See: August 16-31 and Sept 16-30 (View All)
CNN report on the healthiest and most sustainable seafood to eat.
Ted Baxter is finally right about something:
Chris Perez (husband of slain Tejano singer Selena) announced on Facebook today that he has resolved a lawsuit with Selena’s family. This is good news, and actually Perez deserves his fair compensation. Apparently, when Selena died, she had no will, so the husband would stand to receive 100% of her estate. However, two months after her death. Selena’s father made him sign an agreement to receive 25% of the Selena company’s earnings. Perez (who was 22 at the time) was in mourning and hadn’t even consulted an attorney.
I’m not sure we say Selena’s father defrauded Chris Perez, but certainly he didn’t disclose to Chris Perez his legal rights at the time. Then he maintained strict control over the Selena name (which was trademarked). Also, the father sued Chris Perez a few times, mainly over a memoir he wrote about Selena and his plans to develop some sort of TV show about their marriage.
It’s interesting because this disagreement mirrors the cultural disagreement between the two of them as presented in the 1990s biopic of Selena starring Jennifer Lopez. I had the good fortune to see Chris Perez perform in Houston in the early 2000s– what a class act — great musician who really wrote a very personal memoir many years later, when he felt the time was right.
RIP Norm McDonald. I only discovered his comedy recently. Faves: Moth Joke, Logic Professor joke. Also, his compilation of OJ Simpson jokes from SNL were hilarious (here’s part 2).
Great (and devastating) opinion piece on 9-11 by a leading Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami . FUN FACT: Her “Moor’s Account” novel is a fictionalized account of a Muslim man who went with Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530s through Texas and southern parts of the US:
The fact that the United States itself went on to attack, and wreak even greater violence against innocent civilians around the world, was largely omitted from official narratives, as it was in the museum. This erasure is not accidental. After the initial phase of fighting, the Pentagon did not release regular and precise reports of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We got out of the body count business years ago,” Mark Kimmitt, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and former State Department official, said in 2018. “The numbers, while relevant, are not something that we quote, nor do we keep in our back pocket.” The work of counting the civilian dead fell instead to human rights groups, research centers and special sections of newspapers.
Likewise, the speeches of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were more likely to offer assurances that the nation was “staying the course” or “fulfilling our commitment” than to give an honest accounting of the wars. Every time I heard them speak, I wondered what goals they wanted to achieve. Was it the surrender of the Taliban? The capture of Osama bin Laden? The fall of Saddam Hussein? The staging of elections in Iraq and Afghanistan? Each milestone was reached, and yet the wars continued, largely out of sight. Within the first few months of combat operations, news of the wars disappeared from front pages. Nightly news broadcasts spent so little time on the wars that yearly coverage was measured in seconds per newscast.
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