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Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
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from Bruce
Anecdotes
• On 12 June 1936, Ella Fitzgerald recorded her first song, "Love and Kisses," which she made with the Chick Webb Orchestra. The record was in a jukebox at a nightclub, but Ella was not allowed in the nightclub because she was underage. She remembered, "So I had some fellow who was over 21 go in and put a nickel in while I stood outside and listened to my own voice coming out." The turning point in Ella's life came in 1934 on an amateur night at the Harlem Opera House in New York City. She and two friends drew straws to see who would perform on stage, and Ella drew the short straw. She had intended to dance, but performing immediately before her were two sisters who danced much better than she did, so instead of dancing, she sang "Judy," a song made famous by the Boswell Sisters. Ella was a hit with the audience and won $25. She called this "the hardest money I ever earned," but added, "Once up there [on stage], I felt the acceptance and love from the audience - I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life." In her later years, Ella made a commercial for Memorex recording tapes. In the commercial, she hit a high note and broke a glass. Then a Memorex recording of Ella's high note was played, and it broke a glass. The commercial then asked, "Is it Ella, or is it Memorex?" A boy once attended one of Ella's concerts and afterward said, "I liked her singing all right, but she didn't break no glass."
• Country songwriter Harlan Howard knew that the young Hal Ketchum was planning to coming to Nashville, Tennessee, and so he invited him to stay at his house: "I know you're coming up. You're trying to get a publishing deal or a record deal. So just stay at my house." Staying at Mr. Howard's house had some major benefits, such as hearing people such as Mr. Howard, Waylon Jennings, Allen Reynolds, and Jim Rooney talk and play music. Mr. Howard told the young Mr. Ketchum, "Listen twice and talk once; maybe you'll learn something." Mr. Ketchum played a couple of songs that were clever rather than honest, and then he played a folk song titled "Someplace Far Away." Mr. Howard listened to the song and then told Mr. Ketchum, "That's it - that's where you need to go." He added, "One thing you need to bear in mind as a songwriter is that it's all been said before. If you can just learn to say it from your own perspective in some kind of honest fashion, people will gravitate toward it. […] we're all telling the same story, but if you do it from your own heart and your own perspective, people will get it."
• Gerald Moore, world-famous accompanist, used to wonder why some Patronesses of Music knew so little about music. Emerald, Lady Cunard once grabbed Ida Haendel's very valuable Stradivarius by its strings and held it up in the air - Mr. Moore compared it to grabbing a parcel by the strings. Emerald, Lady Cunard then demanded to know why it was so valuable. Mr. Moore also stated that in the same drawing room, the hostess asked Sir Thomas Beecham, who with his orchestra were performing at a large party, "Sir Thomas, when are you going to play that lovely piece of Delius that you were rehearsing this afternoon?" Sir Thomas replied, "We have just this very moment played it, my dear." Speaking of Sir Thomas, one of his friends visited him in his dressing room after a Covent Garden concert and complimented him on the playing of his orchestra but also said that the orchestra had drowned out the singing of the vocalists. Sir Thomas replied, "I know. I drowned them intentionally - in the public's interest."
• Wynton Marsalis wanted to make his living as a musician, but many, many people advised him not to try. They told him, "Don't major in music because it's too difficult to make a living. You need a 'real' profession to fall back on when the dream dies." Fortunately for music lovers, Wynton followed the advice of his father, a man who knew firsthand how hard it is to make a living as a musician. Wynton writes that his father is "a great musician whom I had seen killing himself to make barely enough to take care of his family." So what is his father's advice? His father said, "Make sure you don't have anything to fall back on … because you will. This is not for the faint of heart."
• Comedian Jack Benny loved music. Once he had the chance to get violinist Isaac Stern on the 3 February 1946 episode of his radio program. Mr. Benny's show allowed him to pay $10,000 per episode to the guest stars. He had already booked Ronald and Benita Colman for $6,000. Mr. Stern's fee was $5,000, but Mr. Benny gladly paid $1,000 out of his own pocket to book him. Mr. Benny's comic persona was that of a miser, but he said, "I got my money's worth. During rehearsals, I made him play about twenty solos for me, just for me, in my dressing room. I pretended I wanted to choose the best short number for him to play on the program. It was wonderful."
• Songwriter Steve Earle is not shy when it comes to expressing his opinions. Wearing his cowboy boots, he once stood on songwriter Bob Dylan's coffee table and proclaimed, "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world." He later met Mr. Van Zandt, writer of "If I Needed You," who told him, "That's a really nice quote, but I've met Bob Dylan's bodyguards, and I don't think [what you did] is a really good idea."
• Bobby Hackett was a good enough musician to play for Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, but he was self deprecating. When he was selling one of his trumpets, he told prospective buyers, "It's a good buy. In the upper register, it's absolutely brand new." While Mr. Hackett was going through Canadians customs, an officer asked if he were a musician. Mr. Hackett replied, "Sometimes."
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Last Night
Mostly sunny, but still on the cool side.
Tonight
ABC
ABC says it will rebroadcast its last-night-of-season special, Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear's 'All in the Family' and 'The Jeffersons,' on Saturday, May 25 at 8 PM ET.
Following the broadcast, ABC also will replay the Nightline doc on creator Norman Lear that followed the live remounting of an episode from series.
Jimmy Kimmel's passion project handed ABC a win on the final night of the 2018-19 season by strong margins. From 8-9:30 PM ET, ABC's live, star-strewn Lear sitcoms reboot averaged 10.36 million viewers and a 1.7 demo rating to outstrip all broadcast primetime competition. That's a six-month high for ABC in the 90-minute Wednesday time period, following the CMA Awards back in November. Excluding trophy shows, it's ABC biggest haul since the first Wednesday night of the TV season.
The clunkily named Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear's All in the Family and The Jeffersons starred Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Jamie Foxx, Wanda Sykes among many others, Kimmel's 8-9:33 PM passion project scored biggest numbers in first half hour, 7.6/14, trickling down to 5.9/10 for its final few minutes. The broadcast ended at 9:33 PM ET.
ABC
Raid On Freelance Journalist's Home
San Francisco
SFPD Chief William Scott on Friday apologized for a raid on a freelance journalist's home which sparked national criticism.
The raid at the home and office of stringer journalist Bryan Carmody on May 10th was in connection to a leaked police report which detailed the death of late San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.
The information was reportedly sold to local news outlets for $2,500 hours after Adachi died on Feb. 22 from a heart attack. Scott said the search warrant came after city leaders demanded that the leak be investigated during a Board of Supervisors' hearing last month.
"I'm sorry that this happened. I'm sorry to the people of San Francisco. I'm sorry to the mayor," he said in the interview. "We have to fix it. We know there were some concerns in that investigation and we know we have to fix it."
The chief also released a statement that said he had conducted a thorough review of the Adachi report criminal investigation over the past two days, exploring leak of the Jeff Adachi police report and the subsequent raid.
San Francisco
Fabricate A Video
Deepfake
Imagine someone creating a deepfake video of you simply by stealing your Facebook profile pic. The bad guys don't have their hands on that tech yet, but Samsung has figured out how to make it happen.
Software for creating deepfakes -- fabricated clips that make people appear to do or say things they never did -- usually requires big data sets of images in order to create a realistic forgery. Now Samsung has developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate a fake clip by feeding it as little as one photo.
Here's the downside: These kinds of techniques and their rapid development also create risks of misinformation, election tampering and fraud, according to Hany Farid, a Dartmouth researcher who specializes in media forensics to root out deepfakes.
When even a crudely doctored video of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi can go viral on social media, deepfakes raise worries that their sophistication would make mass deception easier, since deepfakes are harder to debunk.
Like Photoshop for video on steroids, deepfake software produces forgeries by using machine learning to convincingly fabricate a moving, speaking human. Though computer manipulation of video has existed for decades, deepfake systems have made doctored clips not only easier to create but also harder to detect. Think of them as photo-realistic digital puppets.
Deepfake
Nickelodeon 'Henry Danger' Actor
Michael D. Cohen
Actor Michael D. Cohen, from Nickelodeon's longest running live-action sitcom "Henry Danger," told Time in an interview published Thursday that he was misgendered at birth and transitioned from female to male while already working in the entertainment business nearly 20 years ago.
"I identify as male, and I am proud that I have had a transgender experience - a transgender journey," the 43-year-old, who also stars in the "Henry Danger" spinoff "The Adventures of Kid Danger," said in the feature story.
The Canadian-born actor plays character Schwoz Schwartz on the Nickelodeon show, a comedy about a 13-year-old boy, Henry Hart (Jace Norman), who lives in a world of superheroes. Cohen opened up about his transition to his cast, including Norman. Norman told Time that the news "didn't change anything about the high level of respect and admiration I have for the guy," and thinks "it's in the best interest of the entire world to have every type of person represented on TV."
Nickelodeon has been supportive of his decision to come out, Cohen said, with Nickelodeon providing its own statement that it supports "diversity in all its forms."
Cohen cites the Trump administration rolling back protections for transgender people as a reason for coming out with his story now, although he does not identify as transgender himself.
Michael D. Cohen
New Theme Park
National Enquirer Live
A new US theme park has been criticised after unveiling an attraction based on Princess Diana's death.
The 1997 car crash that killed the royal will be recreated in 3D for visitors to National Enquirer Live, an "immersive museum" in Tennessee focusing on the history of the American tabloid and its salacious celebrity stories.
The theme park, which was due to open in the town of Pigeon Forge on Friday, will also feature replicas of the crime scene where OJ Simpson's ex-wife was found murdered and of Michael Jackson dangling his baby from a hotel balcony.
The Diana exhibit is one of about 100 inside the 20,000sq ft theme park, which is four miles down the road from Dolly Parton's theme park, Dollywood.
Other rooms will focus on conspiracy theories about John F Kennedy's assassination and a famed 1977 National Enquirer cover photo of Elvis Presley's corpse.
National Enquirer Live
Sues Insurers Over Rain Damage
Noah's Ark
A replica of the biblical Noah's Ark is suing an insurer over rain damage.
The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., reports Ark Encounter, which features a 510-foot-long model of the boat, that according to the Bible, carried Noah, his family and two of each kind of animals to safety during the Great Flood, opened in 2016.
The ark's owners say heavy rains in 2017 and 2018 damaged its access road, and its five insurance carriers refused to cover $1 million in damages.
The road was rebuilt, and the ark itself was not damaged by the rains.
Noah's Ark
Scientists Think ...
Leonardo Da Vinci
It's been exactly 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci died, and even after all this time we're still trying to discover new things about the famous Italian polymath.
Two scientists have studied historical accounts of da Vinci's life and come to the conclusion that he had a behavioural condition - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.
Leonardo da Vinci is widely known for his paintings - especially the iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But he's also been recognised for his inventive mind: da Vinci's journals and notes are brimming with ideas, including sketches of early versions of a parachute, a helicopter and even a tank.
"The story of Da Vinci is one of a paradox - a great mind that has compassed the wonders of anatomy, natural philosophy and art, but also failed to complete so many projects," neurophysiologist Marco Catani and medical historian Paolo Mazzarello write in a new paper.
"The excessive time dedicated to idea planning and the lack of perseverance seems to have been particularly detrimental to finalise tasks that at first had attracted his enthusiasm."
Leonardo Da Vinci
Trade Food For Sex
Egyptian Fruit Bats
Female Egyptian fruit bats living in captivity will consistently take food right from the mouths of their male peers. Now the Tel Aviv University team that made that discovery is back with new evidence to explain why the males put up with it.
As reported in Current Biology on May 23, these male Egyptian fruit bats are repaid for their tolerance and generosity with sex.
"We found a strong relationship between producer-scrounger feeding interactions and reproduction," says lead author Prof. Yossi Yovel of TAU's George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. "Namely, females bore pups of the males they most often scrounged food from. Three to four months before mating, the females start scrounging for food from several males. Then they eventually mate with one of the males, the one with which they forged the strongest bond.
"Originally, we wondered: Why do the producers of food allow scroungers to take food from their mouths? Maybe they're stronger? But we found that most of the scroungers are female, and so we considered the possibility that females trade mating for food. This was our hypothesis, and, indeed, we found that this is the case."
Prof. Yovel's team earlier found after watching three captive bat colonies over the course of a year that individuals either collected food for themselves or scrounged it from other individuals. That begged the question: Why do males allow other individuals and primarily females to literally take food out of their mouths?
Egyptian Fruit Bats
Oldest Meteorite Collection Just Found
Earth
Meteorites crash into Earth pretty much constantly, and you can find their ancient remains everywhere from King Tut's tomb to some guy's farm in Edmore, Michigan. But to best understand where these space rocks came from and how long they've been living as earthly expats, it helps to visit the densest collection of meteorites on the planet - and that's in Chile's Atacama Desert.
What's so special about Atacama? For starters, it's old - more than 15 million years old - and that means the meteors that have crash-landed on its 50,000-square-mile (130,000 square kilometer) surface have the possibility of being really old, too. This poses a geological advantage over other deserts, including Antarctica, which boast vast supplies of meteorites, but are generally too young to house any space rocks older than about half a million years, according to Alexis Drouard, a researcher at Aix-Marseille Université in France and lead author of a new study in the journal Geology.
Drouard and his colleagues recently went on a meteorite-hunting trip to the Atacama Desert in hopes of finding an array of rocks that spanned millions of years. "Our purpose in this work was to see how the meteorite flux to Earth changed over large timescales," Drouard said in a statement. In other words, could the space rocks of Atacama reveal when Earth was bombarded by meteorites more or less frequently?
For the new study (published May 22), the researchers collected nearly 400 meteorites and closely studied 54 of them, analyzing both the ages and chemical compositions of the alien stones. Consistent with the desert's advanced age, about 30% of the meteorites were more than 1 million years old, while two of them had been gathering dust for more than 2 million years. According to Drouard, this represents the oldest meteorite collection on Earth's surface.
Surprisingly, the composition of the meteorites changed more drastically. According to the researchers, the meteorites that bombarded Atacama between 1 million and half a million years ago were significantly more iron-rich than the rocks that fell before or after. It's possible they all came from a single swarm of stones that got knocked loose from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the team wrote.
Earth
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