from Bruce
Anecdotes
Good Deeds
• J.K. Rowling had some rough times in her life before hitting it big by writing the Harry Potter books. At one point, she and her daughter lived in a mouse-infested apartment. Unfortunately, she was in a poverty trap. She was unable to get a job unless her daughter was in childcare, and because she did not have a job she could not afford childcare for her daughter. Fortunately, she appealed to her lifelong friend Sean Harris, who helped her by giving her enough money for her and her daughter to move into a better, non-mouse-infested, one-bedroom apartment. Mr. Harris is an inspiration for the character Ron Weasley. Ms. Rowling says, “Ron Weasley isn’t a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Seanish.”
• When African-American author James Baldwin sent his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the publisher Alfred A Knopf, Mr. Knopf was interested in it and wanted Mr. Baldwin to return to New York from Paris, France, in order to revise the novel. Mr. Baldwin was willing, but he lacked money to do that. Fortunately, a friend of his, Marlon Brando, who had become famous by starring in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, came through for him by lending him $500, and Mr. Baldwin came back to New York in April 1952. Mr. Baldwin said about Mr. Brando, “Race truly meant nothing to him. He was contemptuous of anyone who discriminated in any way.”
• Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, gave money to good causes, including sending some high-school students in La Jolla, California, where he lived, to a Science Olympiad. The students had created a machine called the Scrambler that scrambled eggs by tossing them 10 meters into the air. Along with the money, he sent this note: “Scrambling has always been my favorite Olympic event.”
Halloween
• When Christopher Paul Curtis, author of Bud, Not Buddy, was a child, his mother worried about her children trick-or-treating, so instead of letting them go out for trick-or-treat, she made them dress up in Halloween costumes and go from room to room of their house. In each room, she would put candy in their bags.
Husbands and Wives
• After writing her first novel, The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton became depressed and suffered from writer’s block. It was her boyfriend who figured out that she was depressed because she wasn’t writing. Therefore, he came up with an idea to make her start writing again. She would have to write two pages a day. He would stop by in the evening, and if she hadn’t written two pages, they wouldn’t go out. It worked. She wrote That Was Then, This is Now. Her publisher accepted it immediately. By the way, S.E. and her boyfriend, David Inhofe, got married. She wrote her third book, Rumblefish, on Thursday nights because that was when her husband played poker. S.E. lets her husband read her in-progress manuscripts because he always says, “That’s nice, honey,” which is the only thing she wants to hear when she is in the middle of writing a book. They had a son, whom they named Nick, and Nick contributed to two picture books she wrote for very young children: Big David, Little David, and The Puppy Sister. On Nick’s first day of kindergarten, he met a boy named David. Coming home, he said to his father, “Dad, there’s a kid in my class and his name is David like you and he has dark hair like you and he wears glasses like you. Is that you?” His father replied, “Sure, Nick, that’s me. Every day I get little, and I go to school with you.” S.E. helped her husband with the joke. Nick would come home and tell her what had happened at school — for example, that a child named Kelsey had thrown up. S.E. would telephone her husband and give him the information, and when he got home he would say to Nick, “Weren’t you grossed out when Kelsey threw up?” This went on for almost a year. S.E. says, “We figured, heck, we’d given the kid something to tell the therapist when he’s forty.” The Puppy Sister is based on a puppy that S.E. gave Nick. A sibling rivalry broke out, and Nick once accused her of loving the puppy more than she loved him. And Nick once asked her when the puppy would stop being a puppy and turn into a person.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Great White Buffalo"
Album: FOREVER
Artist: Bande de los Apaches
Artist Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Info:
“Bande de los Apaches is Danish band located in Copenhagen. Originally started in 2012 the band plays and writes instrumental surf music for both live performance and moving pictures. The band focuses on making music with direct inspiration from old spaghetti westerns and other B-movies.”
“In terms of mainstream performance, surf is perhaps one of the most unrecognized genres of music, yet most people listen to it and are excited by it when watching western movies (or Quentin Tarantino). With instrumental music you can tell a story that words cannot. Our ambition is to be able to make music, which can be used in new moving pictures.”
Price: 6 DKK (approx. .92 USD) for track; 42 DKK (approx. 6.40 USD) for six-track album
Genre: Surf. Rock. Instrumental.
Links:
FOREVER
Bande de los Apaches on Bandcamp
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
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David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Twofer
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The pink hyacinths have bloomed.
Sides With Rogan
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart has sided with Joe Rogan after several artists left Spotify in protest over Rogan’s podcast, which is hosted by the streaming platform.
Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Roxane Gay, and Mary Trump have all pulled their songs and podcasts from the service, as have Young’s former bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash.
Stewart was asked to share his opinion on the matter on his own podcast The Problem with Jon Stewart, a companion to his Apple TV+ show of the same name.
“Don’t leave. Don’t abandon,” he said, urging his followers to “engage” instead – while acknowledging that it might not always “work out fruitfully”.
“I’m more worried about the algorithm of misinformation than the purveyor of misinformation,” he added. “Misinformation will always be out there, but if the algorithm drives people further and further down the rabbit hole, the algorithm is the amplifier and the catalyst of extremism.”
Jon Stewart
Hosting Academy of Country Music Awards
Dolly Parton
Country music icon Dolly Parton will be hosting this year’s Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas, bringing her star power to the show’s new streaming home on Prime Video.
Parton, along with soon to be announced co-hosts, will emcee the new format for the awards show, which will be live streamed March 7 without commercials from Allegiant Stadium.
Parton is a 13-time ACM Award winner, including for the coveted entertainer of the year prize. She has hosted the award show in the past.
Six decades into her career, Parton is showing no signs of slowing down. She is releasing a new book “Run, Rose, Run” with author James Patterson and an accompanying album on March 4 and was announced as a first-time nominee for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this week.
Nominees will be announced next week.
Dolly Parton
NAACP Image Awards
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson will receive the Chairman’s Award during the 53rd NAACP Image Awards this month.
The NAACP announced Thursday that it will bestow the 73-year-old actor with the award, which recognizes individuals who demonstrate “exemplary public service and use their distinct platforms to create agents of change.”
Previous recipients have included Tyler Perry, then-Sen. Barack Obama, Danny Glover, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
The winners of the awards will be revealed during a BET broadcast on Feb. 26 at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Samuel L. Jackson
Hasty Pudding Man of Year
Jason Bateman
“Ozark” actor Jason Bateman is being feted as 2022 Man of the Year by Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
Thursday evening’s festivities will mark the first time the award has been presented since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.
The “Arrested Development” star also produced and directed “Ozark,” a popular Netflix series. He’s the 55th recipient of the theater troupe’s coveted pudding pot.
The last Man of the Year was Ben Platt in 2020. Past recipients include Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro and Samuel L. Jackson. The 2022 Woman of the Year, Jennifer Garner, will be honored Saturday.
Jason Bateman
Closes Indefinitely
National Butterfly Center
The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, closed indefinitely on Wednesday after years of wild QAnon conspiracy theories and mounting threats of violence, including a physical altercation last week with a Republican congressional candidate from Virginia demanding "to see all the illegals crossing on the raft," The Texas Tribune reports.
On any given day, hundreds of species of butterflies travel through the 20-year-old nonprofit sanctuary, the Houston Chronicle reports. "Birders from across the country visit the refuge to observe and photograph birds unique to the Rio Grande Valley, and thousands of local schoolchildren take field trips to the center each year."
In 2017, the National Butterfly Center sued the Trump administration to block construction of a border wall through its property. Two years later, "We Build the Wall" chief Brian Kolfage posted doctored photos of the butterfly sanctuary's dock, claiming it was being used for migrant transport and human trafficking. (Kolfage was later indicted for allegedly misusing funds for his nearby crowdfunded border wall.)
Right-wing conspiracists have been falsely claiming the National Butterfly Center is involved in sex trafficking and other crimes since 2019, and executive director Marianna Treviño-Wright has been getting threats. Former Texas state Rep. Aaron Peña (R) told her before last weekend's "We Stand America" border security rally in neighboring McAllen that she could be a target and should "be armed at all times or out of town," the Tribune reports.
Jeffrey Glassberg, founder of the butterfly sanctuary's parent organization, the North American Butterfly Association, told the Tribune "it's incredibly distressing that the United States has come to the point where a really significant part of the public is just no longer tethered to reality."
National Butterfly Center
Tries To Turn Tables
'The Victim'
Donald Trump The unindicted conspirator has tried to turn the tables by claiming that he was the victim of an attempted coup to remove him from office.
The former president made the wild claim despite new details emerging of his own attempt to steal Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
Mr Trump The failed reality TV producer told Rob Schmitt of right-wing news channel Newsmax that Democrats had tried to kill-off his presidency.
“Don’t forget, the first day we came in we were hit with the phony Russia, Russia, Russia deal and we had to fight that, so we were fighting that and doing more than any president just about has done for our country, we rebuilt the economy, we rebuilt the military, we opened Space Force, we had low interest rates,” said Mr Trump the professional liar.
“But at the same time we were fighting the radical left on the impeachment hoaxes, which was what over a perfect phone call to Ukraine? It was perfect.
'The Victim'
Increasing Price Of Prime
Amazon
Amazon will increase the price of its catch-all Prime membership to $139 annually in the United States, up from the prior price of $119. For those who subscribe month-to-month, the monthly charge will rise from $12.99 to $14.99.
As far as new sign-ups go, the new price will go into effect very soon: February 18. The change will happen with the first renewal date after March 25 for existing members.
Amazon cited higher transportation costs and wages as well as expanded products and services within the membership as reasons.
The company announced the change on the heels of its quarterly and annual earnings reports to investors, which showed reduced profits as a result of those rising expenses. The service had 200 million subscribers worldwide as of last year.
This is the third time Amazon has raised the prices in the US since Prime's introduction back in 2005. The previous time was in 2018, when the annual price raised from $99 to $119. Back in 2014, the price changed from its initial cost of $79 to $99.
Amazon
So Big...
Megayacht
Jeff Bezos' new yacht is so big, it won't make it out to sea unless a Dutch city removes part of a historic bridge.
Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond reported Tuesday that the 417-foot vessel is currently being built in the city of Alblasserdam, Netherlands. Once finished, it will need to pass through Rotterdam, largely considered the maritime capital of Europe, in order to reach the ocean — and, presumably, Bezos.
There's only one problem: The megayacht has three masts, and the masts are too tall to pass underneath the Koningshaven Bridge in Rotterdam, despite its clearance of over 131 feet.
The bridge, which locals refer to as De Hef, is nearly 100 years old, and while it no longer functions as a railroad crossing, it's become something of a monument in the city. It was renovated and then put back together in 2017, after which the city pledged it wouldn't be taken apart again, Rijnmond reported.
In addition to the mega-yacht, the Amazon founder — who is currently worth $176 billion — has reportedly commissioned a second, smaller "support yacht" that will include its own helipad.
Megayacht
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