Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Stay With Your Own Kind (Creators Syndicate)
I've always lived among my own kind, which is humans, cats, dogs and the birds I feed in my yard. You can see someone who is a member of all those species if you look out the window of the apartment I live in, a second-floor apartment in the three-floor apartment building I own.
Froma Harrop: Are People Ignoring Trump or Just Bored by Him? (Creators Syndicate)
It started during the midterm campaign. Democrats stopped talking about Donald Trump all the time. Now presidential hopefuls are doing the same. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, once a relentless sparring partner on Twitter, all but ignores Trump's goading comments.
Froma Harrop: Anti-Vaxxers Spread a Plague of Ignorance (Creators Syndicate)
An outbreak of measles four years ago at Disneyland focused attention on a growing health menace - the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children. The threat has gone international. The World Health Organization has just named the anti-vaccination movement among the 10 biggest global health crises.
Susan Estrich: Eric for President? (Creators Syndicate)
The ever-expanding population of young homeless druggies has returned from the shelters and is doing meth in their "home" on the beach (I kid you not; the police have been told they need a warrant). The formerly liberal homeowners have hired lawyers. The police patiently explain to a 94-year-old homeowner miles from the beach that she should try to look the other way when the kids are defecating in public behind the house she has lived in for 60 years. The cops put cuffs on a man who is masturbating in public and then take them off 10 minutes later, because what are they supposed to do? ... And [Los Angeles Mayor Eric] Garcetti is running for president?
Lenore Skenazy: Child in Car Seat Falls out of Moving Car. Jail the Mom? (Creators Syndicate)
A Minnesota mom strapped her child into a car seat but somehow didn't manage to strap the seat to the car. Then, another misfortune: The car door opened, either because it wasn't slammed shut all the way or because somehow the child opened it. Result? As the mom drove, the car door opened, and the child, in her car seat, fell out. Another driver witnessed what happened and scooped up the child - who's fine, thank God. The mother turned around and came back in hysterics - and was slapped with child endangerment charges.
Ted Rall: You No Longer Have the Right to a Trial by Jury (Creators Syndicate)
Justice is when wrongdoers are punished and victims are compensated. Instead, the California court system has provided anti-justice. The wrongdoers are getting off scot-free. I, the victim, am not merely being ignored or brushed off. I believe I am being actively punished.
Mark Shields: Campaigns Do Matter and Can Change History (Creators Syndicate)
Blacks in the South who could vote at that time were, out of gratitude to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and because local Democrats did not welcome them to the voter rolls, overwhelmingly Republican. "Daddy King," one of the South's most influential ministers and Martin Jr.'s father, was in Coretta Scott King's home when she answered Kennedy's call. He was skeptical of Kennedy's Catholicism and sympathetic to Nixon. After the call, he said the following: "If Kennedy has the courage to wipe the tears from Coretta's eyes, (I) will vote for him whatever his religion." Nixon remained silent.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes - Dance
In January 2011, Cynthia Mello's water broke in Hartford, Connecticut. The weather was very bad and very snowy, but she needed to get to the hospital to give birth. She said, "I didn't think we were going to make it to the hospital on time. I told my husband to start shoveling the driveway. He came back in minutes later and told me there was too much snow." Her husband called 911, but of course the snow was a problem for the ambulance as well as for regular automobiles. What to do? Some people are problem-solvers, and this problem was solved. The ambulance made it to the Mellos' home, and so did a snowplow. Mrs. Mello said, "The ambulance driver told me he had such a hard time getting to us. We live up on a hill, and they had a plow with them leading the way." They made it to the hospital, but the trip took two hours instead of the usual 20 minutes. Mrs. Mello said, "We were on I-84, and there were four tractor-trailers that had jackknifed. We had to turn around and take back roads to the hospital." Without the snowplow, they never would have made it. Pat McDonald, a nurse, said, "She called the ambulance because her water broke, and the next thing we know we have a snowplow leading her in the ambulance so she can have her baby on time." Baby Jack was born in the hospital, and he was immediately given a nickname: Jack Frost. (In a comment on this story, Bedford Brown wrote about a similar incident. At 2:30 a.m. on January 27, 2011, her son, Danny Brown, who lives in Danbury, Connecticut, called 911 because his wife, Stacey, was having labor pains. Mr. and Mrs. Brown received lots of help. An ambulance arrived, along with the Danbury Fire and Police departments, and fourcity snowplows to clear the way to the hospital, where a baby girl, Cameron Noelle Brown, was born at 5:42 a.m. Mother, daughter, and father are all doing well.)
When Mem Fox, the Australian young people's author of Possum Magic, was giving birth to Chloλ, her daughter, she remembered reading somewhere that singing songs was supposed to lessen the pain of childbirth, so she started singing "Penny Lane." The pain remained the same, but at least the expressions on the faces of the nurses were amusing. The pain of childbirth was so great, in fact, that at one point she told her husband, "This is the last time, my darling. I'm never doing this again." The reward of childhood is a child, and Mem greeted her firstborn-who is also her only child, more because of the pressures of having a career than because of having made a declaration during childbirth-with "Hello, my darling."
At Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele performed horrible experiments on pregnant women that left both the women and their fetuses dead. Therefore, Dr. Gisella Perl, who was in Auschwitz, determined that no more women would be pregnant in Auschwitz. She performed abortions whenever they were needed, feeling bad because she was killing a fetus, but knowing that the abortion was necessary to keep Dr. Mengele from killing both the fetus and its mother. After the Holocaust ended, she worked delivering babies, and she always prayed to God before delivering a baby, "God, you owe me a life: a living baby."
When children's book author Tomie DePaola was in kindergarten, his mother got pregnant, and he let her know that he wanted a sister with a red ribbon in her hair, although his mother told him that he wouldn't know if he had a brother or a sister until the baby arrived. When the baby arrived, he had a sister. As his parents were bringing the baby home, his mother made his father stop by Woolworth's where they bought a red ribbon and tied it in his baby sister's hair before showing her to him for the first time.
On February 19, 1473, at about 4:30 p.m., astronomer Nicolas Copernicus, who popularized the heliocentric view of the solar system, was born. Usually, we don't know such exact birth dates of people born so long ago, so how do we know this about Copernicus? Fortunately, an astronomer cast a horoscope for this founder of modern astronomy. Ironically, Copernicus' astronomical tables were used to cast a horoscope for theologian Martin Luther, who had a geocentric view of the solar system.
James McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1834. Lowell was then a new town that was devoted to the manufacture of cloth - it was not a classy town. However, Mr. Whistler had the perfect reply when a society lady asked, "Whatever possessed you to be born in a place like that?" He answered, "The explanation is quite simple - I wished to be near my mother."
In 1969, New York Met Ron Swoboda became a proud father. The birth occurred back home in New York at 1 a.m. at the same time that Mr. Swoboda was playing an away game in Los Angeles at 10 p.m. due to the three-hour time difference on the coasts. On the scoreboard flashed this message: "Congratulations, Ron Swoboda. Your new son was born tomorrow morning."
When ballerina Maria Tallchief was giving birth to her daughter, Elise, her labor pains were intense and she moaned with pain. Her husband, with a straight face, told her, "Now, Maria, tell me when it hurts." During a pause in the contractions, she laughed.
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Get TV at 10pm est | 7pm pst has
2 episodes of 'The Smothers Brothers' from 1967.
The first one features Janet Leigh and a very young Simon & Garfunkel.
The second one has Bette Davis & The Who - noted for the on-screen explosion that cost Pete Townsend an ear drum.
Media Layoffs
Something's Got to Give
The media industry is in the middle of one of its patented bloodlettings, with a wave of layoffs hitting HuffPost, BuzzFeed, and Gannett. Multiple Pulitzerfinalists have lost their jobs. BuzzFeed was hit especially hard. CNN estimated that around 1,000 jobs between the three companies will be lost.
The old excuses for why this keeps happening just won't do anymore. People are still consuming news in large numbers. The right, which is reveling in the layoffs, has always hated journalism that doesn't contort to its worldview, so the "people distrust the media" reason is bunk, too. We know what the real problem is: The unholy trinity of corporate greed and mismanagement, private equity bloodsuckers, and tech behemoths leeching ad money from news companies.
Verizon owns HuffPost and Yahoo News. Layoffs there haven't just hit the media division of the company; in December, the company announced that it would lay off around 7 percent of its workforce, or over 10,000 employees. This is the kind of thing you would expect in a recession, or if the company was flat broke. Neither of those things are true. Verizon netted $30 billion dollars in profit in 2017, and due to the scam Republican tax cuts passed in 2017, the company got $4 billion in tax breaks-nearly enough to cover what it paid for Yahoo.
BuzzFeed, admittedly a much smaller company than Verizon, made over $300 million in revenue last year, according to the New York Times, but still loses money. It's never been profitable. And as a result of that, a whole slew of its news division got the axe in the absolute shittiest way possible. (Hey, at least it still has this dumbass store.)
For Gannett, which owns USA Today and a slew of local newspapers around the country, things are not looking up anytime soon. Earlier this month, Alden Global Capital-a grim reaper for newspapers like the Denver Post-launched a hostile takeover bid of the company. The papers of record in major cities all around the country like Phoenix, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, Milwaukee, and others have already been decimated because of the aforementioned causes, including Gannett's own mismanagement; if Alden gets its way, it'll be the death knell for local journalism. (Full disclosure: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Gannett was pursuing a bid for Gizmodo Media Group, but the bid was reportedly interrupted by the Digital First Media hostile takeover.)
Something's Got to Give
Artwork Stolen From Bataclan Theater
Banksy
A mural painted by famous graffiti artist Banksy that is believed to be a homage to the victims of the 2015 Paris terror attack has been stolen, Bataclan theater officials said today.
The artwork, depicting a woman with her head bowed solemnly, had been painted on one of the exit doors in the theater, where 90 people were killed in a terror attack on Nov. 13, 2015.
Bataclan officials confirmed the theft on Twitter Saturday.
"We are today filled with a deep sense of indignation, read a tweet from the Bataclan theatre Twitter account. "The work of Banksy, a symbol of contemplation belonging to all - residents, Parisians and citizens of the world - has been taken from us."
The Bataclan mural is just one of many in Paris believed to be by the elusive street artist Banksy. A series of murals that seem to critique French immigration policy appeared across the city in 2018.
Banksy
Kansas City Zoo
Otter Pups
May the force be with zookeepers in Kansas City, who have their hands full with some new baby otter pups.
They're named after a very famous trio: Luke, Han and Leia.
The pups were born in October, but made their public debut at the Kansas City Zoo Friday.
These otters even got the attention of none other than Hamill himself - and the Star Wars Twitter page.
"Thanks for finally reuniting Han, Luke and Leia, @KansasCityZoo- It's much appreciated! #YouOtterBeProudOfYourselves"
Otter Pups
'Princess Diaries 3'
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway is on board for "Princess Diaries 3."
The actress appeared Thursday on Bravo's "Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen" and had some positive news when a caller asked about the possible sequel.
"There is a script," Hathaway confirmed. "I want to do it. Julie [Andrews] wants to do it. Debra Martin Chase, our producer, wants to do it. We all really want it to happen."
Both the original and its 2004 sequel "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" have a devoted fan base.
Both films were directed by Garry Marshall, who died in 2016.
Anne Hathaway
Telegraph Newspaper Pays Damages
Melanie
Britain's Telegraph newspaper has apologized and paid damages to U.S. First Lady Melania Trump after publishing an article it says contains many false statements. The newspaper said Saturday it apologizes "unreservedly" to Mrs. Trump and her family for any embarrassment caused by the content of a cover story published Jan. 19 in the newspaper's weekly magazine supplement.
"As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs. Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs," The Telegraph said. The newspaper did not disclose the size of the settlement with Mrs. Trump.
The Telegraph said it falsely characterized Mrs. Trump's father's personality, falsely reported the reasons she left an architecture program, and falsely reported her career as a model was unsuccessful before she met Donald Trump (R-Sad).
It also retracted the statement that Mrs. Trump's father, mother and sister had relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Trump.
The Telegraph is one of Britain's leading broadsheet newspapers and is traditionally aligned with the Conservative Party.
Melanie
Issues Warning
Hannity
Many right-wing figures lined up Friday night to criticize President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Toast) for temporarily ending the government shutdown for three weeks without having convinced Congress to fund his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Controversial commentator Ann Coulter called Trump "the biggest wimp ever to serve as president" and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said Trump had been "whipped" by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Fox News' Sean Hannity, however, had a different take. The "Hannity" host, who is a staunch supporter of the president and even joined him on stage at a Missouri rally ahead of the 2018 midterms, insisted that Trump still "holds all the cards" when it comes to negotiating with Congress for the wall.
Hannity claimed that Trump would simply declare a national emergency to obtain the funds if he couldn't seal a deal for the wall with Congress during the next three weeks that the government is reopened.
"Anyone out there, by the way, thinking President Trump caved today, you don't really know the Donald Trump I know," Hannity claimed in the clip shared online by Media Matters. "He will secure the border, one way or another."
Hannity
New Fake Theory
Moon Landing
NASA's Apollo 11 mission landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in July of 1969, but that's not what some would have you believe.
Conspiracy theories about NASA having allegedly faked the Moon landings are not new. They all focus on the idea that NASA shot footage of supposed lunar excursions in a movie studio right here on Earth, but a new theory by a seasoned conspiracy pusher really takes the cake in terms of utter absurdity.
Jay Weidner, an author and filmmaker who has proposed theories that include the Sun awakening higher levels of human consciousness and the government's alleged use of airborne chemicals to keep us complacent, has now weighed in on the Moon landings, and boy am I glad he did.
As Express reports, Weidner made some bold claims on a recent radio show that included NASA faking video footage of the Moon landings to fool the Russians, but then actually landing on the Moon at the same time anyway.
And who would have been responsible for ensuring that the faked footage looked realistic? Well our good friend Stanley Kubrick of course! Kubrick, whose name has been attached to fake Moon landing conspiracies for literally decades, gets credit from Weidner as the mastermind behind the "fake" footage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface.
Moon Landing
Busiest Border Crossing
Tijuana to San Diego
The port of entry that connects Tijuana to San Diego, the country's busiest border crossing, will allow only 20 migrants to claim asylum a day beginning Friday, a Mexican government official said Friday. Prior to the policy change, Customs and Border Patrol officers had processed up to 100 individuals a day.
The capacity reduction - known in immigration circles as "metering" - came the same day that the Trump administration implemented its "Migrant Protection Protocol," a sweeping policy change that forces asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while they await their U.S. immigration court hearings. Prior to the policy change, asylum seekers waited in the United States, either behind bars or non-detained but monitored.
U.S. government officials have told Mexican officials that they would be processing and transferring back 20 immigrants per day beginning January 25 at the San Ysidro port of entry, a spokesperson for the Mexico Committee on Foreign Relations said during a press conference in Mexico City. They'll join the thousands of others who are waiting in Tijuana just to cross through the port of entry and claim asylum.
"Accepting merely 20 people a day through the metering process at the San Ysidro port of entry is a sharp reduction from the past," said Ruby Powers, a Texas-based immigration attorney who volunteers in the border city. "It will continue to exacerbate an already intense backlog of asylum-seekers waiting in Mexico."
Tijuana to San Diego
Reveal Arctic Summers
Ancient Plants
The latest sign of just how screwed the Arctic is: moss that hasn't seen the light of day in at least 40,000 years is tumbling out of ice caps on Canada's Baffin Island thanks to increasingly balmy summers. Based on that and other lines of evidence, research published in Nature Communications on Friday suggests that Canadian Arctic summers haven't been this warm in 115,000 years or more.
Even in the wild world of statistics about how climate change is transforming the Arctic, this one stands out.
"This study indicates that wow, we're exposing landscapes that are 120,000 years old," lead study author Simon Pendleton of the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research told Earther. "Our last century of warmth is likely is greater than any century in the last 120,000 years."
To reach that conclusion, Pendleton and his colleagues relied on Baffin Island's ice and the bizarre quirks of geography that have allowed it to reveal its secrets. The island is home to deep fjords and high plateaus, the latter of which are covered in ice caps. Ice caps are huge hunks of ice much like glaciers, but there's one key difference. Where glaciers flow and grind down on the earth beneath them, ice caps are static. That means whatever's on the ground when they form gets preserved rather than getting ground to dust.
Pendleton and others collected samples from around 30 ice caps and conducted radiocarbon dating to determine their age. The findings show the mosses are at least 40,000 years old (and on a wild side note, some of the mosses have been taken back to labs and brought back to life as Arctic zombie plants).
Ancient Plants
In Memory
Michel Legrand
Michel Legrand, three-time Oscar winner and composer of such classic film songs as "The Windmills of Your Mind," "I Will Wait for You," "You Must Believe in Spring" and "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?," along with the groundbreaking musical score for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," has died. He was 86.
His most recent film score was "The Other Side of the Wind," composed for Orson Welles' last film, which was finally completed and released in 2018. Decades ago, after their 1974 collaboration on "F for Fake," the legendary director had asked for another Legrand jazz score. "I take it as a gift from Orson, through the clouds," he said early last year.
The Paris-born Legrand was active in all musical fields, composing classical works, stage musicals, arranging and recording albums, playing jazz piano and conducting orchestras in concert, as well as scoring for movies and television. He once said, "I've never settled on one musical discipline. I love playing, conducting, singing and writing, and in all styles."
His approximately 150 scores include Jacques Demy's 1964 classic "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," a landmark film in which all of the dialogue is sung and which is believed to mark the only instance in Oscar history in which a composer was nominated in all three music categories for the same film (best song, best original score, best musical adaptation). The songs "I Will Wait for You" and "Watch What Happens," both of which became standards, emerged from the "Cherbourg" score.
Legrand earned 13 Oscar nominations in all. He won for the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" (1968), the score "Summer of '42" (1971) and the song score for "Yentl" (1983). In addition to the three "Cherbourg" nominations, others included score nominations for "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort" (both 1968) and song nominations for "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" (1969), "Pieces of Dreams" (1970), "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" (1982) and two songs from "Yentl" that have also gone on to standard status: "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" and "The Way He Makes Me Feel."
His best-known scores are from the 1960s and '70s, including "Ice Station Zebra," "The Go-Between," "Le Mans," "Lady Sings the Blues," "The Three Musketeers," Orson Welles' "F for Fake" and "The Other Side of Midnight." His 1980s scores included Louis Malle's "Atlantic City," the James Bond film "Never Say Never Again" and his sole film as writer-director as well as composer, 1989's semi-autobiographical "Five Days in June." In the 1990s he collaborated with trumpeter Miles Davis on the score for "Dingo" and with director Robert Altman on "Ready to Wear."
"Cherbourg" was one of 10 films Legrand made with Demy. They began with "Lola" (1961) and "Bay of Angels" (1962) and went on to do the musicals "The Young Girls of Rochefort" and "Peau d'Ane" (1970) and other films including "Lady Oscar" (1979).
Legrand worked occasionally in television, earning Emmy nominations for his music for the telefilms "Brian's Song" (1971) and "A Woman Called Golda" (1982). He scored a dozen more TV movies and miniseries in the '70s and '80s including "The Adventures of Don Quixote," "Cage Without a Key," "The Jesse Owens Story," "Crossings" and the Richard Chamberlain version of "Casanova."
His most famous work, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," was adapted into a stage musical in 1979 and received stagings in both New York and Paris. His other musicals included "Le Passe-Muraille" (1997) for the Paris stage which became the Tony-nominated "Amour" on Broadway (2002); and the West End production of "Marguerite" (2008). He also wrote a ballet, "Liliom" for the Hamburg Ballet in 2011, and an opera, "Dreyfus," that debuted in Nice in 2014.
Legrand won five Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year in 1972 ("The Summer Knows" from "Summer of '42") with longtime collaborators, lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Legrand penned dozens of songs with the Bergmans, notably the songs for "Yentl" plus "Windmills," "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" and "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?"
He won other Grammys for "Brian's Song," two for his 1975 jazz album "Images" and one for arranging a 1972 album with Sarah Vaughan. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1990 and received the Henry Mancini Lifetime Achievement Award from ASCAP in 1998. In 2016 he was named a commander in the Legion d'honneur, France's highest honor.
Legrand himself was a prolific recording artist, releasing more than 100 albums in addition to his many movie soundtracks. His 1950s albums "I Love Paris," "Holiday in Rome" and "Castles in Spain" were all top-10 hits in the U.S.
He was also widely acknowledged as a brilliant jazz pianist. His 1959 album "Legrand Jazz" featured such greats as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ben Webster and Phil Woods, and he recorded later jazz albums with Stan Getz, Stephane Grappelli, Bud Shank, Oscar Peterson, Arturo Sandoval and other artists.
Legrand was born Feb. 24, 1932, the son of popular French bandleader Raymond Legrand. A child prodigy, he entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11, emerging at 20 with top honors in composition. He also studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger and later served as arranger and conductor for top French stars Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf.
He is survived by his third wife, Macha Meril, whom he married in 2014; and four children. His sister Christiane, who was part of the Swingle Singers and sang in "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," died in 2011.
Michel Legrand
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