from Bruce
Anecdotes
Media
• Richard Watson, author of The Philosopher’s Diet, suggests that people look at the models in a fashion magazine, then look at the models in Playboy or Playgirl. The exercise should show that people enjoy looking at skinny bodies with some clothes on them, while they enjoy looking at naked bodies with some meat on them.
Mishaps
• Ana Samways writes a column titled “Sideswipe” in the New Zealand Herald; her column is a collection of funny photographs and anecdotes that her readers send her. For example, a parent wrote about her daughter, who is a Good Samaritan, “One morning in Bondi [New South Wales, Australia], she spotted from behind what appeared to be a toddler about to cross a busy road and no sign of mum! Quick as a flash, with her long legs and high heels flying, she darted through the traffic and whisked the unattended toddler off his feet … But the ‘toddler’ was a very disgruntled dwarf who swore at her.” In the same column, Ms. Samways put an anecdote sent in by Erik Wetting, who has a female friend who works as a Quarantine Officer at Auckland International Airport in New Zealand. A young female passenger who was returning to New Zealand had been hiking while abroad, and hiking boots need to be inspected for such things as soil and seeds because the seeds of a plant non-native to New Zealand could disrupt the ecology. Mr. Wetting’s friend told the young female passenger, “Show me your boots.” He writes that the passenger “stared blankly at my friend for a moment and then with a shrug started to remove her T-shirt and bra.” The Quarantine Officer quickly let the passenger know, “I said, ‘BOOTS.’”
• After stand-up comedian Judy Carter accepted an invitation to perform in front of a group of handicapped children, she worked hard on her act, which consisted of comic magic tricks involving such things as floating food, but when she arrived at the performance site, she discovered that the children’s handicap was blindness. She ended up improvising her act, telling the children that she was completely naked and how cold it was on stage. Ms. Carter also once worked on a revolving stage. Big mistake. Each time she reached a punch line, she was facing a new part of the audience — who did not know what she was talking about.
• Author G.K. Chesterton once visited Oxford, where he made an acquaintance of an undergraduate, Philip Guedalla, even going to visit him in his rooms. During the visit, Mr. Chesterton sat in Mr. Guedalla’s only armchair — being very much overweight, he broke it. In addition, Mr. Chesterton drank all of Mr. Guedalla’s whiskey. Mr. Guedalla asked him to autograph a copy of Orthodoxy, and Mr. Chesterton wrote, “BOSH BY G.K. CHESTERTON.” By the way, Mr. Chesterton once belonged to a debating society with the name of I.D.F. The initials stand for “I Don’t Know.”
• Very early in his career, during an open-mike night, stand-up comedian Greg Dean made the mistake of inviting a heckler on stage to see if he could get laughs. The heckler told a very funny joke, and even though the club manager succeeded in getting the heckler off stage, the manager then yelled at Mr. Dean, “There are tons of people who have signed up to get on this stage. You can’t put anyone you want up here. Don’t ever do that again. Now finish your show.” For the next six months, Mr. Dean was too mortified to do stand-up.
• Steeply raked (that is, steeply sloped) stages can cause disasters. At a 1962 production of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Cologne, Germany, a piano was wheeled on stage so it could be played at the party given by the character Prince Orlovsky. Somehow, the piano slipped, and it headed down the stage directly into the orchestra pit. Fortunately, the musicians got out of the way in time to avoid injury, but two tubas were flattened and the piano was demolished.
• Entertainer Phil Baker was bald and wore a hairpiece. Once, while they were working together on the movie Goldwyn Follies, the very distinguished Adolphe Menjou saw Mr. Baker and told him, “My God, where did you get that piece? Wardrobe will take advantage of a newcomer every time. You go right back there and tell them to give you a decent hairpiece.” Unfortunately, Mr. Baker’s hairpiece did not come from wardrobe — it was his own personal property.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Chicasurf"
Album: HIJAS DEL DIABLO [DAUGHTERS OF THE DEVIL]
Artist: Los Protones
Record Company: A Tutiplén Records
Record Company Location: Lima, Peru
Info:
A Tutiplen Records is a Peruvian label, based in Lima.
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $5 (USD) for 11-track album
Genre: Rock Instrumental.
Links:
HIJAS DEL DIABLO
A Tutiplén Records
A Tutiplén Records on YouTube
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Michael Egan
Part 8
Bruce’s Stories
Margaret “Peg” Cohn, Dean Emerita of the Ohio University Honors College, remembers carpooling with other mothers. On one occasion, she had a carload of children when they came across an intersection in which someone had written in large letters a four-letter word beginning with “F” and ending with “K.” Ms. Cohn’s seven-year-old carefully said each letter aloud, then asked, “Mom?” Ms. Cohn braced herself, afraid that she would have to give a sex education lesson to a carload of children, but fortunately her seven-year-old asked merely, “How did they do that without getting run over?” Ms. Cohn answered that question, happy that she had remembered “a cardinal rule for parents: Be sure what the question is before you give the answer.”
Women’s sports and women athletes have not always been respected. For example, in the 1960s (well before Title 9), Catherine L. Brown used to teach field hockey at OU on a field that was also used by ROTC cadets. Sometimes, the ROTC cadets would act as if the women athletes were invisible and march onto the field — even during games. On one occasion when this happened, the ROTC cadets were standing at attention — meaning that they could not move — so Ms. Brown ordered the game to continue, and she rewarded each woman athlete who managed to hit the legs of an ROTC cadet with the ball.
Philosophy professor Warren Ruchti studied under the famous philosopher Nelson Goodman, author of Ways of Worldmaking and other important books, at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Goodman’s intelligence was awesome, and Dr. Ruchti tells several anecdotes about him. A visiting lecturer once was busily writing numerous premises for his arguments on the chalkboard before his lecture when Nelson Goodman walked in. Dr. Goodman glanced at the columns of premises, and then told the visiting lecturer, “You have contradictory premises — look here and here.” The lecturer said, “Oh my gosh, you’re right!” Another time a visiting lecturer gave a long, involved talk at a colloquium. At the end of the talk, Nelson Goodman looked at Warren Ruchti and said, “He hasn’t got the answer,” and then walked out of the room. Nelson Goodman moved on to Harvard, from which he retired, but he has not been forgotten. The Ruchtis’ family pet was named in honor of the eminent philosopher: Nelson Gooddog.
Many people don’t regard reading, writing, and learning as working. Philosophy professor Robert Wieman decided to clean his office one day, so he got sweaty moving furniture around and throwing away heaps of old, outdated files. A maintenance worker passed by and said, “You’re the first person I’ve seen working around here.” By the way, Dr. Wieman once told his students, “I have more children than I have fingers, and all but one of them totalled a car by their eighteenth birthday.” Also by the way, Dr. Wieman was my main advisor when I was working on my Master’s thesis in philosophy. At a volleyball game between philosophy professors and philosophy students, I managed to score a point against him. I noticed that he didn’t look too happy about it, so as soon as I could, I let him score a point against me. I could have blocked the ball, but Mama Bruce didn’t raise her little boy Davy up to be no fool.
A student once wanted to interview Ohio University zoologist Scott Moody for a term paper on herpes simplex after learning that Dr. Moody taught herpetology. However, herpetologists study amphibians and reptiles, while virologists study viruses such as herpes. Still, the student’s mistake was not as bad as it may sound. Interestingly, “herpetology” and “herpes” share a common root word, “herpo,” which means crawling. As Dr. Moody explains it, “‘Herpeton’ means creeping, crawling creature. The earlier naturalists used this term for the slow sprawling terrestrial vertebrates (lizards, snakes, turtles, salamanders) in contrast with the more active terrestrial vertebrates (mammals and birds). The first herpes described scientifically was ‘herpes zoster’ or shingles. The way a shingles infection manifests itself is as an outbreak of skin rash and blisters that then spread in a linear fashion, hence crawl in one direction. The Greek word ‘herpes’ was chosen as the genus name for this group of viruses.”
Here is a story that Scott Moody tells his friends: “When I was a graduate student living in Germany collecting data for my doctoral dissertation, I often used the public bathroom at the Berlin Train Station. One of the ‘sanitary engineers’ who happened to be an older woman got her jollies by waiting until there was a long line of men urinating in the contiguous urinal stand, then she would flush real hard, spraying water everywhere, causing men to jump backwards while urinating on the floor or on themselves, displaying their shagadelic [fans of the Austin Powers movies will recognize the reference] tools, and so forth. I witnessed this several times, and it was always the same ‘putzfrau.’”
Ohio University sports publicist Frank Morgan occasionally talked at elementary schools about sports. Once he explained that baseballs are made of horsehide, and a horrified little girl exclaimed, “You mean they kill horsies to make baseballs!”
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Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Gas is $4.35/gal, cash, at the no-name, cash-preferred station (10¢ more/gal for credit) - city average is $4.72/gal.
Comes Out Of Retirement
Hayao Miyazaki
Famed anime director Hayao Miyazaki revealed he is coming out of retirement once again to make a feature length animated film.
In an interview with the New York Times, Miyazaki didn’t give much detail about the film, but mentioned its based on Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book How Do You Live? The story follows a teenage boy in Tokyo who moves in with his uncle after his father dies. The novel is reportedly one of the director’s favorites.
Miyazaki didn’t confirm if the film would have the same name as the book, but when asked why he was returning to direct the film, he simply answered “Because I wanted to.” Studio Ghibli co-founder and producer Toshio Suzuki described the new film as “fantasy on a grand scale.”
Miyazaki has retired several times throughout his career with the first being in the late 1990s. However, a year later he returned to direct the 2002 Oscar winning Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away. His last movie was the 2013 World War II film, The Wind Rises, a fictionalized biographical film about Japanese aviator Jiro Horikoshi, the A6M fighter plane that he created.
Hayao Miyazaki
Powerful Portraits
Project 562
Photographer Matika Wilbur is on a mission to photograph members of every federally recognized Native tribe in North America.
Wilbur herself is Swinomish and Tulalip. She began Project 562 after her grandmother appeared to her in a dream and told her to leave an assignment in South America and photograph her own people.
She's driven hundreds of thousands of miles and photographed members of over 400 tribes for Project 562.
When Wilbur began her project in 2012, there were 562 federally recognized Native American tribes. Now, there are 574.
The project has grown from a photo series to a documentary project to a full-blown archive of Native people, their communities, and their stories.
Project 562
Baby News
Adelaide Meyers
Seth and wife Alexi Ashe had a new face at the table this Thanksgiving!
The Late Night host revealed on Thursday that he and his wife secretly welcomed their third child, a daughter named Adelaide, back in September. Meyers continued his Thanksgiving show tradition of having his parents, Hillary and Larry Meyers, and brother Josh Meyers on as guests, and they helped him reveal the happy news.
First, they shared a video of Meyers and Ashe's two elder sons - Ashe, 5, and Axel, 3 -- in matching turkey costumes, another family tradition. (The family's dog, Frisbee, looked less than thrilled to be dressed as an accompanying pilgrim.) The boys counted down to the surprise reveal, showing their baby sister in her own turkey suit!
Meyers' mother shared the newborn's name, emotionally noting that her granddaughter is named after her own mother.
Adelaide Meyers
Rare Coin Sells For $350,000
Colonial New England
One of the first coins minted in Colonial New England, which was recently found among other coins in a candy tin, has sold at auction for more than $350,000, more than it was expected to get, the auctioneer said Friday.
The one shilling silver coin made in Boston in 1652 — considered the finest example of just a few dozen such coins known to still exist — was sold to an anonymous online bidder from the U.S., London-based Morton & Eden Ltd. said in a statement.
The auctioneer had expected it to sell for about $300,000.
The coin was consigned for auction by Wentworth “Wenty” Beaumont, whose father found it recently in a candy tin containing hundreds of old coins in his study at his family’s estate in England.
Beaumont is a descendant of William Wentworth, an early settler of New England. The Wentworths became one of the most prominent families in New Hampshire.
Colonial New England
Harmful Treatments
'De-Vaccinate'
On social media channels devoted to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, a new craze is spreading.
In a video hosted on Bitchute, a platform known for its extremist content, a man applies electrodes, a strong magnet and "55 percent Montana whiskey" in the hope of removing a COVID-19 vaccine from a US military veteran.
In another, a gory variant of the "cupping" technique to draw blood from an injection site, a man makes extra incisions with a razor to extract a significant amount.
Neither method had any hope of working. It is impossible to undo vaccination, a process which works by teaching the body to fight infection itself, and which doesn't rely on substances that can be isolated or removed.
But, with millions of people now vaccinated against COVID-19, some anti-vaccination advocates are pivoting to a new narrative aimed at those who took vaccines and regret it.
'De-Vaccinate'
Texas Feud
The Alamo
Raymond Hernandez was a boy when his grandfather would take him on walks to the Alamo, pointing at the grounds around the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century.
“He’d tell me again and again, ‘They built all this on top of our campo santo,’ ” said Hernandez, 73, using the Spanish term for cemetery. An elder in San Antonio’s Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, he added, “All the tourists flocking to the Alamo are standing on the bones of our ancestors.”
On a busy day, thousands of visitors explore the Alamo, the site of a pivotal 1836 battle in the Texas Revolution where American settlers fought to secede from Mexico and forge a republic that would become part of the United States.
But long before the Alamo garrisoned secessionists, Spanish missionaries used the site, known as the Mission San Antonio de Valero, to spread Christianity among Native Americans. People from different tribes built the Alamo with their own hands, and missionaries buried many of the converts, as well as colonists from Mexico and Spain, around the mission or right under it.
Now, a new battle over the Alamo is brewing, as Native Americans and descendants of some of San Antonio’s founding families seek protections for the human remains while Texas officials press ahead with a contentious $400 million renovation plan for the site.
The feud comes at a time when political leaders in Texas are trying to bolster long-standing depictions of the state’s history, restrict how teachers discuss the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution and target hundreds of books for potential removal from schools. As critics accuse leaders of political overreach, the dispute over the burial grounds has raised questions about whether the narrow focus on the 1836 battle at the Alamo comes at the expense of the site’s Native American history.
The Alamo
Disease Spillover
Neanderthal Man
Scientists studying ancient disease have uncovered one of the earliest examples of spillover — when a disease jumps from an animal to a human — and it happened to a Neanderthal man who likely got sick butchering or cooking raw meat.
Researchers were reexamining the fossilized bones of a Neanderthal who was found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The “Old Man of La Chapelle,” as he became known, was the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton to be unearthed and is one of the best studied.
The man, thought to be in his late 50s or 60s when he died about 50,000 years ago, had advanced osteoarthritis in his spinal column and hip joint, a study from 2019 had confirmed.
However, during that reanalysis, Dr. Martin Haeusler — a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine — realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.
“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”
Neanderthal Man
Discovered Off The Coast
Mammoth Tusk
To the untrained eye, it may have looked like a giant wood log. In reality, scientists had spotted something unusual off the California coast two years ago: a 3-foot (1-meter) long mammoth tusk.
A research team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered the tusk in 2019 while exploring an underwater mountain roughly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) below the ocean's surface.
Though other mammoth fossils had been plucked from the ocean before, it's rare for such objects to nestle along the deep seafloor, Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, said in a press release.
Scientists ultimately determined that the tusk belonged to a young female Columbian mammoth, possibly one that lived during the Lower Paleolithic era, which spanned 2.7 million to 200,000 years ago. Researchers are still working to determine the creature's precise age, along with more details about its life – including its diet and how often it reproduced.
Scientists are now analyzing the tusk's radioisotopes, or naturally decaying atoms, to pinpoint how long ago the mammoth lived. Since scientists know the rate at which isotopes like uranium and thorium decay, they can determine the tusk's age based on how much of these isotopes are still present in the artifact.
Mammoth Tusk
Airport Employed Herd Of Pigs
Amsterdam
About 20 farm animals were used to chase off larger birds, such as geese, in the area surrounding Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam, the airport said in a press release.
The pilot project was conducted in September to find out whether pigs might be able to help ward off birds from aircrafts. Birds are a danger for airports and planes because they can cause damage if they get sucked into plane engines. They can also damage to the plane exterior, cause crashes, and harm passengers.
How it works: the pigs would be able to come and eat the crop leftovers, which attract birds, removing a source of food.
The pigs grazed on a plot of land between two runways where sugar beets were recently harvested. Bird activity in the area with the pigs was compared to a plot without pigs.
Amsterdam
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