Police in Washington DC are investigating who authorised a controversial high-speed police escort for actor Charlie Sheen.
He was apparently escorted from an airport outside the city to his stage show, Violent Torpedo of Truth: Defeat is Not an Option, on Tuesday.
Police chief Cathy Lanier told a local TV station the escort appeared to violate department policy.
Police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump said the department was investigating.
Sheen posted a photo to Twitter of a speedometer reaching about 80mph (129km/h) and wrote: “In car with Police escort in front and rear! Driving like someone’s about to deliver a baby! Cop car lights #Spinning!”
Sheen was reportedly running late for the one-man show. It is not clear for how much of the journey he had a police escort.
Sheen’s spokesman, Larry Solters, declined to comment on Friday.
Phil Mendelson, who chairs the DC Council’s committee on public safety, said on Friday he considered the escort inappropriate and was glad it was being investigated. …
A 1938 comic featuring Superman’s debut that has been recovered in a storage locker in the US appears to be the copy stolen from Nicolas Cage, police say.
The 47-year-old actor, who accepted an insurance payout after the 2000 theft, said last week’s find, in Los Angeles, was “divine providence”.
He said he was hopeful the “heirloom”, a mint condition copy of Action Comics No 1, would be returned to his family.
In March 2010, a copy of the comic sold for $1.5m (£920,000) at a US auction.
Detective Don Hrycyk, of the Los Angeles Police Department’s art theft department, said an investigation into the theft and recovery – from a locker in the San Fernando Valley – was in its early stages.
He said a number of false leads had been generated over the years, including a 2002 tip-off that the comic was in a safety deposit box in Tennessee.
When detectives followed the lead, they found a replica of the comic’s cover wrapped around a woman’s underwear catalogue.
Detective Hrycyk said it was unclear if Cage would be reunited with the comic and that the actor would have to work out details with the insurance company.
Action Comics No 1 – of which 100 are said to still be in existence – sold originally for 10 cents.
Comic book fan Cage was once linked to a film version of Superman and has a son called Kal-El – the birth name given to the indestructible hero.
Superboy (Kal-El) is a native of the planet Krypton, the son of Jor-El, Krypton’s most brilliant scientist and inventor, and his wife Lara. Finding evidence that the planet is about to be destroyed, Jor-El fails to convince the ruling Science Council, so he conducts tests with model rockets to enable his own family to escape. His tests meet with mixed success. In one experiment, Kal-El’s pet dog Krypto is lost when a test rocket carrying Krypto is knocked off course by a meteor.
As Krypton’s destruction approaches, Jor-El still has not built a rocket large enough to hold his family. With the planet coming apart beneath them, Jor-El and Lara put their two-year old son in a model rocket, launch it just minutes ahead of Krypton’s destruction, and send Kal-El to the planet Earth. Found by Jonathan and Martha Kent, an older couple with no children of their own, the child is anonymously left at a Smallville orphanage. Some days later, the Kents successfully adopt the toddler. They name the boy Clark Kent, using Martha’s maiden name for his first name. …
On his eighth birthday, Clark dons an indestructible costume woven by Martha from the Kryptonian blankets that accompanied him on his journey to Earth. He becomes the costumed hero Superboy, the first superhero of Earth-One. Around the same time as his public debut, Superboy learns of his Kryptonian origin, and several weeks later, he gives reporter Perry White the exclusive story about his alien background.Though most of Superboy’s early adventures occur in the vicinity of Smallville, he becomes famous for his superheroics around the globe. Superboy’s status as both Smallville’s hometown hero and as a national/global hero are reflected in the emergency-signal system that he establishes with Chief Parker of the Smallville Police and the President of the United States. As Superboy repeatedly ventures into interstellar space, his super-heroics also bring him fame on other worlds.
In Smallville, Superboy uses tunnels from the basement of the Kents’ house and general store to make quick, concealed exits when Superboy is needed. Superboy also maintains a secret lab in the basement of the Kent house, where he builds Superboy and Clark Kent robots to cover for him when he is busy elsewhere or otherwise unavailable. …
… He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.
“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.
A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”
But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.
David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”
In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.
“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. … I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”
“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”
He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.
He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”
Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.
Hajdu told me that Dylan has distanced himself from his protest songs because “he’s probably aware of the kind of careerism that’s apparent in that work.” Dylan employed propaganda to get successful but knows those songs are “too rigidly polemical” to be his best work.
“Maybe the Chinese bureaucrats are better music critics than we give them credit for,” Hajdu said, adding that Dylan was now “an old-school touring pro” like Frank Sinatra Sr. …
Joanne Siegel, the inspiration behind Lois Lane and the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, has died at the age of 93.
She was only a teenager during the Great Depression when she placed a classified ad seeking modeling jobs. That led to a meeting with Superman co-creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, her future husband, The Plain Dealer reports. Later, Siegel would say that it was Joanne who served as the muse for Superman’s spunky love interest and fellow reporter at The Daily Planet, Lois Lane.Throughout her life, but especially in the later years after Jerry’s death in 1996, Siegel fought very public court battles to win back a share of the rights to Superman. In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Shuster famously sold the rights to the comic hero to Detective Comics for just $130. Joanne and Jerry married in 1948, after he divorced Bella Siegel, according to the Cleveland newspaper.
In 2008, years of legal battles paid off for Joanne Siegel when a judge awarded a share of the copyright to the Siegel and Shuster families. Laura Siegel Larson, her daughter with Jerry Siegel, had also helped fight for the rights. “We were just stubborn,” Joanne Siegel told The New York Times in 2008. “It was a dream of Jerry’s, and we just took up the task.”Brad Meltzer, a friend of the Siegel family and the author of “The Book of Lies,” about the creation of Superman, announced Joanne Siegel’s death on Twitter late Monday evening. “Just heard Joanne Siegel passed away. Lois Lane herself. One of the most beautiful people I ever met,” he wrote.
A Canadian singer has become the first person in the world to graduate with a Masters degree in The Beatles.
Former Miss Canada finalist Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy, 53, was one of the first students to sign up for the course on the Fab Four when it launched at Liverpool Hope University in March 2009.
Twelve full-time students joined the Master of Arts course in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society that year and Mary-Lu is the first from her class to graduate.
She said: “I am so proud of my achievement. The course was challenging, enjoyable and it provided a great insight into the impact The Beatles had and still have to this day across all aspects of life.
“The faculty and students at Liverpool Hope University were crucial in providing an unforgettable experience and their support was invaluable.” …
BRADLEY BLACKBURN – If John Lennon hadn’t been gunned down in New York in 1980, the global icon of youthful rebellion could have celebrated his 70th birthday this Saturday. Fans around the world are marking the date with what his widow, Yoko Ono, has called an explosion of sentiment.
Nearly 30 years after Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman outside The Dakota, the apartment building where he lived, admirers of all ages gathered right across the street today in a part of Central Park called “Strawberry Fields,” honoring his memory by singing his songs.
Watch “World News with Diane Sawyer” for more on this story tonight on ABC.
Lennon’s life and work are still drawing plenty of fresh interest and new fans.
Today, Google honored the musician on its home page with an animated doodle set to his solo song, “Imagine.”
His solo albums are all being re-released together in a set, “The John Lennon Signature Box,” which includes some of his personal tapes, outtakes and sketches.
There’s a new film coming out, “Nowhere Boy,” about Lennon’s pre-Beatles teenage years in Liverpool, England.
After Lennon’s death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files documenting the Bureau’s role in the deportation attempt.The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Departmentappealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton‘s newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve “foreseeable harm”, the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents. Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including “lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges”. The story is told in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon’s FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing “national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality”, were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.
“FROM: DIRECTOR, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY” CIA Director Richard Helms sent this coded teletype to Hoover on February 10, 1972 (CIA-4 page 1). The subject is “JohnLennon and Project ‘Yes’.” Here, the CIA reports that Lennon is involved in a project “which will include the use of video tapes, films, and special articles” – not exactly a crime in America – and participation by “a caravan of entertainers.” It’s hard to see why any law enforcement agency, much less the CIA hada legitimate reason for monitoring “a caravan of entertainers.”
“THE HALDEMAN LETTER” J. Edgar Hoover’s letter (HQ-12) to H.R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff, dated April 25, 1972, provides crucial evidence that the Lennon investigation was a political one, of significance at the highest levels of the Nixon White House. In the original release, virtually the entire text was withheld on National Security grounds. The FBI describes the portion still withheld as “intelligence information provided by a foreign government.” The FBI has stated that releasing it could lead to “foreign military retaliation.” In 1992 the FBI reported that “the foreign government was recently contacted” and that it “continues to insist that the information remain confidential.” The withheld portion remains in litigation. The ACLU cited this document as evidence that the FBI lacked a legitimate law enforcement purpose in investigating Lennon.
Why would the president of the United States imagine a British rock ‘n’ roll singer to be his primary obstacle to re-election? … Lennon’s financing of people the government was trying to incarcerate, such as John Sinclair and Bobby Seale, did not ingratiate him to the Nixon administration. But neither did his penning of songs such as “Give Peace a Chance,” which threatened to replace “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the national anthem of the Vietnam years. This exhaustive account of Lennon’s years from 1966 to 1976 reveals an unpleasant truth about government paranoia, and the lengths to which the highest office in the land will go to squelch the dissent of a radicalized culture.
Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman (publicly known as H. R. Haldeman; October 27, 1926–November 12, 1993) was an American political aide and businessman, best known for his service as White House Chief of Staff to President Richard Nixon and for his role in events leading to the Watergate burglaries and the Watergate scandal — for which he was found guilty of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He was imprisoned for 18 months for his crimes.
I’ve always wondered why. Did Chapman have any help going crazy, for example, as some conspiracy theories suggest?
Chapman denies such things.
KING: What do you make of all the conspiracy theories that have come up in the last 12 years, CIA, mind control, et cetera?
CHAPMAN: Against the death of John Lennon?
KING: Yes.
CHAPMAN: Hogwash.
KING: No one asked you to do it? No one prompted you to do it? No cabal, nothing?
CHAPMAN: No, they probably wished they would have had me, Larry, but they didn’t. It was me doing it, it wasn’t them. – cnn
While it is reasonable to wonder how much “mind control” the MKULTRA and other projects were able to obtain, there isn’t any evidence that a person can be programmed as a zombie killer.
If it was a conspiracy, the inception of the idea was done with such perfection that the killer still believes the idea was his own. I don’t think anyone has that level of control over human thoughts yet.
The story that Chapman acted alone, and why, is convincing.
Mark David Chapman (born May 10, 1955) …. murdered John Lennon on December 8, 1980. …Chapman was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His father, David Curtis Chapman, was a staff sergeant in the United States Air Force … He said that he lived in fear of his father as a child, who was physically abusive towards his wife and son. … At age 16, Chapman became a born-again Christian, and distributed Bible tracts. …
In 1977, Chapman attempted suicide via carbon monoxide asphyxiation. He connected a vacuum cleaner hose to his car exhaust pipe and led it inside the car, thus exposing himself to the car’s exhaust, but the hose melted in the exhaust pipe and the attempt failed. He was discovered and brought to a local mental health clinic. A psychiatrist admitted him to Castle Memorial Hospital for clinical depression. … Chapman developed a series of obsessions, including artwork, The Catcher in the Rye, music, and John Lennon, and started hearing voices again. In September 1980, he wrote a letter to a friend, Lynda Irish, in which he stated, “I’m going nuts”, and signed it “The Catcher in the Rye” …
He was angry that Lennon would preach love and peace but yet have millions [of dollars],” said his wife Gloria. Chapman later said that “He told us to imagine no possessions, and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music.” …
Chapman recalls having listened to Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album in the weeks before the murder and stated: “I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying that he didn’t believe in God. – wiki
Mark Nichol – The original Batmobile from the 1960s TV series starring Adam West is still the ultimate screen car for an entire generation of caped crusader fans. Now anybody with a spare $149,999 (£95,000) can buy one.
American company Fiberglass Freaks is producing officially licensed, road-legal 1966 Batmobiles. And yes, the flamethrower works.
Each car takes six months to build and features an array of working gadgets, including a red flashing beacon, a radar screen called ‘Detect-a-scope’, a retractable, gold-coloured ‘Batbeam’ and a dashboard DVD player.
The flamethrower in the original Batmobile was the result of the car’s turbine engine, but the replica uses a propane tank – mounted in the boot – to create the same effect. …
A casting call for diminutive actors has been issued in New Zealand, as director Peter Jackson forges ahead with plans to film The Hobbit.
Advertising in a Wellington newspaper, Wingnut Films is looking for men 123cm (4ft) to 158cm (5ft 2ins) tall and women measuring 123cm to 153cm (5ft).
The two-movie project has yet to officially receive the go-ahead by MGM Studios due to ongoing financial woes.
However a Wingnut spokesman said they wanted to “be prepared”.
The spokesman told the AFP news agency that the call was for “scale doubles” for actors with speaking roles, and further auditions for extras would take place at a later date.
“Scale doubles appear in some wide shots in place of our actors and with other adult actors when we need people to look smaller or taller,” he explained.
He added all applicants must be aged 16 or over and anyone not meeting the height requirements would be turned away.
‘Shortish in the leg’
Even with the height restrictions, many of the eligible actors would tower over JRR Tolkien’s fictional creatures.
In a prologue to The Lord Of The Rings, he wrote that Hobbits are between two and four feet tall, the average height being three feet six inches.
Letters from the author, published after his death, went on to describe the physical appearance of The Hobbit’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, as:”fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg”.
“A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and elvish; hair short and curling (brown). The feet from the ankles down, covered with brown hairy fur,” he continued.
Casting for The Hobbit is due to take place on Sunday at the National Dance and Drama Centre in Wellington.
Mexican-born director Guillermo Del Toro had signed on to direct the films, but pulled out in June citing almost two years of delays.
Jackson, who won the Oscar for best director for his work on Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, is expected to replace him at the helm, although no official announcement has been made.
..“To me,” Mr. Allen said, “there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”
Mr. Allen spoke with Dave Itzkoff about his new film, how its themes resonate in his life and whether he has made his last movie in New York. These are excerpts from that conversation.
Q. The ideas of psychic powers and past lives, or at least people who believe in them, are central to your latest film. What got you interested in writing about them?
A. I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t. I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her. The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.
Q. What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?
A. Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get.
Q. How do you feel about the aging process?
A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.
Q. Has getting older changed your work in any way? Do you see a certain wistfulness emerging in your later films?
A. No, it’s too hit or miss. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It’s whatever seems right at the time. I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen “Take the Money and Run” since 1968. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, “Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.” …
Q. When you’ve got down time between projects, as you do now, how do you spend it?
A. I do the usual stuff. I take my kids to school in the morning. I go for walks with my wife, play with my jazz band. Then there’s the obligation of the treadmill, and the weights, to keep in shape, so I don’t get more decrepit than I am. I generally don’t see the big Hollywood movies. I saw “Winter’s Bone” the other day and liked the movie very much, loved all the performers. And when I was in Paris, I got a chance to read a certain amount, Tolstoy and Norman Mailer. Things that had slipped through the cracks over the years.
Police in Washington DC are investigating who authorised a controversial high-speed police escort for actor Charlie Sheen.
A 1938 comic featuring Superman’s debut that has been recovered in a storage locker in the US appears to be the copy stolen from Nicolas Cage, police say.
… He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Joanne Siegel, the inspiration behind Lois Lane and the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, has died at the age of 93.
A Canadian singer has become the first person in the world to graduate with a Masters degree in The Beatles.
A casting call for diminutive actors has been issued in New Zealand, as director Peter Jackson forges ahead with plans to film The Hobbit.
..“To me,” Mr. Allen said, “there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”
Xenophilia (True Strange Stuff) 