from Bruce
Anecdotes
Animals
• Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz, who lives in Ohio, remembers a group of children who attended a school near where she then lived. Each day after school they visited an orange cat named Tim-Tom. One day, Tim-Tom was not in his owners’ driveway — he had died. His owners, Marianne and Paul Carey, saw the children looking for Tim-Tom, and so they posted his picture and obituary on a lamppost: “We would sadly like to let the neighborhood know that our dutiful Tim-Tom passed away on Sat. at age 18 years and 2 months. He is peacefully resting in our garden.” The children wrote letters of condolence and left them under the lamppost.
• P.T. Barnum once received a letter from a Vermont man offering to sell him a cherry-colored cat for $400. The letter assured him that the cat was not dyed, and that the cherry coloring was the cat’s natural color. Thinking that a cherry-colored cat would be a good exhibit for his museum of curiosities, Mr. Barnum wrote out a check for $400 and mailed it. A few days later, a box arrived for Mr. Barnum. Inside the box were a black cat and a note: “In Vermont, our cherries are black.”
• English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell loved Pinkie Panky Poo, her pet Pekingese, and she wanted to take him with her whenever she traveled. She once bundled him under her cloak and tried to smuggle him past customs. Later, she told her friends, “Everything was going splendidly — until my bosom barked.”
Birthdays
• When African-American Duke Ellington reached his 70th birthday, he celebrated it at the White House at the invitation of then-President Richard Nixon. In the receiving line, Mr. Ellington kissed each person four times — twice on each cheek. When President Nixon asked him about it, Mr. Ellington replied, “One for each cheek, Mr. President.” When President Nixon gave him the Medal of Freedom at the birthday celebration, Mr. Ellington kissed him four times.
• On Bernard Baruch’s 95th birthday, Harry Hershfield telephoned to wish him “Happy Birthday” and to ask, “Do you think there’s as much love in the world today as there was years ago?” Mr. Baruch answered, “Yes, but there’s another bunch doing it.”
Children
• As a child, Alicia Markova saw Anna Pavlova dance — and was mesmerized. She told her father that she wanted to speak to Ms. Pavlova, so he reluctantly went backstage, where he was told to bring his daughter to her residence the next morning. Her father read the morning newspapers while Ms. Pavlova put the young Alicia through her paces. She corrected young Alicia as needed, gave her good advice — such as to take care of her teeth — and gave her a cologne rub. Finally, she warned the young Alicia that if she stayed with ballet, there was lots of hard work ahead of her. As a child, Alicia was billed as “Little Alicia, the Child Pavlova.” Unfortunately, this almost kept her from being accepted as a student of the best ballet teacher in London: Serafine Astafieva. When Ms. Astafieva learned that Alicia was billed as “the Child Pavlova,” she became angry because she regarded Ms. Pavlova as a supreme artist. However, young Alicia began to cry, so Ms. Astafieva allowed her to audition. Afterward, she gave Alicia a hug and told her mother, “I will accept her. Take her home. Wrap her in cotton wool — you have a racehorse.”
• A person who calls himself “MarkGrace” posted a funny story on the ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’ thread at Cougaruteforum.com: In church some people asked little kids what they liked to do for fun. A four-year-old girl replied, “Not go to church.” A man who calls himself “Clackamascoug” remembers when his little son was taking a bath and started yelling for him. He ran to the bathroom and saw his son holding a Bic razor and bleeding from a cut on his face. His son told him, “You and Mom should know better than to leave this thing where I can find it.” A person by goes by the posting name “BigPiney” has a three-year-old daughter who insists that BigPiney’s burps are gross but her own burps are “yummy.” And “Cowboy” remembers his five-year-old praying at the dinner table: “Please bless us that we’ll never, ever, ever raise our middle finger at people.” By the way, Cowboy’s daughter complained about her brother, “He called me fat and ugly.” The brother protested: “Not fat!”
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Michael Egan
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Recommended Viewing
BETTY BOWERS
Betty Bowers: God Comes Out as Pro-Choice (YouTube)
Betty Bowers: Stupidest People in Congress Awards (YouTube)
UKRAINE
Video shows how Ukraine defeated Russians in key battle (CNN)
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Extra foggy night.
Museum Opening In Tulsa
Bob Dylan
Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Mavis Staples will be among the dignitaries expected in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this weekend for the opening of the Bob Dylan Center, the museum and archive celebrating the Nobel laureate’s work.
Dylan himself won’t be among them, unless he surprises everyone.
The center’s subject and namesake has an open invitation to come anytime, although his absence seems perfectly in character, said Steven Jenkins, the center’s director. Oddly, Dylan was just in Tulsa three weeks ago for a date on his concert tour, sandwiched in between Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas. He didn’t ask for a look around.
The center offers an immersive film experience, performance space, a studio where visitors can play producer and “mix” different elements of instrumentation in Dylan’s songs and a curated tour where people can take a musical journey through the stages of his career. The archive has more than 100,000 items, many accessed only by scholars through appointment.
Dylan sold his archive in 2016 to the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, which also operates the Woody Guthrie Center — a museum that celebrates one of Dylan’s musical heroes and is only steps away from the new Dylan center.
Bob Dylan
Offers Banned Books
Dave Eggers
Best-selling author Dave Eggers is offering high school seniors in South Dakota’s second-largest city free copies of his book “The Circle” and copies of four books by other authors that were removed from the district’s schools.
School administrators in Rapid City deemed the books inappropriate for high school students and and marked the district’s copies as surplus to be destroyed.
“The mass destruction of books by school boards is an unconscionable horror, and the freethinking young people of South Dakota shouldn’t be subjected to it,” Eggers said. “Every high school student should have unfettered access to literature, so if you’re a Rapid City high school senior, email our office and ask for any of these titles. For every copy the school board destroys, let’s add a new one to the local circulation.”
Eggers said Rapid City seniors can receive any of the books that were pulled from the high school at no cost to them by emailing Amanda Uhle at amanda@daveeggers.net. He said the books will be shipped to students by independent bookstores.
The other books that the district pulled are “How Beautiful We Were: A Novel” by Imbolo Mbue, which follows a young woman from a small African village who starts a revolution against an American oil company, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” a graphic memoir about author Alison Bechdel’s fraught relationship with her late father, and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, which some schools elsewhere have banned because of its references to drug and alcohol use and sexual content.
Dave Eggers
Video Collaboration
Ukraine
The melancholic sound of Ukrainian violinist Vera Lytovchenko’s music has echoed in subway stations, consoling people, some homeless, huddled in fear of Russian bombings.
A new music video called “The Brave Ones” has her in an online collaboration with more than 200 musical artists from various nations, including the U.S., South Africa, Japan and Canada.
The video, which includes news footage of neighborhoods reduced to rubble and the mournful but enduring faces of the people of Ukraine, is raising money for humanitarian aid for musicians in Ukraine, so far gathering more than $20,000.
At first, when the war began, she even had doubts about playing music, and felt helpless. Maybe what the world needed were medical doctors and politicians who can stop war, she thought.
Then she saw how her music could help people, raise funds and tell the world about Ukraine. An outpouring of sympathy ensued on social media. Most of all, people loved her music.
Ukraine
Misconduct Investigation
‘Wonder Years’
Fred Savage has been let go from his roles as executive producer and director of ABC’s revived The Wonder Years following an investigation into misconduct, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Savage faced three separate allegations and cooperated with the investigation, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Though he’d dabbled as an actor in recent years, with starring roles on Fox’s The Grinder and Netflix’s Friends from College, he’s been considerably more active as a director over the last decade or two. After his star-making turn on the original The Wonder Years that premiered in 1988, Savage was the directing producer on creator Saladin K. Patterson’s series that launched in 2021, which Savage was intimately involved in from inception.
In an interview published earlier this year, Savage told THR that it took him time to agree to participate in a new version of The Wonder Years. “I had to kind of get over myself a bit and realize that we were telling a new story,” he said back then. “Eventually, we moved forward with [Patterson] being the narrative-driving force and me being the connection to the past, keeping the tone and the shape of it consistent with the original. That’s how it started, and we went out and pitched it together, and it’s been an incredible partnership.”
‘Wonder Years’
LGBTQ Content
“Disturbing”
A group of Republican senators is calling for a TV ratings system to warn parents about LGBTQ content in children’s programs. Their statement singles out Disney repeatedly.
GOP Senators Roger Marshall (Kan.), Mike Lee (Utah), Mike Braun (Ind.), Steve Daines (Mont.) and Kevin Cramer (N.D.) sent a letter to Charles Rivkin, Chairman of the TV Guidelines Ratings Board — the entity that manages and monitors the designations on programs such as TV-Y, TV-14, TV-MA, etc.
The letter casts suspicion on “the motivations of hyper-sexualized entertainment producers” who, the letter says, are “striving to push this content on young audiences,” calling those motivations “suspect at best and predatory at worst.”
The Congressmen ask for a response by May 18 and for a briefing with the members of the board in person.
A GLAAD spokesperson responded to the Senators’ letter by saying, “LGBTQ people are in every family, workplace, school and neighborhood. Media is simply reflecting and representing this reality and growing acceptance of LGBTQ people across the board. An overwhelming majority of Americans reject efforts to ban books and censor conversation.”
“Disturbing”
Net Neutrality
California
Telecommunications industry groups on Wednesday ended their bid to block California’s net neutrality law that prevents broadband providers from throttling service.
In a federal court filing in Sacramento, the groups and California Attorney General Rob Bonta jointly agreed to dismiss the case.
The move followed a January decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing enforcement of the 2018 law, which bans internet providers from slowing down or blocking access to websites and applications that don’t pay for premium service.
“The case is finally over,” Bonta said in a statement. “With this victory, we’ve secured a free and open internet for California’s 40 million residents once and for all.”
The law was signed by former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown after regulators during the Trump administration killed federal net neutrality rules designed to prevent AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other major internet providers from exploiting their dominance to favor certain services or apps over others.
California
Blasts Crackdown
Lewis Hamilton
Seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton protested the FIA’s crackdown on body piercings Friday by showing up at the Miami Grand Prix wearing every piece of jewelry he could fit on his body and suggesting he was willing to sit out races over the issue.
Hamilton arrived in the paddock wearing an all-denim outfit with several open buttons on his long-sleeved shirt that showed at least four stacked necklaces. Hamilton was later seen wearing at least three watches and with four rings on each hand. He also has earrings and a nose ring.
“I couldn’t get any more jewelry on today,” he said.
The FIA on Thursday tightened its ban on non-regulatory underwear and body piercings when new race director Niels Wittich issued a bulletin that makes the rule part of official scrutineering, meaning such choices are subject to review by race officials.
Four-time champion Sebastian Vettel said he thought FIA was being petty and wondered if the rule was aimed at Hamilton, the 37-year-old Mercedes driver from Britain. Vettel also appeared to take exception to the underwear policing and walked through the paddock with a pair of briefs on over his firesuit.
Lewis Hamilton
Amazon Deforestation Hits Record
Brazil
Deforestation detected in the Brazilian Amazon broke all records for the month of April, and that followed similar new records set in January and February, reflecting a worrisome uptick in destruction in a state deep within the rainforest.
Satellite alerts of deforestation for April corresponded to more than 1,000 square kilometers (nearly 400 square miles), the highest figure for that month in seven years of record-keeping and 74% more than the same month in 2021, which was the prior record.
It marked the first time that deforestation alerts have surpassed 1,000 square kilometers during a month in the rainy season, which runs from December to April.
The data come from the Brazilian space agency’s Deter monitoring system, and correspond to the first 29 days of April. Full-month figures will be available next week.
Brazil
Immense Reservoir Of Fossil Seawater
Antarctic Ice Shelf
An immense groundwater reservoir that sits beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been mapped for the first time. The reservoir is said to extend downward for over a kilometer and could have a significant influence on how the Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to climate change and affects sea level.
The discovery marks the first evidence of the reservoir, which scientists had suspected sat beneath the ice shelf but (until now) had been unable to verify. The findings are reported in the journal Science.
The geophysical survey is the first of its kind to use magnetotelluric (MT) imaging to find and map subglacial groundwater water beneath an ice stream. These ice streams, sometimes called subglacial hydrologic systems, are plumbing networks that sit beneath glaciers.
Until now, it was expected that these ice streams were shallow systems – but all that has been blown out of the water (so to speak) by the discovery of an immense groundwater reservoir stretching deep into the sediments that sit beneath the Antarctic Ice Shelf. As to its vastness, we’ll defer to Gustafson for a relatable comparison.
Antarctic Ice Shelf
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