• After the death of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, punk rocker Patti Smith was understandably devastated. One person who helped her to move on was Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who telephoned her and advised, “Let go of the spirit of the departed and continue your life’s celebration.” He felt that performing would be good for her and invited her to go with him to Ann Arbor to read their poetry at a benefit to raise money for the Jewel Heart, a Tibetan Buddhist organization. Before extending the invitation to Ms. Smith, Mr. Ginsberg had already sold out all 4,000 seats available, so he wasn’t inviting Ms. Smith to perform so he could get a big audience; instead, his invitation was one of compassion and generosity.
• When African-American author James Baldwin was growing up, a white teacher named Orilla “Bill” Miller encouraged him by taking him to plays and movies. And when young James’ adoptive father, David Baldwin, had a hard time getting work, Ms. Miller helped in a big way by giving the Baldwin family gifts of such necessities as food. In part because of Ms. Miller, James did not fall into the trap of hating all white people. A grown-up James Baldwin once said, “It is certainly partly because of her that I never really managed to hate white people.”
• As a little girl, Emma Lazarus was given a good education, but because her parents were wealthy, she learned little about lower-class people. After seeing her parents give money to a woman, she asked why they had done that. They explained that the woman was poor, and young Emma, not understanding, had to ask them what the word “poor” meant. Later, the adult Ms. Lazarus became a champion of poor people. Her poem “The New Colossus” graces the base of the Statue of Liberty.
• Novelists can be brave. When Charles Dickens was 53 years old, he was traveling by train when the engineer received a wrong signal and crashed. Mr. Dickens’ train car teetered above some wrecked train cars that were lying in a ravine. Mr. Dickens was able to get out and help some of the injured by bringing them water, and later, when he remembered that he had left the manuscript of his book Our Mutual Friend in the teetering train car, he climbed back in and retrieved it.
• This anecdote is touching rather than funny. In the early 1960s, poet Allen Ginsberg and his sometimes lover Peter Orlovsky took a trip to India. There they found a man who was almost dead from starvation and around whom flies were buzzing. His eyes were yellow with pus, and his wounds were festering. They took care of the man and paid for his medical care, and the man became healthy again. Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Orlovsky also did this for some other starving people.
• When Yousuf Karsh set up an appointment to take Norman Mailer’s photograph, he was warned that the author of The Naked and the Dead was someone to be feared: an enfant terrible. However, he found Mr. Mailer to be a very warm person. After the photography session was over, Mr. Mailer even drove his car in front of Mr. Karsh’s car for several miles so that Mr. Karsh would be sure to take the correct road back to New York City.
• William Weightman, a curate and a friend to the family of the Brontës — including Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre; Emily, author of Wuthering Weights; and Anne, author of Agnes Grey — was a kind man. He discovered that none of the three women had ever received a valentine, so he wrote a poem and made a card for each sister. To mail them, he walked 10 miles!
Daphnomancy is a form of pyromancy whereby the future is predicted by burning bay laurel leaves. A loud crackling from the fire is a positive omen, whereas silence is a negative one.
Daphno is thought to be a tribute to Daphne, an ancient Greek nymph turned into the first laurel tree by Apollo. Originally, the leaves were selected from the sacred grove of Apollo, but as time moved on the practice of daphnomancy spread to pre-Christian era Rome and Greece and was thought to be commonly practiced by augurs of both empires.
The original grove from which the Romans took their laurel branches withered in 68 AD, which contemporary augurs associated with Nero's death.
Source
Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Bay laurel leaves.
Randall wrote:
Obviously, it's comes from burning Daphne
Mac Mac said:
Laurel branches
Alan J answered:
Laurel Leaves.
Billy in Cypress replied:
Laurel tree leaves
Dave responded:
Laurel tree branches and/or leaves. In this case the practitioner would listen for crackling and make his divination based on the intensity of the sound. Loud crackling was taken as a good omen, but little or no crackling meant shit was going to get really bad. Also, loud crackling meant ‘yes’ but no crackling meant ‘no.’
Photo: I just read a news blurb that Germany was celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. I’m not sure that celebrating is the right word? | As if 2020 wasn’t bad enough…
zorch said:
Burning laurel leaves.
Jacqueline wrote:
Predicting the future by burning bay laurel leaves. It's done by the type of sound the burning leaves make.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, replied:
Daphnomancy is a form of pyromancy whereby the future is predicted by burning bay laurel leaves.
Rosemary in Columbus responded:
Laurel leaves
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame wrote:
The answer is bay laurel leaves.
DJ Useo said:
They burned laurel. I've witnessed people doing something similar using sage.
Daniel in The City answered:
Bay laurel leaves
Deborah, the Master Gardener responded:
Burning bay laurel leaves is daphnomancy. I guess there’s a divination for all kinds.
Joe ( -- Vote Blue, No Matter Who -- ) said:
Unfortunately it's women named Daphne while wearing laurel wreaths. The practice has been discontinued cuz the Daphne's were pissed and retaliated and they weren't kind about it. The part about laurel wreaths survived though cuz the survivors said that's all they were aiming for to begin with. Laurel wreaths.
( A lot of people are talking about this)
Cal in Vermont wrote:
Divination by means of throwing laurel leaves and branches on a fire. If they snapped crackled and popped, everything was and would be tickety boo. If they burnt with no drama, everything was not tickety boo.
mj took the day off.
Stephen F took the day off.
Dave in Tucson took the day off.
David of Moon Valley took the day off.
Leo in Boise took the day off.
Kevin in Washington DC, took the day off.
Michelle in AZ took the day off.
Jon L took the day off.
Roy, Lifelong member of Antifa, in Tyler, TX took the day off.
Doug in Albuquerque, New Mexico, took the day off.
-pgw took the day off.
Kenn B took the day off.
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Ed K took the day off.
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Harry M. took the day off.
George M. 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.
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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.
~~~~~
Local TV is fear-mongering about grocery stores, so attended to the weekly shopping early, and experienced no problems.
Tonight, Saturday:
CBS begins the night with a RERUN'NCIS; The 3rd One', followed by '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night with the movie 'The Croods', followed by an old 'SNL' (from 11/02/13) with Kerry Washington hosting, music by Eminem.
'SNL' is RERUN with Bill Burr hosting, music by Jack White.
ABC fills the night with LIVE'College Football', then pads the left coast with local crap.
The CW offers a couple old 'Friends', and a couple old '2½ Men'.
Faux fills the night with LIVE'College Football', then pads the left coast with local crap.
MY recycles an old 'Weather Gone Viral', followed by an old 'Storm Of Suspicion'.
AMC offers the movie 'Four Christmases', followed by the movie 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation', then the movie 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation', again.
BBC -
[6:00AM] MOON LANDING
[8:00AM - 2:00PM] WEIRD WONDERS
[3:00PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - KALAHARI
[4:00PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - SAVANNAH
[5:00PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - CAPE
[6:00PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - SAHARA
[7:00PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - CONGO
[8:00PM] EARTH'S GREAT SEASONS - AUTUMN (EXTENDED)
[9:20PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - KALAHARI
[10:30PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - SAVANNAH
[11:30PM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - CAPE
[12:30AM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - SAHARA
[1:30AM] EARTH'S GREAT SEASONS - AUTUMN (EXTENDED)
[2:50AM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - CONGO
[4:00AM] PLANET EARTH: AFRICA - THE FUTURE
[5:00AM] PLANET EARTH: THE MAKING OF AFRICA (ALL TIMES ET)
Bravo has 'Southern Charm', followed by the movie 'Sweet Home Alabama'.
Comedy Central has the movie 'We're The Millers', followed by the movie 'Step Brothers', then the movie 'South Park Imaginationland: The Trilogy'.
FX has the movie 'Sing', followed by the movie 'Trolls', then the movie 'Trolls', again.
History has 'History's Greatest Mysteries', followed by a FRESH'History's Greatest Mysteries'.
IFC -
[6:00am - 10:00am] Saved By The Bell
[10:30am] Airplane II: The Sequel
[12:30pm] Airplane!
[2:35pm] Tommy Boy
[4:55pm] The Wolf Of Wall Street
[9:00pm] Transporter 2
[11:00pm] White House Down
[2:00am] Grindhouse Presents: Death Proof
[4:30am - 5:30am] Saved By The Bell (ALL TIMES ET)
Sundance -
[6:30am - 10:30am] the andy griffith show
[11:00am - 5:00pm] hogan's heroes
[5:30pm] under siege
[8:00pm] heartbreak ridge
[11:00pm] the hunt for red october
[2:00am] under siege
[4:30am] monk - Mr. Monk Meets The Playboy
[5:30am] monk - Mr. Monk And The 12th Man (ALL TIMES ET)
SyFy has the movie 'Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets', followed by the movie 'Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban'.
Actor Edward Norton knows a thing or two about playing poker and is using that knowledge to call what he sees as Donald Trump's bluff.
The Oscar-nominated star broke down the president's "desperate endgame" on Friday, giving followers a nuanced political analysis that likened Trump's lame-duck period — and reluctance to peacefully transfer power to President-elect Joe Biden — to a failed poker hand.
"The Illusionist" star called Trump's actions a "contemptible, treasonous, seditious assault" on the stability of the country and its institutions, and that's when he put it lightly. Norton has been a vocal opponent of Trump and GOP leaders enabling him for quite some time. He's also an active proponent of Democratic candidates in the decisive Georgia run-off elections to determine party majority in the U.S. Senate.
"I’m no political pundit but I grew up w[ith] a dad who was a federal prosecutor & he taught me a lot & I’ve also sat a fair amount of poker w[ith] serious players & l’ll say this: I do not think Trump is trying to ‘make his base happy’ or ‘laying the groundwork for his own network,' or that ‘chaos is what he loves," Norton said in series of tweets Friday morning.
"The core of it is that he knows he’s in deep, multi-dimensional legal jeopardy & this defines his every action," he continued in the thread. "We’re seeing 1) a tactical delay of the transition to buy time for coverup & evidence suppression 2) above all, a desperate endgame which is to create enough chaos & anxiety about peaceful transfer of power, & fear of irreparable damage to the system, that he can cut a Nixon-style deal in exchange for finally conceding. But he doesn’t have the cards. His bluff after ‘the flop’ has been called in court."
Rachel Maddow made an emotional return Thursday to her MSNBC show, saying her partner’s bout with COVID-19 was so serious they thought it might kill her.
Maddow has been off the air for roughly two weeks since disclosing she had been in close contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. Maddow didn’t disclose who it was at the time, but said Thursday evening it was her partner, Susan Mikula.
“At one point, we really thought it was a possibility it might kill her and that’s why I’ve been away,” Maddow said.
Maddow said her partner is recovering and will be OK, but that it didn’t seem that way at the outset of her illness. Maddow said she’s tested negative so far for the virus.
She is the host of MSNBC’s most-watched show and did the broadcast from inside her home, encountering some technical difficulties before laying out their coronavirus experience.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch says the company’s target date to start to reopen offices and facilities in January has been postponed until “no earlier than” April 2021.
The executive delivered the update today in a memo to employees.
November has brought a mix of news on the coronavirus front in the U.S. Two major vaccines have reported high rates of effectiveness and appear to be on the verge of federal approval and wide distribution. At the same time, though, most states and major cities have imposed strict restrictions as overall infection rates surge to record highs. New York and LA, where many Fox and overall media workers are based, have outperformed much of the country but are nevertheless seeing significant flare-ups and setbacks.
In addition to extending the remote work period, Fox is also going to prolong the period when it pays full-time employees’ health insurance premiums. That benefit will now last through the end of 2021.
A male “Wipeout” contestant has died after suffering cardiac arrest following completion of the TBS competition’s obstacle course, a person close to production told TheWrap. Due to privacy laws, we do not currently have any additional information about the man’s age or identity.
The contestant required medical attention after completing and leaving the obstacle course in the late-morning hours on Wednesday, the production insider said. The contestant was first attended to by on-site emergency professionals. Paramedics were then called to set and the man was transported to a local hospital.
The show’s talent, like hosts John Cena and Nicole Byer and “host in the field” Camille Kostek, were not on set at the time of the incident, we’re told.
The rebooted show, which is midway through production on Season 1, paused production for Thursday and Friday of this week.
“Wipeout” has two paramedics and two set doctors on-set at all times, as well as a safety producer and a paramedic coordinator, the production insider said. All contestants undergo medical exams before being cleared to participate.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teen charged with fatally shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was released from the Kenosha County Jail Monday after posting $2 million bond, according to authorities.
Rittenhouse's bond was posted at 2 p.m. Friday, according to the Kenosha County Sheriff's office.
In a tweet Friday, Rittenhouse's attorney Lin Wood said "God bless ALL Who donated to help #FightBack raise required $2M cash bail."
Wood also gave a shoutout to actor Ricky Schroder and Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow for "putting us over the top."
Later in the evening, Wood tweeted a picture of Rittenhouse alongside John Pierce, another attorney who represents the teen, and Schroder.
Sharing the letter "M" was apparently enough to confuse the Trump campaign's legal team into using data from Minnesota in an affidavit filed in Michigan.
In the latest court filing fail for the president's campaign, paperwork purporting to show evidence of voter fraud mixed up counties between the two states .
An Atlanta lawyer working for the campaign, L Lin Wood, on Wednesday filed an expert analysis of suspiciously high turnout in Democrat-leaning areas of Michigan, according to The New York Times.
But some of the counties identified in the affidavit are in Minnesota: Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee and Kandiyohi.
The apparent mix-up was first discovered by conservative legal website Powerline, with litigator John H Hinderaker writing it was likely made due to the state's similar abbreviations of MI and MN.
A defiant Donald Trump (R-Loser) again falsely insisted he "won" reelection in his first public appearance for a week Friday, as the US president appeared increasingly isolated over his long-shot bid to stay in power.
Claiming against all odds that a path to victory remains viable, and facing pushback from fellow Republicans alarmed by his effort to overturn results, Trump invited Michigan lawmakers to the White House Friday as part of a bid to subvert the will of voters in key states.
But if he expected them to parrot the president's line and publicly support efforts to overturn election results in Michigan -- which Biden won by 155,000 votes -- he was mistaken.
The Republican legislators stood firm, saying they would honor the election's outcome.
"We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan," the state's Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said in a joint statement after meeting Trump.
The usually bright green plants often stand alone amid the jumbled scree that tops the Himalayan and Hengduan mountains in southwestern China — easy pickings for traditional Chinese medicine herbalists, who’ve ground the bulbs of wild Fritillaria into a popular cough-treating powder for more than 2,000 years. The demand for bulbs is intense, since about 3,500 of them are needed to produce just one kilogram of the powder, worth about $480.
But some Fritillaria are remarkably difficult to find, with living leaves and stems that are barely distinguishable from the gray or brown rocky background. Surprisingly, this plant camouflage seems to have evolved in response to people. Fritillaria delavayi from regions that experience greater harvesting pressure are more camouflaged than those from less harvested areas, researchers report November 20 in Current Biology.
The new study “is quite convincing,” says Julien Renoult, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Montpellier who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s a nice first step toward demonstrating that humans seem to be driving the very rapid evolution of camouflage in this species.”
Camouflaged plants are rare, but not unheard of, says Yang Niu, a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China, who studies cryptic coloration in plants. In wide open areas with little cover, like mountaintops, blending in can help plants avoid hungry herbivores (SN: 4/29/14). But after five years of studying camouflage in Fritillaria, Niu found few bite marks on leaves, and he did not spot any animals munching on the plants. “They don’t seem to have natural enemies,” he says.
Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his elaborate, nuanced artworks and advanced technological ideas. But new research has revealed another level of complexity to his drawings: a hidden world of tiny life-forms on his artwork.
The findings, the researchers said, could help build a microbiome "catalogue" for artwork. Each of the pieces had a unique enough collection of microbes that researchers could have identified it again later purely from a study of its microscopic biology. And the drawings' microbiomes had enough key elements in common to help researchers spot counterfeits based on differences in their microbiomes, or even authentic drawings that had been stored in different conditions over the centuries. The researchers also showed that da Vinci's drawings had a significantly different microbiome than expected, with lots of bacteria and human DNA — likely a consequence of centuries of handling by art restorers and other people. Microbes known to make paper degrade over time were also present, showing why those restorers' efforts had been necessary The study amounts to a proof-of-concept exercise, showing how microbiomes might, in the future, reveal unexpected histories of certain artworks or help detect forgeries.
Researchers examined the microscopic biological material, living and dead, in seven of the master's "emblematic" drawings, and found an unexpected diversity of bacteria, fungi and human DNA. Most of that material probably landed on the sketches well after da Vinci's death 501 years ago, so the DNA (or the bulk of it at least) likely comes from other people who have handled the drawings over the centuries and not the polymath himself. But the newfound biological materials do have a story to tell.
The biggest surprise, the researchers wrote, was the high concentration of bacteria in the drawings, especially as compared with fungi. Past studies have shown that fungi tend to dominate the microbiomes of paper objects such as these drawings, but in this case an unusually high amount of bacteria from humans and insects (likely flies that pooped on the paper at some point) were present.
Most of that DNA likely came from people who have restored the work starting in the 15th century. The team has not analyzed the genetic material in the level of detail necessary to see who specifically it might have come from.
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has returned to semi-retired status.
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