"Breaking Bad" Wins Big At The Golden Globes

That was to be expected, since "Breaking Bad" is the Best TV Series Ever.

This was unexpected, though: Jennifer Lawrence apparently not wanting to intrude into Taylor Swift's interview, yet capturing the attention anyway.

Similar to many people, I like Taylor Swift, but love Jennifer Lawrence.

Dinner With the Ettensohns

A good time catching up with the fambly.

Time To Repair Relations With Iran

Bad relations with Iran never made much geopolitical sense. We have too many interests in common. It's time to reboot.

Amber - If You Could Read My Mind

I like Amber's cover of Gordon Lightfoot's song. She had been part of the Starz 54 trio. Here, she is at a fashion show.




These guys lip sync over her solo studio recording (from 2000, or so). Disconcerting, but one can always choose not to look, and listen instead.

How "Breaking Bad" Broke All Of Biggie Small's Crack Commandments

Follow these rules, you’ll have mad bread to break up
If not, twenty-four years on the wake up

Sixty Years Without A Bath

No one knows why he lives like this.

Impressive! Since the California rainy season has utterly failed this winter, and with water use restrictions a dead certainty, I might look like this by next November.

Likes to smoke a pipe filled with animal dung.

Damn, this guy is a role model!

I Want To Believe

From Breaking Bad Friends.

From a 2011 review in Salon by Matt Zoller Seitz:

"Breaking Bad" is, in its heart, the story of the supposedly respectable, white, upper-middle class becoming the Other. I don't think it's an accident that those quasi-mythic drawings of Walt in the guise of his porkpie-hatted alter ego, Heisenberg, resemble old Project Bluebook sketches of extraterrestrial visitors. Walt is becoming as much an alien -- an undesirable Other -- as the illegals who have periodically sneaked across the border throughout the show's run.

Which reminds me of the only time I ever reported a UFO sighting.

Why Lavell Crawford's Fans Were Upset With 'Breaking Bad' Finale

Jeff Brofsky Will Be At Albuquerque Comic Con

It's time for Albuquerque Comic Con, and that means it's time for Jeff Brofsky! Here is brand-new profile of Jeff:

Brofsky's love for comic books goes back to his days as a youngster, growing up in Far Rockaway, N.Y. He still remembers his father, a lieutenant with the NYPD, giving him a buck and telling him to select 10 comic books.

Although his dad seemed to prefer that he pick out favorites like Superman and Batman, the youngster "wanted Marvel (brand) X-Men, Spider Man ("the first hero of the Silver Age of comics," Brofsky says), Fantastic Four." He wouldn't let his father read his new comics because he didn't like the way his dad bent the covers back when he read them, almost as if Jeff Brofsky anticipated a price guide coming out sometime in the future, with incredibly high prices for those in "mint" condition.

Some of those old titles are still some of his favorites.

"I still have a lot of stuff," he said. He keeps his best comics, including some top-dollar items, in a safe deposit box, and keeps his prized comics in mint condition by not reading them. Many of his old favorites have been reprinted in volumes of hardback books.

...Brofsky's parents moved the family, apparently part of that great Empire State migration, to Rio Rancho in 1972, right after Brofsky graduated high school. Brofsky said some Rio Ranchoans may remember his name in the Observer several decades ago, when he donned a costume to be "Chicken Man" at New Mexico Six Guns' hockey games at Tingley Coliseum.

He attended the University of New Mexico, where he ultimately obtained his bachelor's degree in psychology.

"I use it every day," he says of that degree, although a marketing degree might have suited him better for his Tall Tales Comics venture. Although his passion had once been stamps and coins - he remembered organizing his own show for those hobbies in New York - comic books remained a passion when he was an adult.

I went on two Vegas weekends. Since what happens in Vegas ends up on my blog, here is that report.

I Have A House Guest!

I've been in my house for nearly nineteen years. I've never had a house guest before! Shake things up a bit!

He went on a walk this morning. Who does that?

Curious if E. has met him by now:

M.: Say hello when he returns from his walk.

E.: I'll hide in my bedroom when mokum comes back.

M.: No, be sure to say hello! He's a nice guy!

Parking Violation In Midtown

Scofflaw on left; cop car on right.

Busiest Week Of My Pathetic Life

I hope it's enough....

A Roadkill Opportunity?

Sheryl Crow - "No One Said It Would Be Easy"

Really like this song.

So, Chris Christie's Got Himself A Scandal

It figures a bully like him would do something like this:

“What I've seen today for the first time is unacceptable," Christie said. "I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge."

I like a tweet posted at Daily Kos:

If you think Gov. Christie wasn't involved in closing the lanes to the bridge, then I have a bridge to sell you.
— @zachbraff

Rush Limbaugh, Meteorologist

He's an ass, but he makes me laugh, sometimes.

The trouble is that Meteorologist speak is slowly bleeding into common English usage. Weather guys talk like this all the time. At least the 'polar vortex' crisis of 2014 isn't as severe as the 'haboob' crisis of 2011 and 2012, when Arizona was hit unusually hard by these dust storms, and people all over the state freaked out about lurid-edged Arabic words contaminating the pristine way they speak out in the 602:

We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country. And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the “polar vortex.” The dreaded polar vortex.

Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have you ever heard of it? Well, they just created it for this week…They’re in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming.

Made Buzzworthy!

Dave Layman noticed this Buzzworthy article that appeared last October regarding the descanso my sister and myself made. Somehow, I missed it, but it's cute:

"This Might Be The Sweetest Walter White Tribute Yet"

Clickworthy

Not:

For as little as a half cent each click, websites hawk everything from LinkedIn connections to make members appear more employable to Soundcloud plays to influence record label interest.

...Italian security researchers and bloggers Andrea Stroppa and Carla De Micheli estimated in 2013 that sales of fake Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $40 million to $360 million to date, and that fake Facebook activities bring in $200 million a year.

...Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is an international hub for click farms.

The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients' social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. "Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine," Shaiful Islam said.

...In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.

...In Indonesia, a social media-obsessed country with some of the largest number of Facebook pages and Twitter users, click farms proliferate.

Ali Hanafiah, 40, offers 1,000 Twitter followers for $10 and 1 million for $600. He owns his own server, and pays $1 per month per Internet Protocol address, which he uses to generate thousands of social media accounts.

...David Burch, at TubeMogul, a video marketing firm based in Emeryville, Calif., said that buying clicks to promote clients is a grave error. "It's bad business," he said, "and if an advertiser ever found out you did that, they'd never do business with you again."

Charity As A Form Of Kickback

Pharmaceutical prices are way too high:

As drug prices have soared in recent years and insurers have increased co-payments, a new type of charity has blossomed to fill a vital niche — helping patients pay the steep out-of-pocket costs for their medicines.

But the largest of these co-payment assistance charities, the Chronic Disease Fund, is now in turmoil after questions have arisen about its relationship with a pharmaceutical company that is itself under investigation for its marketing practices.

The practice is casting light on what has long been an open secret: The bulk of the contributions to these charities come from the pharmaceutical companies. The foundations not only help hundreds of thousands of patients a year, they also raise drug company sales and profits.

After all, if a patient cannot afford out-of-pocket costs of $5,000 for a $100,000-a-year drug, the drug company gets nothing. But if the manufacturer or the charity pays the $5,000, the patient gets the drug and the company receives $95,000 from the patient’s insurance company or Medicare.

...Critics say co-pay assistance helps keep drug prices high and circumvents efforts by insurers to control drug spending by making consumers bear part of the cost.

“These subsidies are unfortunately used to promote the overutilization of expensive brand-name drugs,” said Wells Wilkinson, a lawyer at Community Catalyst, a consumer advocacy organization.

The charities counter that any benefit to the drug companies is secondary to helping patients.

“Look at the alternative,” said Dana Kuhn, founder and president of Patient Services, one of the charities. “If they didn’t donate their dollars, people would die.”

Drug companies often directly subsidize the co-payments for privately insured patients. But they cannot do so for patients covered by federal programs like Medicare’s Part D drug benefit, because that would be considered a kickback, an illegal inducement to use a drug.

Wonder How Pamela Trokanski's Plans Will Affect DMTC?

Synergy? Competition? Trouble? Success?:

Trokanski is fixing to build an 18,000-square-foot, two-story building next to her current studio that will introduce what she calls “Life in 11 Dimensions,” which will bring together a spa, healthy meals, dancing, art, theatrical productions and a community meeting space.

...According to a professionally drawn site plan for the project, a full 3,438 square feet can be devoted to meeting places for community groups, business conferences and the community, with a dedicated nearby space for the healthy food vendor Stone Soup to provide on-site catering. Produce could come from an on-site organic garden. A theater will have 115 to 200 seats depending on the production.

“It’s kind of a gift to Davis,” Trokanski said. “Living a healthy, creative life in a healthy, creative community in a healthy, creative world.”

Collaboration is the name of the game. Acme Theatre Company, a longtime troupe for high school-aged actors, is just one of several groups looking to benefit from “11D,” as the project is being called.

“We’ve been thinking of a collaborative space, so when Pamela talked about 11D it seemed just like a dream,” said Emily Henderson, artistic director of Acme. Henderson first met Trokanski as her student at a dance class at Davis High School, an example of the roots Trokanski has in the community.