from Bruce
Anecdotes
Couples
• When she was 15 years old, world-class figure skater Janet Lynn asked a boy to a Sadie Hawkins dance. Unfortunately, there was a drawback. After they had arrived at the dance, Janet had to tell her date that they could stay only 15 minutes because she had to get up early to practice.
• John Custis and Fidelia Custis were not happy after they were married. Once, they attempted a reconciliation and even drew up a contract between each other. In the contract, they agreed, among other things, not to hide the other’s silver.
• Dating a cowgirl can be a little different from dating other women. Jeana Day Felts, the World Champion Barrel Racer in 1974, was just setting out on a date when he reminded her, “Jeana, take off your spurs.”
Daughters
• Humorist H. Allen Smith once came up with a wonderful idea to keep his teenage daughter from spending so many hours on the telephone. He decided to have her telephone tapped so that by flipping a switch he could have her calls broadcast through the house. That way, he could give her a reasonable amount of time to talk, then flip the switch, and as soon as she heard her voice booming through the loudspeakers, of course she would immediately hang up the telephone. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith was unable to put his idea in action, as this kind of wiretapping—even if it’s your own telephone—was illegal. Later, the manager of the telephone company told Mr. Smith that he was glad that wiretapping was illegal. Other fathers had heard of Mr. Smith’s idea and the telephone company was being swamped with requests to put Mr. Smith’s idea in action.
• Sometimes, fathers and stepfathers become feminists because their daughters or stepdaughters want to do something other people don’t want them to do. As a teenager, Sandy Smith wanted to ride bulls in the rodeo. Many cowboys would say things such as, “Girls can’t ride bucking stock.” However, her stepfather told her, “Sandy, at your age a girl’s coordination is as good as a guy’s. Don’t take any lip from them—they’re just afraid you’re going to show them up.” Young Sandy did as she wished and rode bucking bulls in rodeos.
• Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, started to smoke while her father was President. He would not allow her to smoke in the White House, so she used to climb up to the roof and smoke there. About his daughter, President Roosevelt said, “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”
• Rod Chisholm coached football, so of course his young daughters, ages 10 and four, wanted to be cheerleaders. They practiced their cheers in the basement, then came upstairs to perform before their parents. That evening, the youngest daughter said her bedtime prayer in a special way: “God bless Ma, God bless Pa, God bless everybody, rah rah rah!”
• Judge Roy Bean had two daughters, and sometimes when he wanted them, they were gone. Therefore, he used to take a shotgun and go looking for his daughters, telling the people he met, “I ought to kill ’em.” However, although the judge was frequently loaded, the shotgun never was.
• Lady Mills (Mary Hayley Bell) once gave a party at the conclusion of which her five-year-old daughter made a surprise entrance, As the guests were leaving, her perfectly healthy daughter stood at the top of a stairway and announced in a calm voice, “Mummy, my heart has stopped.”
Death
• A “cold call” is a telephone call that a broker makes to drum up business with someone he doesn’t know. During the Roaring Twenties, a broker called a prospective customer only to be told that the person he was calling had died—so the broker asked to speak to the next of kin!
• Harry Lehr, America’s Court Jester, got married, but he later grew to hate his wife. When he died, his will stated that he had left her “my houses, lands, silver plate, tapestries, pictures, carriages, yachts and motor cars.” However, Mr. Lehr didn’t own any of that stuff.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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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
Track: “Numeros Rogos” [Red Numbers]
Album: TRIPLE AGENT RECORDS Vol. l
Artist: Viernes De Hongos [Mushroom Friday]
Artist Location: Mexico, Missouri
Record Company: Triple Agent Records
Record Company: Mexico City, Mexico
Info:
“Intro Surf Rock Band and stuff.” — Viernes De Hongaos
“Triple Agent Records: SURF / GARAGE Indie Record Label from Mexico City.”
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for 22-track album by various artists.
The track “Numeros Rogos” is also on Viernes De Hongaos’ album THE RETURN OF THE CHAMPIÑONS. Price: $1 (USD) for track; $5 (UDS) for six-track EP
Genre: Surf. Garage.
Links:
TRIPLE AGENT RECORDS Vol. l
THE RETURN OF THE CHAMPIÑONS
Viernes De Hongos on Bandcamp
Viernes de Hongos on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
davidbrucebooks: EDUCATE YOURSELF - Free PDFs
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
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
Only 2 ice cream trucks this afternoon.
Shuts Down Protesters
Bernadette Peters
Bernadette Peters takes her love for animals very seriously. The three-time Tony-winning Broadway star — who is known for leading productions of “Sunday in the Park with George,” "Song and Dance” and "Annie Get Your Gun" — was in New York City’s Shubert Alley on Saturday, July 10 for her 24th annual Broadway Barks pet adoption event.
Peters, who helped found the charity behind the initiative in 1998 with Mary Tyler Moore, reacted to protesters who crashed her event.
In a video posted on Twitter, the 74-year-old actor called out the protesters for interrupting her while she was giving a speech on stage.
“Excuse me! You are stopping all the animals here from having a chance to be adopted, “ she told them as the crowd cheered.
The social media user who shared the clip wrote in the caption, “How do we get Bernadette a Tony for fighting protesters at Broadway Barks?”
Bernadette Peters
First Concert In 11 Years
Rage Against The Machine
This weekend, at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley music venue, Rage Against The Machine played its first live show together in 11 years—a reunion that was announced back in 2019 (check out the prescient headline on that story) and was intended to coincide with the presidential election before getting delayed because of COVID. And, as you might expect for Rage Against The Machine, there was some raging to be had. (Uh oh, don’t let some incredibly stupid people find out!)
As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the show had barely any actual talking or banter from onstage, but a screen behind the band regularly showed relevant imagery like “a border patrol agent posing menacingly with a barking German Shepherd,” “an El Paso police van burning in slow-motion,” and “a boy with a blindfold busting open a piñata that looked like an ICE agent.” The most direct message, though (yes, more direct than a kid hitting a piñata of an ICE agent), was a statement projected onto the screen about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade:
Forced birth in a country where Black birth-givers experience maternal mortality two to three times higher than that of white birth-givers. Forced birth in a country where gun violence is the number one cause of death among children and teenagers. ABORT THE SUPREME COURT.
The Journal Sentinel also notes that Rage is donating $475,000 raised from ticket sales for this show and two more at the United Center near Chicago to “reproductive rights organizations in Wisconsin and Illinois.”
Rage Against The Machine
‘Intelligent and Precise’ Interview
Pete Buttigieg
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is being lauded for speaking “intelligently and precisely” during an appearance on Fox News Sunday with Mike Emanuel, where he defended his husband Chasten’s pointed tweet about people protesting justice Brett Kavanaugh at a Washington D.C. restaurant.
In a clip from the interview, Emanuel asked the politician if the tweet — which read, “Sounds like [Kavanaugh] just wanted some privacy to make his own dining decisions” in reference to Kavanaugh’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade — was “appropriate.”
Buttigieg began his answer by establishing that public officials should always be free of “violence, harassment and intimidation” in public locations, while adding that they will “never be free of criticism or peaceful protest” from individuals exercising their rights to freedom of speech.
He continued, “Remember, the justice [Kavanaugh] never even came in contact with these protesters. They reportedly didn’t see or hear them, and these protesters are upset because a right — an important right, that the majority of Americans support — was taken away. Not only the right to choose, by the way, but this justice was part of the process of stripping away the right to privacy.”
“As long as I’ve been alive, the seventh case law of the Constitution protected a right to privacy, and that has now been thrown out the window by the justices, including justice Kavanaugh, who — as I recall — swore up and down, in front of God and everyone, including the United States Congress, that they were going to leave settled case law alone,” Buttigieg added.
Pete Buttigieg
Weekend Box Office
‘Thor: Love and Thunder’
“Thor: Love and Thunder” earned $143 million in its opening weekend in North America, according to studio estimates Sunday. It’s a franchise best for the God of Thunder and another success story of the summer 2022 box office season.
The second Thor movie directed by Taika Waititi opened on 4,375 screens this weekend, starting with Thursday previews. It easily topped the box office, bumping “Minions: The Rise of Gru” into second place. Including international showings, where “Love and Thunder” opened in 47 territories starting in the middle of last week, its global total is already at $302 million.
The Minions carved out a second-place spot with $45.6 million in weekend two, bringing its domestic total to $210.1 million and its worldwide grosses to $399.9 million.
The summer’s workhorse “Top Gun: Maverick” placed third in its seventh weekend in theaters with $15.5 million. With its domestic total currently at $597.4 million, the Tom Cruise film is poised to cross $600 million by Monday — one of only 12 films ever to do so.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “Thor: Love and Thunder,” $143 million.
2. “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” $45.6 million.
3. “Top Gun: Maverick,” $15.5 million.
4. “Elvis,” $11 million.
5. “Jurassic World: Dominion,” $8.4 million.
6. “The Black Phone,” $7.7 million.
7. “Lightyear,” $2.9 million.
8. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” $340,000.
9. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” $262,000.
10. “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” $245,416.
‘Thor: Love and Thunder’
The Only Demographic
America
The only demographic in America that reliably opposes abortion access is men over the age of 50, according to an analysis of data provided to Insider from Gallup's annual survey on abortion.
The Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision that has brought abortion to the forefront of the national conversation.
While pluralities of both men and women in the aggregate expressed support for abortion, men were almost evenly split down the line. Forty-eight percent of men surveyed said they identify as "pro-choice," while 47% said they identify as "pro-life."
During the past 20 years, men over the age of 50 are the only group with a relatively steady increase in "pro-life" identification (up 11 percentage points) and a decline in "pro-choice" identification (down 6 percentage points) with numbers declining below 50%.
When it comes to legal abortion under any circumstance, older men are the least supportive.
America
Massive Leak
Uber
Thousands of leaked files have exposed how Uber courted top politicians, and how far it went to avoid justice.
They detail the extensive help Uber got from leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and ex-EU commissioner Neelie Kroes.
They also show how the taxi firm's former boss personally ordered the use of a "kill switch" to prevent raiding police from accessing computers.
The Uber Files are a trove of more than 124,000 records, including 83,000 emails and 1,000 other files involving conversations, spanning 2013 to 2017.
They were leaked to the Guardian, and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a number of media organisations including BBC Panorama. They reveal, for the first time, how a $90m-a-year lobbying and public relations effort recruited friendly politicians to help in its campaign to disrupt Europe's taxi industry.
Uber
Possible Moonies Link
Shinzo Abe
The man arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday might have been motivated by anger towards the controversial religious group known as the Moonies, reports say.
Suspect Yamagami Tetsuya, 41, told investigators he believed the Japanese leader was linked to a religious group that he blamed for his mother's financial problems, according to Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Shimbun.
On Sunday, a Tokyo-based representative of the Unification Church confirmed that the suspect's mother is a member, The Washington Post reported.
Yamagami told investigators that his mother became bankrupt after donating money to a religious group and that his family disintegrated because of his mother's obsession with the group, Mainichi Shimbun reported.
Abe had appeared at Unification Church-related events as a paid speaker, most recently by video link in September 2021, per The Post.
Shinzo Abe
Observe Electrons Flow
Physicists
For the first time, physicists have witnessed something incredibly exciting: electrons forming whirlpools just like a fluid.
This behavior is one that scientists have long predicted, but never observed before. And it could be the key to developing more efficient and faster next-generation electronics.
"Electron vortices are expected in theory, but there's been no direct proof, and seeing is believing," says one of the researchers behind the new study, physicist Leonid Levitov from MIT.
"Now we've seen it, and it's a clear signature of being in this new regime, where electrons behave as a fluid, not as individual particles."
While electrons flowing in a vortex may not sound that groundbreaking, this a big deal because flowing like a fluid results in more energy being delivered to the end point, instead of being lost en route while electrons are jostled around by things such as impurities in the material or vibrations in atoms.
Physicists
Archeologists On A Mission
Mammoth Cave
Archeologists on a mission to see where a mysterious passageway under the world's longest known cave system goes are uncovering 19th and 20th-century artifacts in the historical dig.
This collapsed sinkhole, the largest known natural entrance to the Mammoth Cave system, is believed by researchers to be where the cave's extensive labyrinth of naturally formed passages first began at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.
Archeologists from the National Park Service and the University of Idaho found artifacts — including coke bottles, ticket stubs, ceramic pieces and other items from over 200 years ago, according to Bowling Green Daily news.
Historians believe a 50 feet vertical pit directly below the waterfall at Mammoth Cave’s entrance was filled around the 1810s during the saltpetre mining operation, according to a statement on the park's Facebook page. The assumption is based on a historical map from 1835 identifying a passage as "filled."
Mammoth Cave
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