SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

A LOSS – From London's Daily Mail:   A single-engine plane registered to Oscar-winning composer James Horner has crashed in Southern California, and while the identity of the one person who died has not been released it is believed to be the famed musician according to one of his friends.  Ventura County fire spokesman Mike Lindbery said the crash happened around 9:30am Monday in the Los Padres National Forest.  The pilot was killed. No one else was on board.  Horner wrote the music for "Titanic."  No one has heard from him since the crash.  As his lawyer was quoted as saying, if it wasn't him in the plane he would have called.  He was a quality composer.  This is a loss.

MAJOR MEDICAL NEWS – From the Los Angeles Times:  Are conservatives more likely to stick to a diet than liberals? The answer might be yes.  In a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say there is a link between political ideology and the ability to exert self-control.  In a series of three studies with more than 300 participants, the authors found that people who identify as conservative perform better on tests of self-control than those who identify as liberal regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender.  Ah, we've always known it.  We have greater discipline.  We're more mature.  And we're thinner!  Think I'll have some ice cream.

HYPOCRITE – From Vanity Fair: News outlets, the Internet, and Hillary Clinton’s own staff were charmed by the former secretary of state’s decision to headquarter her presidential campaign in Brooklyn. But in the months since the campaign’s official launch, it seems that one person is pretty much over Brooklyn: Hillary Clinton.  Clinton has been spending most of her time in the city at her Manhattan office, which is located in Tower 45, a Midtown high-rise not far from Times Square. According to Politico, Clinton “works exclusively from Midtown” when she’s in New York.  The now-candidate had signed a two-year lease on the Midtown space before she declared her campaign. The thought then, a spokesman told Politico, was to use it as a personal office. Once senior staffers developed a habit of working at the Manhattan office while they were taking meetings in the city, however, it had to be declared a campaign expense.  What a hypocrite.  Woman of the people.  Headquartered in Brooklyn.  Seems like a phantom office.  She has a tin ear, and her campaign is not going well.

THE NEW MUSIC – From RealClearScience:  Barney was a fairly normal chimpanzee. A 24-year-old, low-ranking member of a group of five adult male chimpanzees raised at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands, he generally showed stereotypical behaviors: he played, he banged bottles, he climbed trees. Then, one January day, he walked away from his group and sat down outside, placing an upturned bucket between his feet. He then rattled off the only-known spontaneous, unsolicited chimpanzee drum solo. Primatologists at the center were taken completely by surprise.  Watch.  He'll be signed by a recording company.  He'll have an agent by Friday.  Movie deal.  It's understood he wants to direct...and will probably raise the level of Hollywood movies several notches.

June 22, 2015