Uninhabited Spaces

Gary Coleman (Feb 8, 1968 - May 28, 2010)         Dennis Hopper (May 17, 1936 - May 29, 2010)

U2 has been forced to postpone their North American tour due to Bono having had emergency back surgery on Friday. The U2360 Tour was supposed to start on June 3 in Salt Lake City but now it looks like Bono will need at least 8 weeks to properly recover. According to U2.com, "Dr Muller Wohlfahrt confirmed, 'Bono suffered severe compression of the sciatic nerve. On review of his MRI scan, I realized there was a serious tear in the ligament and a herniated disc, and that conservative treatment would not suffice. I recommended Bono have emergency spine surgery with Professor Tonn at Munich's LMU University Hospital on Friday." Professor Tonn, who carried out the operation, added, "Bono was referred to me by Dr Muller Wohlfahrt late last week with a sudden onset disease. He was already in severe pain with partial paralysis in the lower leg. The ligament surrounding the disc had an 8mm tear and during surgery we discovered fragments of the disc had travel...

We have returned from our long weekend in New York City. We rented the same apartment in the Upper East Side that we had stayed in back in May 2008, which was nice since we knew the neighbourhood well and felt like we were at home. We were supposed to be a foursome but one of our party had to drop out at the very last minute to have emergency knee surgery so we ended up travelling with our dear friend Mara. FRIDAY We enjoyed awesome bagels each morning from Tal Bagels before starting our daily adventures. This was Mara's first trip to NYC so we took her on a grand tour of the must-sees. The first night we took the subway down to 42nd Street in Midtown and walked over to Times Square to take in the craziness. I got us off at 42nd street on purpose because when we existed we were right across from Mara's (and mine as it turns out) favourite building in the world, the Chrysler Building . It was a hoot to surprise her by asking her to look up. She was in a nice state of quiet a...

For a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns, I deleted my Facebook account well over a year ago. When I want to connect with friends afar I phone or email them. If they are in town, where most of my real friends are, I get together with them to, perish the thought, talk in person. Facebook allows folks to pretend they are much more popular than they really are and pretend to connect with their legions of pretend friends. In reality, I am much closer to the cashier at my local Food Basics than any of the so-called friends I used to carry along on my Facebook account. With accusations flying of a (possibly criminal) ambivalence towards its users' privacy, the Facebook organization is facing some very harsh media coverage and users are starting to wake up and trying to navigate the maze of 170 options in order to manage their privacy. Now, as the bloom is definitely off of Facebook, its actual creator ponders whether we are at the end of the Facebook era , while anoth...

See full info-graph here .

There are a number of things that I would like to submit for consideration for banishment in the hopes of making our lives better. 1. The expression "going forward". (Annoying and redundant) 2. The constant flow of TV dramas about cops, lawyers, or doctors. (Are these the only three careers on the planet?) 3.  The expression "from Wall St. to Main St." or any derivative. (A patronizing rhetorical device) 4. Illegible small print on TV automobile ads. (Impossible to read in time alloted. How is this legal?) 5. Wall-to-wall pharmaceutical ads during the news. (How medicated do we meed to be? We have made almost every part of the human condition a pathology) 6. Twitter. (Massive waste of time and bandwidth) 7. The pseudo-philosophical crap on the side of Starbucks coffee cups. (Because I always look to paper cups for wisdom and guidance) 8. Those horrific cow bell milk commercials. (Simply terrible) 9. Being asked to make a donation by the cashier at l...

As if FOX News wasn't enough of a mouthpiece for ardent Republicans, coming soon to cable is the Right Network . With none other than Kelsey Grammer (yes, as in Frasier) as its celebrity pitcher, the new network is aiming its guns at the major networks and hoping to capture the hearts and eyes of the disaffected Tea Baggers and others who think the G.O.P. has drifted too far to the middle. Here's their promo trailer...

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State University shootings. A student protest against the Vietnam War and the presence of the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State campus ended in tragedy when guardsmen shot and killed four and wounded nine Kent State students. A poignant archive and documentary is available at May 4 Archive .