Thursday, January 21, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Thursday, January 21, 2010)
(1)- NOTED -- Dr. Herbert Spiegel treated pain, anxiety and addictions by putting people into a trance. Broadway actors sought his help to overcome stage fright, singers to quit smoking, politicians to overcome fear of flying.

(2)- ONE OR THE OTHER -- Two of her adult siblings suffered from kidney failure, both enduring energy-draining dialysis sessions as they waited for a kidney that could give them a new lease on life. But Mollie Walsh could only help one of them.

(3)- HANG IT OUT -- Peggy Brace’s front porch is always awash with hanging laundry and the neighbors are complaining so she has filed an article for the April Town Meeting warrant that to allow her to continue and encourage others to do the same.

(4)- FRENCH LAW -- In a surprise ruling last month, France’s highest court – la Cour de Cassation – ruled that an employee was wrongly dismissed for downloading smut to his work PC. The employee was fired by Peugeot Citroën Automobiles in June 2002.

(5)- AMERICAN WOES -- In most ways, the U.S. is envied. But here’s the problem: our governing system is old, broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

(6)- TWEEKING THE LOOK -- British archaeologists have unearthed evidence that Neanderthals wore makeup 50,000 years ago. Researchers say the discovery proves the human subspecies were not 'half-wits' and were capable of symbolic thinking.

(7)-BIBLICAL WOES -- The author of What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, argues that, etiologically, “rib” doesn’t make much sense in a story pregnant with sexual innuendo; nor is there precedent for it as an instrument of creation.

(8)- NORTH KOREA -- Barbara Demick writes in "Nothing to Envy," a piercing account of the lives of a handful of North Korean refugees, credibly suggesting a human rights tragedy of enormous proportion is taking place out of Western public view.

(9)- LOCO VIDAL -- What has happened to Gore Vidal, the witty, tough-minded subversive of American letters, the century’s only possible answer to Oscar Wilde? After 9/11, Vidal’s writings took a graceless lurch toward the crackpot.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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