This week, A.P Ticker calls out mainline dentist/Jersey Shore medical waste dumper Dr. Thomas W. McFarland Jr.
CLASSICAL GAS: Q&A W/ Brooklyn Rider
BY DAVE ALLEN Don’t let the name throw you – Brooklyn Rider isn’t an invading army from the Big Apple looking to dethrone our world champions and displace our native cultural treasures; two of the members even attended the Curtis Institute of Music in our fair city. BR is a string quartet that, like the Kronos (interviewed here in November and seen and heard later at the Kimmel Center), isn’t content with the two-violins-viola-and-a-cello mold. The group’s outside-the-box playing and thinking led to participation in the Silk Road Festival, a collection of Asian and Middle Eastern music curated by cellist […]
OBITUARY: Sneak Previews
BY JIM DOOLITTLE Mom’s Italian. 100%. And while she could have poured the over-exuberant passion that is the genetic cross my people bear into anything obvious – food, language, Catholicism, music, Sophia Loren – she opted at an early age to funnel my genetic disposition into her love for the cinema. We’d go every week, right after church, our reward for the penance that was 10AM mass. And without cable television, without a VCR, my cinematic cravings were only sated on the homefront via the weekly sit-down with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Fortunately, they were accessible via rabbit ears. […]
THE WISCONSIN INQUISITION: Pope On The Ropes
NEW YORK TIMES: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish. MORE TIMES ONLINE: Pope Benedict XVI was drawn deeper yesterday into the clerical sex abuse scandal that has begun to overwhelm the Roman Catholic Church, when he was accused of personally failing to take action against a serial […]
SIDEWALKING: Doggone It
Germantown Ave and Lehigh, 2:26 PM by JEFF FUSCO
HOT DOC: Statehouse Dems Tell PA Attorney General To Back Off Anti-Health Care Reform Lawsuit
Senate and House Democrats respond to AG’s federal health care lawsuit HARRISBURG, March 24 – State Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Delaware/Montgomery, and state Rep. Tim Briggs, D-Montgomery, were joined today by colleagues from the House and Senate at a news conference to respond to Attorney General Tom Corbett’s federal health care lawsuit. During the news conference, the group of lawmakers urged Attorney General Corbett to cease and desist in his efforts to strike down the nation’s new health care reform law. In a letter to Corbett, Leach stated, “Certainly, reasonable minds can disagree on the merits of health care […]
BREAKING: The End Of ACORN Philadelphia
PW: Tuesday night the board of ACORN Pennsylvania voted to dissolve the Keystone state chapter of the embattled community-service organization and re-invent itself as Pennsylvania Communities Organizing For Change, according to Craig Robbins, the former Head Organizer for ACORN PA, who will now serve as executive director of the newly formed PCOC. The board’s decision came in the wake of an announcement Monday from ACORN’s national leadership that it was ceasing operations and that state chapters would be given the option of closing up shop or re-branding themselves as standalone statewide community-service organizations. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Why The Right Hates ACORN, […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
RIP: Icon-Making Rock Photographer Jim Marshall
NEW YORK TIMES: Jim Marshall, a photographer who took some of the most famous images of rock and pop musicians, including Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar aflame at the Monterey International Pop Festival and Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison, died on Tuesday night in a hotel in New York. He was 74. Mr. Marshall was as well known for the extraordinary images that he captured as the extraordinary access that he had to some of the most famous names in music. He was a favored photographer of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and he was the only […]
FLASH MOB ALERT: University City, NOW NOT!
[Photo by AL IN PHILADELPHIA] AL IN PHILADELPHIA: On Saturday, March 20, 2010 the South Street District was hit with what the media have been calling a “flash mob”–large groups of teenagers converging on areas organized through social networking websites and microblogs like Flickr. That night I would estimate between 10-20,000 mainly high school students filled the streets and sidewalks. There wasn’t too much going on, as many of the store owners closed up shop in fear of riots and looting, as happened a few weeks earlier with another, much smaller “flash mob” in Center City. Overall, everyone was pretty […]
RIP: Man’s Man Actor Robert Culp Dead At 79
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Robert Culp, the veteran actor best known for starring with Bill Cosby in the classic 1960s espionage-adventure series “I Spy” and for playing Bob in the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” died Wednesday morning. He was 79. Culp fell and hit his head while taking a walk outside his Hollywood Hills home. He was found by a jogger who called 911 and was pronounced dead at Hollywood-Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, said LAPD Lt. Bob Binder. An autopsy is pending. “My mind wants to flow into sadness, but I want to stay […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR In February, the Senate Armed Services Committee discovered that the private security firm Blackwater had diverted hundreds of AK-47s and pistols from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan to Afghan policemen. Whoever signed for the weapons from Blackwater did so under a fake name: Eric Cartman. Cartman is, of course, one of the characters on Comedy Central’s South Park, the animated sitcom that’s been satirizing everything in the news and pop culture for the past 14 years. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park follows the adventures of grade-schoolers Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski and Kenny […]