Acclaimed documentary maker Les Blank dies at 77

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) ? Les Blank, an acclaimed documentary maker who focused his camera on cultural corners ranging from blues music, to garlic lovers, to shoe-eating artists, died Sunday at age 77, his son said.

Blank died at his home in Berkeley, Calif. nearly a year after being diagnosed with bladder cancer, Harrod Blank said.

Blank's 42 films earned him a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

"I think he's a national treasure," filmmaker Taylor Hackford, president of the Directors Guild of America, told the New York Times. "Although his films are not well known at the moment, they'll take their place"

The Florida-born Blank's early documentaries focused on musicians, including 1965's "Dizzy Gillespie" and "The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins," a portrait of the Texas bluesman that won Blank his first wide renown.

He shifted to food with documentaries like 1980's "Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers," and 2007's "All in This Tea."

Blank was known for following his curiosity anywhere. No topic was too strange ? or too ordinary. His 1987 film "Gap-Toothed Women" was a series of interviews on the subject spurred by an old high school crush.

"If he was interested in gap-toothed women, he's going to make a film about it. If he wants to make a film about garlic because he loves to eat garlic, he's going to do it," said Harrod Blank, who is also a filmmaker.

But the subject that led to Blank's most memorable work was fellow filmmaker Werner Herzog.

In 1979's "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe," Blank chronicled Herzog's attempt to dine on his boot, the result of a lost bet.

And "Burden of Dreams," Blank's 1982 behind-the-scenes view of Herzog's disastrous filming of "Fitzcarraldo" in the Peruvian jungle, became a classic chronicle of artistic obsession.

"If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams," Blank films Herzog saying in the film. "I don't want to live like that,"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/acclaimed-documentary-maker-les-blank-dies-77-055328582.html

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Population boom poses interconnected challenges of energy, food, water

Apr. 8, 2013 ? Mention great challenges in feeding a soaring world population, and thoughts turn to providing a bare subsistence diet for poverty-stricken people in developing countries. But an expert speaking in New Orleans on April 8 at the 245^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, described a parallel and often-overlooked challenge.

"The global population will rise from 7 billion today to almost 9 billion people by 2040," Ganesh Kishore, Ph.D., said at the meeting. "Providing enough food to prevent starvation and famine certainly will be a daunting problem. But we also have to meet the rising expectations of huge numbers of people who will be moving up into the middle class. We will have a New York City-sized population added to the middle class every second month. Their purchasing power is projected to be more than $60 trillion by 2040. Most of this growth will be in Asia. The expanding middle class will demand food that doesn't just fill the belly, but food that's appetizing, safe and nourishing, convenient to prepare and available in unlimited quantities at reasonable prices. Producing food for a middle class that will number more than 5 billion within 30 years will strain existing technology for clean water, sustainable energy and other resources."

Kishore spoke at a symposium, "The Interconnected World of Energy, Food and Water," that focused on approaches to prepare for the population boom. Kishore is a co-organizer of the symposium, along with John Finley, Ph.D., of Louisiana State University and Hessy Taft, Ph.D., of St. John's University.

"We want to foster greater awareness among scientists, the public and policy-makers about the interconnections between these three challenges," said Kishore. "Water, food and energy must be understood together -- it's not just one or the other, so we have speakers addressing all of these topics. And the reason for this interconnection is that we need water to produce both energy and food -- whether it is about harvesting fossil-fuel energy, producing biobased renewable energy or producing food, we need fresh water! In addition, we are competing with other demands for fresh water. It is not just about developing technology -- we have to move the technology from the bench to the real world so that solutions see the light of day, which the industry speakers in the session can address. Regulatory policies have to keep pace with technology development, not just in places where the technology is developed but where the technology is deployed, and that requires science-based risk assessment capability and the creation of consumer confidence in the process."

He described how the addition of one billion people every 12-13 years itself poses challenges that require innovations, rather than simply scaling up existing technologies. And he said that opportunities go hand-in-hand with the challenges.

They include using plant biotechnology and tools of synthetic biology to expand the food supply and providing new sources of energy, developing more efficient ways to convert sunlight into chemical energy and applying information technology to the production of food and chemical energy more efficiently. Kishore cited specific examples of progress being made in those areas. As CEO of the Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund, Kishore and colleagues are promoting some of these strategies by investing in companies working in these areas. One company in which they invest, for instance, improves agricultural crops by enhancing plant breeding and genetic technologies. Another is developing ways to transform waste gases into fuels.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/OLHh-Odg8Nw/130408142632.htm

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Crews find bodies of 2 buried children

STANLEY, N.C. (AP) ? Authorities on Monday recovered the bodies of two children who were buried when a wall of dirt fell on them while they were playing in a hole at a home construction site in North Carolina.

The bodies of a 6-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy were pulled from a 24-foot-deep pit in the town of Stanley, outside of Charlotte, said Lincoln County Emergency Services spokesman Dion Burleson.

"We've been working a horrific scene here," Burleson told reporters gathered near the rural site on a two-lane road.

Crews had been searching for the children since Sunday afternoon, when one of their fathers called 911 to report the collapse. Officials were on the scene within minutes but couldn't get to the children.

Neighbors have said a man building the home had been digging with a backhoe earlier in the day. Lincoln County Sheriff David Carpenter would not say what was being built at the site or if the man was doing it alone or had professional help.

Burleson described the pit as 20 feet by 20 feet with a sloped entrance leading down to the 24-foot bottom. Carpenter said the children were at the bottom of the pit retrieving a child-sized pickaxe when the walls fell in on them.

Carpenter said his deputies would continue to investigate what happened. The children's names have not been released, but Carpenter said it was the boy's father who called 911.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/crews-bodies-2-nc-children-trapped-dirt-124557541.html

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Martini Madness

S?verine Serizy.

Photo by GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images

The Contemporary Standard (2) vs. S?verine Serizy (10)
ACT ONE:
I am sitting at the bar, sipping on my S?verine Serizy, waiting for the surrealism to kick in?waiting, also, for Edith to appear at our follow-up to last week?s martini appointment. She materializes. The barman presents to her my interpretation of The Contemporary Standard, which I call The Liquid Transmitter.

?This is The Liquid Transmitter,? I say, explaining that it relies on Old Tom, a slyly soft, slightly sweet style of gin ubiquitous in the Gilded Age, when the institutions of?telephony?and the martini began to emerge. (?The first martinis were made with Old Tom,? Gary Regan writes, discussing?The Martinez, in?The Joy of Mixology.) I float the fun fact that Old Tom once was dispensed from?cat-shaped vending machines.

?It tastes like water!? Edith says. Then chummily she asks, not for the first time and not without a glimmer of expectancy, if I have prepared myself mentally for this project's ?crash-and-burn phase.? I do not quite see what she means.

ACT TWO:
I am sitting at the desk, siccing coffee at my eyelids, waiting for the editrix to shoot me an email following up our most recent rendezvous, which effected the delivery of vermouth-spiked cocktail onions prepared by editorial assistant J. Bryan Lowder ("When I was boiling them, my roommate said it smelled like the cats had been sick in his room!").?

When we spoke last night, you mentioned that you think you will ?crash and burn? at some point during the remainder of the tournament. I confess that this worried me, largely because I assumed you had already gone through your crash-and-burn phase. I understand that this is a stressful project, and that I?m putting a lot of pressure on you to get to the championship already, so of course there?s going to be some psychological fallout. But can this be a carefully controlled, tightly managed crash-and-burn phase, please? Is there any chance you can defer the crashing and burning until after you finish the Sweet 16? Or, better yet, put it off till you live-blog the Final Four and Championship on Monday night?

With and on that note, lyrically Madness Martini sinks into dementia, proving narrative pass?.

ACT THREE:
I am setting here a record of two (2) very fine interpretations of the Contemporary Standard, which advances to the Sweet 16:

The Liquid Transmitter
2? ounces Hayman's Old Tom gin
? ounce Dolin dry vermouth
1 dash orange bitters
1 dash grapefruit bitters
Garnish: 1 cherry, 1 broad piece of lemon peel long enough to arc across the glass at its diameter

Place the cherry at the center of the bowl of a chilled cocktail glass. Do not risk swallowing a toothpick?that's what killed Sherwood Anderson. Stir well with ice and strain into the chilled cocktail glass. Garnish and serve. Pretend that the lemon peel is a tiny little yellow telephone.

Under the Host
1? ounces Hayman's Old Tom gin
? ounce Dorothy Parker American Gin
? ounce Dolin dry vermouth
1 dash orange bitters (optional)
Garnish: lemon twist

Stir well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish and serve and note well: These martinis may be deceptive. Have two at the very most. Have three and you?re under the table.

The Contemporary Standard advances to the Sweet 16 in the South Regional.

Interlude
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

The Cuke (2) vs. The Martinez (10)
Q: How forgettably bland is the Cuke??

The Martinez advances to the Sweet 16 in the Midwest Regional.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=746a0bf86c15b6ecfe25a8835c998bf6

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Mom: 'BUCKWILD' star a Christian, now in heaven

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) ? For all his on-camera carousing and cussing, "BUCKWILD" reality TV star Shain Gandee was a publicly proclaimed and baptized Christian, and his mother told hundreds of mourners Sunday that she will see him again.

"I know where Shain is," Loretta Gandee told the family, friends and fans crammed into the Charleston Municipal Auditorium. "He said about a month ago, 'I know when I die I'm going to heaven.'"

Dressed in a hot-pink "Gandee Candy" T-shirt and jeans, she spoke only a few words but bellowed out an unaccompanied hymn, her voice echoing through the auditorium in prayer for their reunion.

Gandee, his 48-year-old uncle, David Gandee, and 27-year-old friend Donald Robert Myers were found dead April 1 in a sport utility vehicle that was partially submerged in a deep mud pit near Sissonville. They had last been seen leaving a bar at 3 a.m.

Autopsies determined all three died of carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly caused by the tailpipe being submerged in mud. That could have allowed the invisible gas to fill the vehicle's cabin.

Shain Gandee, nicknamed "Gandee Candy" by fans, was a breakout star of the show that followed the antics of young friends enjoying their wild country lifestyle. Season one was filmed last year, mostly around Sissonville and Charleston.

The Rev. Randy Campbell told the many young people in the crowd he understands that life bombards them with difficult choices. But he urged them to follow Shain Gandee's lead and embrace their faith now, while they are energetic and engaged.

"This life will hand you a lot of things and call it pleasure, but there is nothing that brings greater joy to a person's heart than serving the Lord," Campbell said. "You may think at this point, you're having fun, but those days will pass."

When they do, he said, God is all that matters.

Cameras were not allowed at the funeral or private family burial in Thaxton Cemetery.

As hundreds filed past the two closed coffins on the auditorium stage, a slideshow of family photos showed the simple life that Shain Gandee lived long before TV cameras started following him.

Set to country music were snapshots of him as a uniformed pee wee football player, as a teenager in a tuxedo for prom, then graduating from high school in a black gown and mortarboard.

In other images, he kissed a bride and held babies. In several, he wore hunting camouflage, displaying a slain buck by its antlers and lining up a batch of gray squirrels on a bench.

Gandee favored four-wheelers, pickups and SUVs over cellphones and computers, and "mudding," or off-road driving, was one of his favorite pastimes.

It was no coincidence some mourners arrived in mud-splattered trucks.

Dreama and Charlie Frampton, who live a few doors down, said Gandee had been playing in the mud since he was 5.

"If it wasn't a four-wheel drive truck," Dreama said, "it was a four-wheeler or a dirt bike."

"He was dedicated to the sport," Charlie added. "That's all you can do out in the country."

Gandee's family asked mourners to wear camouflage or the neon-colored Gandee Candy T-shirts to the service because Shain didn't like to dress up.

Ricky Sater, 23, said his friend would have loved the sea of camo and T-shirts that filled the auditorium.

"He probably would walk in there going, 'BUCKWILD!'" he said.

Sater has known Shain since middle school and last saw him a week ago, when he came over to borrow a pin for a trailer hitch.

"He said, 'See ya, Rick!' and I said, 'See ya, drunk!" recalled Sater, who got the terrible news days later in a phone call.

"My sister told me about it, and it being April Fool's, I thought she was joking. But she wasn't," he said, swallowing hard. "I try to keep my emotions balled up, but I started breaking down about six hours later."

Shooting was underway on season two at the time of Gandee's death, but MTV spokesman Jake Urbanski said film crews were not with him over Easter weekend and hadn't filmed him since earlier that week.

MTV says it will be weeks before producers and cast members decide whether to continue. For now, the network said, everyone is focused on supporting Gandee's family.

Katrina Burdette, 25, of Cross Lanes, didn't know Gandee but is friends with his cast mate, Ashley Whitt. Burdette has watched every episode and wants to see more.

"I think it should go on. Give them time to mourn and everything, but he'd want the show to go on," she said. "He wanted to be in the show and keep it going, so why not ? in his memory ? keep it going?"

MTV said the half-hour series in the old "Jersey Shore" time slot was pulling in an average of 3 million viewers per episode since its premiere and was the No. 1 original cable series on Thursday nights among 12- to 34-year-olds.

Others, like his neighbors the Framptons, say the show just won't be the same.

"They should just leave well enough alone," Charlie Frampton said.

But he won't object if the show survives. It's bringing people to West Virginia, and he rejects the notion that it portrays the state in a negative light.

"They're just showing what true country is," he said. "It's no worse than that 'Teen Mom.'"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mom-buckwild-star-christian-now-heaven-201147426.html

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Conn. gov faults gun lobbyists over restrictions

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy harshly criticized gun industry lobbyists on Sunday, saying they are doing too little to halt gun violence.

Just three days after he signed into law new restrictions on weapons and large-capacity magazines, the governor compared Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, to clowns and said lobbyists want to ensure that the industry can sell guns indiscriminately.

"Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus," Malloy said of LaPierre on CNN's "State of the Union." ''They get the most attention and that's what he's paid to do."

Representatives of the NRA did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

"What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible even if they're deranged, even if they're mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background," Malloy said. "They don't care. They want to sell guns."

Robert Crook, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition of Sportsmen, a lobbying group, said Malloy's criticism was "absolutely false."

"It's another political statement from a governor with little knowledge," he said.

Connecticut's gun industry supports a gun trafficking task force and tighter background checks of buyers, Crook said.

Andrew Doba, a spokesman for Malloy, said the Democratic governor was criticizing lobbyists, not the gun industry. Malloy has said he wants Connecticut's large gun industry to remain in the state, though gun manufacturers say the new restrictions will hurt their business.

"People are welcome to stay in our state as long as they're producing a product that can be sold in the United States legally," Malloy said.

Nearly four months after a gunman killed 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, lawmakers and Malloy enacted legislation that adds more than 100 firearms to the state's assault weapons ban. It also immediately bans the sale of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. People who purchased those guns and magazines before midnight Wednesday will be allowed to keep them if they're registered with the state police before Jan. 1.

Required background checks for private gun sales also take effect.

Other parts of the new law include a ban on armor-piercing bullets, establishment of a deadly weapon offender registry, expansion of circumstances when a person's mental health history disqualifies them from holding a gun permit, mandatory reporting of voluntary hospital commitments, doubled penalties for gun trafficking and other firearms violations, and $1 million to fund the statewide firearms trafficking task force.

Malloy said he preferred an "all-out ban" on magazines of more than 10 rounds of ammunition, but the legislature opposed him on the issue.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/conn-gov-faults-gun-lobbyists-over-restrictions-195304857.html

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Matisse in Norwegian museum was once Nazi loot

OSLO, Norway (AP) ? The family of a prominent Parisian art dealer is demanding that a Norwegian museum return an Henri Matisse painting seized by Nazis under the direction of Hermann Goering, in the latest dispute over art stolen from Jews during World War II.

The painting at the center of the dispute, Matisse's 1937 "Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair," depicts a woman sitting in a living room. It has been among the highlights of the Henie Onstad Art Center near Oslo since the museum was established in 1968 through a donation by wealthy art collector Niels Onstad and his wife, Olympic figure-skating champion Sonja Henie.

Museum Director Tone Hansen said it had been unaware the painting was stolen by the Nazis until it was notified in 2012 by the London-based Art Loss Register, which tracks lost and stolen paintings.

She said Onstad bought the painting in "good faith" from the Galerie Henri Benezit in Paris in 1950. The Benezit gallery "has no record of collaborating with the Nazis, as many galleries did," she said in an interview.

Although the war ended almost 70 years ago, disputes over looted art have become increasingly common in recent years, in part because many records were lost, and in part because an international accord on returning such art was only struck in 1998.

But the case of the Matisse is somewhat different in that its former owner, Paul Rosenberg, was one of the most prominent art dealers in Paris before the war, which he survived by fleeing to New York. Art Loss Register Director Chris Marinello said the records in this case are unusually clear.

According to a biography published by New York's Museum of Modern Art, Rosenberg was one of the preeminent modern art dealers of his day, and personal friends with Picasso and Matisse, among others.

Art Registry documents show he purchased "Blue Dress" directly from the painter, having noted the purchase in 1937 and put it on display in the same year, Marinello said. After the war, Rosenberg re-established his business and sought to recover more than 400 works that had been taken by the Nazis.

Marinello showed The Associated Press documents that name the piece now on display in Norway as among those missing after the war.

He slammed the Henie Onstad art museum for "stonewalling."

"The evidence is overwhelming. They just don't want to resolve this," he said.

Paul Rosenberg died in 1959. His family has remained prominent, as his son Alexandre was a war hero and later began his own art dealership.

Among surviving family descendants are Anne Sinclair, the French journalist and ex-wife of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Another granddaughter, American lawyer Marianne Rosenberg, said Friday she didn't wish to antagonize the museum, but hoped that it would come to realize that it is wrong in every sense of the term.

The paintings seized from Paul Rosenberg and other Jewish victims of Nazi aggression were taken "under difficult conditions, in a cruel and unfair situation," she said in a telephone interview from her office in New York. "We honor my grandfather Paul's memory ... by doing what he would have done: we wish to recover that which we consider ours."

The lawyer representing the museum, Kyre Eggen, said it was significant that Onstad didn't know where the painting came from.

Under Norwegian law, if a person has had an item in good faith for more than 10 years, that person becomes the rightful owner, he said.

That argument runs against the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, to which Norway is a party. The principles say that owners of looted art should take into account the difficulty that Jewish war survivors faced in reclaiming lost property after the Holocaust, and that owners of looted art should in all cases seek a fast and fair solution.

The Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse to the Rosenberg family in 1999, after initially making similar arguments.

Eggen also argued that it is possible Rosenberg sold the painting himself between 1946 and 1950.

But Marianne Rosenberg rejected that possibility. Art Loss Register documents show Paul Rosenberg notifying French authorities the piece was missing in 1946, and his family again listing it as among missing pieces it was seeking in 1958.

"The Rosenberg family has since the end of the war assiduously and continuously sought the recovery of the paintings it lost," she said. "We have never sought to recover paintings not lost."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/matisse-norwegian-museum-once-nazi-loot-191439837.html

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