from Bruce
Anecdotes
Clothing
• Underneath their colored stockings, professional baseball players wear white sanitary hose. Why? In and before 1905, players wore only the socks bearing the colors of their team. However, in 1905, a player sliding into second base cut Napoleon Lajoie’s foot. The dye from his colored socks seeped into the wound and he came down with a bad case of blood poisoning. He survived and continued to play baseball, but as a precautionary measure players began to wear white sanitary hose.
• While playing at the Jerry Ford Invitational Golf Tournament in Vail, Colorado, baseball great Yogi Berra split his pants. The crowd was amused to see that Mr. Berra was wearing Yogi Bear undershorts.
Coaches
• In figure skating, people fiercely compete to get the best coach. The mother of a young figure skater once telephoned Frank Carroll, who has coached Michelle Kwan, at 2:30 a.m., although he was asleep and had to get up at 4:30 a.m. The skating mother explained, “I thought this was the only time that I could get through to you.” Mr. Carroll responded by living without a telephone for the next three years.
• Michelle Kwan is a United States and World Champion figure skater. From her coach, Frank Carroll, she has learned to keep going after a fall — even during practice. According to Mr. Carroll, a fall can be the most important part of a practice, because it may be the only time you ever practice continuing to a strong finish in your program after recovering from that particular fall.
• A Notre Dame basketball team played badly, trailing 15 points at halftime. Coach George Keogan angrily and methodically ripped each player apart at halftime, going from one to the other in order. Finally, he looked at Marty Peters and asked, “What have you got to say for yourself?” Mr. Peters replied, “Only this, coach — I haven’t gotten into the game yet.”
• Bob Zuppke coached the football Illini for years. In a discussion of football rules, someone described a play and asked whether the officials had made the right call. Before answering, however, Mr. Zuppke asked, “Which team made the foul — Illinois or the other one?”
Comedians
• A baseball player named Thurman Tucker, a White Sox outfielder, looked a lot like the famous comedian Joe E. Brown. One day, Mr. Brown watched a game in which Mr. Tucker went to bat 9 times, but made only one hit. After the game, Mr. Brown went to the White Sox clubhouse, where he told Mr. Tucker, “Look, if you’re going to look like me, hit like me.” Mr. Tucker replied, “I’m afraid that’s just what I’ve been doing.”
• Groucho Marx once captained a charity baseball game between the Comedians and the Actors. He ordered Jack Benny to step up to the plate and hit a home run, but Mr. Benny promptly struck out. This caused Groucho to resign, complaining, “I can’t manage a team that won’t follow instructions.”
• When Jackie Gleason was a struggling nightclub comedian, famous ice skater Sonja Henie walked in during one of his performances. Mr. Gleason handed her an ice cube and said, “Do something.”
Competitiveness
• The longest winning streak ever in college sports — 131 straight games in the 1950s — is held by the Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, Texas. This team, coached by Harley Redin, did a Harlem Globetrotter-type warmup before games, and they were so famous that the school bought them a private plane so they could perform exhibitions across the country. In 1958, the Flying Queens played Nashville Business College in the AAU championship game, and Nashville Business College won, despite a valiant come-from-behind effort by the Flying Queens. With 15 seconds left on the clock, the game definitely lost, and many players on the team crying because their 131-game winning streak was over, Coach Redin called time out. He told his players — tears streaming from their eyes — in the huddle, “I called time out so I could tell you this. I want you to go back out there and lose. And I want you to lose with the same kind of class that you’ve won with for the past five years.” This is the moment the players on the team most remember — and remember as thrilling.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. was first, and correct, with:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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Reader Suggestion
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Bonus Links
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Started having connectivity issues late last night (OK, early this morning), followed by no internet at all.
After a good deal of poking, cursing, tracing wires, and finally reaching a real, live human at my ISP, it was determined the router took a dive.
Had to drive cross-town for a new modem, then spent way too many hours installing it.
So far, so goo
Tucson Fetes
Linda Ronstadt
Retired singer Linda Ronstadt is being feted by her hometown with her very own day.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero earlier this week officially proclaimed Thursday as Linda Ronstadt Day. It was the Grammy award winner’s 75th birthday.
Romero said in a Facebook post that Ronstadt had made “substantial contributions to varied musical genres” while sharing the Southwestern culture of her upbringing with the world.
Ronstadt was born in Tucson on July 15, 1946, to a musically inclined ranching family, and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’60s to start her singing career. She found enormous success performing and recording a variety of styles including folk-rock, country, Latin, light opera and pop.
Ronstadt retired after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Linda Ronstadt
James Gandolfini’s $3M Payoff
‘The Office’
A recent episode of the Talking Sopranos podcast saw co-hosts Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa (aka Christopher Moltisanti and Bobby Baccalieri on The Sopranos) reveal that James Gandolfini was paid $3 million to turn down a role as the new boss in The Office.
The story came up during a conversation with Ricky Gervais, who created the original UK version of The Office.
The story goes like this: Several years after The Sopranos ended, NBC needed an impact replacement for Steve Carell’s departure from The Office.
Schirripa claimed NBC offered Gandolfini $4 million dollars for one season.
But HBO paid him $3 million not to do it.
‘The Office’
Ex-Sex Pistols Sue
Johnny Rotten
Two former members of the Sex Pistols are suing singer Johnny Rotten for the right to use the band’s songs in an upcoming television series about the anarchic punk rock icons.
Guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook want the songs to appear in “Pistol,” a television series based on a memoir by Jones. Rotten, whose real name is John Lydon, has slammed the series as “disrespectful” and is refusing to grant permission for the songs to be included.
Edmund Cullen, a lawyer for Jones and Cook, told a judge at the High Court in London on Thursday that the former bandmates have a “brittle and fractious” relationship.
Cullen argued that under the terms of a 1998 band agreement, decisions regarding licensing requests could be determined on a “majority rules basis.” Lydon, however, contends that licenses to use the music can’t be granted without his consent.
Cullen said both the band’s original bassist, Glen Matlock, and the estate of Matlock’s replacement, Sid Vicious, supported the position of Cook and Jones. Vicious died in 1979 at age 21.
Johnny Rotten
Moving Jobs Out Of Southern California
Di$ney
The Walt Disney Co. plans to move about 2,000 jobs in Southern California to a new regional facility in central Florida, it announced on Thursday.
“I want to share news about an exciting project that has been in various stages of planning since 2019,” wrote Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products Division, in a letter to staff that was obtained by Deadline. “This new project will create a dynamic environment to support our expanding business – a brand-new regional campus which will be built in the vibrant Lake Nona community of Orlando, Florida.”
“In addition to Florida’s business-friendly climate, this new regional campus gives us the opportunity to consolidate our teams and be more collaborative and impactful both from a creative and operational standpoint,” he wrote.
Initially, the new campus will be home to “more than 2,000 Cast, Imagineers and employees,” according to D’Amaro’s letter – “driving further collaboration and creativity and allowing us to better integrate our business and functional teams.”
The new facility in Florida will be located near Orlando International Airport, about 20 miles east of the Walt Disney World resort. While the California-based company is still determining which employees to relocate D’Amaro wrote, “we expect most Southern California-based DPEP (Disney’s Parks, Experiences and Products) professional roles that are not fully dedicated to Disneyland or, in some cases, the international parks businesses will be asked to relocate to this new Florida campus.”
Di$ney
Brings Attention To Hiroshima
Olympics
Many residents of Hiroshima welcome attention from abroad, which IOC President Thomas Bach will bring when he visits on Friday. The western Japanese city has been in the forefront of the world peace movement and a campaigner for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
But Bach will also bring political baggage — as will his vice president John Coates when he visits Nagasaki the same day — that is largely unwelcome in two cities viewed as sacred by many Japanese.
Bach and Coates are using the backdrop of the cities, hit with atomic bombs by the United States in 1945, to promote the first day of the so-called Olympic Truce, a tradition from ancient Greece that was revived by a United Nations resolution in 1993. They will also be signaling the start of the Tokyo Olympics in one week. The Games are going ahead during the pandemic despite persistent opposition in Japan from the general public and the medical community.
“Many Japanese believe that that IOC strictly forced Japan to have the Olympics this year,” Yasushi Asako, a political scientist at Waseda University, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Many Japanese believe that it is their (IOC’s) fault for having such an international event during the pandemic, and there is a high possibility that the pandemic becomes more severe after the Olympics.”
“President Bach using the image of ‘a peaceful world without nuclear weapons’ only to justify holding of the Olympics by force under the pandemic is a blasphemy to atomic bombing survivors,” the group said in a statement. “An act like this does nothing but do harm to the global nuclear weapons ban movement.”
Olympics
Pledge Change
Audubon Society
When Boston socialites Minna Hall and Harriet Hemenway sought to end the slaughter of birds in the name of 19th century high fashion, they picked a logical namesake for their cause: John James Audubon, a naturalist celebrated for his stunning watercolors of American birds.
Now, 125 years after the founding of the Massachusetts Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds, the organization and the nearly 500 Audubon chapters nationwide it helped inspire are reckoning with another side of Audubon’s life: He was also a slaveholder and staunch opponent of abolition.
In the year-plus since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, Audubon chapters have pledged to do more to atone for the past, including diversifying their staff and finding ways to make natural spaces more welcoming to people of color. It’s part of a broader reckoning within the wider environmental movement, which for years has faced criticism for its racist origins and lack of diversity.
The Mass Audubon published an essay last fall acknowledging how Audubon’s family’s wealth came in large part from running a Caribbean sugar plantation. It has also pledged to have people of color make up 25% of its board of directors, and hopes to open more wildlife sanctuaries in communities of color.
The National Audubon Society, which is based in New York and is separate from the Mass Audubon, has similarly delved into its namesake’s legacy in a series of essays.
Audubon Society
Hidden System Of Lakes
Antarctica
Scientists have discovered two new lakes buried deep beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
These hidden gems of frigid water are part of a vast network of ever-changing lakes hidden beneath 1.2 to 2.5 miles (2 to 4 kilometers) of ice on the southernmost continent. These lakes fill and drain over and over again in largely mysterious cycles that may influence how fast the ice sheet moves and how and where meltwater reaches the Southern Ocean. This flow, in turn, can change the currents in the Southern Ocean and potentially affect ocean circulation worldwide.
The lakes sit at the bottom of the ice sheet, where the ice meets the rocky Antarctic continent. Unlike in Greenland, where meltwater flows from the ice surface through crevasses and holes called moulins, Antarctica's lakes form from beneath the ice, probably as a result of pressure, friction and perhaps geothermal heat.
This water system was largely invisible until the advent of NASA's ICESat mission in 2003. The ICESat satellite used lasers to precisely measure the elevation of Antarctic ice. In 2007, Scripps Institution of Oceanography glaciologist Helen Amanda Fricker connected the elevation changes measured by ICESat to the dynamics of the lakes deep beneath the ice surface. As the lakes drain and fill, the ice above rises and falls, offering hints as to what's happening below.
Fricker's breakthrough opened up the possibility of tracking the lake system over time. ICESat, however, collected data for only six years. Its European Space Agency equivalent, CryoSat-2, collected similar data starting in 2010 but over a broader area and with less precision. In September 2018, NASA launched a new satellite, ICESat-2, which collects the highest-precision data yet.
Antarctica
Can Decide Where To Go
Slime Mold
A slippery yellow slime that lives in the damp undergrowth is continuing to test our understanding of what it means to make decisions.
Physarum polycephalum, AKA the many-headed slime mold, uses its body to physically sense its environment before making a decision about where it wants to go, new research has found. It's the latest in an impressive list of ways the single-celled organism has blown our minds lately.
"People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn't have a brain but it can still perform a lot of the behaviors that we associate with thinking," said neuroscientist Nirosha Murugan of Algoma University in Canada.
"Figuring out how proto-intelligent life manages to do this type of computation gives us more insight into the underpinnings of animal cognition and behavior, including our own."
P. polycephalum is a curious little organism. It's not actually a fungus at all; nor is it an animal or a plant. It belongs to the protist kingdom - basically anything that doesn't belong in the other three kingdoms. It lives in dark, humid environments like forest floors, aiding in the decomposition of organic matter and recycling it back into the food web.
Slime Mold
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