from Bruce
Anecdotes
Illness
• While researching a book on children surviving cancer, Erma Bombeck was impressed by the way a three-year-old boy faced life. The boy told her, “You know what? I’m going to the circus!” — but a camp counselor reminded the boy that he wasn’t going to the circus, but he was going swimming instead. The boy then turned to Ms. Bombeck and said, “You know what? I’m going swimming!” Ms. Bombeck wrote later, “It didn’t matter, he would have gone to the opening of a bottle of aspirin. And it made me think — little things, little moments. Go for them.”
• Albert III, Al Gore’s six-year-old son, was hit by a car in 1989 and thrown for several feet, breaking some of his bones and crushing some of his internal organs. He was rushed to a hospital, and when he regained consciousness, he told his parents, “I can’t get well without you.” They stayed with him throughout his three-week hospital stay, and when they took him home in a full-body cast, they put a bed for him in the dining room and took turns sleeping on a mattress placed on the floor by his bed until he recovered.
• Many people fear AIDS. Carmine Buete was a 10-year-old boy suffering from AIDS who lived with his grandmother near New Year City. After some of the friends of his grandmother discovered that he had AIDS, they refused to talk to her anymore. Because of that experience, Carmine and his grandmother soon learned not to tell many people that he had AIDS. Before he died, one of Carmine’s favorite toys was an E.T. doll that made him feel better when he was ill.
• Teddy Kennedy, Jr., the senator’s son, lost a leg to cancer in 1973. He used humor to deal with his prosthesis (artificial limb). While he was riding on the back of a friend’s bicycle, they crashed, and young Ted’s foot became twisted around backwards. No problem. He simply twisted his foot around so it was facing the right way, then he walked away. The people watching him — who didn’t know he was wearing a prosthesis — were shocked.
In-Laws
• Mark Twain married a woman from a wealthy family. Arriving in Buffalo, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Twain were driven to a fancy house, where his new wife told Mr. Twain that the fancy house was a gift to them from her father. Mr. Twain shook hands with his father-in-law and said, “If you ever come to Buffalo, bring your grip [suitcase] and stay all night — it won’t cost you a cent.”
• A 1993 TV commercial for a Norwegian airline showed a man stripping until he was wearing nothing but his socks, then bursting through a doorway to surprise his wife. Unfortunately, her parents are with her — and they know don’t where to look. The title card for the commercial says, “Warning: we’re flying in your in-laws at half-price.”
• Irish ballad writer Jimmy Hiney is a small man. When he was first introduced to his mother-in-law, she told her daughter, “Well, by God, if you get nothing else from him, you’ll always get a laugh.”
Language
• As the writer of most episodes of The Twilight Zone, host Rod Serling displayed a love of language, a love that he exhibited even as a child. When he was six years old, his family took a two-and-a-half-hour car trip from Binghamton, New York, to Syracuse, New York. Before the trip, his parents agreed that they would not speak until young Rod had stopped talking. However, they never got a chance to speak during the trip because Rod never stopped talking!
• After being divorced from his father, Zack’s mother, Aimee, discovered that she was in love with another woman, Margie, and they moved in together. Zack occasionally hears other people use words such as “fag” and “dyke,” but his mother tells him, “The problem is not with us. It’s with them. We’re in a family where everybody loves each other, and that’s what matters.”
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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
Track: "Let’s Leave the Beach"
Album: SUMMER FEELINGS, VOLUME 2
Artist: Bad Tats
Artist Location: Seattle, Washington
Record Company: RTTB Records
Record Company Location: SH, Germany
Info:
“RTTB” means “Ramone To The Bone”
RTTB Records has low-cost or FREE Pop Punk compilations by various artists
Nick Benitez- Vocals
Josh Dale- Guitar
Ricky Gonzales- Bass
Isaac Rivelle- Drums
“Let’s Leave the Beach” is also on the Bad Tats’ album I NEED A P.M.A. Price $7 (USD) for nine tracks. Originally released in July of 2012 under the band name, The Downstrokes.
P.M.A. = Positive Mental Attitude?
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for 60-track album
Genre: Pop Punk.
Links:
SUMMER FEELINGS, VOLUME 2
I NEED A P.M.A.
Bad Tats on Bandcamp
RTTB Records
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
davidbrucebooks: EDUCATE YOURSELF - Free PDFs
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
America
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
Currently, the episodes of 'Bonanza' on Me-TV
have the old NBC Peacock ("Brought to you in living color") open.
Moon Dust and Cockroaches
NASA
NASA wants its moon dust and cockroaches back.
The space agency has asked Boston-based RR Auction to halt the sale of moon dust collected during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that had subsequently been fed to cockroaches during an experiment to determine if the lunar rock contained any sort of pathogen that posed a threat to terrestrial life.
The material, a NASA lawyer said in a letter to the auctioneer, still belongs to the federal government.
The material from the experiment, including a vial with about 40 milligrams of moon dust and three cockroach carcasses, was expected to sell for at least $400,000, but has been pulled from the auction block, RR said Thursday.
In another letter dated June 22, NASA’s lawyer asked RR Auction to work with the current owner of the material to return it to the federal government.
NASA
Grateful For Rickrolling
Rick Astley
How does Rick Astley handle one of his songs being part of the biggest internet meme of all time? He rolls with it, obviously.
“Listen, let’s face it, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ has sort of become something else,” he says. “The video and the song have drifted off into the ether and become something else, and I’m ever so grateful for it.”
That song turns 35 this year and is still very much alive, buoyed by a second chapter as a gentle joke wherein someone baits you with an enticing online link, which points instead to the video for this 1987 dance-pop smash. It’s called Rickrolling.
Thirty-five years later, Astley is singing it this summer on tour with New Kids on the Block, Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue for the 57-date “The Mixtape Tour 2022.” A remastered version of his 1987 debut album also has been released featuring, of course, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
“I’m never going to have a song as big as that ever, and I kind of knew that while it was happening. I kind of thought, ‘We’re never going to beat this.’ But I also kind of thought, ‘Well, how bad is that?’”
Rick Astley
Pranked by Russians
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling has fallen victim to a hoax by a prankster duo who tricked the Harry Potter author into believing she was having a Zoom call with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
First discovered online early Tuesday by The Rowling Library, Rowling was fooled by Russian comedy outfit Vovan and Lexus, who are infamous for prank-calling celebrities. Their past victims include Elton John, Prince Harry, Billie Eilish, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and George W. Bush.
The author’s spokesperson called the hoax “distasteful” and noted, “J.K. Rowling was approached to talk about her extensive charitable work in Ukraine, supporting children and families who have been affected by the current conflict in the region. The video, which has been edited, is a distorted representation of the conversation.”
During the 12-minute, increasingly awkward video, the pranksters remark that Harry Potter’s lightning bolt forehead scar looks like a “Z,” which the Russian military has put on its tanks during its invasion of Ukraine and has become a symbol of support for the war among Russians. Rowling was asked if she would change the symbol to a Ukrainian trident. “I will look into that,” she assured. “It might be good for me to do something with that myself on social media because I think that will get into the newspapers.”
Beyond the specifics of the pranks themselves, Vovan and Lexus have been criticized in the past for often targeting high-profile people who are critical of Russian foreign policy, leaving some to suspect they’re state actors.
J.K. Rowling
Daddy Dearest
Musk
A California judge has approved a request by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s adult daughter to change her name and gender on her birth certificate.
Vivian Jenna Wilson filed the petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court the day after turning 18 in April.
Judge Rafael Ongkeko approved the petition Wednesday in the Santa Monica courthouse after no one objected to the change. A hearing that had been scheduled for Friday was canceled. The court order said a new birth certificate would be issued reflecting the change.
Vivian will now legally use the last name of her mother, Canadian author Justine Wilson, who was married to Musk from 2000 to 2008.
The couple had five children, the oldest of which died as an infant. Vivian has a twin brother.
Musk
Raids Georgia Churches
FBI
The FBI on Thursday raided three churches associated with the House of Prayer Christian Church in Georgia and Texas.
The House of Prayer is owned by the foreign nonprofit company House of Prayer Christian Churches of America Inc., which registered with the Georgia Secretary of State in 2004. The business's listed officers are affiliated with the Georgia churches and use Hinesville, Georgia, post office boxes as mailing addresses.
Its churches, which are primarily located near military bases throughout the country, have been accused by former members and a veterans' advocacy group of operating like a cult and targeting soldiers.
In August 2020, Veterans Education Success, an advocacy organization based in Washington D.C., asked the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Georgia Veterans Service to investigate alleged abuses of the GI Bill program by House of Prayer Christian Church’s bible seminaries.
Veterans alleged the House of Prayer Christian Church "deceives the VA during inspections and targets veterans in order to access GI Bill funding, VA disability compensation, and VA home loans," according to the organization's letter to the VA and Georgia SAA.
FBI
Inca-Era Tomb Discovered
Lima, Peru
Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb in the heart of Peru's capital Lima, archaeologists said on Wednesday, a burial dug up under a working-class home and believed to hold noble remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.
Lead archeologist Julio Abanto told Reuters the 500-year-old tomb contains "multiple funerary bundles" tightly wrapped in cloth.
He said the entombed were likely elites from the Riricancho society, a culture that once populated present-day Lima before the powerful Inca came to rule a sprawling empire across the length of western South America in the 1400s.
Hipolito Tica, the owner of the house in Lima, said in an interview he was overcome with emotion at the surprise find.
Excavations began last month after Tica's reconstruction plans for his property triggered a required archeological survey in a Lima district known for hundreds of past archaeological finds from cultures that developed before and after the Inca.
Lima, Peru
'Perfect and Unique'
SMF R 4970
Paleontologists have discovered the oldest belly button known to science — and the first ever found on a non-avian dinosaur — on a 125 million-year-old fossil of a parrot-beaked biped in China.
The faint navel mark belongs to a reptile in the genus Psittacosaurus, which lived during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 millions years ago). Scientists spotted the long, thin trace of an umbilical scar when they exposed the fossil to a concentrated beam of laser light. The scar is a slight misalignment in the pattern of skin and scales over the dinosaur's abdomen and is the reptile equivalent of a mammalian belly button.
Unlike fetal mammals, which get their nutrients from a placenta, the embryos of birds and reptiles are nourished by a yolk sac connected to their abdomens through various blood vessels. When these embryos hatch, the yolk sac is absorbed completely into the body, leaving a linear abdominal scar that usually heals in a few days or weeks. But in some reptiles, such as alligators, the umbilical scar can last beyond sexual maturity. This fossilized navel discovery is the first indication that dinosaurs may have also had umbilical scars that never completely disappeared. The researchers published their findings June 7 in the journal BMC Biology.
"This Psittacosaurus specimen is probably the most important fossil we have for studying dinosaur skin," vertebrate paleontologist Phil Bell, a senior lecturer in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, said in a statement. "But it continues to yield surprises that we can bring to life with new technology like laser imaging."
The fossil, known as SMF R 4970, is a Psittacosaurus mongoliensis, an early type of ceratopsian, a group of beaked herbivores that later included Triceratops. Measuring 6 feet (1.8 meter) long and 4 feet (1.2 m) tall, P. mongoliensis was likely a highly social creature, living in groups and foraging for seeds to grind and nuts to crack in its sharp beak. Discovered roughly 20 years ago, the fossil of the horn-cheeked creature is incredibly well preserved, which has enabled scientists to document individual scales, tail bristles and the first dinosaur butthole ever discovered (described at the time as "perfect" and "unique"), Live Science previously reported.
SMF R 4970
World’s Biggest Bacterium
Thiomargarita magnifica
Scientists have discovered the world’s largest bacterium in a Caribbean mangrove swamp.
Most bacteria are microscopic, but this one is so big it can be seen with the naked eye.
The thin white filament, approximately the size of a human eyelash, is “by far the largest bacterium known to date,” said Jean-Marie Volland, a marine biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of a paper announcing the discovery Thursday in the journal Science.
Olivier Gros, a co-author and biologist at the University of the French West Indies and Guiana, found the first example of this bacterium — named Thiomargarita magnifica, or “magnificent sulfur pearl” — clinging to sunken mangrove leaves in the archipelago of Guadeloupe in 2009.
But he didn’t immediately know it was a bacterium because of its surprisingly large size -- these bacteria, on average, reach a length of a third of an inch (0.9 centimeters). Only later genetic analysis revealed the organism to be a single bacterial cell.
Thiomargarita magnifica
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