• As a boy, Mark Twain was a talented speller and almost always won the medal for spelling at his school. However, one day he did not win the medal in a spelling contest because he left out the first ‘r’ in “February.” He later admitted that he had done that on purpose, so a childhood sweetheart could win the medal instead of him. (Laura Hawkins, the model for Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was the sweetheart.)
• A female college student in Canada once asked science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, “What is reality?” (He was a good person to ask because much of his writing is concerned with this question.) He thought about the question, then gave her his answer in one sentence: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
• As a teenager, Walter Dean Myers skipped school a lot, so much in fact that he once went to school and found out that it was closed — for summer vacation. As an adult, Mr. Myers became the author of such books as Scorpions, Hoops, and Slam!
Fiction
• Fan fiction — fiction written by fans using the characters they are fans of — has been around for longer than you may think. When Ray Bradbury was 12 years old in the early 1930s, he was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of books starring such characters as Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars. Mr. Burroughs sometimes ended a book with a cliffhanger, so the reader would have to buy the next book in the series to find out what had happened. After young Ray had finished a John Carter of Mars novel, he didn’t have enough money to buy the sequel, so he wrote his own sequel. Was it published? Mr. Bradbury says, “I was twelve! It was terrible! I threw it away!”
• As head of her own architectural firm in California at a time when that was rare for a woman, Julia Morgan knew how to make a point. Once, a young man in her employ designed a staircase. Ms. Morgan looked at the drawing and noticed that it was impossible to walk up and down the staircase. She told the young man, “I can’t deal with fiction writers.”
• Barbara Taylor Bradford has written a number of popular books, including A Woman of Substance. Asked if she minded being a “popular novelist,” she replied, “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be an unpopular novelist.”
Food
• When Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, was a little girl, her mother was very strict and would not allow her to eat sugar with her oatmeal; in fact, her mother tasted the oatmeal before Madeleine ate it to make sure it had no sugar. Fortunately, young Madeleine had a nanny, Mrs. O’Connell, who liked to spoil her. Therefore, Mrs. O, as Madeleine called her, would put sugar in the bottom of Madeleine’s oatmeal bowl. Madeleine’s mother would taste the unsweetened oatmeal at the top, and then Mrs. O would stir the oatmeal and sugar and let Madeleine eat the sweetened oatmeal. Madeleine’s mother never figured out why Madeleine would eat oatmeal for Mrs. O, but not for anyone else.
• The first time Gary Paulsen, author of Hatchet, competed in the 1,000-plus-mile sled dog race in Alaska known as the Iditarod, he ran into a problem. One of his dogs refused to eat the food he had available to feed them. Instead, the dog would eat only the food that he had available to feed himself. Dogs are important in the Iditarod, and sled dogs have to eat to get the energy necessary to pull the sled, so Mr. Paulsen fed the dog his own food, leaving only butter for himself to eat. At a race checkpoint, moose chili was available, and Mr. Paulsen gorged himself, eating 19 bowls before he could bring himself to stop.
A quarantine is a restriction on the movement of people and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests. It is often used in connection to disease and illness, preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis. It is distinct from medical isolation, in which those confirmed to be infected with a communicable disease are isolated from the healthy population. Quarantine considerations are often one aspect of border control.
The concept of quarantine has been known since biblical times and is known to have been practised through history in various places. Notable quarantines in modern history include that of the village of Eyam in 1665 during the bubonic plague outbreak in England; East Samoa during the 1918 flu pandemic; the Diphtheria outbreak during the 1925 serum run to Nome, the 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak, and extensive quarantines applied throughout the world during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The word quarantine comes from quarantena, meaning "forty days", used in 14th–15th-century Venetian and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic; it followed the trentino, or thirty-day isolation period, first imposed in 1347 in the Republic of Ragusa, Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia).
Source
Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Forty days.
Billy in Cypress U. $. A. said:
40 days
mj wrote:
Having just watched Inferno
I know this to be 40, the number of days the crews of incoming ships to
the port of Venice had to remain on board the ship anchored well out
from the port itself to prove they weren't carrying the plague before
coming ashore.
Alan J answered:
Forty Days.
Dave responded:
40 days. That was my guess and for a change I was right. Trump is supposed to be in quarantine for coronavirus, but he busted out and contaminated the West Wing of the White House, endangering the few aides and employees that haven’t yet been infected. And being an equal opportunity heartless sociopath, Trump wants to hold a rally in Florida Saturday to infect his supporters and debate Biden on the same stage next week. Trump considers himself completely cured and ‘immune’ after a few days, which is at odds with what doctors know about the coronavirus. Trump has also decided that he wants Joe Biden indicted for an unspecified crime before the election. I think its time to consider the 25th as a temporary solution until Biden is inaugurated.
Mac Mac replied:
40
Randall wrote:
40 days in a quarantina
zorch said:
40 days. It was for the plague.
Adam answered:
That's what it sounded like - 40 days
Cal in Vermont replied:
Forty days. And forty nights. You know what I mean. So does Lee Michaels.
Micki responded:
40
Deborah, the Master Gardener wrote:
How timely is this — I’m learning Italian on Duolingo, and Quarent’ is 40, so I’m going with Quarantena equals 40 days.
The weather took a turn to the cool, the smoke (mostly) cleared out, and there’s even a chance of rain. One can hope…
Jim from CA, retired to ID, said:
40 days
Dave in Tucson answered:
Wild guess, it's probably twenty eight.
Rosemary in Columbus responded:
Forty days
Daniel in The City replied:
40
Joe ( -- Vote Blue, No Matter Who -- ) wrote:
I'm just guessing because I want to go to bed and I'm guessing 14. It;s a reasonable guess.
Stephen F took the day off.
Roy, the Never Trumper snowflake from Tyler, TX took the day off.
David of Moon Valley took the day off.
Kenn B took the day off.
DJ Useo took the day off.
Leo in Boise took the day off.
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame took the day off.
John I from Hawai`i took the day off.
Michelle in AZ took the day off.
Jacqueline took the day off.
Kevin in Washington DC took the day off.
Ed K took the day off.
Jon L took the day off.
Angelo D took the day off.
Harry M. took the day off.
George M. took the day off.
Doug in Albuquerque, New Mexico, took the day off.
-pgw took the day off.
Gary K took the day off.
Roy the (now retired) hoghead (aka 'hoghed') ( Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid. ~Frank Zappa ) took the day off.
Saskplanner took the day off.
Gateway Mike took the day off.
Steve in Wonderful Sacramento, CA, took the day off.
MarilynofTC took the day off.
Paul of Seattle 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.
~~~~~
Info: “Mad Staggers is a Faces-esque detonation of unapologetic dirty, powerpop infused, rock and roll, ferociously old school with chunks of DJ culture in its stool ….”
“Almost Saturday Night”:
Chris Campion-Vocals
Benny Landa-Electric Guitars
JP Bowersock-Acoustic Guitar
Gary Bristol-Bass
Joe Vitale-Banjo
Keith Foley-Drums
Written by John Fogerty
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $7 (USD) for 11-track album
CBS fills the night with LIVE'College Football', then pads the left coast with local crap and maybe an old '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night on the East Coast with a RERUN'Weakest Link', followed by 'Dateline' then an old 'SNL'.
NBC opens the night a half hour early with a RERUN'Weakest Link', followed by a LIVE'SNL', then an old 'SNL'.
'SNL' is FRESH, with Bill Burr hosting, music by Morgan Wallen Jack White.
ABC fills the night with LIVE'College Football', then pads the left coast with local crap.
The CW offers a couple of old 'Friends', followed by a couple of old '2½ Men'.
Faux has a RERUN'The Masked Singer', followed by a RERUN'I Can See Your Voice'.
MY recycles an old 'Weather Gone Viral', followed by an old 'Storm Of Suspicion'.
A&E has 'The First 48', another 'The First 48', followed by a FRESH'Live Rescue'.
AMC offers the movie 'Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later', followed by the movie 'Halloween', then the FRESH'Eli Roth's History Of Horror'.
BBC -
[12:00AM] SOULMATES - WATERSHED
[4:02AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - CHAIN OF COMMAND
[5:01AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - CHAIN OF COMMAND
[6:00AM] ATTENBOROUGH AND THE GIANT ELEPHANT
[7:00AM] CHIMP SANCTUARY
[8:00AM] CHIMPS OF THE LOST GORGE
[9:00AM] PLANET EARTH: BLUE PLANET II - THE BEST OF THE BLUE PLANET II
[11:00AM] LIFE STORY - FIRST STEPS - EXTENDED
[12:00PM] LIFE STORY - GROWING UP - EXTENDED
[1:00PM] LIFE STORY - HOME - EXTENDED
[2:00PM] LIFE STORY - POWER - EXTENDED
[3:00PM] LIFE STORY - COURTSHIP - EXTENDED
[4:00PM] LIFE STORY - PARENTHOOD - EXTENDED
[5:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - CITIES
[6:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - ISLANDS
[7:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - MOUNTAINS
[8:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - JUNGLES
[9:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - DESERTS
[10:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - GRASSLANDS
[11:00PM] PLANET EARTH II - ISLANDS
[12:00AM] PLANET EARTH II - MOUNTAINS
[1:00AM] PLANET EARTH II - JUNGLES
[2:00AM] PLANET EARTH II - DESERTS
[3:00AM] PLANET EARTH II - GRASSLANDS
[4:00AM] PLANET EARTH II - CITIES
[5:00AM] PLANET EARTH II -THE MAKING OF PLANET EARTH II (ALL TIMES ET)
Bravo has the movie 'The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift', followed by the movie 'Fast & Furious', then the movie 'Fast & Furious', again.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Bruce Almighty', followed by the movie 'Dumb & Dumber', then the movie 'Joe Dirt'.
FX has the movie 'Skyscraper', followed by the movie 'Venom', and 'Fargo'.
History has all old 'The Men Who Built America' all night.
IFC -
[7:45am] Saved By The Bell
[8:15am] Saved By The Bell
[8:45am] Saved By The Bell
[9:15am] Saved By The Bell
[9:45am] Saved By The Bell
[10:15am] Saved By The Bell
[10:45am] Saved By The Bell
[11:15am] Saved By The Bell
[11:45am] Saved By The Bell
[12:15pm] Saved By The Bell
[12:45pm] Saved By The Bell
[1:15pm] Saved By The Bell
[1:45pm] Saved By The Bell
[2:15pm] Kick-Ass 2
[4:45pm] House On Haunted Hill
[6:45pm] Carrie
[9:00pm] Final Destination
[11:15pm] Final Destination 2
[1:15am] Final Destination 3
[3:15am] The Final Destination
[5:15am] Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Gauntlet - Experiment 1204: The Day Time Ended (ALL TIMES ET)
Sundance -
[12:00am] law & order
[1:00am] law & order
[2:00am] columbo - A Case Of Immunity
[3:45am] columbo - A Matter Of Honor
[5:30am] the andy griffith show
[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] hogan's heroes
[5:00pm] hogan's heroes
[5:30pm] hogan's heroes
[6:00pm] blazing saddles
[8:00pm] caddyshack
[10:00pm] blazing saddles (ALL TIMES ET)
SyFy has the movie 'Boo 2: A Madea Halloween', followed by the movie 'Tales From The Hood 3'.
TCM "improved" their website & I can no longer access it.
Jack White has replaced Morgan Wallen as the musical guest for the October 10th episode of Saturday Night Live, joining host Bill Burr.
Wallen was set to make his debut on the show this Saturday, before a video surfaced of the country artist at a party without a mask. SNL then uninvited Wallen from the show due to his disregard for Covid-19 safety measures. The Tennessee native later filmed an apology video from his hotel room and posted it to Instagram.
“I was getting ready for SNL this Saturday and I got a call from the show letting me know that I would no longer be able to play. And that’s because of Covid protocols, which I understand,” he said. “I am not positive for Covid, but my actions this past weekend were pretty shortsighted and they’ve obviously affected my long term goals and my dreams.”
The October 10th episode will mark White’s third solo appearance on SNL as a musical guest and his fourth appearance overall. He is set to release a White Stripes compilation album, The White Stripes Greatest Hits, on December 4th via his own Third Man Records.
It's official. Every time residents of Danbury, Connecticut, flush, they will be sending their special deliveries to the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.
The City Council voted 18-1 Thursday night to rename the sewage plant after the comedian, who began a tongue-in-cheek battle with Danbury when he went on an expletive-filled rant against the city on HBO's “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” in August.
Mayor Mark Boughton didn't waste any time responding on social media. He posted a video of himself at the sewage plant saying the city was going to name it after Oliver.
“Why?” the Republican mayor asked. "Because it’s full of crap just like you, John.”
The mayor added he will be offering tours of the sewer plant for $500 donations to local food pantries.
Broadway theaters on Friday extended a coronavirus shutdown until the end of May 2021, bringing the closure of one of New York City's biggest tourist attractions to more than a year and forcing a revival of musical "The Music Man" into 2022.
Broadway theaters went dark in mid-March as the pandemic hit New York and previous target dates for reopening have come and gone without any progress in finding a way to put on indoor shows with live audiences that also protects actors and backstage crews working in cramped conditions.
Producers of "The Music Man," who had hoped to stage the revival in May 2021 with Hugh Jackman, said on Friday they had pushed back the opening date of the show until February 2022.
The Actors' Equity Association called the extended shutdown heartbreaking and appealed again for a national testing strategy and government help for the arts.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” curmudgeon married producer Ashley Underwood on Wednesday in Southern California, People reported. It was an “intimate affair,” a source told “Entertainment Tonight.”
The two began dating in 2017 after meeting at a birthday party for a mutual pal, the actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Underwood worked on Cohen’s show “Who Is America?”
“We were seated next to each other,” David told The New York Times of their introduction. “Much to her surprise I left before dessert. I was doing so well, banter-wise, I didn’t want to risk staying too long and blowing the good impression.”
Donald Trump (R-Compromised) called into Rush Limbaugh (R-Oxy)’s radio show on Friday for what was billed as a “rally,” and it turned into a two-hour marathon of media bashing, insistence that there is a COVID-19 cure, and a reversal on where the president stands on another coronavirus relief package.
As he did on previous interviews, Trump called for indictments of political rivals, and chided his attorney general, William Barr, for reports that he would not finish an investigation of the Mueller investigation until after the election.
Trump also bashed Fox News, as he has done before, arguing that the network “is a much different thing that it was four years ago. Somebody said, ‘What is the biggest difference? I said the biggest difference is Fox.”
“You watch this Fox, and it is a whole different ballgame,” Trump said. “And you know Paul Ryan is on the board of Fox. So I am sure that has something to do with it.”
Trump went on. “When Roger Ailes ran Fox, I mean Roger had a very strong point of view that is totally gone, and I think it is influenced by Paul Ryan.”
A top Republican senator has said that “democracy isn’t the objective” of America’s political system, sparking widespread outrage at a time when his party has been accused by Democrats of plotting voter suppression and questioning a peaceful transition of power in November’s election.
The Utah senator Mike Lee (R-Pantywaist) made the inflammatory declaration in an early morning tweet following Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate.
“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that,” he wrote, misspelling prosperity.
Lee, who is among a swath of Republicans who recently tested positive for coronavirus, wrote: ‘The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.’
A Berlin district has ordered a local Korean group to remove a statue commemorating women used as sex slaves by Japan during World War II, saying Friday it goes beyond what had been approved.
The issue of sex slaves, euphemistically called “comfort women,” has been a major source of friction between South Korea and Japan, and the district's decision came after Japan expressed irritation about the statue depicting a woman sitting next to an empty chair.
Stephan von Dassel, mayor of the central Mitte district, said permission had been given for the Korean organization to display a “peace statue” for one year, as a broad “statement against sexualized violence against women in armed conflicts.”
Instead, he said, the statue unveiled in late September “exclusively addresses the behavior of the Japanese army in World War II.”
The Korean association has until Oct. 14 to remove the statue.
A team of astronomers from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) has produced the most comprehensive astronomical imaging catalog of stars, galaxies, and quasars ever created with help from an artificially intelligent neural network.
The group of astronomers from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) released a catalog containing 3 billion celestial objects in 2016, including stars, galaxies, and quasars (the active cores of supermassive black holes). Needless to say, the parsing of this extensive database—packed with 2 petabytes of data—was a task unfit for puny humans, and even grad students. A major goal coming out of the 2016 catalog release was to better characterize these distant specks of light, and to also map the arrangement of galaxies in all three dimensions. The Pan-STARRS team can now check these items off their to-do list, owing to the powers of machine learning. The results of their work have been published to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Their PS1 telescope, located on the summit of Haleakala on Hawaii’s Big Island, is capable of scanning 75% of the sky, and it currently hosts the world’s largest deep multicolor optical survey, according to a press release put out by the University of Hawai?i. By contrast, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) covers just 25% of the sky.
To provide the computer with a frame of reference, and to teach it how to discern celestial classes of objects from one another, the team turned to publicly available spectroscopic measurements. These measures of colors and sizes of objects numbered in the millions, as Robert Beck, the lead author of the study and a former cosmology postdoctoral fellow at IfA, explained in the press release.
A Canadian project studying the impact of giving cash directly to homeless people told the CBC on Thursday their findings were “beautifully surprising.”
The New Leaf Project, a program of Foundations for Social Change, a Vancouver-based charity, began in 2018, and awarded a group of Lower Mainland homeless people a cash payment of $7500 each. They then compared how this group of 50 spent it over a year to a control group of 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any payments.
The results, Foundations for Social Change CEO Claire Williams told the CBC, pushed back against assumptions that it’s bad to give money directly to homeless people because they can’t be trusted to use it well.
According to their recently published findings, the group that got cash spent less days homeless than the others, moved into stable housing in an average of three months, and nearly 70 percent of them became food secure after a month.
The individuals who got the payments tended to spend them on the necessities: on average they spent 52 percent of the cash on food and rent, 15 percent on other items like bills and medicine, and 16 percent on clothes and transportation. Spending on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs went down an average 39 percent as well.
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said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
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