from Bruce
Anecdotes
Children
• The most dominant basketball player who ever lived is probably Bill Russell, who led the Boston Celtics to 11 NBA Championships. But even he was not that good when he started out. As a third-string center on the JV team at McClymonds High School in Oakland, CA, he suited up for only half of the games. According to Mr. Russell, “We had 15 uniforms and 16 players, so another guy and I split [the use of] the 15th uniform.”
• Kristi Yamaguchi won the gold medal in women’s ice skating at the 1992 Winter Olympic Games. She had started ice skating as a little girl for a very good reason. She was born with a clubfoot—her foot turned inward too much—and her parents felt that skating would help to straighten her legs. The skating, in combination with corrective shoes and a brace she wore at night, worked. She did not need surgery to fix the clubfoot.
• Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in men’s figure skating, was adopted. When as an infant he became a member of Dorothy and Ernie Hamilton’s family, Susan, their daughter, asked why he was so wrinkled and if they could get a different baby. Soon she learned to love her new brother, and she even had him visit her school so she could use him for her show-and-tell presentation.
• Gymnast Mary Lou Retton has very muscular legs. Of course, that is due to heredity and training, but her family joked that Mary Lou got the muscles in her legs from constantly being sent on errands by her older siblings and parents when she was young. Because she was the youngest of five children, she was constantly hearing, “Run upstairs and do that” or “Go and get me this.”
• When he was six years old, Ken Griffey, Jr., watched his father play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds. After his father struck out in a game, young Ken called out in support, “That pitcher’s got nothing.” However, after his father struck out a second time, young Ken got a laugh by calling out, “Dad, you got nothing.” (Even his father, who often batted over .300 in a season, laughed.)
• Ekaterina Gordeeva, the winner of two Olympic gold medals in pairs skating with Sergei Grinkov, started skating when she was only four years old. Despite being so young, she took skating seriously, and early in the morning, when it was time to get ready to be driven to practice, she would wake her parents and tell them, “I can’t miss it. It’s my job.”
• When figure skater Sonja Henie was five years old, she won a skating race and was awarded a small silver paper cutter. Thereafter, the paper cutter became a good-luck charm for her, and she kept it always. Ms. Henie died in 1969, but the small silver paper cutter can still be seen in a museum dedicated to her in her native Oslo, Norway.
• Amy Grossman was half of a figure skating pairs team with Robert Davenport. She has a twin sister named Karen, and the easiest way to tell them apart is by looking at a slight birthmark Amy has on her cheek. When they were youngsters, Karen sometimes drew a fake birthmark on her cheek, and they pretended to be each other.
• As a young figure skater, Dorothy Hamill was pleasantly surprised to discover that in competitions, she was called a lady, even though she was only 10 years old. Many other young girls have also been pleasantly surprised to discover that in figure-skating competitions, all females are called ladies.
• Some children have positive mental attitudes. A boy once took a baseball and a ball into his backyard. He threw the baseball into the air, swung the bat, and missed. He tried to hit the baseball a second time, and then a third, but he missed each time—so he marveled, “Gosh, what a pitcher!”
• Sometimes, people make fun of male figure skaters because they see figure skating as a female sport. This never bothered figure skater Ron Kravette because he enjoyed being the only boy in the midst of many girls. (Besides, he had a beautiful ice dance partner: Amy Webster.)
• Muriel Grossfeld competed in women’s gymnastics for the United States at the Melbourne, Rome, and Tokyo Olympic Games. As a child, she demonstrated her balancing ability by reading entire comic books while standing on her head.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. wrote:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Spies Who Surf"
Album: GRIM REAPER BEACH PARTY BLOWOUT! PART TWO: JODI'S REVENGE (SURF 2007)
Artist: Deathpod (and Philip Bosley)
Artist Location: Port Colborne, Ontario, Canada
Info: The prolific Philip Bosley has 110 releases on Bandcamp.
Philip Bosley, a member of Deathpod, does Americana music outside of Deathpod.
“‘Philip Bosley is a sarcastically witty, skillful Canadian musician who brings honest grunge country to a hardworking, urban audience so that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from Philip’s cheap therapy through musical storytelling, humor and a unique perspective that reminds us all that it’s okay to laugh at yourself.’ I’d like to think my music fills a need: Americana needs louder guitars and Grunge needs better lyrics, so this is where I step in. Back in the 80's, they would've called it Heartland Rock. Now it's Roots Rock, Alt-Country, Americana, or Canadiana. It’s a harmonious meeting place between blue collar city workers, bored suburban kids, and farmer country sensibility. Buck Owens heartache with Big Sugar guitars, Merle Haggard and Nirvana, Jason Isbell and the Melvins. James McMurtry singing for Mudhoney? Seattle Grunge meets up with Austin Roots-Country in Southern Ontario for beer and whiskey. (This bio was written before I got sober.)”
Price: $1 (CAD) for 11-track album
Genre: Surf Instrumental.
Links:
GRIM REAPER BEACH PARTY BLOWOUT! PART TWO: JODI'S REVENGE (SURF 2007)
Philip Bosley (and Deathpod) on Bandcamp
Philip Bosley 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
Runt of a possum hissed at a much larger raccoon and ran him off.
Sure do like those possums!
RERUN
FRESH
Buying Casa Bonita
‘South Park’
The creators of the irreverent animated television series “South Park” are buying Casa Bonita, a quirky restaurant in suburban Denver that was featured on the show.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in an interview with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday that they had come to an agreement with the current owners of the restaurant, which closed to diners in March 2020 as the pandemic took hold. It declared bankruptcy in the spring.
The Lakewood restaurant has been in business since 1974 but gained wider recognition when it was featured on a 2003 “South Park” episode and when the Denver Broncos announced some of their draft picks there in 2018.
The Mexican restaurant is known for its decor, which includes a pink facade and large indoor waterfall, as well as its cliff divers and skits that feature an excitable actor in a gorilla costume. But some have noted there is room for improvement.
Casa Bonita’s 85-foot-tall (26-meter-tall) pink clock tower stands out in the otherwise nondescript strip mall. The 52,000-square-foot (4,831-square-meter) restaurant can seat more than 1,000 guests. The 30-foot-tall (9-meter-tall) waterfall at the center was designed to resemble the cliffs of Acapulco.
‘South Park’
Loses ‘Rings’
New Zealand
New Zealand has long been associated with “The Lord of the Rings” but with the filming of a major new television series suddenly snatched away, the nation has become more like Mordor than the Shire for hundreds of workers.
In a major blow to the nation’s small but vibrant screen industry, Amazon Studios announced Friday it would film the second season of its original series, inspired by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, to Britain.
The move came as a blow to many in New Zealand. The production is one of the most expensive in history, with Amazon spending at least $465 million on the first season, which just finished filming in New Zealand, according to government figures.
Amazon said the as-yet untitled series takes place on Middle-earth during the Second Age, thousands of years before the events depicted in Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books and the subsequent films directed by Peter Jackson.
The move to Britain comes just four months after Amazon signed a deal with the New Zealand government to get an extra 5% rebate on top of the 20% — or $92 million — it was already claiming from New Zealand taxpayers under a screen production grant.
New Zealand
CEO Doubles Down
Di$ney
After the Walt Disney Company slipped on a banana peel and released Black Widow on streaming on the same day of its theatrical release, severely cutting into the film’s box office earnings and prompting a lawsuit from its star, Scarlett Johansson, the company’s CEO doubled down on its ability to “fairly compensate” talent regardless of film release method.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Disney boss Bob Chapek said said that the company has “entered hundreds of talent arrangements with our talent” since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, and said that, by and large, “they’ve gone very very smoothly, so we expect that that would be the case going forward.”
Although Johansson isn’t explicitly mentioned, that response certainly sounds like a refutation of the lawsuit she brought against Disney in July, which alleges that the company’s decision to debut Black Widow on Disney+ “Premiere Access” on the same day of its theatrical release had resulted in a breach of her contract, which had unambiguously tied her salary to the film’s box office performance, as well as substantial financial losses.
For the stars of major blockbusters, it’s common practice to have a stipulation in your contract that says that your earnings from the film will be contingent upon its box office success, but the advent and ubiquity of streaming has muddied those waters. As Gizmodo previously reported, a source familiar with Johansson’s contract told the Wall Street Journal that the actress stood to lose as much as $50 million from the movie, the direct result of its streaming release cutting into box office returns.
During Thursday’s call, Chapek defended the way Disney has opted to release its films throughout the pandemic, which has included traditional theatrical releases, straight-to-streaming Disney+ exclusives, and a hybrid model that combines the two. The company, he said, is “reacting to a very fluid situation in terms of the marketplace,” but he added that the current slate of films was “conceived under a time when we did not know what was going to be happening with consumer behavior three, four years later and certainly didn’t know about covid at the time.”
The comments come alongside the news that Disney+ blew analyst expectations out of the water in Q3 by netting 116 million paid subscribers—over a 100% year-over-year increase.
Di$ney
Pops To The Top
‘Field Of Dreams’
MLB’s Field of Dreams game between the White Sox and Yankees on Thursday night was magical. It included a cinematic pre-game with an on-field appearance by Kevin Costner and a battle that saw eight(!) home runs, capped by a walk-off to win the game for Chicago. The morning after may have been even more astonishing for the film’s distributor, Universal Pictures.
The game sent the 32-year-old film flying to the top of Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list in Movies & TV. In fact, it was not only No. 1, it was also No.2, No.5., No. 11 and No. 12.
The region free Blu-ray disc of the film was No. 1, up 60,800%. The basic DVD of the film clocked in next at No. 2, up a 52,772%. The multi-format Blu-ray landed at No.5, up a paltry 3,168%. See chart below.
In fact, Kevin Costner-starring movies constituted 7 of the top 12 DVDs on the list by midday Friday. The under-appreciated A Perfect World, directed Clint Eastwood rose to No. 7. For Love of the Game, with Costner and Kelly Preston made No. 9.
The game, by the way, did well too. The Iowa match won the night’s ratings battle, earning a 1.3 in the 18-49 demo and 5.16 million viewers, per fast affiliates.
‘Field Of Dreams’
Hottest Month On Record
July
Earth sizzled in July and became the hottest month in 142 years of recordkeeping, U.S. weather officials announced.
As extreme heat waves struck parts of the United States and Europe, the globe averaged 62.07 degrees (16.73 degrees Celsius) last month, beating out the previous record set in July 2016 and tied again in 2019 and 2020. the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. The margin was just .02 degrees (.01 Celsius),
The last seven Julys, from 2015 to 2021, have been the hottest seven Julys on record, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. Last month was 1.67 degrees (0.93 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average for the month.
Warming on land in western North America and in parts of Europe and Asia really drove the record-setting heat, Sanchez-Lugo said. While the worldwide temperature was barely higher than the record, what shattered it was land temperature over the Northern Hemisphere, she said.
Northern Hemisphere temperatures were a third of a degree (.19 degrees Celsius) higher than the previous record set in July 2012, which for temperature records is “a wide margin,” Sanchez-Lugo said.
July
'This Is Because Of You!'
Jan. 6
As the House select committee begins investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, one key line of inquiry will be the role Republican members of Congress played in helping set the stage for the violence.
On Friday, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., recounted how he vented his anger at Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., as the rioters stormed the Capitol and halted the certification of the Electoral College vote. In a video interview posted to Twitter by the Recount, Phillips recalled that “Rep. Gosar, from Arizona, was objecting to the Arizona slate of electors” when a Capitol Police officer “announced that we should take cover.”
Phillips said he stood up at the back of the gallery, on the second floor of the House chamber, and “at that moment, I simply shouted out at the top of my lungs, ‘This is because of you!’ I screamed it.”
Audio of Phillips’s outburst was captured on video as members led by Gosar and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had begun debating a challenge to Arizona’s 2020 election results.
“This has been brewing for four years,” Phillips said, according to a pool report, when asked about his comments after he and other lawmakers had been evacuated from the chamber as a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol. “And the collective dereliction of duty manifests itself in that moment for me.”
In the months since, Gosar has attempted to downplay the severity of the attack on the Capitol and to deflect blame for the violence away from Trump supporters. He has claimed that Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer while trying to climb through the broken window of a door to the speaker’s lobby, was “executed.” His campaign office has also promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI “might have had a hand” in carrying out the riot.
Jan. 6
Caught Plagiarizing
Snopes
Snopes, the website that advertises itself as, "the internet's definitive fact-checking resource," is facing a major plagiarism scandal: The site's CEO and cofounder, David Mikkelson, just admitted to plagiarizing dozens of Snopes articles.
That's according to a BuzzFeed News investigation that first discovered the plagiarized works. When Snopes investigated, it found a whopping 54 pieces in total that included plagiarism. That investigation remains ongoing, according to the company.
To that end, Mikkelson's publishing rights have been revoked. He remains a 50% shareholder and the company's CEO.
The plagiarized pieces were taken from major news outlets like The Guardian, and published under at least three separate bylines. Mikkelson's own name was tied to some, as was the general "Snopes Staff" byline and a pseudonym Mikkelson set up under the byline Jeff Zarronandia.
In the case of Mikkelson, the pseudonym was used, "to write about topics he knew would get him hate mail under that assumed name," a former managing editor of Snopes, Brooke Binkowski, told BuzzFeed News. "Plus it made it appear he had more staff than he had."
Snopes
500 Years Ago
Mexico City
Walking for hours through the gritty streets in the center of Mexico City, you can hear the daily urban soundtrack: Car engines, the call of the man who buys scrap metal and the handbells that announce the passing of a garbage truck.
It’s hard to imagine that some of these streets trace the outline of what was, five centuries ago, Tenochtitlan, a sophisticated city on an island in a bridge-studded lake where a great civilization flourished.
The Aztec emperors who ruled much of the land that became Mexico were defeated by a Spanish-led force that seized the city on August 13, 1521.
Despite all that was lost in the epic event 500 years ago — an empire and countless Indigenous lives — much remains of that civilization long after its collapse. Vestiges lie beneath the streets, in the minds of the people, and on their plates.
Then, as now, the city’s center was dedicated to commerce, with vendors laying out wares on blankets or in improvised stalls, much as they would have done in 1521.
Mexico City
So Hard, It Can Scratch Diamond
Glass
Down on an atomic level, glass is a jumbled mess of atoms, which makes it easily prone to distortion and cracking. Now, chemists have discovered how to arrange the atoms within glass in such a way, the resulting material can even rival the strength of diamonds.
A team of materials scientists from Yanshan University in China has discovered the critical proportion of crystallized and amorphous carbon needed to create a glass with remarkable properties that won't weaken under intense pressure.
The mechanical properties of a material often come down to the way its building blocks link together. Diamond's notorious toughness is determined by the four bonds every single one of its carbon atoms makes with its neighbors. Though these bonds make for a solid bridge, they also don't leave any electrons spare to carry a current, effectively making diamond an insulator.
So the Yanshan researchers experimented, squishing spheres of carbon atoms called 'buckyballs' under intense pressure of around 25 gigapascals (just under 250,000 atmospheres) and then baking the mush at temperatures between 1,000 and 1,200 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit).
Subjecting the products, dubbed AM-I, II, and III, to a litany of tests, the chemists mapped the way the atoms bonded with one another, showing they all operated as a semiconductor on a level comparable with amorphous silicon.
Glass
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