from Bruce
Anecdotes
Work
• Follow your bliss. Ron Shelton, a minor-league baseball player, was fascinated by director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch when it first appeared in movie theaters. He saw it at least once every day for two weeks, risking his job because he began to arrive late at the ballpark. After seeing the movie, he decided to become a film director. Now, he is known as the director of Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump.
• Phil Baker was both a comedian and an accordion player. Even though he was not a very good accordion player, a manufacturer of accordions once asked him to endorse its products. Mr. Baker asked, “How come you selected me? There are a lot of better accordion players.” The answer came back, “I know, but you’re the only one who’s working steadily.”
• Like many writers, Quentin Tarantino, famous for his movies Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, worked at many odd jobs before becoming famous. He once worked on a workout video starring Dolph Lundgren. (Mr. Tarantino’s job was cleaning doggy doodoo off the parking lot so Mr. Lundgren wouldn’t get his outfit dirty.)
• A teacher let her 1st-grade students know that after returning from work, she liked to sew. One of her students asked, “Where do you work?” In another classroom, a student asked her teacher the same question. Of course, the teacher said, “Here. This is my job — teaching.” The student was shocked: “You mean you get paid for this?”
• As a salesman, Myron Cohen told a lot of funny stories to his customers. One day, his boss talked to him and said, “Myron, you’re a wonderful, funny guy and you should be paid for telling those stories of yours — but not by me!” So Mr. Cohen became a professional comedian.
Introduction
Living works of art tend to take joy in living. So how can we be a living work of art? Some ways include living a life of wit and intelligence, practicing an art, doing good deeds, paying attention to your soul as well as your body, staying angry at the things that should anger us, and being aware of the fabulous realities that surround us despite the presence of evil in the world. Here are some bumper-sticker condensations of ancient and modern wisdom: Resist Psychic Death, Do It Yourself, Resist Mindless Consumption, Don’t Fear the Reaper, Maintain Maximum Cool, Do Good Now (and Maybe be a Hero), Love and Live Life, and Reality is Fabulous. Of course, more good advice is this: Dress Like a Work of Art.
Acting and Actors
• Some people can’t distinguish the actor from the actor’s role. A grocer from Lichfield once carried a letter to the famous actor David Garrick from his brother. However, the grocer never delivered the letter. After seeing Mr. Garrick perform on stage the comic role of Abel Drugger in The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, the grocer said that he didn’t want anything to do with such a shabby creature as he had seen on stage.
• Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) was proud of his performances as the lead of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Once he asked his dresser, Walter Collinson, to say in which play he was at his best, and he was pleased when Mr. Collinson answered, “Macbeth.” Sir Henry said, “It is generally conceded to be Hamlet,” but Mr. Collinson insisted, “Oh, no, Sir. Macbeth. You sweat twice as much in that.”
• In 1642, the Puritans closed the theaters in England. By the time they reopened 18 years later, the boy actors who had played the roles of women had grown up and no apprentices had been available to learn to take their places. When theater-friendly King Charles II wanted to see a play, he was forced to wait until the man playing the Queen had finished shaving.
• Sam Mendes was very young — 23 years old — when he directed Judi Dench in three plays. During a conversation, they talked about some plays that Ms. Dench had starred in during the mid-1970s. Ms. Dench asked Mr. Mendes if he seen the plays, and he replied, “Well, no. I was 10 years old.” Ms. Dench screamed, then pretended to choke him.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Be a Work of Art — Buy
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Heart of Nat Turner"
Album: UPPITY
Artist: Laura Love
Artist Location: Winthrop, Washington
Info:
deepmission, a fan, wrote, “I’ve always loved Laura Love since I first saw her perform on a stage on the Embarcadero here in San Francisco. Her songs always have something to say in a beautiful and lyrical way that makes a person think, and every song on UPPITY is a gem. I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite, but the harmonies with Ruthie Foster on ‘Two of Us’ are truly memorable.”
Laura Love - Lead vocals, bass guitar
Orville Johnson - Acoustic guitars, dobro, mandolin, percussion, bass guitar
Woody Simmons - Banjo, organ, harmonica, gong
Ruthie Foster - Guest vocalist on “Two Of Us”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $8 (USD) for eight-track album
Genre: Folk
Links:
UPPITY
Laura Love on Bandcamp
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
New Venture
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Mrs. Betty Bowers
Click on image for larger version
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.
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
From AP:
It's a Wonderful Life is 75 years old
It was just another job for child actor Karolyn Grimes:
* She was 6 and had already done four movies by the summer of 1946 when filming began on "It's a Wonderful Life." The only thing she recalls about the biggest movie of her career was being delighted to play in snow on the set, AP's Mark Kennedy writes.
Jimmy Hawkins, another former child actor who played Tommy in the film, recalls as a 4-year-old getting up while it was dark and taking buses and streetcars to Culver City to film his scenes.
* "On the set, [director Frank] Capra would squat down, eye-to-eye, tell me what he wanted me to do and did I understand it. I said: 'Oh, yes, sir.'"
Grimes and Hawkins are the last surviving members of the cast, and have chosen to spread its lesson of doing good.
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
When Zappa visited The Monkees:
In Numbers
Faith
Fox News possesses an “outsized influence” on the American public, especially among religious viewers.
That was the conclusion of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute in a report released just after the 2020 presidential election. It noted that 15% of Americans cited Fox News as the most trusted source – around the same as NBC, ABC and CBS combined, and four percentage points above rival network CNN. The survey of more than 2,500 American adults also suggested that Fox News viewers trend religious, especially among Republicans watching the show. Just 5% of Republican viewers of the channel identified as being “religiously unaffiliated” – compared to 15% of Republicans who do not watch Fox News and 25% of the wider American public.
In most cases, about a third of people from each religious tradition said that they watched one of those legacy networks in the last 24 hours. PBS scored very low among every tradition. In most cases fewer than 15% of respondents reported watching PBS in the time frame.
However, the numbers for the three major cable news networks – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – were much higher across the board. In eight of the 16 religious and nonreligious traditions categorized in the poll, CNN viewership was at least 50% of the sample. This was led by 71% of Hindus who watched CNN and 63% of Muslims.
The least likely group to watch CNN was clearly white evangelicals, at just 23%. In comparison, MSNBC scored lower nearly across the board. In fact, in none of the 16 classification groups was viewership of MSNBC greater than it was for CNN.
Faith
Creates T-Shirt
Banksy
Hundreds of people lined up Saturday in the English city of Bristol to get the latest work by elusive street artist Banksy — a T-shirt created to help four defendants charged over the toppling of a local statue of a slave trader.
The gray shirt features the word Bristol above the empty plinth on which the statue of 17th-century slave merchant Edward Colston long stood, with a rope hanging from it and debris scattered around.
Anti-racism demonstrators pulled down the statue and and dumped it in Bristol harbor in June 2020 amid global protests sparked by the police killing of a Black American man, George Floyd.
Four people have been charged with criminal damage over the statue’s felling and are going on trial next week.
“I’ve made some souvenir shirts to mark the occasion,” Banksy said on social media Friday. “Available from various outlets in the city from tomorrow. All proceeds to the defendants so they can go for a pint.”
Banksy
Record Solo-Flight
Zara Rutherford
Teen pilot Zara Rutherford landed in Seoul on Saturday from Russia, the first Asia stop on her attempt to become the youngest woman to fly around the world solo.
In August, the 19-year-old British-Belgian departed from Kortrijk-Wevelgem Airport in western Belgium on her 51,000-km (32,000-mile) journey, which is to span five continents and 52 countries, including the United States, Greenland, Russia and Colombia.
"It has been challenging," Rutherford told reporters at Gimpo International Airport after arriving from Vladivostok in her bespoke Shark ultralight plane, the world's fastest microlight.
"I was stuck in Alaska because of visa and weather issues for a month and I was stuck in Russia for a month because of visa and weather issues," she said. "I was hoping to complete it by Christmas but I guess that’s not happening anymore, but it’s an adventure."
Zara Rutherford
Delays Ballet Season
La Scala
Italy’s La Scala has postponed its ballet season premiere after a coronavirus outbreak in its ranks, just days after the famed Milan theater staged its high-profile opera season opener with a full-capacity audience.
At least one of the four ballerinas who tested positive for COVID-19 also appeared in the Dec. 7 premiere of the opera “Macbeth.”
Ten other people linked to the outbreak tested positive for the virus, all of them theater support personnel, including someone who worked in the hairdressing department, the theater said in a statement.
La Scala Theatre Ballet was scheduled to perform “La Bayadere” to open its season on Dec. 15. The performance has been pushed back until Dec. 21.
La Scala
For Anti-Vaxxers
Bodily Autonomy
Texass Governor Gregg Abbott (R-Weasel) wants you to know you have “the right to control and secure your own body” — unless, that is, you’re seeking an abortion.
Speaking out against vaccine mandates, Abbott told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday night, “This is whether or not somebody is going to have something put into their body that they do not want put into their body. That’s more than freedom, that’s the right to control and secure your own body. And that’s exactly why we’re winning on this issue.”
Abbott signed the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban, S.B. 8, into law this year. The bill allows individuals to sue for up to $10,000 anyone who performs an abortion or helps someone get an abortion after six weeks gestation (before many even know they are pregnant), effectively limiting providers’ ability to give abortion care to their patients in the state. On Friday, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the law’s constitutionality but allowed the law to stand while providers sue the Texas attorney general, judges and health licensing officials. The United States is also suing the state of Texas over the law. But as Julie Murray, an attorney who works with Planned Parenthood, described the court’s decision to ABC News: “The threat of bounty-hunting suits will continue.”
Abbott has been as fervently anti-vaccine as he is anti-abortion. He put in place an order barring Texas employers from imposing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate on employees who qualify for a religious, personal or medical exemption, in response to Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employers. And he announced this week the creation of a hotline where employees in Texas can report “illegal” vaccine mandates to the state. Employees can also get an exemption by simply signing a form declaring they have “medical reasons, including prior recovery from Covid-19” or “reasons of personal conscience or religious belief” that prevent them from getting vaccinated. Many people seeking an abortion, however, will now likely have to leave the state to get one, and that’s only if they are able to afford to do that. The state’s attorney general has argued that’s a good thing.
Bodily Autonomy
'Extremely Calming'
Jan. 6 Speech
Former President Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) claimed that a speech he gave to supporters on January 6 before the Capitol riot was "extremely calming."
"I have nothing to hide," Trump told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Friday night, referring to the congressional panel investigating the Capitol riot.
"I wasn't involved in that and if you look at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming, actually."
In the interview with Laura Ingraham on Friday, Trump said the events on January 6 were a "protest" and that the hundreds of arrested rioters were "innocent."
"It was a protest. The insurrection took place on November 3rd, which was election day. This was a protest and a lot of innocent people are being hurt. A lot of innocent people are being injured," he said.
Trump also discussed his attempts to try and prevent the January 6 select committee from obtaining a tranche of executive branch documents relating to their investigation.
Jan. 6 Speech
Social Media Posts Influences Sentencings
Coup Plotters
For many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the insurrection are influencing even their criminal sentences.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson’s posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. “Overall I had fun lol,” Peterson posted on Facebook.
The judge told Peterson that his posts made it “extraordinarily difficult” for her to show him leniency.
“The ’lol’ particularly stuck in my craw because, as I hope you’ve come to understand, nothing about January 6th was funny,” Jackson added. “No one locked in a room, cowering under a table for hours, was laughing.”
As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant’s social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records.
Coup Plotters
And Reinstate Pluto
Rethink Moons
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has a very strict definition of the word "planet".
According to the definition – drafted, tweaked, and agreed upon in August 2006 – an astronomical body is officially a planet if it orbits the Sun, has sufficient mass to be spherical, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
Under these strictures, only eight bodies in the Solar System can be considered planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
This definition very effectively cut out Pluto, a move that has proven, at the very least, extremely controversial, with many scientists calling for a more inclusive redefinition based solely on the physical properties of the body in question.
Which brings us to a new paper that has bolstered those bids with an in-depth analysis of the IAU criteria. Those criteria, the paper finds, are not based on science after all; instead, they rely on folklore and astrology.
Rethink Moons
‘Old South’ Restaurant
Smyrna, Georgia
A Georgia city may soon decide what to do with a decades-old restaurant that served southern staples and lured celebrities but also used racist imagery and tropes to evoke the pre-Civil War South.
A task force in Smyrna is expected to decide by the end of the month whether the Atlanta suburb should preserve, rebuild, demolish or try to give away Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Thursday.
The now-defunct restaurant became a well-known dining destination starting in the mid-1900s. Its guests included sports icons Jack Dempsey and Ty Cobb and Hollywood star Doris Day. Former President Jimmy Carter stopped at the cabin during his presidential campaigns.
But it also relied on an “Old South” decor and theme to bring in diners, the AJC reported.
According to news reports, Black youths hired as servers wore wooden menu boards around their necks and danced on table tops, and the walls had framed advertisements for slaves. The restaurant’s namesake, Fanny Williams, sat on the front porch in a faded dress and headwrap telling customers about her days as a slave, though she never was a slave, according to the AJC.
Smyrna, Georgia
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