Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: How To Tell If Harassing Women Makes You a Woman Harasser (Creators Syndicate)
The Republican Party is the party of "personal responsibility." If you're poor, you're responsible. If you're pregnant, you're responsible. If you're poor and pregnant you're responsible. If you're too old to work, you're responsible. If you're sneaking across the Mexican border with your toddler, your toddler is responsible. If you're black, you're responsible for stuff you haven't even done. That great reverence for personal responsibility vanishes from the Republican Party as soon a guy with a couple of dollars in his wallet puts his hands on a woman.
Froma Harrop: Can We Have a Sensible Immigration Policy? (Creators Syndicate)
What would a sensible immigration policy look like? It would have three goals: be humane, enforce the laws and meet America's need for labor. This can happen only if our political fringes get out of the way.
Froma Harrop: Sometimes Voters Just Want Competence (Creators Syndicate)
In our highly polarized era, we too often judge election results from the confines of partisan politics. That's not nearly as useful on the state and local levels, where elected officials have roads to fix, kids to educate and budgets to balance. Voters want people who can do the job. Ideology can wait.
Susan Estrich: The Other Donald Trump (Creators Syndicate)
Imagine, just for a minute, that after the 2016 election, the other Donald Trump had gotten elected. You know, the one who hung out with establishment types, invited Bill and Hill to his wedding, liked Democrats, knew how to bring a group together. That guy. And for season one, just imagine that his target was not red-state conservatives and Hillary Clinton's "deplorables"; it was not less-educated and whiter voters; it was not any of these people because he already had them. Even if he had killed former FBI Director James Comey. To get better ratings, you need the people you don't have. Donald Trump - that Donald Trump, the Donald Trump New York friends used to tell me was an OK guy if you didn't fight with him - might have actually pulled this country together.
Susan Estrich: Broken Windows (Creators Syndicate)
What I saw, and what neighborhood leaders have found, is a slew of young white druggies who are not from Venice but came here for the beach, complete with public showers and public toilets that they often don't bother to use. It's not that they can't get jobs. At one restaurant down the street from the beach, just one, there were 11 job postings, everything from dishwashers to busboys to baristas to hostesses. There are plenty of young people on the beach who could fill them. They don't want to.
Mary Beard: Clive James, the Larrikin (TLS)
I learned a new word this week: larrikin. It is Oz-English for a rebellious, boisterous wide-boy. And it is how Clive James (who has a new poetry book out just now, The River in the Sky) describes himself.
Mary Beard: The Mere Don (TSL)
Yesterday Debbie came across this, a poem which offers vivid proof that the idea that university teachers are lazy bastards is not a new one. It's called 'The Mere Don' and come in 9 verses: "O timely happy, timely wise, / Dons that extremely late arise, / Resolved to carry out the plan, / To work as little as they can; …"
Lenore Skenazy: Just Outside (Creators Syndicate)
Giving mice a re-think: That's what I'm doing, having just watched an amazing new 3D film, "Backyard Wilderness," now playing hourly at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It's hard - well, let's say a little hard-er - to hate the whiskered nibblers once you see what they're up against, including freezing, starving and staring down the family dog as it peers inquisitively into their mouse hole. Give it up for these mice! "Backyard Wilderness" is a movie that makes you thrilled to be connected to all the living things on Earth.
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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
• In a 2008 article titled "The Walking Wounded" in Great Britain's Guardian newspaper, several critics described the worst reactions that their criticisms had provoked. For example, music critic Robin Denselow says that he was "attacked … from the stage" by singer-songwriter John Martyn although he didn't recall having written anything especially bad about Mr. Martyn. And later, Mr. Denselow says, musician Kevin Coyle hit him "on behalf of John Martyn." In contrast, other musicians are much kinder. Mr. Denselow once criticized what he calls "a decidedly substandard early show" by Pink Floyd. The musicians in the group were very kind to him. He says, "They wrote to me, agreeing that they had played badly that night, and thanking me for actually listening."
• The Peruvian contralto Marguerite D'Alvarez had the misfortune of slipping on some steps in Chicago while singing the role of Delilah. Even more unfortunate for Ms. D'Alvarez was the presence in the audience of Mary Garden - who exclaimed, "My God, she's making her entrance into the Chicago Opera like Balaam into Jerusalem." This remark quickly made the rounds of the opera critics, and quickly Ms. D'ALvarez decided to leave Chicago. (And even quicker Ms. D'Alvarez and Ms. Garden became enemies.)
• Like many people in the arts, conductor Marin Alsop reads at least some of her reviews. Like many people in the arts, she tends not to remember the good reviews, but she definitely remembers the bad reviews. For example, she remembers her very first review, which she received after conducting a major concert in New York. The review stated, "We should think that this person is talented, but we don't." She says, "I stayed in bed for a couple of days after that."
• Theater critic Michael Billington once enjoyed a lunch with lots of alcoholic refreshments with a Polish critic, and then he left to review a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters. However, when he arrived at the theater he noticed that the theater was spinning. He also noticed that the number of sisters seemed to multiply-at one point, he counted 27 sisters! Mr. Billington says, "I fled, guilty and ashamed, and vowed never to drink on the job again."
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Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
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We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"FORD V. KAVANUAGH"
TAKING A LEFT TURN.
TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FASCISM!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Got a new TV antenna for my birthday.
While I really like all the retro-channels now over-the-air, I intensely dislike the retro-action of having to get up & fuss with the damn antenna almost every time I change channels.
Edited Heretical Ideas To Fool The Inquisition
Galileo
It had been hiding in plain sight. The original letter - long thought lost - in which Galileo Galilei first set down his arguments against the church's doctrine that the Sun orbits the Earth has been discovered in a misdated library catalogue in London. Its unearthing and analysis expose critical new details about the saga that led to the astronomer's condemnation for heresy in 1633.
The seven-page letter, written to a friend on 21 December 1613 and signed "G.G.", provides the strongest evidence yet that, at the start of his battle with the religious authorities, Galileo actively engaged in damage control and tried to spread a toned-down version of his claims.
Many copies of the letter were made, and two differing versions exist - one that was sent to the Inquisition in Rome and another with less inflammatory language. But because the original letter was assumed to be lost, it wasn't clear whether incensed clergymen had doctored the letter to strengthen their case for heresy - something Galileo complained about to friends - or whether Galileo wrote the strong version, then decided to soften his own words.
Galileo did the editing, it seems. The newly unearthed letter is dotted with scorings-out and amendments - and handwriting analysis suggests that Galileo wrote it. He shared a copy of this softened version with a friend, claiming it was his original, and urged him to send it to the Vatican.
The letter has been in the Royal Society's possession for at least 250 years, but escaped the notice of historians. It was rediscovered in the library there by Salvatore Ricciardo, a postdoctoral science historian at the University of Bergamo in Italy, who visited on 2 August for a different purpose, and then browsed the online catalogue.
Galileo
Played On A Loop
'Africa'
A music venue in Bristol will play Toto's hit song "Africa" on a loop for an entire night to raise funds for an African charity.
DJ Michael Savage is set to play the US rock band's biggest hit on vinyl for "five hours straight" at The Exchange on 30 November.
He told the BBC that people can be sponsored for how long they last or can donate "to not go to the event at all".
"What started out as a really stupid idea from a stupid drunken night out has become a stupid reality," he said, adding that he felt "quite sorry for the bar staff."
The bar at The Exchange will also be playing cover versions and remixes of the classic 1980s track, which is Toto's biggest hit and still receives millions of streams.
'Africa'
Faces Pressure
CNN
CNN is facing growing calls to drop Jason Miller as a contributor after the pro-Trump Republican strategist faced an accusation in a legal filing on Friday that he slipped abortion pills to a former lover without her knowledge - a charge he has denied.
"The best place for Jason Miller to hide from reporters' questions about how many women he had extramarital affairs with and got pregnant while working on the Trump campaign is @CNN where he is paid to defend everything Trump says and does," MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell said in a tweet slamming the network.
On Friday, Splinter reported that the child custody fight between Miller and ex-lover A.J. Delgado took a nasty turn after Delgado's legal team filed legal papers on Sept. 14 accusing Miller of impregnating an unnamed woman he met at an Orlando strip club and slipping her an abortion pill without her knowledge.
"Shortly thereafter, according to Joe Doe, Mr. Miller visited her at her apartment with a Smoothie beverage. Unbeknownst to Jane Doe, the Smoothie contained an abortion bill. [sic] The pill induced an abortion, and Jane Doe wound up in a hospital emergency room, bleeding heavily and nearly went into a coma. The unborn child died," the filing read.
Miller, who served as chief spokesman for Trump's 2016 campaign and transition and has served as a CNN commentator since last year, did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.
CNN
Outbids Fox For Sky
Comcast
Comcast beat Rupert Murdoch's (R-Evil Incarnate) Twenty-First Century Fox in the battle for Sky on Saturday after offering 30.6 billion pounds ($40 billion) in a dramatic auction to decide the fate of the pay-television group.
The U.S. cable giant bid 17.28 pounds a share for control of London-listed Sky, bettering a 15.67 pounds-a-share offer by Fox, Britain's Takeover Panel said.
Buying Sky will make Philadelphia-based Comcast, which owns the NBC network and Universal Pictures, the world's largest pay-TV operator with around 52 million customers.
Comcast's knock-out offer thwarted Murdoch's long-held ambition to win control of Sky, and is also a setback for U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney which would have likely been its ultimate owner.
Disney has agreed a separate $71 billion deal to buy most of Fox's film and TV assets, including its existing 39 percent stake in Sky, and would have taken full ownership after a successful Fox takeover.
Comcast
Stops Work With Senators
National Task Force
For two years, a task force of national sexual assault and domestic violence groups has been working behind the scenes with the Senate Judiciary Committee to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which expires this year.
Now the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence is suspending negotiations with the committee over its treatment of Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teens.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) called Kavanaugh a "good man," and said senators should judge his character today. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) expressed sympathy for Kavanaugh, saying he couldn't "imagine the horror of being accused of something like this." On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reassured Republicans that Kavanaugh will be confirmed - even though Blasey has not yet testified about her allegations. "Don't get rattled by all of this," he said. "We're going to plow right through it and do our job."
Blasey is currently negotiating the conditions under which she will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a letter to the committee on Friday, members of the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence admonished senators for failing to treat Blasey with respect, saying lawmakers' actions and comments have set the clock back on responding to sexual violence.
"Your actions and comments in the past week have taken us back 25 years, as if VAWA never existed, as if all of the hard-won, evidence-based, best practices we have invested in as a nation were for naught. How can Congress legislate a coordinated community response for the nation, yet fail to live up to its own mandate?" the letter asks.
National Task Force
No-Jail Sentence
Anchorage
The Alaska Department of Law stood by a judge's sentence that calls for no jail time for an Anchorage man who authorities say offered a woman a ride and choked her until she was unconscious.
Justin Schneider, 34, pleaded guilty to one count of felony assault in the case. A kidnapping charge was dropped as part of the plea deal.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Michael Corey sentenced Schneider to two years with a year suspended.
Schneider also received credit for a year he served under house arrest and will serve no additional time as long as he doesn't violate the conditions of his probation.
Schneider choked an Alaska Native woman and then masturbated over her unconscious body, according to charging documents. He also told the woman he would kill her if she screamed, Anchorage police detective Brett Sarber wrote in a sworn affidavit.
Anchorage
Man Earns Nickname
'Permit Model'
Move over Permit Patty, BBQ Becky, and Pool Patrol Peter and Paula. There's a new video of a public act of incivility about to go viral. Some of the women in the video even got a head start, labeling their antagonist "Permit Model."
The video begins in the middle of an argument between a white man and a group of black women working on a photo shoot. The man stands behind the women, making sure that he'll feature in their photos. He seems to want them to stop photographing in the location, which appears to be either a sidewalk or a parking lot in front of an iron gate. At some point before the video begins, the two parties must have started to dispute whose property they were on and whether they had a right to shoot.
"Guys, this is Permit Model. He is blocking our model while we are trying to shoot," says the woman behind the camera.
The conversation grows more tense when the camerawoman brings up the case of Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger, who has been charged with manslaughter for walking into the apartment of a black man from Saint Lucia, Botham Jean, earlier this month, and shooting him fatally, reportedly saying that she thought it was her own apartment.
It's worth noting that sidewalks and any area between the sidewalk and the road are considered public property in most states. In the state of Texas, where the people in the video may reside (based on the man's Beto O'Rourke pin), the law states that public right-of-way includes not only a street or roadway, but also sidewalks within the right-of-way.
'Permit Model'
Ear Spring
Yellowstone
A normally docile hot pool in Yellowstone National Park took a dramatic turn over the weekend, spewing water and other debris in the biggest eruption since 1957. Ear Spring, located on Geyser Hill in the park's Upper Geyser Basin, erupted water that reached 7 to 10 meters (20 to 30 feet) high on Saturday, ejecting rocks and other things that had fallen into the geyser over the last few years, including coins, old cans, and other human debris, reports the US Geological Survey (USGS).
Geyser Hill is located across the Firehole River (seriously, who had the job of naming these features?) from the park's most famous thermal feature, Old Faithful. The area hosts dozens of other hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles - a vent in the Earth's surface where gases and steams emitted. According to the USGS, hydrothermal activity at several of these features has changed since last weekend's eruption while other thermal features appear to be more active than usual.
Most interestingly, another feature has formed overnight on September 18 that is now located directly under the Ear Spring, forcing the park to close off parts of it. This new feature is "pulsing water," and a 2.5-meter-wide (8-foot) area of ground surrounding the new hole is "breathing," rising and falling by about 15 centimeters (6 inches) every 10 minutes.
But don't go hitting the Yellowstone Caldera Panic Button just yet. Though it sounds like a scene straight out of Dante's Peak, the hydrothermal activity is in no sense signaling that the supervolcano is about to erupt. Changes in hydrothermal features are common. Shifts in the hydrothermal systems happen just a few hundred feet below the Earth's crust and they're not directly related to magma, which moves around several kilometers deep.
What happens next is still uncertain, but most likely one of two things will occur. Either this thermally heated ground continues to expand and cause changes in thermal activity for the next few years - just like what happened in the Norris Geyser Basin in 2003 - or a small hydrothermal explosion happens, creating a crater a few feet across and ejecting rocks and hot water hundreds of feet in the air - like what happened in 1989 at the Porkchop Geyser.
Yellowstone
Pages Turn Yellow
Books
If you look at old newspaper clippings, aging paper documents and books that are past their prime, you'll notice that they likely have a yellow tinge. But why do old paper products turn this golden hue?
It's not that books would rather be blond, but rather that paper is made from components that yellow over time - at least when they're exposed to oxygen, Susan Richardson, a chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina, told Live Science.
Most paper is made from wood, which largely consists of cellulose and a natural wood component called lignin that gives land plant cell walls their rigidity and makes wood stiff and strong. Cellulose - a colorless substance - is remarkably good at reflecting light, which means we perceive it as being white. This is why paper - including the pages of everything from sheet music to dictionaries - is usually white.
But when lignin is exposed to light and the surrounding air, its molecular structure changes. Lignin is a polymer, meaning it's built from batches of the same molecular unit bonded together. In the case of lignin, those repeating units are alcohols consisting of oxygen and hydrogen with a smattering of carbon atoms thrown in, Richardson said.
But lignin, and in part cellulose, is susceptible to oxidation - meaning it readily picks up extra oxygen molecules, and those molecules alter the polymer's structure. The added oxygen molecules break the bonds that hold those alcohol subunits together, creating molecular regions called chromophores. Chromophores (meaning "color bearers," or "color carriers" in Greek) reflect certain wavelengths of light that our eyes perceive as color. In the case of lignin oxidation, that color is yellow or brown.
Books
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