The humor stakes are so high in Los Angeles that live-audiences sitcoms are turning to laughter ringers, folks so good at guffawing they're planted in the audience and get everyone else cackling at the right moment. To find those ringers, TV execs turn to Central Casting, the staffing company that's been LA's go-to place for extras and stand-ins since 1925. That's where we are right now, at Central Casting's giant warehouse-sized headquarters in Burbank, ready to meet with the woman who started it all: Lisette St. Claire. She started auditioning people, looking for dominating, infectious laughs, guffaws that were explosive and unique. She aimed for a 50-50 mix of men and women, and she discovered those in their 40s and 50s tended to be the best. She doesn't know why; maybe it takes more life experiences, more joy and sorrow, to find things to really laugh about. Her formula was a hit. Her phone started ringing off the hook, with three to four shows a week planting her cacklers in their audience. While demand for St. Claire's laughers eventually began to wane, lately she says business is picking up. It could be tied in to the return of the laugh track; with competition fierce for the few comedy slots left on TV, folks are eager for any advantage they can get. JOEL WARNER http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2011/12/how_to_be_a_professional_laugh.php

A novel by an anonymous Chinese author living in America, which started life as a blog, has become a worldwide publishing sensation. It has been snapped up by publishers in 15 countries who have been impressed by the fact that it has sold more than a million copies in China and inspired a film by an Oscar-winning Chinese director. Some publishers even bought it before reading a translation. Yet none of the publishers, translators or editors knows the author's identity. Under the Hawthorn Tree, a tragic love story set during the Cultural Revolution, is written under the pen name of Ai Mi. All that is known about the author is that she leads a reclusive life in Florida, having gone there to study. She is thought to be in her fifties or sixties, if only because her insight into the Cultural Revolution suggests someone who experienced first hand the political and social persecution of Mao Zedong's last decade. She tells her readers that it was inspired by a true story. Her central character – a young woman from a "politically questionable family" who falls in love with the son of a general – is based on a real person with names and places disguised. In a publishing world where an author's identity is often more important than their talent, it is striking that publishers as far afield as Italy, Norway, Brazil and Israel have responded to the writing alone. Lennie Goodings of Virago bought it without knowing a word of Chinese – and was relieved to discover that it lived up to her expectations when she commissioned an English translation. She said: "It's a beautiful love story, almost like a Romeo and Juliet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/08/hawthorn-tree-zhang-yimou-ai-mi

Quotes
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into a flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) German philosopher, physician, musician, humanitarian, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize

UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme is an international initiative launched to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archival holdings, library collections and private individual compendia all over the world for posterity, the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and the increased accessibility to and dissemination of these items. The Memory of the World Register is a compendium of documents, manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials, library, and archival holdings of universal value. Inscription on the Register leads to improved conservation of the documentary heritage by calling upon the program's networks of experts to exchange information and raise resources for the preservation, digitization, and dissemination of the material. The program also has the aim of using state-of-the-art technologies to enable wider accessibility and diffusion of the items inscribed on the Register. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_of_the_World_Programme Memory of the World official site http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/homepage/

Edgar Allan Poe
Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. By the age of thirteen, Poe had compiled enough poetry to publish a book, but his headmaster advised Allan against allowing this. Read more and see events at the Poe Museum site: http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php

BALTIMORE—Each year, on the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, several fans of the writer spend a chilly night by his grave here. They are hoping to catch a glimpse of another Poe admirer—one who wears a dark hat and coat and for several decades has left three red roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac by the tombstone. But the mysterious figure—who, due to a masculine gait and imposing size, is presumed to be male—hasn't shown up the past two years. And if the so-called Poe Toaster doesn't pay a visit sometime late Wednesday or early Thursday, the Poe fanatics who keep vigil in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground will declare "nevermore." The tradition will be over. JONATHAN D. ROCKOFF http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203735304577166873613905702.html

Follow-up: Wikipedia has taken its English-language site offline as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US. Users attempting to access the site see a black screen and a political statement: "Imagine a world without free knowledge." The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing are also taking part in the "blackout". Wikipedia, which attracts millions of hits every day, is opposed to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) being debated by Congress. The legislation would allow the Justice Department and content owners to seek court orders requiring search engines to block results associated with piracy. The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, told the BBC: "Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy". "But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy." Read more and find Full explanation on Sopa and Pipa at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16590585