from Bruce
Anecdotes
Money
• Elias Hicks, a Quaker farmer, once had an abundant wheat crop when his neighbors’ fields did poorly. Speculators knew that the price of wheat would rise, and they offered to buy Mr. Hicks’ crop at a high price, but he declined to sell. Later, when his neighbors began to suffer from the effects of the poor growing season, Mr. Hicks sold them wheat — but at the normal price, not at the higher price.
Monks
• According to legend, the monks who studied at the Shaolin Temple had a unique graduation ceremony. They were sent to the temple’s maze of underground passageways and had to find their way out by passing many tests. In one test, the monk came to a wall on which were hanging many weapons, a broom, and a sign saying, “Choose one.” The monk would select one, and then go into the next room, which turned out to be filled with scorpions. If the monk had chosen the broom, he was able to simply sweep the scorpions out of his way. Getting through the room was much more difficult if the monk had chosen a sword. At the end of the underground passageways, one final door needed to be opened, and the only way to open it was to use one’s bare arms to lift and move a searingly hot cauldron decorated on each side with dragon designs. In moving the cauldron, the monk’s graduation diploma — the figures of the dragon — were burned into his arms.
• Two monks and a woman crossed a river on a ferry. One monk ogled the woman, then he winked to his companion, so the woman slapped him. The monk then closed his eyes, but a few minutes later the woman slapped him again. The monk said, “What have I done wrong? I had my eyes closed!” The woman said, “You have been thinking about me with your eyes closed — and that is worse than ogling me with your eyes open!”
Mothers
• Before one seeks truth in faraway places, one ought to find the truth that is available at home. Yang Pu wished to study Buddhism under a great Buddhist teacher, so he left his home and went to Sichuan Province. However, he met an old man to whom he confided his ambition. But the old man asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to seek Buddha rather than a teacher?” “Of course,” said Yang Pu, “but where is Buddha to be found?” The old man said, “Go home. When you see a person wearing a blanket and with shoes on the wrong feet, that person is Buddha.” Yang Pu returned home, where his mother, who was not fully dressed, heard him. She was so happy that he was home that in order to run to greet him she threw a blanket around herself and put on her shoes so hurriedly that she put them on the wrong feet.
• When Dovid Goldwasser acted as Rabbi at a summer camp in Poland for Jewish adults, he met many people who had stories to tell about the Nazis and the death camps. One man, Boruch Segal, told about being lined up to be deported to Buchenwald by the Nazis. A mother in line, who was not observant as a Jew, saw a Rabbi and ran over to him so he could bless her infant daughter. The Rabbi blessed her daughter, saying, “May your daughter live a long life and may she one day become a leader of her community.” After telling this story to Rabbi Goldwasser, Mr. Segal pointed to a woman nearby — a leader of one of the groups at the camp — and said, “She was that baby.”
• When Kathleen O’Connell Chesto, a Christian, was a young girl, she looked into a mirror and complained about a perceived lack of beauty. Her mother overheard her complaints, then told her, “Don’t you dare criticize my handiwork!”
Movies
• One of the studio heads at Paramount invited Groucho Marx to a screening of Samson and Delilah, starring the muscular Victor Mature and the beautiful Dorothy Lamarr, then the studio head asked Groucho how he liked the movie. Groucho pointed out the one glaring fault the movie had: “No picture can hold my interest where the leading man’s bust is bigger than the leading lady’s.” For a long time thereafter, Groucho wasn’t invited to screenings at Paramount.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. responded, blankly.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Almost Love"
Album: FALLING AWAY FROM ME
Artist: Sandra Bouza
Artist Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Info:
“Sandra Bouza has a lot to offer through her music and life experience, and on her new LP, FALLING AWAY FROM ME, the Toronto native shares deeply personal stories derived from living, studying and working all over the world.
“FALLING AWAY FROM ME’s eight tracks together build on the deep grooves of Bouza’s previous EP, THREE YEARS, showing off her sultry, soulful vocals.”
Price: $2 (CAN) for track; $8 (CAN) for 8-track album
Genre: R&B. Soul.
Links:
FALLING AWAY FROM ME
Sandra Bouza on Bandcamp
Sandra Bouza on YouTube
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Frankie the shitten wants my chair to himself, and if I leave so does he.
When I sit down again, there he is.
Honors Author
Mississippi Writers Trail
A new marker has been unveiled on the Mississippi Writers Trail to honor the late author and civil rights activist Anne Moody.
Moody, who was Black, was part of an integrated group of Tougaloo College students who staged at sit-in at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson in 1963. A violent white mob poured ketchup, mustard and sugar on their heads and beat one of the men.
Moody recounted that and other activities in her memoir “Coming of Age in Mississippi.”
“The book has been widely assigned in universities because of its eloquent and bracing truth about the experience of growing up in a society profoundly shaped, or misshaped, by white supremacy,” Mississippi Humanities Council executive director Stuart Rockoff said during the unveiling ceremony Wednesday, according to a news release from the Anne Moody History Project.
Rockoff said Moody grew up in a society that was “predicated on the idea that white lives matter more.”
Mississippi Writers Trail
Governor Pardons Firefighters
California
California’s governor has issued pardons to two formerly incarcerated firefighters who had been threatened with deportation to Laos after spending most of their lives in the US.
Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the pardons for Bounchan Keola, 39, and Kao Saelee, 41, who were both sent to US immigration authorities last year after spending decades in prison for teenage convictions and had battled wildfires as incarcerated firefighters.
Both men told their stories to the Guardian from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) jails last fall, prompting national outrage about their potential deportation to Laos, a country their families had fled as refugees decades ago.
“I could never have imagined this would happen,” Saelee told the Guardian by phone after learning the news. Saelee, who was two years old when his family left Laos, spent 22 years in prison for a robbery when he was a teen, and after completing his sentence was transferred to Ice for deportation. He was released from an Ice jail last week and came home to his family in the Fresno, California, area, reuniting for the first time in decades.
Keola spent more than two decades in prison after he was prosecuted as an adult at age 16 and accepted a plea deal in a second-degree attempted murder case. At the end of his sentence last year, he served on the frontlines of massive wildfires as part of an inmate firefighting program. He was hit by a fallen tree and suffered a near-fatal injury.
California
Pittsburgh Rental Empire
Haddad’s
You definitely know David Haddad’s name, even if you may not necessarily be able to remember where you saw it.
Here’s a hint: It’s on the side of those giant trucks or trailers you see whenever a movie or TV series is being filmed here. That would be the 66-year-old Pleasant Hills native’s company, Haddad’s Inc., which boasts on its website that it’s “the leading film and television equipment rental company in America.”
Haddad’s equipment has been used on more than 3,400 films nationwide over its 66-year history. And to think it all started with a humble Pittsburgh gas station.
In 1955, Haddad’s father opened an Amoco gas station in Pleasant Hills that quickly morphed into a truck rental and towing company. Haddad, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania graduate, assumed he’d eventually take over the family business, though he never could have imagined the direction it would take.
In 1982, the movie “Flashdance” began filming in the Steel City, which at the time didn’t have a particularly robust entertainment infrastructure. The film crew was having trouble finding the necessary equipment from local vendors, so Haddad’s stepped in and rented them a box truck.
Haddad’s
Houston Home Inspiration
Darth Vader
Many have tried to get inside Darth Vader’s head, including, most notably, his creator, George Lucas, who made three prequel movies showing the once-imposing Star Wars villain as a pod-racing, baby-murdering, sand-hating youth. Now, enterprising fans with a desire to more literally live within the dark lord’s noggin and who have a spare $4.3 million kicking around can buy a house designed to kind of look like his creepy space helmet.
“The Darth Vader House,” according to its listing on Sotheby’s real estate website and a post on Boing Boing, was built in 1992 by Dr. Jean Cukier, a presumably wealthy man whose riches allowed him to build a home modeled after one of pop culture’s most recognizable symbols of cartoonish evil.
Located in Houston, Texas, Dr. Cukier’s mad experiment resulted in a 7,040-square foot house that’s meant to resemble Darth Vader’s helmet and basically just looks like a weird postwar museum building that got dropped in a suburb. It comes with four bedrooms, five bathrooms, central air, and a four-car garage. It’s also located in the Houston Independent school district, in case that’s of concern to any evil Sith buyers who want to ensure that their nefarious younglings are well-educated.
The listing leans into its reputation, stating that the home is “known to many as ‘The Darth Vader House’” and calling it a “contemporary masterpiece [that] is one not to miss.” It pretty needlessly adds that there’s “nothing else like it in the area.” As for the price: $4.3 million may be a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the bucket for the incredible sums that wealth-hoarding Star Wars fans will have to spend if they’d like to go the entire way and really, fully embody their evil hero.
Darth Vader
'Only Following Orders' Didn't Work, Either
Election Misinformation
Falsehoods about the election helped bring insurrectionists to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and now some who are facing criminal charges for their actions during the riot hope their gullibility might save them or at least engender some sympathy.
Lawyers for at least three defendants charged in connection with the violent siege tell The Associated Press that they will blame election misinformation and conspiracy theories, much of it pushed by then-President Donald Trump, for misleading their clients. The attorneys say those who spread that misinformation bear as much responsibility for the violence as do those who participated in the actual breach of the Capitol.
“I kind of sound like an idiot now saying it, but my faith was in him,” defendant Anthony Antonio said, speaking of Trump. Antonio said he wasn’t interested in politics before pandemic boredom led him to conservative cable news and right-wing social media. “I think they did a great job of convincing people.”
After Joe Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly claimed that the race was stolen, even though the claims have been repeatedly debunked by officials from both parties, outside experts and courts in several states and Trump’s own attorney general. In many cases, the baseless claims about vote dumps, ballot fraud and corrupt election officials were amplified on social media, building Trump’s campaign to undermine faith in the election that began long before November.
The tide of misinformation continues to spread, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote Wednesday in a decision denying the release of a man accused of threatening to kill U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Election Misinformation
Comparisons
Marjorie 3-Names
There’s an old internet adage that says the longer a political discussion continues, the greater the probability that someone will compare something to Nazi Germany. In a speech on Thursday night, however, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t take long to both denounce such comparisons – and then make one herself.
At a stop in Dalton, Georgia on her and Rep Matt Gaetz’s “America First” speaking tour, the combative congresswoman complained that Democrats “spent four years… calling Republicans Nazis.”
“That’s a mean, nasty, dirty word,” she said. “And what did they call President Trump? Hitler, that’s right! That’s one of the most evil men to ever walk this earth, but that’s what they called our president.”
Moments later, Ms Greene was using that “mean, nasty, dirty word” to describe Democrats.
“You know, Nazis were the National Socialist Party, just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party,” the Georgia Republican said.
Marjorie 3-Names
The Nose Doesn’t Know
K-9s Retire
Asking dogs to follow their noses won’t work anymore in states that have legalized marijuana.
As Virginia prepares to legalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana on July 1, drug-sniffing police dogs from around the state are being forced into early retirement, following a trend in other states where legalization has led to K-9s being put out to pasture earlier than planned.
Virginia state police are retiring 13 K-9s, while many smaller police departments and sheriff’s offices are retiring one or two dogs. Most are in the process of purchasing and training new dogs to detect only illicit drugs, including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. Some departments are unable to afford up to $15,000 to buy and train a new dog, so they are disbanding their K-9 units.
The dogs trained on multiple drugs alert in the same way for all of them, so it’s impossible to tell whether they are indicating the presence of marijuana or an illicit drug. The dogs also cannot distinguish between a small, legal amount of marijuana or a larger, still-illegal amount of the drug. For police, that means they can no longer be used to establish probable cause for a search.
“We won’t use our dogs trained in marijuana because that could be a defense an attorney would raise for a client, to say, ’Which odor did the K-9 alert on — was it marijuana or was it an illegal drug?” said Bedford County Sheriff Mike Miller.
K-9s Retire
Dead Bald Eagle
Hunter Story
An eagle-eyed turkey hunter from Wisconsin made a wild discovery on Wednesday morning.
Neal Herrman, from Barron, had already harvested a bird in nearby Dunn County when he decided to continue scouting at other properties. A little while later, however, he stumbled across something much more fowl than a turkey.
“I noticed something white out in the field, just a white spot… I put my binoculars on, and I thought, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s a bald eagle over there.’”
Sure enough, it was. But that’s not all Herrman found. Inside the dead eagle’s talons was the head of a deer.
“I walked down to it, I saw it had a newborn fawn in its talons,” Herrman said. “I would guess the deer had been dead for three days or so. And the eagle only about 12 hours.”
Hunter Story
Origin Mystery Solved
Watermelon
Researchers have identified the likely origins of Citrinus lanatus vulgaris, commonly known as the watermelon, according to a new study. Their work pegs a Sudanese melon as the progenitor of the iconic green-striped fruit.
Watermelons are native to Africa, but exactly when, where, and how a watermelon predecessor was domesticated and turned into the fruit we know today has long been a mystery to botanists.
The team’s research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, follows up on years of work on the biogeography of the melon genus, Citrillus. As lead author Susanne Renner, a botanist at the University of Munich, put it, “everybody thought that there were only four wild species and that the sweet watermelon that we eat today came from South Africa.” But in 2015, one of her then-graduate students, Guillaume Chomicki, found through DNA sequencing of different specimens across Africa that the suspected watermelon ancestor in the south was just a distant relation. “From there, one thing led to another,” Renner said, and the researchers just landed on the Kordofan melon as the most likely genetic origin for the modern watermelon.
Tracing the watermelon’s ancestry to South Africa was the result of a slew of errors, said Chomicki, now a botanist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Some 150 years after a disciple of taxonomist Carl Linneaus picked up and named a new variety of watermelon near Cape Town, naming it Citrullus lanatus, an American botanist merged the find with watermelons, which share the same name. “From this moment on, the general idea was that the watermelon came from South Africa,” Chomicki said.
Watermelons and their archaic predecessors aren’t the sorts of things that tend to fossilize, which has further obscured the fruit’s true origins. Seeds sometimes fossilize, which can be useful for probing ancient DNA, but the oldest DNA in this paper comes from 270-year-old watermelon leaves that were preserved in a herbarium. The team reared samples of all watermelon species and grew them to maturity in greenhouses in Munich, Germany and Ithaca, New York.
Watermelon
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