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Sandra Bernhard is a textbook Gemini. Acerbic and catty one second, then warm and compassionate the next, it is exactly that dual nature that makes her so compelling and hilarious to watch in action. Since her startling film debut in Martin Scorcese’s King of Comedy, Hollywood hasn’t known what the hell to do with her many talents, but this funny lady has soldiered on, forging her own signature art form of musical comedy cabaret, becoming a modern day Fanny Brice in the process. With her unique one woman shows like Without You I’m Nothing, I’m Still Here, Dammit to her brand new one I Love Being Me, Don’t You, (premiering this week at Town Hall) Bernhard has been making us laugh and think from the eighties to the

Happy Monday everyone, here’s my Top 5 for June 6, 2011 from Len Berman at www.ThatsSports.com.
1. Quick Hits
* Miami leads Dallas two games to one in the NBA Finals after last nights 88-86 win. Game 4 is tomorrow night in Dallas.
* Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals is tonight in Boston with Vancouver leading two games to none.
* Rafael Nadal won his sixth French Open beating Roger Federer in four sets.
* Maybe walk him next time? Albert Pujols of the Cards hits an extra inning game-ending homer against the Cubs for the second straight day.
* The baseball draft is today.
* Don’t kill the messenger. A-Rod and Cameron Diaz are supposedly

I was recently contacted, from prison, by a former student, a brilliant young man according to the state standardized tests we were giving a decade ago on which he scored in the 99th percentile in math and not far below that in English. Michael (not his real name) expected to do well in school with little effort. He’d done that for most of his life — and didn’t seem interested in being challenged. He and I had some

On Friday, more than two months after President Obama ordered U.S. forces into a war of choice in Libya without congressional authorization, and more than two weeks after the expiration of the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution for the unauthorized use of force, the House finally debated and voted on the deployment of U.S. forces to the Libya conflict. You can watch the debate on C-SPAN here.
What brought this debate and vote to pass was a resolution to withdraw

For many years America has been sliding into a dark abyss…
… succumbing to the lowest common-denominator — spurning intelligence for ‘cool.’
As a result all areas of American life have changed, but not for the better. In fact, it is easier to be stupid than it is to become smart. And, unfortunately, America has embraced stupid.
Sarah Palin has somehow emerged at the vortex of this strange struggle — this negative

Canaries have been used to warn miners digging for coal underground of the danger of toxic gases. As long as the bird kept singing, the miners knew their air supply was safe. A dead canary signaled need for an immediate evacuation.
There are valuable “canaries,” albeit, politically diverse, and in some cases sending warnings to the White House. Their “singing” (voices) may be more valuable in providing guidance for Obama in his reelection campaign than the president and his advisers fully understand and appreciate.
18 months or more ago,

Have two British academics found the key to why Americans keep being bombarded today with a discourse that highlights dramatic “emergency” events — that then leads inevitably to legislation that chips away (or chisels away) at what is left of the Constitution? I believe they have. Dr. Stephen Morton and Dr. Elleke Boehmer, in their very important new book, Terror and the Postcolonial, show how today’s headlines on CNN may have been crafted for use in India in the 1800s — perfected throughout the nineteenth century — and road-tested on unfortunate Irish citizens in the 1910s.
This weekend, in an Oxford lecture titled “Travelling Texts in a Time of Emergency”, Morton demonstrated that the British “practiced” techniques for repressing populations in their

The Babson College definition of entrepreneurship is: “A way of thinking and acting that is opportunity obsessed, holistic in approach, and leadership balanced.”
In honor of the Urban Entrepreneurship Summit being held at Rutgers Business School in Newark today, I wanted to present my thoughts on what the younger generation needs to know about entrepreneurship.
The quotation above from Babson, the top entrepreneurship college in the country, gives a springboard to my essential thought: Every individual should learn how to start, finance, and manage a small business. This will give millions of people the skills necessary to make a livelihood, in case they have to leave a job or are unable to find one. It will also enable them to take advantage of a market insight and turn it into a business opportunity. Also, they will become better employees through understanding how business functions.
After 30 years of teaching entrepreneurship as a way to encourage at-risk students to learn how to be economically independent and to stay in school, I am confident that this experiential approach works will help struggling youth to stay in school and learn basic skills.
One of the major causes of poverty is business failure, often due to a lack of

With First Lady Michelle Obama headlining a media event, the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week officially and finally scrapped its food pyramid — an explanation for nutrition that could be as elusive to decipher as the riddle of the Sphinx. Uncle Sam, instead, replaced the old good eating diagram with a sight that’s familiar at every meal: a plate.
The new image is organized in the same fashion as the actual plates recommended by a host of successful dieters and nutrition experts: half of it is heaped with vegetables and fruit and the rest of the area is divided for grains and protein.
More specifically, the USDA version gives the largest share of the plate to vegetables, with similar space occupied by grains. Fruit and protein round it out in equal

An Arizona wildfire continued to grow on Monday morning, as firefighters contending with strong, dry winds remain unable to contain the blaze.

The Wallow fire, the third-largest in the state's history, has already consumed 301 sq miles (780 sq km).

More than 2,300 firefighters from across the country have joined the fight, with residents evacuating towns in the fire's path.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has described the fire as "horrific".

The fire, which started on 29 May, is threatening mountain communities in the east of the

On a bright afternoon in March, I climbed a dusty path in the northern highlands of Jordan, passing olive groves, pine forests and grazing goats along the way. I arrived at a tent where Imam Sheikh Zuhare welcomed me warmly and invited me to take a seat with him on a rug on the ground under a giant photograph of Jordan’s King Abdullah.
He poured me a glass of sugary mint tea, served me a platter of crusty pita bread, fresh olive oil, zataar, labneh and hummus, and explained how things in this tiny corner of the Muslim world were changing.
Sheikh Zuhare wasn’t referring to the groundbreaking protests of the Arab Spring, although that was certainly on the tip of everyone’s tongue in Jordan at the time. Rather, he talked about the incremental shifts in how Muslim law was being interpreted in terms of family

As the countdown continues to the beginning of August, our nation and the rest of the world waits to see whether Congressional Republicans and Democrats, working with the Obama Administration, can come together to raise the debt ceiling, allowing the government to borrow to fund its activities. Assuming that Congress resolves that short-term issue, still looming is the much greater and tougher problem of lowering deficits and ultimately reducing the national debt. Democrats as well as Republicans have accepted the idea that debt reduction is a must. The president appointed a bi-partisan commission headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson that studied the problem and made recommendations about how to reduce the

Paul Says…
It’s not a great piece of music, but it does send a message… a strong one! Abusive men could pay the ultimate price.
R&B/hip-hop artist, Rihanna has released a new video that has media watchdogs screaming foul.
The title of the video is ‘Man Down.’ In it, a woman (Rihanna) approaches a man in a crowd, points a gun and shoots him in the back. With the man’s body lying in a pool of blood, horrified on-lookers scatter for cover.
As the story unfolds, and the woman belts out a confession to her mother, we learn the motive for the shooting.

According to multiple news reports, on Saturday German scientists identified the source of the deadly E. coli O104:H4 outbreak around Hamburg, Germany, as bean sprouts not hamburgers, lettuce, tomato, or cucumbers. No surprise to anybody who pays attention to food safety issues.
This is just the latest outbreak of foodborne illness caused by sprouts, probably the riskiest food on the market. I predict that within weeks raw sprouts will disappear from grocery shelves in the US and around the world, perhaps to never appear

The former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Khan, has entered a plea of not guilty in a New York court to charges of attempted rape and sexual assault.

He stands accused of assaulting a maid at the Manhattan hotel where he was staying on 14 May.

The claims led to his arrest on a plane that was about to take off for Paris.

His next court date is set for 18 July. If found guilty, the 62-year-old faces up to 25 years in prison.

Mr Strauss-Kahn arrived at the New York Supreme Court on Monday with his wife, the French television journalist Anne Sinclair.

A group of hotel workers shouted, "Shame on you!" in a show of solidarity with the maid who accuses him of attacking

Ever heard of the Pippin?
It’s on a very short list: an utterly failed Apple product. It was Apple’s first and, so far, only attempt at designing a video game console. The Pippin was released in 1996, along with a controller called the AppleJack. It had one-tenth the computing horsepower of a current iPhone and ten thousand times fewer games to

Given the choice, would you prefer to make an iron-clad, no-turning-back decision, or one you could back out of if you needed to? Does that seem like a stupid question? I understand why it might, but bear with me — because it isn’t.
People overwhelmingly prefer reversible decisions to irreversible ones. They believe it’s better to “keep your options open,” whenever possible. They wait years before declaring a major, date someone for years before getting married, favor stores with a guaranteed return policy (think Zappos) and hire employees on a temporary basis (or use probationary periods), all in order to avoid commitments that can be difficult, or nearly impossible, to undo.
People believe that this is the best way to ensure their own happiness and

This is serious; what cures are there for pathetically small job creation and the suffocating weakness in real home prices? Dr. Bernanke has no magic potions. Congress and the White House are bewildered. The big Wall Street houses are just plain wrong on their

A recent news item that certainly got my attention announced that stress is contagious. This is something that I have known to be true ever since childhood. My mother was a stresser, a person who was highly emotional and given to panicky reactions. Her stress level affected the entire family, those who lived in the house and the larger extended

What is the purpose of spiritual inquiry?
It is to make sense out of life at the deepest level. If we don’t make the effort to deeply grasp who we are and why we are here, we will half-blindly stumble our way through life, like most people do. And that’s not much help to the evolutionary process. We are living in a time when nobody really knows what the rules are

Four years ago, I decided to clean up my mind and become a Lovetarian. Choosing loving thoughts over fearful delusions was a tough transition at first. Giving up fear is like giving up sugar. Much like sugar, fear is a sneaky ingredient that hides out in

When the credits rolled at the end of the pre-screening of The Undefeated my first thought was this: Why didn’t Hillary’s advisors think of this? It was impossible for our country to know the real Hillary Rodham Clinton through the media’s sexism-colored-glasses during the 2008 presidential race. The real Hillary was never introduced. By the time our country finally got to know her post-2008 and she became our most popular politician, it was already too late.
Which is why The Undefeated is providing such an important service by, finally, introducing Sarah Palin. True, the producer Stephen Bannon does share the same political ideology as Governor Palin, and so has a point of view (as Bannon aptly points out, so does Michael Moore in producing his

Over the past 17 years, the sprawling E3 video game expo has been the launch pad for innumerable smash hit games and innovative consoles. But some say the flashy, tech-centric exposition may no longer have the soul or relevance it once did.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, as it is also known, is a three-day conference run by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), a trade body which invites video game journalists, retailers and other industry insiders to the Los Angeles Convention Center to critique, and in some cases swoon over new products from industry giants including Nintendo and Sony.

Roughly 45,000 of those tech heads are currently invading downtown LA for the much-anticipated event, which officially kicks off tomorrow.

Messy-haired video game reporters with stacks of accreditation badges slung around their necks are already being picked up and shipped to press conferences around the city by shuttle buses, owned by Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft.
Roughly 45,000 gamers from over 80 countries are expected to attend the E3 Expo
The four companies are poised power up the smoke machines for the unveiling of their new products a day before the start of the expo.

This year's E3 could be huge for Nintendo, as the pioneering video game company is expected to release the next Wii console, currently dubbed Project Café.

Other new products due to premiere include Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Irrational Games' Bioshock Infinite, Bethesda Softwork's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the next generation portable console from Sony.
‘Fall from grace’
Beyond the headline grabbers, some gamers say the conference does not have quite the same weight or allure it once did; they believe that E3 has become too focused on glitzy presentation, while also limiting its scope to industry insiders rather than the gamers

As I write, the minions of X have just waged a campaign on Wikipedia to revise the facts of one of the best known episodes in American history so its entry will conform to their idol’s dazzlingly dumb word-salad version of that event. Elsewhere, Y is closing in on hit number 3,000. And Z, who has long wanted one, just got an afternoon talk show.
No point naming names. They don’t