'' voice of the Duchess of Windsor giving orders about menus and flowers on a neighboring yacht. Whatever the Duke did on deck, even when he tossed a match over the side after lighting his pipe, the tourists on the quai would applaud.

Mr. Fairbairn had his second love affair, with an 18-year-old French girl, in a quaint hotel with a balcony on the waterfront and gypsy music drifting up from the cafe below. Obviously, the idle life could offer no more, so he went back to the United States and wrote a novel, ''A Man's World,'' that was published in 1956 by Simon & Schuster. Joanne Woodward starred in a ''Studio One'' television adaptation of the novel.

It was a lucky turn for Mr. Fairbairn, who went on to write five more novels, but a poor way to end ''Down and Out in Cambridge,'' just when we were all enjoying the picaresque pleasures of failure.

Illustrations: photo of Douglas Fairbairn


Sep 11th 2012, 10:46 by T.P. | BEIJING

“I HOPE you will raise serious questions.”

This was the reply a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Hong Lei, gave on Tuesday afternoon at a press briefing in Beijing. His answer struck many of the reporters who had gathered for a regular daily session as rather odd, given that the question he had been asked seemed anything but frivolous. It was from a foreign reporter who, after noting accurately that Xi Jinping’s disappearance from public view in recent days had prompted many rumours, asked whether it was related to any instability within the Chinese government, and indeed whether Mr Xi was still alive.

A clear answer as to Mr Xi’s whereabouts or condition would have put the matter quickly to rest. But no such answer was forthcoming. Asked moments earlier whether Mr Xi had been injured or whether he was “fit and well”, Mr Hong replied tersely, “I have no information on that to provide to you.”

And with that Mr Hong was done. Reporters were not, but to all subsequent questions on the topic, Mr Hong replied simply that he had already answered.

Questions do linger, and not only about Mr Xi’s health. That in itself is of course a matter of great import. He is currently China’s vice president, looks a bullish 59 years old, and has been groomed as the man who in coming months will replace Hu Jintao, the outgoing president and Communist Party chief, to lead China for the next ten years.

Beyond the immediate questions about Mr Xi’s physical and political well-being loom other disturbing questions about the widening mismatch between China’s Leninist politics and black-box opacity on the one hand, and its growing economic and political importance on the other.

Last week, when Mr Xi cancelled a scheduled meeting with America’s visiting secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, it seemed possible that it was a snub designed to express dissatisfaction over policy disputes. But taking into account a meeting with the prime minister with Singapore, which was also cancelled, his non-appearance at a meeting with the Danish prime minister, where at least some people had expected him, and then another one that went by the board entirely—between Mr Xi and a Russian official—speculation ran wild in some of Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s more freewheeling news outlets. An official account of a Central Military Commission session held on September 8th to discuss the earthquakes in Guizhou and Yunnan did not show him in attendance, though he is the CMC’s vice chairman. China’s information commissars responded to all this not with clearer explanations, but by blocking related search terms on the internet.

Among the tales spun from these mills were reports that Mr Xi had injured his back (while swimming or playing football—take your pick). Or that he had suffered a stroke. Or a heart attack (mild or severe—again, take your pick). Or that he was injured in a politically motivated attack while in his car. Or that he has merely been sidelined politically in last-minute manoeuvring in the delicate political transition process that is now under way.

These rumours bear repeating not because any have been reported with anything like corroborating information, but because they illustrate the nature of the information vacuum that China’s system produces, and the nature of what rushes in to fill it.

In the early 1980s, Soviet government spokesman drew ridicule every time they tried to explain away the prolonged disappearance of one of the USSR’s frail and elderly leaders. They tended to say that Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko had a cold. It was laughable, but also disconcerting for the rest of the world to be left in the dark as to who was running one of the world’s two nuclear-armed superpowers.

China is not only a nuclear-armed superpower today but also an economic and industrial behemoth. In a world where events and information move so much faster than they did in the days of Yuri Andropov and his head colds, simple questions about the condition and the whereabouts of a top leader deserve to be taken seriously.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons, AFP)

Summary: “I HOPE you will raise serious questions.”This was the reply a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Hong Lei, gave on Tuesday afternoon at a press briefing in...


It's redundant to call a Flaming Lips album baffling. If someone somewhere isn't being baffled, the band’s not doing its job. But “The Terror’’ goes further: It flat-out confounds. An unbroken miasma of sound, it’s 55 minutes of interstitial music for songs that never arrive. As expansive and wiggy as the group’s last proper album, “Embryonic,” was, its tracks found a traction all but missing here, replaced with the shriek and clang of industrial psychedelia. Considering the pre-release statement about existence after the disappearance of love, the album might be the band’s conception of hell: the swarming, insectoid buzz of “You Are Alone,’’ the angelic choir seeming to descend while remaining ever distant in “Be Free, A Way,’’ the guitar jabs that claw at the ear in “Look . . . The Sun Is Rising,’’ all drowned in a motionless swamp of keyboards. “The Terror’’ is the Flaming Lips without form, and void. They're reportedly working with Ke$ha next. Let there be light. (Out Tuesday)

ESSENTIAL “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die’’

Summary: It's redundant to call a Flaming Lips album baffling. If someone isn't being baffled, the band's not doing its job. But


1991 — WEEI, then at 590 AM, becomes an all-sports station.

1998 — Entercom buys WEEI from CBS-owned American Radio Systems.

2005 — The Celtics and Entercom agree to broadcast games on WRKO and WEEI.

2006 — WEEI and the Red Sox sign a $200 million, 10-year deal to broadcast games.

2007 — WEEI brings in $44.2 million in advertising revenue as the Sox win their second World Series in four years.

2009 — CBS launches 98.5 The Sports Hub. It will eventually outpace WEEI in the ratings.

2011 — WEEI begins simulcasting AM programming on 93.7 FM, a former pop rock station.

October 2012 — WEEI begins broadcasting exclusively on 93.7 FM.

Aug. 16, 2013 — Entercom fires WEEI program director Jason Wolfe.

Aug. 20, 2013 — WEEI announces it will no longer carry Celtics games.

Summary: Key moments in WEEI history.


Watery grave … Daniel Silver's exhibition creates a lost city in the heart of London. Photograph: Marcus J Leith, courtesy Artangel

Daniel Silver: Dig This project commissioned by Artangel takes a derelict site in the middle of modern London and makes it as mysterious as a lost city discovered by archaeologists.Odeon site, off Tottenham Court Road, London WC1E until 3 November

Yinka Shonibare MBEThe satirist and post-colonial history painter takes on Greenwich, once the centre of British maritime power.National Maritime Museum, Greenwich SE10 from 18 September until 23 February

Tony Ray-Jones and Martin ParrBrutally honest portraits of the British at a new art and media gallery in the the Science Museum. But is it science?Science Museum, London SW7 from 21 September until 16 March

Richard SerraNew drawings by the master of modern sculpture.Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R from 19 September until 12 January

Thinking with the BodyAn exhibition about the work of Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance.Wellcome Collection, London NW1 from 19 September until 27 October

Georges SeuratBathers at Asnières (1884)I am haunted by the pale ghosts of tall industrial chimneys as working class men and boys pose still as statues beside and in the waters of the river Seine. Seurat's figures are as rounded and pale as people painted by Piero della Francesca. His light is as ethereal as Monet's. This painting is a frozen pastoral of stolen time, in which reality melts and assumes new, idealised forms.National Gallery, London WC2N

Terry Richardson is officially a pervert

If you can't wait for the new Jurassic Park film to arrive, take a trip to Crystal Palace's very own version

What Bashar al-Assad's palace tells us about about dictator's regime

That a landscape by Van Gogh has just been seen for the first time – and it may be his clumsiest work ever

That the ICA are delving into London's post-punk subcultures for a new show

Summary: A newly discovered Van Gogh work is a dud. Plus punks take over London and Terry Richardson stands accused, writes Jonathan Jones


Peter Thursby's Designed Growth (1986), an abstract bronze relief measuring 3 metres x 1.8 metres

The sculptor Peter Thursby, who has died aged 80, produced his first work in the wake of the second world war, a time when new and brutal abstract art came into being, challenging the semi-abstract and the figurative. His early sculptures were hard and aggressive, with form sacrificed to surface qualities. In time a more human modernism took over. His work ranged in scale from the architectural and monumental to small pieces for domestic interiors. He worked with a range of materials, from cast concrete, stone and slate to bronze, stainless steel, aluminium and silver.

His father was an army officer, and Peter had a rather military bearing himself. His handshake was firm, and his manners and his attire (when not in the studio) were both impeccable. He was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and his childhood was spent in Jamaica. Back in England, he attended Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury. The author William Golding was his English teacher, and Peter remembered Golding provoking his pupils into "thinking" – something that was not normally on the curriculum.

After doing his national service, he began to study art at St Paul's College of Education in Cheltenham (now Gloucestershire University). He then studied with Paul Feiler and Ernest Pascoe at the West of England College of Art. Attending their life classes honed his natural drawing skills and laid down the ideas which informed his first sculptures.

At Exeter College of Art and Design (1954-60), the teacher Edward Atkinson stimulated Peter's interest in sculpture. Throughout the 1950s Peter's output was almost exclusively in the form of paintings. By 1957 his canvases had become not only richly textural, but also fully abstract. His small series of red, black and grey paintings entitled Metal Objects in Space was praised in La Revue Moderne. His switch to sculpture was marked with early success when, in 1962, he won first prize in an exhibition held in Gloucester entitled 19 Young Sculptors.

Referencing the human form, Peter's early totemic sculptures were dark, coruscating pieces. These evolved into winged creatures thrusting into space. Marjorie Parr bought one winged creature at his solo exhibition at Plymouth Art Gallery in 1964, and he showed regularly at the Parr gallery. Gradually his organic sculptures became subsumed by the mechanical. New bronze table-sculptures took on a resemblance to assemblages of engine parts. Not all of his audience was convinced, although Eduardo Chillada, Eduardo Paolozzi and César Baldaccini were also engaged in making sculpture from reclaimed materials.

Peter made a number of tensile, poised aluminium sculptures, their linear forms in tune with new modernist architecture. They foreshadowed Peter's large public sculptures of the 1980s. Cast in bronze by the Morris Singer Foundry, these monumental works, weighing up to three tonnes, were erected in the US, Germany and the UK. Water was brought in to flow over many of them, creating movement, light reflection and sound.

Peter was not averse to semi-figurative work if he felt the subject called for it. Such was the case for his 1970s Podmen sculptures and his later Sarum series and Flight series. Intrigued by satellites and space travel, he produced a number of ringed and domed sculptures in the 1970s and 1980s, works which both reflected and refracted light. He also made a successful Tower series in which sculpture becomes architecture.

A good communicator, he gave generously of his time to art education and arts organisations, including the Royal West of England Academy, of which he was president for five years (1995-2000). In 1995 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West of England, Bristol.

I first met Peter when working on his biography with Simon Olding. For me, his Optimism series from the 1990s (one of which is now in the Queen's collection) came to epitomise him. His optimism was a paramount energising force, along with his deep Christian faith, and both helped him to create a body of work that is recognised as a significant contribution to 20th-century sculpture.

He is survived by his wife, Maureen, whom he married in 1956.

• Peter Lionel Thursby, sculptor, 23 December 1930; died 6 January 2011

Summary: British sculptor of works ranging in scale from the monumental to the domestic


Editor's note: As the 49ers play their 43rd and final season at Candlestick Park, The Chronicle recounts memorable moments in the stadium's history. This week, we reprint part of Jack Smith's story on the team's NFC West Division-title-clinching, last-game-of-the-season defeat of the Lions on Dec. 19, 1971. John Brodie, the only quarterback a generation of 49ers fans ever knew, was in the twilight of his team-record 17-year career. He already had thrown three TD passes that day, but it wasn't until he scored on a 10-yard run with less than five minutes to play that the 49ers took the lead for good and secured a postseason berth.

An hour after the electrifying tension of the field had dissipated in victory and all the electric cords and cameras had been swept from an emptying 49er dressing room, John Brodie approached Charlie Krueger, hand extended. Brodie didn't have a chance to say anything.

"John, congratulations," said the defensive tackle with 13 years of pro experience to the quarterback with 15 seasons behind him. "It's good to see us here again, old fella."

Krueger was still ensconced in his stall wearing only shorts long after 45,580 Candlestick fans had chanted the clock down to zero for a 31-27 victory over Detroit.

He was savoring San Francisco's second successive (NFC) West championship and another cigarette. Coach Dick Nolan may be thankful that Charlie does not unwind with martinis.

"This was the first time all year our offense played as well as it can play," said Brodie. "And it was the end of the season if it didn't."

Summary: John Brodie, the only quarterback a generation of 49ers fans ever knew, was in the twilight of his team-record 17-year career.  An hour after the electrifying tension of the field had dissipated in victory and all the electric cords and cameras had been swept from an emptying 49er dressing room, John Brodie approached Charlie Krueger, hand extended.  "John, congratulations," said the defensive tackle with 13 years of pro experience to the quarterback with 15 seasons behind him.


Current Wisconsin law requires employers to give their workers at least one day off for every week on the job, but a new law being proposed in the state assembly could change that. Two state politicians working with the local business lobby have introduced legislation that would allow employees in the manufacturing and service sectors to work for a week or more without any mandated breaks.

One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican state representative Mark Born, said the bill was intended only to allow workers the option of volunteering for additional work.

“Let’s allow businesses and employees to work together, and if there’s extra work that needs to be done, give the option to the employee to come in,” he told msnbc.

Most states don’t have mandated rest days like the one in Wisconsin, said Born, and some businesses have already had the requirement waived. But to Wisconsin labor unions and other opponents of the bill, the current law is a crucial safeguard against workplace abuse. If employees are given the “option” to work more, it ultimately won’t be up to them, said National Employment Law Project’s Catherine Ruckelshaus.

“ ‘Voluntary’ typically doesn’t mean that the worker has any choice in the matter,” she said. “It generally means, if you want to keep your job or have a job, you have to take what the employer is describing.”

“There has not been some sort of outcry from small business and employees asking for this protection to be removed,” said Mike Browne, deputy director for the progressive group One Wisconsin Now. Instead, the law was originally proposed by the powerful industry lobbying group Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC). Rep. Born confirmed to msnbc that he began working on the legislation after he was approached by WMC.

“They’ve had a tradition of being very successful in influencing Republican politicians or conservative politicians to vote with their interests,” said Browne.

A WMC spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Republican state senator Glenn Grothman, who sponsored the legislation along with Born, has also co-sponsored a law that would allow employers to provide comp time in lieu of overtime pay ”if such an arrangement is authorized by a collective bargaining agreement or other agreement arrived at before the work is performed.” Republicans on the federal level proposed a similar measure last spring, but critics of the legislation argued that it would put too much power in the hands of the boss.

“It’s the employer that gets to decide when and under what circumstances you can take this comp time,” National Partnership for Women and Families senior adviser Judith Lichtman told msnbc at the time, an argument that would be echoed by opponents of the seven-day work week bill.

“Even God said rest on the seventh day,” David Reader, secretary-treasurer for the union Teamsters Local 662, told Wisconsin’s Stevens Point Journal. “I would hate to see that Republican bill pass. Some employers would really take advantage of that.”

Summary: Current Wisconsin law bans employers from having employees work seven days straight, but the state's business lobby is working to change that.


It’s that time of year, when TurboTax and H&R Block are busy advertising their paid tax preparation services with commercials featuring celebrity voice-overs and promises of aircraft carrier-size refunds. Less publicized, though, are the free options these well-known tax-season brands and other companies offer.

Lower- and moderate-income taxpayers, who earn an adjusted gross income of less than $58,000 either individually or filing jointly as a married couple, can access tax preparation software packages from many of these companies online for free through a partnership with the IRS. Nearly 70 percent of Americans earn less than $58,000 and can take advantage of the program at IRS.gov/freefile, said Tim Hugo, executive director of Free File Alliance, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps manage the no-cost service.

Fourteen companies, including TurboTax, H&R Block, Liberty Tax Service, and TaxSlayer, along with some lesser-known tax preparers, such as TaxSimple and Free1040TaxReturn, offer free e-filing for federal tax returns.

“It’s essentially the same product that they are offering in the commercial market,” Hugo said. The alliance has been offering the free tax software since 2002. Taxpayers have used it to complete 40 million returns over that time, he said.

Filing electronically can speed a refund. The IRS website includes a list of the participating companies; each has its own eligibility requirements based on income, age, state residency, and military status. Consumers can research each company on their own and pick the one that best suits them.

The IRS website can also help taxpayers find the best software for them with a quick, online questionnaire that asks how much they made, their age and whether they qualify for the earned income tax credit or served in the military. The site narrows down the search of potential tax preparation programs. Filers are then directed to the specific company website.

For taxpayers who don’t meet the strict income requirements, don’t worry. Many of these companies offer similar bare-bones tax preparation programs on their websites, too. These programs are best for taxpayers filing simple returns without investment income or mortgages. This free tax software generally does not allow consumers to speak directly with a company representative but does let them submit e-mail questions.

The companies will ask taxpayers if they want to be added to a mailing list or pay for additional services, but consumers can opt out, Hugo said. Still, by going through the IRS website, filers will avoid a barrage of pop-up advertising. The free filing software used to have advertising, but that’s no longer the case, Hugo said.

The companies are willing to offer the free service in the hopes that as customers’ incomes grow and returns become more complicated, they will eventually pay for the upgraded service, which includes more hand-holding, access to a tax specialist over the phone, and a search for qualifying deductions and tax credits.

While companies offer federal filings free, they charge extra to complete the state filings. Considered an add-on service, TaxSlayer charges $12.95, Liberty Tax charges $19.95, and Tax Simple charges $24.95 for state returns.

But consumers can find free tax software for filing state returns at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue’s website. Slightly more than 124,000 returns, or 3.5 percent, were filed through the software, Webfile for Income, last year, according to state officials.

Massachusetts tax officials have tried to encourage more people to abandon paper tax forms and file electronically by letting taxpayers know about the Webfile for Income and reducing the distribution of paper tax forms.

There’s also another advantage, said Ann Dufresne, a spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue. The state’s step-by-step free e-file program, which does the math for taxpayers, also doesn’t have an income limit, Dufresne said.

Summary: h It’s that time of year, when Turbo Tax and H&R Block are busy advertising their paid tax preparation services with commercials featuring celebrity voice-overs and promises of aircraft carrier-sized refunds. Less publicized though, are the free options these well-known brands and other companies offer. Low and moderate-income taxpayers, who earn an adjusted gross income of less than $58,000 either individually or filing jointly as a married couple, can access tax preparation software packages from many of these companies online for free through a partnership with the IRS. Nearly 70 percent of Americans earn less than $58,000 and can take advantage of the program at IRS.gov/freefile, said Tim Hugo, executive director of Free File Alliance, a Virginia based non-profit that helps manage the no-cost service


A new official portrait of the outgoing governor general Quentin Bryce was unveiled in Canberra on Tuesday evening. Painted by the celebrity portraitist Ralph Heimans, it is very large, measuring 1.9m by 1.36m. The painting, which depicts Bryce at the doorway of her former office, gazing out into a sunset, achieves everything a contemporary portrait appears supposed to: it is easily recognisable, and it looks like an illustration. It is also utterly redundant.

Heimans’s portrait of Bryce will become part of the Historic Memorials Collection and will be hung at Members Hall, Parliament House, next to William Dargie’s 1953 portrait of the Queen. In that museum of the living dead, Heimans’s vision of Bryce as a kind of mystic seer will no doubt be popular; in contrast to Dargie’s ghastly fanboy pic of her maj in all-yellow, it will be seen as both modern and restrained.

If the success of a portrait is measured by an artist’s ability to render a likeness, then this painting of Bryce earns an unqualified two thumbs up: this painting really does look like her. But if your measure of a successful portrait is some kind of insight into the painting’s subject, character and, dare I say it, very soul, then Heimans’s picture is a shambles of hokey symbolism and compositional trickiness. (Although it could have been a lot worse.)

According to the press release, there is hidden within the painting “numerous symbolic artefacts, each holding personal significance for the governor general and her connection to the Australian people”, including objects that testify to “her commitment to women’s groups and equal rights, respect for Indigenous culture and community, and gratitude and admiration for the armed forces”.

I’ll leave it to the viewer to determine whether it's the brooch on Bryce’s suit jacket or the pen in her hand that comments on her gratitude and admiration for the armed forces.

Instead, I’d like to offer another interpretation. Bryce is looking out of her office, not into a sunset, but into the recent past: she’s wondering why, in the age of photography, status and importance are still enshrined in paint, and why such pedestrian art is celebrated as worthy. Bryce’s office represents the future – the modern world of media and reflection – while the outside represents the past, symbolised in the reflected landscape that looks like a background from a colonial-era painting by John Glover. Bryce isn’t going out the door, she’s closing it.

Summary: A good likeness by Ralph Heimans but there's no insight in this shambles of hokey symbolism and compositional trickiness


UPDATED 06/12/2014 at 12:45 PM EDT • Originally published 06/12/2014 at 12:30 PM EDT

From left: Bill Murray, Ashley Donald and Erik Rogers

There's a fantastic urban legend about

, one that you've probably heard from your cousin or your college roommate or your neighbor, about how he'll walk up to strangers, put his hands over their eyes and whisper, "No one will ever believe you," into their ear before he dissolves into thin air. (OK, that last bit might not be true.)

But when Ashley Donald and Erik Rogers say that they had their own unexpected run-in with Murray, they can prove it. The Charleston, South Carolina, couple were posing for their engagement pictures, smiling and holding hands on the steps of an historic building when a man on the sidewalk started trying to get their attention.

"I thought, 'Who the heck is bothering them,'" photographer Raheel Gauba of

. "I turn around and it's Bill Murray with his shirt up, belly out, tapping his belly and trying to make them laugh."

Gauba did the only logical thing one can do when Carl Spackler/Steve Zissou/

is flashing his stomach at you on a public sidewalk: He asked Murray if he'd like to join the couple (and their fully extended jaws) for a picture. "'Sure I would,'" Gauba said Murray told him. "I took the shot and off he goes."

This is the second time in the past few weeks that Murray has become part of a Charleston couple's pre-wedding plans: Over Memorial Day,

the groom-to-be during a bachelor party. "If you have someone that you think is The One â¦ take that person and travel around the world," he said. "And if, when you land, you're still in love with that person, get married at the airport."

We give it another month before Murray actually performs a wedding ceremony, serves as the ring bearer or rides a borrowed lawnmower through a rehearsal dinner. And – at this point – no one would ever doubt that story.

Summary: One of the most Bill Murray-esque of recent Bill Murray sightings


The spymaster has just had the pretty young lawyer for progressive causes thrown in the back of a van and taken to an interrogation cell somewhere in Hamburg. He takes the bag off her head and asks, “Do you know where you are? No, you don’t. You’re in the real world, Annabelle.”

With “A Most Wanted Man,” we’re not in the real world, exactly. We’re in John le Carré-land, a landscape of fictional espionage that’s still much closer to the compromises, betrayals, and gray moral areas of realpolitik than most movies and books dare give us. There’s a lot to sort out — who’s on which side, what anyone’s endgame is — which is why a film like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” can baffle audiences used to movies that do all the thinking for them.

“A Most Wanted Man,” directed steadily and subtly by photographer Anton Corbijn from le Carré’s 2008 novel, is a little easier to parse. Partly that’s because it puts so much faith in its central character, Gunther Bachmann, an intelligence lifer exhausted from fighting the bureaucrats while holding on to a spark of honor. Partly it’s because of the faith we, the audience, put in the man playing him: Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the actor’s last leading role before his death, in February.

After an unspecified intelligence disaster in Beirut, Gunther has washed up in Hamburg, a city still under a sticky blanket of guilt for harboring the 9/11 terrorists in the months leading up to the attack. He heads a small antiterrorist unit that “not many people know about and less people like,” mostly because he prefers to make his quarry work for him as moles rather than throwing them to the Americans. The cadre of agents under Gunther worship him; Daniel Bruhl (“Rush”) is among their number, as is the magnificent Nina Hoss (“Barbara”), the sort of grown-up woman before whom Hollywood movies quail.

The intelligence services are in a dither because a young Chechen Muslim named Issa (Grigoriy Dobrygin), with ties to jihadist groups, has hopped off a container ship and is now at large in the city. Gunther’s rivals at other units in Hamburg and Berlin have taken an interest, as have the Americans in the cool, collected person of the CIA’s Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright). Watching her and Gunther discuss matters over coffee (spiked with whiskey in his case) is almost comical. These are people who know how to speak without ever using concrete nouns or verbs.

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head. A terrorist may turn out to be a victim, scarred by 24 hours of Russian “questioning.” A money-laundering banker (Willem Dafoe) may turn out to be a quiet beacon of decency. That lawyer (Rachel McAdams), a crusader for political asylum, might be a hapless naïf in over her head. And all of us, in one way or another, are atoning for the sins of our fathers, which is just another way of saying that history — the Cold War, World War II, World War I, man’s cruelty to man — is a bill that never stops coming due.

Le Carré’s heroes tend to be shabby men, flawed by their goodness and expert at what they do. George Smiley is the most famous (played by Alec Guinness on TV and Gary Oldman on film), but Gunther Bachmann may be even more touching a figure, old enough to have known East Germany and the Stasi, experienced enough to know that treating a person as an enemy tends to make him one. A parallel plotline involves an Arab philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi) who may be funneling money to jihadists. Most movies would assume he’s the bad guy, and, indeed, that’s what the CIA and Berlin think. Gunther knows better: Take the philanthropist out and you’re back to tap-tap-tapping in the dark. Turn him around and maybe he’ll take you to the real bad guys.

Hoffman was 46 when he died, and “A Most Wanted Man” hints at the older roles he was starting to move into. His Gunther is a battered knight in a wheezy, overweight body; the character rarely looks anyone in the eye because he’s tired of looking at liars. The actor gives his character a German accent that may even be accurate, and that has the sound of a man patiently outthinking calamities he knows will come. The love affair that Gunther and Hoss’s Anna don’t quite have just about breaks your heart.

Le Carré himself wrote a recent article in The New York Times about the emotions he experienced witnessing Hoffman on set. They’re the same ones we felt and still do when we watch his acting: awe, delight, solidarity, gratitude. He was the rare movie star who seemed to function without egotism, whose performances acknowledge we’re all in the same boat, that it’s sinking, and that the tragedy of the situation is inextricable from its comedy. “We should take care. All of us,” Gunther advises the lawyer at one point, but he probably knows it’s too late. One wonders if Hoffman felt the same.

- Appreciation: Lamented last curtain for Philip Seymour Hoffman

- Philip Seymour Hoffman, 46; Oscar-winner took edgy roles

Summary: The late Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in ‘A Most Wanted Man,’ adapted from John le Carré’s best-selling novel.