from Bruce
Anecdotes
Pitchers
• In the 1920s, the New York Yankees had several power hitters, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Tony Lazzeri, who were called “Murderers’ Row” because they figuratively murdered pitchers by frequently hitting home runs. Waite Hoyt, a right-handed pitcher for the Yankees, once joked, “A Yankee pitcher never should hold out (not sign a contract in hopes of getting more money) because he might be traded, and then he would have to pitch against them.”
• Gaylord Perry was well aware that he had a reputation for throwing spitballs—he titled his autobiography Me and the Spitter and after winning 300 games he wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan “300 Wins is Nothing to Spit At.” Baseball manager Gene Mauch was also well aware of Mr. Perry’s reputation and once said, “He should be in the Hall of Fame, with a tube of K-Y Jelly attached to his plaque.”
• Gaylord Perry was a great pitcher but not a great hitter. In fact, Alvin Dark (manager for the San Francisco Giants) once predicted that an astronaut would land on the moon before Mr. Perry hit a home run. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon—and 17 minutes later Mr. Perry hit his very first major-league home run.
Practical Jokes
• Jay Johnstone played major-league baseball from 1966 to 1984 and made his mark as a clown. After a Dodger shortstop made a couple of fielding errors in one game, Mr. Johnstone put Band-Aids on his glove. While sitting in the dugout, Mr. Johnston often wore giant sunglasses, a space helmet, or a beanie. During one game, he and Dodger pitcher Jerry Reuss left the dugout, changed clothes, and joined the groundskeeping crew in manicuring the field at the end of the fifth inning. They were recognized, a TV cameraman broadcast their antics, and the fans gave them a standing ovation. However, Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda gave both men $200 fines for being out of uniform and sent Mr. Johnstone in to pinch-hit—Mr. Johnstone hit a home run. Returning to the dugout, he told Mr. Lasorda, “Next time you need me, I’ll be in the groundskeepers’ room.”
• When Chamique Holdsclaw played as a first-year athlete for the Tennessee Lady Vols, her first road trip was to Hawaii, where they would play in the Kona Classic. Before they left for the airport, her teammates handed her a yellow broomstick and told her that it was a tradition for a first-year player to carry the “freshman pole” during their first road trip of the season. Not wanting to break tradition, Ms. Holdsclaw carried the broomstick through the airport and onto the airplane, where finally a coach told her that she was the victim of a practical joke. Actually, the practical joke started a new tradition. The Lady Vols won the Kona Classic (and Ms. Holdsclaw was named Most Valuable Player of the tournament), and in years afterward the freshman pole was carried on the first road trip of the season to bring the team good luck.
• Referee Dan Tehan of Cincinnati witnessed a practical joke pulled on a timekeeper at a University of Michigan basketball game in the first half of the 20th century. The timekeeper always made a grand show of getting his pistol out, pointing it toward the rafters, and pulling the trigger to announce that time had run out and the game had ended. This time, when the timekeeper pulled the trigger, a huge, dead bird fell within three feet of him. Before the game had started, a couple of Michigan football coaches had hidden the bird and a student in the rafters.
• Major-league umpire Eric Gregg was a heavy man, sometimes weighing 360 pounds, and of course he heard a lot of fat jokes while working. Once, he was told that in the fifth inning, his girlfriend would appear. This had him wondering because he didn’t have a girlfriend—he was very happily married. The mystery was indeed revealed in the fifth inning—when the Goodyear blimp arrived. On another occasion, he couldn’t find the baseball, so the Phillies’ Greg Gross told him, “Eric, if it was two scoops you’d find it in a second.”
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. responded:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Summertime Blues"
Single: This is a one-sided single
Artist: The Hot Toddies
Artist Location: Oakland, California
Info:
“The Hot Toddies, an all-girl band from Oakland, CA mix sunny beach pop, indie rock riffs and a dry sense of humor. Heidi, Erin and Sylvia are best friends who have been playing music, drinking whiskey and writing songs together since 2005. They’ve toured across the US, Canada and the UK. Their latest EP ‘Bottoms Up’ was released on Tricycle Records in Feb 2013.”
Price: $1 (USD) for track
Genre: Pop
Links:
“Summertime Blues”
The Hot Toddies on Bandcamp
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
Stephen Suggests
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
Bit of a marine layer delayed the sun.
Pulls Out Early
GoDaddy
Website hosting service GoDaddy Inc on Friday terminated services for the owner of an anti-abortion website that allows people to report suspected abortions in Texas.
"Last night we informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have violated GoDaddy's terms of service and have 24 hours to move to a different provider," the company said in a statement.
Portions of the website which allow people to submit anonymous tips on suspected abortions on Friday showed a GoDaddy notification saying the site had been locked down.
Texas Right to Life, the anti-abortion group owning the website, in a statement said it will not be silenced, adding that it would put its website back up.
GoDaddy
Calls On Women
Bette Midler
Bette Midler is calling on women to abstain from sex with men until they are guaranteed the right by law to choose what to do with their own bodies. As you can guess, some men (and even some women) were not pleased.
One day after a strict new anti-abortion law in Texas was enacted that restricts abortions when a pregnancy has reached six weeks, the actress and activist proposed a somewhat unorthodox protest.
“I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress,” Midler tweeted Thursday.
Fellow actress Rosanna Arquette replied to Midler’s tweet with concern, writing, “But then again men with angry Guns and rape not being a much of a crime in Texas. Watch this space.”
Nancy Sinatra replied that, “My dad actually suggested that decades ago.” And Jane Lynch wrote, “Lysistrata for modern times,” referring to the ancient Greek comedy in which women withhold sex as a means of ending the Peloponnesian War.
Bette Midler
Venice Film Fest
Jimmy Page
Guitarist Jimmy Page says he turned down a lot of “pretty miserable” pitches over the years to make a documentary about Led Zeppelin. But he finally bit when he received a deeply-researched proposal focusing almost exclusively on the music and chronicling the band’s birth in 1968 and its meteoric early rise.
The result is “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” one of the most eagerly anticipated documentaries at the Venice Film Festival, which made its premiere Saturday with Page on the red carpet.
Producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty — avowed Zeppelin fans — obtained never-before-seen footage of some of the band’s early U.S. and British concerts as well as an astonishing audio interview that drummer John Bonham gave to an Australian journalist before he died in 1980.
The interview, concert footage and other archive material are spliced into contemporary interviews with the three surviving band members — Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones — to create a montage that maps the frenetic first two years of the band’s existence and its early musical influences.
Page said he particularly appreciated the focus on the music — the songs are played at full-length, not just snippets. And it lets the band members tell their own story in their own words. There are no other on-camera interviews.
Jimmy Page
Store That Inspired Song Demolished
Lynyrd Skynyrd
A Florida store that inspired the famous Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” was demolished.
Jacksonville’s Woodcrest Grocery Building where Ronnie Van Zant allegedly met “the finest picker to ever play the blues,” was torn down last week. The abandoned store was a hangout for generations of kids.
The song, written by Van Zant and Allen Collins, tells the story of a young boy who collected bottles to raise money so the old man who hung out at the corner store could play his dobro. Curtis Loew was fictional, but the store was real.
It was known as Claude’s in the late ’50s and early ’60s and was right down the street from the house where Van Zant was raised, according to the Florida Times-Union.
Scott Hill, who grew up in the neighborhood, said fans started dropping by the site last week to grab cinder blocks souvenirs after hearing about the demolition.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Tour To Spread Pandemic Disinformation
"ReAwaken America"
A group of Donald Trump loyalists and anti-vaxx doctors are embarking on a series of events across the US to fuel disinformation about the election and pandemic, a report from The Guardian says.
The "ReAwaken America" tour, which features high-profile Trump allies including Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Lin Wood, has already held events in states including Florida and Michigan and has upcoming events scheduled in Colorado and Texas.
The events, dubbed by organizers as "health and freedom" conferences, have been orchestrated by Clay Clark, a conservative podcast host.
Lawyer Gerry Hebert, who spent over two decades handling voting rights at the Justice Department, told the Guardian that the tour was perpetuating lies about the 2020 election being stolen, despite numerous failed court cases and recounts.
"Lies and disinformation campaigns can kill both our fellow Americans and our democracy, and this ReAwaken America tour seems designed to accentuate these problems," Hebert told the paper.
"ReAwaken America"
Reparations For Slave Owners
California
On a July 18 episode of Prager University's "The Candace Owens Show," Larry Elder said an argument could be made that slave owners were owed reparations after the Civil War because slavery was legal and their "property" had been taken.
"When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal," Elder said. "Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose 'property' was taken away after the end of the Civil War."
Owens and Elder's conversation on reparations began when Owens said the US was one of the first countries to ban the slave trade.
It was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, according to PolitiFact.
California
Liz Assists Gavin
L.A.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren stood side-by-side with Gov. Gavin Newsom in Culver City on Saturday and urged California voters to reject the effort to recall him from office, calling the top Republican candidate hoping to replace Newsom "California's own Donald Trump."
Warren warned that replacing Newsom could put California on a path toward becoming more like Texas, where Republican political leaders have instituted a strict new abortion ban, or Florida, where the Republican governor has tried to bar school mask mandates.
"Governors matter," Warren (D-Mass.) said at the Newsom campaign rally at Culver City High School. "Just consider this week what we've seen in Texas: a state legislature and Republican governor who are willing to set vigilantes loose to prey on vulnerable women who want to make their own decisions about their bodies."
On Sunday, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is slated to appear with Newsom at a rally in Santa Ana. Californians have also been peppered with television and social media ads featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a favorite of liberal voters and winner of the state's presidential primary in 2020, who says the last thing the country needs is a "right-wing Republican governor in California."
Newsom warned that if Elder becomes governor, he would also have the authority to appoint anti-abortion judges and fill political vacancies, including for the U.S. Senate. When Harris was sworn in as vice president this year, Newsom appointed then-Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla to take her place.
L.A.
Apologizes For AI Label
Facebook
Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates,” causing the company to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.
Facebook on Friday apologized for what it called “an unacceptable error” and said it was looking into the recommendation feature to “prevent this from happening again.”
The video, dated June 27, 2020, was by The Daily Mail and featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates.
Google, Amazon and other technology companies have been under scrutiny for years for biases within their AI systems, particularly around issues of race. Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is biased against people of color and has more trouble identifying them, leading to incidents where Black people have been discriminated against or arrested because of computer error.
In one example in 2015, Google Photos mistakenly labeled pictures of Black people as “gorillas,” for which Google said it was “genuinely sorry” and would work to fix the issue immediately. More than two years later, Wired found that Google’s solution was to censor the word “gorilla” from searches, while also blocking “chimp,” “chimpanzee” and “monkey.”
Facebook
Hand-Standing
Spotted Skunks
Despite being both extremely fluffy and very cute, spotted skunks don’t get a lot of love – perhaps due to their impressively stinky defense mechanism (more on that later). However, those of you who enjoy the small mammalian gymnasts will be pleased to know researchers have just nearly doubled their number of species, from four to seven, paving the way for better conservation efforts.
The number of species of spotted skunks has been hard to pin down, ranging from two to 14 over the years before resting on four, but a new study in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution has analyzed skunk DNA and found there are enough differences to make seven separate spotted species. However, getting up close and personal with skunks to study them is not easy.
If you’ve ever seen a skunk, it’s most likely (before you ran away) you saw a striped skunk (Mephitis): think the questionably amorous Pepé Le Pew. Spotted skunks (Spilogale) may be smaller, spottier (technically their stripes are broken), and more elusive than their urban-dwelling cousins but they win for being the most extra when deploying skunks’ famous stinky spray: they do a handstand first.
“Spotted skunks are sometimes called the acrobats of the skunk world,” explained Adam Ferguson of Chicago’s Field Museum, one of the study's authors.
“We made wanted posters that we distributed across Texas in case people trapped them or found them as roadkill,” Ferguson explained. “People recognize spotted skunks as something special, because you don’t see them every day, so they’re not the kind of roadkill that people just paint over.”
Spotted Skunks
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