Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: The Russians Didn't Need Trump (Creators Syndicate)
While we wait for the media to stop packing itself with MORE people who all think alike, I'll explain to you why the Russians didn't collude with Trump. They didn't have to, and, anyway, I don't think they believed he was stable enough to be a double agent. They took a look at this real estate developer turned politician, and they were damn sure they wanted him to win, but after a couple of approaches, they realized Trump and his merry crew of amateurs would be the worst asset they ever bought. So, they bypassed the candidate, and went after the voters.
Ted Rall: "I Told You So: Only Idiots Believed in Russiagate" (Creators Syndicate)
A second Trump administration, which just became likelier, will hasten the destruction of the planet by pollution and climate change, widen income and wealth disparity and gut the Affordable Care Act. […] Wanna know the richest irony? Trump knew how this would turn out. He knew what the Mueller report would say. For two years, he's been watching DNC mouthpieces such as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow rant about Russiagate. He knew he'd use those clips for one attack ad after another. Actual collusion! Democrats and their media outlets conspired to install Donald Trump as president in 2020.
Mark Shields: The Powell Doctrine Has Been Repealed (Creators Syndicate)
[Colin] Powell insisted that before such action, our vital national security interest be threatened by the identified adversary, and that we take action only when the U.S. forces were overwhelmingly disproportionate to the forces of the adversary; and only after the mission was fully understood by and strongly supported by the American public; and only when the U.S. mission had real international backing. Finally, before any such an action was launched, there had to be a coherent and agreed-upon exit strategy for the U.S. troops.
Owen Myers: "Agnès Varda's last interview: 'I fought for radical cinema all my life'" (The Guardian)
How would you like to be remembered? "I would like to be remembered as a film-maker [who] enjoyed life, including pain. This is such a terrible world, but I keep the idea that every day should be interesting. What happens in my days - working, meeting people, listening - convinces me that it's worth being alive."
Peter Bradshaw: "'Greatest of the great' - Agnès Varda: the eternally youthful soul of world cinema" (The Guardian)
Arguably the greatest film-maker of the French New Wave, Varda - who has died - continued making her distinctive brand of wise, personal, accessible cinema into her late 80s.
Agnès Varda, beloved French New Wave director, dies aged 90 (The Guardian)
The veteran film-maker, whose Faces Placesearned her a best documentary Oscar nomination in 2018, has died. … Varda, who became the oldest ever Oscar nominee for Faces Places (alongside the photographer JR and her producer daughter, Rosalie), earned legions of new admirers after she sent a cardboard cutout to the Oscar nominees lunch. In the event, she lost out to the doping documentary Icarus, but it was a characteristic flourish from the film-maker.
Simon Hattenstone: "Agnès Varda: 'I am still alive, I am still curious. I am not a piece of rotting flesh'" (From Sept 2018; The Guardian)
Agnès Varda is a dizzying blur of dots - polka-dot trousers, polka-dot shirt, polka-dot socks, polka-dot scarf. "I've always loved polka dots. Ah, oui. It is a joyful shape, the polka dot. It is alive." You could say the same of Varda. She is more joyously alive than anybody I have ever met.
Alison Flood: "Plagiarism, 'book-stuffing', clickfarms ... the rotten side of self-publishing" (The Guardian)
Scams are rife, particularly when some authors can rake in thousands each month - but high-profile victims of plagiarism warn 'day of reckoning is coming'.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Observation
Politics
A political observation:
The difference between the two major political parties in this country seems to be:
Republicans are the party of us (white folks) against everyone else
Democrats are the party of us AND everyone else.
Am I wrong?
Randall
Thanks, Randall!
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• William R. Brody, President of the Johns Hopkins University, tells a story about two students attending Columbia University. One student was Sandy Greenberg, who discovered that he was suffering from glaucoma. The eye disease had not been discovered in time, and he became blind. Fortunately, the other student, with whom he roomed, read his textbooks to him each night, and Mr. Greenberg got his degree with honors and even earned a Fulbright Scholarship. Of course, he stayed in contact with his former roommate, who had also graduated and who also went on to do graduate work. It turned out that his former roommate was unhappy in graduate school, instead wanting to sing with a high school friend who was also interested in music, but they needed $500 to pay for a demo record. Mr. Greenberg was not rich, but he did have $500, and he sent it to his former roommate. (Mr. Greenberg said to Mr. Brody, "He made my life; I needed to help make his life.") By the way, the roommate was Art Garfunkel, Art's friend was Paul Simon, and the demo record resulted in Simon and Garfunkel's first hit: "The Sound of Silence." (Also by the way, Mr. Garfunkel sang at the wedding of Sandy's daughter.) Here's another Sandy Greenberg/Art Garfunkel story; this one is told by Jerry Speyer: After Sandy became blind, Art asked Sandy to accompany him on the subway to downtown as he ran an errand. Sandy agreed, but downtown, far from the campus, Art said to him, "All right then, Sandy, I'll see you back at the dorms." Then he left Sandy, who had not been on the subway alone since he had become blind. Well, Sandy thought that Art had left him. Actually, Art stayed with him, but Sandy did not know that because he could not see. Sandy made his way back to the campus, and Art tapped his shoulder and told him, "I knew you could do it. I wanted to be sure YOU knew you could do it." Mr. Speyer says, "I'll leave out Sandy's exact words to Art in that moment, but suffice it to say, they laughed about it later."
• Both punk and riot grrrl (riot grrrl = punk + feminism) music believe in Do-It-Yourself (DIY) when it comes to creating music and other art. In 1994, a drunk and enthusiastic 16-year-old girl named Lauren Goften approached Rachel Holborow, who worked for the English record label Slampt. Lauren told Rachel about her band Kenickie, which she said she had formed with some schoolmates. Rachel was so intrigued by what she heard that she asked for a demo tape. Actually, the band existed only in Lauren's head. Also, Lauren and her schoolmate Marie du Santiago did not know how to play musical instruments. No problem. They learned how to play two chords and started writing songs and recorded their first tape: Uglification. They then learned to play a third chord and started playing in public. Lauren, whose band name was Lauren Laverne, remembers that she forgot how to play her guitar solo while on stage, so she sang it instead. Basically, the band learned how to play on stage and they learned how to write songs by writing them. So what happened? Alan McGee, head of Creation Records, took a plane to see them. He liked what he heard and offered to sign them to a record deal. They turned him down. Kenickie was active from 1994 to 1998, recorded for Fierce Panda and EMI, and when they broke up, lots of female fans mourning the breakup sent letters for months to the music magazines NME (New Musical Express)and Melody Maker.
• In some parts of the world, girls are not prized as highly as boys. For example, in India, girls are sometimes unwanted because providing dowries and paying for weddings for them is very expensive. Boys, on the other hand, are valued because when they get married, they receive a dowry and bring money into the family. In India, many girls have been given the names "Nakusa" or "Nakushi." In Hindi, these names mean "Unwanted." In October 2011, hundreds of girls in central India attended a renaming ceremony in which they shed their unwanted names and instead chose new names for themselves. Their new, self-chosen names include "Aishwarya" after a Bollywood star, "Savitri" after a Hindi goddess, and "Vaishali," which in Hindi means "prosperous, beautiful, and good." A 15-year-old girl who had shed her old name of "Nakusa" for her new name of "Ashmita," which in Hindi means "very tough," said, "Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy."
• So where did the title of John Lee Hooker's song "Boom Boom" come from? He got the title from a bartender named Luilla at the Apex Bar in Detroit. Mr. Hooker was playing with a band, and he always arrived late. Whenever that happened, and it always happened, Luilla pointed at him and said, "Boom boom, you're late again." Mr. Hooker recognized a good song title when he heard it, so he created a song, and it was a hit first for him and later for the Animals. What about Luilla? Mr. Hooker says, "She went around telling everyone 'I got John Lee to write that song.' I gave her some bread for it, too, so she was pretty happy."
• Sometimes, male audience members would yell "Show us your tits!" at the all-female San Francisco band Frightwig. They always yelled back, "Show us your dicks!" Soon, they began inviting a male audience member to come on stage and strip and dance as they played the song "A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do." Once, four young fans asked if they could dance on stage to the song. They danced in their underwear and then turned around and mooned the audience. Frightwig member Deanna Ashley remembers that they had FRIGHTWIG written on their butt cheeks. She says, "It was so cute."
• According to ballet lingo, a particularly demanding dance is called a "puff," because the dancer will huff and puff after dancing it. Of course, no matter how strenuous the role, the dancer must wait until after exiting to huff and puff.
• Eve Arden was born Eunice Quedens. She got her stage name by combining the name of the first woman in the Bible, which she was reading when she decided she needed a stage name, with the last name of famous cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden.
• Actress Swoosie Kurtz was named after an airplane. Her father was a famous pilot in the Air Force, and he had flown a B-17 named "The Swoose" in World War II. When she was born, the press wrote such things as "The other Swoose has landed."
• Bryon, nicknamed "Brynie," was the eldest of the Seven Little Foys, whose real last name was Fitzgerald, When he met John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President told him, "You know, Brynie, all we Fitzgeralds are related." Bryon asked, "What about Ella?"
• Suzanne Farrell, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet, had three cats. They were named Top, Middle, and Bottom. (Her first cat was named Bottom because it had black patches on its bottom.)
• Count Basie got his name early in his career, when he was often late for rehearsals. Frequently, the bandleader Bennie Moten would look around, see that Mr. Basie was not present, then shout, "Where is that no-'count Basie?"
• The brother of American dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis was never properly named by their parents. He signed himself "B. St. Denis" and was called either "Brother" or "Buzz."
• "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." - William Shakespeare
• "A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence." - Leopold Stokowski
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny spring day.
Cancel Tour
Rolling Stones
British rock icon Mick Jagger said on Saturday he was "devastated" after his Rolling Stones were forced to cancel their United States and Canada tour dates so he could receive "medical treatment".
"I really hate letting you down like this," the 75-year-old wrote on his Twitter account, without specifying what treatment he was receiving.
The rock legends earlier announced the cancellations, saying that they would reschedule the dates.
Jagger has eight children, five grand children and a great-granddaughter, but has maintained his energetic stage performances well into his 70s, playing Britain's Glastonbury Festival in 2013.
The band, who formed in 1962, were due to play 17 shows in the US and Canada between April and June.
Rolling Stones
Bob Dylan's Paintings
Tulsa
A Tulsa museum will soon open a new Bob Dylan exhibition that will showcase 12 pastel portraits the musician painted.
The Tulsa World reports that the Gilcrease Museum will display "Bob Dylan: Face Value and Beyond" from May 10 to Sept. 15.
The exhibit is filled with pieces from the Bob Dylan Archives, which holds more than 100,000 items from Dylan's 60-year career.
The exhibit will also include handwritten song lyrics, a black leather jacket, an electric guitar and screen tests filmed by Andy Warhol.
It's the first major show from the archives since it was acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa in 2016.
Tulsa
Kon-Tiki Museum
Norway
Norway agreed Thursday to hand back thousands of artefacts removed from Easter Island by the explorer Thor Heyerdahl during his trans-Pacific raft expeditions in the 1950s.
An agreement was signed by representatives of Oslo's Kon-Tiki Museum and officials of Chile's culture ministry at a ceremony in Santiago as part of a state visit by Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja.
The museum pieces include carved artifacts and human bones from the Rapa-Nui, the first inhabitants of the remote Chilean island in the Pacific.
Heyerdahl's family said he had long wanted to return the pieces he collected in expeditions in the mid-1950s and mid-1980s, currently exhibited in the Oslo museum.
The signing ceremony was also attended by Thor Heyerdahl Jr. who accompanied his father on one of his expeditions to the island in 1955, when he was 17.
Norway
Longest-Running Primetime Live-Action Series
L&O: SVU
Celebrating a very special milestone-one that could really only have been achieved with the help of a whole lot of very special victims-NBC's Law & Order: SVU has now officially become the longest running primetime live-action series in U.S. TV history. In doing so, the Dick Wolf-produced procedural has now surpassed Gunsmoke, a venerable TV Western from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s (Jesus) that now exists solely as a longevity milestone for other long-running TV series to blithely blow past.
Per Deadline, NBC renewed the show for a new season today, confirming that Mariska Hargitay's Olivia Benson will continue to try to protect New York's various dead and abused children for a record-setting 21-season reign of fake search engines, weird Ice-T reaction shots, and general John Mulaney-inspiring cop show pleasures. (That also, incidentally, means it just blew past the record set by the original Law & Order, which went off the air with its 20th season back in 2010.) SVU, of course, offers up a particularly addicting flavor of discomfiting TV comfort food, ensuring that no matter what year you tune in, you'll catch a bunch of basically good detectives trying to catch some very bad people with a minimum of distracting fuss. Meanwhile, Hargitay's Benson is now officially the longest-running starring character in a live-action primetime show, kicking the ass of not only Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon, but also Dr. Frasier Crane, which is honestly a DVD bonus feature we'd kind of like to see.
L&O: SVU
Charter School
North Carolina
A North Carolina charter school promoting traditional values engaged in unconstitutional sex discrimination by requiring girls to wear skirts, a federal judge has ruled.U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard ruled that Charter Day School can't enforce the skirts-only rule as part of its dress code that punishes violations with suspensions and even expulsion.
No child has been expelled for violating the dress code since the school opened in 2000, Howard said in a decision filed on Thursday.
But girls are clearly treated differently than boys at the kindergarten through 8th grade school in Leland, about 10 miles west of Wilmington, Howard ruled. That's a violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal protection requirements.
One of the mothers suing with the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of their daughters said the judge's decision means a girl's comfort and freedom to move is on par with their male classmates.
"All I wanted was for my daughter and every other girl at school to have the option to wear pants so she could play outside, sit comfortably, and stay warm in the winter," Bonnie Peltier said in a statement provided by the ACLU. "But it's disappointing that it took a court order to force the school to accept the simple fact that, in 2019, girls should have the choice to wear pants."
North Carolina
Fungal Disease Decimates Bat Population
Minnesota
Half of Minnesota's bat species are nearing extinction because of a potentially fatal fungal disease.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources released its bat population survey findings on Thursday. The department found that the disease called white nose syndrome has killed up to 94 percent of bats that hibernate in state-monitored caves and abandoned mines.
The fungus produces a white, powdery substance and is known to only harm hibernating bats. Minnesota has four bat species that hibernate and four that migrate south for the winter.
Department mammalogist Gerda Nordquist says researchers are concerned the hibernating bats will soon be completely wiped out in Minnesota.
Nordquist says the dramatic decline in bats could lead to an increase in insect populations. Bats help reduce mosquitoes and some agricultural crop pests.
Minnesota
From Cadaver Tissues
Blood Vessels
Blood vessels damaged by cardiovascular disease can become a serious problem if they're not repaired in time. To do that, you have two options: replace it with a vessel taken from another part of your body, or make a new one from scratch.
Option A has its limits. And the kinds of synthetic vessels we currently use for option B aren't risk-free. So researchers are exploring option C - get a dead body to make one for you.
The US-based biotech company Humacyte has made headway on a radical new method for building replacement blood vessels using tissues from recently deceased donors.
The results from two recent phase II clinical trials involving patients with end-stage kidney failure have shown their lab-grown vessels work just as predicted.
Rather than swapping a damaged vessel for a spare part taken from a cadaver and risking rejection, the company have developed a procedure that puts donated cells to work constructing a frame of proteins for the patient's own cells to grow on.
Blood Vessels
'Day The Dinosaurs Died'
Fossils
Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.
Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt.
Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper published Friday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a discovery that has sparked tremendous excitement among paleontologists.
About 3 in 4 species perished in what is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, also known as the K-Pg event or K-T extinction. The killer asteroid most famously claimed the dinosaurs.
Four decades of research buttresses the asteroid extinction theory, widely embraced as the most plausible explanation for the disappearance of dinosaurs.
Fossils
Prove Quick Adaptors
Tasmanian Devils
A contagious cancer is threatening Tasmanian devils with extinction, but these unique carnivores -- and their human helpers -- are adapting at breakneck speed, giving new hope for their survival.
Evolutionary change is usually measured over millennia, but in the craggy mountains of northern Tasmania, it can be seen in real time.
Three decades after the first cases of a fatal transmissible cancer scythed through Tasmanian devil populations, experts are seeing dramatic changes in the 15 percent of creatures that have survived.
The cancer spreads via the bite of an infected individual, usually during mating or when they challenge each other jaw to jaw.
The disease is still almost always fatal, and a second strain is being investigated, but antibodies have been detected in infected animals for the first time and more than two dozen have contracted the cancer and survived.
Tasmanian Devils
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