from Bruce
Anecdotes
Fathers
• When he was growing up, Hank Aaron both had trouble in school and wanted to be a baseball player. At one point, he was suspended from school but did not tell his parents. Instead, he pretended that he was still going to school. He would enter the school at the front entrance but immediately exit through the rear door. Then he would go to a pool hall and do such things as listen to the radio so he could hear the games that Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers. One day, his father found out what he was doing and walked into the pool hall and took Hank out for an important talk. His father explained that each morning he gave Hank two quarters so that Hank could get a good lunch and concentrate on getting his education. Meanwhile, his father left home each day with only one quarter in his pocket for his lunch. That is how important Hank’s education was for Hank’s father—Hank’s education was more important than his father’s stomach. After the talk, Hank agreed to start attending a new school, and yes, he did graduate from the school.
• Professional boxer Muhammad Ali is a good father. When they were very little, his daughters Laila and Hana would get up early and make him a cup of “coffee.” They did this by pouring various edible liquids they found in the kitchen into a cup and taking it to him to drink. Being the good father he is, Mr. Ali drank every drop, kissed them, and praised them for the goodness of their “coffee.”
• After Ekaterina Gordeeva won the gold medal in pairs skating (with Sergei Grinkov) at the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, her Russian father did what he always did when Ekaterina won an important award. He filled a glass goblet with champagne, put the gold medal in the goblet, and let family and friends take a sip to celebrate her victory.
• When Monica Seles was a little girl growing up in Yugoslavia and learning to play tennis, her father, a cartoonist, gave her lessons. He sometimes drew the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry, a cat and mouse, on a tennis ball for her to play with. The cartoon characters reminded her that she must play competitive tennis as if she were a cat hunting a mouse.
• The Zamboni, which maintains the ice at skating rinks, may be the most favorite sports machine—it definitely has its fans. Just like the top skating stars of the National Hockey League, the Zamboni has had a trading card devoted to it.
Fights
• Major-league umpire Jocko Conlan saw a bad fight on the diamond in San Francisco—no one was hurt because everyone was fighting so badly. Daryl Spencer slid into Don Hoak at third base, they had words and started fighting, then the other players started fighting. Mr. Conlan looked around, and what he saw was pitiful. Players weren’t throwing punches; instead, it looked like they were hugging each other. He told the managers, “You know the rules in this league. Anybody who gets in a fight on the field has to leave the ball game. But if you can get these fellows back to the dugouts immediately, I won’t throw anybody out.” They did, and the game continued. After the game, reporters wanted to know why Mr. Conan hadn’t thrown any players out of the game. He replied, “If it was a good fight, I would have thrown a dozen of them out. But it was a lousy fight. I didn’t see one punch thrown. Why throw them out for not fighting?”
• On June 22, 1938, heavyweight champion Joe Louis fought a rematch against Max Schmeling, who had defeated him in 1936. One of Joe’s trainers asked before the fight how he felt. Mr. Louis replied, “I’m afraid.” The trainer asked, “Afraid?” “Yeah,” Mr. Louis said, “I’m afraid I might kill Schmeling tonight.” Mr. Lewis didn’t kill Mr. Schmeling, but he did knock him out two minutes and four seconds into the first round.
• After jockey Julie Krone won a race by 10 lengths, competing jockey Miguel Rujano whipped her across the face. With her ear bleeding, Ms. Krone told the bystanders, “Excuse me, I have to go hit somebody,” then she punched her attacker’s nose. Ms. Krone’s assertiveness paid off when she became the first woman to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes, in 1993.
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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: "White Girl Wasted"
Album: WHITE GIRL WASTED
Artist: A Bunch of Jerks
Artist Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Info:
A Bunch of Jerks - Now with instruments! What could possibly go wrong?
Stabby - vocals
Mike - Guitar
Bat - Bass
Ethan - Drums
jessfranco, a fan, wrote, “A rowdy good time that projectile spits out of your speakers with that hardcore Zima-swilling woozy sensation only a WHITE GIRL WASTED can boot n' rally from! Favorite track: ‘White Girl Wasted.’”
The sexy, talented Stabby had a family emergency and so does not appear. But the gentleman Jerks are both fine and potty-mouthed.
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for three-track EP
Genre: Rock. Satire.
Links:
WHITE GIRL WASTED
A Bunch of Jerks on Bandcamp
A Bunch of Jerks Official Website
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
Stephen Suggests
Twofer
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
Vinnie-the-shitten disappeared a couple of days ago.
No Vinnie, no where.
Looked in closets, under furniture, behind the bookcase, in the garage, under the house, on the roof, and finally, walked the hood, put up signs, called her name a LOT.
Nothing.
Tonight she nonchalantly strolled outta the bedroom - major WTF?
Can't puzzle it out unless there's an extra-dimensional portal in the bedroom that I don't know about.
But I'm happy she's back.
Oopsie
‘Jeopardy!’
Producer Mike Richards stepped down from his brief tenure as host of “Jeopardy!” after a report about past misogynistic comments surfaced this week and following a drumbeat of criticism about his selection and how it was made.
Richards was chosen last week as the successor to Alex Trebek, a decision that was seen as divisive from the beginning after the show had embarked on a search that included actors, sports figures, journalists and celebrities.
Earlier this week, The Ringer websiterevealed demeaning comments about women, the homeless and others that Richards had made on a 2013-14 podcast, “The Randumb Show.” The clips were removed online after the report was posted.
But viewers will get to see the short-lived emcee in action. The episodes that Richards taped Thursday will air when the show returns for its 38th season starting Sept. 13; a do-over with a substitute host would be a slap at the contestants and further undermine the show.
“I was really looking forward to the season premiere where after an exhaustive 61-clue search for the next Jeopardy champion, the show looks past the three obvious candidates and declares Mike Richards the winner,” James Holzhauer tweeted.
‘Jeopardy!’
All-Girls Robotics Team Evacuated
Afghan Dreamers
A celebrated all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan made it out of the country safely and are now in Qatar. Officials there sent a plane to evacuate the young girls, after the team's parent organization, Digital Citizen Fund, worked with Qatar's government to secure visas.
The team, known as the Afghan Dreamers, made headlines in 2017 when they were rejected for U.S. travel visas twice while trying to travel to the country for an international robotics competition in Washington.
Their package of robot parts was delayed due to concerns about terrorism. They had only two weeks to build their robots, while other groups at the competition had much longer. But still, they won the first round of the competition, CBS News' Chip Reid reported at the time.
The girls' struggle to overcome war, hardship and U.S. bureaucracy on their journey to the U.S. capital made their team stand out among more than 150 competing in the FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science.
As the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan accelerated this month, Digital Citizen Fund founder Roya Mahboob and board member Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown requested assistance from Qatar to evacuate the girls on August 12. In a statement to CBS News, the fund said the two women worked for days "against the backdrop of great uncertainty, to organize safe passage for team members still in the country."
Afghan Dreamers
Buys The Hill
Nexstar Media
Broadcaster Nexstar Media said Friday it’s buying The Hill, a leading purveyor of Beltway news, for $130 million as it expands in digital content.
The Hill had 48 million average monthly users and 2.2 billion total pageviews in 2020 according to Comscore and attracted more than 4 million followers and 914 million video views on Twitter.
It has more than 100 journalists covering political news and events. It is ad-supported. The deal is the latest in a consolidation in the digital media space that has been marked by acquisitions, the latest being Buzzfeed’s merger with a SPAC and purchase of Complex Networks.
Texas-based Nexstar operates 199 television stations in 116 markets covering about 39% of all U.S. TV households with affiliates of all major networks. Its digital division operates 120 local websites and 284 mobile apps offering hyper-local content and verticals. The networks division operates NewsNation, which reaches 75 million television homes, multicast network Antenna TV, and WGN Radio in Chicago.
Nexstar also owns a 31.3% ownership stake in TV Food Network.
Nexstar Media
Czech Film Festival
Karlovy Vary International
The international film festival is returning to the Czech spa of Karlovy Vary after it was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
The 55th edition of the festival will honor Oscar-winning British actor Michael Caine for his outstanding contribution to world cinema at its start on Friday night.
He will also present “Best Sellers” (2021), a comedy in which he stars, at the festival.
Organizers will also honor U.S. actor, director and writer Ethan Hawke.
Actor Johnny Depp will present two movies he produced: “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan” and “Minamata.”
Karlovy Vary International
Hypocrisy In Action
Grindr
The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.
The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.
The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.
“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.
The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.
Grindr
Rains For First Time
Greenland
Rain has fallen on the summit of Greenland's ice sheet for the first time in recorded history, heightening concerns about the already precarious condition of its ice.
An unprecedented 7 billion tons (6.3 billion metric tons) of water pelted the ice sheet last Saturday (Aug. 14), falling as rain and not snow for several hours. This was the third time temperatures at the summit had risen above freezing in less than a decade, according to recordings taken by the National Science Foundation's Summit Station.
The rain, which occurred over two days from Aug. 14 to Aug. 15, was also accompanied by the melting of up to 337,000 square miles (872,000 square kilometers) of ice, according to the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
"There is no previous report of rainfall at this location, which reaches 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) in elevation," NSIDC researchers said in a statement, adding that the amount of ice lost in one day was the same as the average ice lost across a typical week for the same time of year.
Scientists attribute the cause of the rainfall to an atmospheric event, called an anticyclone, above the island. Anticyclones are regions of high pressure that cause air to sink, warming as it falls. These anticyclone conditions enable hot weather to persist in one area for long periods of time, creating heat waves.
Greenland
Coveted Blue Blood
Horseshoe Crabs
It’s one of the stranger, lesser-known aspects of U.S. health care — the striking, milky-blue blood of horseshoe crabs is a critical component of tests to ensure injectable medications such as coronavirus vaccines aren’t contaminated.
To obtain it, harvesters bring many thousands of the creatures to laboratories to be bled each year, and then return them to the sea — a practice that has drawn criticism from conservationists because some don’t survive the process.
The blood, which is blue due to its copper content, is coveted for proteins used to create the LAL test, a process used to screen medical products for bacteria. Synthetic alternatives aren’t widely accepted by the health care industry and haven’t been approved federally, leaving the crabs as the only domestic source of this key ingredient.
Many of these crabs are harvested along the coast of South Carolina, where Gov. Henry McMaster promoted the niche industry as key to the development of a domestic medical supply chain, while also noting that environmental concerns should be explored.
Horseshoe crabs — aquatic arthropods shaped like helmets with long tails — are more akin to scorpions than crabs, and older than dinosaurs. They’ve been scurrying along the brackish floors of coastal waters for hundreds of millions of years. Their eggs are considered a primary fat source for more than a dozen species of migratory shore birds, according to South Carolina’s Department of Natural Resources.
Horseshoe Crabs
Surprising Similarity
Baby Bats
"Mamama," "dadada," "bababa" – parents usually welcome with enthusiasm the sounds of a baby's babble. Babbling is the first milestone when learning to speak. All typically developing infants babble, no matter which language they're learning.
Babbling is characterized by universal features – for example, repetition of syllables and use of rhythm. It lets an infant practice and playfully learn how to control their vocal apparatus to correctly produce the desired syllables.
Luckily, in Central America's tropical jungle, there's a mammal that engages in a very conspicuous vocal practice behavior that is strongly reminiscent of human infant babbling: the neotropical greater sac-winged bat, Saccopteryx bilineata.
The pups of this small bat, dark-furred with two prominent white wavy stripes on the back, engage in daily babbling behavior during large parts of their development.
Greater sac-winged bats possess a large vocal repertoire that includes 25 distinct syllable types. A syllable is the smallest acoustic unit, defined as a sound surrounded by silence.
Baby Bats
Earth's Magnetic Field
Ancient Lava
We know that Earth's magnetic field is always shifting in its direction and its strength. Just how quickly these changes are happening is of great interest, considering this planetary feature keeps us all protected from violent cosmic radiation.
Now, a new analysis of ancient lava flows in eastern Scotland – filling in some crucial blanks in our magnetic field history – has backed up previous research pointing to a 200-million-year cycle during which the field weakens and then strengthens again.
The team also used the magnetic history they found buried in the geological record to double-check other measurements made over the last few decades, and to chart a history of Earth's magnetic field going back some 500 million years.
Thermal and microwave paleomagnetic analysis techniques were used on rock samples from the ancient lava flows, with the alignment of mineral crystals inside them revealing the state of Earth's magnetic field at the time they were originally formed.
The team discovered that between 332 and 416 million years ago, there was a dip in the magnetic field that matches up with another one from 120 million years ago. During the earlier period, now called the Mid-Palaeozoic Dipole low (MPDL), the field surrounding Earth was around a quarter of the strength that it is today.
Ancient Lava
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