from Bruce
Anecdotes
Umpires
• Umpire Tom Gorman once got mad at the players in the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout because they had been riding him all game. He yelled at them to shut up, they didn’t shut up, so he walked over to the dugout. At that point, he had committed himself, so he had to throw somebody out. Of course, an umpire doesn’t want to hurt any team unless it is necessary, so an umpire in that situation will choose a player to throw out who isn’t useful to the team — for example, a pitcher who had worked the game before. Mr. Gorman pointed in the dugout and yelled, “You’re out of here, John Van Cuyk,” because Mr. Van Cuyk had pitched the day before. The Brooklyn manager, Chuck Dressen, asked, “Who you want out?” Mr. Gorman repeated that he wanted Mr. Van Cuyk out, and Mr. Dressen said, “That’s great, but you’ll have to yell a little louder because I sent him back to the Texas League last night.”
• Major league baseball manager Preston Gomez sometimes was criticized by higher management for being too nice, which means they felt that he didn’t argue with the umpires enough. At a time in his career when he was under fire, a close play at second base went against his club, so he came out of the dugout, told his shortstop, who was complaining, “Get back to your position. I’ll handle this,” then went to the umpire, Harry Wendelstedt. Out of earshot of everybody but the umpire, Mr. Gomez said, “Look, Harry, I know you got the play right and I shouldn’t be out here. But they’re on my *ss. They’re telling me I’m not tough enough.” As he talked, he performed a pantomime of a manager arguing chin to chin with an umpire. Every fan, reporter, and player thought he was mad as hell.
• Late in the career of baseball umpire Bill Klem, his eyesight started to go, and of course he didn’t want the baseball team managers to know that. One day, Casey Stengel and Frank Frisch, who suspected Mr. Klem’s eyesight was going, cooked up a scheme. Mr. Frisch wrote out his lineup in very large letters and Mr. Stengel wrote out his lineup in very small letters. The two managers then gave their lineups to Mr. Klem, who first read Mr. Frisch’s lineup out loud, then looked over Mr. Stengel’s lineup and said, “That’s fine.” Later, Mr. Klem admitted to fellow umpire Jocko Conlan that he couldn’t see Mr. Stengel’s lineup: “Always have the answers, my boy. They tried to stump me. I couldn’t see that lineup no more than the man in the moon. But I could still umpire.”
• Even as a young minor league umpire, Doug Harvey had gray hair — his hair started turning gray when he was 13 — and chewed tobacco. A pitching coach for the Philadelphia Phillies, Ray Ripplemeyer, told him, “You’re a good umpire, but if you want to make it to the major leagues, you better dye your hair and get rid of that chewing tobacco.” Mr. Harvey replied, “If they don’t want a gray-haired, tobacco-chewing umpire, then I guess they don’t want me.” In a few more years, Mr. Harvey was in the major leagues as an umpire, and he went up to Mr. Ripplemeyer, spit chewing tobacco juice on his shoe, and said, “Well, I made it.”
• In the early days of baseball, Hugh Rorty was an umpire in New England. During a game between Lynn and Haverhill, Haverhill was leading when a fog rolled in, and the Haverhill manager requested — strongly — that the game be called on account of poor visibility, saying that he was the right fielder as well as the manager and so he knew when visibility was so bad that a game couldn’t be played. Mr. Rorty simply picked up a baseball glove and went to right field, telling the Haverhill manager to hit him three flies. Mr. Rorty caught all three flies, then the game continued.
• Minor league umpire Harry “Steamboat” Johnson officiated at a time when violence against umpires was not uncommon. Following a game in Nashville, some angry fans stood outside the umpires’ dressing room and demanded that they come outside. Steamboat made a motion toward his hip pocket and said, “Just wait until I get this gun out and you’ll leave us alone.” The fans ran away, leaving Steamboat laughing because he didn’t carry a gun — all he carried was a knife, which sometimes came in handy in such situations.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Grave Dance"
Single: This is a one-sided single
Artist: Beware of Blast
Artist Location: Cologne, Germany
Info:
“BEWARE OF BLAST is a German Surf Rock band. The first album THE LEGACY reached No. 1 in the Surf Rock Radio album charts in 2018. The Halloween single BONE SHAKER BOOGIE was released in October 2019. In April 2020 the album OUTER SPACE entered the single charts on Surf Rock Radio. Just in time for Halloween 2020 the single GRAVE DANCE was released.”
Price: €0.99 (EURO) for track
Genre: Instrumental Surf Rock
Links:
“Grave Dance”
Beware of Blast on Bandcamp
Beware of Blast on YouTube
Beware of Blast Official Website
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
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David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
So Long, Low Price
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
Overcast most of the day.
Utah's Arches National Park
Julie Bowen
Modern Family actress Julie Bowen helped rescue a woman who fainted on an August 2nd hike in Utah’s Arches National Park.
The New Jersey woman, Minnie John, was hiking on a park trail with her husband and son, as ABC 7 New York first reported. Around 7 p.m. MDT, she began feeling lightheaded, telling her family members to go ahead, as she sat down for a breather.
Subsequently, John fainted, hitting her nose on a rock and breaking her glasses. When she came to, she saw two women who had come to her rescue, one of whom she recognized.
“All I remember is sitting there with my head in my hands secure on the rock. Next thing I hear someone with a familiar voice kept asking me questions. I wondered if i might be watching tv,” John shared in a recent Facebook post. “My eyes were closed and they said I will be fine and they were cleaning my face and bandaging me up. I heard that familiar voice saying I am going to be ok, a doctor is cleaning me up.”
The doctor in question was Bowen’s sister, Annie, who gave John electrolytes and pretzels and cleaned up her wounds. Of course, John would ultimately come to recognize the other Bowen as Modern Family‘s Claire Dunphy.
Julie Bowen
Told Producers
Alan Cumming
Alan Cumming apparently spelled (get it?) things out quite clearly for the producers of Harry Potter when they offered him a role in the franchise.
It's long been known that the former The Good Wife star was, at one time, in contention to play ill-fated Hogwarts professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second film in the fantasy series. In a new interview with The Telegraph, Cumming elaborated on what led him to decline the role — in no uncertain terms.
"I didn't turn it down," Cumming told the U.K. newspaper. "I told them to f--- off!"
The actor explained that a salary dispute with the Potter producers was what prompted his curt response. "They wanted me and Rupert Everett to do a screen test, and they said they couldn't pay me more than a certain sum, they just didn't have any more money in the budget," he recalled. "And I had the same agent as Rupert, who of course, they were going to pay more. Blatantly lying, stupidly lying, as well. Like, if you're going to lie, be clever about it.
"I said, tell them to f--- right off," he continued. "And thought, well Rupert's going to get the part. They made him screen test, and I remember he brought his own wig. And then they f---ing gave it to Kenneth Branagh, came out of the shadows."
Alan Cumming
Chicago Home
Muddy Waters
The Chicago home where blues legend Muddy Waters once lived and recorded music is a step closer to landmark status and becoming a museum in his honor.
The Commission on Chicago Landmarks on Thursday granted final approval of landmark status to the brick two-flat home in the South Side neighborhood of North Kenwood, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. It now moves to the City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards and, if approved, to a vote of the full council.
Waters, known as the “Father of Chicago Blues,” moved to the city from rural Mississippi in 1943. He moved his family into the home in 1954 and purchased it in 1956. Waters’ family lived on the first floor of the house. He rented out the upstairs and had a recording studio in the basement.
Waters’ great granddaughter, Chandra Cooper, now owns the property and is converting it into The MOJO Muddy Waters House Museum.
Cooper was “elated and happy” that the landmarks commission recognized and is honoring Waters’ musical legacy and history.
Muddy Waters
Crime Historian Conducts Dig
D.B. Cooper
Nearly 50 years after skyjacker D.B. Cooper vanished out the back of a Boeing 727 into freezing Northwest rain — wearing a business suit, a parachute and a pack with $200,000 in cash — a crime historian is conducting a dig on the banks of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, in search of evidence.
KOIN reports that Eric Ulis, a self-described expert on the infamous D.B. Cooper case, began a two-day dig on Friday. Ulis and four volunteers are searching for evidence about 10 to 15 yards away from where a boy found $6,000 of Cooper’s ransom money in 1980.
Ulis said his theory is that Cooper buried the parachutes, an attache case and the money at the same time, but dug smaller holes instead of one large one.
Cooper was never found. But a boy digging on a Columbia River beach in 1980 discovered three bundles of weathered $20 bills — nearly $6,000 in all. It was Cooper’s cash, according to the serial numbers.
D.B. Cooper
Treated Like A Bioweapon
Covid
Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.
Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years. A Business Insider article from a year ago noted: “Kushner’s coronavirus team shied away from a national strategy, believing that the virus was hitting Democratic states hardest and that they could blame governors.” An administration more committed to saving lives than scoring points could have contained the pandemic rather than made the US the worst-hit nation in the world. Illnesses and casualties could have been far lower, and we could have been better protected against the Delta variant.
At the outset of the pandemic, as Seattle and New York City became hard hit, Republicans apparently imagined that the pandemic would strike Democratic states and cities first, and certainly in 2020 Black, Latinx and indigenous people were disproportionately affected. To put it clearly, Republicans enabled a campaign of mass death and disablement, thinking it would be primarily mean death and illness for those they regarded as opponents.
Nevertheless, Democratic governors, Native nations and people with moderate-to-leftwing views have done a better job of protecting against this scourge. The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”
Covid
LinkedIn for Doctors
Doximity
Medical professionals have become some of the most important individuals in society during the pandemic, working countless hours to save the lives of covid-19 patients and encouraging the public to get vaccinated. However, it appears that even the medical community isn’t immune to the vaccine misinformation plaguing the internet.
A new CNBC report has found that Doximity, a social media network for doctors with 1.8 million members, including 80% of physicians in the U.S., is rampant with misinformation spread by professionals who are supposed to be grounded in science. If you’ve never heard of Doximity, it’s because you’re not a doctor. Only practicing medical professionals can join the social network, and their credentials, such as their medical license and hospital badge, are verified by the company. Users also can’t post their own content. They’re only allowed to comment on content posted by Doximity.
The closed community and verification aspect only makes the misinformation being posted more worrisome. Doximity is purportedly full of comments posted by physicians that claim covid-19 vaccines are experimental, unproven, or deadly. Some refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical advisor, as “Fauxi.” Other doctors have claimed the antibodies that develop when people become infected with the virus are more effective than vaccines.
In response to a June article about a federal judge that dismissed a lawsuit brought on by employees of a Houston hospital that refused to comply with its vaccine mandate, a surgeon repeated a lie spouted by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“Covid-19 vaccines have already killed over 4,000 adults who’ve received the vaccine,” the surgeon wrote, according to the CNBC report. “To mandate a vaccine that has already killed over 4,000 is akin to murder.”
Doximity
Aggressive Fundraising Tactic
Campaign Refunds
Former President Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) and the Republican Party have refunded nearly $13 million to donors in the first half of the year, after deploying fundraising tactics in the 2020 election that duped donors into giving more money than they intended or believed they were, The New York Times reported.
What’s more, the Times reported Saturday that more than $135 million has been refunded to donors by Trump’s reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021.
A Times investigation earlier this year found that Trump’s political operation last year automatically enrolled their online donors into recurring donations every week until Election Day.
Citing newly released records from the Federal Election Commission, the Times reported that of the $12.8 million in refunds issued this year, $8.1 million came from Trump and the RNC’s shared account, $2.2 million from Trump’s reelection committee, and $2.5 million from the RNC.
Campaign Refunds
Don't Try This At Home
Constipation
After an attempt to cure his constipation by inserting a sizeable live eel into his anus, a man from Xinghua in East China's Jiangsu Province has lived to regret it. Unfortunately for both eels and anuses alike, this is not an isolated incident.
The man had become constipated and eschewed (or wasn't aware of) usual medical advice on relieving constipation, opting for the folk remedy of ramming an eel up there and letting it do its thing.
Unfortunately, its thing was to travel up his rectum and into his colon, where it bit a hole in the colon wall and made its way into his abdomen.
The unnamed patient was operated on to remove the 20-centimeter (8-inch) eel. Remarkably, the eel had also survived its adventure and was still alive when surgeons pulled it out of him. The lesson about not putting live eels into your anus was learned the hard way.
This "folk remedy" has struck others in recent times. In 2017, a man had a 50-centimeter (20-inch) eel removed from his stomach following his own attempt to relieve constipation.
Constipation
Formed By Intergalactic Winds
"Dancing Ghosts"
Astronomers have observed what they have dubbed “dancing ghosts” deep in space for the first time. These cosmic dance partners are actually clouds of electrons shaped into being by the intergalactic winds of two supermassive black holes about a billion light-years apart.
“When we first saw the ‘dancing ghosts’ we had no idea what they were,” said Professor Ray Norris from Western Sydney University and CSIRO. “After weeks of work, we figured out we were seeing two ‘host’ galaxies, about a billion light-years away. In their centres are two supermassive black holes, squirting out jets of electrons that are then bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.”
The extraordinary observation is one of many detailed in a paper accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia – available as a preprint on arXiv – describing the first data from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project.
These giant spectral clouds, named PKS 2130-538, reveal information about black hole behavior and what happens in the space between galaxies – and, the astronomers readily admit, they also throw up more questions than ever.
"Dancing Ghosts"
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