from Bruce
Anecdotes
Prejudice
• Ralph Bunche, the first African-American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was raised by his grandmother, Nana, a light-skinned woman. In Los Angeles, when Ralph was young, a cemetery plot salesman came to their house and talked to Nana. The salesman thought that Nana was white, so he assured her that no blacks or Mexicans would be buried near the cemetery plot. Nana grabbed a broom and chased the salesman away.
• When segregation was still a big part of the American scene, Jewish comedian George Jessel took black singer Lena Horne to the Stork Club. The headwaiter pretended not to be able to find a reservation and finally asked, “Mr. Jessel, who made the reservation?” Mr. Jessel replied, “Abraham Lincoln.”
• A hospital orderly once took care of a truly racist patient. The orderly gave the man a sponge bath with a chemical that turns white skin black for several days. A nurse in on the joke told the racist that blood from a black person had been used in his most recent transfusion. Unfortunately, the racist stayed racist.
Problem-Solving
• In 2009, Roger Ebert and his wife, Chaz, attended the Cannes Film Festival, where credentials are expensive but are usually necessary to see movies. A man named Scott Collette, who faithfully read Roger’s essays on the WWW, emailed him: “I am currently in Cannes, working out of an office on the Croisette across from the Palais. Work ends Tuesday/Wednesday and I am here until the end of the festival and I am very worried that when all is said and done, I will have attended the largest film festival in the world and will have not seen any films.” Roger suggested that Scott do what Raven, Roger’s granddaughter, was doing: Going to the movie theater and holding up a sign begging for a ticket (Invitation, si’l vous plait!). After leaving a movie theater fresh from seeing Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, Roger and Chaz ran into Scott, who proudly held up a precious movie ticket and said, “I got in!” Roger asked him what he had done to get the ticket. Scott replied, “What Raven did — I begged.”
• Gene Fowler occasionally suffered from headaches while working as a screenwriter at MGM, but he didn’t have anywhere to lie down because an efficiency expert had ordered all the sofas removed from writers’ offices. This made Mr. Fowler mad, so he told the efficiency expert that unless he had a sofa by 4 p.m., he was going to throw all the furniture he could find outside his office window, then set fire to the studio backlot and its many expensive sets. The efficiency expert laughed at him, and at 4 p.m., Mr. Fowler began to throw all his furniture out his office window. After throwing out all his own furniture, he began to throw out furniture from other offices. Of course, MGM tried to stop him, but Mr. Fowler and his confederates had locked all the doors. After an hour of mayhem, a truck arrived, bearing a new couch for Mr. Fowler, and peace was declared.
• Educators tend to be creative problem-solvers. For example, a number of schools in England had problems with girls wearing skirts that were much too short and violated the schools’ dress codes. Teachers were spending too much time enforcing the dress code, and they wanted to spend more time teaching. They solved the problem of too-short skirts by banning skirts altogether. Now girls as well as boys have to wear trousers. Publicly funded Nailsea School is one school that banned skirts. Headmaster David New says about the dress-code violations that resulted in the ban, “We didn’t want to waste any more time on it. [The ban] just means that teachers can concentrate on what’s important in education.”
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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: "Free"
Album: DAUGHTER
Artist: Grace Morrison
Artist Location: Massachusetts
Info:
“Grace Morrison is an award-winning Cape Cod-based singer/songwriter. Grammy-nominated recording engineer John Mailloux of Bongo Beach Productions says, ‘Grace’s voice is a reflection of herself–pure and true. She is an incredible talent mixing seemingly effortless musicality and original storytelling in the Folk and Americana genres.’”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $10 (USD) for 12-track album
Genre: Country. Singer-Songwriter.
Links:
DAUGHTER
Grace Morrison on Bandcamp
Grace Morrison on YouTube
Other Links:
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Reader Comment
Current Events
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We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
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And we're back to overcast and brisk.
Sells Catalog
John Legend
When ZZ Top sold its catalog to the KKR-BMG partnership in December, observers noted that the companies, which announced that they were joining forces to acquire music catalogs last March, hadn’t actually seemed to acquire much.
However, it turns out they have: A source close to the situation confirms to Variety that John Legend sold a catalog that includes such songs as “All of Me” and “Ordinary People” to the partnership in September in a deal that was not announced, but was revealed by Bloomberg late Thursday, citing an unspecified regulatory filing (a search of SEC filings in the past year did not return any documents related to John Legend or his real name, John Stephens, BMG or KKR).
While the price was not disclosed, Bloomberg says Legend sold the copyrights and the rights to receive royalties from music he wrote from late 2004 through early 2020, with the two companies acquiring a 50% stake each.
The source tells Variety that BMG will continue to administer the catalog and also has struck a new deal to administer John Legend’s future compositions.
John Legend
Virtual Event
Muhammad Ali
Boxing great Muhammad Ali would be 80 this month, and the center in Kentucky that bears his name said a virtual celebration is planned next week.
The one-hour program on Wednesday will include an introduction by his widow, Lonnie Ali. Guest speakers will include PBS filmmaker Ken Burns, Muhammad Ali’s daughter Hana Ali and others, the Ali Center said. Burns will share some comments and a segment from his PBS documentary, “Muhammad Ali.”
The program is presented by the Ali Center in Louisville, PBS Books, USA Today, the Courier Journal, Metro Louisville United Way, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and Kentucky Educational Television.
The event will be at 8 p.m. EST on the PBS Books Facebook page.
The center said the program will encourage people to participate in The Greatest Giveback through service projects across the country. The projects are organized each year on Ali’s birthday, Jan. 17, but the on-site event at the Ali Center was postponed until June because of recent COVID-19 spikes.
Muhammad Ali
Emergency Performance
‘Wicked'
A former actor returned to Broadway to play Elphaba in “Wicked” after the show experienced COVID-related cast shortages earlier this week.
Carla Stickler was previously the understudy for Elphaba in the national tour and Broadway companies of “Wicked,” according to her website.
Stickler stepped away in 2015 to begin a new career as a software engineer, but when she was called back to the Broadway stage about seven years later, she didn’t miss a beat.
Today, Stickler works as a software engineer as well as a vocal coach and teacher. She said her unique career path is proof that people don’t have to limit themselves to one dream.
As she wrote on Twitter, “At the end of all of this, I hope some little girl who loves coding/math/science but also loves music/theatre/art saw this story and thought to herself: I can do both, I can be so many things, the possibilities are endless!”
‘Wicked'
Investigation Ordered
Acropolis
Greece’s Culture Ministry launched an investigation Friday following the online release of a short film showing two men having sex at the ancient Acropolis in Athens.
The 36-minute movie, titled “Departhenon,” was released on Dec. 21 but came to the attention of authorities this week.
“The archeological site of the Acropolis is not suitable for any kind of activism or other activity which would cause offense and displays disrespect for the monument,” the ministry said in a statement.
The movie contains several explicit scenes involving male and female actors whose faces are not shown. The scene at the Acropolis shows two men having sex while standing in a circle formed by other actors. Visitors to the ancient site can be seen walking close by.
The makers of the film, who remained anonymous, described it as “artwork that is also a political action.”
Acropolis
$165 Million Over Three Years
Grift Pays
Hawking supplements and survival gear has been quite a lucrative business for Alex Jones (R-Amoral). The conspiracy theorist raked in $165 million from the Infowars store over three years beginning in September 2015, all while begging his supporters to help him stay financially solvent, records obtained by Huff Post revealed on Friday.
Jones pleaded with a caller to his radio show to help him “pay the bills” as recently as Thursday. “I’m not going to stop growth and let them push us backwards,” he said in a typical appeal. “I need your help, Frank. I need your help!”
The bills Jones needs to pay aren’t for the cost of electricity at the Infowars studio. Jones is entering 2022 facing potentially massive legal expenses after losing yet another lawsuit stemming from his lies about the Sandy Hook shooting being fake.
The news about just how fast merchandise has flown off the shelves of the Infowars store — which is known for selling a variety of survivalist items, dubious brain supplements, and more — came as the result of a discovery request in a court case brought by a parent of one of the victims of the 2012 massacre. Jones lost the case last September, as he has several others that have been brought over his Sandy Hook lies, and his wallet has taken a hit.
Grift Pays
Single Payer Now
Rabies
Rabies was unusually deadly in the U.S. last year, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found, with at least five people dying from the viral illness in 2021. Rabies can be transmitted to people from infected animals and is almost always fatal without swift post-exposure treatment.
The CDC told the Associated Press late Thursday night that five cases of rabies had been reported in 2021. Three of the cases were detailed in a new report by CDC scientists and local health officials released Friday. Those three deaths involved people who contracted rabies in August, all from close contact with bats.
Rabies is a frightening viral infection that targets the brain and spinal cord. Depending on the route of exposure, it can take weeks to months before symptoms appear, and during that time, post-exposure prophylaxis can almost always prevent illness and death. Once people start feeling sick, though, very little can be done, and those cases are almost always fatal. Though now rare in many parts of the world, due to animal control and dog vaccination programs, many wild mammals carry the virus, including bats. Only about one to three cases of rabies are reported annually in the U.S. nowadays, and 2021’s total is the highest seen since 2011.
Sadly, one of the deaths involved a man who did get post-exposure treatment but likely didn’t respond to it due to undocumented problems with his immune system, according to the AP. The fifth death involved someone who was bitten by a rabid dog while traveling in the Philippines and who later died in New York.
Unfortunately, while these treatments are life-saving, they can be prohibitively expensive, costing thousands even with insurance.
Rabies
Death Throes Seen For First Time
Supergiant Star
Astronomers have finally caught something long sought – the last days of a giant star prior to its explosion of a supernova. Confounding expectations, the star in question was very active prior to the explosion, raising the question of whether such behavior is common and we have somehow missed it, or there was something very unusual about this star.
Red supergiant stars with masses more than eight times the Sun’s eventually become Type II (or Ib/Ic) supernovas, leaving either a neutron star or a black hole behind. Although our galaxy has stubbornly failed to provide us with such an event in the last 400 years, we now see hundreds of explosions like this in other galaxies each year.
Astronomers frequently go back through archived images and identify a giant star, called the progenitor, at the location of a supernova explosion. However, with no reason to study it closely first, our knowledge is usually poor, and these pre-explosion images don’t show anything that indicates an explosion was imminent. Even when progenitors were emitting a lot of light they have been generally fairly stable.
However, in September 2020 astronomers detected a supernova SN 2020tlf in the 120 million light-years distant galaxy NGC 5731 and observed it with telescopes across the spectrum. Prior images of NGC 5731 reveal the progenitor star was varying dramatically in brightness from 128 to 51 before the explosion, offering a clue to anyone watching it was about to go off.
“This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die,” Jacobson-Galán, said in a statement. “Direct detection of pre-supernova activity in a red supergiant star has never been observed before in an ordinary type II supernova. For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode.” Senior author Dr Raffaella Margutti described examining the archival images as “like watching a ticking time bomb.”
Supergiant Star
First Pregnant Mummy
Egypt
Scientists working on mummified remains from Egypt recently made a huge discovery: a set of remains they thought was a man was actually a woman — and a woman who was pregnant.
Before the Warsaw Mummy Project analyzed the remains, no one had ever spotted a fetus in a mummified body before.
Wojciech Ejsmond, a Warsaw Mummy Project scientist who led the study, told Insider on Friday that this had always seemed weird.
"Women in reproductive age were maybe not constantly pregnant, but every few years they would have been pregnant," he said. So why was there no proof of pregnant women who died being mummified?
Fetal skeletons — the usual way to spot a developing baby in this kind of case — never appeared on X-ray scans. It took the scientists developing a technology that wasn't looking for bones.
Egypt
From Different Civilization
Horned 'Viking' Helmets
Two spectacular bronze helmets decorated with bull-like, curved horns may have inspired the idea that more than 1,500 years later, Vikings wore bulls' horns on their helmets, although there is no evidence they ever did.
In 1942, a worker cutting peat for fuel discovered the helmets — which sport "eyes" and "beaks" — in a bog near the town of Viksø (also spelled Veksø) in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen. The helmets' design suggested to some archaeologists that the artifacts originated in the Nordic Bronze Age (roughly from 1750 B.C. to 500 B.C.), but until now no firm date had been determined. The researchers of the new study used radiocarbon methods to date a plug of birch tar on one of the horns.
"For many years in popular culture, people associated the Viksø helmets with the Vikings," said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But actually, it's nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East."
The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 B.C. — almost 3,000 years ago and many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region.
That dates the helmets to the late Nordic Bronze Age, a time when archaeologists think the regular trade of metals and other items had become common throughout Europe and foreign ideas were influencing Indigenous cultures, the researchers wrote in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.
Horned 'Viking' Helmets
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