• Jimmy Durante used to close his performances by saying, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash—wherever you are.” Frequently, people would write him letters asking who Mrs. Calabash was; Mr. Durante always wrote back, “Thank you for your letter about Mrs. Calabash. I’d like to tell you about her, but there are some things a gentleman doesn’t talk about.”
Mishaps
• Shemp Howard was a member of the Three Stooges for 10 years after Curly had a stroke in 1946. While shooting the short Brideless Groom, an actress was supposed to slap Shemp around, but she was afraid she would hurt him and so she pulled her punches way too much. Shemp pleaded with her to really let him have it—and she did, giving Shemp a long series of hard slaps and finally knocking him through a door. Afterward, she tearfully apologized to a groggy Shemp, who replied, “It’s all right, Honey. I said you should cut loose, and you did. You sure as hell did.”
• The family of Donald O’Connor performed in vaudeville and traveled in a car with all of their costumes, tumbling mats, and other stage paraphernalia. One day, a little smoke started coming from the car. Someone yelled “Fire!”—and people grabbed axes and fire extinguishers from their office buildings and, Mr. O’Connor says, “literally beat our act to death.”
• Silent-film comedian Ben Turpin, who was famous for his crossed eyes, saved his money and had a happy retirement. When he was an old man, he enjoyed directing rush-hour traffic in downtown Los Angeles. With his crossed eyes and wildly swinging arms, he always managed to royally screw up traffic.
Money
• Country comedian Jerry Clower knew a very religious general store owner named Duvall Scott who recites a Bible verse every time he opens the cash register drawer to put money in. For example, if a child buys a piece of candy, Mr. Scott will open the cash register drawer and say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” If a son comes in to buy something for his father, then Mr. Scott will open the cash register drawer and say, “Honor thy father and mother.” One day, a city fellow driving a big car and pulling a fancy horse trailer came in to buy a horse blanket. Mr. Scott went to the back of the store, brought back a blanket and said, “That’ll be $5.” The city fellow said, “This is a real expensive horse. I don’t put any $5 blankets on him,” so Mr. Scott went to the back of the store and looked over his stock. All he had was one kind of horse blanket in different colors, so he put the blanket down, picked up another blanket of a different color, brought it to the front of the store, and said, “That’ll be $25.” The city fellow said, “My horse is famous—too famous for a $25 blanket. Do you have anything better?” Mr. Scott went to the back of the store again, picked up yet another blanket in yet another color, brought it to the front of the store, and said, “That’ll be $50.” This time, the city fellow was satisfied, and he cheerfully handed over the $50, then walked out of the store. Of course, the other people in the store knew what was going on, and they wondered which Bible verse Mr. Scott would quote. Mr. Scott put the money in the drawer, and he said, “He was a stranger, and I took him in.”
Basic India ink is composed of a variety of fine soot, known as lampblack, combined with water to form a liquid. A binding agent such as gelatin or, more commonly, shellac may be added to make the ink more durable once dried. India ink is commonly sold in bottled form, as well as a solid form as an inkstick (most commonly, a stick), which must be ground and mixed with water before use. If a binder is used, India ink may be waterproof or non-waterproof.
Woods and Woods (2000) state that the process of making India ink was known in China as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, in Neolithic China, whereas Needham (1985) states that inkmaking commenced perhaps as early as three millennia ago in China. India ink was first invented in China, but the English term India(n) ink was coined due to their later trade with India. A considerable number of oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty contain incised characters with black pigment from a carbonaceous material identified as ink. Numerous documents written in ink on precious stones as well as bamboo or wooden tablets dating to the Spring and Autumn, Warring States, and Qin period have been uncovered. A cylindrical artifact made from black ink has been found in Qin tombs, dating back to the 3rd century BC during the Warring States or dynastic period, from Yunmeng, Hubei.
Source
Alan J was first, and correct, with:
China.
Randall wrote:
China
Mark. said:
China.
Billy in Cypress answered:
China
Dave responded:
China. Invented about 2,500 BC, English called it India Ink because that was the source of their trade.
zorch replied:
India ink was invented in China.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, said:
China
Deborah, the Master Gardener wrote:
I’m going with a WAG: India ink was discovered in China. Really, I have no idea.
I hope you all have a merry Christmas. We’re good in this corner of the Universe.
John I from Hawai`i says,
China, of course.
Adam answered:
Probably China. yes...China.
'Well done, well done everybody! We're half way through the dark.'
Cal in Vermont replied:
China.
DJ Useo wrote:
My past art experience clues me in to China being the source of ink for quite a long while.
I've spent so many hours of my life drawing with India ink, & doing calligraphy.
Just think of all the shirts I've smudged.
Stephen F took the day off.
Daniel in The City took the day off.
Jacqueline took the day off.
David of Moon Valley took the day off.
Bob from Mechanicsburg, Pa took the day off.
Dave in Tucson took the day off.
Michelle in AZ took the day off.
Mac Mac took the day off.
Leo in Boise took the day off.
Joe took the day off.
Roy, getting used to the Hermit Lifestyle in Tyler, TX took the day off.
mj took the day off.
Rosemary in Columbus took the day off.
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame took the day off.
Kevin K. in Washington DC took the day off.
Ed K took the day off.
Jon L took the day off.
Doug in Albuquerque, New Mexico, took the day off.
-pgw took the day off.
Kenn B took the day off.
Micki took the day off.
Angelo D took the day off.
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.
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.
~~~~~
The shittens are afraid of the raccoons. I can't blame them.
Tonight, Saturday:
CBS begins the night with a RERUN"NCIS: The 3rd One', followed by '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night with a RERUN'Ellen's Game Of Games', followd by a RERUN'The Wall', then an old 'SNL' (from 12/08/18) with Jason Momoa hosting, music by Mumford & Sons.
'SNL' is a RERUN (from 10/24/20) with Adele hosting, music by H.E.R.
ABC starts the night with a RERUN'To Tell The Truth', followed by a RERUN'Shark Tank', then a RERUN'The Rookie'.
The CW offers a RERUN'iHeartRadio Jingle Ball 2020', followed by a RERUN'Whose Line Is It Anyway?'.
Faux has LIVE'PBC Fight Night', 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 'Vegas Vacation', followed by the movie 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation', then the movie 'National Lampoon's Vacation'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE ELEVENTH HOUR
[7:05AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE BEAST BELOW
[8:05AM] DOCTOR WHO - VICTORY OF THE DALEKS
[9:05AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE TIME OF ANGELS
[10:05AM] DOCTOR WHO - FLESH AND STONE
[11:05AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE VAMPIRES OF VENICE
[12:10PM] DOCTOR WHO - AMY'S CHOICE
[1:15PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE HUNGRY EARTH
[2:15PM] DOCTOR WHO - COLD BLOOD
[3:20PM] DOCTOR WHO - VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR
[4:25PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE LODGER
[5:25PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE PANDORICA OPENS
[6:27PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE BIG BANG
[7:30PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT
[8:32PM] DOCTOR WHO - DAY OF THE MOON
[9:37PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE CURSE OF THE BLACK SPOT
[10:42PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE DOCTOR'S WIFE
[11:47PM] DOCTOR WHO - THE REBEL FLESH
[12:50AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE ALMOST PEOPLE
[1:55AM] DOCTOR WHO - A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR
[3:00AM] DOCTOR WHO - LET'S KILL HITLER
[4:00AM] DOCTOR WHO - NIGHT TERRORS
[5:00AM] DOCTOR WHO - THE GIRL WHO WAITED (ALL TIMES ET)
Bravo has the movie 'Overboard', followed by the movie 'Overboard', again.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Get Hard', followed by the movie 'Step Brothers', then the movie 'Get Hard'.
FX has the movie 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2', followed by the movie 'Spider-Man: Homecoming'.
History has 'History's Greatest Mysteries', followed by a FRESH'History's Greatest Mysteries'.
IFC -
[6:00am - 1:00pm] Saved By The Bell
[1:30pm] Christmas In Connecticut
[4:00pm] A Dennis The Menace Christmas
[6:00pm] A Christmas Story 2
[8:00pm] Jack Frost
[10:30pm] Jack Frost
[1:00am] Richie Rich
[3:00am] All I Want For Christmas
[5:00am] Saved By The Bell
[5:30am] Saved By The Bell (ALL TIMES ET)
Sundance -
[6:00am - 10:30am] the andy griffith show
[11:00am - 1:30pm] hogan's heroes
[2:00pm] braveheart
[6:00pm] oblivion
[9:00pm] the fugitive
[12:00am] the fugitive
[3:00am] public enemies (ALL TIMES ET)
SyFy has the movie 'Seven', followed by the movie 'The Goonies'.
Taylor Swift had a monster year thanks to her back-to-back surprise albums. But apparently, her juggernaut success wasn’t enough to keep her on a Nashville mural depicting some of country music’s biggest stars.
Per TMZ, Swift will be removed from the iconic mural and replaced by singer Brad Paisley. Swift had long appeared on the popular tourist attraction, alongside living legends like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Reba McEntire.
While artist Tim Davis didn’t say why Swift was being erased, let’s face it — she’s been far removed from the country music universe for some time.
Swift is notorious for having one of the most rabid fan bases in music, so you can imagine how her removal from the mural sat with her fans. Hint: not well.
The major news networks are touting big ratings gains in 2020, after the coronavirus crisis and the presidential election drove viewers in record numbers to their lineups.
Fox News will finish the year again at top of the news channels in primetime, with an average of 3.6 million viewers, up 45% from the same period the previous year. MSNBC averaged 2.2 million, a boost of 24%. CNN saw an even greater increase, as it was up 85% to average 1.8 million.
The figures are for the period running December 30, 2019 to December 14, 2020, and are from Nielsen via Fox News.
In the 25-54 demo, Fox News averaged 644,000 viewers, a boost of 65%, while CNN more than doubled its audience, up 104% to 521,000. MSNBC increased 29% to 361,000.
In total day, Fox News again led, up 35% to 1.9 million in total viewers. MSNBC averaged 1.2 million, up 27%, while CNN posted 1.1 million, a boost of 75%.
The first Black president of an American college is being honored with a sculpture installed in the Vermont city where he was born in 1826.
The larger-than-life marble bust of Martin Henry Freeman, a scholar, sits on a stack of books in a downtown square as part of the Rutland Sculpture Trail.
It’s the eighth sculpture to be added to the city’s sculpture trail aimed at celebrating local history and drawing more people to visit the working-class community. Among the pieces is a marble relief honoring the Vermont volunteers who served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, made up of African Americans soldiers, during the Civil War.
In 1856, Freeman became president of the all-Black Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, later named Avery College. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating at the top of his class in 1849. Freeman’s father fought in the American Revolution, one way for enslaved men to win their freedom.
The sculptures of Freeman and the Black Civil War soldiers were recently added to the Vermont African American Heritage Trail, a guide to various spots around the state that highlights the lives of African Americans in Vermont.
It’s only appropriate that NBC leads Christmas Eve TV ratings with its presentation of It’s a Wonderful Life. The 1946 holiday classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed won Thursday night with a 0.6 in the adults 18-49 demographic while 4.47 million viewers tuned in to feel some Christmas joy and hope.
ABC’s presentation of The Greatest Showman starring Hugh Jackman came in second for the night with the circus-driven movie musical delivering a 0.4 in the demo and 2.50 million viewers. The network ended the night with back-to-back encores of Disney’s Prep & Landing animated franchise.
Elsewhere, CBS’s Wednesday was occupied by repeats of Young Sheldon, B-Positive, Mom, Unicorn and FBI while Fox aired reruns of The Resident and Prodigal Son. The CW gave audiences an encore of iHeartRadio’s Jingle Ball from a couple of weeks ago and ended the night with a Whose Line Is It Anyway repeat.
It’s “a powerful reminder that we can no longer trust our own eyes,” a representative for the UK broadcaster Channel 4 told the Guardian. Each year, the BBC broadcasts a special Christmas address to the nation from Queen Elizabeth II. But it’s 2020 and that means everything has to be extra weird. So, Channel 4 has seized the moment to broadcast its own deepfake version of the Queen’s holiday message.
Played by actress Debra Stephenson, the deepfaked Queen began her speech by thanking Channel 4 for giving her the opportunity to speak from the heart. She then proceeds to make cracks about Harry and Meghan leaving the British Royal Family and health workers taking their lives in their hands to treat Prime Minister Boris Johnson. She also takes a not-so-subtle dig at Prince Andrew’s relationship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
If you have bad eyesight and limited hearing, you might, might, be fooled by the fake Queen on a busy Christmas day. But by the time she starts talking about Netflix and launches into a dance routine, you’d surely know something’s up. Channel 4 makes little effort to hide its deception, but that hasn’t stopped some critics from expressing discomfort with the stunt.
Deepfakes use machine learning to analyze a batch of images and output a video approximation of what it might look like if say, Office Space starred the cast of The Matrix. But the technique requires a lot of processing power and artistic nuance on the part of a creator in order to fool anyone. Earlier this year, the creators of South Park released a deepfake web series that included counterfeit portrayals of Mark Zuckerberg and Jared Kushner. Even with the resources and talent available to the showrunners of the most successful TV series of all time, the deepfakes were still pretty janky.
But the method of fakery is only getting more convincing and easier for novices to pull off. If deepfakes don’t prove to be a significant source of dangerous misinformation, they’ll at least allow Channel 4 to have its own annual Christmas address from the Queen for years to come.
Donald Trump (R- golfed on Christmas Day with Lindsey Graham (R-Narnia) as he complained about the ‘pork’ contained in the latest Covid stimulus bill.
The outgoing president went to his golf club in West Palm Beach with the South Carolina senator as he continued to push back on the $900bn bill he has so far refused to sign.
The actual bill has now been flown to Palm Beach, where he staying at Mar-a-Lago, so it is available to sign.
Mr Trump caused chaos earlier this week when he decided he would not sign the bill, which would give every American $600.
Despite his administration helping broker the deal, Mr Trump released a video calling for checks of $2,000 to be issued.
A Russian court sentenced a distinguished historian known for re-enacting Napoleonic battle scenes to 12.5 years in jail on Friday after convicting him of the murder of his young student lover, whom he dismembered.
Oleg Sokolov, 64, a former history professor at St Petersburg State University, was found in a river in November last year with a bag containing the severed arms of Anastasia Yeshchenko, a 24-year-old postgraduate.
Sokolov pleaded guilty to her murder, but told the court it had not been premeditated and that she had driven him to "a state of complete insanity" by making insulting comments about his children from another relationship.
As she handed down the verdict, the judge said Sokolov had shot Yeshchenko four times with a rifle before dismembering her with a knife and saw, taking the body parts out in bags and dumping them in St Petersburg's River Moyka.
Sokolov is an expert on Napoleon Bonaparte and was awarded the Legion of Honour order of merit by France.
About 11,000 years ago, Stone Age hunters crafted sharp weapons out of human bone, a new study finds.
These hunter-gatherers lived in Doggerland, a now-underwater region in the North Sea that connected Europe to Britain. At the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, it was inhabited by herds of animals and humans. Although these people are long gone, artifacts from their culture, including bone weapons, often wash ashore in the Netherlands.
An analysis of 10 of these bone weapons revealed that eight were carved from red deer (Cervus elaphus) bone and antlers, and two were crafted from human bone. "We expected to find some deer, but humans? It wasn't even in my wildest dreams that there would be humans among them," study lead researcher Joannes Dekker, a Master's student of archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.
It's a mystery why these weapons, known as barbed points, were carved from human bone. The research team couldn't think of a practical reason — human bones were likely hard to come by (unlike deer remains) and human bone isn't an especially great material for crafting sharp weapons — deer antler is much better, Dekker said.
Rather, "there were probably cultural rules on what species to use for barbed point production," he said. "We think it was a conscious choice ... [that had to do] with the connotations and associations that people had with those [deceased] people as symbols."
An artifact that was taken from Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza in 1872 was missing for 70 years until it was recently discovered in a cigar box at the University of Aberdeen Museums (UAM) in Scotland.
Curatorial assistant Abeer Eladany was reviewing objects in storage in the museum's Asia Collection at the end of 2019 when she found a small box that looked out of place — in part because its lid was decorated with a motif of the former Egyptian flag, university representatives said in a statement.
Inside the box was a 5-inch-long (13 centimeters) piece of cedar, now in several pieces. The humble-looking wood fragment is one of only three objects ever to have been removed from the Queen's Chamber; it is thought to have been placed in the tomb when the structure was built about 4,500 years ago and may be part of a tool that was used to erect the massive pyramid, according to the statement.
Back in the 19th century, British engineer Waynman Dixon was constructing a bridge in Cairo when he was contacted by Charles Piazzi Smyth, astronomer royal for Scotland, to assist in a survey of the Great Pyramid with the permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, according to the NMS. During the 1872 survey, Dixon removed three objects from the Queen's Chamber: a piece of cedar, a ball and a hook. Together, they became known as the "Dixon relics," and while the ball and hook were later housed in the collection of The British Museum, the piece of wood embarked on a different journey, according to the UAM statement.
The cedar chip ended up in the possession of Dr. James Grant, a Scottish doctor who practiced medicine in Egypt during the late 19th century; he assisted Dixon with the Great Pyramid survey and was with Dixon when he found the so-called relics, UAM representatives said. Their records showed that Grant's daughter donated a "five-inch piece of cedar" to the museum in 1946.
You have reached the Home page of BartCop Entertainment.
Do you have something to say?
Anything that increased your blood pressure, or, even better, amused or entertained?
Do you have a great album no one's heard?
How about a favorite TV show, movie, book, play, cartoon, or legal amusement?
A popular artist that just plain pisses you off?
A box set the whole world should own?
Vile, filthy rumors about Republican hypocrites?
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
