• Very early in his career, children’s picture-book creator Ezra Jack Keats tried to get a job working for a miserly comic book artist as a cleanup and background man. He arrived to try out for the job with his own brushes because the comic book artist with the job didn’t want him to ruin his brushes. In a poorly lit room, Mr. Keats worked for nearly an hour. The comic book artist then looked at his work, said, “This won’t do,” and told Mr. Keats that he owed him fifteen cents. Mr. Keats asked, “For what?” The comic book artist answered, “The ink.” Mr. Keats was so tired and discouraged that he paid the fifteen cents. Fortunately, Mr. Keats became so successful in his career that he never had to charge a struggling artist fifteen cents for ink.
• Julia Morgan was a woman who was an architect in the first half of the 20th century, a time when few women were working as architects. She often said, “Don’t ever turn down a small job because you think it’s beneath you.” One of her smallest jobs was a two-room residence in Monterey, California, for a woman who became chair of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Because the woman was pleased with her residence, she was instrumental in getting Ms. Morgan the job of designing several YWCAs — big jobs, all — across the country. (An even smaller job was when Ms. Morgan designed a tiny house for the daughters of her taxi driver to play in.)
• During the Great Depression, the United States government created many jobs for its citizens. Among its jobs program was the Easel Project, which paid artists to create works of art. Many people are likely to regard such a program as a make-work program, with nothing significant resulting from it. Indeed, many of the paintings were sold to a plumber who was interested only in the canvas. He removed the canvas from the frames and used it in his plumbing work! However, some of the artists in the Easel Project, such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, became world-class (in addition to being African-American) artists.
• Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti worked long and hard from 1508 to 1512 as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Often, he spent days and nights on the scaffolding without leaving, working as paint dripped onto his face and sleeping only inches from the ceiling. He slept in his clothes and his boots, and sometimes when he finally took off his boots, his skin came off with them. The ceiling is a masterpiece, but Pope Julius II became frustrated with the amount of time Michelangelo spent painting it. Sometimes, Pope Julius II came into the Sistine Chapel and yelled up at Michelangelo, “When will it be done?” Michelangelo always yelled back, “When it is done.”
• Country comedian Archie Campbell started out as an artist, and his talent came in handy. While serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he doodled while on duty, drawing several pictures of Donald Duck when he should have been working. His boss caught him in the act, but instead of bawling him out, he asked, “Can you do other things like that?” Mr. Campbell replied that he could, so his boss showed the doodles to a Lieutenant, and Mr. Campbell was put to work illustrating pamphlets for the Bureau of Personnel. In this job, he drew such things as Donald Duck pulling the wrong switch and getting an electrical shock.
This collection of novellas by 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio contains tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death. Considered a masterpiece of Italian prose, what is the title of this book?
The Metonic cycle or enneadecaeteris (from Ancient Greek: "nineteen") is a period of approximately 19 years after which the phases of the moon recur on the same day of the year. The recurrence is not perfect, and by precise observation the Metonic cycle is defined as 235 synodic lunar months, a period which is just 1h27m33s longer than 19 tropical years. Using these integer numbers facilitates the construction of a luni-solar calendar.
A tropical year is longer than 12 lunar months and shorter than 13 of them. The arithmetical equality
12x12 + 7x13 = 235
allows it to be seen that a combination of 12 'shorter' (12 months) years and 7 'longer' (13 months) years will be equal to 19=12+7 solar years.
Source
Billy in Cypress U. $. A. was first, and correct, with:
19 years
Mark. said:
19 years.
Alan J answered:
Approximately 19 years.
Randall wrote:
19 years
Jacqueline responded:
19 years.
zorch replied:
19 years. A Metonic cycle also has five wheels.
DJ Useo wrote:
19, if I recall correctly. My mind is happily consumed with the Demo Con.
Joe ( -- Vote Blue, No Matter Who -- ) answered:
I don't even know what that is. Is it math? I don't do math. I'm tired, I'm going to bed early.
mj took the day off.
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~~~~~
A neighbor found a cat and didn't know what to do with it, so he brought it here, where it got loose and disappeared somewhere in the house.
Have the feeling it's gonna be a l-o-n-g night.
Tonight, Saturday:
CBS begins the night with a RERUN'Magnum FU', followed by '48 Hours'.
NBC fills the night with LIVE'Stanley Cup Stuff', then pads the left coast with local crap and maybe an old 'Dateline'.
Of course, 'SNL' is a RERUN, with Adam Driver hosting, music by Halsey.
ABC fills the night with LIVE'2020 NBA Playoffs', then pads the left coast with local crap.
The CW offers some local crap and some old '2½ Men'.
Faux fills the night with LIVE'PBC Fight Night', then pads the left coast with local crap.
MY recycles an old 'Major Crimes', followed by another old 'Major Crimes'.
A&E has 'Live Rescue', followed by a FRESH'Live Rescue: Rewind', then 'Live Rescue'.
AMC offers the movie 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', followed by the movie 'Police Academy', then the movie 'First Blood'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[7:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[8:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[9:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[10:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[11:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS
[12:00PM] WEIRD WONDERS
[1:00PM] WEIRD WONDERS
[2:00PM] PLANET EARTH - From Pole to Pole
[3:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Mountains
[4:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Freshwater
[5:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Ice Worlds
[6:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Caves
[7:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Deserts
[8:00PM] EARTHFLIGHT - South America (Extended)
[9:10PM] PLANET EARTH - From Pole to Pole
[10:10PM] PLANET EARTH - Mountains
[11:10PM] PLANET EARTH - Freshwater
[12:10AM] PLANET EARTH - Ice Worlds
[1:10AM] PLANET EARTH - Caves
[2:10AM] PLANET EARTH - Deserts
[3:20AM] EARTHFLIGHT - South America (Extended)
[4:30AM] HIDDEN HABITATS - Them & Us
[5:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS (ALL TIMES ET)
Bravo has the movie 'Catch Me If You Can', followed by the movie 'Catch Me If You Can', again.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Zombieland', followed by the movie 'Step Brothers', then the movie 'Step Brothers', again.
FX has the movie 'Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising', followed by the movie 'Blockers'.
History has 'Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation', another 'Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation', followed by a FRESH'Unidentified: Inside Ameria's UFO Investigation'.
IFC -
[7:00A] Saved by the Bell
[7:30A] Saved by the Bell
[8:00A] Saved by the Bell
[8:30A] Saved by the Bell
[9:00A] Saved by the Bell
[9:30A] Saved by the Bell
[10:00A] Saved by the Bell
[10:30A] Saved by the Bell
[11:00A] Saved by the Bell
[11:30A] Saved by the Bell
[12:00P] Saved by the Bell
[12:30P] Saved by the Bell
[1:00P] Saved by the Bell
[1:30P] Saved by the Bell
[2:00P] Coneheads
[4:00P] Semi-Pro
[6:00P] Grandma's Boy
[8:00P] Get Hard
[10:15P] The Wolf of Wall Street
[2:15A] Blow
[5:15A] The Three Stooges - Pardon My Scotch
[5:30A] Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return - Cry Wilderness (ALL TIMES ET)
Sundance -
[6:00am] the andy griffith show
[6:30am] the andy griffith show
[7:00am] the andy griffith show
[7:30am] the andy griffith show
[8:00am] the andy griffith show
[8:30am] the andy griffith show
[9:00am] the andy griffith show
[9:30am] the andy griffith show
[10:00am] the andy griffith show
[10:30am] the andy griffith show
[11:00am] hogan's heroes
[11:30am] hogan's heroes
[12:00pm] hogan's heroes
[12:30pm] hogan's heroes
[1:00pm] hogan's heroes
[1:30pm] hogan's heroes
[2:00pm] hogan's heroes
[2:30pm] hogan's heroes
[3:00pm] hogan's heroes
[3:30pm] hogan's heroes
[4:00pm] hogan's heroes
[4:30pm] marauders
[7:00pm] a bronx tale
[9:30pm] carlito's way
[12:30am] a bronx tale
[3:00am] fargo
[5:00am] perry mason (ALL TIMES ET)
SyFy has the movie 'Sharknado', followed by the movie 'Twister'.
Two weeks after The Hollywood Reporter asked the question “How do you solve a problem like the Tonys?” we have an answer.
The 74th Tony Awards ceremony, which was scheduled to take place at Radio City Music Hall on June 7 before the pandemic cut short the 2019-2020 Broadway season it was to recognize, will now be held digitally in the fall on a date still to be determined. (The timeline and specifics of the voting process are expected soon.)
“Though unprecedented events cut the Broadway season short, it was a year full of extraordinary work that deserves to be recognized,” Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, and Heather Hitchens, president & CEO of the American Theatre Wing, said in a statement. “We are thrilled not only to have found a way to properly celebrate our artists’ incredible achievements this season, but also to be able to uplift the entire theatre community and show the world what makes our Broadway family so special at this difficult time. The show must go on, no matter what — and it will.”
When Broadway shut down on March 12, some highly-anticipated shows had just opened, were in previews or hadn’t even reached that point yet — the eligibility cutoff was to be April 23.
There had, however, been considerable work that many in the New York theater community were buzzing about as likely contenders, such as The Inheritance and Slave Play for best play; Moulin Rouge! for best musical; Betrayal or A Soldier's Play for best play revival; Danny Burstein (Moulin Rouge!), a popular vet with six nominations but no wins under his belt (and who recently overcame a brutal battle with COVID-19), for best featured actor in a musical; 33-year-old phenom Adrienne Warren (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) for best actress in a musical; 89-year-old Lois Smith (The Inheritance), who has worked steadily since her debut in 1952 and has been nominated twice but never won, and 80-year-old Jane Alexander (Grand Horizons), who made her debut in 1969 and won one competitive award 51 years ago, for best featured actress in a play; four-time Tonys bridesmaid Laura Linney (My Name Is Lucy Barton) and 2001 winner Mary Louise Parker (The Sound Inside) for best actress in a play; veterans Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins (The Height of the Storm) for best actor and actress in a play, respectively; Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox (Betrayal) for best actor in a play; Elizabeth Stanley (Jagged Little Pill) for best featured actress in a musical; David Alan Grier (A Soldier's Play) for best actor or featured actor in a play, depending on where the nom-com placed him; and Derek McLane (Moulin Rouge!) for best scenic design. David Byrne, meanwhile, would almost certainly receive a special award for American Utopia.
Taylor Swift continues her reign as the GoFundMe Fairy.
The “Cardigan” singer is known for her acts of generosity and she’s done it again, donating $30,000 to an 18-year-old with a hefty college bill.
Vitoria Mario, who lives in Britain, shared in her online fundraiser that she is “a young Black 18 year old with a dream.” She aced her exams and was accepted at a prestigious university, but she can’t afford the tuition due to her family’s financial status and is not eligible for loans.
Mario detailed her hardships, including the death of her father and living apart from her mother, who resides in Portugal, so she can study in the U.K. “In spite of this, I have always been a studious person, and after coming to the U.K. in 2016, unable to utter a word in English, I achieved” top grades, she wrote, noting she plans to study in a field that is male-dominated and in which Black women are extremely underrepresented.
Nearly three weeks after Mario created the fundraiser, Swift made the huge donation toward the $52,000 goal — which has now been met. In the comments, the singer wrote, “Vitoria, I came across your story online and am so inspired by your drive and dedication to turning your dreams into reality. I want to gift you the rest of your goal amount. Good luck with everything you do! Love, Taylor.”
Drew Barrymore has confirmed a long-standing rumour that her grandfather’s corpse was taken from the morgue by friends for one last night of partying.
In an interview with the YouTube channel Hot Ones, the Santa Clarita Diet star said three friends of the actor John Barrymore stole his body after his death in 1942 and propped it against a poker table.
The younger Barrymore confirmed that Hollywood legend Errol Flynn, comedian WC Fields and the poet and anarchist Sadakichi Hartmann were behind the stunt.
“I hope my friends do the same for me,” said the 45-year-old actress.
“That is the kind of spirit I can get behind. Just prop the old bag up and have a last few rounds.
David Pecker, the longtime publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, is leaving the role as part of a deal unveiled Friday in which the paper’s parent company American Media LLC said it was merging with Accelerate, a national wholesale distribution company.
Pecker, the longtime, often controversial president and CEO of Enquirer parent American Media, will become an executive adviser to the new combined company, which will be known as A360. Chris Scardino, previously EVP and Group Publisher and an 18-year veteran of American Media, becomes president.
This move comes over a year after it was announced the scandal hobbled Enquirer was to be sold to a new company headed by Hudson News boss James Cohen for $100 million. Slowed down by the coronavirus pandemic, that deal is clearly DOA with today’s news.
Longtime Donald Trump (R-Baby Fingers) ally Pecker most recently was in the news after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos accused him of “blackmail and extortion” with regard to the tech mogul’s separation and divorce in February 2019, with Bezos going public ahead of salacious stories appearing in the Inquirer. The office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York opened an investigation into alleged strong-arm tactics used by Pecker and the company.
He also was at the center of a “catch and kill” strategy at the tabloid to effectively bury stores that could have adversely affected Donald Trump, a practice that including paying Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 before the 2016 election for a story on an alleged affair with Trump that never ran.
How does a 28-year-old woman from Kent, England, with a thin résumé of bit parts in a few movies play a major role in the fall of two Hollywood moguls?
That’s the question that has riveted if not rocked the industry this week after NBCUniversal executive Ron Meyer acknowledged paying hush-money to actress Charlotte Kirk to cover up a years-old affair that spiraled into an alleged extortion plot, leading to his ouster from his longtime perch at the studio.
Meyer was the second mogul embroiled in a sex scandal with Kirk to be toppled in less than two years.
Last year, former Warner Bros. studio head Kevin Tsujihara resigned after text messages suggesting he would find film roles for Kirk, with whom he had a sexual relationship, became public. Tsujihara denied having a direct role in securing her roles.
The end began nine years ago in 2011 when Meyer, then 66, attended a film premiere in London hosted by members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., where he was introduced to Kirk, an aspiring actress. She was 19 at the time.
Physical gold dealers in India this week offered the highest discounts in more than one and a half months, as buyers stayed away even as more bullion flowed in from the United Arab Emirates.
On Friday, gold futures in India, traditionally the world's second biggest gold consumer after China, were trading around 51,800 rupees ($691.24) per 10 grams, having surged to a record high of 56,191 rupees earlier this month.
"A significant amount of gold was imported from Dubai last week and customs cleared that this week. But demand is not there because of volatile prices," said Chanda Venkatesh, managing director of CapsGold, a bullion merchant in the city of Hyderabad.
Discounts of up to $20 an ounce were offered against official domestic prices — including 12.5% import and 3% sales levies — versus the $2 premiums last week.
Demand suffered in China as well, where discounts eased slightly to $80-$70 from last week's record $100-$75 levels versus international benchmark spot prices, which traded in a volatile $1,911.00-$2,014.97 an ounce range.
While bacteria are often associated with icky germs, they really are so much more than that. They help us digest things, feed trees nitrogen, play a huge role in cycling Earth's nutrients, and survive staggering extremes. Recently, we discovered some of these incredibly tough and tiny packages of life can even live off air alone.
A few years back, scientists discovered bacteria in Antarctic soils that not only breathe air, but eat it too. Now, a new study shows these microbes could be present elsewhere, detected via genetic analysis of soils from the three most icy regions of our planet - the Arctic, Antarctic, and the Tibetan Plateau.
As these bacteria have so far been detected in very low nutrient environments, they likely play a key role in fuelling the (admittedly sparse) life around them.
"There are whole ecosystems probably relying on this novel microbial carbon fixation process where microbes use the energy obtained from breathing in atmospheric hydrogen gas to turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into carbon – in order to grow," explained microbiologist Belinda Ferrari from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
The process - called atmospheric chemosynthesis - joins photosynthesis and geothermal chemotrophy as yet another way primary producers can make their own organic building blocks for growth and energy storage, using reactions based on inorganic materials.
These particular bacteria oxidise hydrogen from the air to drive a series of reactions that convert atmospheric carbon into living tissues, which other lifeforms can then also make use of - by consuming.
For the first time in more than 100 years, wolverines have returned to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, the National Park Service announced Thursday.
The National Park Service and scientists with the conservation organization Cascades Carnivore Project spotted the female wolverine and her two offspring, also called kits.
Wolverines are rare in the U.S. with less than 1,000 living in the lower 48 states, officials said. In Washington state, there are only about 20, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Scientists say climate change is presumably a threat to the species.
Wolverines are the largest members of the weasel family and weigh about 44 pounds. And they tend to live in mountainous areas.
The National Park Service says they have set up cameras throughout the park as more sightings have been reported throughout the state.
A small, soft space rock smacked into Costa Rica on April 23, 2019. And it may have carried building blocks for life.
The washing machine-sized clay fireball broke up before landing. Locals found shards scattered between two villages, La Palmera and Aguas Zarcas. And while meteorites turn up all over Earth, these shards were special; the asteroid that spawned them was a soft remnant of the early solar system, made from the dust from the spinning nebula that would ultimately form our solar system, formed in even older stars. And the meteorites that rained down from the event — collectively called Aguas Zarcas — belong to a rare class called carbonaceous chondrites, which form in the wee hours of the solar system's emergence and are typically packed with carbon. This particular space rock contains complex carbon compounds, likely including amino acids (which join to form proteins and DNA) and perhaps other, even more complex building blocks of life.
An earlier meteor that exploded over Murchison, Australia, in 1969 had similar features. Amino acids discovered in its clay, Joshua Sokol reported in Science, helped spread the idea that life on Earth may have originated from chemicals delivered in meteorites. And like the Murchison meteorite, this Aguas Zarcas fragment contains dust from the ancient, earlier Milky Way, before our sun formed.
Studies of this new meteorite are still incomplete, Sokol wrote. But researchers are excited that they can examine it using modern techniques, looking for complex organic compounds —— maybe even proteins —— that even if they did once exist inside the Murchison meteorite have long since disappeared, degrading in Earth's atmosphere. (The Murchison meteorite very closely resembled Aguas Zarcas, and if Aguas Zarcas contained proteins then Murchison probably did as well, though the opportunity to detect them has been lost.) Already, there's evidence of amino acids in this Aguas Zarcas fragment not found elsewhere on Earth.
Aguas Zarcas shards may offer the most pristine samples yet of the early solar system and pre-solar dust cloud. But landing as they did in the Costa Rican rainforest, Sokol reported, there's still the possibility of contamination.
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