Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Armed Guards Among the Jews (Creators Syndicate)
… for the first time, you had two security guards in the lobby of the place. They weren't those joke security guards, either, like the fat guy in the uniform shirt who chases the junkies out of the dollar store parking lot. They had pistols on their hips. … I lived in that neighborhood for 16 years. I've lived in this country for 61 years. This is where I live now.
Lenore Skenazy: How to Raise a College Dropout (Creators Syndicate)
Now, I don't blame parents for giving their kids less and less freedom. In a society almost obsessed with childhood danger, it is increasingly rare - and sometimes illegal - for parents to let their kids play outside on their own, come home with a latchkey, wait briefly in the car, or even trick-or-treat without a security detail. Instead, these age-old ways to give kids more and more independence and responsibility are seen as unacceptable risks. The trade-off - raising anxious kids with no street smarts - does not figure into the equation.
Mark Shields: The Cases Against Nancy Pelosi Don't Hold Up (Creators Syndicate)
Let's be blunt: There is no Democratic case against Nancy Pelosi other than that in certain races - because Republicans had run unanswered TV smear campaigns against her - she became a political inconvenience for a few Democratic candidates to distance themselves from. It's time for Democrats to admit that openly and to re-elect, for the good of the country and the party, the best speaker any of them have ever served with.
Mark Shields: "'College' Dropouts" (Creators Syndicate)
Think about it: Every library board member, city councilor, state legislator and U.S. senator and representative - but not the president - is elected directly by the people. With its contaminated origins in a compromise to appease - by rewarding more political clout to - the fledgling nation's slaveholding states, the Electoral College was adopted. Because each state, regardless of how unpopulated it is, is guaranteed two U.S. senators and at least one U.S. representative (which translates directly into electoral votes), in 2016 each of Wyoming's three electoral votes represented just 195,000 state residents. California, with about 39 million residents, qualified for 55 electoral votes, but a single Golden State electoral vote was awarded for every 700,000 or so Californians.
Froma Harrop: He Who Primaries Can Be Primaried (Creators Syndicate)
Case in point is the campaign by Democratic "rebels" against efforts to return Nancy Pelosi to the House speaker's chair. Of course, any Democrat is perfectly within his or her rights to want a new head of party. Speakers get elected, not crowned. But the problem with the anti-Pelosi faction, led by Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, isn't the desire for changed leadership. It's that the insurgents have absolutely no one to replace Pelosi with. Thus, they have interrupted the Democrats' ascension to power with pointless acrimony. … Constituents have accused him of ageism - an ageism perceived to single out women. He has asserted, "The majority of Democrats want this change." Oh? When was that vote taken?
Froma Harop: Alcohol and Opioids Are Different Risks (Creators Syndicate)
Be that as it may, a residual temperance movement tries to tag alcohol as an evil for all, not a pleasurable relaxant when taken in moderation. A study using federal data found that only 10 percent of drinkers account for over half(!) of the alcohol consumed. So it's misleading to lump the two-glass wine drinker with the fall-down drunk. Or he who takes just a couple of opioid pills after surgery with a drug addict. Or A with B. For society as a whole, these substances provoke serious concern, but on the level of the individual, every story is different.
Ted Rall: Trump Is Crazy. Invoke the 25th. (Creators Syndicate)
I am not a psychologist. I don't know what exactly is wrong with Trump. Former presidential aide Omarosa Manigault Newman thinks he is succumbing to dementia; it's certainly possible. Trump is 72. His father developed Alzheimer's, which points to an increased chance for the president.
Suzanne Moore: Nicolas Roeg created a filmic world of sex and shock. He messed me up - and I loved him (The Guardian)
Everyone declares Don't Look Now his best work, but how to choose? This was a shaman at work.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• In September of 1969, tenor John Brecknock was given the role of Paris in Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hélène at the London Coliseum. This was an important role for him at the time, and it was in an important venue. Of course, he got stage fright, and just before he was supposed to go on stage, he turned to baritone Derek Hammond-Stroud and said, "I can't go on. I don't want to make a fool of myself." The next moment he was flying onto the stage - Mr. Hammond-Stroud had given him a mighty shove. Of course, once he was on stage, Mr. Brecknock was forced to sing.
• The orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera is made up - as you would expect - of highly skilled and educated musicians, and it has been for a long time. Gabriel Peyre, a violinist for the Met during the mid-1950s, remembered that the lights went out during a concert where the orchestra performed the Semiramide Overture. No problem. The orchestra finished the piece from memory.
• A couple of women - tenor Leo Slezak, whose story this is, calls them Fräulein Meier and Fräulein Schulze - hated each other. One day, Fräulein Meier was lunching with the wealthy artist, Bela Haas, and she asked what would happen to his money when he died. Because Mr. Haas disliked any mention of death, he replied, "I've made my will, and I'm leaving all my money to Fräulein Schulze."
• Tom Waits has been a successful singer-songwriter for decades, but he is far from being a sell-out. In her book Tom Waits, Cath Carroll includes a discography but does not include information about how high the songs or albums reached on the record charts. Mr. Carroll writes, " … noting chart positions on a Tom Waits discography is like putting Barbie clothes on a bulldog."
• As a famous singer, Nat King Cole was besieged by songwriters who wanted him to record their songs. He was once trapped in a men's room by a songwriter who showed him his manuscript. Mr. King told the songwriter, "Please! Not here!" On another occasion, his bus was pulled over by an Oklahoman deputy sheriff who gave him a song manuscript instead of a ticket.
• Even as a young teenager, Victoria de los Angeles sang well. Her father worked at the University of Barcelona, where young Victoria would go into the classrooms after class had let out and sing. Sometimes, the professors chased her out because their students preferred to listen to her than do their own work.
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE GAMES DICTATORS PLAY.
CRYBABY CROWLEY.
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE.
ONLY THE "BULLET MONGERS" WIN.
SIX CROOKED RATS CAUGHT!
LITTLE BY LITTLE. STEP BY STEP.
'PAGES OF LIES'.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny, but cooler than seasonal.
Hollywood Walk O' Fame
Lin-Manuel Miranda
"Hamilton" musical creator Lin-Manuel Miranda rapped his way down memory lane on Friday as he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The multiple Tony, Emmy and Grammy winner unveiled his pink and bronze star outside the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, where he recalled performing in his first hit musical, "In the Heights," in 2010.
Miranda has also been busy with other projects. He is co-starring in the upcoming movie "Mary Poppins Returns," he co-wrote the music for the animated film "Moana," and he is working on a new musical movie version of "The Little Mermaid."
"In spite of his astronomical success, he has somehow managed to remain a sweet, humble, down-to-earth guy," comedic singer-songwriter "Weird Al" Yankovic said at the ceremony.
Puerto Rican actress and singer Rita Moreno echoed that sentiment.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Dress Incited 'Debauchery and Temptation'
Rania Youssef
An Egyptian actress could face five years in prison for showing skin at a film festival.
Rania Youssef attended the closing event for the 40th Cairo International Film festival Nov. 29 in a glamorous black ensemble. The outfit consisted of a black leotard with a sheer black overlay. While the top layer was floor length and had beading, it was mostly see-through, revealing her legs. It did have a high neck, but the leotard dipped a bit lower, so part of her collarbone was visible through the overlay. It was also sleeveless.
While the gown hit a fashion high-note, it didn't go over well in Egypt. Multiple lawyers filed a lawsuit against the 44-year-old accusing the actress of "inciting debauchery." If convicted, she could face up to five years in jail, according to AFP. According to The Telegraph, lawyers accused her of committing an obscene act in public, "inciting debauchery and temptation," and "spreading vice in ways that violate established norms in Egyptian society."
Two of the lawyers "alleging obscenity" are Amro Abdelsalam and Samir Sabri. Apparently, Youssef's appearance "did not meet societal values, traditions and morals and therefore undermined the reputation of the festival and the reputation of Egyptian women in particular," Sabri told AFP.
Egypt is a mostly conservative country with a Muslim majority. The Muslim religion requires women to cover much of their body for the sake of dignity, modesty, and "bodily integrity."
Rania Youssef
Misconduct Claims Being Investigated
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Fox and the producers of the television series "Cosmos" have opened an investigation into multiple sexual misconduct claims against the show's host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The move follows a report on the website Patheos in which two women accused Tyson of inappropriate sexual behavior.
In the Patheos article, Dr. Katelyn N. Allers of Bucknell University claimed deGrasse Tyson groped her at an event in 2009. Another woman, Ashley Watson, claimed in the article that she quit her former job as Tyson's assistant in response to repeated inappropriate sexual advances he made toward her.
Both allegations came to light roughly a year after musician Tchiya Amet claimed that Tyson raped her when they were both graduate students.
On Sunday, Tyson issued a response via a lengthy Facebook post. In the post, titled "On Being Accused," Tyson offered his account of the incidents that resulted in Allers, Watson, and Amet's allegations.
He stated that his alleged groping of Allers was an attempt to see whether a planetary tattoo on her arm that extended to her shoulder included Pluto. Of Watson, Tyson wrote that her departure as his production assistant was over an evening of wine and cheese at his home, during which he said he did not touch her except to give her a handshake at the end of the night. He added that when she informed him of her discomfort over the meeting, he apologized, and she accepted his apology. While he admitted to having a brief relationship with Amet during graduate school, he denied ever assaulting her.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Christmas Parade Grand Marshall
Nashville
Kid Rock is out as Grand Marshal of Nashville's 2018 Christmas Parade. The move to expel the controversial conservative rocker comes after he used disparaging language against The View TV host Joy Behar, calling her a "bitch" during a TV appearance.
The parade will go on with James Shaw Jr., the so-called Waffle House hero who thwarted a mass shooting in Nashville last spring, replacing Kid Rock.
The controversy started when Kid Rock appeared on Fox & Friends, which was on location in downtown Nashville and broadcasting from Kid Rock's new Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N' Roll Steakhouse.
During the broadcast, Kid Rock told host Steve Doocy that rhetoric in the nation was too hot. "I would say, love everybody. . . except screw that Joy Behar bitch," he said, a remark which drew an immediate Doocy apology.
Kid Rock then noted that he was joking and apologized, but said, "I apologize for the language, not the sentiment," he said.
Nashville
153 Billion Hours of Work Lost
Heat Waves
Because we haven't had enough dire reports this fall, let's throw one more log on the fire, shall we? A report released on Wednesday chronicles how human health around the world is already suffering from climate change, and the top line statistics are pretty stunning.
The Lancet Countdown is in its third iteration, presenting an annual checkup by climate scientists, doctors, and public health experts on the health of our planet and the 7.5 billion of us who call it home. The prognosis isn't so good.
"Heat has the most substantial [health] burden currently," Jeremy Hess, a doctor at the University of Washington and report author, told Earther. "Heat season is starting earlier, lasting longer, and becoming more intense."
In 2017, there were 157 million more vulnerable people exposed to heat waves than the 1986-2005 average. That total represents the highest ever recorded in a non-El Niño year (El Niño tends to boost temperatures around the globe as a whole), driven by rising temperatures and more people living in urban areas, which tend to swelter a bit more. The report notes that this impacts health directly through heat-related illnesses as well as indirectly via killing crops and livestock, which can then cause food insecurity. The risk is hardly limited to poor countries, though they continue to suffer the most. The rapidly aging population in Europe, for example, means that more people are becoming vulnerable to heat-related illnesses in places where hot weather hasn't always been such a regular occurrence.
Heat waves are also resulting in an astounding loss in productivity. An almost unfathomable 153 billion hours of labor were wiped out last year because it was either too hot to work or even go outside, a 62 billion hour rise compared to 2000. That's the equivalent of roughly 45 percent of the world's population losing a week of work. While workers all deserve more time off, doing so because its too dangerous to do your job is not exactly the ideal way to get a break.
Heat Waves
Vaping
Pot
Pot inhaled through a vape device produces a more powerful high - and often with more deleterious side effects - than the smoked version, a new study finds.
At the same level of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, vaping led to higher blood concentrations of the chemical than smoking, as well as higher levels of cognitive and psychomotor impairment and a higher incidence of adverse effects, such as vomiting, anxiety, hallucinations and feelings of paranoia, according to the report, published Friday in JAMA Network Open.
It's important to understand the impact of vaping as more and more states legalize cannabis and the drug becomes more easily accessible, said the study's lead author, Tory Spindle, a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "More people are coming into cannabis dispensaries and using for the first time in a while or for the first time ever," Spindle told NBC News. "They should be aware that vaping will produce stronger effects. We found there was a fine line sometimes between a dose that produced the desired effects and one that was too strong."
To learn more about the impact of vaping cannabis, Spindle and his colleagues rounded up 17 intermittent pot smokers whose average age was 27. Most had not used cannabis in a long while; on average, it had been nearly a year.
All study volunteers completed three eight-and-a-half-hour sessions during which they smoked marijuana at three different THC doses (zero milligrams, 10 mg and 25 mg) and three in which they vaped the drug at the three different doses. The sessions were scheduled to be a week apart. The zero-milligram dose served as the control in this study.
Pot
Mystery Seismic Wave
Earth
Scientists are baffled by a strange seismic ripple that traveled around the globe the morning of November 11.
Seismic waves buzzed sensors from Africa to New Zealand and Hawaii for about 20 minutes, but it seems no humans felt the bizarre ripple, National Geographic reported.
Twitter user matarikipax spotted the strange motion on U.S. Geological Survey graphs. He noticed a "most odd and unusual seismic signal" on data from Kilimambogo, Kenya; Lusaka, Zambia, Mount Furi, Ethiopia; San Pablo, Spain; and Wellington, New Zealand.
The signals, National Geographic reported, resembled the long-period surface waves that rumble out from earthquakes alongside other higher-frequency waves. But there was no major earthquake that morning to set off the ripple.
Stranger still, the waves were monochromatic, stripped of the fuzzy noise that multiple different frequencies create.
Earth
Stone Tools Found
Algeria
A collection of prehistoric stone tools and butchered animal bones was discovered in 1992 at the Ain Boucherit archaeological site on the north-eastern high Algerian plateau have now been dated to 2.4 million years old. This dating directly challenges the current evolutionary paradigm that east Africa was the "cradle of humanity," as they are approximately the same age as the oldest known tools which were found in Gona, Ethiopia, dated to 2.6 million years old.
The research was published in the journal Science, and an article in Nature informs that "The oldest known widespread stone-tool technology, called the Oldowan , is thought to have arisen in East Africa some 2.6 million years ago and then spread across the continent." But this new discovery suggests that tool production might "have popped up independently in different parts of Africa."
The archaeologists report in Science says that the tools were "typical of the Oldowan stone tools already known of in east Africa" and that they were "unearthed near dozens of fossilized animal bones, with cut marks on them, from early crocodiles, elephants and hippopotamuses, and archaeologists think this could be evidence of meat-eating."
These new findings suggest hominins inhabited North Africa around 600,000 years earlier than previously thought, and according to an article in The Independent , this also means "Human ancestors may have walked like people far earlier than thought." According to Professor Mohamed Sahnouni at the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Spain, who led the research, "One hypothesis is that our early ancestors quickly carried stone tools with them out of east Africa and into other regions. Another is a "multiple-origin scenario" in which early hominids made and used tools in both east and north Africa." "The evidence from Algeria shows that the cradle of humankind was not restricted to only east Africa. Rather the entire African continent was the cradle of humankind" added Professor Sahnouni.
Algeria
Sell At Auction
Moon Rocks
Three moon rocks brought to Earth nearly half a century ago and the only known documented lunar samples in private hands, sold for $855,000 in New York on Thursday, Sotheby's said.
The rocks, collected by an unmanned Soviet Luna-16 Mission in 1970, went for nearly double the $442,500 last paid for them by the present-day US sellers in a Sotheby's Russian space history sale in 1993.
They were originally the property of Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev -- the former director of the Soviet space program -- who was given them by the Soviet Union in honor of her husband's work.
Korolev was a rocket engineer, aircraft and spacecraft designer, and mastermind behind the Soviet space program during the 1950s and '60s.
In September 1970, Luna-16 landed on the moon, drilled a 35-cm (14-inch) hole in the surface and collected the sample before returning safely back to earth.
Moon Rocks
In Memory
Ken Berry
Ken Berry, a popular TV actor in the 1960s and '70s who starred in "F-Troop," "Mama's Family" and "Mayberry R.F.D.," died Saturday.
His former wife, actress Jackie Joseph-Lawrence posted the news on Facebook. "F-Troop" co-star Larry Storch wrote on Facebook, "We hope you know how much you were loved. Goodnight Captain."
Berry played Captain Wilton Parmenter on Western sitcom "F-Troop" for two years in the mid-1960s.
Berry appeared as widowed farmer Sam Jones on "The Andy Griffith Show" and transitioned into the lead as the show spun off as "Mayberry R.F.D." He played Vinton Harper on the "Carol Burnett Show" spinoff "Mama's Family" from 1983 to 1984, which starred Vicki Lawrence, Rue McClanahan and Betty White.
"Mayberry R.F.D." ran from 1968 to 1971, when the folksy smalltown sitcom was cancelled as more contemporary shows such as "All in the Family" came on the air.
He also appeared in comedy films "Herbie Rides Again" and "The Cat From Outer Space" and made frequent guest appearances on shows including "The Golden Girls," "Love Boat," "Fantasy Island" and "CHiPs."
Born in Moline, Ill., Berry started out as a singer and dancer. He served in the U.S. Army special services under Sergeant Leonard Nimoy, entertaining the troops and winning a slot on the "Ed Sullivan Show."
Ken Berry
Ken Berry, Star of 'F Troop' and 'Mama's Family,' Dies at 85
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