from Bruce
Anecdotes
Prejudice
• At one time, actors and theaters were regarded as sinful. After an actor named George Holland died, the great 19th-century actor Joseph Jefferson went to a church in New York to arrange for a funeral, but the clergyman told him that actors could not have funerals in that church; however, he did say that “a little church around the corner” was willing to hold funerals for actors. “The Little Church Around the Corner” is the Church of the Transfiguration, located on East Twenty-ninth Street. The critic Edward Wagenknecht says that it is “a living testimonial against bigotry and a living protest against the tendency to regard human beings as members of groups rather than as themselves.”
• “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was tossed out of professional baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, when he was charged with helping the Black Sox throw the World Series, although he batted .375 in the series. This disgrace stayed with him for the rest of his life. Back home in South Carolina, he and his wife, Katie, offered to buy an organ for the Brandon Methodist Church they attended, but the church turned down the money on account of the scandal, despite having accepted tithes from the couple for many years. Therefore, “Shoeless Joe” and Katie began attending the Brandon Baptist Church and bought it an organ.
• In 1928, Tom Connally and Earle B. Mayfield ran against each other in a campaign to be elected to the United States Senate. The Ku Klux Klan, which was powerful in Texas in those days and which supported Mr. Mayfield, started rumors that in San Antonio Mr. Connally’s daughter was attending a Catholic convent school. In addition to calling the KKK “un-American and devil-possessed,” Mr. Connally showed that the KKK were liars by taking his only child, a son, to his political rallies, where he introduced him by saying, “Now, folks, this is my daughter, who is attending a Catholic convent school for girls in San Antonio.”
• Hung-jen, the Fifth Patriarch, met Hui-Neng, who was to become the Sixth Patriarch and who wanted to study with Hung-jen. The Fifth Patriarch asked, “Who are you, where are you from, and what do you want?” The Sixth Patriarch-to-be answered, “I am a commoner, I come from the south, and I have come here to become a Buddha.” The Fifth Patriarch decided to test him by asking, “How can a southerner and a barbarian ever become a Buddha?” The Sixth Patriarch-to-be replied, “The Buddha-nature knows of no north or south, no monk or barbarian.”
• When Muriel, a lesbian, was in high school, her first close friend was a girl named Millie. After Millie was missing for a couple of days, Muriel discovered that she was absent from school because of a Jewish holiday. Muriel had not realized that Millie was Jewish before, and that got her thinking about all the things that ignorant people say about people of other races, religions, or creeds. She felt that Millie was just like her, with many ideas in common, so she lost her prejudice fast.
• Some Puritans absolutely despised the Native Americans, even though the Native Americans had helped the earliest European immigrants survive in the new land. Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan preacher, told his congregation that it was “the duty of good Christians to exterminate” the Native Americans. In addition to fighting the Native Americans, the Puritans occasionally captured some Native Americans and sold them into slavery.
• During the Jim Crow days, a black couple wanted to move into a white-only neighborhood. Hearing this, an outraged Catholic wrote a petition to keep the black couple out, and he asked his next-door neighbor, a Protestant, to sign it. The Protestant, however, declined to sign the petition. Puzzled, the Catholic asked why. The Protestant replied, “Petitions don’t work. Ten years ago, I signed a petition to keep you from moving into the neighborhood.”
• A black man went to a “whites only” church and was turned away at the door and told to go to the black church and pray to God there. The black man went back to the white church the following Sunday and said, “I took your advice. I prayed to God and He told me not to feel bad that I had been kept out of your church — He said that He’s been trying to get into your church for years, and He hasn’t made it yet.”
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "El Cowboy"
Album: LAS CHICAS DEL BOMBÓN LP
Artist: Bombón
Artist Location: Los Angeles, California
Info: Bombón is Spanish for Chocolate.
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $8 (USD) for 10-track album
Genre: Rock. Some Instrumentals.
Links:
LAS CHICAS DEL BOMBÓN LP
Bombón on Bandcamp
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Of Cats and Men
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast morning, sunny afternoon.
First Time in Its History
‘SNL’
For the first time in its history, Saturday Night Live finished ahead of every other entertainment show in the ratings — not just in late night, but across all of ad-supported TV.
The NBC series wrapped its 46th season as the top entertainment program (i.e., not including sports telecasts) among adults 18-49. It’s the top-rated comedy in the key ad demographic for the second consecutive season.
For the season, SNL averaged a 2.06 rating in the demo — equivalent to about 2.67 million adults under 50 — with a week of delayed viewing. That was enough to edge Fox’s The Masked Singer and NBC’s This Is Us (both of which are at 2.0 ratings) for the top spot. It’s well clear of the second-highest-rated comedy, CBS’ Young Sheldon (1.2 rating).
Saturday Night Live also drew 9 million viewers per episode in the seven-day ratings, which ranks 12th among all broadcast entertainment shows.
SNL got an election year bump in the fall, scoring big audiences for a run of six straight episodes to open the season (the longest stretch of live shows to open a season in its history). The Nov. 7 episode, hosted by Dave Chappelle, hit a three-year high in adults 18-49 and drew the show’s second-largest same-day viewership (after a 2019 installment hosted by Eddie Murphy) since May 2017.
‘SNL’
FBI Subpoenas Reader Info
USA Today
The FBI issued a subpoena demanding U.S. newspaper giant Gannett provide agents with information to track down readers of a USA Today story about a suspect in a child pornography case who fatally shot two FBI agents in February.
The subpoena, served on the company in April, came to light this week after the media company filed documents in federal court asking a judge to quash the subpoena. The Justice Department’s actions were immediately condemned by press freedom advocates.
The news comes as the Justice Department has disclosed in recent weeks that it seized the email and phone records of reporters in at least three separate instances during the Trump administration. It raises questions about what liberties federal authorities are taking in using news organizations, journalists and their work as investigative tools.
The subpoena asks for information about anyone who clicked on the article for a period of about 35 minutes on the day after the shooting. It seeks the IP addresses — which can sometimes be used to identify the location of a computer, the company or organization it belongs to, and where it was registered — along with mobile phone identification information of the readers.
While the subpoena doesn’t ask specifically for the names of those who read the story, such identification information could easily lead federal agents to the readers.
USA Today
Jeopardized Graduation
Stanford
It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.
His offense: sending an email flyer to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.
The satirical flyer promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”
The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.
Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.
Stanford
Maine Thrift Store
Vincent van Gogh
A painting possibly made by a companion of Vincent van Gogh was recently purchased from a thrift store in southern Maine, and it could offer insight into the last months of the famed artist’s life.
The painting is thought to be a watercolor produced by Edmund Walpole Brooke, who had become a friend of van Gogh in the months before the artist killed himself, The New York Times reported.
It was discovered by Katherine Mathews, a self-described thrift store enthusiast, as she was perusing through Warehouse 839 in Saco. She purchased the piece for $45 in April.
The image is relatively small, measuring 13 by 19 inches, and shows a Japanese woman carrying a child on her back as she walks away from a small house that is surrounded by forest.
According to Tsukasa Kodera, a curator and professor of art history at Osaka University in Japan, Brooke had become a companion to van Gogh as the Dutch artist spent his last days in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise in France. Brooke’s work never reached the level of fame that van Gogh’s work did, but he has intrigued art historians because of his connection to van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh
American Legion Official Resigns
Ohio
The head of an American Legion post in Ohio stepped down Friday amid criticism following the decision of Memorial Day ceremony organizers to turn off a retired U.S. Army officer's microphone while he was speaking about how freed Black slaves honored fallen soldiers just after the Civil War.
American Legion leaders in Ohio also suspended the post's charter and are taking steps to close it.
The moves come in the wake of intense backlash to the decision to censor retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter, who said he included the story in his speech because he wanted to share the history of how Memorial Day originated.
But organizers of the ceremony in Hudson, Ohio, said that section of the speech was not relevant to the program’s theme of honoring the city’s veterans.
“They knew exactly when to turn the volume down and when to turn it back up,” Friend said.
Ohio
Rooted
Obsession
Bodies are piling up all over the second amendment as two of America’s pandemics converge. The “plague of gun violence” and the inability to mount an effective response, even in the wake of multiple mass shootings, is, unfortunately, rooted in the other pandemic gripping the United States: anti-Blackness and the sense that African Americans are a dangerous threat that can only be neutralized or stopped by a well-armed white citizenry.
For too long, the second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes.
But “a well-regulated militia” wasn’t, as the story goes, about how valiant and effective the militias were in repelling the British. George Washington was disgusted with their lack of fighting ability and the way the men would just cut and run from battling against a professional army. Nor was the militia reliable as a force to uphold the law. In Shays’ Rebellion, bands of armed white men, who were in the state’s militia, attacked the Massachusetts government because of foreclosures and debt seizures, demonstrating, again, how unreliable the militia were. Boston merchants had to hire mercenaries to put down the rebellion.
On the other hand, where the militia had been steadfast was in controlling the enslaved Black population. Access to guns for white people was essential for this function.
In 1788, at the constitutional ratification convention in Virginia, a major source of contention was that the draft constitution had placed the training and arming of the states’ militia under federal control. Virginians Patrick Henry and George Mason balked, and raised the specter of a massive slave revolt left unchecked because Congress could not be trusted to summon the forces to protect the plantation owners. Mason warned that if and when Virginia’s enslaved rose up (as they had before), whites would be left “defenseless”. Patrick Henry explained that white plantation owners would be abandoned because “the north detests slavery”. In short, Black people had to be subjugated and contained and state control of the militia was the way to do that.
Obsession
Eggs Abandoned
Rlegant Terns
Some 3,000 elegant tern eggs were abandoned at a Southern California nesting island after a drone crashed and scared off the birds, a newspaper reported Friday.
Two drones were flown illegally over the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach in May and one of them went down in the wetlands, The Orange County Register said.
Fearing an attack from a predator, several thousand terns abandoned their ground nests, according to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Now, during the month when the white birds would be overseeing their eggs as they begin to hatch, the sand is littered with egg shells.
It's one of the largest-scale abandonment of eggs ever at the coastal site about 100 miles (160 km) north of San Diego, according to reserve manager Melissa Loebl.
Rlegant Terns
Shrinking Giants
North Atlantic Right Whales
One of the giants of the deep is shrinking before our eyes, a new study says.
The younger generation of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales are on average about three feet (one meter) shorter than whales were 20 years ago, drone and aircraft data show in a study in Thursday’s journal Current Biology.
Scientists say humans are to blame. Entanglements with fishing gear, collisions with ships and climate change moving their food supply north are combining to stress and shrink these large whales, the study says.
Diminishing size is a threat to the species’ overall survival because the whales aren’t having as many offspring. They aren’t big enough to nurse their young or even get pregnant, study authors said.
These marine mammals used to grow to 46 feet (14 meters) on average, but now the younger generation is on track to average not quite 43 feet (13 meters), according to the study.
North Atlantic Right Whales
Too Left Wing
Coca-Cola
A county in North Carolina is trying to "cancel" The Coca-Cola Company after the company’s foray into politics to campaign against Georgia’s voting reforms.
Surry County voted 3-2 to ban Coke vending machines in its public buildings in response to the Atlanta company’s statement claiming the new laws would "diminish or deter" access to voting.
Surry County Commissioner Eddie Harris told local broadcaster WXII he hopes the Coke ban would spread across North Carolina to use the far left’s cancel culture tactics against them.
“The left-wing in America, they defund, they boycott, they cancel, they tear down statues — all sorts of egregious actions,” Eddie Harris, a county commissioner, told WXII.
“The expectation from them is the opposing political side will cower in the corner and we’re supposed to accept that and it’s supposed to be OK. And it’s not OK.”
Coca-Cola
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