from Bruce
Anecdotes
Language
• Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx were in a Paris hotel where Harpo upset the management with his shenanigans. Mr. Woollcott tried explaining Harpo to the management, but gave it up, turned to Harpo, and said, “How can I explain you? There’s no French word for ‘boob.’”
• Ring Lardner once read through a newspaper column about the 10 most beautiful words in the English language — words such as “moonlight,” “melody,” and “tranquil.” Setting the newspaper down, he mused, “What’s wrong with ‘gangrene’?”
• French grammarian Dominique Bonhours cared about language even on his deathbed. As he lay dying, he said, “I am about to — or I am going to — die; either expression is used.”
Letters
• In 1975, publishing company Alfred A. Knopf rejected A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, although it had previously said that it would publish the book. University of Chicago Press published the book, which met with considerable critical praise and popular success. Much later, an Alfred A Knopf editor wrote Mr. Maclean to express interest in seeing the manuscript of his next book. However, Mr. Maclean was still sore — very sore — over being rejected by Alfred A Knopf in the past, and he still dreamed of telling off the publishing company, so for his reply letter he wrote a masterpiece of invective that ended with “if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books.” Mr. Maclean called his letter “one of the best things I ever wrote […] I really told those bastards off. What a pleasure! What a pleasure! Right into my hands! Probably the only dream I ever had in life that came completely true.”
• When poet Nikki Giovanni was a very young girl, she attended an all-black Episcopal school called St. Simon’s in Cincinnati. After the mother of a teacher died, the school principal asked Nikki’s class to write letters of condolence to the teacher. Young Nikki wrote, “I’m sorry your mother died. But it’s just one of those things.” This letter was never mailed — Nikki’s teacher told her, “We can’t say that.” By the way, when Ms. Giovanni was young, much segregation existed in the United States. She eagerly awaited the coming of the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to Knoxville, Tennessee, but she was disappointed when it arrived first at the whites-only movie theater. She and other children with her skin color had to wait for it to come to the blacks-only theater before they could see it.
• A person who posts online as Revstephmc tells about not living close to her only niece, Brooke, but sending her a letter each week, beginning when Brooke was two. The letters are known as “Thursday letters” because that is the day she writes them. When Brooke was two years old, she talked with Revstephmc’s mother: “Auntie Steph writes me a letter every week.” Revstephmc’s mother asked, “That’s a lot of letters. What does she write about?” Brooke replied, “She tells me that she loves me! Sometimes she says it long and sometimes she says it short!” Revstephmc says, “She was absolutely right!”
• Moss Hart apparently was curious about other people’s mail and was known to read his friends’ letters if they were lying around or were in unsealed envelopes. To cure his friend of this bad habit, Alexander Woollcott once put this letter in an unsealed envelope and left it where he knew Mr. Hart would find it: “I’ll ask you up here just as soon as I can get rid of this nauseating Moss Hart, who hangs on like a leech, although he knows how I detest him.”
• Corey Ford once wrote a letter to Frank Sullivan in which he described being in a plane over the Atlantic when the engine caught on fire. Mr. Sullivan was unsympathetic: “What better place for an engine to catch fire? You have the whole d*mn Atlantic to put it out with!”
Media
• When geneticist Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, she was surrounded by reporters who wanted to interview her. At a press conference, a reporter asked her, “What do you think of big to-dos like this, with all the attention that’s being heaped upon you?” The 81-year-old geneticist replied, “You put up with it.”
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy
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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: "Space Snowplow"
EP: IN SEARCH OF COSMIC OCEANS
Artist: Girl Over Planet
Artist Location: Yekaterinburg, Russia
Info:
“Girl Over Planet is a foursome from Russia with great original surf tunes. They have a highly honed sound that sometimes wanders into the vibe of Los Straitjackets and Laika & Cosmonauts. Intelligent guitars and spacey keys create a more modern sound of surf music. The new album INTERGALACTIC COWBOYS & SOLAR WIND SURFERS was recently released on Moroz Records/Warner music, Russia.”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $7 (USD) for six-track EP
Genre: Surf.
Links:
IN SEARCH OF COSMIC OCEANS
Girl Over Planet on Bandcamp
Girl Over Planet on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
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David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
South Dakota
Wattsa matta w/ South Dakota?
New Venture
Michael Egan
Part 7
Bruce’s Stories
Robert Roe served in the tank corps in Africa during World War II. One day, while driving a tank he ran out of gas in the desert; an Arab saw him and tried to speak to him, but neither spoke the other’s language. The Arab shrugged, went to a nearby clump of trees where he had a cache of gasoline, then filled Mr. Roe’s tank with gas. Mr. Roe not only reads Old English, but he also reads Marcel Proust in French. As an undergraduate at a time when professors were more autocratic than they are today, he took a French class but had a hard time in it. He needed the professor’s permission to drop the class, but when he asked the professor for permission, the professor glowered at him. This so unnerved Mr. Roe that he left the professor’s office and learned French.
John Jones specialized in Milton and Swift as an English professor. One day, a freshman student came to Professor Jones’ office and asked him why he should take his course. Professor Jones pointed to one bookshelf, then another. “Milton! Swift! What more do you want?”
When English professor Barry Roth first came to OU, he was asked to teach a course on mysteries. But instead of teaching mysteries by such people as Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, he taught such “mysteries” as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.
Classics professor Steve Hays says that he doesn’t want his students to graduate only to write poetry to themselves in coffeehouses; humanity can be well served by engineers, journalists, nurses, physicians, dentists, and lawyers. Dr. Hays points out that building a better fuel injector is a wonderful way to serve humanity. When he was taking university classes, he would go through the Student Catalogue and circle the names of professors who had graduated from such schools as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and then try to take classes from those professors.
OU physiologist Fredrick Hagerman, who worked at NASA, vouches for the authenticity of this anecdote about the first man to walk on the moon: Ohio-born astronaut Neil Armstrong. The first words he spoke on the moon are famous — “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind” — but he said other things on the moon, including, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” At first, people assumed that Mr. Gorsky must be a Russian cosmonaut, but no Russian cosmonaut had that name. For a long time, Mr. Armstrong declined to reveal who Mr. Gorsky was, but after years had passed, he said that the Gorskys had died and so it was OK to reveal the story. It turned out that the Gorskys were next-door neighbors to the Armstrongs when Neil was growing up. One day, during a game, a ball was hit into the Gorskys’ yard, and young Neil went to get it. The ball had landed near an open window, and Neil heard the Gorskys arguing. In particular, he heard Mrs. Gorsky yelling, “Sex? You want sex? I’ll tell you when you’ll get sex! You’ll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!”
In the 1970s, OU President Claude Sowle decided to hold public meetings at which college deans would argue for money for their departments. Of course, these were spectacular events at which college deans wore caps and gowns and argued passionately for money. At one such public meeting, Dr. Henry Lin, Dean of Fine Arts, began his remarks by saying, “Ni hao, Dr. Sowle.” Of course, he was speaking flawless Mandarin Chinese, and he continued to speak flawless Mandarin Chinese — which Dr. Sowle did NOT understand — for the rest of his remarks, occasionally using a Chinese abacus to emphasize a financial point. At the end of Dr. Lin’s remarks, President Sowle told him, “Henry, you know I don’t understand Chinese, but I’ve never understood you more clearly than right now — you need big bucks!” (By the way, Dr. Lin is the father of Maya Lin, the genius who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.)
Artists frequently work with nude models. OU art professor John “Jack” Baldwin and his wife, Bunny, once took a vacation in Mexico, where they went to a clothing-optional beach. Bunny pointed out a particularly beautiful naked woman to Jack, who told her, “Bunny, I am here on vacation. I am not here to work.”
An OU art professor once wrote a letter in which she used as many words beginning with the letter F as possible. She called it her F-word letter.
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy
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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
Santa Ana winds and only 5% humidity, 2 miles from the coast.
Expanded Awards
Grammys
An expansion of the Grammy Awards nominations aimed at improving inclusion benefited established artists such as Taylor Swift and Kanye West, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
A decision to grow the award ceremony's "Big Four" categories from eight to 10 nominees was made Monday, a day before the nods were announced, and led to nominations for artists including ABBA and Lil Nas X, according to the report. The new additions were revealed by comparing an early version of the final nominations list that had circulated several days before the official announcement made on Tuesday morning, a copy of which the New York Times said it obtained.
This year's nominees included the largest age spread in Grammys history, from Tony Bennett, 95, to Olivia Rodrigo, 18, in an example of the academy’s attempt to laud new stars as well as established talent.
The latest revelations could generate more backlash for the music industry’s most prominent trade group a year after it was fiercely criticized for snubbing the Weeknd — in a process that raised suspicions about backroom vote-rigging.
According to the New York Times, the two entries added to the ballot for album of the year were Swift’s “Evermore” and West’s “Donda.” They joined albums by Bennett and Lady Gaga, Rodrigo, Bieber, Doja Cat, H.E.R., Billie Eilish, Batiste and Lil Nas X.
Grammys
Evacuated To Italy
“Afghan Girl”
National Geographic magazine’s famed green-eyed “Afghan Girl” has arrived in Italy as part of the West’s evacuation of Afghans following the Taliban takeover of the country, the Italian government said Thursday.
The office of Premier Mario Draghi said Italy organized the evacuation of Sharbat Gulla after she asked to be helped to leave the country. The Italian government will now help to get her integrated into life in Italy, the statement said.
Gulla gained international fame in 1984 as an Afghan refugee girl, after war photographer Steve McCurry’s photograph of her, with piercing green eyes, was published on the cover of National Geographic. McCurry found her again in 2002.
In 2014, she surfaced in Pakistan but went into hiding when authorities accused her of buying a fake Pakistani identity card and ordered her deported. She was flown to Kabul where the president hosted a reception for her at the presidential palace and handed her keys to a new apartment.
Italy organized her travel to Italy “as part of the wider evacuation program in place for Afghan citizens and the government’s plan for their reception and integration,” the statement said.
“Afghan Girl”
Republican In Spirit
British Politician
A British politician has claimed that casting women in film and TV roles that have traditionally been occupied by men is leaving boys with criminals for role models.
Speaking during a Westminster debate marking International Men’s Day, Conservative Party MP Nick Fletcher linked “female replacements” for roles such as Doctor Who, or the rumoured James Bond casting post-Daniel Craig, has left young men looking up to characters such as Peaky Blinders protagonist Tommy Shelby.
“Is there any wonder we are seeing so many young men committing crime?”, he said in comments that appeared to baffle others involved in the debate.
“There seems to be a call from a tiny, but very vocal, minority that every male character or good role model must have a female replacement,” Fletcher continued. “In recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, The Equaliser, all replaced by women.”
British Politician
Robbery Attempt
Oakland
A security guard for a television news crew was shot and wounded during an attempted robbery Wednesday near a store that was hit by a smash-and-grab crew of thieves days earlier, police said.
The guard was with a KRON-TV reporter near downtown shortly before 12:30 p.m. when he was shot in the abdomen, police said.
The guard was taken to a hospital in stable condition.
The reporter wasn’t hurt but was “understandably shaken,” Jim Rose, KRON-TV general manager, said in a statement.
“The safety of our personnel is our top priority which is why we assign security to reporters when working in the field,” Rose said.
Oakland
Saturn-Like Rings
Earth
The growing amount of space junk orbiting Earth could eventually give the planet its own Saturn-like rings, according to Jake Abbott, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Utah, who is developing a solution with a team whose research was published last month in the science journal Nature.
"Earth is on course to have its own rings," Abbott told The Salt Lake Tribune this month. "They'll just be made of junk."
As of May, NASA reported that there are approximately 100 million pieces of debris larger than a millimeter (about .04 inches) orbiting the earth, and about 23,000 of those pieces are larger than a softball.
The Department of Defense's global Space Surveillance Network sensors track more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, which have been known to pose significant problems for space crews and earthbound folk alike.
Since both spacecrafts and debris travel at extremely high speeds, an impact with even the smallest piece of debris could be catastrophic. And according to the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, a total of between 200 and 400 pieces of orbital debris fall to Earth each year, but most of it burns up and disintegrates upon reentering the atmosphere.
Earth
Road Connecting Luxor & Karnak
Egypt
A restored road connecting two ancient Egyptian temple complexes in Karnak and Luxor was unveiled on Thursday in a lavish ceremony aimed at raising the profile of one of Egypt's top tourist spots.
The procession to reopen the 2.7 km (1.7 mile) road included a reenactment of the ancient Opet festival, where statues of Theban deities were paraded annually during the New Kingdom era in celebration of fertility and the flooding of the Nile.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi marched along the road at the start of the ceremony. Pharaonic chariots and more than 400 young performers dressed in pharaonic costumes paraded along the avenue.
The 3,400-year-old road linking the ancient centres of Karnak and Luxor, also known as Road of the Rams or the Avenue of the Sphinxes, is lined with hundreds of ram- and human-headed sphinxes, though over the years many have been eroded or destroyed.
The road has undergone several restoration efforts since being discovered in 1949, and the latest began in 2017.
Egypt
Stolen Dog Collar
Warren G Harding
A radio station serving U.S. President Warren G. Harding’s Ohio hometown says a reward offered by one of its listeners is providing new hope of finding a long lost dog collar stolen from his historic home.
Scott Spears, host of a morning radio show on WWGH-FM in Marion, near the 29th president’s birthplace, said the donor of the $1,000 reward asked to remain anonymous. Spears told listeners of the offer on “Now With Scott Spears” last week.
He said the station has deposited the money in a local bank and will act as an intermediary on any tips offered to solve the mystery.
The antique collar belonged to Harding’s Airedale terrier. It was the only thing stolen from his home on a Tuesday in 2012. A groundskeeper found a ladder propped against a second-story window. That prompted speculation that the thief had visited the home before and knew where to look for the collar.
Made in 1923, the collar has the dog’s name, “Laddie Boy,” engraved on it in raised letters surrounded by hearts.
Warren G Harding
Scenes From The Iliad
Roman Mosaic
Archaeologists have hailed the discovery of a late Roman mosaic beneath a field in Rutland as the “most exciting” find of its type in the UK for a century.
The artwork is the first in Britain to represent scenes from the Iliad, including the battle between the Greek hero Achilles and the Trojan prince Hector, which takes place towards the end of the epic poem.
Given how unusual the mosaic is, the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) has - on the advice of Historic England - designated the artwork and the surrounding villa complex as an archaeological site of national significance.
The Rutland mosaic, which measures 11 metres by almost 7 metres, was initially found by Jim Irvine, the son of the landowner Brian Naylor.
Experts have dated the artwork to some time in the 3rd or 4th century AD, and believe that it was later reused and repurposed based on evidence of fire damage and cracks.
Roman Mosaic
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