‘Evita’ to close in January when Big 3 leave






NEW YORK (AP) — The Broadway revival of “Evita” — faced with trying to replace Ricky Martin, Elena Roger and Michael Cerveris — will instead close when the Big Three leave early next year.


Producers of the Tony Award-nominated revival of Tim Rice‘s and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s landmark musical said Tuesday night they have decided against plans for an open-ended run after Martin, Roger and Cerveris leave after the Jan. 26 performance.






“Our extensive search for a new cast presented the significant challenges of not only replacing a high-caliber trio of stars but also synchronizing the schedules of potential replacements with that of the production,” producer Hal Luftig said in a statement. “Despite going down the road with a variety of artists, the planets have simply not aligned for us to engage the right talent at the right time.”


When it closes, the musical will have played 26 previews and 337 performances, far less than the original’s more than 1,580 shows played between 1979 and 1983.


A national tour will launch in September 2013 at the Providence Performing Arts Center in Providence, R.I., and a cast album has been released, including the songs “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “High Flying Adored.” The cast for the tour has not been announced.


The revival opened March 12 at the Marquis Theatre, directed by Michael Grandage and choreographed by Rob Ashford. It has broken the theater’s box office record seven times, though has seen the box office slump at times.


Last week, it pulled in $ 920,994, or a little more than half its $ 1,666,936 potential. The average ticket price was $ 111.73 and the top premium went for $ 275.


The musical tells the story of Argentina’s Eva Peron, who rose from the slums to the presidential mansion. Roger plays Eva, Cerveris her husband and Martin is Che.


___


Online: http://evitaonbroadway.com


Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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The New Old Age Blog: The Gift of Reading

This is the year of the tablet, David Pogue of The Times has told us, and that may be good news for seniors who open holiday wrappings to find one tucked inside. They see better with tablets’ adjustable type size, new research shows. Reading becomes easier again.

This may seem obvious — find me someone over 40 who doesn’t see better when fonts are larger — but it’s the business of science to test our assumptions.

Dr. Daniel Roth, an eye specialist and clinical associate professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., offered new evidence of tablets’ potential benefits last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

His findings, based on tests conducted with 66 adults age 50 and over: older people read faster (a mean reading speed of 128 words per minute) when using an iPad, compared to a newspaper with the same 10-point font size (114 words per minute).

When the font was increased to 18 points — easy to do on an iPad — reading speed increased to 137 words per minute.

“If you read more slowly, it’s tedious,” Dr. Roth said, explaining why reading speed is important. “If you can read more fluidly, it’s more comfortable.”

What makes the real difference, Dr. Roth theorizes, is tablets’ illuminated screen, which heightens contrast between words and the background on which they sit.

Contrast sensitivity — the visual ability to differentiate between foreground and background information — becomes poorer as we age, as does the ability to discriminate fine visual detail, notes Dr. Kevin Paterson, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, who recently published a separate study on why older people struggle to read fine print.

“There are several explanations for the loss of sensitivity to fine detail that occurs with older age,” Dr. Paterson explained in an e-mail. “This may be due to greater opacity of the fluid in the eye, which will scatter incoming light and reduce the quality of the projection of light onto the retina. It’s also hypothesized that changes in neural transmission affect the processing of fine visual detail.”

Combine these changes with a greater prevalence of eye conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy in older adults, and you get millions of people who cannot easily do what they have done all their lives — read and stay connected to the world of ideas, imagination and human experience.

“The No. 1 complaint I get from older patients is that they love to read but can’t, and this really bothers them,” Dr. Roth said. The main option has been magnifying glasses, which many people find cumbersome and inconvenient.

Some words of caution are in order. First, Dr. Roth’s study has not been published yet; it was presented as a poster at the scientific meeting and publicized by the academy, but it has not yet gone through comprehensive, rigorous peer review.

Second, Dr. Roth’s study was completed before the newest wave of tablets from Microsoft, Google, Samsung and others became available. The doctor made no attempt to compare different products, with one exception. In the second part of his study, he compared results for the iPad with those for a Kindle. But it was not an apples to apples comparison, because the Kindle did not have a back-lit screen.

This section of his study involved 100 adults age 50 and older who read materials in a book, on an iPad and on the Kindle. Book readers recorded a mean reading speed of 187 words per minute when the font size was set at 12; Kindle readers clocked in at 196 words per minute and iPad readers at 224 words per minute at the same type size. Reading speed improved even more drastically for a subset of adults with the poorest vision.

Again, Apple’s product came out on top, but that should not be taken as evidence that it is superior to other tablets with back-lit screens and adjustable font sizes. Both the eye academy and Dr. Roth assert that they have no financial relationship with Apple. My attempts to get in touch with the company were not successful.

A final cautionary note should be sounded. Some older adults find digital technology baffling and simply do not feel comfortable using it. For them, a tablet may sit on a shelf and get little if any use.

Others, however, find the technology fascinating. If you want to see an example that went viral on YouTube, watch this video from 2010 of Virginia Campbell, then 99 years old, and today still going strong at the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community in Lake Oswego, Ore.

Ms. Campbell’s glaucoma made it difficult for her to read, and for her the iPad was a blessing, as she wrote in this tribute quoted in an article in The Oregonian newspaper:

To this technology-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer

Caregivers might be delighted — as Ms. Campbell’s daughter was — by older relatives’ response to this new technology, a potential source of entertainment and engagement for those who can negotiate its demands. Or, they might find that old habits die hard and that their relatives continue to prefer a book or newspaper they can hold in their hands to one that appears on a screen.

Which reading enhancement products have you used, and what experiences have you had?

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Eastern Congo rebels thrive on fear, chaos









Los Angeles Times

RUTSHURU, Democratic Republic of Congo — The rebels materialized out of the moist, heavy air, startling the woman as she tended her crops in the lush volcanic hills near the Rwandan border.


They wanted a bag of salt. No salt, and they'd kill her.








"You just do what they say," said Solange, a widow struggling to support a family in the midst of war.


To people like her who live in eastern Congo's North Kivu province, the M23 fighters who have taken control of their region are bandits, not rebels. After they seized Solange's village of Rutshuru in July and plundered all her beans, she fled south to the provincial capital, Goma.


It would prove to be no refuge. The rebels and the violence followed her.


The awesome serenity of the cloud-swathed emerald hills, twittering with bird life, home to mountain gorillas, is almost deep enough to erase, for a moment, successive waves of gruesome violence.


The region, an important source of minerals used in laptops and cellphones, was swept up in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since then, it has become the scene of one of the great tragedies of the last century: Wars fueled by a toxic blend of resource riches, ethnic hatred and interfering neighbors have killed 5 million people.


In recent years, the area settled into a fragile peace. But militias still drain the country's wealth. There now are fears that eastern Congo could spiral into another long and bloody conflict.


United Nations experts say Rwanda armed and commanded M23, which rebelled against the Congolese army in April, and directly supported the rebels' attack on Goma.


Rwanda has been accused of backing militias and fueling conflict in the region for years, but it denies interfering. It has a security interest because Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide fled into eastern Congo, where they continue to mount attacks. And with few mineral resources of its own, Rwanda has a strong economic interest in the region.


Among M23's reputed leaders is Bosco Ntaganda, a commander nicknamed the Terminator who was indicted in July by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of atrocities including murder, rape, sexual slavery and pillaging.


The M23 political leaders wear shiny silk suits, with labels like "High Class" left ostentatiously on the sleeve. They made Rutshuru their base, imposed compulsory weekend cleanup brigades for the entire population, planted grass around the administrative building and put up signs condemning corruption. They made the town look like a miniature copy of Rwanda, a country so tidy that all plastic bags are banned and seized at the border.


They also looted villages and killed an undetermined number of people.


Solange is 35 and belongs to the Nande tribe, the main ethnic group in North Kivu. Her husband was a government soldier who earned $55 a month before his death three years ago from malaria. They had no children.


On the farm, she grew cassava and beans to sell in the local market and always had plenty to eat. "Life was good," she said. After her husband's death, she had to support not only her family, including her parents and a younger sister with children, but her late husband's family too. In all, there were 15 mouths to feed.


M23 disrupted all that.


After fleeing to Goma, she stayed at a friend's house. She registered with an aid agency, hoping to get food assistance, but never received any.


"It's very difficult. Sometimes we don't have enough food," said Solange, who preferred not to use her last name out of concern for her safety.


Goma's idyllic lakeside setting could be a tourist haven in a parallel universe. But in this one, teenage boys and grimy men push heavy loads of water, wooden poles or potatoes. Women pound cassava leaves or fry tennis-ball-size lumps of dough in bubbling oil.





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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 11











Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.


SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!


Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.


And now, without further ado, we give you…


TODAY’S PUZZLE:



Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.




Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.



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“The Colbert Report” mames new co-executive producer, head writer






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “The Colbert Report” has promoted former supervising producer and head writer Barry Julien to co-executive producer, series host, writer and executive producer Stephen Colbert said Monday. In addition to Jullien’s promotion, Opus Moreschi, previously a writer for the series, has been moved up to head writer on the Comedy Central news-show spoof.


Julien joined “The Colbert Report” as a writer in 2007, moving to head writer in 2009 and picking up the supervising producer title last year. Moreschi came aboard the show in 2008.






“Barry Julien and Opus Moreschi are tireless, visionary producers and incredibly talented writers,” Colbert said of the promotions. “For instance they wrote this sentence.”


Both Julien and Moreschi have won Writers Guild Awards and Emmy Awards during their “Colbert Report” stints.


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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Personal Health: When Daily Stress Gets in the Way of Life

I was about to give an hourlong talk to hundreds of people when one of the organizers of the event asked, “Do you get nervous when you give speeches?” My response: Who, me? No. Of course not.

But this was a half-truth. I am a bit of a worrier, and one thing that makes me anxious is getting ready for these events: fretting over whether I’ve prepared the right talk, packed the right clothes or forgotten anything important, like my glasses.

Anxiety is a fact of life. I’ve yet to meet anyone, no matter how upbeat, who has escaped anxious moments, days, even weeks. Recently I succumbed when, rushed for time just before a Thanksgiving trip, I was told the tires on my car were too worn to be driven on safely and had to be replaced.

“But I have no time to do this now,” I whined.

“Do you have time for an accident?” my car-savvy neighbor asked.

So, with a pounding pulse and no idea how I’d make up the lost time, I went off to get new tires. I left the car at the shop and managed to calm down during the walk home, which helped me get back to the work I needed to finish before the trip.

It seems like such a small thing now. But everyday stresses add up, according to Tamar E. Chansky, a psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., who treats people with anxiety disorders.

You’ll be much better able to deal with a serious, unexpected challenge if you lower your daily stress levels, she said. When worry is a constant, “it takes less to tip the scales to make you feel agitated or plagued by physical symptoms, even in minor situations,” she wrote in her very practical book, “Freeing Yourself From Anxiety.”

When Calamities Are Real

Of course, there are often good reasons for anxiety. Certainly, people who lost their homes and life’s treasures — and sometimes loved ones — in Hurricane Sandy can hardly be faulted for worrying about their futures.

But for some people, anxiety is a way of life, chronic and life-crippling, constantly leaving them awash in fears that prevent them from making moves that could enrich their lives.

In an interview, Dr. Chansky said that when real calamities occur, “you will be in much better shape to cope with them if you don’t entertain extraneous catastrophes.”

By “extraneous,” she means the many stresses that pile up in the course of daily living that don’t really deserve so much of our emotional capital — the worrying and fretting we spend on things that won’t change or simply don’t matter much.

“If you worry about everything, it will get in the way of what you really need to address,” she explained. “The best decisions are not made when your mind is spinning out of control, racing ahead with predictions about how things are never going to get any better. Precious energy is wasted when you’re always thinking about the worst-case scenarios.”

When faced with serious challenges, it helps to narrow them down to specific things you can do now. To my mind, Dr. Chansky’s most valuable suggestion for emerging from paralyzing anxiety when faced with a monumental task is to “stay in the present — it doesn’t help to be in the future.

“Take some small step today, and value each step you take. You never know which step will make a difference. This is much better than not trying to do anything.”

Dr. Chansky told me, “If you’re worrying about your work all the time, you won’t get your work done.” She suggested instead that people “compartmentalize.” Those prone to worry should set aside a little time each day simply to fret, she said — and then put aside anxieties and spend the rest of the time getting things done. This advice could not have come at a better time for me, as I faced holiday chores, two trips in December, and five columns to write before leaving mid-month. Rather than focusing on what seemed like an impossible challenge, I took on one task at a time. Somehow it all got done.

Possible Thinking

Many worriers think the solution is positive thinking. Dr. Chansky recommends something else: think “possible.”

“When we are stuck with negative thinking, we feel out of options, so to exit out of that we need to be reminded of all the options we do have,” she writes in her book.

If this is not something you can do easily on your own, consult others for suggestions. During my morning walk with friends, we often discuss problems, and inevitably someone comes up with a practical solution. But even if none of their suggestions work, at least they narrow down possible courses of action and make the problem seem less forbidding. “If other people are not caught in the spin that you’re in, they may have ideas for you that you wouldn’t think of,” Dr. Chansky said. “We often do this about small things, but when something big is going on, we hesitate to ask for advice. Yet that’s when we need it most.”

Dr. Chansky calls this “a community cleanup effort,” and it can bring more than advice. During an especially challenging time, like dealing with a spouse’s serious illness or loss of one’s home, friends and family members can help with practical matters like shopping for groceries, providing meals, cleaning out the refrigerator or paying bills.

“People want to help others in need — it’s how the world goes around,” she said. Witness the many thousands of volunteers, including students from other states on their Thanksgiving break, who prepared food and delivered clothing and equipment to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Even the smallest favor can help buffer stress and enable people to focus productively on what they can do to improve their situation.

Another of Dr. Chansky’s invaluable tips is to “let go of the rope.” When feeling pressured to figure out how to fix things now, “walk away for a few minutes, but promise to come back.” As with a computer that suddenly misbehaves, Dr. Chansky suggests that you “unplug and refresh,” perhaps by “taking a breathing break,” inhaling and exhaling calmly and intentionally.

“The more you practice calm breathing, the more it will be there for you when you need it,” she wrote.

She also suggests taking a break to do something physical: “Movement shifts the moment.” Take a walk or bike ride, call a friend, look through a photo album, or do some small cleaning task like clearing off your night table.

When you have a clear head and are feeling less overwhelmed, you’ll be better able to figure out the next step.


This is the first of two columns about anxiety.

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Boeing 787 Plane Works to Overcome Snags


Stuart Isett for The New York Times


The upper deck of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner being assembled in Everett, Wash. The basic model, called the 787-8, can carry 210 to 250 passengers.







After years of delays in producing its much-anticipated 787 aircraft, Boeing seemed in recent months to be turning a corner, streamlining production and increasing the pace of deliveries.




But a pair of embarrassing problems last week revived concerns about the reliability of the plane, the first commercial aircraft to make extensive use of lightweight carbon composites that promise big fuel savings for airlines.


A United Airlines 787 flying from Houston to Newark was diverted to New Orleans last Tuesday after one of its six electric generators failed midflight. That same day, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of fuel line connectors on all 787s, warning of a risk of fuel leaks and fires.


Aviation experts cast these issues as minor hiccups and said it was typical for new planes to experience such problems, particularly in the first few years of production.


On Monday, an aerospace analyst, David E. Strauss of UBS, raised another concern — whether the cost of building the planes was coming down fast enough for individual plane sales to become profitable by early 2015, as Boeing has projected.


Boeing officials have said that the company will earn enough on subsequent sales to average a percentage profit in the low single digits on the first 1,100 planes, which includes deliveries into 2021. Company officials said late Monday that they remained confident in their projections.


But in a research report, Mr. Strauss said that Boeing’s costs did not appear to be declining rapidly enough for sales to turn profitable in 2015 and that the program could continue to spend $4 billion to $5 billion more than it gained in revenue over the next three years. Unless the company can bring down the costs more quickly as it gains experience in building the planes, Mr. Strauss wrote, Boeing may not begin to make a profit on each plane until 2021.


A lot is riding on the success of the 787 Dreamliner, a risky technological and commercial bet for Boeing, which is based in Chicago. The company has so far delivered 38 of the jets to eight airlines, including United Airlines, All Nippon Airways of Japan and Poland’s LOT. It has outlined ambitious plans to double its production rate to 10 planes a month by the end of 2013. It is also starting to build a stretched-out version and mulling an even larger one after that, to make the venture more profitable.


But with the combination of the problem on the United flight and the F.A.A. directive, “This was too much news about the 787 in one day,” said Addison Schonland, an aviation analyst and a partner at Airinsight.com. “But remember, it’s a brand-new airplane. When you start flying it around, you start discovering things. Over all, the number of hiccups has been fantastic.”


The basic model, called the 787-8, can carry 210 to 250 passengers about 8,000 nautical miles, the distance from New York to Singapore, and has a list price of $206.8 million. Early customers, however, are receiving big discounts to make up for the delays caused by a series of manufacturing problems. The first stretched version for 250 to 290 passengers, the 787-9, is listed at $243.6 million and could be ready in early 2014.


Mr. Strauss estimated that Boeing was recently spending $232 million to build each plane but charged customers, on average, only about half that.


Given Wall Street’s concerns, Boeing’s stock has been in limbo for more than three years, trading in a narrow range around $75 a share.


“Boeing has not had a major snafu on the 787 for over a year now, but we think most investors remain skeptical as to whether Boeing can keep this up,” Robert Stallard, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said in a note to clients last month.


Boeing has acknowledged that it outsourced too much of the work on the plane to suppliers who were willing, collectively, to cover billions of dollars of the development costs. Many parts needed reworking. That and other design changes forced the company to set up a separate line in Everett, Wash., to handle the extra work on the first 65 jets. It has also built a 787 plant in Charleston, S.C., with an entirely new work force.


Still, even with all of the headaches, the 787 has enabled Boeing to jump ahead of its European rival, Airbus, in exploiting the lightweight carbon composites. Half of the plane by weight is made with composites instead of aluminum and other metals. Airbus said last week that it had finished assembly on the first A350, its rival to the 787. Its entry into commercial service is not expected before the second half of 2014.


Passengers who have flown on 787s this year have raved about the experience, and the first airlines using them also seem satisfied.


United will begin using the 787 internationally in January, with flights from Houston to Lagos, Nigeria. “There is a tremendous amount of promise for customers preferring this airplane over others,” said Jeff Smisek, chief executive of United. “It still has a new-plane smell.”


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Latin music star Jenni Rivera believed dead in plane crash









MEXICO CITY — Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera, the "diva de la banda" whose commanding voice burst through the limits of regional Latin music and made her a cross-border sensation and the queen of a business empire, was believed to have died Sunday when the small jet carrying her and members of her entourage crashed in mountainous terrain.

Rivera, a native of Long Beach, was 43. Mexico's ministry of transportation did not confirm her death outright, but it said that she had been aboard the plane and that no one had survived the crash. Six others, including two pilots, also were on board.

"Everything suggests, with the evidence that's been found, that it was the airplane that the singer Jenni Rivera was traveling in," said Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's secretary of communications and transportation. Of the crash site, Ruiz said: "Everything is destroyed. Nothing is recognizable."








Word of the accident ricocheted around the entertainment industry, with performer after performer expressing shock and grief. Fans gathered outside Rivera's four-acre estate in Encino.

"She was the Diana Ross of Mexican music," said Gustavo Lopez, an executive vice president at Universal Music Latin Entertainment, an umbrella group that includes Rivera's label. Lopez called Rivera "larger than life" and said that based on ticket sales, she was by far the top-grossing female artist in Mexico.

"Remember her with your heart the way she was," her father, Don Pedro Rivera, told reporters in Spanish on Sunday evening. "She never looked back. She was a beautiful person with the whole world."

Rivera had performed a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, on Saturday night — her standard fare of knee-buckling power ballads, pop-infused interpretations of traditional banda music and dizzying rhinestone costume changes.

At a news conference after the show, Rivera appeared happy and tranquil, pausing at one point to take a call on her cellphone that turned out to be a wrong number. She fielded questions about struggles in her personal life, including her recent separation from husband Esteban Loaiza, a professional baseball player.

"I can't focus on the negative," she said in Spanish. "Because that will defeat you. That will destroy you.... The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up."

Hours later, shortly after 3 a.m., Rivera is believed to have boarded a Learjet 25, which took off under clear skies. The jet headed south, toward Toluca, west of Mexico City; there, Rivera had been scheduled to tape the television show "La Voz" — Mexico's version of "The Voice" — on which she was a judge.

The plane, built in 1969 and registered to a Las Vegas talent management firm, reached 11,000 feet. But 10 minutes and 62 miles into the flight, air traffic controllers lost contact with its pilots, according to Mexican authorities. The jet crashed outside Iturbide, a remote city that straddles one of the few roads bisecting Mexico's Sierra de Arteaga national park.

Wreckage was scattered across several football fields' worth of terrain. An investigation into the cause of the crash was underway, and attempts to identify the remains of the victims had begun.

Rivera, a mother of five and grandmother of two, was believed to have been traveling with her publicist Arturo Rivera, who was not related to her, as well as with her lawyer, hairstylist and makeup artist; reports of their names were not consistent. Their identities were not confirmed by authorities. The pilots were identified as Miguel Perez and Alejandro Torres.

In the world of regional Latin music — norteƱo, cumbia and ranchera are among the popular niches — Rivera was practically royalty.

Her father was a noted singer of the Mexican storytelling ballads known as corridos. In the 1980s he launched the record label Cintas Acuario. It began as a swap-meet booth and grew into an influential and taste-making independent outfit, fueling the careers of artists such as the late Chalino Sanchez. Jenni Rivera's four brothers were associated with the music industry; her brother Lupillo, in particular, is a huge star in his own right.

Born on July 2, 1969, Rivera initially showed little inclination to join the family business. She worked for a time in real estate. But after a pregnancy and a divorce, she went to work for her father's record label and found her voice, literally and figuratively.

She released her first studio album in 2003, when she was 34.

Her path had not been easy, but rather than running from it, she wrote it into her music — domestic violence; struggles with weight; raising her children alone, or "sin capitan," without a captain. She was known for marathon live shows that left audiences exhilarated and exhausted; by the fifth hour of one recent performance, she was drinking straight from a tequila bottle and launching into a cover of "I Will Survive."

In a witty and sometimes baffling stew of Spanish and English, she sang about her three husbands, about drug traffickers, in tribute to her father, in tribute to her gynecologist.

She became, in a most unlikely way, a feminist hero among Latin women in Mexico and the United States and a powerful player in a genre of music dominated by men and machismo. Regional Mexican music styles had long been seen as limiting to artists, but Rivera shrugged off the labels and brought traditional-laced music — some of which sounded perilously close to polka — to a massive pop audience.





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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 10











Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.


SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!


Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.


And now, without further ado, we give you…


TODAY’S PUZZLE:



Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.




Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.



Read More..

Half a century on, Rolling Stones rock Brooklyn






NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fifty years since their first London jam sessions, the Rolling Stones kicked off the U.S. leg of a brief anniversary tour with a vibrant show in New York on Saturday that belied their years – wrinkles and nostalgia aside.


Drummers wearing gorilla masks warmed up the crowd packed into Brooklyn’s Barclays Center as black-clad women swung their long tresses in rhythm.






Mick Jagger pranced, shimmied and howled his way through the 2-1/2 hour show, pausing to reminisce about the band’s history and its first New York concert at Carnegie Hall in 1964.


For a group whose early years were punctuated by quarrels and occasional brushes with the law, the biggest controversy ahead of Saturday’s show was the price of seats – up to $ 800, and as much as 10 times that amount on websites offering last-minute tickets.


In those days, milk was cheaper and “tickets to the Rolling Stones was – well, I’m not going to go there,” Jagger acknowledged.


The band’s last major tour was in 2007 and the latest reunion almost didn’t happen, owing in part to a spat between Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards over comments Richards made about the singer in a 2010 autobiography.


Richards joked in a recent interview: “We can’t get divorced – we’re doing it for the kids.”


A tribute video opened Saturday’s proceedings featuring celebrities heaping praise on the band.


“They’re great songs to do bad things to,” said actor Johnny Depp. “Just how skinny they all are… It really, really pisses me off,” said actress Cate Blanchett.


The Stones – average age 68 – ripped through 20 hits that began with “Get Off of My Cloud” and closed with “Sympathy for the Devil” and an encore of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, “Jumping Jack Flash” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.


Women in the crowd opened their arms wide as Jagger, wearing a silver sequined jacket, strutted along the horseshoe-shaped stage for “I Wanna Be Your Man”, a Beatles tune. The band was then joined by R&B singer Mary J. Blige for “Gimme Shelter”.


“People say ‘why do you keep doing this?’” Jagger told the crowd. He thanked fans for buying records and “generally being amazing for the last 50 years.”


The Stones started their brief diamond jubilee tour in London and are due to play twice in Newark, New Jersey.


Fans said it could be the last chance for New Yorkers to see the band live.


“It’s the only concert I wanted to see before I die,” said Lucy Webley, 33.


(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)


Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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