• Music critic and scholar Chadwick Jenkins remembers being required to take his choice of music classes when he was in high school. He signed up for chorus, but quickly the teacher wanted him to drop the class - and offered him $50 to do just that. According to Mr. Jenkins, the teacher "said that the sum was a substantial portion of his yearly income but that it was worth it just so he could sleep at night."
• The Raconteurs have a reputation for producing rock 'n' roll alchemy. Although they were selling records in 2008, they also made money in other ways than playing music. During their tours, they both played live music and sold their own homemade elixirs. What kind of elixirs? One elixir is intended to put hair on your chest; another elixir is intended to remove the hair on your chest.
Mothers
• Vince Clarke, a former member of the bands Depeche Mode and Erasure, occasionally gets together with Alison Moyet to tour as the duo Yas, aka Yazoo. He is very popular with gays although he is straight with a wife and a son. In fact, he is so popular with gays that the gay magazine The Advocate asked him whether he had to "frequently come out of the closet as straight." Mr. Clarke replied, "My Mum was surprised, actually. When I phoned her to tell her I'd just gotten married, she didn't believe me. It was a good half-hour conversation of 'No, Mum, I really did just get married.'"
• The New Kids on the Block have their fans. Writer David Wild once stayed in a hotel on the same floor that the boy band was staying on. Each time he turned on his light, teenaged female fans outside the hotel screamed. But what really impressed him about the fame of the New Kids on the Block was that lots of hot mothers offered him sexual favors for his All-Access Backstage Pass. He blogged, "For the record - and for my wife who might be reading this - I adamantly refused these propositions for reasons that are not entirely clear to me today."
• Sam Endicott, the frontman/bass player of the Bravery, an indie-rock band, learned about ethics from his mother when he was very young. He took a grape out of a grocery store without paying for it and ate it. His mother found out, and, Mr. Endicott remembers, "My mom made me go back and tell the cashier lady what I'd done. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. I've never stolen since."
Names
• When the Replacements performed at their first concert, they were supposed to be known as the Impediments. However, their first concert was in the basement of a Presbyterian church, and the promoter thought that the name the Impediments was not very Presbyterian and that it sounded anti-people with handicaps. Forced to pick a replacement name very quickly, they very quickly named themselves the Replacements. Of course, the band had nicknames as well. At times, members of the band were so drunk that they could barely perform. At those times, they called themselves the Placemats, or more simply, the 'Mats. Once, in Portland, the 'Mats wore their own clothing on stage - and over their own clothing, they wore the clothing of the opening act.
Draughts (British English) or checkers (American English) is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Draughts developed from alquerque. The name derives from the verb to draw or to move.
The most popular forms are English draughts, also called American checkers, played on an 8×8 checkerboard; Russian draughts, also played on an 8×8, and international draughts, played on a 10×10 board. There are many other variants played on 8×8 boards. Canadian checkers and Singaporean/Malaysian checkers (also locally known as dum) are played on a 12×12 board.
Source
Billy in Cypress U$A was first, and correct, with:
Checkers
Jim from CA, retired to ID, wrote:
happy 4th of July........Checkers
Dave in Tucson said:
Ummmm, darts?
Deborah, the Master Gardener, answered:
I was thinking backgammon, but you didn't mention dice, so maybe checkers?
The last 3 days have been pleasantly cool and enjoyable. Real tired of the fireworks, though. Nothing like being woken up in the wee hours by 3 barking dogs, freaking out over bangs and pops. And it's still just the 3rd.
Michelle in AZ responded:
Darts
Kevin in Washington DC , wrote:
Well, I don't know anything about "strategy games", being an innocent man, but you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.
Nixon with his dog, Checkers.
Dave said:
Checkers. Versions of the game have been played for thousands of years.
Daniel in The City answered:
Checkers
mj replied:
Obviously beyond
The Toddler-in-Chief's skill set, checkers.
Roy, the socially distant snowflake in Tyler, TX responded:
Happy 4th of July Eve! Those British folks have to fancy up everything! Draughts is what they call the fabled game of Checkers. Fun to play after a few draught beers.
Stephen F took the day off.
DJ Useo took the day off.
Rosemary in Columbus took the day off.
Micki took the day off.
David of Moon Valley took the day off.
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame took the day off.
Harry M. took the day off.
Jon L took the day off.
Ed K took the day off.
Saskplanner took the day off.
Doug in Albuquerquem New Mexico, took the day off.
Joe ( -- Vote Blue, No Matter Who -- ) Hi Joe! Gateway Mike took the day off.
Steve in Wonderful Sacramento, CA, took the day off.
Gary K took the day off.
Leo in Boise took the day off.
PGW. 94087 took the day off.
MarilynofTC took the day off.
George M. took the day off.
Paul of Seattle took the day off.
Peter W took the day off.
Brian S. took the day off.
Gene took the day off.
Tony K. took the day off.
Noel S. took the day off.
James of Alhambra took the day off.
BttbBob has returned to semi-retired status.
~~~~~
Artist Location: The Hi-Tide Record Company is located in New Jersey.
Info: "Hi-Tide presents two sleazy instrumentals - remotely written & recorded by members of The Swingin' Palms, Black Flamingos & Plato Zorba! No cover, two-drink minimum."
"Hi-Tide Recordings is an international record label based in New Jersey, USA. The label is owned & operated by husband-and-wife team Vincent Minervino & Magdalena O'Connell - renowned DJ duo and producers of the Hi-Tide Summer Holiday."
Price: $1 (USD) for single; $2 (USD) for both tracks
And now we're seeing reports that Donald Trump will refuse to attend the inauguration in January if he loses the election. Could this day get any better?
CBS begins the night with a RERUN'SEAL Team', followed by '48 Hours'.
NBC fills the night with the 'Macy's 4th Of July Fireworks Spectacular'.
Of course, 'SNL' is a RERUN with Scarlett Johansson hosting, music by Niall Horan.
ABC starts the night with a RERUN'America's So-Called Funniest Home Videos', followed by a RERUN'Shark Tank', then a RERUN'The Good Doctor'.
The CW here fills the night with local crap.
Faux has a RERUN'Celebrity Watch Party', followed by a RERUN'Ultimate Tag'.
MY recycles an old 'Major Crimes', followed by another old 'Major Crimes'.
A&E has 'Mobsters', 'Gotti: Godfather & Son', and another 'Gotti: Godfather & Son'.
AMC offers the movie 'Independence Day', followed by the movie 'Independence Day', again.
BBC -
[6:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Melt
[7:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Migration
[8:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Tide
[9:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Flood
[10:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Feast
[11:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Salmon Run
[12:00PM] SEASONAL WONDERLANDS - Extended
[1:00PM] SEVEN WORLDS, ONE PLANET - North America: Extended
[2:00PM] WILD ALASKA - Spring
[3:00PM] WILD ALASKA - Summer
[4:00PM] WILD ALASKA - Winter
[5:00PM] PLANET EARTH: WILD WEST - Desert Heartlands
[6:00PM] PLANET EARTH: WILD WEST - Restless Shores
[7:00PM] PLANET EARTH: WILD WEST - The High Country
[8:00PM] YELLOWSTONE - Winter
[9:00PM] YELLOWSTONE - Summer
[10:00PM] YELLOWSTONE - Autumn
[11:00PM] SEVEN WORLDS, ONE PLANET - North America: Extended
[12:00AM] WILD ALASKA - Spring
[1:00AM] WILD ALASKA - Summer
[2:00AM] WILD ALASKA - Winter
[3:00AM] YELLOWSTONE - Winter
[4:00AM] YELLOWSTONE - Summer
[5:00AM] YELLOWSTONE - Autumn (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has the movie 'Home Again', followed by the movie 'Legally Blonde'.
IFC -
[10:15A] Saved by the Bell
[10:45A] Saved by the Bell
[11:15A] Saved by the Bell
[11:45A] Smokey and the Bandit II
[2:15P] Smokey and the Bandit
[4:30P] Major League
[7:00P] Old School
[9:00P] Grown Ups
[11:15P] Grandma's Boy
[1:15A] Old School
[3:15A] Major League
[5:45A] The Three Stooges - Back to the Woods (ALL TIMES EST)
Other performers expected to play include Sheryl Crow, Ziggy Marley, Steve Earle and Nelson's fellow Texas-based singers Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen and Kinky Friedman.
Some of the artists will perform at Nelson's Luck Ranch in Spicewood, northwest of Austin. Others will stream live from elsewhere.
Nelson's event started in 1972 and has been held most years since, moving around Texas and occasionally outside the Lone Star State. It typically draws thousands.
When Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this week on Fox News that Americans needed to wear face masks to protect themselves from the coronavirus, anchor Sandra Smith did not challenge him on the science. Or the policy. She did not accuse him of fearmongering, or working to undermine President Trump.
"For the most part, we do see a lot of people that are willing to engage in that good behavior," Smith said instead during the notably vitriol-free Thursday afternoon interview.
The interview followed an op-ed that the Obama-era public health expert published on the Fox News website. "The more we fight among ourselves, the more the virus divides and conquers us," Frieden wrote, alluding to the political and cultural battles that have shadowed the medical one, against a deadly pathogen. "The more people wear masks when near others, the less opportunity the virus has to spread."
Another headline on the Fox News website earlier this week posed a question laced with obvious skepticism: "Wasn't summer supposed to kill the coronavirus?" Among those who had hoped as much was the president, who suggested in April that warmer weather might defeat the pathogen, which causes a potentially deadly disease called COVID-19.
It was a remarkable turn for a news organization whose most prominent personalities have been among Trump's most trusted advisers. However haltingly and incompletely, the president's favorite news outlet has started to acknowledge, across various programs and its news site, that the coronavirus is a far graver threat than even Trump himself will acknowledge.
Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is running for his old Senate seat in Alabama, appeared to refer to a prominent Black professor at Harvard as "some criminal," while disparaging former President Barack Obama's treatment of police officers. Sessions made the remarks in a New York Times Magazine profile published online Tuesday.
In the interview, Sessions said he wanted to support law enforcement when he served as President Trump's first attorney general and that his mantra was, "Back to the men and women in blue."
"The police had been demoralized," Sessions said. "There was all the Obama - there's a riot, and he has a beer at the White House with some criminal, to listen to him. Wasn't having a beer with the police officers. So we said, 'We're on your side. We've got your back, you got our thanks.'"
This appears to be a reference to Mr. Obama's famous "beer summit" at the White House in the early months of his first term. Attendees included Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the director of Harvard University's Center for African and African American Research. Gates also hosts the PBS show "Finding Your Roots," in which he traces the genealogy of celebrities.
The summit happened in July 2009 after a highly publicized incident where Gates was arrested at his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a white police officer. Gates had been trying to open a jammed door, and a woman called the police to report it as an attempted break-in.
Denmark woke up on Friday to the words "racist fish" scrawled across the base of the "Little Mermaid", the bronze statue honouring Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairy tale that perches on a rock in the sea off a pier in Copenhagen.
Police said it had not yet identified the perpetrators. The 107-year-old sculpture, which is visited by one million tourists each year, has been vandalised before, including by anti-whaling campaigners and pro-democracy activists, twice suffering decapitation.
"We consider it vandalism and have started an investigation," a spokesman for the Copenhagen police said.
The Little Mermaid has not been part of this debate but last year a Disney live action remake of the 1989 animated film of the same name was the subject of a controversy after African American actress Halle Bailey was cast in the central role.
On June 12, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did something it had not done for months: It held a press briefing.
Widely touted as the finest public health agency in the world, the CDC had been dormant since March 9, when one of its top officials held a teleconference with journalists. On that day, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the agency's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, counseled the American public to "fight the urge to buy a mask" to protect against the coronavirus.
Then came a protracted and, for many, problematic silence. CDC officials hope that is coming to an end, but a pressing question remains: Can the agency reclaim its voice while avoiding political blowback from the White House? Can it find a way to communicate valuable scientific information after three muted months during which some substantive communications from the CDC came only in the form of leaks to the press?
As the number of coronavirus cases in the United States spiked in late March and early April, the White House coronavirus task force convened almost daily before a thinned-out, socially distanced presidential press corps. The briefings became a kind of daily ritual, watched at their height by millions. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health became a national celebrity; the scarves of Dr. Deborah Birx, a leading HIV/AIDS expert at the State Department, were the subject of a "Saturday Night Live" skit.
"Public health is always political," says Curran, the former CDC official now at Emory University. "But public health should never be partisan in an epidemic."
Scientists still aren't entirely sure how the Moon formed, though plenty of hypotheses have been discussed. Now, new findings around metal deposits in lunar craters could mean we need to rethink those hypotheses again.
In short, the findings suggest there are more metals like iron and titanium in the Moon's craters than we thought there were - and that might point to a rich store of metal material just under the lunar surface.
How much metal the Moon is holding in comparison to Earth is one of the key clues astronomers have when trying to figure out how our satellite came to exist. Any adjustments in those readings can tell us more about the Moon's origins.
While the most prevalent hypothesis has been that the Moon was spun off from Earth's crust as a result of a massive collision with a third body, our planet's crust has less iron oxide in it than the Moon does - something that scientists have been trying to explain for some time.
This new research posits that there's even more metal material lurking just below the lunar surface, which wouldn't make sense if it had spun off from the relatively metal-poor Earth crust. That casts doubt on the preferred origin story.
Jules Verne sent his fictional submarine, the Nautilus, to the South Pole through a hidden ocean beneath a thick ice cap. Written 40 years before any explorer had reached the pole, his story was nevertheless only half fiction.
There are indeed hidden ocean cavities around Antarctica, and our latest research explores how the ocean circulates underneath the continent's ice shelves - large floating extensions of the ice on land that rise and fall with the tides.
These ice shelves buttress the continent's massive land-based ice cap and play an important role in the assessment of future sea level rise. Our work sheds new light on how ocean currents contribute to melting in Antarctica, which is one of the largest uncertainties in climate model predictions.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest floating slab of ice on Earth, at 480,000 square kilometers. The ocean cavity it conceals extends 700km south from Antarctica's coast and remains largely unexplored.
The only other expedition to the ocean cavity underneath the central Ross Ice Shelf goes back to the 1970s and came back with intriguing results. Despite the limited technology of the time, it showed the ocean cavity was not a static bathtub. Instead, it found fine layering of water masses, with subtly different temperatures and salinities between the layers.
A button that experts believe was from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's dress coat and a strand of hair from his horse are among the items found inside a time capsule discovered when workers removed the base of a Confederate monument from the grounds of the North Carolina state Capitol.
Workers found the time capsule while dismantling a 75-foot (23-meter) Confederate monument that stood on the state Capitol grounds for 125 years, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Thursday.
Time had taken its toll on the capsule, according to the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. There was rust on the metal box that kept the contents, which the department said were "severely damaged by the elements."
Also, the department recovered Confederate money, song books and flags and a stone believed to be from Gettysburg. The capsule also contained newspapers from across the state.
A beauty spot in Oregon has been named "Exploding Whale Memorial Park" after the infamous exploding whale incident of 1970, nearly 50 years ago.
The name was chosen in a vote that included other suggestions such as "Rolling Tides Community Park", "Dune View Park" and "Little Tree Park", according to Live Science. These were obviously always going to lose out to a name that involved a whale explosion. It wasn't even close. If you can put a whale explosion in a name, you just do.
If you're unfamiliar with the story of the exploding whale of Florence, Oregon - which also happens to be a surprisingly prescient analogy for the importance of social distancing - strap in because it's one hell of a ride.
In November 1970, an 8-ton sperm whale beached itself on the Oregon coast. The highway division took charge of the situation as it fell under their jurisdiction. They decided in their wisdom, and upon advice from the Navy (who are known for their fondness for blowing things up), to blow the whale up in order to get rid of the body, attempting to aim it towards the ocean. The theory was it would leave the smaller more digestible (and let's face it, cooked) bits of whale for smaller animals, including seagulls, to chow down on.
As you can see in the video, the explosion caused massive pieces of blubber to get blown quite some distance onto buildings, cars in parking lots, and people who had previously been minding their own business and enjoying how whale blubber wasn't currently raining down from the sky.
You have reached the Home page of BartCop Entertainment.
Do you have something to say?
Anything that increased your blood pressure, or, even better, amused or entertained?
Do you have a great album no one's heard?
How about a favorite TV show, movie, book, play, cartoon, or legal amusement?
A popular artist that just plain pisses you off?
A box set the whole world should own?
Vile, filthy rumors about Republican hypocrites?
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
