Saturday, December 28, 2013

Year-End Film Releases Require Audiences to Write Their Own Endings - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

Year-End Film Releases Require Audiences to Write Their Own Endings - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

Movies and novels have had ambiguous or abrupt endings since time immemorial. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that several of this season's movie releases bring the audience to the end of a cliff and just stop there.

Among the current movie offerings that don't need "Spoiler Alerts" are "August: Osage County," "Llewyn Davis" and Robert Redford's "All is Lost." None of these films have definite endings, in much the same way that the last "Sopranos" episode left audiences wondering whether Tony got whacked or not. Sudden, abrupt endings, where the audience is left to write its own conclusions, will enrage some people. Perhaps the movie companies should release these films with a disclaimer.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Canadian Prostitutes Pitch Shut-out to Supreme Court - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

Canadian Prostitutes Pitch Shut-out to Supreme Court - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

Youth Unemployment: Food Servers Need Not Apply

The youth of today, defined as those between the ages of 16 and 24, might want to move to France. There, Socialist President Francois Hollande has launched an ambitious project wherein the French government has offered to pay 75 percent of a young unemployed worker's salary for three years. In so doing, the French government hopes to create 150,000 additional jobs for youth within the next two years.

Meanwhile, back in the ole U.S.A., the Huffington Post reports a study that counts "almost 6 million young people (within that youth age group) are neither in school nor working." That translates to a 15 percent unemployment rate among youth in America, compared to a 25 percent unemployment rate in France.

If this is recovery, then why are we working as waiters and waitresses? 

Monday, December 9, 2013

Lenin Statue Tumbled in Ukraine as Protests Mount - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

Lenin Statue Tumbled in Ukraine as Protests Mount - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

The photo shows a white-haired, bewhiskered man of prodigious strength wielding a 20-pound sledge hammer to split in half a statue of Vladimir Lenin. The man is surrounded by a crowd estimated in the newspaper to number almost half a million people. This is in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, December 2013.

Those who might think that Ukraine's problems are uninteresting might consider that world champion heavyweight boxer Vitaly Klitschko, a protest leader, was on hand to stare down a police phalanx as he might have stared down an opponent during the preliminaries of a title shot, according to the newspaper account. More to the political point, Ukraine faces economic threats from Putin and Russia in the face of weak support from Europe and the U.S.