http://www.fastcocreate.com/3033103/london-celebrates-the-monty-python-reunion-by-putting-a-50-foot-dead-parrot-in-potters-field



The Monty Python reunion in London began on July 1, and after a 10-day break, picks up again tonight at the O2 Arena for the final five nights that will see Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin on the same stage together, doing silly things one more time. Of course, it's not all silliness—the first five-night run of the performance raised more than £20,000 for five different charities chosen by the Python members, by giving those charities the opportunity to auction off the right to perform in a sketch alongside the cast.

To celebrate the achievements of the Monty Python crew, UKTV channel Gold—which will air the final performance of the reunion on Sunday—contracted with sculptor Iain Prendergast to create a 50-foot fiberglass version of the famous "Norwegian Blue" parrot. The parrot, which is famous for being dead from the moment it was sold, was placed on Monday at Potters Fields Park in South London, near Tower Bridge. This is both a fine reminder to tune in on Sunday to the broadcast and an outstanding opportunity to inspire countless visitors to declare in increasingly frantic tones that "This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It’s a stiff!" Because if there’s anything that you need to commission a 50-foot fiberglass sculpture to get people who know every word to famous Monty Python sketches to do, it’s to recite the funnier bits of those sketches to anyone within earshot.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated.



Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”

Schwartz had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”

Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trump—camping out in his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know him better than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until Schwartz posted the tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about Trump for decades. It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

https://www.good.is/articles/going-to-africa-on-a-racists-dime

=s1000x1400

Larry Mitchell is fed up with racists telling him and other African-Americans to “Go back to Africa.” So he’s asking them to put their money where their mouth is and pay for his dream vacation to the continent. Recently, the 41-year-old forklift driver from Kokomo, Indiana couldn’t believe the racist hate and venom he saw on the Internet after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police officers. “It kind of shocked me, because we just celebrated Fourth of July and to come back the next week and see people saying ‘Go Back to Africa,’ ” Mitchell told The New York Daily News. “If you want me to go ‘back’ to Africa, then pay for it.”

So Mitchell put together a GoFundMe page where he has no qualms about accepting donations from racists who want him to go back to Africa. Although Mitchell, an Indiana native, has never stepped foot on the continent. On the page he openly invites the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, or any other like-minded individuals to pony up and donate to the cause. “Money is green,” he told The New York Daily News. “They take our money every day.”

Here’s a snippet from his GoFundMe page.

Send me “back” to Africa fund... If you want me to go back to Africa I will gladly go... you can help make your dream and mine come true... accepting all donations... KKK, Skinheads and anyone else with like mind thinking are welcome to donate... Thank you.. God bless you and America... #putyourmoneywhereyourhateis

Mitchell’s original attempt was to ask racists to pay for his trip, but his donors seem to be well-wishers hoping to make his dream come true. There’s only one negative comment on his page from a donor named fedup whiteguy who gave a paltry $5 saying “you better not come back.” Although Mitchell doesn’t think he’ll reach his ultimate goal of $100,00, if he does, he fully intends on taking his trip. We hope he takes wonderful pictures.

http://time.com/4409356/baton-rouge-police-plot-12-year-old-suspect/

Police said the boy was part of a plot to shoot officers with stolen handguns

Police in Baton Rouge, La., on Friday arrested a 12-year-old boy who they say is a suspect in a plot to shoot police officers using stolen handguns.

Three other suspects were already arrested in the case, after eight handguns were stolen in a pawn shop robbery on July 9. The others who were arrested are Antonio Thomas, 17, Malik Bridgewater, 20, and an unnamed 13-year old, the Times-Picayune reported.



The 12-year-old boy arrested Friday was charged with simple burglary and theft of a firearm, the AP reported.

Police said the plot was the reason for their heavy response to last weekend’s largely peaceful protests over the death of Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot and killed by police officers on July 5 while he was pinned to the ground outside a convenience store. The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana is suing Baton Rouge police over their treatment of protesters, claiming authorities used excessive force and carried out mass arrests.

“We took this as a very viable threat,” Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie said at a press conference last week about the robbery, according to USA Today. “We have received questions as to why we used such a show of force during weekend protests, this is why.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-convention.html

As Republicans stream into Cleveland to nominate Donald J. Trump for president, they confront a party divided and deeply imperiled by his racially divisive campaign. He has called for cracking down on Muslims and undocumented immigrants, stoked fears of crime and terrorism and repeatedly declared that the United States is in a war for its very survival.

But amid gloom about Republican prospects in November, Mr. Trump may have endangered the party in a more lasting way: by forging a coalition of white voters driven primarily by themes of hard-right nationalism and cultural identity.

Republicans have wrestled for years with the push and pull of seeking to win over new groups of voters while tending to their overwhelmingly white and conservative base. Now, Mr. Trump’s candidacy may force them into making a fateful choice: whether to fully embrace the Trump model and become, effectively, a party of white identity politics, or to pursue a broader political coalition by repudiating Mr. Trump’s ideas — and many of the voters he has gathered behind his campaign.

With his diatribes against Islam, immigration from Mexico and economic competition from Asia, Mr. Trump has amassed dominant support from restive white voters. His political approach would have Republicans court working-class and rural whites, mainly in the South and Midwest, at the grievous cost of alienating minorities and women, who often decide presidential races.

A starkly different path forward for Republicans would involve rejecting that base and the ideas that Mr. Trump has used to assemble it.

In order to build a winning party again, some Republican leaders say, the party will have to disavow Mr. Trump’s exclusionary message, even at the price of driving away voters at the core of the Republican base — perhaps a third or more of the party.

This approach would amount to a highly risky lurch away from the faction that made Mr. Trump the Republican nominee, and toward a community of female, Latino and Asian voters who have never been reliable Republicans. Should the effort falter, and Republicans fail to win a second look from these Democratic-leaning groups, they could find themselves stranded with virtually no base at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/12/top-five-most-outlandish-pokemon-go-stories

Did you hear the one about the Wyoming girl who stumbled across a dead body while catching Pokémon by a river?

Catching cheating boyfriends, stumbling across dead bodies and advertising one’s services as a professional Pokémon Go trainer – less than a week since the launch of the virtual-meets-real-world app Pokémon Go and the stories it has sparked are kookier than the names of the critters its fans are trying to catch.

Cheating boyfriend
Evan Scribner, a resident of Sunnyside, Queens, told the New York Post that his girlfriend spotted his infidelities after accessing his Pokémon Go app and noticing that he’d caught a Pokémon in the exact location of his ex-girlfriend’s house in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

“She saw that I had caught a Pokémon while at my ex’s house,” Scribner told the Post. “She found out last night at my house and hasn’t contacted me since then.”

Professional Pokémon trainer
No time to spend your summer days walking the streets in search of Pokéstops when you also have a real job? No problem. Craigslist ads are now popping up for Pokémon trainers, with prices in New York City ranging from $20-30 per hour.

Arthur, a 26-year-old lifelong Pokémon fan, is offering his services for $25 per hour:

http://americannewsx.com/politics/nra-tax-filing-membership/

Fed up with gun violence in America? Take heart from the fact that an NRA tax filing reveals a decline in membership fees by a whopping $47 million.

As one gun measure after another dies in Congress, the National Rifle Association may seem like an unbeatable juggernaut. But now, it’s looking more and more like their days are numbered. The Trace reports:

The National Rifle Association’s (NRA) New York state financial disclosure forms for 2014 are now online, and like past years’ tax filings, the documents provide a rare glimpse at the organization’s inner machinery. The group’s total revenues fell from more than $347 million in 2013 to roughly $310 million. Contributing to the decline was a drop in income collected from its members. Revenue from annual dues fell from $175 million to $128 million in 2014, a drop of 27 percent.
Really, no one knows how many members the pro-gun group has. They’ve never allowed any kind of head count from outside parties. In 1998 a former board member told reporters the NRA’s membership rolls include “lifetime members” who’ve died. Ooops.

DESPITE ALL THE NRA’S BLUSTER, GUN CULTURE IS ON THE DECLINE.