from Bruce
Anecdotes
Fame
• Charlie Chaplin was widely imitated. One day, he was watching one of his imitators on a street in New York when a small boy pushed him. Mr. Chaplin asked him, “What’s the matter?” The small boy said, “Oh, git outa me way. I wanta see Charlie Chaplin. Whada you care about seein’ him? Youse guys always gets in a kid’s way.” On another occasion, Mr. Chaplin had finished shooting a scene in an alley. The people he was working with left, but Mr. Chaplin stayed because he wanted to watch some crap-shooting newsboys. A police officer came by and wanted to run Mr. Chaplin off, but Mr. Chaplin protested, “I’m Charlie Chaplin, and I’ve been working here!” The police officer replied, “You Charlie Chaplin! Huh, I guess I know Charlie Chaplin when I see him. You’re just one of his bum imitators. Get out!”
• As a young comedian, Jim Carrey made out a $10 million check to himself “for acting services rendered,” and carried it around in his wallet as a physical symbol of an important goal. Later, he received $10 million for starring in The Mask 2 — and $20 million for starring in Liar, Liar. Along the way to mega-success, he achieved success as an actor in the TV comedy series In Living Color. Unfortunately, his fame did have a downside when he took his daughter out for trick-or-treating on Halloween. Perhaps exaggerating a little, Mr. Carrey says that people would say, “It’s the dude from In Living Color! Here’s an extra candy! Do something [funny]!”
• Terry Gilliam considers himself fortunate because he is the least recognized of the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He is recognized just enough to keep his ego happy, but he realizes how much of a hassle it would be to be recognized everywhere he went. He says, “Thank God I’m not John. It’s an awful job to walk down the street and be John Cleese because you can’t escape from it!”
• Stan Laurel was funny in his old age. At a stationery store, a man kind of recognized him, saying, “Aren’t you…,” but the man was unable to come up with a name, so Mr. Laurel suggested a name: “Oliver Hardy.” The man replied, “Right. Whatever happened to Laurel?” Mr. Laurel sadly replied, “Oh, he went balmy.”
Fans
• Comedians are often writers; for example, Bill Cosby does much writing — both of comic routines and of books. His old comic routines still hold up. One day, some parents brought their nine-year-old son to see Mr. Cosby. The son was a fan, and he started doing Mr. Cosby’s 1966 routine “The Playground.” In the routine Bill and his friends play safely in a vacant lot despite the presence of broken glass — but they are no longer safe after someone installs monkey bars. The nine-year-old boy recited the routine, using Mr. Cosby’s inflections, and Mr. Cosby says that he started “listening to, and admiring, my writing. The kid’s performing, and I’m saying to myself, ‘This is really wonderful writing.’”
• Comedian Fred Allen was generous with his time. Whenever a fan wrote him, the fan received a personal reply from the great comedian himself. In addition, Mr. Allen did not repeat himself. If 10 requests for autographs came in the mail, Mr. Allen sent back 10 different replies and not one reply copied 10 times. One of his writers, Arnold M. Auerbach, once asked him why he spent so much time answering fan mail. Mr. Allen replied, “Anyone who takes the time to write to me deserves a personal answer.”
• At the premiere of stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman’s movie titled Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, which includes music in addition to comedy, an enthusiastic fan told her that she was “the true heir to Lenny Bruce.” She smiled and replied, “Wow! Thank you! That is the ultimate compliment! I’m actually not that familiar with Lenny Bruce’s work, but from what I understand, he was a really great singer.”
• Jack Riley played the character of the insulting, misanthropic Mr. Elliott Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show. Frequently, fans of the showed asked him if he was anything like the character he portrayed. Because he was a professional comedian, Mr. Riley’s standard response to this question was in the character of Mr. Carlin: “Bite me, you wiener.”
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In The Chaos Household
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Special Salute
Independent Spirit Awards
You can add the Independent Spirit Awards to the list of Vladimir Putin’s enemies.
The awards show wasted little time before weighing in on the war in Ukraine, with hosts Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally addressing the conflict when the show returned from its first commercial break.
“Before we keep going, we’d like to take a minute to extend our best wishes to those affected by the war in Ukraine, and all unjust conflict around the world,” Offerman said, before turning things over to Mullally.
“I think we speak for everyone here when we say we are hoping for a quick and peaceful resolution,” she said. “Specifically, fuck off and go home, Putin.”
“Yes, that is the quick and peaceful resolution we’re talking about,” Offerman said. “That Vladimir Putin fucks off and goes home. And to that end, let’s all join together and send him off with a Spirit Awards salute: to Putin!”
Independent Spirit Awards
Hipgnosis Acquires Catalog
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen is the latest artist to have their song rights scooped up, with Hipgnosis Song Management reaching a deal with the poet-rocker’s estate to acquire his legendary catalog.
The deal — the terms of which were not announced — includes all 278 songs that Cohen wrote, including his oft-covered “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “First We Take Manhattan” and more.
Under the agreement, Hipgnosis obtained the “songwriter’s share” of 127 songs are from Leonard Cohen’s Stranger Music catalogue, covering the period from the inception of his career through to the year 2000; derivative works pushes that to total of 211 songs. As for the tracks Cohen penned from 2001 to his death in 2016, Hipgnosis acquired the ownership of 100% of the copyrights, “publisher’s share” and “songwriter’s share” of royalties in the Old Ideas catalog.
Hipgnosis previously reached agreements with artists like Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie, producer Bob Rock and many more. The company brokered the deal in partnership with Cohen’s family and the late singer’s manager Robert Kory.
Leonard Cohen
Weekend Box Office
‘The Batman’
Batman has his fair share of pressures, from saving Gotham to saving movie theaters. And while they’re both still decidedly works in progress, “The Batman,” starring Robert Pattinson, managed to give a little glimmer of hope to both by grossing $128.5 million in North America, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The latest relaunch of the 80-year-old comic book character is well above Warner Bros.’ conservative estimates going into the weekend, which had the film pegged for a debut in the $90 million range. It’s the best opening of 2022 and the second best of the pandemic, though it’s more than $100 million shy of “Spider-Man: No Way Home’s” still unbelievable $260 million opening weekend in December.
So how does Pattinson’s stack up against his predecessors? It’s the fourth biggest opening for a Batman movie in North America. As far as lifetime profits, only time will tell, but Batman as a $1 billion franchise is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “The Batman,” $128.5 million.
2. “Uncharted,” $11 million.
3. “Dog,” $6 million.
4. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” $4.4 million.
5. “Death on the Nile,” $2.7 million.
6. “Sing 2,” $1.5 million.
7. “Jackass Forever” $1.4 million.
8. “Cyrano,” $682,607.
9. “Scream,” $570,000.
10. “Marry Me,” $530,000.
‘The Batman’
NBC News Plans Special
Barr
NBC News released more excerpts from their interview with former Attorney General William Barr, who told Lester Holt that he thinks Donald Trump the grifter was responsible “in the broad sense of that word” for the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Barr said that “it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that was wrong.”
But he said that he had not seen “anything to say he was legally responsible for it in terms of incitement.”
Barr told Lester Holt that, in a December, 2020 meeting, he said to Trump the loser that his claims of election fraud were “bulls—.”
Barr
Exclusive Gathering
Think Tank
A private, off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders and wealthy donors will convene this week in Sea Island, Georgia, with appearances by a Biden White House official and several critics of the former President Donald Trump.
Trump The loser was not invited to the exclusive event, which will be attended by some of the Republican Party's biggest donors, according to two people familiar with the event who were not authorized to discuss it.
The conservative American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum this year will be held at The Cloister, a high-end hotel complex in Sea Island, and feature invite-only discussions, meals and access to miles of private beach. The schedule for this year's forum was obtained by CBS News.
The makeup of this year's conference reflects AEI's drift in recent years. While the nonpartisan — but historically conservative — group has previously supported aspects of Trump the grifter's agenda, many of its scholars have become critics of the former president, particularly after he refused to concede defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
This year's guest list also underscores how some leaders inside the establishment wing of the Republican Party and their allies on the right are increasingly eager to move on from Trump a known liar and loosen his grip on the conservative movement.
Think Tank
Returning to Earth
Jesus
The day after Russia started dropping missiles on Ukraine, pastor Greg Laurie took to Facebook with a message for his flock. To much of the world, current events may look like the unhinged machinations of a megalomaniacal authoritarian intent on worldwide disruption, but to Christians of a certain ilk, Laurie argued that the war could be viewed as something else entirely: a sign of the second coming of Christ. “Is there any prophetic significance to what is happening in Ukraine right now?” the heading of the post posed. “The answer is…Yes!”
For millennia, end times Christians have tried to shoehorn current events into proof of Jesus’ imminent return, taking cryptic language from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew, and Revelation to come up with various theories as to how the world will end. In most of these theories — embraced by conservative evangelical or fundamentalist branches of the faith — an entity referred to as Gog and Magog descends from the “far north” upon a peaceful, reconstituted Israel, whose people had been “brought out from the nations, and all now dwell securely,” as it is described in Ezekiel. The resulting war that follows allows a Messiah to swoop in and come to Israel’s rescue. It also ushers in the end of the world as we know it and the establishment of a new and better kingdom of God on earth.
Certain members of every generation since antiquity have found ways to convince themselves that they lived in the end times. “One of the beauties of end times theology is that it’s protean,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of American religion at Dartmouth College. “That is, it can be shaped and shifted to comply with particular circumstances, and it allows those who subscribe to it to claim to have a command of history, that they know how it’s all going to come out eventually.”
Pat Roberston — who can always be counted on to connect the dots between current events and crazy — even came out of retirement this week to argue that the world’s most famous tyrant was actually just a hapless pawn in the plans of the Almighty. “I think you can say, ‘Well, Putin’s out of his mind.’ Yes, maybe so. But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God,” Robertson proffered, alluding to Ezekiel directly. “God says, ‘I’m going to put hooks in your jaws and I’m going to draw you into this battle, whether you like it or not.’”
Jesus
Voter Fraud
Mobile Home
Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who parroted his boss’ unfounded claims that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election, may have engaged in questionable voting behavior himself. According to a report from The New Yorker, Meadows filled out a form registering to vote in North Carolina on Sept. 19, 2020, and where the form asked for the address “where you physically live,” he listed a mobile home on a mountain that his wife had briefly rented.
But according to the former owner of the mobile home, which measures 14 by 62 feet, Meadows never visited the property. “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there,” the owner, who declined to be named, said of Meadows. The owner told the magazine that Meadows’s wife, Debbie Meadows, rented the property for two months sometime in the last few years (but could not recall specific dates) and only stayed for two nights. Another time, the owner rented the mobile home to Debbie and the Meadows children visited. At the time Meadows filled out the voter registration form, the magazine said he did not own any property, having recently sold his home in Sapphire, N.C.
Last year the prior owner sold the property, which is now owned by Ken Abele. Abele told The New Yorker that he was surprised Meadows would have stayed at the house considering the condition it was in. “I’ve made a lot of improvements,” Abele said, explaining he had done work on the mobile home since he purchased it. “But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the president would be staying.”
When the magazine told Abele that Meadows listed the address as his residence, Abele responded, “That’s weird he would do that. Really weird.”
Mobile Home
They’re Off
Iditarod
The 50th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race started Sunday with 49 mushers setting their sights on Alaska’s western coast.
The race will take the mushers across Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving terrain, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and the unpredictable Bering Sea ice.
The winner is expected to cross the finish line in the western Alaska coastal community of Nome about nine days after the start.
For the first time ever in 2021, the race did not finish in Nome because of the pandemic. Instead, the race started in Willow, went to the ghost town of Iditarod and then doubled back to Willow.
Iditarod
Feud With Mail Carriers
Wild Turkeys
For months, mail carriers in the Sacramento County enclave of Arden-Arcade have been terrorized by wild turkeys, at times disrupting deliveries.
This week, tensions between the fowl and one U.S. Postal Service worker reached a violent climax when the carrier killed a turkey while on duty, officials said, prompting an investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
"On Monday, one of the mail carriers actually had some kind of a stick or something in his vehicle," said Capt. Patrick Foy, a spokesman for the department's Law Enforcement Division. "And when one of the particularly aggressive male turkeys attacked him, he smacked it and killed it."
Even more odd was the fact that the birds seem to spare the neighborhood's residents and non-delivery personnel from their wrath.
"I walked up to the turkeys myself, and they didn't want anything to do with me," he said. "But when that mail carrier pulled up, they immediately went on the offensive."
Wild Turkeys
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