It’s about time [thanks, Abby].

Holocaust Victims Claims Rejected: European insurers continue to improperly fail to honor

claims filed by Holocaust survivors or the heirs of those who perished under Nazi oppression. An International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, established to resolve allegations of insurance company malfeasance on the issue by appealing unjust rejections, is overwhelmed. The commission has no enforcement power and participation in it is voluntary. Numerous other insurance companies have declined to participate in it at all.

Some U.S. insurance regulators said they were shocked by the high rate of rejections because the initial claims were submitted by the

commission on behalf of individuals considered to have particularly strong cases. Insurance companies appear to have less compunction about rejecting claims now that a separate humanitarian fund has been endowed. The extent of insurance company contributions to the fund has yet to be established.

Talking dirty [Salon]: “Could it be that our laudable cleanliness has something to do

with the increase in immune disorders? Epidemiologists,

immunologists, bacteriologists and parasitologists from

England to Iowa think this may be the case. According to

what’s called the “hygiene hypothesis,” our immune systems,

which evolved in environments where we couldn’t escape

disease, microorganisms of every description and just plain

dirt, don’t always develop normally if they don’t meet these

things during our childhood development.” Recently, I noticed restauranteur Terence Conran saying the same thing about the public health regulations for eating establishments.

Discovery of pigment and paint-grinding accoutrements shows that Stone Age proto-humans were painting before they were human. “British archaeologists have found evidence suggesting

humans were producing art 350,000 to 400,000 years ago.

It is the earliest indication of humanity’s artistic nature and

suggests the activity was linked with evolution that turned

pre-anatomically modern humans into Homo sapiens.”

For you public radio listeners interested in ins and outs: PRI sues to stop “Marketplace” sale. Minnesota Public Radio, which founded Public Radio International, has started to compete with its offspring in producing, and PRI fears it may now do so with distribution as well.

“Shut up!” says veteran film critic. John Simon, New York magazine reviewer, could not stand these children enjoying themselves at a recent performance of “The Music Man”.

“It was disturbing as all hell. Finally, after 30 or 40

minutes I leaned forward and said, ‘Madam, could

you please try and control your brats?’

“She said, ‘I will try and control them, but they’re not

brats.’ Well, for the purposes of a theater audience,

they certainly were brats.” [New York Post via Jorn Barger]

A Ryerson University (Toronto) conference will tackle the issue of Hollywood’s anti-intellectualism and glorification of stupidity. Is it the filmmakers’ populism, an insulting appraisal of the American viewing audience, or realistic dumbing-down? Or is it that thoughtfulness and the life of the mind are just much harder to portray on film than their converse?

Things Creationists Hate. A list of the truths they have to ignore to avoid cognitive dissonance with their cherished creationist beliefs.

Nick Park, creator of the Wallace & Grommit shorts, is working on his first feature length film, Chicken Run. Park describes it as “The Great Escape with chickens.” Alas, W & G are nowhere to be found in Chicken Run.

Bookmark and click daily: The Rainforest Site is a sister site to the Hunger Site. Each click-through on this page (which you can do once a day) causes corporate sponsors to donate the cost of 19.2 square feet of rainforest to The Nature Coservancy, which has a massive program to buy up acreage in the world’s shrinking rainforests to preserve and protect them.

Red Rock Eater Digest: a primer on global internet finance. ‘Who pays for the Internet? “The answer is either really long or

really short depending on what you’re trying to say,” says Scott

Bradner, a leading Internet expert at Harvard University. The

Internet does not have a set economic model, so there’s no standard

way network providers are remunerated for the resources they use.

End of story.

The longer answer is more complicated…’

A New Kind of Storytelling: The New Arrival is a short immersive film debuting at Cannes on May 10. “This is certainly a film of a different stripe: The viewer sees the world from the vantage

point of a worn-out TV set being shipped off to an old-age home to join 8-track tapes and

other retired technologies. Using a Be Here add-on to Real Player, the viewer can pan the

car transporting the TV, the well-wishers welcoming the TV to the home, and so on.” [Wired]

Buzz pix are M.I.A. at Cannes, “…plenty of screenings to keep buyers bleary-eyed, but not enough to stop complaints that there’s nothing big to pick up.”

Man Smuggles Dead Father-In-Law on Bus. Upon arising in his Glasgow hotel room, he found that his father-in-law, who had accompanied him to Scotland for a rugby match, had died overnight. Damned if I don’t get to use the other half of that return fare to England, he might’ve said.