from Bruce
Anecdotes
Children
• Kian and Remee are fraternal twins, born in April 2005 a minute apart, although one has black hair and black skin and the other has blonde hair and light skin. At age seven in 2012, they live in Dudley, West Midlands, England. Both twins are biracial, and their parents, Kylee Hodgson and Remi Horder, both have a white mother and a black father. Kylee said, “They are such a perfect example of how it should be. They are not bothered about their skin colour. It’s not the big issue everyone else seems to see it as. It isn’t important to them at all — it’s about what they’re like underneath.” When Kylee saw them for the first time, she “noticed that both of them had beautiful blue eyes. But while Remee’s hair was blonde, Kian’s was black and she had darker skin. To me, they were my kids and they were just normal. I thought they would start to look the same as time went on.” As time went, however, they looked more different; for example, Kian’s eyes grew darker. Kylee said, “People would ask me why I dressed the children the same. I’d just say, ‘Because they’re twins,’ and leave people to work it out. It kind of irritated me at first, but everyone in my area got to know they were twins and accepted it. It was only strangers or outsiders who didn’t know.” The twins said the same first word: “Juice.” However, they are different. According to Kylee, Kian “is a bit bossier, a bit louder. Remee is a bit more laid back. She’ll think a bit longer before she does something.” Kylee added, “They get on so well. They’re really close. They’re best friends — they absolutely love each other. They play together all the time, go swimming together, read their books together, help each other out. If one can’t do their shoes, the other will help. Sometimes they do the same things at the same time. Once, they even sneezed together. That really made me laugh. As they’ve got older, they’ve taught each other everything. They’ve helped each other to grow. And they don’t notice the colour thing, not at all. They’ve grown up with light-skinned people around them, and they’ve grown up with black people. But they’re just themselves. They don’t see what everyone else sees.”
• The winter of 1880-1881 was a hard one in De Smet, South Dakota. The snow blizzards covered up the railroad tracks and the train couldn’t get through to carry food and fuel to the De Smet residents. Among the families living there was that of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie. In her book The Long Winter, she later described her family running out of coal, so she and her father used to twist straw into sticks for fuel. The family also began to run out of food. Fortunately, two young men, Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland, learned that a certain man had grain stored away. The two young men were able to get grain to distribute to the De Smet families to keep them from starving. Later, young Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder, and much later, when they were elderly, they returned to De Smet for Old Settlers Day and wore badges that said “Hard Winter” to show that they were among the pioneers who had survived the long, hard winter of 1880-1881. By the way, when she was little, Laura and her sisters got measles. Neighboring mothers sent their children to play with the ill little girls so their children would also catch measles and “get it over with.”
• When E.B. White was working on his first book for children, Stuart Little, he set a deadline for releasing the book in the fall of 1939, but he made sure the publisher knew that this was only a tentative deadline, saying, “Everything depends on whether the finished product turns out pleasing to mine eye. I would rather wait a year than publish a bad children’s book, as I have too much respect for children.” By the way, in 1961, nine years after E.B. White had published Charlotte’s Web, a young reader wrote him to ask why he hadn’t written another children’s book since then. Mr. White was feeling testy that day, and he complained that he would have more time to write children’s books if only children would stop writing him letters. However, this doesn’t mean that Mr. White disliked children. Sometimes, they sent him awards and certificates, and Mr. White treasured these.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Bad Investment Blues"
Album: ONE MORE TIME!
Artist: The Unkool Hillbillies
Artist Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Info:
“Five great Swedish musicians form The Unkool Hillbillies. They started late 2002, and they have along with frequent performances in Scandinavia and also toured over Europe and USA.”
Price: 8 SEK for track; 56 SEK for 17-track album. 56 Sweden Krona is approximately $6.40 (USA)
Note that the digital version of the album contains 17 tracks. The physical version contains a greater number of tracks.
Genre: Boogie-Woogie
Links:
ONE MORE TIME!
The Unkool Hillbillies on Bandcamp
The Unkool Hillbillies Videos
The Unkool Hillbillies Official Website
Other Links:
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
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We are all only temporarily able bodied.
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still warmer than seasonal, but cooler than yesterday.
‘A Mediocre Pub Band’
Roger Daltrey
The Who’s Roger Daltrey has scathingly criticised The Rolling Stones, likening their sound to a “mediocre pub band”.
Speaking to the Coda Collection, Daltrey was asked about some of the other rock bands who rose to prominence around the same time as The Who, such as the Stones and Led Zeppelin.
He effusively praised the Stones’ frontman, Mick Jagger, conceding: “You’ve got to take your hat off to him. He’s the number one rock ‘n’ roll performer.”
However, he continued: “But as a band, if you were outside a pub and you heard that music coming out of a pub some night, you’d think, ‘Well, that’s a mediocre pub band!’”
Beatles star Paul McCartney also recently criticised The Rolling Stones, describing them as “a blues cover band”.
Roger Daltrey
Weekend Box Office
‘Eternals’
Disney and Marvel’s “Eternals” took a steep drop in its second weekend in theaters, but it’s still hanging on to first place ahead of newcomers like “Clifford the Big Red Dog.”
“Eternals” added $27.5 million over the weekend, bringing its domestic total to $118.8 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. The film, directed by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao and starring Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani and Gemma Chan, fell 61% from its debut. Though not uncommon for a big superhero tentpole, it was significantly steeper than the 52% drop seen by the last Disney and Marvel offering, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.”
Second place went to “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” which opened in theaters during the week and was also available to stream at home for Paramount+ subscribers. It made an estimated $16.4 million from 3,700 theaters over the weekend and $22 million across its five days in release.
Blockbusters rounded out the top five with “Dune” in third place with $5.5 million, “No Time to Die” in fourth with $4.6 million and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” in fifth with $4 million. Notably, “Venom 2” this weekend became only the second pandemic-era film to cross the $200 million mark at the domestic box office. The other was “Shang-Chi.”
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “Eternals,” $27.5 million.
2. “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” $16.4 million.
3. “Dune,” $5.5 million.
4. “No Time to Die,” $4.6 million.
5. “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” $4 million.
6. “Ron’s Gone Wrong,” $2.2 million.
7. “The French Dispatch,” $1.8 million.
8. “Belfast,” $1.8 million.
9. “Spencer,” $1.5 million.
10. “Antlers,” $1.2 million.
‘Eternals’
Musicians Pursue World Record
Venezuela
Hundreds of violins, violas and double basses sounded at Venezuela’s military academy Saturday, then woodwinds, brass and percussion gradually joined in — and thousands of musicians, mostly children and adolescents, were playing with a single goal: setting the record as the world’s largest orchestra.
The musicians, all connected to the country’s network of youth orchestras, performed a roughly 10-minute Tchaikovsky piece outdoors under the watchful eyes of independent supervisors with the job of verifying that more than 8,097 instruments were playing simultaneously, which would break the current record. The country’s music network, known as “El Sistema,” had hoped to gather 12,000 musicians.
“This means that all these years that I’ve been with the orchestra were worth it, all those hours of rehearsing and all those hours of practicing, which were many,” said Angele Barraoeta, a 15,-year-old viola player who has been part of The System since she was 4 and usually plays with a regional group of about 230 people.
The Guinness World Records will determine within 10 days whether a record was set. More than 250 supervisors were each assigned a group of musicians to observe during the record attempt. For the musicians to set a record, more than 8,097 had to be tallied playing at the same time during a five-minute period of Tchaikovsky’s “Slavonic March.”
The musicians, ranging in age between 12 and 77 and wearing black pants, white shirts and pandemic-mandated face masks, attempted the record during a patriotic, one-hour concert. The repertoire included “Venezuela” by Pablo Herrero and Jose Luis Armenteros, the South American country’s national anthem and Pedro Gutierrez’s “Alma Llanera,” which Venezuelans consider their unofficial anthem.
Venezuela
Top Charts
Abba
The winner takes it all when it comes to the weekly UK albums chart battle, and on Friday the spoils went to an "over the moon" Abba for a 10th time.
The Swedish band's long-awaited Voyage - their first album of new material for 40 years - shot straight to number one, earning them the biggest opening week of sales for any album in four years.
The former Eurovision winners have since hit number one with their greatest hits collections, The Singles and Gold.
The album is also the fastest-selling LP released by a group in eight years, since One Direction's Midnight Memories. Aside from Abba, Sheeran and One Direction, only Adele's 25 has breached the 200,000 barrier for first-week sales in the past decade.
Voyage is also the fastest-selling vinyl release of the century, overtaking the Arctic Monkeys' Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino from 2018.
Abba
As A Political Tool
Menace
At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.
“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.
In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration.
And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors.
From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.
Menace
Foreign Policy
Ambassador Shortage
Joe Biden will on Monday hold a high-stakes virtual summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, his latest initiative to restore US authority on the world stage. But the president’s efforts are being hampered by a logjam in Washington that threatens to cripple American diplomacy.
Biden had made 78 ambassadorial nominations as of 5 November, according to the White House, but just seven of them – or 9% – had been confirmed by the Senate. Former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had 77% and 70% of their ambassadorial nominees confirmed respectively at this stage.
The inertia has left posts in vital world capitals unfilled – Biden is yet to even nominate an ambassador to the UK – and America confronting complex foreign policy crises with one arm tied behind its back.
The problem was starkly illustrated during a recent row over France’s loss of a submarine contract with Australia, which opted instead for nuclear-powered submarines to be developed with the US and UK. There was no US ambassador in Paris for the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to deal with; like many world leaders, he does not engage with the chargé d’affaires or other substitutes.
The depleted diplomatic corps is a symptom of Washington’s polarized politics and evenly divided Senate. Two rightwing Republicans, Rafael "Ted" Cruz (R-Born In Canada) of Texas and Josh Hawley (R-Opportunist) of Missouri, have been slowing down the process by objecting to the Senate moving forward via unanimous consent.
Ambassador Shortage
Federal Prisons
Crimes
More than 100 federal prison workers have been arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019, including a warden indicted for sexual abuse, an associate warden charged with murder, guards taking cash to smuggle drugs and weapons, and supervisors stealing property such as tires and tractors.
An Associated Press investigation has found that the federal Bureau of Prisons, with an annual budget of nearly $8 billion, is a hotbed of abuse, graft and corruption, and has turned a blind eye to employees accused of misconduct. In some cases, the agency has failed to suspend officers who themselves had been arrested for crimes.
Two-thirds of the criminal cases against Justice Department personnel in recent years have involved federal prison workers, who account for less than one-third of the department’s workforce. Of the 41 arrests this year, 28 were of BOP employees or contractors. The FBI had just five. The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives each had two.
The numbers highlight how criminal behavior by employees festers inside a federal prison system meant to punish and rehabilitate people who have committed bad acts. The revelations come as advocates are pushing the Biden administration to get serious about fixing the bureau.
At the highest ranks, the warden of a federal women’s prison in Dublin, California, was arrested in September and indicted this month on charges he molested an inmate multiple times, scheduled times where he demanded she undress in front of him and amassed a slew of nude photos of her on his government-issued phone.
Crimes
Intense Storms
Egypt
Extreme weather in Egypt brought out a swarm of scorpions from their nests, resulting in hundreds of people in the southern city of Aswan being stung and three people dying from their injuries, according to multiple reports.
At least 450 people were injured by scorpion stings on Friday, an Egyptian health ministry official said, according to the BBC.
Heavy rain, hail, and dust storms near the River Nile, forced scorpions and snakes out of the ground, Sky News reported.
The scorpions, displaced by the weather, then sought shelter in people's homes, the Independent reported.
Doctors were redirected from COVID-19 vaccination centers to help treat the scorpion stings, the BBC reported, citing a health official.
Egypt
How Many Satellites?
Earth
Human-made satellites were once rare in low Earth orbit (LEO), with just a handful of them rotating around the planet at the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s. But now, there are thousands of satellites swarming around Earth, with even more waiting to join them.
So, to put an exact number on it, how many satellites are orbiting Earth, and how many might join them in the near future? And once all of these satellites are spaceborne, what types of problems might they cause?
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, in 1957, a slow but steady stream of satellites entered LEO, with between 10 and 60 launched annually until the 2010s, Supriya Chakrabarti, a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, wrote in an article published on Space.com, a Live Science sister site. Since then, that rate has skyrocketed, with more than 1,300 new satellites launched into LEO in 2020 and more than 1,400 satellites launched in 2021, Chakrabarti wrote. In total, there were around 7,500 active satellites in LEO as of September 2021, according to the United Nations' Outer Space Objects Index.
The number of satellites in LEO, a region that spans up to 1,424 miles (2,000 kilometers) from Earth, will continue to increase at an exponential rate in the coming decades. That's because private companies are setting up their own megaconstellations, each containing thousands of individual satellites, which will be used to develop faster online networks and deliver a range of other services, such as monitoring climate change.
This increased activity is happening now largely because of dropping costs, said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at The University of British Columbia. "We know SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon and StarNet/GW [China's satellite network] have proposed a combined satellite total of 65,000 when including all phases" of their satellite programs, Boley told Live Science. And "well over 100,000 satellites have been proposed" in total, he added.
Earth
CURRENT MOON lunar phases |