from Bruce
Anecdotes
Names
• Elliot S! Maggin wrote many stories featuring Superman and Green Arrow. How did he get the exclamation point in his name? The first time it was a typo, but an editor named Julius Schwartz saw and liked the typo, so it stayed. Another name story: Author Jayme Lynn Blaschke is a guy, but lots of people seeing his name in print assume that the name belongs to a woman. Mr. Blaschke once submitted a story to Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but Mr. Van Gelder addressed his rejection letter to Ms. Blaschke. At a convention, Mr. Blaschke walked up to Mr. Van Gelder to introduce himself. Seeing Mr. Blaschke’s name card, Mr. Van Gelder immediately began apologizing even before Mr. Blaschke began to speak. Mr. Blaschke says, “More offense was assumed, obviously, than actually took.”
• At Dartmouth, Theodore Giesel became editor of its campus humor magazine, Jack O’Lantern. Unfortunately, after he hosted a noisy party the night before Easter, he was ordered to quit the position. Nevertheless, he kept editing the magazine as always — and writing and drawing for it. To keep the college dean from knowing that he was still working as editor, he began to use a pseudonym — his middle name, Seuss. Later, he added “Dr.” to his pseudonym and joked that he had saved his father a small fortune by not going to medical school, yet becoming a doctor.
• Young-people’s author Orson Scott Card, writer of Ender’s Game, and his wife name their children after their favorite authors. Michael Geoffrey is named after Geoffrey Chaucer. Emily Janice is named after Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson. Charles Benjamin is named after Charles Dickens. Zina Margaret is named after Margaret Mitchell. And Erin Louisa is named after Louisa May Alcott. By the way, when Orson was a child, he learned to read phonetically, and therefore he pronounced “knew” as “canoe.” That is the day that he learned about silent letters.
• Progressive journalist Molly Ivins’ name was actually Mary. The nickname “Molly” came from her childhood habit of burrowing like a mole among the books in her bedroom. She was a true original, once naming a dog “Sh*t” — I suppose for reasons that would be obvious if I had been acquainted with the dog. She was a master of the comic putdown, once writing about politician Dick Armey, “If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on that man’s head.”
• Late in his life, George Plimpton started to suffer from the effects of a lifetime dedicated to poor diet and a fondness for alcohol — and the production of much fine writing. In 2003, he collapsed while drinking at the Brook Club. Paramedics arrived, recognized him, and one paramedic started slapping his face and saying, “Hey, George! Wake up!” The maitre d’ of the Brook Club did not approve and said to the paramedic, “At the Brook Club, sir, we refer to him as Mr. Plimpton.”
• Ambrose Bierce was a very talented writer of short stories, a cynical man, and a native of Meigs County, Ohio. In his book The Devil’s Dictionary, he gives many cynical, but funny, definitions of common words. One example: he defines zoo as a “place where animals from all over the world come to see men, women, and children behave like fools.” Because of his great cynicism, Mr. Bierce acquired the nickname “Bitter Bierce.”
• When LeRoi Jones first became a successful African-American writer, his works seldom mentioned race. Therefore, when fellow African-American writer Langston Hughes wrote to him in 1959, he teased, “Hail LeRoi, I hear you are colored.” Later, Mr. Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka, and when people read his writing, which now focused on black themes, they had no doubt that he was “colored.”
• Adjusting to another culture can be difficult. Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz was born in Mexico, but when he was six years old, his family moved to the United States for a while. In school at lunchtime, young Octavio needed a spoon, but he didn’t know the English word for spoon, so he used the Spanish word: cuchara. As a result, he acquired a nickname: His classmates called him “Cuchara.”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
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In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Beautiful"
One-Sided Single: “Beautiful”
Artist: AJ Dávila
Artist Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Info:
Martin Douglas: “A Bluffer’s Guide to AJ Dávila” (kexp.org)
“In the 13 years since his band barnstormed the mainland United States with its sloshed and stunning set of delightfully nasty garage-rock, AJ Dávila has proven to be one of music’s most far-reaching pop shapeshifters. Driven by crafting the kinds of songs people want to dance and sing along to, the Puerto Rican-born, Mexico City-based singer/songwriter’s magnanimous presence has burrowed into hours upon hours of music; more music than it would take to absorb in one listen. Thankfully, dear reader, you have me as your humble correspondent on all things garage-rock, ready to offer my Cliffs Notes on the talented, prolific musician who took off from that world to become a pop music jack of all trades.”
Price: $12 (MXN), approximately $0.58 USD, for track
Links:
“Beautiful”
AJ Dávila on Bandcamp
AJDavilaVEVO on YouTube
Other Links:
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David Bruce's Blog #1
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
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Reader Comment
Current Events
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We are all only temporarily able bodied.
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that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still way too hot, but not as hot as yesterday.
Weekend Box Office
‘Death on the Nile’
Hollywood’s Super Bowl weekend largely fizzled with the muted debut of Kenneth Branagh’s long-delayed Agatha Christie whodunit, “Death on the Nile,” a tepid reception for the Jennifer Lopez romantic-comedy “Marry Me” and modest box-office bumps for Oscar nominees.
“Death on the Nile,” Branagh’s follow-up to the 2017 hit “Murder on the Orient Express,” led all films with $12.8 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. Produced under 20th Century Fox before its acquisition by the Walt Disney Co., “Death on the Nile” had been delayed by the pandemic and by scandal that engulfed one of its stars, Armie Hammer.
“Marry Me” opened with $8 million while simultaneously streaming on Peacock. The Universal Pictures release, which was timed to Valentine’s Day on Monday, stars Lopez as a pop star who, after finding out her fiancé has been cheating, marries a stranger (Owen Wilson) at one of her concerts. In recent years, streaming platforms have increasingly been the rom-com’s primary home. Netflix, in particular, has pumped out a constant stream of new entries in the genre. On Friday, Amazon Prime Video debuted its own: “I Want You Back,” with Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.
Another once dependable ticket-seller at the box office — a Liam Neeson thriller — also struggled. Briarcliff Entertainment’s “Blacklight,” a poorly reviewed action film starring the 69-year-old Neeson as a shadowy government agent, opened with $3.6 million.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “Death on the Nile,” $12.8 million.
2. “Jackass Forever,” $8.1 million.
3. “Marry Me,” $8 million.
4. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” $7.2 million.
5. “Blacklight,” $3.6 million.
6. “Sing 2,” $3 million.
7. “Moonfall,” $2.9 million.
8. “Scream,” $2.8 million.
9. “Licorice Pizza,” $922,500.
10. “The King’s Man,” $433,000.
‘Death on the Nile’
Mysteries Of Doodle-Filled Blackboard
Stephen Hawking
A new museum exhibit hopes to uncover the secrets behind the doodles, in-jokes and coded messages on a blackboard that legendary physicist Stephen Hawking kept untouched for more than 35 years.
The blackboard dates from 1980, when Hawking joined fellow physicists at a conference on superspace and supergravity at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., according to The Guardian. While attempting to come up with a cosmological "theory of everything" — a set of equations that would combine the rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics — Hawking's colleagues used the blackboard as a welcome distraction, filling it with a mishmash of half-finished equations, perplexing puns and inscrutable doodles.
Still preserved more than 40 years later, the befuddling blackboard has just gone on public display for the first time ever as the centerpiece of a new exhibition on Hawking's office, which opened Feb. 10 at the Science Museum of London. The museum will welcome physicists and friends of Hawking — who died in 2018 at the age of 76 — from around the world in hopes that they may be able to decipher some of the hand-scrawled doodles.
What, for example, does "stupor symmetry" mean? Who is the shaggy-bearded Martian drawn large at the blackboard's center? Why is there a floppy-nosed squid climbing over a brick wall? What is hiding inside the tin can labeled "Exxon supergravity?" Hopefully, the world's great minds of math and physics can rise to the occasion with answers.
The blackboard joins dozens of other Hawking artifacts on display, including a copy of the physicist's 1966 Ph.D. thesis on the expansion of the universe, his wheelchair and a personalized jacket given to him by the creators of "The Simpsons" to honor his multiple appearances on the show. The exhibit will run until June 12 at the Science Museum in London, before hitting the road with stops at several other museums in the U.K., according to The Guardian.
Stephen Hawking
Arizona Artifacts
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
A Tucson archaeologist has unveiled a discovery in Santa Cruz County that she thinks could rewrite the history of the Coronado Expedition.
Deni Seymour said she has unearthed hundreds of artifacts linked to the 16th century Spanish expedition, including pieces of iron and copper crossbow bolts, distinctive caret-headed nails, a medieval horseshoe and spur, a sword point and bits of chain mail armor.
The “trophy artifact” is a bronze wall gun — more than 3 feet long and weighing roughly 40 pounds — found sitting on the floor of a structure that she said could be proof of the oldest European settlement in the continental United States.
The independent researcher revealed her find on Jan. 29 in a sold-out lecture to more than 100 people at Tubac Presidio State Historic Park.
Seymour is not disclosing the exact location of the archaeological site, but her general description in the Santa Cruz Valley places it at least 40 miles west of Coronado National Memorial, which overlooks the San Pedro River and the U.S.-Mexico border south of Sierra Vista.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
‘Doesn’t Care’
Chevy Chase
Chevy Chase says he’s happy with who he is and doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of him.
In a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Chase addressed the accusations he was a jerk while working on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and the Dan Harmon comedy Community for four seasons. He departed the series due to conflicts with Harmon over the direction of the character.
“I guess you’d have to ask them. I don’t give a crap!” he said with a laugh when asked how he felt when he hears about his former collaborators’ negative experiences working with him.
He added, “I am who I am. And I like where— who I am. I don’t care. And it’s part of me that I don’t care. And I’ve thought about that a lot. And I don’t know what to tell you, man. I just don’t care.”
In one of Chase’s most controversial outbursts on set, he used the N-word during a particularly heated discussion in 2012 with Harmon regarding his character Pierce Hawthorne, an aging tycoon who is described as a bigot.
Chevy Chase
Distinct Style
Ripping
Former Trump administration aides instantly knew when a document had been torn by the former president, according to a report from The Washington Post.
Donald Trump The election losr had such a distinct style of ripping that became familiar to his aides, the Post reported. He would tear each document twice — once down the middle horizontally and once vertically — leaving the paper in four quarters. When the aides saw these documents torn up in this manner, according to the Post, they immediately knew Trump the undisciplined babyman had done it.
The former president would then leave the documents scattered across desks and in trash cans all over the White House, the Post reported. Documents were also strewn across floors, and aides found them in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One, the report said.
Scrutiny into the preservation of documents under the Trump previous administration started partly after New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman revealed in a forthcoming book that the president had clogged a toilet by flushing torn pieces of paper down it.
Recently, the National Archives and Records Administration, a US agency responsible for the preservation and documentation of government and historical records, said Trump the teflon grifter had taken several boxes of official White House records to his Mar-a-Lago resort upon vacating office. Under the Presidential Records Act, he should have turned the records over to the agency upon leaving office.
Ripping
Enforcement Power
Los Angeles
Lawmakers in Los Angeles earlier this week voted to strip a sheriff who refused to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for his staff of his enforcement power.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors decided on Tuesday to relieve Sheriff Alex Villanueva (R-Maga) of the responsibility to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates, The Los Angeles Times reported.
The decision to strip him of the responsibility comes after Villanueva has for months refused to enforce the mandate.
In October, Villanueva said he would not enforce the mandate because he feared losing a chunk of his staff.
As of Tuesday, 83% of all county employees were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, a county spokesperson told the Times.
Los Angeles
Can Blame ‘Clutter’
Older Adults
There’s a paradox in memory science: Empirical evidence and life experience both suggest older adults have more knowledge of the world. However, in laboratory settings, they generally perform worse on memory tests than younger adults. What can explain the disparity?
The answer might be “clutter,” according to a review of memory studies published Friday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.
Compared to young adults, healthy older adults (defined in the paper as 60 to 85 years old) process and store too much information, most likely because of greater difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, the analysis found. This difficulty is described as “reduced cognitive control” and can explain the cluttered nature of older adults’ memory representations.
“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.”
This explanation stems from and is supported by the team’s review of several behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Their paper “makes a compelling case that, as we get older, part of the problem is that we get less selective,” said Charan Ranganath, a professor at the University of California, Davis Center for Neuroscience. Ranganath was not part of the new paper.
Older Adults
Barbershop’s Civil Rights Artifacts
Tuscaloosa
Archivists and volunteers will soon begin combing through decades of artifacts from a Tuscaloosa barbershop central to the city’s civil rights history with the goal of determining which pieces in the vast collection should be included in a future museum.
Rev. Thomas Linton died in 2020 but before his death he collected a gigantic array of historical items such as newspaper clippings or artifacts related to the civil rights fight as well as other materials such as dozens of spittoons, a collection of shaving mugs and three wooden hand-crank telephones, the Tuscaloosa News reported.
Next week, archivists and volunteers from the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation will start combing through the collection. The team will make an inventory and catalogue of the treasure trove.
Tim Lewis is the foundation’s co-president. He is coordinating the preservation effort and has brought in people who have experience in preservation work. Tom Wilson, who’s retired from the University of Alabama libraries and Bill Bomar, executive director of the University of Alabama museums are both part of the effort as well as Ph.D. students and other volunteers.
During the struggle for civil rights, the barbershop was often a gathering place for people involved in the struggle. Autherine Lucy, who became the first Black student at the University of Alabama, went to the shop to clean up after racists threw food and garbage on her. On June 9, 1964 activists protesting a segregated courthouse ducked into the shop as opponents attacked them outside. Linton was in contact with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to arrange hospital care and bail money for those beaten and arrested.
Tuscaloosa
'Naughty' Students
Ancient Egypt
Archeologists discovered more than 18,000 shards of pottery used as writing materials in ancient Egypt, revealing details about life approximately 2,000 years ago.
The pottery fragments, known as "ostraca," were used to inscribe shopping lists, receipts, school texts, and more, researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany said.
Hundreds of fragments were from an ancient school and had a single symbol repeated on the front and back.
Researchers believe this was an early example of "naughty" students being forced to write lines as punishment.
The pottery fragments were discovered during excavations at a site of the ancient settlement of Athribis, around 200 kilometers north of Luxor.
Ancient Egypt
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