from Bruce
Anecdotes
Preachers
• Woodrow Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister who was paid by his congregation for preaching. One day, a friend said to Reverend Wilson, “Your horse looks very well, Reverend Wilson. Much better than you do.” Yes,” Reverend Wilson agreed. “You see, I keep my horse, but I am kept by my congregation.”
• A preacher was more than ordinarily long winded during his Sunday sermon. One bored parishioner asked another, “What follows the sermon?” The answer came back: “Wednesday.”
Prejudice
• Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach once invited a woman named Chaya Adler in his congregation to go with him to visit a Hasidic man. She tried to beg off, saying that her skirt was too short to be seen in a Hasidic community and that the men there might be shocked, but Rabbi Shlomo insisted that she accompany him. While there, Rabbi Shlomo introduced her to everyone, saying, “Everybody should meet my sweetest friend, holy sister Chaya. Do you know that she is an outstanding scholar and learns Hasidic thought brilliantly?” The Hasids were all pleased to learn from speaking to her that she was studying the thought of the Ishbitzer Rebbe. Later, Ms. Adler thought about the visit, and she realized that Rabbi Shlomo was breaking the barrier of stereotypes that both she and the Hasidic men had. She says, “On that day, both they and I learned a valuable lesson: to suspend judgment and look beyond dress and appearance for the divine spark that resides in each soul.”
• When John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, ran for President, he was frequently asked if a Catholic could become President. In part, people were worried that a Catholic President would have divided loyalties — to the Pope and to the United States. In reply to the question when asked by a high school student, Mr. Kennedy pointed out that he had pledged his loyalty to the United States when he entered the U.S. Navy, when he became a U.S. Representative, and when he became a U.S. Senator: “If I was qualified to serve my country in those other capacities, I am qualified to serve it as President.” He added, “No one asked my brother Joe [a pilot who died in action in World War II] if he had divided loyalties when he volunteered and died for his country.”
• On January 1, 1965, the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) held a dance in San Francisco. Before the dance, the religious ministers and gay members of the organization let the police know about the dance, thinking that the information — and the sponsorship by religious leaders — would prevent the police from disrupting the dance. No such luck. The police showed up and arrested several gay men and lesbians, and a police officer even told a minister, “If you’re not willing to enforce God’s law, we will.” The arrests resulted in massive negative publicity for the police department, and a judge dismissed all charges against the gay men and lesbians.
• When country comedian Jerry Clower was 12 years old, he was confused and bothered by some of the racist things that happened in his home state of Mississippi. One night, a black man was beaten, and the following Sunday, young Jerry asked in his Sunday School class, “What about the beating they gave the man last night?” His teacher told him, “Don’t you ever bring that up in this church again. There are just some things that you don’t discuss.” Once young Jerry became a Christian, he knew that he couldn’t be prejudiced and be a “maximum Christian,” so he overcame his prejudice toward blacks and sought to love everybody.
• Long ago, a man with an Eastern European accent wanted to rent an apartment in a building managed by an anti-Semite. The manager noticed the man’s heavy accent and said, “We don’t rent to Jews.” The man replied, “I’m a Christian.” The manager didn’t believe him, so he decided to test him. The manager asked, “Who is our Lord?” The man replied, “Jesus Christ.” The manager asked, “What was his mother’s name?” The man replied, “Mary.” The manager asked, “Where was he born?” The man replied, “In a stable in Bethlehem.” The manager asked, “Why was he born in a stable?” Fed up, the man replied, “Because bigots like you wouldn’t rent apartments to Jews.”
***
© 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: "The Bottom"
Album: THE PARTY’S OVER
Artist: Emily Moment
Artist Location: London, UK
Info:
“An American songwriter living in London, Emily Moment spent much of the 2010s championing Americana music in the UK — not only as a member of acclaimed bands like The Savannahs (featured on BBC One and BBC Radio 4) and Mahoney & The Moment, but also as one of the organizers behind the long-running concert series Chalk Farm Folk. Her solo debut, THE PARTY'S OVER, is an album about coping with life's physical and mental struggles when it seems as though things can't possibly get any harder. Glide Magazine has called Moment’s music ‘achingly beautiful … reminiscent of many a spectral songwriter including Emmylou Harris.’”
Price: £1(GBP) for track; £9 (GBP) 12-track album
Price: £1(GBP) for track; £9 (GBP) 12-track album
Genre: Alternative Country.
Links:
THE PARTY’S OVER
Emily Moment on Bandcamp
Emily Moment Official Site
Emily Moment on YouTube
Other Links:
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 Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
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We are all only temporarily able bodied.
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In The Chaos Household
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End Remote Audio Broadcasts
L.A. Courts
After recordings of the remote audio from Britney Spears’ blistering 24-minute statement during her June 23 conservatorship hearing began circulating widely over the web, Los Angeles County courts have decided to end their remote audio attendance program completely. Despite warnings on the web page of the audio broadcast, which was open only to involved parties and the media, and from Judge Brenda Penny, recordings were readily available just minutes after her statement was broadcast; Penny shut down the remote audio shortly after Spears had made her statement.
No recordings of court hearings are allowed without written advance permission from the judge, according to state and local policies. The 2019 California Rules of Court read: “Any violation of this rule or an order made under this rule is an unlawful interference with the proceedings of the court and may be the basis for an order terminating media coverage, a citation for contempt of court, or an order imposing monetary or other sanctions as provided by law.”
Asked for comment, L.A. County Superior Court Communications Director Ann E. Donlan told the Hollywood Reporter: “Parties who publish unauthorized recordings of court proceedings in violation of a court order are subject to sanctions and other potential liability pursuant to California Code of Civil Procedure section 1209 and other applicable law.”
The day after the hearing, the court announced that the program, which was launched last year in response to the pandemic, would be shut down on Monday of this week.
“Effective June 28, the Court will no longer offer the Remote Audio Attendance Program (RAAP) to listen remotely to courtroom proceedings,” it reads. “The Court implemented this temporary program during the pandemic recognizing there may be abuses of the Court’s orders prohibiting recording, filming, and distribution of proceedings. Widespread breaches by the public in a recent court proceeding highlighted the need to return to in person, open courtroom proceedings, which is a welcome development.”
L.A. Courts
Ploy Backfires
Taylor Swift
A California police officer played Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” in an attempt to prevent a Black Lives Matter activist from uploading a video to YouTube — in the belief that the platform’s copyright-detection system would block it.
In fact, the video in question was not only shared successfully on YouTube, it has gone viral — garnering widespread attention because of the controversy.
On June 29, BLM protesters gathered at the Alameda Country courthouse in Oakland, Calif., before a pretrial hearing for Jason Fletcher, a former police officer charged with murdering Steven Taylor, a Black man, inside a Walmart store in 2020.
As captured on video, an officer from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office confronted one of the protestors, James Burch of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), to demand Burch remove his group’s banner. Burch questioned why the banner needed to be moved — before the cop takes out his mobile phone and starts playing the Swift song.
Burch, confused, says, “Are we having a dance party now?” The officer eventually admits, “You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.” Later, the officer, identified as Sgt. David Shelby, reiterates to Burch, “I’m playing my music so that you can’t post on YouTube.”
Taylor Swift
Bruce Lee's Daughter
Shannon Lee
Shannon Lee hit back Friday after director Quentin Tarantino doubled down on his controversial depiction of her father, martial arts icon Bruce Lee, in his 2019 film “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”
In a guest column in the Hollywood Reporter, Shannon Lee wrote that she is “really f------ tired of white men in Hollywood trying to tell me who Bruce Lee was” after Tarantino said on the “Joe Rogan Experience” that while he understands her previous criticism, others who took issue with his interpretation of the legend can “suck a d---.” Tarantino’s depiction was slammed for showing Bruce Lee as an arrogant figure who lost a fight against aging stuntman Cliff Booth.
“While I am grateful that Mr. Tarantino has so generously acknowledged to Joe Rogan that I may have my feelings about his portrayal of my father, I am also grateful for the opportunity to express this: I’m really f------ tired of white men in Hollywood trying to tell me who Bruce Lee was,” Lee wrote.
She added: “I’m tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that he was arrogant and an asshole when they have no idea and cannot fathom what it might have taken to get work in 1960s and ’70s Hollywood as a Chinese man with (God forbid) an accent, or to try to express an opinion on a set as a perceived foreigner and person of color.”
In his interview with Rogan, Tarantino claimed that Bruce Lee had “nothing but disrespect for stuntmen” while on the set of the TV show “The Green Hornet,” citing Matthew Polly’s book, “Bruce Lee: A Life.” But Polly denied his book conveyed such a message, tweeting that Lee was not disrespectful, but rather had a different “fight choreography philosophy and style” and had aimed to change American flight choreography “so that the blows would miss by millimeters rather than by feet” and banged up some stuntmen in the process.
Shannon Lee
Series Pulled After Giardia Outbreak
‘Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide’
Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide, NBC’s new reality competition series that scored the plum post-Olympics slot for its premiere, has been pulled from the schedule, sources close to the production confirmed to Deadline. The move comes a month after the show’s producer, Universal Television Alternative Studio, paused production due to an outbreak of giardia, an intestinal infection, among staff.
The show was to premiere over two nights: Sunday, August 8 at 10:30 pm ET / 7:30 pm PT, immediately following the Closing Ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, and Monday, August 9 at 8 pm ET/PT. Production remains on hold, and there are no plans for a new premiere date at this point, a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline. NBC would not comment.
There was one week of scheduled production left when filming was halted on June 2 after it was learned that a crew member had tested positive for giardia. Additional testing results received on June 10 revealed giardia in the surrounding area, and the studio announced that they would not be shooting the series at the current site moving forward.
We hear the studio is considering a few options for finishing the season that it will share with NBC next week.
Hosted by SNL alum Bobby Moynihan and Ron Funches (The Goldbergs, Black-ish), Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide is a reality competition take on Wham-O’s iconic 1960s outdoor game, in which contestants compete in a series of challenges on the gigantic slippery slide including Human Pong, Body Bowling, Cornhole, Bocce Fall and more. The two teams that make it to the final challenge will take on the Big Slipper, a colossal multi-part slide, to determine who earns the Slip ‘N Slide champion title, along with the cash prize.
‘Ultimate Slip ‘N Slide’
Roberts Court
SCOTUS
The Supreme Court took a big step towards oligarchy on Thursday with Americans for Prosperity Foundation vs. Bonta, a 6-3 decision that invalidated a California law requiring charities to report their major donors to the state government. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent with the other two liberals.
The important impact of this decision is not what it will do in California so much as the precedent it sets. It almost certainly lays the groundwork for further challenges to political donor disclosure requirements in all circumstances. Previous conservative rulings opened a floodgate of bribery and corruption in politics, and now the court will prevent the American people from being able to find out who is buying the government.
Previously, the court had supported this kind of disclosure requirement. In 2010, Citizens United vs. FEC abolished limits on independent political spending by corporations and political committees, but still upheld disclosure requirements for super PACs. The decision created a tsunami of political bribery and corruption and, when combined with several other rulings that made it nearly impossible to prosecute politicians for corruption (like former Republican governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell), means that today rich people and corporations can buy legislators "over the counter like so many pounds of cheese."
In Americans for Prosperity Foundation (which was was brought by a bunch of right-wing advocacy groups), Roberts holds that the disclosure requirement is facially invalid — a sweeping phrase meaning it is always unconstitutional — and argues that the requirement is necessarily a burden on First Amendment rights of association. As such, it must be "narrowly tailored" to a government interest, he says, which California supposedly didn't do. Though he points to some instances in which donors had been harassed or threatened, his argument does not require anyone to actually demonstrate a real burden. It would therefore be virtually impossible for California to rewrite its disclosure law to comply.
It's not hard to see what is going on here: Laws that mandate disclosure of other political contributions are going down. As Sotomayor notes in her dissent, "Today's analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull's-eye. Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment 'privacy concerns.'" (I would guess that public records of personal donations to individual candidates will stay put, since oligarchs typically prefer to funnel their spending through committees and nonprofits).
SCOTUS
Amery Ice Shelf
Antarctic Lake
A huge lake on the east coast of Antarctica has disappeared, causing 200 billion gallons of water to vanish without a trace.
In the winter of 2019 on the Amery Ice Shelf, the third-largest ice shelf on the continent, around 21 billion to 26 billion cubic feet (600 million to 750 million cubic meters) drained really quickly into the ocean. The lake’s disappearing act was noticed the following summer when scientists were looking at satellite photos of the region. The findings are chronicled in a new study.
“We believe a large crack opened briefly in the floating ice shelf and drained the entire lake into the ocean within three days,” Roland Warner, a scientist at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania who first spotted the major drainage on satellite imagery, said in a release. “The lake held more water than Sydney Harbor and the flow into the ocean beneath would have been like the flow over Niagara Falls, so it would have been an impressive sight.”
In the paper published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, Warner and his coauthors found that the sudden drainage may have been caused by meltwater in the ice. They theorize that there was meltwater stored underneath the deep, ice-covered lake, which put pressure on the ice shelf and caused a crack to open that sent the water right to the ocean, in a process known as hydrofracturing. The drained lake left a huge depression in the ice—around 4.24 square miles (11 square kilometers)—which quickly began to fill with meltwater again last summer.
Meltwater has been responsible for collapse and drainage on smaller ice shelves throughout the continent. But the Amery Shelf is around 4,593 feet (1,400 meters) thick, and this happened in the middle of winter. That makes this event pretty unusual. (Similarly leaky lakes have appeared in recent winters on the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet thousands of miles away in the Arctic as well.)
Antarctic Lake
Hawking Prediction Finally Observed
Black Holes
Gravitational wave astronomy has just given us another amazing gift: the first observational confirmation of one of Stephen Hawking's predictions about black holes.
An analysis of the very first gravitational wave detection made back in 2015, GW150914, has confirmed Hawking's area theorem. It states that, under classical physics, the area of the event horizon of a black hole can only grow larger - never smaller.
The work gives us a new tool for probing these mysterious objects, and testing the limits of our understanding of the Universe.
"It is possible that there's a zoo of different compact objects, and while some of them are the black holes that follow Einstein and Hawking's laws, others may be slightly different beasts," said astrophysicist Maximiliano Isi of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Hawking first proposed his theorem back in 1971. It predicted that the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole should never decrease, but only increase.
Black Holes
Ohio State University
“The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons”
In a 1970 Beetle Bailey comic strip, the character known as Sarge berates his uniform-wearing dog, Otto, for a paperwork mistake.
“Think, Otto, think!!” Sarge says.
“We can’t all be Snoopy,” a dejected Otto replies.
This confluence of two iconic comic strip dogs is on exhibit along with dozens of other images at the world’s largest cartoon museum as part of a new presentation of the history of canines in the world of cartooning.
“The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons” at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is running through October.
“The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons”
First-Known Case
Vertically Broken
In a wince-inducing new medical case study, doctors detail the first known person to have their penis broken vertically during sex. Excuse the bad analogies, but instead of the penis fracturing horizontally, a bit like the snapping of a twig, it somehow managed to splinter vertically from top to bottom.
Fortunately, the man managed to recover and his doctors say he’ll live to have sex again (although, understandably, sex was off the table for the 6 months following the injury).
As reported in the British Medical Journal Case Reports, urologists in the UK reported the case of a 40-year-old man who turned up to the emergency room complaining his penis had "buckled against his partner’s perineum", the space between the anus and the genitals, during sex.
It appears this is the first time doctors have ever come across this vertical penile fracture. While they only have this one-off case to go by, the study authors speculate that vertical fracture is not associated with the classical features of a penile fracture, namely the “popping” sensation, discoloration of the penis, and swelling.
Rest assured, penile fractures are relatively rare, thought to affect some 1 per 175,000 people per year, according to some estimates. The injury appears to be most common in men in their 40s. Typically, patients will present with a deeply bruised, swollen penis that looks like an eggplant. It also commonly causes the penis to bend to one side. If it's not operated on within 24 hours then people are put at much of higher risk of erectile dysfunction, as well as an excessively curved penis.
Vertically Broken
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