from Bruce
Anecdotes
Politics
• Benjamin Disraeli often was forced to deal with hecklers. One person shouted, in an attempt to disrupt his speech, “Speak up! I can’t hear you.” Mr. Disraeli responded, “Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time.” On another occasion, someone shouted that Disraeli’s rich wife had picked him out of the gutter. Mr. Disraeli responded, “My good fellow, if you were in the gutter, no one would pick you out.”
• In 1963, Adlai Stevenson went to Dallas, where a group of far-right extremists confronted him. Afterward, he said, “A woman hit me on the head with a placard, and a man hit me on the cheek with a different weapon. … I asked the angry police not to prefer charges against them, not to punish them; after all, I didn’t want them to go to jail — I thought it would be better if they went to school.”
• In the 1920s, politician Al Rabinowitz concluded a rousing speech about why he should be elected, and then he asked for comments from the audience. A pushcart peddler stood and said, “Mr. Rabinowitz, if you and I would campaign together all over New York, we could tell more lies than any other two men, and I wouldn’t have to open my mouth.”
• Margaret Trudeau, the wife of Pierre, Prime Minister of Canada, was a free spirit. Frequently, the smell of marijuana drifted from the windows of the Ottawa residence of the Prime Minister, and a local police officer once gave her a gift of incense in an attempt to disguise the smell of the marijuana smoke.
• President Lyndon Baines Johnson once got out of a limousine and walked toward some helicopters in Vietnam. A young military attaché told President Johnson, “Sir, your helicopter is over there.” President Johnson replied, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”
• In the good old days, Senator George Vest was making a speech when the gaslights went out. Senator Vest announced, “I shall continue my speech. However, when the last person gets ready to leave the hall, let me know and I’ll stop.”
• Lady Bird Johnson was more of a feminist than she has been given credit for. Frequently, when her husband, President Lyndon Johnson, returned home, she would ask him, “What have you done for women today?”
Practical Jokes
• Judi Dench’s co-stars enjoy teasing her. While John Miller was researching his biography of her, he witnessed a fluff by Ms. Dench while she was acting in a TV series. Geoffrey Palmer told Mr. Miller loudly, so Judi would hear, “Make sure you put this in your book, John — she isn’t always perfect!” On another occasion, Mr. Miller was talking with Billy Connolly, who also spoke loudly so she could hear, “Sssshh, she’s coming — I’ll finish telling you later.” In addition, once when Ms. Dench was being interviewed, she laughed when she heard Mr. Connolly tease her by screaming in the next room, “She was a nightmare to work with.”
• In 1916, Casey Stengel bet Brooklyn Dodger manager Wilbert Robinson that he couldn’t catch a baseball thrown out of an airplane. Wilbert accepted the bet, and Casey got an airplane with an open cockpit. As Wilbert stood in the field wearing a baseball mitt, Casey and the pilot flew over the field. At this time, one of the greatest practical jokes in baseball occurred. Casey didn’t throw a baseball from the plane — he threw a grapefruit which splattered all over Wilbert’s chest. Wilbert was so angry that Casey was forced to stay in hiding until he was forgiven.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Suggests
RE: Clarinet
Marty,
I would like to recommend an excellent book, "Really the Blues" by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe.
Mezz was a jazz clarinet player in the 30s and 40s. During a brief stint in prison, he registered as black man so he could play with the black band. He led a hell of a life, including bringing,and selling, the " kind maryjane " to Harlem. A great music history read with a jazz dictionary in the back.
Steve B.
Thanks, Steve!
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Chicken Wants Corn"
Album: LUCKY 13
Artist: Fiona Boyes
Artist Location: Australia
Record Company: Yellow Dog Records
Record Company Location: Memphis, Tennessee
Info: “Sassy and soulful electric and acoustic blues have earned this Australian guitarslinger nominations for Blues Music Awards for four years running.”
“Yellow Dog Records carries the living lore of authentic American music into the present. Featuring new interpretations of Blues, Jazz, Soul, and Americana styles by established and emerging artists, Yellow Dog Records is where innovation confronts tradition. What’s left after the collision? Inspired explorations of America's musical roots.”
Price: $1 (AUS) for track; $8 (USD) for 13-track album
Genre: Blues.
Links:
LUCKY 13
Fiona Boyes on Bandcamp
Fiona Boyes on YouTube
Fiona Boyes Official Website
Yellow Dog Records
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
Twofer
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
Booster kicked my ass & spent most of the day sleeping, with lots of bitching and whining in between.
Postpone Ceremony
Grammys
The Grammy Awards were postponed Wednesday weeks before the planned Los Angeles ceremony over what organizers called “too many risks” from the omicron variant, signaling what could be the start of another year of pandemic upheaval for awards season.
The attempt at a back-to-normal show had been scheduled for Jan. 31st at the newly renamed Crypto.com Arena with a live audience and performances, but no new date is on the books. The Recording Academy said it made the decision to postpone the ceremony “after careful consideration and analysis with city and state officials, health and safety experts, the artist community and our many partners.
Last year, like most major awards shows in early 2021, the Grammys were postponed due to coronavirus concerns. The show was moved from late January to mid-March and held with a spare audience made up of mostly nominees and their guests in and around the Los Angeles Convention Center, next door to its usual home, the arena then known as Staples Center.
The move was announced around the same time the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-person programming set to begin on Jan. 20 and shifted to an online format.
The multitalented Jon Batiste is the leading nominee for this year’s honors, grabbing 11 nods in a variety of genres including R&B, jazz, American roots music, classical and music video.
Grammys
Ratings
NFL Football
Ryan Seacrest is still the king of New Year’s Eve television, no matter what Andy Cohen may think.
Seacrest, inheritor of ABC’s 50-year-old “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” from Dick Clark, reached 19.6 million viewers between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. last weekend, the Nielsen company said. During the 15-minute interval where the ball dropped in New York’s Times Square, his audience jumped to 24.2 million people.
CNN’s shot-filled celebration with Cohen and Anderson Cooper reached 3.3 million viewers between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., outdoing Fox News Channel’s Nashville-based show, which had 2.1 million people watching.
NBC, which tried a new show with Miley Cyrus and Pete Davidson, reached 6.3 million during the same time as Seacrest’s fest, Nielsen said. CBS’ country-oriented show had 5.2 million viewers.
Among broadcast networks last week, NBC had the highest prime-time average of 4.4 million viewers. CBS had 3.9 million, Fox had 3 million, ABC had 2.8 million, Univision had 1.4 million, Ion Television had 1 million and Telemundo had 890,000.
For the week of Dec. 27 to Jan. 2, the top 20 prime-time programs, their networks and viewerships:
1. NFL Football: Minnesota at Green Bay, NBC, 18.55 million.
2. College Football Playoff: Georgia vs. Michigan, ESPN, 16.51 million.
3. Rose Bowl: Ohio State vs. Utah, ESPN, 15.99 million.
4. “College Football Studio” (Friday, 7:28 p.m.), ESPN, 15.97 million.
5. “NFL Pregame Show,” NBC, 14.68 million.
6. “The OT,” Fox, 14.25 million.
7. “College Football Studio” (Friday, 7:11 p.m.), ESPN, 13.4 million.
8. NFL Football: Miami at New Orleans, ESPN, 12.31 million.
9. “Football Night in America, Part 3,” NBC, 11.17 million.
10. Sugar Bowl: Baylor vs. Mississippi, ESPN, 9.51 million.
11. “Yellowstone,” Paramount, 9.34 million.
12. “Primetime New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” ABC, 8.79 million.
13. Peach Bowl: Pittsburgh vs. Michigan St., ESPN, 7.65 million.
14. “College Football Studio” (Friday 11 p.m.), ESPN, 7.15 million.
15. “60 Minutes,” CBS, 7.09 million.
16. “The Equalizer,” CBS, 6.53 million.
17. “Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party,” NBC, 5.82 million.
18. “Football Night in America, Part 2,” NBC, 5.263 million.
19. “The Price is Right 50th Anniversary,” CBS, 5.258 million.
20. “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS, 5.17 million.
NFL Football
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Rupert
Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade thinks it’s time to “live with” COVID and told “Fox & Friends” viewers as much Tuesday — even though he was broadcasting apart from his colleagues due to, well, COVID.
“It’s called live with it. Go to work. Live with it. Get on a train. Get on a bus. Get on a plane. How do we live with it? We can no longer hide from it,” he declared after a longer discussion of school closures and the impact of remote learning on children.
As he spoke, he and his co-hosts each appeared in their own frame on air, signaling that they are not broadcasting together from their show’s famous curvy couch and are instead social distancing. Kilmeade, however, was in the studio, as he pointed out on Twitter. Like most companies, Fox News Media is still taking serious precautions to keep its employees safe amid the latest spike of positive cases and hospitalizations.
At the end of December, Fox News removed the option for employees to opt out of its vaccine mandate with negative COVID tests. Those working in New York City, as the “Fox & Friends” hosts do, needed to show proof of at least one jab by Dec. 27 to work in the office.
Rupert
Pardoned
Homer Plessy
Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car in 1892 led to the Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into U.S. law for half a century.
The state Board of Pardons last year recommended the pardon for Plessy, who boarded the rail car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn a state law segregating trains. Instead, the protest led to the 1896 ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
At a ceremony held near the spot where Plessy was arrested, Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was “beyond grateful” to help restore Plessy’s “legacy of the rightness of his cause … undefiled by the wrongness of his conviction.”
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote in the 7-1 decision: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.”
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only dissenting voice, writing that he believed the ruling “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case” — an 1857 decision that said no Black person who had been enslaved or was descended from a slave could ever become a U.S. citizen.
Homer Plessy
1,000 Public Figures
Aided Effort
More than 1,000 Americans in positions of public trust acted as accomplices in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result, participating in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January or spreading the “big lie” that the vote count had been rigged.
The startling figure underlines the extent to which Trump’s attempt to undermine the foundations of presidential legitimacy has metastasized across the US. Individuals who engaged in arguably the most serious attempt to subvert democracy since the civil war are now inveigling themselves into all levels of government, from Congress and state legislatures down to school boards and other local public bodies.
The finding that 1,011 individuals in the public realm played a role in election subversion around the 2020 presidential race comes from a new pro-democracy initiative that will launch on Thursday on the anniversary of the Capitol assault.
The Insurrection Index seeks to identify all those who supported Trump in his bid to hold on to power despite losing the election, in the hope that they can be held accountable and prevented from inflicting further damage to the democratic infrastructure of the country.
Among them are 213 incumbents in elected office and 29 who are running as candidates for positions of power in upcoming elections. There are also 59 military veterans, 31 current or former law enforcement officials, and seven who sit on local school boards.
Aided Effort
Division, Cruelty, Ratings
The New Right
One of the hosts of Fox’s “The Five,” Jesse Watters said the quiet part out loud Monday evening, when discussing President Biden’s agenda and pushback he’s getting from progressives in his party.
“[D]o I feel sorry for Joe Biden? No. I work at Fox. I wanna see disarray on the left. It’s good for America. It’s good for our ratings.”
In those eight seconds of television, Watters may have unknowingly articulated the entire philosophy of the new American right, adding to the canon of philosophical giants before him. I kid, of course. The leaders of the modern conservative movement, from Burke, to Kirk, F.A. Hayek to William F. Buckley, Ayn Rand to Ronald Reagan, likely wouldn’t recognize today’s American right wing.
Co-opted entirely by Donald Trump in 2016, it’s now sufficiently aligned with whatever he just said, rather than the centuries of principles and philosophy that conservative thought leaders once espoused. It’s led this arm of American politics, both in the Republican Party and in right-wing media, to forget about the things that used to animate it: things like fiscal responsibility, anti-protectionism, family values, lowering the debt and deficit, national security, law and order, and, you know, preserving democracy.
Now, the American right is off wasting taxpayer dollars chasing phony election audits to soothe the fragile ego of a guy who lost everything for the Republican Party in four short years.
The New Right
Finders Keepers Sue
Dent’s Run
Treasure hunters who believe they found a huge cache of fabled Civil War-era gold in Pennsylvania are now on the prowl for something as elusive as the buried booty itself: government records of the FBI’s excavation.
Finders Keepers filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department over its failure to produce documents on the FBI’s search for the legendary gold, which took place nearly four years ago at a remote woodland site in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Finders Keepers’ owners, the father-son duo of Dennis and Kem Parada, had spent years looking for what, according to legend, was an 1863 shipment of Union gold that was lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The duo focused on a spot where they say their instruments detected a large metallic mass.
After meeting with the treasure hunters in early 2018, the FBI brought in a contractor with more sophisticated instruments. The contractor detected an underground mass that weighed up to nine tons and had the density of gold, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed last year at the request of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
The Paradas accompanied the FBI to the site in Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, but say they were confined to their car while the FBI excavated.
Dent’s Run
Adds 2 Dog Breeds
American Kennel Club
An athletic Hungarian farm dog and a tiny pet of bygone Russian aristocrats are the latest breeds in the American Kennel Club’s purebred lineup.
The club announced Tuesday that it’s recognizing the Russian toy and the mudi. That means they’re eligible to compete for best in show at many U.S. dog shows, including the AKC’s big annual championship and the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club show.
The mudi (whose American fans pronounce its name like “moody,” although the vowel sound in Hungarian is closer to the “u” in “pudding”) descended from long lines of Hungarian sheepdogs before a museum director took an interest in the breed and gave it a name around 1930. Fans say the medium-size, shaggy dogs are vigorous, versatile and hardworking, able to herd sheep, hunt boars, snag rats and compete in canine sports such as agility and dock diving.
The dogs — the proper plural is “mudik” — were featured on postage stamps in their homeland in 2004, as were some other Hungarian breeds.
The Russian toy developed from small English terriers that gained the fancy of Russian elites by the early 1700s. The diminutive dogs — supposed to weigh no more than 6.5 pounds (2.7 kg) — have a leggy silhouette, perky expression and lively demeanor, breeders say.
American Kennel Club
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