from Bruce
Anecdotes
Sex
• A couple of professors at the University of Washington were immensely cool. On their table was prominently displayed a copy of Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response, which reported the results of their research on sex. Inside was an inscription written by Masters and Johnson themselves: “Thanks for your cooperation.”
Siblings
• Buddy Ebsen is perhaps best known for portraying the character of Jed Clampett in the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies; however, he and Vilma Ebsen were a popular brother-and-sister dance team in the 1930s. As they toured, their billing changed frequently. Sometimes they were billed as the Ebsens, but at other times they were billed as Vilma and Buddy Ebsen. However, Vilma was upset once when they were billed in two towns in a row as “Buddy Ebsen and Sister Vilma.” She even threatened, “If that is not replaced with Vilma and Buddy Ebsen, or The Ebsens, you will be very interested to know that I’m doing the whole act in a nun’s habit. If I’m going to be Sister Vilma, then I’ll be ‘Sister’ Vilma!”
• Fortunately, homosexuality is becoming more accepted. Lesbian comedian Kate Clinton was trying to get into a concert featuring Ellen DeGeneres when she had to ask a police officer for help. The police officer asked her a few questions — then he tried to fix her up with his sister!
• Quaker William H. Sessions once heard a woman in the Salvation Army say that when she realized that wearing jewelry would cause her to go to hell, she immediately gathered up all her jewelry — and gave it to her sister!
• Early in figure skater Rudy Galindo’s career, he was financially supported by Laura, his sister. For a while, he affectionately called her the “Bank of Laura.”
Sons
• Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum used to tell bedtime stories to Eli, her son. For an entire year, each of the bedtime stories she told was about her rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach! Eventually, she collected the stories into a book that her son urged her to title The Rabbi of Love. (She used the title Holy Brother.) Here is one story she tells in the book: In the early 1980s, Rabbi Carlebach, aka the Singing Rabbi, gave a concert to a maximum-security prison for both Jewish and Arab women in Ramlah, Israel. However, when the concert was scheduled to begin, Rabbi Shlomo noticed that only Jewish prisoners were present, so he asked that the Arab prisoners also attend his concert. By the end of the concert, everyone—Jewish prisoners, Arab prisoners, and prison guards—were singing together and dancing in a circle.
• A Jew met a cantor and asked, “What shall I do? My son has decided to convert to Christianity.” The cantor replied, “Funny you should ask — my son has also decided to convert.” Together they sought their rabbi and asked, “What shall we do? Our sons have decided to convert to Christianity.” The rabbi replied, “Funny you should ask — my son has also decided to convert.” Together they decided to pray to God: “What shall we do? Our sons have decided to convert to Christianity.” Out of Heaven, a mighty voice replied, “Funny you should ask ….”
• Poet Nikki Giovanni read frequently to Thomas, her young son, but occasionally she was tired and told him, “Go read it yourself,” although he was too young to read. One day, she said that to him, and he replied, “OK, I will.” Ms. Giovanni said, “But you don’t know how to read.” However, Thomas proved that he could read by picking up a New York Times and reading the headlines out loud to her. Immediately, Ms. Giovanni read a story to him. She explained later, “I didn’t want to punish him for having learned to read, by not reading to him.”
• Francis Hodgson Burnett, author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, based the title character of her novel Little Lord Fauntleroy on her own son, Vivien. In 1937, Vivien Burnett died a hero. Two men and two women were in a craft that overturned in a sound. Vivien maneuvered his yawl to the overturned craft and rescued the two men and two women, then he collapsed and died.
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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: "Skinny Woman"
Album: RUMOURS OF LIGHT 2: A 60 SONG DIGITAL BOXSET IN SUPPORT OF THE DISASTERS EMERGENCY COMMITTEE AND THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE
Artist: Rum for Legba
Artist Location: Sunbury, Australia
Record Company: Aldora Britain Records (“The worldwide hub of independent and underground music since 2013.”)
Record Company Location: Rothley, UK
Info:
“Out of Sunbury Australia, RUM FOR LEGBA weave together open tuned 5-string guitars, and rollicking jungle drums. It's raucous hypnotic blues. They believe in the healing properties of juke joint boogie; the possession of the spirit; cranked valve amps, and the eternal mission to transcend time and space.”
Rattlin’ Bones Blackwood - guitars & vocals
Dazz Condy - drums & percussion
“Aldora Britain Records presents the second release in our 'Rumours Of Light' series. This album is a 60 song digital boxset in support of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and the people of Ukraine. Our first release has raised £157 so far and we hope to do so much more through using the power of music. This project features a further 60 artists from ten different countries and is specifically in aid of DEC’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.”
"You know, I always tried to be a humanist, a pacifist. Even our music is soaked with peace and joy, but this whole situation makes me feel a lot of anger and hate. Not only this war, but also the fact that due to disgusting and lousy propaganda, 85% of Russians support this war. They honestly believe that they have a right to do this. Today, I read another propaganda article where they were saying that all Ukrainians who fought against Russia and supported resistance should be murdered. All intelligent and culture-related people should be repressed. The Ukrainian language must be banned, vanished and forgotten. You know why? Because they claim that Ukrainians are Nazis…
"THIS IS ABSURD!
"This is even worse than what Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘War is peace, freedom is slavery’. They are putting everything upside down.”
— Ukrainian psychedelic rock musician Art Dudko, of the band Straytones
Price: £8.15 (GBP) for 60-track charity-appeal album
“Skinny Woman” is also on the Rum for Legba album ATOMIC HYPNOTIC. Price: $10 (AUS) for five tracks.
Genre: Southern Rock. Various.
Links:
RUMOURS OF LIGHT 2: A 60 SONG DIGITAL BOXSET IN SUPPORT OF THE DISASTERS EMERGENCY COMMITTEE AND THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE
Rum for Legba on Bandcamp
ATOMIC HYPNOTIC
Bones Blackwood on YouTube
Aldora Britain Records on Bandcamp
Aldora Britain Records on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
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David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Voice Actors
New Venture
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Trump
Michael Beschloss: This Hearing Is About As Historic As It Gets
“This is about as historic as it gets, argues presidential historian Michael Beschloss. The first minute, for sure. And you may want to watch all six minutes. Nixon and his inner circle were saints compared with the former president and his inner circle.
Other Links:
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
davidbrucebooks: EDUCATE YOURSELF - Free PDFs
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
Seeing a whole lot of reckless driving out there.
Filmmaker Now Has Armed Guards
Alex Holder
Documentary filmmaker Alex Holder revealed that he has been provided “two armed guards” for protection following a subpoena for materials from the Jan. 6 committee.
Holder, a British filmmaker, was subpoenaed by the committee in regard to footage and interviews Holder and his team shot throughout the production of Unprecedented, a documentary film on Trump and his inner circle during the 2020 presidential campaign. Holder confirmed that he and his team are cooperating fully with the committee.
In a Wednesday interview with BBC, Holder detailed that since the revelation of his cooperation with the committee, he has been assigned a security detail that “follow me around everywhere,” and that he has become the subject of various conspiracies. “According to some, I’m an undercover FBI agent, some think I’m an MI6 spy, and there’s all sorts of conspiracies and threats that are coming through,” he told the BBC.
The security detail was provided to Holder by Discovery+, which will premiere Unprecedented this summer.
Alex Holder
Directing Zombie Comedy
Zelda Williams
Zelda Williams, the actor, filmmaker, and daughter of the late Robin Williams, is finally taking her talents to the (feature film) director’s chair. Working from a script by Diablo Cody, Williams is set to direct a new zombie rom-com, Lisa Frankenstein. The film has yet to receive an official premiere date.
Set in 1989 and stylized as such, Lisa Frankenstein follows “an unpopular high schooler who accidentally re-animates a handsome Victorian corpse during a lightning storm and starts to rebuild him into the man of her dreams using the broken tanning bed in her garage,” per Deadline.
Kathryn Newton of Big Little Lies and Dylan Sprouse are set to presumably star as the lonely teen and her re-animated dream, with principal filming beginning at the end of the summer. Lisa Frankenstein will also reunite Cody with producer Mason Novick, who she worked with on multiple films including her breakout Juno and the absolutely winning cult-favorite Jennifer’s Body.
Zelda Williams
Watermarked Screener
Elizabeth Olsen
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” has earned just over $950 million at the worldwide box office, but the film’s co-lead Elizabeth Olsen still has not seen it. The actor revealed on “The Tonight Show” that a cold prevented her from watching the movie at its premiere, and then she refused to watch the watermarked screener Disney sent her as a back-up because it was just too “distracting.”
“I’m not one of those [actors who doesn’t watch her own movies],” Olsen said. “I’m one of those people who likes to study something so I can figure out how to make it better. But I had a cold when we had the premiere and I didn’t want to sit through it. And so I asked them to send a copy so I could watch it, and it had my name on it and it had the time that I was watching it, and I didn’t want to watch it like that.
“My name was on it and the exact time and date,” Olsen added. “It’s just distracting.”
“The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon explained that Marvel screeners have watermarks on them “in case you sell it illegally,’ to Which Olsen responded, “How do you even do that? Who do you even send it to? How do you even record it on a computer?”
Elizabeth Olsen
Salmonella Found
Chocolate
Salmonella bacteria have been discovered in the world's biggest chocolate plant, run by Swiss giant Barry Callebaut in the Belgian town of Wieze, the firm said Thursday.
A company spokesman told AFP that production had been halted at the factory, which produces liquid chocolate in wholesale batches for 73 clients making confectionaries.
The Wieze plant does not make chocolates to be sold directly to consumers, and the firm has no reason yet to believe that any contaminated goods made by clients have yet made it onto shop shelves.
Swiss group Barry Callebaut supplies cocoa and chocolate products to many companies in the food industry, including industry giants such as Hershey, Mondelez, Nestle and Unilever.
Chocolate
Personal Militia
Oath Keepers
When nine accused leaders of the Oath Keepers go on trial for seditious conspiracy in Washington, DC, this fall, jurors in the government's first big, Jan. 6 showcase trial will hear a defense argument that sounds little short of crazy.
They'll be told that the far-right extremists believed the former President Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act as they gathered at the Capitol, 100 strong in their camo-colored tactical gear — and turn them into his own, ultra-loyal federal militia.
Their fantasy mission? To "Stop the Steal," "Defend the President," and "Defeat the Deep State," according to since-deleted rhetoric from their website. A defiant Trump would officially be their commander in chief.
"Do NOT concede, and do NOT wait until January 20, 2021," Inauguration Day. "Strike now," Oath Keepers leader and founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes urged in an open letter to Trump on Dec. 14, 2020.
Oath Keepers
Cites Debunked Claim
Slappy
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Clarence "Slappy" Thomas expressed support Thursday for a debunked claim that all Covid vaccines are made with cells from “aborted children.”
His dissent came in a decision by the Supreme Court to not take up a legal challenge by New York health care workers who opposed the state’s vaccine mandate on religious grounds.
Thomas, citing the plaintiffs, wrote that the health care workers “object” to the state’s vaccine mandate “on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
Pfizer and Moderna used fetal cell lines early in their Covid vaccine development to test the efficacy of their formulas, as other vaccines have in the past. The fetal tissue used in these processes came from elective abortions that happened decades ago. But the cells have since replicated many times, so none of the original tissue is involved in the making of modern vaccines.
Slappy
Jail Time For Flashing
Pennsylvania
A Pennsylvania mom was sentenced to prison time after authorities said she flashed inmates while her kids played nearby.
The 36-year-old woman from Elizabethtown took her two children — aged 8 and 12 — with her to the Lancaster County Prison on Sept. 16, 2021, the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release.
Officials said the woman went to see a specific inmate, got on top of her car and “exposed her breasts.”
In court, the prosecutor argued that the woman “showed no remorse, was belligerent toward the responding officers, who were just there to do their jobs, and bragged about her behavior afterward,” per the court statement.
The jury deliberated for eight minutes before finding her guilty of open lewdness. Lancaster County Judge Thomas Sponaugle sentenced the woman to prison time between two months and a year, according to the release.
Pennsylvania
Never-Before-Seen
Microbes
Stunned scientists have uncovered more than 900 never-before-seen species of microbes living inside glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau. Analysis of the microbes' genomes revealed that some have the potential to spawn new pandemics, if rapid melting caused by climate change releases them from their icy prisons.
In a new study, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences took ice samples from 21 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau — a high-altitude region in Asia wedged between the Himalayan mountain range to the south and the Taklamakan Desert to the north. The team then sequenced the DNA of the microscopic organisms locked inside the ice, creating a massive database of microbe genomes that they named the Tibetan Glacier Genome and Gene (TG2G) catalog. It is the first time that a microbial community hidden within a glacier has been genetically sequenced.
The team found 968 microbial species frozen within the ice — mostly bacteria but also algae, archaea and fungi, the researchers reported June 27 in the journal Nature Biotechnology(opens in new tab). But perhaps more surprisingly, around 98% of those species were completely new to science. This level of microbial diversity was unexpected because of the challenges associated with living inside glaciers, the researchers said. "Despite extreme environmental conditions, such as low temperatures, high levels of solar radiation, periodic freeze-thaw cycles and nutrient limitation, the surfaces of glaciers support a diverse array of life," the study authors wrote.
The researchers aren't sure exactly how old some of these microbes are; prior studies have shown that it is possible to revive microbes that have been trapped in ice for up to 10,000 years, according to the study.
Microbes
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