Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Waldman: The best way to force Trump's hand? Ignore him. (Washington Post)
So the only answer may be for everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, to ignore President Trump. Act as though he doesn't exist and this has nothing to do with him. By which I mean that members of Congress should shut their ears to Trump's tweets and threats and fulminations, pass something that House Democrats and Senate Republicans can live with, and then dare Trump to veto it.
Jonathan Chait: Why Fox News Made Trump Shut Down the Government (NY Mag)
You could see the outline of a plan. Trump would wheedle some money out of Democrats, rebrand the tweaked NAFTA as Mexico "paying" for it, rebrand the fence as a wall, and say he won. Accordingly, Trump abandoned his previous threats to shut down the government over the lack of a wall. But then right-wing media threw a fit.
Jonathan Chait: Paul Ryan's War on the Safety Net Failed Because Democracy Worked (NY Mag)
Attacks on the most established social-insurance programs, like Social Security and Medicare, already lay so far out of reach that his party did not dare attempt them. Ryan did attempt to repeal Obamacare, but this effort proved toxically unpopular, contributing to the enormous losses his party suffered in the midterm elections. Even a tax cut, which he managed to pass, hurt Ryan's party. The unpopularity of the tax cut was so severe that President Trump was forced to promise before the midterm elections that he would soon introduce a new tax cut that really would benefit the middle class. (He never did, of course.)
Lucy Mangan: I'd never kissed a Tory - then I married one (Telegraph)
There is a scene in the eighties sitcom Bread, about the Catholic, working class Liverpudlian family the Boswells, in which one of Nellie Boswell's sons plans to bring A Homosexual round for tea. "But Joey," she whispers urgently, "what do they eat?" Twenty five years later a similar scene played out in my own house when I told my parents I was bringing a Tory home - a boyfriend, for their inspection - except that they would have been happy to feed him anything, up to and including poison.
Lucy Mangan: My husband's a shady character (The Guardian)
We're decorating the house and can't agree on anything. That'll serve me right for marrying a Tory.
Peter Bradshaw: "Rip it up and start again: what's next for film criticism on the BBC?" (The Guardian)
The BBC has promised to replace Film with another show, but the challenge is how do you cover movies for a BBC One audience? The problem the BBC has is that movie broadcasting has been subject to a populist online revolution. There has been an explosion of podcasts and YouTube channels, many brilliant, and as in so many other areas of broadcasting, the BBC is wondering how to accommodate this new reality. Whatever happens, with either a single presenter, or a group format, it should be on all the year round, and in a non-insomniac slot.
Happy New Year (Wordpress)
Written & performed by George J. Raymond.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Early in his career as a playwright, August Wilson found writing dialogue difficult. He once asked his friend and fellow playwright Rob Penny, "How do you make characters talk?" Mr. Penny replied, "You don't. You listen to them." When writing his play Jitney, Mr. Wilson listened to his characters. He says, "I found that exhilarating. It felt like this was what I'd been looking for, something that was mine, that would enable me to say anything." Unfortunately, his play was rejected-twice-by the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, leading Mr. Wilson to wonder what to do next. His thinking took the form of a conversation with himself: "Maybe it's not as good as you think. You have to write a better play." "I've already written the best play I can write." "Why don't you write above your talent?" "Oh, man, how can you do that?" "Well, you can write beneath it, can't you?" "Oh, yeah." Of course, he did continue to write plays. His manner of writing was unusual. He wrote while standing up, and he had a punching bag by his side. John Lahr writes, "When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he'd stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work."
• Playwright Tennessee Williams hated racism. In 1947, his Glass Menagerie played to all-white audiences in Washington, D.C. He tried to stop this from happening, but he was unable. Therefore, he wrote to The New York Times that "any future contract I make will contain a clause to keep the show out of Washington while this undemocratic practice continues." Mr. Williams could see the humor in life as well as the evil. In 1977 he was asked to leave the Shaw Theater in London because he kept laughing during a performance of The Glass Menagerie. Michael Billington writes that "his incessant hilarity at this memory of his own youth was disturbing the rest of the audience."
• The mother and stepfather of children's book illustrator and author Margot Zemach worked in the theater. Sometimes, she would look at her stepfather while he was eating a salad at home at the dinner table and wonder to herself whether this was really the same man who had been dancing the role of a soldier or a camel or a demon on stage the previous night. While backstage one day, young Margot was poked and prodded by someone who seemed to be a cackling witch. She worried-until she recognized in the cackling the sound of her mother.
• One of Orson Welles' rare flops occurred in a spectacular fashion in 1946 when he brought to Broadway the extravaganza Around the World, which was based on Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Forty Days. Cole Porter wrote the songs, and the musical featured four mechanical elephants, circus interludes, and a cast of 70. Critics disliked it, and Mr. Welles was aware that they disliked it. When one critic said that it had everything but the kitchen sink, Mr. Welles appeared in the next performance with a sink.
• Theatrical guru Danny Newman is not a fan of the Method, believing as he does that its use resulted in "morose, intellectual, and inhibited thespians who could no longer be heard in the third row." A famous critic who seems to have agreed with him was Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who once told him that he enjoyed going to Yiddish Art Theater because there he could see thespians "who were not afraid to act!"
• Pia Zadora once played the role of Anne Frank very badly. How badly? In the scene where the Nazis arrive to take the Frank family out of hiding and to the concentration camps, the audience yelled, "She's upstairs!" (This story is apocryphal-but funny.)
• One woman of true originality and great bitchiness was Tallaluh Bankhead. After Somerset Maugham rejected her for a role in one of his plays, she told him, "Mr. Maugham, I have two words left to say to you, and the second one is 'off.'"
• Dorothy Parker once reviewed the play "The House Beautiful" by Channing Pollock: "'The House Beautiful' is the play lousy."
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Open Letter to Republican Leadership
Open letter to Republican leadership . . .
When Trump finally goes down - and he WILL go down - how many will go down with him??
Already, several of Trump associates have been convicted and/or pleaded guilty to crimes and are going to prison and a whole lot more have been indicted but not yet tried. . . ?
The reputations of those who have attached their dinghy to Trump's sinking ship will at LEAST be tarnished and in many cases, ruined?
How many in the right-wing media, Fox News, Limbaugh, Coulter, et. al. will be legally deemed as complicit and worse: aiding and abetting??
How many Senators and Representatives will be deemed complicit in his crimes? ?
Remember: Nixon never went to prison . . . but 38 other people involved with Watergate DID?
If you KNEW and did nothing about it then you were complicit; if you DIDN'T and didn't seek to find out, then you were incompetent?
Will history remember YOU as a convicted criminal - or an ignorant fool??
It's a loser either way. . . ?
And history never forgets?
Randall
Thanks, Randall!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Another brisk day.
Turning 250
Encyclopedia Britannica
Americans are awash in information. Most of us walk around with devices that give us instant access to all the knowledge in human history. But before you could Google it, and long before we met Alexa, there was Britannica.
As in Encyclopedia Britannica, which turns 250 years old this month.
"Britannica did something unique," said executive editor Ted Pappas. "It combined long, scholarly essays with short definitional entries and practical information."
Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica was the brainchild of Colin Macfarquhar, a printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver. They also had an editor, William Smellie. "He was a very learned man," Pappas said, with (he added) a wonderful capacity for drinking.
So there they were, two guys with no formal training and one very drunk editor managed to write and publish the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in three volumes. Its useful, practical information also contained some guesses: a short article from 1768 spells California with two L's, and says it's a large country of the West Indies - "It is uncertain whether it be a peninsula or an island."
Encyclopedia Britannica
Beetle Species
'Game of Thrones'
A Nebraska entomologist has named three of his eight newest beetle discoveries after the dragons from the HBO series "Game of Thrones" and George R.R. Martin book series "A Song of Ice and Fire."
University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Brett Ratcliffe named the new scarab beetle species drogoni, rhaegali and viserioni, The Omaha World-Herald reported. The names are Latinized versions of Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion, three dragons owned by Daenerys Targaryen's character in the fictional work.
Radcliffe said he's a fan of the series, but ultimately chose the names to draw attention to biodiversity and the amount of undiscovered species.
Ratcliffe said he's named hundreds of species over his 50-year career and creating new names becomes difficult. Naming rules recommend against using humor or insults, and are particularly useful to avoid having duplicate names, he said.
Drogoni and viserioni can be found in Colombia and Ecuador, while rhaegali is in the French Guiana. All three have orange features.
'Game of Thrones'
1st Year Of Legal Pot
California
It was supposed to be a great year for marijuana entrepreneur Brian Blatz.
When California broadly legalized pot on Jan. 1, the lawyer with a background in banking and health care had been working for a year to set up a trucking company that would whisk fragrant marijuana buds, infused juices and other products from fields and production plants to store shelves.
On its website, Long Beach-based Verdant Distribution said the company's goal was to be the United States' pre-eminent business for transporting cannabis.
But it's all gone. The trucks were sold to cover debt, a warehouse vacated, its license expired.
The choppy rollout of California's legal market saddled the company with costly delays, but it was undone by an abrupt state rule change that allowed just about any marijuana business to become its own distributor, undercutting the need for stand-alone companies like Verdant.
California
Ancient Settlement
Northern Ireland
In the highlands of Boho in Northern Ireland, there's an old story about soil with medicinal properties. It turns out, this is not just an empty old-wives tale - this folk medicine could hold some real potential in the fight against antibiotic resistance.
Researchers led by Swansea University in the UK have discovered that alkaline soil in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, is home to a previously unknown strain of bacteria, Streptomyces sp. Myrophorea, which is effective against some of the most persistent antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The recent study, published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, showed that the newly discovered bacteria helped to inhibit the growth of four of the top six multi-resistant pathogens, including the notorious methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). It also appeared to tackle both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria.
The team are still unsure what component of the bacteria prevents the growth of the pathogens, however they are on the case to try to figure it out. They are also looking for new environments where similar bacteria might lurk.
The area of Boho, where the soil samples were taken, was once home to the Druids around 1,500 years ago and the Neolithic people some 4,000 years ago. In more recent times, a number of reports show that the soil was used as a traditional remedy for toothaches or throat infections. Traditionally, people would wrap up a small piece of the soil in cotton and apply it to the affected area.
Northern Ireland
Retired Army Gen.
Stanley McChrystal
The former top commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, retired four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, criticized President-for-now Donald Trump's (R-Crooked) behavior and handling of the presidency, saying the commander-in-chief is dishonest and immoral.
"I don't think he tells the truth," McChrystal said in an exclusive interview on "This Week" when asked by Co-Anchor Martha Raddatz if he believes the president is a liar.
"Is Trump immoral, in your view?" Raddatz asked.
"I think he is," he said.
McChrystal said he couldn't tell any of Trump's supporters "that they are wrong," but added, "What I would ask every American to do is ... stand in front of that mirror and say, 'What are we about? Am I really willing to throw away or ignore some of the things that people do that are -- are pretty unacceptable normally just because they accomplish certain other things that we might like?'
Stanley McChrystal
Judge Dismisses Suit
Google
A lawsuit filed against Google by consumers who claimed the search engine's photo sharing and storage service violated their privacy was dismissed on Saturday by a U.S. judge who cited a lack of "concrete injuries."
U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang in Chicago granted a Google motion for summary judgment, saying the court lacked "subject matter jurisdiction because plaintiffs have not suffered concrete injuries."
The suit, filed in March 2016, alleged Alphabet Inc's Google violated Illinois state law by collecting and storing biometric data from people's photographs using facial recognition software without their permission through its Google Photos service.
Plaintiffs had sought more than $5 million collectively for the "hundreds of thousands" of state residents affected, according to court documents. Plaintiffs had asked the court for $5,000 for each intentional violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or $1,000 for every negligent violation, court documents said.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs as well as officials with Google could not immediately be reached to comment. Google had argued in court documents that the plaintiffs were not entitled to money or injunctive relief because they had suffered no harm.
Google
Anak Krakatoa
Indonesia
The Indonesian volcano which caused a tsunami that killed more than 400 people last week lost more than two-thirds of its height following the eruption which triggered the killer waves.
A section of Anak Krakatoa's crater collapsed after an eruption and slid into the ocean, generating the tsunami last Saturday night.
A visual analysis by the Indonesian volcanology agency found the volcano has lost more than two-thirds of its height, an official said Saturday.
Anak Krakatoa which used to stand 338 metres (1,109 feet) high was now just 110 metres tall.
The agency estimated the volcano lost between 150 and 180 million cubic metres of material as massive amounts of rock and ash have been slowly sliding into the sea following a series of eruptions.
Indonesia
Stumbled Upon
Roman Busts
An Israeli woman walking near ancient ruins noticed a head sticking out of the ground, leading to the uncovering of two Roman-era busts, archaeologists said Sunday.
The life-size sculptures, carved in limestone, were found in the northern city of Beit Shean earlier this month, with the Israel Antiquities Authority dating them to the late Roman period, some 1,700 years ago.
The well-preserved busts are of men, one of them bearded, sculpted in the Oriental style that was becoming fashionable at the end of the Roman period, according to Eitan Klein, deputy head of the IAA's theft prevention unit.
The sculptures emerged north of Beit Shean's national park, where the ruins of a Roman and Byzantine city lie, probably thanks to the recent rains.
The IAA said the finder would receive a "certificate of appreciation" for her good citizenship in reporting her find to the authorities rather than taking them for herself.
Roman Busts
Weekend Box Office
'Aquaman'
In the final weekend of 2018, "Aquaman" still led the pack at the box office, but other films like "Mary Poppins Returns," ''The Mule" and "Second Act" enjoyed post-holiday bumps too, even amid an onslaught of new Christmas offerings like "Vice," ''Holmes and Watson," ''On the Basis of Sex" and the Netflix phenomenon "Bird Box."
Warner Bros. said Sunday that "Aquaman" added an estimated $51.6 million in North American ticket sales over the weekend to take first place again. Down just 24 percent from its domestic debut, the DC Comics pic, which has been No. 1 internationally for four weeks, has now grossed nearly $748.8 million worldwide.
Although other films in theaters were left in "Aquaman's" wake, more than a few in the top 10 experienced an uncommon uptick in returns this weekend. Disney's "Mary Poppins Returns" ended the weekend up an estimated 19 percent, in second place, with $28 million, while "Bumblebee," down only five percent, settled in third with $20.5 million.
Up 11 percent, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" got fourth with $18.3 million, and "The Mule," up 24 percent, took fifth with $11.8 million.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1."Aquaman," $51.6 million ($85.4 million international).
2."Mary Poppins Returns," $28 million ($28.9 million international).
3."Bumblebee," $20.5 million ($45.7 million international).
4."Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," $18.3 million ($27.4 million international).
5."The Mule," $11.8 million.
6."Vice," $7.8 million ($875,160 international).
7."Holmes and Watson," $7.3 million ($4 million international).
8."Second Act," $7.2 million ($1.5 million international).
9."Ralph Breaks the Internet," $6.5 million ($13.7 million international).
10."Dr. Seuss' The Grinch," $4.2 million ($17.5 million international).
'Aquaman'
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
