Red rice is a special variety of rice that looks red in color, thanks to its anthocyanin content.  It is generally unhulled or partially hulled rice which has a red husk, rather than the much more common brown.  Red rice has a nutty flavor, and a high nutritional value, as the germ of the rice is left intact.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rice 

 

Red Rice ‘Risotto’ recipe   http://www.goop.com/recipes/dinner/red-rice-risotto

According to ancient Chinese legend, black rice was so rare, tasty, and nutritious that only the emperors were allowed to eat it.  Like brown rice, black rice is full of antioxidant-rich bran, which is found in the outer layer that gets removed during the milling process to make white rice.  One spoonful of black-rice bran -- or 10 spoonfuls of cooked black rice -- contains the same amount of anthocyanin as a spoonful of fresh blueberries, according to a study presented at the American Chemical Society, in Boston.   Carina Storrs  http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/08/26/black.rice.new.brown/ 

Black Forbidden Rice with Peaches and Snap Peas recipe  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/black-forbidden-rice-with-peaches-and-snap-peas-recipe/index.html 

Grammar Geekery With Bill Walsh  Look up Black Sunday, Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday, Black Thursday, Black Friday and Black Saturday.  Wikipedia tells me there are 75 or so examples of that monicker, and aside from Black Friday and its new sibling, the stores-open-on-Thanksgiving "Black Thursday," every one refers to something calamitous, or at least negative or potentially negative.  Most of us have heard the fairy tale about how "black" stands for black ink, because that's the day when retailers' balance sheets finally emerge from the red, when stores finally show a profit for the years.  Now, how would you stay in business all year -- why would you stay in business all year -- if you were losing money for 11 months or so?  (The less-ridiculous popular belief is that it's the biggest shopping day of the year, but even that appears not to be the case.)  As Ben Zimmer and Kevin Drum recount, the term started with Philadelphia cops who dreaded the traffic that the first shopping day of the Christmas season brought.  At some point not too many years ago, the term Black Friday became so common that retailers latched onto it and started labeling their sales as such.  http://live.washingtonpost.com/grammar-geekery-with-bill-walsh-131203.html?tid=hpModule_4697cf50-868d-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z15   BillW alsh  has worked for newspapers since 1981 and for The Washington Post since 1997.  He is the author of "Lapsing Into a Comma," "The Elephants of Style" and the new "Yes, I Could Care Less."  Visit The Slot, A Spot for Copy Editors since 1995 at http://www.theslot.com/. 

The 459 most valuable city-bought masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Arts have a fair-market value of less than $2 billion, Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr said Dec. 3, 2013. 

That figure is significantly below most predictions for the value of the art, which many observers expected to reach at least several billion dollars — perhaps as much as $8 billion.  A figure less than $2 billion is likely to inflame the passions of bondholders, unions and other creditors who see DIA masterpieces as a prime source for recovering the billions they are owed by the city.  It also increases the chances that a court battle over the fate of the DIA will become even more contentious as Orr prepares his plan of adjustment to restructure city finances.  Orr hired the New York-based Christie’s auction house to evaluate about 2,800 city-owned works at the DIA. Christie’s modest estimate of the most expensive works could bolster creditors’ pending argument in court that the auction house might deliver a low-ball assessment.  A wild card in the fight over the DIA are the ongoing talks between U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, the federal mediator in the bankruptcy, and various parties, including at least 10 local and national charitable foundations.  The talks are aimed at creating a new pool of cash to help the city escape bankruptcy.  So how could 459 works add up to less than $2 billion?  Part of the answer could be that many of the DIA’s most valuable works — including those by Caravaggio, Ruisdael, Van Gogh, De Kooning, Giacometti, Cezanne and others — were not evaluated because they were either donated to the museum or bought with funds other than city dollars.  Though every piece of art at the DIA is owned by the city regardless of how it was acquired, Orr decided to evaluate only works bought directly with city funds to avoid messier legal entanglements of donated works and expedite the evaluation process.  The DIA owns roughly 65,000 works.  Fair-market value is defined by the Internal Revenue Service as the amount a willing and knowledgeable buyer would pay a willing and knowledgeable seller when neither has to buy or sell.  Museums typically get more than one appraisal when seeking formal evaluations, often calling on both Christie’s and its New York rival Sotheby’s.  Orr’s office has repeatedly told DIA officials that they must monetize the museum’s collection — squeeze cash out of the art so the city can use it to strike a deal with creditors and forge a restructuring plan that will pass muster with Rhodes. Orr’s deputies told the DIA he expects roughly $500 million.  Under federal law, neither the judge nor creditors can force the sale of any asset in a municipal bankruptcy; only Orr has that power.   However, Judge Steven Rhodes could deny any restructuring plan that doesn’t include some contribution from the art if he thinks the city’s plan doesn’t treat all creditors fairly.  The DIA has pledged to protect the art in court. Michigan’s attorney general has issued a formal opinion stating that a forced sale of art would be illegal because the museum holds the works in the public trust, but legal experts say the ruling may not hold up in court.  In the end, it would be up to Rhodes to decide whether there is a public trust exception that precludes the sale of art.  Mark Stryker  http://www.freep.com/article/20131203/NEWS/312030140/DIA-detroit-bankruptcy-orr-rhodes 

Paul Patterson Timman (born 1972) is an American tattoo artist and award winning dinnerware designer.  Paul's tribal designs, hand painted tattoo work in movies and celebrity clients have made him one of the "giants in the industry" called the 'Rembrandt of Sunset Strip' by The Wall Street Journal.  In 2008 Paul Timman partnered with Ink Dish to create a line of porcelain dinnerware.   Paul's Irezumi design was named to Metropolitan Home's 2009 Design 100 list.  The design "is based on the Japanese style of tattooing known as Irezumi.  Vibrant dragons, colourful Koi, cherry blossoms and waves weave together organically to exhibit this ancient style of tattooing, blending in the same way on porcelain as they would on a body."   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Timman  Paul Timman considers Toledo home and has fond memories of going to The Toledo Museum of Art when he was a young boy.  The impetus for a lifetime in art was his visits to the Monroe Street museum.  After high school he graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a degree in sculptured glass and he and his buddies began experimenting with tattooing, both as an individual form of expression on their own bodies and as art.  “In the early 1990s there was a group of either art students, or art school dropouts, or art school graduates that kind of started getting into tattooing and these people could really draw and were really excited about tattooing.  It wasn’t just slapping a few images on the skin for a few bucks.  It was, ‘Let me see if I can take this a little further,’” he said.  Timman worked at Toledo Tattoo at the time and noticed that new customers were increasingly from more mainstream cultural groups.  At the same time, celebrities and athletes were getting inked, which spread the message that tattoos were acceptable.  http://www.toledoblade.com/Peach-Weekender/2013/12/05/Hollywood-tattoo-artist-to-share-insights-at-Peristyle.html

Dec. 4, 2013  Billy Joel has turned Madison Square Garden into his own personal Vegas by promising to play one show every month starting in January 2014, going on and on until either he or his fans are exhausted.  The idea of an artist-in-residency program at a stadium as big as the Garden is a spectacular undertaking, but the 64-year-old Joel knows exactly what he’s getting into.  He has already played 46 shows at the arena during his career.  A banner even hangs from the rafters celebrating his record-setting run of a dozen concerts in a row in 2006:  “The longest run of a single artist,” as the banner boasts.  Next to it hangs Elton John’s banner for playing the most MSG shows of any artist, although with this new residency Joel would surpass John’s 62-concert record in a little more than a year.  Claire Suddath  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-04/billy-joel-will-play-madison-square-garden-for-the-rest-of-his-life 

Dec. 4, 2013  DNA gleaned from a 400,000-year-old femur from Spain has revealed an unexpected link between Europe’s hominin inhabitants of the time and a cryptic population, the Denisovans, who are known to have lived much more recently in southwestern Siberia.  The DNA, which represents the oldest hominin sequence yet published, has left researchers baffled because most of them believed that the bones would be more closely linked to Neanderthals than to Denisovans.  The fossil was excavated in the 1990s from a deep cave in a well-studied site in northern Spain called Sima de los Huesos (‘pit of bones’).  This femur and the remains of more than two dozen other hominins found at the site have previously been attributed either to early forms of Neanderthals, who lived in Europe until about 30,000 years ago, or to Homo heidelbergensis, a loosely defined hominin population that gave rise to Neanderthals in Europe and possibly humans in Africa.    The team sequenced most of the femur’s mitochondrial genome, which is made up of DNA from the cell’s energy-producing structures and passed down the maternal line.  The resulting phylogenetic analysis ­— which shows branches in evolutionary history — placed the DNA closer to that of Denisovans than to Neanderthals or modern humans.  Ewen Callaway  http://www.nature.com/news/hominin-dna-baffles-experts-1.14294