from Bruce
Anecdotes
Laughs
• The Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin were, as you would expect, practical jokers. When they were in vaudeville, the Marx Brothers gave Mr. Chaplin a free ticket to their show. He showed up, but all during their act he ignored them and read a newspaper. Mr. Chaplin then gave the Marx Brothers free tickets to see him, but the Marx Brothers gave the tickets to some Hasidic Jews. Mr. Chaplin thought that the Marx Brothers had dressed up as Hasidic Jews with long beards and black hats and black clothing, and he performed magnificently, but the Hasidic Jews weren’t into comedy, and they left in the middle of his performance.
• Fellow comedian Eddie Cantor once wrote Groucho Marx asking which were the two biggest laughs he ever received. Groucho replied: “Briefly (and quickly) the two biggest laughs that I can recall (other than my three marriages) were in a vaudeville act called ‘Home Again.’ One was when Zeppo came out from the wings and announced, ‘Dad, the garbage man is here.’ I replied, ‘Tell him we don’t want any.’ The other was when Chico shook hands with me and said, ‘I would like to say goodbye to your wife,’ and I said, ‘Who wouldn’t?’”
• In 1956, the Olympics came to Australia — so did satirist Stan Freberg. He opened his comedy concerts by parodying the carrying of the Olympic torch, which was then making its way from town to town in Australia. Mr. Freberg, wearing a blue suit, would arrive at the comedy concert venue carrying the Olympic torch and make his way to the stage — where he allowed a confederate to use the torch to light his cigar.
• Ben Blue did a bit in his act as Chandu the Magician that George Burns considered hysterically funny. Mr. Blue put a man into a big basket, raised the basket about 15 feet above the stage, then he shot through the basket. “Blood” began dripping onto the stage, but Mr. Blue ignored the blood. As Mr. Burns wrote, “For the rest of the act, it kept dripping down. It was a riot.”
• At his first rehearsal at Glyndebourne, noted conductor Fritz Busch raised his baton, then he lowered his arm before even a note had been played, and joked to the orchestra, “Already is too loud.”
Letters and E-mails
• In 2007 and in some previous years, Gabe Kaplan, former star of Welcome Back, Kotter, considered himself a D-list celebrity. No problem. No one needs to be an A-list celebrity to lead a life of wit and intelligence. When Mr. Kaplan received an e-mail asking him to fight another D-list celebrity in Celebrity Boxing, he knew that he would reject the invitation, but he wanted to do so in a funny way. Therefore, he e-mailed back a list of silly demands that would have to be met before he would fight. For example, he claimed that he had become a Hasidic Jew; therefore, when he fought, he would have to wear a skullcap and a tzitzit, which Mr. Kaplan explains is “a body prayer shawl worn under a shirt so that only the fringes are visible.” To his surprise, his silly demands were taken seriously. This gave him the idea to see what a D-list celebrity could get away with. He contacted a reputable book publisher, claiming that he had broken Wilt Chamberlain’s record of sleeping with 20,000 women. The book publisher took his claim seriously. He contacted the Postmaster General’s office, saying that he was a good candidate to be the first living person whose image would appear on a U.S. postage stamp. The Postmaster General’s office thought he was serious. He contacted Sioux City, Iowa, to see if they would be willing to throw him a gala birthday parade, complete with floats. The good people of Sioux City, Iowa, were willing. Eventually, he got the idea of putting his e-mails and their responses into a book. Most people were good sports and gave him permission — and the good people of Sioux City, Iowa, let Mr. Kaplan know that they were still willing to throw him a gala birthday parade, complete with floats. Therefore, in 2007 Mr. Kaplan celebrated his birthday with a gala parade in Sioux City, Iowa. (By the way, Mr. Kaplan’s book is titled Kotter’s Back: E-mails From a Faded Celebrity to a Bewildered World.)
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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: “Sail On Sailor” (Beach Boys Cover)
Album: CRUISE CONTROL: A YACHT ROCK COVER COMP
Artist: Seventh Seals
Record Company: Fadeawayradiate Records
Record Company Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Info:
“This Bandcamp page is an extension to the indiemusic blog Fadeawayradiate.com
“We release some stuff amongst friends and above all, some great compilations!”
“This is the 5th comp from Fadeawayradiate Records. The musical genre we have chosen this time is Yacht Rock, a genre we all love. A perfect soundtrack to the coming summer!”
Above: The Original Beach Boys Song
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE)
Genre: Yacht Rock
Links:
CRUISE CONTROL: A YACHT ROCK COVER COMP
Fadeawayradiate Records on Bandcamp
Fadeawayradiate Records Official Website
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Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Recommended
Tom Southern: Russia’s disinformation machinery breaks down in wake of Ukraine invasion (Wired, Ars Technica)
A few critical errors have cost Russia dearly when it comes to disinformation.
WHEN I THINK OF RUSSIA, I THINK OF DEAD UKRAINIAN FAMILIES
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Reader Comment
Current Events
It's always hard to figure out how best to help people when there is a disaster, I made a contribution to Jose Andres's efforts to feed people. Please consider donating to the
World Central Kitchen's efforts in Ukraine and Poland.
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Happy Pi Day.
55 Years
Keith Richards
Keith Richards is officially a non-smoker.
The Rolling Stones guitarist told CBS Sunday Morning that he quit smoking cigarettes two years ago, after 55 years of the habit.
"You know, it's funny, I don't think about it much anymore," Richards said.
While he mostly quit cold turkey, Richards, 78, also used "a few patches for a few weeks." But ultimately, he realized it was time to ditch the habit for good.
Keith Richards
Weekend Box Office
‘The Batman’
In its second weekend of release, Warner Bros.' “The Batman” easily remained the No. 1 movie in North American theaters with $66 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday, while a live BTS concert broadcast was one-day-only blockbuster.
Matt Reeves’ Caped Crusader reboot starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz held well in its second week, dropping a modest 51% — a good rate for a comic book movie — from its $134 million debut and bringing its domestic total to $238.5 million. It’s done nearly identical business overseas, leading to $463.2 million globally thus far.
“Uncharted,” the action-adventure starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, declined only 17% in its fourth week of release. The videogame adaptation, from Sony Pictures, came in second with $9.3 million. It grossed $113.4 million domestically.
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,” $66 million.
2. “Uncharted,” $9.3 million.
3. “BTS Permission to Dance on Stage: Seoul,” $6.8 million.
4. “Dog,” $5.3 million.
5. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” $4.1 million.
6. “Death on the Nile,” $2.5 million.
7. “Radhe Shyam,” $1.8 million.
8. “Sing 2,” $1.6 million.
9. “Jackass Forever,” $1.1 million.
10. “Scream,” $445,000.
‘The Batman’
Thoughts on Slavery
John Cleese
It took about an hour for John Cleese to say something that turned a panel into cringey awkwardness.
The British comedy icon was joined by fellow comics Jim Gaffigan, Dulcé Sloan and Ricky Velez for a 90-minute event titled “John Cleese in Conversation.”
The Friday night session was helping kick off the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, marking the first time in two years the popular conference was held in person.
The quartet of comics were from very different backgrounds, yet each successfully riffed off each other and kept the crowd laughing as they discussed their upbringings, creative process and views on comedy with the panel’s moderator, Portlandia executive producer Dan Pasternack. The mood, overall, was like a lovefest, and the 82-year-old Cleese – who has been getting a reputation in recent years for saying controversial things – was seemingly on his best behavior.
Now before we get to the reason you’re reading, it’s important to point out what happened was under the umbrella of “comedy panel.” Some attending might have very different views of the tone of this moment, which appeared to segue from comedy to cringe to offense. But it began with Sloan, a stand-up comic and Daily Show correspondent who is Black, making a joke about colonization.
John Cleese
At 100
Jack Kerouac
David Amram started collaborating with Jack Kerouac before he even knew his name. The celebrated composer first met the novelist in 1956 at an artist’s party in Manhattan. “This guy came up to me in a red and black chequered shirt, looking like a French-Canadian lumberjack,” remembers Amram, now 91, from his New York home, which is littered with souvenirs of an illustrious career spent making music with everyone from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie to Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. “He said: ‘I’m gonna read, you play.’” Amram took out his French horn and penny whistle and set about accompanying the stranger’s performance. “I just closed my eyes and listened to him,” he recalls. “I had no idea what he was going to do, and it was magical. I’m hesitant to use the phrase ‘ESP’, but not hesitant enough not to use it! That’s the best way to describe what it was like to get the feeling you’d known somebody your whole life, and that they were talking right to you and making sense.”
Afterwards, Amram still didn’t get an introduction. “He ran off to go dance with some fine young woman,” he says with a chuckle. “We were all out there flirting and drinking and having a good time.” It was only when they bumped into each other again at another party a couple of weeks later that Amram learnt Kerouac’s name, and that he was an author whose first major work, the 1950 novel The Town and the City had been published to a chorus of widespread indifference. That all changed in 1957 with the publication of his second book: On The Road.
A poetic and profound account of his years traversing America, often in the company of his irrepressible friend and inspiration Neal Cassady, On The Road made Kerouac a celebrity overnight. Its runaway success helped him to publish another dozen novels before he drank himself to death in 1969, at the age of 47, but he never enjoyed his sudden fame. “Most of the time, he was very quiet and very shy,” says Amram. “That’s one reason he used to drink, so that he could anaesthetise himself enough to be comfortable with people.”
On the centennial anniversary of Kerouac’s birth, Amram remembers his friend best for his “sweetness and purity of intent”. This remained intact even after he’d been declared the voice of his generation. “Someone came up to me at a party [after meeting Jack] and said: ‘If that guy’s so great, why was he talking to me so long?’” laughs Amram. “Jack never saw any differentiation between a ‘nobody’ and a ‘somebody’. He never considered any human being to be a nobody.”
Jack Kerouac
'Lay Down Their Very Lives'
Critical Race Theory
The former President Donald Trump called on his supporters to "lay down their very lives" to fight against Critical Race Theory at a rally in Florence, South Carolina, on Saturday night.
During a speech that lasted a little under an hour, Trump the grifter told a crowd that eliminating Critical Race Theory from schools is a "matter of national survival."
Critical Race Theory is an academic practice that explores how America's history of racism and discrimination continues to impact the country today.
"The fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down, and they must do this, lay down their very lives to defend their country," Trump the bone spur draft-dodger said on Saturday night, appearing to suggest that Americans should die for the cause.
Critical Race Theory
5 Fewer Doritos
Shrinkflation
Perhaps more than any other economic concept, inflation is felt in real-time by everyone. The cost of gas rises, as does the cost of most consumer goods, and you're reminded of that reality every day.
"Shrinkflation," however, offers companies a more insidious way to hide those rising costs from people.
Would you notice if, say, a bag of Doritos had five fewer chips? How about if your roll of Bounty paper towels contained a handful fewer sheets? The price is the same, of course, you just get less.
PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble are betting you won't. Both companies, alongside dozens of others documented by Consumer World, have enacted "shrinkflation" on a variety of major consumer goods: Everything from Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Gatorade to Charmin toilet paper.
Many of these size changes are subtle, like making candy bars sold in multipacks smaller than ones being sold individually, or changing the shape of their products so you can barely notice the difference in weight.
Shrinkflation
New London, Connecticut
Coast Guard Museum
A project to build a Coast Guard museum in New London could begin preliminary construction this summer after getting a boost from the federal government.
An omnibus bill passed by the House last week contains $50 million for the museum, raising the total federal investment to $70 million, according to Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.
“This project will not only create hundreds of jobs and annually pump millions into the local economy, but also inspire the next generation to serve,” Murphy said in a statement. “The Coast Guard is the only long-standing branch of the armed services without a national museum. We owe it to the brave men and women of the Coast Guard — past, present and future — to finally make the museum a reality.”
Wes Pulver, president of the National Coast Guard Museum Association, told the New London city council that $81 million had been raised out of a goal of $150 million, and that the federal dollars would allow demolition work to begin as early as July, WTNH-TV reported.
The 80,000-square-foot, 5-story museum is planned to offer more than 200 galleries and exhibits, state-of-the-art simulator and virtual reality experiences and interactive STEM learning programs, according to the museum association’s website.
Coast Guard Museum
Palm-Sized
Joro Spider
A huge invasive spider that invaded Georgia from East Asia could soon take over most of the U.S. East Coast, a new study has revealed.
New research, published Feb. 17 in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold.
This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders — whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) — could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard.
Since the spider hitchhiked its way to the northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, inside a shipping container in 2014, its numbers and range have expanded steadily across Georgia, culminating in an astonishing population boom last year that saw millions of the arachnids drape porches, power lines, mailboxes and vegetable patches across more than 25 state counties with webs as thick as 10 feet (3 meters) deep, Live Science previously reported.
Common to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, the Joro spider is part of a group of spiders known as "orb weavers" because of their highly symmetrical, circular webs. The spider gets its name from Jorogumo, a Japanese spirit, or Yokai, that is said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to prey upon gullible men.
Joro Spider
14th Century
'Leopard' Coin
This week, a rare gold "leopard" coin dating back to the 14th century sold for £140,000 (around $185,000) at an auction in Mayfair, London.
It was sold on Tuesday to a private UK buyer, according to a press release from auction house Dix Noonan Webb.
The coin was discovered by Andy Carter, 65, a retired research scientist from Norfolk, England, while he was using a metal detector in a field in 2019.
It dated back to January 1344 and was in circulation for just seven months before being withdrawn, the auction house said.
'Leopard' Coin
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