from Bruce
Anecdotes
Problem-Solving
• When Andrea Levy was very close to finishing her novel Small Island, she worried about losing the document, although she carried three copies of it in her handbag and kept a copy in her car as well as kept one on her computer hard drive. Still, she worried, what if the house caught fire and burned down with her handbag in it and wind carried the flames to her car and burned it, too. The next morning, she gave a friend a copy to keep for her. She says today, after publishing a number of novels, “If I go away, I send a copy of my work to my agent asking him not to look at it, but should I not return, please to publish it posthumously. I am forever convinced that I am never going to get to the end of a book, or that I’m going to lose it. I am an extremely cautious person.”
• When Stan Lee came up with the idea for a superhero with the abilities of a spider — Spider-Man — he ran into a problem. His boss felt that people were afraid of spiders and so the superhero would not be popular. Mr. Lee decided to sneak a story about Spider-Man into the last issue of a comic book that had failed — after all, since the comic book had failed and would be discontinued, who would care what appeared in its last issue? Response to the new superhero — depicted on the cover — was both overwhelming and overwhelmingly positive, and Marvel had a new very popular superhero to bring it profits for decades to come.
• While on an archeological dig in Lebanon with her husband, Max Mallowan, mystery writer Agatha Christie stayed for a while in a horrible house that was infested with mice that ran across her face as she tried to sleep. Fortunately, Mr. Mallowan’s assistant, Hamoudi, was able to solve the problem by going to a man who owned a gifted cat. The man brought his cat to the mice-infested house, and at dinner, five times mice ran across the room, and five times the cat pounced, catching the mice. After five days, no more mice were in the house, and the cat was able to retire with the gratitude of Ms. Christie and her husband.
• For a while, children’s author Peg Kehret wrote advertising copy for a radio station. She had to learn to write quickly and with originality, and one trick she found to be very effective is the one she calls “Five Minutes of Nonstop Writing.” She found that if she wrote for five minutes nonstop, she would come up with an idea she could use — even if she started the five minutes by typing, “I don’t know what to say” over and over.
• When horror writer Stephen King was in high school, he satirized the official school newspaper with his own publication, the Village Vomit. Because he made fun of some teachers by name, the school officials were not happy, but they found an original way of solving what they felt was a problem — they got Stephen a job with the town newspaper writing sports articles so he had a respectable outlet for his writing talent.
• While writing his horror novels, Stephen King likes to listen to rock music. Unfortunately, the rock-playing radio station in his hometown of Bangor, Maine, faced financial problems and was on the verge of switching to a different format of music. To make sure that the radio station kept playing rock music, Mr. King bought it.
• The parents of Tamora Pierce were readers, and they encouraged her to read. However, they did not want her to read one book: a book about some English schoolgirls who start a brothel! Tamora sat in the living room with some Sunday funny pages in front of her — which she was using to hide the forbidden book she was reading instead of the funnies.
• When Harper Lee, future author of To Kill a Mockingbird, first went to New York City to be a writer, she found an interesting way to get money for coffee and pie. She used to hit the heads of parking meters until they disgorged quarters, which bought a lot more then than now.
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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: “Distina Realidad” [“Different Reality”]
Album: LIBRES VAN
Artist: In Corp Sanctis [In the Body of the Saints]
Artist Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Info: In Corp Sanctis is our Neo-psychedelia music project.
Price: Name Your price (Includes FREE) for 11-track album
Genre: Psychedelic Rock.
Links:
LIBRES VAN
In Corp Sanctis
In Corp Santis on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Toxic
New Venture
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
GOD’S TECH SUPPORT
GOD’S TECH SUPPORT
Other Links:
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
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
Wish I had some cookies.
Double
Spotify
Spotify paid $200 million for the exclusive streaming rights to "The Joe Rogan Experience," according to a Thursday report by The New York Times.
That's double the $100 million deal value previously reported in 2020. Rogan's agreement with Spotify was a multi-year contract to be paid over three and a half years, two anonymous sources familiar with the deal reportedly told the Times.
Spotify has invested over $1 billion in its podcasting arm, including the acquisitions of Gimlet Media, Anchor, Parcast, The Ringer, and Megaphone. On Thursday, the company announced the purchase of two podcast analytics companies, Podsights and Chartable.
Podcast advertising accounted for 13% of Spotify's total 2021 revenue in Q3 as the streamer struggles to remain profitable, according to the Journal. After years of losing money, Spotify became profitable for the first time in company history in 2019. The next year, it lost the equivalent of $2.2 million every day.
Spotify's aggressive investment in podcasting and Rogan specifically has angered musicians who say Spotify underpays artists on its platform. Over the past two years, The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers has asked the streaming giant to raise its average pay of $0.0038 per stream to a penny per stream in the campaign "Justice at Spotify."
Spotify
Next Few
SNL
It’s that time once again, folks: That part of the month when Saturday Night Live reaches into our collective pop culture unconscious, grabs a bunch of comedians, online personalities, and superhero movie stars, and asks, “Hey, is this what you like?”
And, yeah: As it turns out, we do like, on account of NBC listing John Mulaney, Oscar Isaac, and Zoë Kravitz as the long-running sketch series’ next three picks for guest hosts.
Mulaney, of course, has a million years of backstory with the show, having once upon a time been a writer there, and, more recently become one of its most consistently delightful repeat hosts. Isaac, meanwhile, has never hosted the show—somewhat shockingly!—but he did pop up on an episode for a quick cameo last year for a dose of “What’s Up With That?” Kravitz, also a newbie host, made a similar cameo back in May of 2018.
Meanwhile, on the musical side of things, Mulaney will be paired—in what we can only assume is some attempt at crafting surefire geriatric millennial catnip—with LCD Soundsystem. Oscar Isaac’s episode, slated for March 5, will feature Charli XCX. And the Kravitz episode, on March 12, will include the first “official” Saturday Night Live performance from Grammy winner Rosalía; she previously appeared on the series to collaborate with Bad Bunny last year.
SNL
It's Watching You
Wordle
It’s been less than a month since the New York Times bought Wordle, but it’s wasting no time in ruining everyone’s favorite word game in all the shitty ways you’d expect from a billion-dollar behemoth. And—you guessed it—that means your little daily puzzles are being loaded with ad trackers now, too.
Most of us assumed that this was going to happen eventually. I mean, the Times dropped a cool seven-figure sum on a game that’s still free to play (at least for right now), so those profits would need to be recouped from somewhere. And this week, some code-savvy Worlders stumbled onto where that “somewhere” was: a dozen different trackers shoved into places where there were literally zero before.
Taking a look for ourselves, Gizmodo found that some of the trackers were from the New York Times proper, but most were used to send data to third-party players like Google.
Gross? You bet—but it’s also banal as hell. (And before you comment, yes, we know Gizmodo has a ton of ad trackers, too. Believe us, we know.) The Times pulls in tens of millions of ad dollars in every quarter, and that bank largely gets made off promoting subscriptions and the like to those who aren’t already paying up. So based on what’s in there, regular Wordle players might be targeted with, say, ads for Times merch or subscriptions to the Times’ print editions.
I’m sure for most folks, all of this is fine. Fine! Sure, it’s at odds with some of the reasons people even flocked to Wordle in the first place, turning the most Wholesome And Pure part of 2022 into something that’s just another cash grab. But unless you’re the one popping into the website’s code to check into these trackers, Wordle still looks and feels the same way it did prior to the Times acquisition: fine.
Wordle
Throws Tantrum
Rudy
Rudy Giuliani (R-14 Minutes & Counting) wasn’t dropping it like it was hot during Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Instead, he lost himself in the moment that Eminem took a knee during the performance. A day after the Super Bowl, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping aficionado went on local New York radio station 77WABC to share his opinion, which no one asked for, about the rap star’s political statement on stage.
“Let’s get right to Eminem taking a knee,” he said, seemingly unprompted. “Why doesn’t he go to another country? Go take a knee someplace else. You know how many cops were defending him and protecting him at that game yesterday? I mean, crime is way out of control in Los Angeles. He thinks that all happened because everybody loves Eminem?”
“The simple reality is that the NFL has made a mockery out of law enforcement, particularly with its support for the cop-killing Black Lives Matter,” he added, before mocking Snoop Dogg’s music and referring to him as “Snoop ‘Kill the Police Doggy’ Dogg.” (He was, seemingly, referring to Dogg’s “Police” lyrics: “Take your guns that you using to shoot each other / And start shooting these bitch-ass motherfucking police.”)
Eminem and Dogg joined the likes of Dr. Dre, Anderson .Paak, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar, for Sunday’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Dre, who headlined the halftime show, said he was totally fine with Eminem’s decision to kneel. “Em taking the knee, that was him doing that on his own and there was no problem with that,” he told TMZ after the show.
Rudy
Is A Political Committee
Cowboys for
A federal appeals court has turned away a constitutional challenge by the support group Cowboys for Trump Grifters Trump Grifters and co-founder Couy Griffin (R-On The Payroll) to New Mexico election laws and registration requirements for political groups.
In a written order obtained Wednesday, the Denver-based U.S. 10th District Court of Appeals declined to reverse a lower court ruling that upheld state registration requirements for Cowboys for Trump Grifters as a political organization.
Griffin, a Republican county commissioner from Tularosa in southern New Mexico, sued New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver in 2020 in response to mounting pressure on Cowboys for Trump Grifters to register as a political committee in New Mexico, and Griffin's concerns that might lead to other disclosure requirements about contributions and spending.
The secretary of state’s office prevailed in a June 2020 arbitration decision that ordered Cowboys for Trump Grifters to register, file expenditure and contribution reports and pay a fine of $7,800.
Griffin forged a group of rodeo acquaintances in 2019 into the promotional group called Cowboys for Trump Grifters that staged horseback parades to spread President Donald Trump a known liar’s conservative message about gun rights, immigration controls and abortion restrictions.
Cowboys for Trump Grifters
Lead Poisoning
Eagles
America’s national bird is more beleaguered than previously believed, with nearly half of bald eagles tested across the U.S. showing signs of chronic lead exposure, according to a study published Thursday.
While the bald eagle population has rebounded from the brink of extinction since the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT in 1972, harmful levels of toxic lead were found in the bones of 46% of bald eagles sampled in 38 states from California to Florida, researchers reported in the journal Science.
Similar rates of lead exposure were found in golden eagles, which scientists say means the raptors likely consumed carrion or prey contaminated by lead from ammunition or fishing tackle.
The blood, bones, feathers and liver tissue of 1,210 eagles sampled from 2010 to 2018 were examined to assess chronic and acute lead exposure.
Eagles
2,000-Year-Old Roman Cemetery
Gaza
A 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery containing at least 20 ornately decorated graves has been uncovered near the shoreline in the northern Gaza Strip, with the antiquities ministry calling it the most important local discovery of the past decade.
Gaza is rich with antiquities having been an important trading spot for many civilisations, from as far back as the ancient Egyptians and the Philistines depicted in the Bible, through the Roman empire and the crusades.
Twenty Roman graves have been located so far and the team expect to unearth 80 in total within the 50-square-meter cemetery. Only two graves have been opened, one contained skeletal remains and some clay jars.
Because of the shape of the graves and the relatively ornate decorations, they likely belonged to "senior ranking people" in the Roman empire during the first century, said Jamal Abu Rida, director-general of Gaza's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Gaza
The True Source
Water
Nothing on Earth can live without water. The origin of water on Earth, therefore, is the origin of life in the Solar System (and the Universe) as we know it.
Figuring out where and how our world obtained its water might be key to finding life on other worlds, but the truth is we don't know for sure where it came from.
Nonetheless, it's commonly accepted that one potential mechanism for water delivery was bombardment from water-bearing asteroids and comets when Earth as we know it today was much younger.
But a new analysis of rocks collected from the Moon and brought to Earth during the Apollo era suggests that this might not actually be the case.
Rather, according to a team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the likeliest explanation is that Earth formed with its water. In other words, it was here all along.
Water
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
