from Bruce
Anecdotes
Mishaps
• Operatic tenor Leo Slezak was a big man — six-foot-four and 300 pounds. Once, while singing the role of Adolar in Weber’s Euryanthe, he accidentally stepped on a female singer’s toes. She had to stay in bed for a month and lost all the toenails on one foot. Whenever he saw the singer, Ms. Ludmilla, afterward, she always took one step backward, then said, “Take my soul, my life, my all — but for God’s sake take care not to tread on my toes, dear Adolar!”
• Unfortunately, at some operas, the music and the singers don’t finish at the same time. Orchestra leader Gottfried Schmidt once told of finishing five full seconds before the singers in the second act of a 1981 performance of Carmen. In fact, Mr. Schmidt boasted, “Next time we shall beat them by 10 seconds.”
• Ballerinas have amazing flexibility. Tanaquil Le Clerq once showed up for practice with a bandage on her nose. Why? She had practiced a forward kick (a grand battement) — and she had karate-kicked herself right in the nose!
Money
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates enjoys a good party. At one of the parties he threw for Microsoft employees, he had six tons of sand brought in, and then he held a contest to see who could build the best sand castle. By the way, Mr. Gates is a billionaire, and he has a mansion that could belong only to a billionaire. It has 40,000 square feet, a garage for 30 cars, video walls that show ever-changing displays of electronic art, a swimming pool with an underwater stereo system, and a room with a 25-foot-high vaulted ceiling to house his trampoline. His “yard” includes a trout stream. Also by the way, two of the world’s richest men, Mr. Gates and Warren Buffett, took a two-week trip together through China in October 1995. While riding a train along the Yangtze River, they became engrossed in playing bridge and missed the spectacular scenery until some of their fellow passengers drew their attention to it.
• Early in Charlie Chaplin’s career, he was very popular and he wanted to be paid in proportion to his popularity. Essanay Film Company executives were on the verge of giving him a contract for $1,250 per week, but they hesitated because this was a lot of money, especially back then when a usual normal salary was $6 per week. Mr. Chaplin hired a messenger to walk through a hotel where he was meeting with Essanay executives and to call out his name. People passing by, hearing Mr. Chaplin’s name, created quite a commotion and quite a crowd, and Mr. Chaplin got his contract. By the way, because Mr. Chaplin was a silent film star early in his career none of his fans knew what he sounded like. Just for the fun of it, he sometimes spoke in a high-pitched squeaky voice to fans who recognized him.
• In the early 1900s in Italy many opera singers were cheated. The impresario of an opera company used to hire people to attend the opera and boo the singer, then the impresario would come backstage and say that because the singer was so unpopular, he was forced to cancel the singer’s contract. The impresario would then say that the singer could continue to work if he was willing to sign a new contract for a much lower salary. One impresario tried to play this trick on tenor Enrico Caruso — Mr. Caruso punched him in the face, then left town.
• Major Woodward S. VanDyke II, USMC, was a Hollywood director who knew how to get a bonus. When he directed a movie, he would finish the first print early, in plenty of time to get a bonus for being ahead of schedule, and then he would start doing retakes and really direct his movie. According to actor Sheldon Leonard, “It was not uncommon for VanDyke to take longer on his retakes than on his original production.”
• Mark Twain was once down on his luck in San Francisco and almost resorted to begging. Here’s how he tells it: “I remember a certain day in San Francisco, when, if I hadn’t picked up a dime that I found lying in the street, I should have asked someone for a quarter. Only a matter of a few hours and I’d have been a beggar. That dime saved me, and I have never begged — never.”
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy The Paperback
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy Kindle
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy Apple
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy Barnes and Noble
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy Kobo
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF
Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Origami"
Album: STORYTELLER
Artist: Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg
Artist Location: Athens, Ohio
Info:
bruce123 wrote, “Excellent piano solos. Soft and meditative. Favorite track: ‘Origami.’”
Songs written and recorded by Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg.
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $7 (USD) for 11-track album
Genre: Meditative Piano Instrumentals.
Links:
STORYTELLER
Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg on Bandcamp
Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
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
8,000 Chinese Restaurants
New Venture
Michael Egan
Part 9
Bruce’s Stories
I used to write for The Athens News in Athens, Ohio, partly to make extra money and partly to show my composition students that I am a competent writer. I once wrote a preview story for an Ohio University School of Dance performance. The only place for interviews during a rehearsal was in a closet, so Ohio University dance teacher Michele Geller told the dance students, “This is David Bruce. He is going to interview you for a story he is writing for The Athens News, so don’t be shocked if he asks you to go into a closet with him.”
I remember the first article that I wrote for The Athens News. It was about the OU women’s basketball team and appeared just after Thanksgiving in 1983. I was standing in line at a bank just behind a man who was reading a copy of The Athens News. He came to my article, read the headline, and then started to turn the page. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Sir, I wrote that article. Please read it.”
A janitor at Ohio University is a good problem-solver. OU students aren’t supposed to drink soda, coffee, or other liquids in classrooms, but several do anyway — and they leave behind their cans and bottles, creating a huge mess for janitors. One janitor made a statement by collecting all the cans and bottles in each classroom and stacking them up on the professor’s desk in the classroom. The next morning the professors reminded their students not to bring liquids to class.
Ohio University engages in problem-solving occasionally. For example, students often create their own paths on a green instead of walking on the concrete sidewalks or brick pathways. Of course, this means that the grass is killed where the students frequently walk. To keep students from creating their own paths, OU groundskeepers sometimes put a load of stinky manure right where the students like to walk.
I mostly enjoyed my years at Ohio University except for the devil students and that time Parking Services booted my car. (What! You couldn’t just give me a ticket! OU fundraisers, take note: Don’t even think about asking me for money! I gave! This happened years ago, and I still get angry when I think about it.)
The booting of my car happened just after Halloween. Athens, Ohio is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in the world, and when I was a student at Ohio University, some friends and I heard that if you went to a certain place at midnight on Halloween, you would see your future. We followed the directions carefully and arrived at the location exactly at midnight. It was a cemetery.
Now I am retired. The students I wrote about have graduated, and the professors I wrote about have mostly retired or died. I have been spending my retirement happily writing such books as Dante’s Inferno: A Retelling in Prose, Virgil’s Aeneid: A Retelling in Prose, and William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost: A Retelling in Prose.
I know that I’ve gotten a little off topic with some of these anecdotes, but so what. This is as close to an autobiography as I’ll ever write, and if I would write an autobiography, I would fill it with as many anecdotes from my life and the lives of my friends as I can.
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy The Paperback
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy Kindle
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy Apple
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy Barnes and Noble
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy Kobo
Kids Are Not Always Angels — Buy Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com
.
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
Sunny & seasonal.
Di$ney Wanted No Swearing
The Beatles
Peter Jackson says that Disney wanted to edit out all the swearing from his The Beatles: Get Back documentary, but the surviving band members talked them out of it. Jackson's new three-part docuseries covers the making of The Beatles iconic 1970 album, Let It Be. The new documentary largely utilizes material originally captured by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in his behind-the-scenes production surrounding the making of the same album.
Jackson has characterized The Beatles: Get Back as "a documentary about a documentary," with each episode running between two to three hours in length. The making of the iconic Let It Be album was marred by tensions between the bandmates, however, Jackson's docuseries also shows the more upbeat side of the production. Featuring nearly 60 hours of unseen footage and more than 150 hours of unheard audio, The Beatles: Get Back details the highs and lows of the most famous band in history. While fans will enjoy the raw, uncut footage, it appears Disney initially asked for some changes.
Speaking to NME, Jackson reveals that Disney wanted the legendary director to edit out all the swearing from his The Beatles: Get Back documentary. Jackson further explains that upon hearing Disney wanting to "remove all the swearing," surviving band members Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney were initially confused. They told the director and Disney "that's how we spoke. That's how we talked." Even George Harrison's former wife, Olivia, refuted Disney's suggestions, joining Ringo and Paul in saying "that's how we want the world to see us."
Jackson also recalls Ringo and Paul's first reactions to viewing the documentary. The director says he "was expecting notes" from the band members, but he never received "a single note." Jackson further explains that one of the bandmates told him watching the documentary was "one of the most stressful experiences of their entire life." It seems that Jackson and the surviving Beatles wanted the documentary to be "truthful." Above all else, Jackson, Ringo, and Paul didn't want to "whitewash" the documentary or make it "sanitized." Because of this strong belief in presenting the truth in the documentary, all involved immediately shot down Disney's suggestion in removing the swearing.
The Beatles
“Retrospectrum”
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has been telling stories through songs for 60 years. But recently America’s master lyricist has also captured moments in a new series of paintings that, just like his songs, are intimate and a bit of a mystery.
The most comprehensive exhibition of the Nobel laureate’s visual art to be held in the U.S. goes on display on Tuesday in Miami at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. Forty new pieces by the 80-year-old songwriter will be showcased for the first time.
The exhibition with more than 180 acrylics, watercolors, drawings and ironwork sculptures will kick off the same week as Art Basel Miami Beach and will run through April 17 with no future stops announced yet. Tickets are $16 and are booked by hourly slots.
“Retrospectrum” includes some of Dylan’s works from the 1960s, starting with pencil sketches he made of his songs such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” His pieces, loaned from private collections around the world, also include abstract sketches from the 1970s, and covers six large rooms. But the vast majority was created in the past 15 years.
The exhibit has some interactive displays for music fans. The 64 cards with words from the lyrics of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” that he flipped through in one of the earliest music videos ever made were framed and lined up in eight columns by eight rows, while the clip is played on loop.
Bob Dylan
Fundraising Challenge
Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle is asking for the public's input to decide whether his high school alma mater will name a theatre after him, days after a controversial appearance at his alma mater.
The Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, was set to name a theatre after the comedian but moved the fundraising ceremony from November 2021 to April 2022, after students threatened to stage a walkout following his recent Netflix special, "The Closer," Insider previously reported.
"Talk is cheap (Unless I do it). The Duke Ellington school is a glorious institution," Chappelle wrote in a Friday Instagram post. Chappelle wrote that the school's founder, Peggy Cooper Cafritz requested to name the school's theatre after him.
'In April, I intend to honor that request. If you object to my receiving this honor, I urge you to donate to the school noting your objection," Chappelle continued. "If you are in favor of the theater being named 'Chappelle,' I urge you to donate to the school, noting your approval."
"Whichever opinion donates the highest collective dollar amount, wins," he wrote. "If by April, those against the 'Chappelle' theater exceed the donations of those who are neutral or in favor of the theater being named 'Chappelle,' I will gladly step aside. If not, I will happily attend the naming ceremony. And if you don't care enough to donate … please shut the fuck up, forever," he concluded.
Dave Chappelle
Can Write Poetry and Create Artworks
Ai-Da
When people think of artificial intelligence, the images that often come to mind are of the sinister robots that populate the worlds of “The Terminator,” “i, Robot,” “Westworld,” and “Blade Runner.” For many years, fiction has told us that AI is often used for evil rather than for good.
But what we may not usually associate with AI is art and poetry — yet that’s exactly what Ai-Da, a highly realistic robot invented by Aidan Meller in Oxford, central England, spends her time creating. Ai-Da is the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, and on Friday she gave a public performance of poetry that she wrote using her algorithms in celebration of the great Italian poet Dante.
The recital took place at the University of Oxford’s renowned Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Ai-Da’s poem was produced as a response to the poet’s epic “Divine Comedy” — which Ai-Da consumed in its entirety, allowing her to then use her algorithms to take inspiration from Dante’s speech patterns, and by using her own data bank of words, create her own work.
As Ai-Da has learned how to imitate humans based on our behavior, Meller says the project has shown just how habitual human beings are and how we tend to repeat actions, words, and patterns of behavior — suggesting that it is we, in fact, who are robotic.
Ai-Da
Duped The World
PR Machine
On March 16, 1941 – with European cities ablaze and Jews being herded into ghettos – The New York Times Magazine featured an illustrated story on Adolf Hitler’s retreat in the Berchtesgaden Alps.
Adopting a neutral tone, correspondent C Brooks Peters noted that historians of the future would do well to look at the importance of “the Führer’s private and personal domain,” where discussions about the war front were interspersed with “strolls with his three sheep dogs along majestic mountain trails.”
For more than 70 years, we have ignored Peters’s call to take Hitler’s domestic spaces seriously. When we think of the stage sets of Hitler’s political power, we are more apt to envision the Nuremberg Rally Grounds than his living room.
Yet it was through the architecture, design and media depictions of his homes that the Nazi regime fostered a myth of the private Hitler as peaceable homebody and good neighbor.
But once Hitler became chancellor – and particularly after the royalties from Mein Kampf made him a wealthy man – he focused considerable energies on the redesign and furnishing of his residences: the Old Chancellery in Berlin; his Munich apartment; and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg.
PR Machine
Ice Wall Melting
Fukushima
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) will launch remedial works at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to strengthen an ice wall intended to halt the flow of groundwater after testing indicated partial melting.
The work could begin as early as the start of December, according to a presentation from the plant operator dated Thursday, part of a costly and troubled effort to secure the site following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The ice wall is intended to limit the seepage of groundwater into the plant, which has created large amounts of toxic water being stored by Tepco in tanks.
Japan plans to release more than 1 million tonnes of water into the sea after treating it. The water contains the radioactive isotope tritium, which cannot be removed.
Fukushima
800-Year Old Mummy
Peru
A team of experts has found a mummy estimated to be at least 800 years old on Peru's central coast, one of the archaeologists who participated in the excavation said on Friday.
The mummified remains were of a person from the culture that developed between the coast and mountains of the South American country. The mummy, whose gender was not identified, was discovered in the Lima region, said archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna.
"The main characteristic of the mummy is that the whole body was tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face, which would be part of the local funeral pattern," said Van Dalen Luna, from the State University of San Marcos.
The mummy was found inside an underground structure found on the outskirts of the city of Lima. In the tomb were also offerings including ceramics, vegetable remains and stone tools, he said.
Peru
Ambient Noise
Mars
NASA's Mars InSight lander provided researchers with the data needed to give us our first detailed look at the red planet's crust, mantle and core. That map doesn't include any information on the structures nearer its surface, however, and we need that to be able to get a more complete picture of how the planet was formed. Now, a team of scientists was able to create the first detailed image of what lies right underneath the planet's surface, showing three billion years of its history, by listening to Martian winds.
More precisely, they analyzed the ambient noise (in the absence of marsquakes) collected by the seismometer that was installed by the InSight lander. On Earth, that kind of ambient seismic noise is generated by the ocean, human activity and winds, but only the last one is present on Mars. The Swiss Seismological Service (SED) and ETH Zurich have been regularly analyzing data collected by the seismometer as part of the Marsquake Service. Over the past years, SED was able to develop ways to analyze ambient noise data to define geological structures here on Earth, and those are the techniques they used on the data from InSight.
Based on the data the tool gathered, the top three meters of InSight's landing site is made of sand, while the next 20 meters are loose material, particularly volcanic rock fissured by meteorite impacts. Underneath that sand and rock lie lava flows divided by sediments that formed when the planet experienced cold and dry conditions. Researchers believe the uppermost lava flows were deposited around 1.7 billion years ago, while the deepest ones were deposited as far back as 3.6 billion years ago at a time when there was a lot more volcanic activity on the planet.
The researchers recently published their study in Nature, and one of the things they emphasized is that it proves techniques to investigate our planet can also work on Mars. Other methods used to know more about Earth could also give us more information about the red planet, which may one day become humanity's second home.
Mars
Harder Than Diamonds
Glass
A team of researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, U.S. have discovered a way to synthesize a new ultra-hard form of carbon glass – possibly the hardest-known type of glass with the highest thermal conductivity properties in its class.
In the team's findings (now published in the journal Nature), they said that they managed to create the incredible material by smashing what is known as a fully-carbon "soccer ball" (called a soccer ball due to the shape of the molecule) called fullerene C60 under an anvil press.
The method's result is similar in practice to how graphite is converted into diamond under high pressures, and thus how the new carbon glass maintains such hardness.
The team led by Bingbing Liu from Jilin University, China and former Carnegie visiting scholar Mingguang Yao explained that while an extremely high-melting point meant it was impossible to use diamonds as a starting point to create diamond-like glass, they managed to instead use fullerence C60 in the shape of a soccer ball and collapse it under the giant anvil press.
The versatility of carbon as a material has allowed it to be used in numerous types of products, like carbon fiber (strong yet light) or silicon carbide (extremely resistant to high temperatures). Incidentally, it's also one of the reasons diamonds are so hard.
Glass
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
