Quote of the week

“It’s a silly comedy, man. Come on, brother. I hate to see something crushed that way. I hate that for the film company and for those two comedians. Unbelievable. I’d like to show it, but the choice might not be mine at this point.” — Matt Smith, owner of Riverdale 10 and other Central Arkansas theaters, on “The Interview,” the Seth Rogen comedy about killing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that Sony Pictures delayed releasing after receiving threats of violence from anonymous Sony web hackers and the refusal of several large theater groups to screen it.

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Don’t get it twisted

Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, who writes frequently on police-community relationships, wrote this week on his blog about the slayings of New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu as they sat in a patrol car. The shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a man with a lengthy record of crime and mental instability, left social media comments on recent highly publicized police killings of suspects. Griffen’s key point is an important one:

“Brinsley’s murderous conduct was an act of injustice. Let no one mistake that fact (or as young people might say “don’t get it twisted”). Those of us who denounce and condemn police brutality and racial profiling also denounce and condemn what Brinsley did. It is as wrong to profile and brutalize people in law enforcement as it is wrong for people in law enforcement to profile and brutalize others. All lives matter equally.

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“It is also wrong for law enforcement leaders (including Patrick Lynch, president of the New York City police union) to attribute Brinsley’s vicious behavior to the legitimate calls for reform and the non-violent protests and acts of civil disobedience that have occurred in recent months. Officers Ramos and Liu were murdered. Their assassination was evil. The people who are protesting abusive and homicidal conduct by police officers know this painfully well. Grief and shock at the murders of Officers Ramos and Liu are no excuse for anyone to blame people who are protesting abusive and homicidal conduct by police.”

Bringing a lot to the table

What do you do with a coffee table you’ve paid nearly $4.5 million for? Place it casually in the living room? Put your feet up on it? Sources told a columnist for the online gossip column “In the Air” on BLOUIN ARTINFO that Walmart heiress Alice Walton was the high bidder for Isamu Noguchi’s glass and laminated rosewood “The Goodyear Table, for A. Conger Goodyear” at “The Collector: Icons of Design” auction Dec. 16 at Phillips, in New York. Walton already owns a Noguchi, “Lunar Landscape,” a wall sculpture on exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

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The table, manufactured in 1939, is a little too early to be appropriate for the Usonian home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that Walton bought and is moving from New Jersey to the grounds of Crystal Bridges (you can see photographs of the Bachman Wilson House, built in 1954, being dismantled for shipping on the museum’s website, crystalbridges.org). Besides, the house apparently comes with furniture. However, if Walton was looking for tables to fit the style of the Wright home, maybe she also bought at Phillips the teak-veneered “Managing Committee Table,” designed by Balkrishna Doshi and Le Corbusier, 1953-54. The auction house estimated it would sell for $300,000 to $400,000, but the winning bid was $1.8 million. You would definitely not put your drink down on that table.

By the numbers

2 – Arkansas’s score on a 10-point scale used by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in their report assessing state’s readiness for handling threats of infectious diseases. Arkansas scored the lowest among all states.

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4 – The amount of hours, round trip, Little Rock fans of maddening-to-assemble cheap furniture will save once IKEA opens in the fall of 2016 in Germantown, Tenn., outside of Memphis. (The closest IKEA now is in Dallas.) Judging from the social media response to the news, that’s a lot to folks.

2 – The amount of hours, round trip, Little Rock fans of maddening-to-assemble cheap furniture will save once IKEA opens in the fall of 2016 in Germantown, Tenn., outside of Memphis. (The closest IKEA now is in Dallas.) Judging from the social media response to the news, that’s a lot to folks.

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