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Demonstrators against police brutality took advantage of the busiest holiday shopping day of the year by staging a “die-in” at the Easton mall in Columbus on December 20, the Saturday before Christmas. Sixty or so activists gathered in the Easton mall food court, unfurled a banner proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” and struck death poses on the floor.

Columbus police and mall security were there in large numbers, but a legal observer overheard orders to the police to “stand down.” Twenty to thirty bystanders, mostly young black adults, joined the demonstration. After a brief die-in, the demonstrators moved close to the AMC theatre area and proceeded to sing and chant: “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” and “Black Lives Matter!”

The group marched outside and overwhelmed the holiday musicians with their own musical performance. They also chanted “Hands up! Don’t shoot” and “This is what democracy looks like!”

Back inside the mall, one demonstrator gave a speech to the crowd about how the community was no longer going to tolerate racist police killings. Hundreds of shoppers stopped holiday consumption to record the events on their cellphone cameras.

On Saturday, Dec. 20, the usual holiday hustle at the Beavercreek Walmart was disrupted as nearly 200 protesters and activists took to the aisles to demand justice for the late John Crawford III, a 22-year old black man shot and killed by the local police department earlier this year.
 

The crowd first amassed in the pet department of the store, marking the spot where Crawford died. Once enough people gathered in the confined aisles, thus congesting the flow of shopping, Walmart management demanded all shoppers and protestors alike evacuate the store. For nearly two hours, all commerce came to a halt.  The protesters remained.

Can you walk your way back to emotional health? Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspooon) gives it a try in Wild. 

Divorce, disease and her own misbehavior have separated the young woman from the people who’ve been closest to her. Since her life lacks direction, she arbitrarily gives herself one: north. On a morning in the mid-1990s, she sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail all the way from California’s Mojave Desert to Washington state.  

It’s a grueling trek, as we learn from an early flash-forward. Cursed with a backpack that’s too heavy and boots that are too small, she pauses on a rocky mountain ledge to examine her bloodied feet.  

But though her walk is both lonely and dangerous, Cheryl’s greatest challenge is coming to terms with what lies behind her. Thanks to a constant stream of flashbacks, we learn that she had a supportive husband (Thomas Sadoski) but cheated on him with a series of strangers. We also learn that she never appreciated her plucky mother (Laura Dern), who has now disappeared from her life. 

The craft-brewing wave sweeping the US makes drinking beer more fun than ever. Maryland’s Flying Dog Brewery brews a beer from oysters, and the Delaware-based Dogfish Head uses an ancient beer recipe they dug up from 2,700-year-old drinking vessels in the tomb of King Midas.

But as this trend spreads, there is another revolution going on that’s concentrating most of the world’s beer into the hands of a few mega-corporations. These so-called kings of beer are riding the wave of craft brewing enthusiasm, buying up smaller breweries, and duping customers along the way.

“If you want to listen to Milli Vanilli, I suppose that’s a choice you get to make. Just know that you’re making that choice,” is how Greg Koch of Stone Brewing Company puts it.

Take Blue Point, Long Island’s first micro-brewery. A couple of home brewers started the company ten years ago, but this year, Anheuser-Busch InBev (which has brewery in Columbus) bought Blue Point for $24 million. John Hall, the founder of Chicago’s Goose Island brewery, told a reporter in 2013, “Goose Island is a craft beer, period.” Yet it was sold to AB InBev in 2011.  

When you think of Antarctica, you probably picture ice, snow and penguins. You don’t normally think of people, other than the odd intrepid explorer driving his dogsled across a frozen landscape.  

And yet a few thousand human beings do work in bases spread across Antarctica during what passes for the continent’s summer. And nearly 700 stay through the winter, when the sun never rises, the winds blow fiercely and the temperature dips far, far below zero.  

Anthony Powell’s documentary Antarctica: A Year on Ice shows what it’s like to be one of those rare individuals who dare to spend 12 months on the continent at the bottom of the world. It’s fascinating both visually and psychologically.   

Who are these folks? Scientists, of course, but New Zealander Powell trains his camera on what one visitor refers to as “normal people”: firefighters, mechanics, shopkeepers.  

What all of them share is a sense of adventure. They’re willing to put up with the body-numbing cold and the spirit-numbing isolation just for the chance to experience a land that few will ever see. 

Frontier life was tough in the 1850s, particularly if you were a woman. That’s the prime message of The Homesman.

Winters were harsh. Crops were uncertain. Disease was rampant. Foreplay had yet to be invented.

Directed and co-written by Tommy Lee Jones, and based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman takes place in pre-statehood Nebraska at the end of a particularly brutal winter. In one community, the hardships have robbed three women of their sanity. Their symptoms include hostility, withdrawal and—as depicted in the film’s most horrific scene—infanticide.

The local minister (John Lithgow) decides the solution is to transport the women to a church in Iowa where they can receive care. That leaves the question of who’s going to undertake this difficult journey across the desolate plains.

When the local men are unable to accept the task because their families need them, an unmarried farmer named Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) volunteers. The others agree she’s as capable as any man, and they provide her with a mule-driven wagon equipped with a padlocked enclosure.

Tuesday afternoon about 100 people gathered at the base of the Peace statute on the east side of the Statehouse to protest the Grand Jury decision to not prosecute Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Brown in the shooting death of Michael Brown. The rally was peaceful with over a dozen speakers, mostly young people,urging black and white solidarity. 

Stephen Hawking is known as the brilliant physicist who slumps in a wheelchair and speaks through a computer-generated voice. In The Theory of Everything, we first meet the Brit when he’s a still gawky university student bicycling wildly through the streets of Cambridge.  

He’s already brilliant, however. That becomes obvious when a professor assigns his class a series of 10 questions, “each more impregnable than the last.” Though his fellow students are stymied, Stephen returns with the correct and densely complex equations scribbled on the back of a railway schedule.   

Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire), The Theory of Everything is based on a book written by the scientist’s first wife, Jane Hawking. That helps to explain why it’s more interested in Stephen Hawking the husband and family man than in Stephen Hawking the scientist.  

In the first half, both sides of his life are pretty well integrated. 

What do you do when you’re 20-something and stuck in a dead-end job or relationship? According to Fugitive Songs, you hit the road.

  Lyricist Nathan Tysen says the show consists of songs he and composer Chris Miller wrote for other projects that fell through. After realizing that all of them were about people on the run from one thing or another, they decided to combine them into a “song cycle” that’s united by a general theme rather than characters or plot.

  It sounds like a haphazard way to construct a show, which may lead you to believe you shouldn’t expect too much. And after hearing the first handful of angsty but unmemorable songs, you may think you were right.

  With song No. 6, though, things start to turn around. “Get me the hell out of Washington Heights,” sings the sonorous-voiced Ezekiel Andrew, playing the part of a man who’s spent too much time in one neighborhood. From that point on, the songs are as well-honed as the singers who deliver them.

I'm a 59 year old artist that's been painting since 1974. I'm self taught and have been labeled "Outsider/Visionary Artist" and I have no qualms over this description being that my desire, drive to create art is driven from personal issues and not from an "art for art's sake" or some preconceived notion of ever making a living from my artistic endeavors. I've often said that I paint because I'm unable to do much else...unfortunately that's closer to the truth than just a self effacing quip. I never acquired enough credits to graduate the low standards, rural high school that I attended. Predictably my only high marks were from Art and Creative writing classes. So it seems I'm the poster boy for ADHD!
  Yes, I know that the definitions over this term can be a bit loose and may be over diagnosed but with me, it fits me to a "T." This past summer I underwent six hours of "comprehensive cognitive" testing.