from Bruce
Anecdotes
Money
• Competitive figure skating can be expensive. In 1995, Rudy Galindo retired from competitive figure skating because he didn’t have enough money to pay for training. However, the 1996 United States Championships were being held in his hometown of San Jose, California, so he entered. Smart move. Despite being an underdog, he won the gold medal and became THE story of the championships. His victory led to a career as a professional figure skater and lots of money for training.
• Figure skater Gary Beacom once felt that judge Kathy Casey had given him an unfairly low score at a competition, so he publicly skated over to her and handed her a dollar the next time he skated. He was satisfied with the result of his “bribe” — she gave him a higher score than she had the first time. Mr. Beacom joked, “It does seem possible to bribe the judges, even in broad daylight.”
• Figure skater Rosalynn Sumners had a tendency to put on weight. When she was skating for Disney, her contract required her to be weighed each week, and if she was three pounds over a certain weight, Disney fined her $10. After a while, Ms. Sumners began to stand on the scales each week with a $10 bill in her hand.
• Being a competitive figure skater can be expensive. Until 1995, Michelle Kwan wore only used skates, partly because they were more comfortable and partly because they were cheaper. In fact, her father sold their house and moved his family in with Michelle’s grandparents so he could raise money for her training.
• Winning a championship in the modern Olympic Games means a great deal, and it meant a great deal in the ancient world. For example, for the rest of their lives ancient Olympic champions did not have to pay taxes!
Mothers
• When Carol Heiss was a little girl, her ice skating teacher urged her parents to hire a professional coach for her. However, coaching is expensive, and Mr. Heiss’ salary was enough only to support his family. Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Heiss asked the teacher how good their daughter could be with the best coaching. The teacher replied, “We believe that if she studies hard, in ten years she can be the champion of the world.” Immediately, Mrs. Heiss began working at a part-time job. Carol did study hard, and Mrs. Heiss saw Carol win her first world championship. (Carol went on to win four more world championships.) Unfortunately, Mrs. Heiss died of cancer shortly before Carol won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics. When the medal was given to Carol, she whispered, “It’s for you, Mother. I promised.”
• Tiger Woods’ mother, Kultida, wanted her son to grow up to be a good sportsman. She once made Tiger watch tennis brat John McEnroe on television. When Mr. McEnroe argued a call that an official had made, she told Tiger, “See that? Never that! I don’t like that. I will not have my reputation as a parent ruined by that.” At a golf tournament, Tiger hit a bad shot and angrily hit his golf bag with his club. His mother immediately reported him to the tournament director and demanded that he be penalized two strokes. When Tiger complained, she said, “Who made the bad shot? Whose fault? You want to hit something? Hit yourself in the head!”
• When world-class figure skater Tiffany Chin was eight years old, she received a gift from her mother — her very first pair of skates, which cost $1 at a garage sale. Tiffany was very happy to receive the slightly used skates, but of course, she didn’t look like a world-class figure skater her first time on the ice. Instead, she did what everyone does the first time they try to skate — she fell down. Later, of course, she improved dramatically. In 1985, she was the United States Ladies National Champion, and in 1985 and 1986, she was the World Bronze Medalist.
• In 1986, Lyn St. James was involved in a crash while racing in California at the Riverside International Raceway. Her car was bumped by another car, then her car sped out of control and several other cars hit it. As her car burst into flames, Ms. St. James crawled out, then walked to a telephone. The race was being televised, and she knew her mother would be worried about her, so she called immediately to say that she was all right.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Buy
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Buy the Paperback
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Kindle
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Apple
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Barnes and Noble
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Kobo
The Funniest People in Sports: 250 Anecdotes — Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PFD
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: "Stay Inside"
Album: DARK AND DEEP
Artist: Mike Stapleton
Artist Location: Wells, Maine
Info: All songs by Mike Stapleton
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $5 (USD) for 15-track album
Genre: Folk.
Links:
DARK AND DEEP
Mike Stapleton on Bandcamp
Mile Stapleton 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
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Gas was $4.05/gal at the no-name, cash preferred gas station. Dime a gallon more for credit.
Postal Stamp
Alaska
Alaska Native artist Rico Worl said he jumped at the chance to create for the U.S. Postal Service a stamp he hopes will be a gateway for people to learn about his Tlingit culture.
A ceremony marking the release of Worl’s Raven Story stamp was held Friday in Juneau, where Worl lives.
Worl said his Twitter following exploded from five to more than 8,000 after he shared the Postal Service’s tweet highlighting the stamp announcement earlier this month, with his own quote tweet adding: “I did a thing.”
Raven, a trickster or transformer, is a key figure in Tlingit culture. Worl described as an influence for the stamp a story in which Raven discovers that a clan leader had in his possession the sun, moon and stars. Raven assumed human form to share those items with the world. The stars were in the last box Raven opened.
In a statement, Worl said he wanted to showcase “a bit of drama,” with Raven trying to hold onto as many stars as possible while transforming back into bird form during a frenzied escape.
Alaska
Agent Slams Di$ney
Scarlett Johansson
CAA co-chairman and Scarlett Johansson’s agent Bryan Lourd issued a statement Friday in response to Disney’s harsh slam against the Black Widow actress in her breach of contact lawsuit versus the Burbank studio.
On Thursday, Disney shamed the two-time Oscar nominee by saying her lawsuit showed “callous disregard” for the pandemic — the latter of which has been the studio’s excuse for taking Black Widow day-and-date in theaters on and Disney+ Premier. Disney also outed her $20 million salary for the film, which it claims that coupled with the Disney+ monies of the MCU title “significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation.”
In addition to CAA, Johansson is getting support from other celebrities, who pounced on media conglomerate for making an issue of her pay when its own executives are so highly compensated. Alex Baldwin tweeted, “Remarkable to read Disney execs bashing SJ over large salaries…”
The actress’ contract with Disney called for a wide theatrical release, much like other MCU movies. Reports have it that Johansson lost more than $50M in Disney’s dynamic window experiment, which yielded a first-weekend global PVOD and theatrical weekend for Black Widow of $218M. Black Widow will be lucky to hit $350M worldwide at the box office, a low gross for an MCU title, which typically churns out of late over $1 billion. The National Association of Theatre Owners slammed Disney during the pic’s second weekend for moving PVOD money forward. All of this means in the end that Black Widow will make less money in its total revenue life cycle. Universal’s F9, which has respected the theatrical window, looks to do double what Black Widow does at the global box office.
“It’s no secret that Disney is releasing films like Black Widow directly onto Disney+ to increase subscribers and thereby boost the company’s stock price – and that it’s hiding behind Covid-19 as a pretext to do so,” Johansson’s attorney, John Berlinski of Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, said in a statement Thursday. “But ignoring the contracts of the artists responsible for the success of its films in furtherance of this short-sighted strategy violates their rights and we look forward to proving as much in court. This will surely not be the last case where Hollywood talent stands up to Disney and makes it clear that, whatever the company may pretend, it has a legal obligation to honor its contracts.”
Scarlett Johansson
Prevails In Lawsuit
Bob Dylan
The estate for Jacques Levy, co-writer of much of Bob Dylan’s 1976 “Desire” album, was handed a defeat Friday in a lawsuit against Dylan and Universal Music Group that hoped to establish co-ownership of the songs the late collaborator had a hand in.
“We’re pleased with today’s decision,” Dylan’s attorney, Orin Snyder, said in a statement Friday. “As we said when the case was filed, this lawsuit was a sad attempt to profit off the recent catalog sale. We’re glad it’s now over.”
Levy’s widow, Claudia Levy, filed the suit in January after Dylan sold his publishing catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group in December, contending that the estate should received a portion of Dylan’s overall haul from the reported $300 million sale, commensurate with the 10 songs in the catalog that Jacques Levy had a hand in.
Judge Barry Ostrager of the Supreme Court of New York agreed with Dylan and UMG’s lawyers that the agreement drafted between Dylan and Levy in 1975 made it clear that he was not a participant in ownership of the material, and that his profit participation would consist of a share of songwriting royalties.
Levy died in 2004. His multi-leveled career included being a practicing psychologist, avant-garde theater director and playwright. He also was said to be instrumental in the creation and direction of Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, although the suit complained that he was never properly billed at the time and was unfairly not even mentioned in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary about the tour. The judge did not comment on that argument.
Bob Dylan
National Film Institute
Brazil
A government warehouse storing movies, documents and antique projectors from Brazil’s film industry caught fire Thursday night in Sao Paulo.
The fire department said 15 fire vehicles and 50 firefighters were at the site trying to prevent the flames from spreading to a larger area of the building.
The warehouse is owned by the national film institute, Cinemateca, and houses South America’s largest collection of films, some made of cellulose nitrate, a highly flammable material. The films in the warehouse were copies for exhibition, not originals, and the extent of the loss wasn’t immediately clear.
Two other beloved Brazilian cultural institutions have suffered similar fates in recent years.
The National Museum in Rio de Janeiro had most of its structure destroyed by fire in 2018 along with much of its more than 20 million items. It is scheduled to reopen next year. In 2015, the Museum of Portuguese Language, also in Sao Paulo, went up in flames. Its reopening is scheduled for Sunday.
Brazil
January 6
'Pussies'
Former President Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) has in private conversations been calling some of the police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 "pussies," The Daily Beast reported.
More than 200 officers with the US Capitol Police and Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department were injured as a result of clashes with pro-Trump supporters on January 6, police and union officials have said.
In the months since the insurrection, multiple officers have recounted their horror and accused Trump of lying about the nature of the riot.
But according to sources who spoke with The Daily Beast, Trump believes a number of officers who worked that day were weak, and called them "pussies."
The former president has on occasion expressed pity for some officers who worked that day, but has also said that he believes the events of January 6 "broke" several officers because they weren't tough enough, The Daily Beast reported.
'Pussies'
'Massive' Ice Melt
Greenland
With climate change fueling high temperatures across the Arctic, Greenland lost a massive amount of ice on Wednesday with enough melting to cover the U.S. state of Florida in 2 inches (5.1 cm) of water, scientists said.
It was the third-biggest ice loss for Greenland in a single day since 1950. The other two records, also within the last decade, happened in 2012 and 2019.
The rapid melt followed warm air being trapped over the Arctic island by a change in atmospheric circulation patterns, scientists said, noting that there could be more ice lost.
On Wednesday alone, some 22 gigatonnes of ice melted - with 12 gigatonnes flowing to the ocean and 10 gigatonnes absorbed by the snowpack where it can refreeze, said Xavier Fettweis, a climate scientist at the University of Liege in Belgium.
Polar Portal, a group of Danish Arctic research institutions, described it in a tweet as a "massive melting event." While that volume was less than the record single-day ice melt in 2019, this week’s event covered a larger area, the group said.
Greenland
Covid Surge Driven By White, Affluent Neighborhoods
Los Angeles
Covid cases continued to rise in Los Angeles County on Thursday, albeit more slowly. The raw number of daily cases rose 17% in the past week, to 3,248. That’s roughly half of the 7,458 cases recorded in California on Thursday, even though Los Angeles County’s population accounts for only roughly 25% of the state’s residents.
Driving this rise, according to Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, have been more affluent communities on the West Side including Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Beverly Crest, Venice, Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Encino. The winter surge was driven by higher case rates in Central L.A. See map below.
L.A.’s average daily case rate had risen to 15.7 per 100,000, according to Public Health Data. That rise, according to County officials has been driven chiefly by a more than fivefold rise in case rates among white residents of L.A., from 18 per 100,000 on June 19 to 83 per 100,000 on July 17. That’s compared with a fourfold increase among the county’s Black and Asian populations and a nearly threefold increase among Latino residents.
“White residents — who have traditionally experienced lower case rates than LatinX and Asian residents — are now second (in raw case rate) only to Black residents,” said Ferrer.
According to Ferrer, the increase in more affluent areas of the city is being driven by a younger, less-vaccinated population. “Transmission in these neighborhoods is mostly being spread among young adults,” she said, before speculating on other factors behind the increase. She ventured that these are “people with resources who can now go out and about more,” to restaurants, social gatherings or large parties, even if they are not vaccinated.
Los Angeles
Live To 100
Bacteria
People who live to age 100 and beyond may have special gut bacteria that help ward off infections, according to a new study from Japan.
The results suggest that these bacteria, and the specific compounds they produce — known as "secondary bile acids" — could contribute to a healthy gut and, in turn, healthy aging.
Still, much more research is needed to know whether these bacteria promote exceptionally long life spans. The current findings, published Thursday (July 29) in the journal Nature, only show an association between these gut bacteria and living past 100; they don't prove that these bacteria caused people to live longer, said study senior author Dr. Kenya Honda, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo.
The community of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the gut, known as the gut microbiome, is known to play a role in our health and changes as we age. For example, having less diversity in the types of gut bacteria has been linked with frailty in older adults. But researchers suspected that people who reach age 100 may have special gut bacteria that contribute to good health. Indeed, centenarians tend to be at lower risk of chronic diseases and infections compared with older adults who don't reach this milestone.
In the new study, the researchers examined the gut microbiota of 160 centenarians, who were, on average, 107 years old. They compared the centenarians' gut microbiota to those of 112 people ages 85 to 89, and 47 people ages 21 to 55.
Bacteria
Scientists Transform
Water
In a mind-mending experiment, scientists transformed purified water into metal for a few fleeting seconds, thus allowing the liquid to conduct electricity.
Unfiltered water can already conduct electricity — meaning negatively charged electrons can easily flow between its molecules — because unfiltered water contains salts, according to a statement about the new study. However, purified water contains only water molecules, whose outermost electrons remain bound to their designated atoms, and thus, they can't flow freely through the water.
Theoretically, if one applied enough pressure to pure water, the water molecules would squish together and their valence shells, the outermost ring of electrons surrounding each atom, would overlap. This would allow the electrons to flow freely between each molecule and would technically turn the water into a metal.
The problem is that, to squash water into this metallic state, one would need 15 million atmospheres of pressure (about 220 million psi), study author Pavel Jungwirth, a physical chemist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, told Nature News & Comment. For this reason, geophysicists suspect that such water-turned-metal might exist in the cores of huge planets like Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, according to Nature News.
But Jungwirth and his colleagues wondered whether they could turn water into metal through different means, without creating the ridiculous pressures found in Jupiter's core. They decided to use alkali metals, which include elements like sodium and potassium and hold only one electron in their valence shells. Alkali metals tend to "donate" this electron to other atoms when forming chemical bonds, because the "loss" of that lone electron makes the alkali metal more stable.
Water
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
