Garrison Keillor: The art of love in the far North
Winter is a thoughtful time. Snow falls in the trees and my natural meanness dissipates and the urge to bash my enemies' mailboxes with a baseball bat. I put fresh strawberries on the cornflakes and taste the sweetness of life. I speak gently to the lady across the table. Marriage is the truest test - to make a good life with your best-informed critic, and thanks to her excellent comedic timing, we have a good life. My third marriage and this year we ding the silver bell of twenty-five years.
Hugh McIntyre, "Taylor Swift's 'Lover' Was The Only Album To Sell One Million Copies In The U.S. In 2019" (Forbes)
Taylor Swift's Lover was the top-selling album of 2019, and it wasn't even close. […] Lover, which was bought 1.085 million times, was the only album last year to actually sell one million copies. There were many titles that moved at least one million equivalent units when looking at hybrids, comprised of sales of the full-length, track purchases and streams, but Swift was the only artist with a dedicated enough (and large enough) fan base to actually convince one million people to head to their favorite store or online retailer and purchase a copy, either digital or physical.
Sales of this artificially flavored drink mix were poor until NASA used it on John Glenn's Mercury flight in February 1962. What is the name of this product?
In 1969 (for the year 1968) Glen Campbell was awarded the Grammy for Album of the Year, a first for a country album. What is the title of this Capitol Records release?
By the Time I Get to Phoenix is the seventh album by American singer-guitarist Glen Campbell, released in November 1967 by Capitol Records.
In March 1969 the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year (for 1968), the first country album to do so. In February 1968 the album's lead single "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", released October 1967, won Grammys for both Best Vocal Performance, Male and Best Contemporary Male Solo Vocal Performance (for 1967). In 2004 "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Source
Stephen F was first, and correct, with:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Mark. said:
Wichita Lineman.
Randall wrote:
Wichita Lineman
Alan J answered:
By the Time I Get To Phoenix.
Mac Mac replied:
By the time I get to Phoenix
zorch responded:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix.
Dave wrote:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix. For several years, Glen Campbell was on our TV every week because my parents watched "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour" so I heard him sing all his hits many times. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have heard some of them because my Dad usually tuned his car's AM radio to Top 40 or pop stations, although some Campbell songs were crossover hits. Before being signed as a solo artist, Campbell was a member of the famous group of LA session musicians, "The Wrecking Crew."
Deborah responded:
I was a big fan of Glen Campbell back in the day, and spent a lot of my allowance money on his albums (and the Monkees, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, CSN&Y, etc.). I believe the one to which you refer is "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."
Cold and clear, with a big Alaskan storm moving in later today. Should make tomorrow messy.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, replied:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Daniel in The City said:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Billy in Cypress U$A wrote:
By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Rosemary in Columbus responded:
By The Time I Get To Phoenix
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• In 1957, dancer Anton Dolin had supper with opera singer Maria Callas at the Café de Paris. After they had dined, Ms. Callas told Mr. Dolin why she had chosen that particular supper club: "I was offered £1,000 a week to come here and sing."
• Georgia O'Keeffe once offered Summer Days to a museum for the price of $400,000, but the museum was reluctant to pay that price. No problem. She sold Summer Days to fashion designer Calvin Klein for $1 million.
• Canadian painter Jean-Paul Piopelle once grew annoyed because art dealers priced his paintings by the number of square inches in them. Therefore, he created a circular painting to confuse them.
• Early in his career as a painter, Claude Monet suffered from great poverty. Once, a laundress kept the Monet family sheets because he could not afford to pay his laundry bill.
Movies
• When John Huston directed Beat the Devil (1954), he tore up the script, then invited Truman Capote to write new scenes. (During the filming, Mr. Capote spoke on the telephone each day to a pet raven. Once, when the pet raven declined to make any sounds on the telephone, Mr. Capote flew to Rome to see the raven in person.) In addition, Mr. Huston let the supporting actors - including, and especially, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley - make up their own dialogue. The movie flopped, but later it became a cult classic. As you would expect, Mr. Huston would have preferred that the movie be a success from day one. He said in 1975, "Of course it's about as bad to be ahead of your time as behind it. It's always nice when pictures are revived years later, it gives you the satisfaction of seeing them finally accepted, and God knows Beat the Devil and The Asphalt Jungle were no great shakes their first time around. But as far as the, ah, material rewards are concerned, it's better to have a success from the first."
• In the movie The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine played the Shoemaker. As a result of the movie, he received more publicity than he had ever received. After making the movie, Mr. Massine vacationed in Italy, and a real shoemaker in Positano told him that he was ready to take him on as an assistant.
Music and Musicians
• Choreography Hermes Pan once needed to work out a dance to some music by George Gershwin. He asked the rehearsal pianist in the studio to play the song, but was dissatisfied with it, so he asked the pianist to play the song at a slower tempo. Again, he was dissatisfied, and he said, "Gershwin or no Gershwin, I think this stinks!" Later that day, Mr. Pan was able to meet Mr. Gershwin and discovered he was the pianist at the rehearsal. Mr. Pan apologized to him, but Mr. Gershwin replied, "You know something? You might be right!"
• Billy Rose once tried to impress choreographer Agnes de Mille with his plans for an arts production. Among other things, he asked what she would think if Leopold Stokowski came out in his theater and conducted a symphony orchestra in Debussy's "Claire de Lune." Ms. de Mille replied that she would be surprised, as no doubt would Mr. Stokowski, since "Claire de Lune" was written for solo piano, not for a symphony orchestra.
• Sometimes symphony musicians don't like the new music they are playing. At a rehearsal for the premiere of Claude Debussy's La Mer, the musicians grew bored with the music. One of the musicians took the score, made a paper boat of it, then used his foot to push it along the floor. Soon many other musicians followed suit.
the last is a video capture from some of the Lev Parnas stuff recently turned over to Congress--such a gourmet meal Predator asks the White House Chef to prepare!
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
CBS opens the night with a FRESH'Young Sheldon', followed by a FRESH'The Unicorn', then a FRESH'Mom', followed by a FRESH'Carol's Second Act', then a FRESH'Evil'.
Scheduled on a FRESHStephen Colbert are Josh Gad and Tamron Hall.
Scheduled on a FRESHJames Corden, OBE, are Bradley Whitford and Brett Gelman.
NBC begins the night with a FRESH'Superstore', followed by a FRESH'The Good Place', then a FRESH'Will & Grace', followed by a FRESH'Perfect Harmony', then a FRESH'L&O: SVU'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Fallon are the cast of "Schitt's Creek", Finn Wolfhard, and Justin Willman.
On a RERUNSeth Meyers (from 12/17/19) are Robert De Niro, Guy Pearce, and Joe Pera.
Scheduled on a FRESHLilly Singh are Susan Kelechi Watson and Tig Notaro.
ABC starts the night with a RERUN'The Conners', followed by another RERUN'The Conners', followed by the FRESH'The Last Days Of Richard Pryor'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Kimmel are Al Pacino, Florence Pugh, and Nicky Jam featuring Daddy Yankee.
The CW offers a FRESH'Supernatural', followed by a FRESH'Legacies'.
Faux has a FRESH'Last Man Standing', followed by a FRESH'Deputy'.
MY recycles an old 'L&O: CI', followed by another old 'L&O: CI'.
A&E has 'The First 48', followed by a FRESH'The First 48', then a FRESH'Alaska PD', followed by a FRESH'60 Days In'.
AMC offers 'Ghostbusters II', followed by the movie 'Taken', then the movie 'The Last Stand'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Migration
[7:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Tide
[8:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Flood
[9:00AM] NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS - The Great Feast
[10:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Ice Worlds
[11:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Great Plains
[12:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Jungles
[1:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Shallow Seas
[2:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Seasonal Forests
[3:00PM] PLANET EARTH - From Pole To Pole
[4:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Mountains
[5:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Fresh Water
[6:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Ice Worlds
[7:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Caves
[8:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Deserts
[9:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Great Plains
[10:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Jungles
[11:00PM] PLANET EARTH - Shallow Seas
[12:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Seasonal Forests
[1:00AM] PLANET EARTH - From Pole To Pole
[2:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Mountains
[3:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Fresh Water
[4:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Caves
[5:00AM] PLANET EARTH - Deserts (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has 'Below Deck', 'Project Runway', followed by a FRESH'Project Runway', then a FRESH'Watch What Happens: Live'.
FX has the movie '22 Jump Street', followed by the movie 'Baby Driver', then the movie 'Baby Driver', again.
History has 'American Pickers', another 'American Pickers', followed by a FRESH'American Pickers', and another 'American Pickers'.
IFC -
[6:30A] Underworld: Evolution
[9:00A] Underworld
[11:30A] The Last Stand
[2:00P] X-Men Origins: Wolverine
[4:30P] Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
[7:00P] The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1
[9:30P] The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2
[12:30A] X-Men Origins: Wolverine
[3:00A] The Last Stand
[5:30A] Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:20am] The Andy Griffith Show
[6:55am] The Andy Griffith Show
[7:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[8:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[8:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[10:00am] Rosewood
[1:00pm] Law & Order
[2:00pm] Law & Order
[3:00pm] Law & Order
[4:00pm] Law & Order
[5:00pm] Law & Order
[6:00pm] Law & Order
[7:00pm] Law & Order
[8:00pm] Law & Order
[9:00pm] Law & Order
[10:00pm] Law & Order
[11:00pm] Law & Order
[12:00am] Law & Order
[1:00am] Law & Order
[2:00am] In the Heart of the Sea
[4:30am] The Mary Tyler Moore Show
[5:05am] The Mary Tyler Moore Show
[5:40am] The Mary Tyler Moore Show (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'Troy', followed by the movie 'Star Trek Beyond'.
This year's six inductees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame were announced Wednesday morning, and they are Whitney Houston, Depeche Mode, the Notorious B.I.G., Nine Inch Nails, the Doobie Brothers, and T. Rex.
Notably absent from the Class of 2020, however, was Pat Benatar. The fact that Benatar - one of the most successful female artists of the 1980s, who undoubtedly set the template for female hard rock singers at a time when few female hard rock singers had a presence on the charts or at rock radio - had never been nominated before had been a subject of annual Hall protest. She was widely predicted to be a lock this year, especially considering that last year's inductee, Janet Jackson, had implored in her Rock Hall acceptance speech to thunderous applause: "Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, please, 2020: Induct more women!" (Only three female artists total were on this year's Hall ballot, the other two being Houston and passed-over four-time nominee Rufus featuring Chaka Khan. Women make up less than 8 percent of all Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees.)
Benatar actually came in second in this year's online Fan Vote. Also not making the Class of 2020 cut were the Dave Matthews Band, who actually topped the Fan Vote by a wide margin. (It is noteworthy that the seven previous winners of the Fan Vote had all been inducted in their years).
Along with Benatar, hard/classic rock in general was passed over, with nominees Motörhead, Thin Lizzy, Todd Rundgren, the MC5, and two other artists that made the top five of the Fan Vote, Judas Priest and Soundgarden, all not getting in.
Just over two months since its debut, AppleTV+ finally hit the Hollywood big time today with its first high-profile lawsuit.
Along with director M. Night Shyamalan, the streaming arm of the Tim Cook-run tech behemoth is facing claims that its Tony Basgallop created Servant series lifts a little too liberally from Francesca Gregorini's 2013 film The Truth About Emanuel.
"Servant is a wholesale copy of Plaintiff Francesca Gregorini's 2013 feature film The Truth About Emanuel," declares a copyright infringement and injunction seeking lawsuit filed today in federal court in California (read it here).
"As demonstrated by the long list of key parallels catalogued in Section III(C) of this Complaint, the misappropriation is not a mere borrowed premise, idea or story," the jury seeking and graphically detailed complaint adds of the film that opened at the Sundance Film Festival seven years ago. "Mr. Shyamalan has gone so far as to appropriate not just the plot of Emanuel-but also its use of cinematic language, creating a substantially similar feeling, mood, and theme."
Seeking to shut the already renewed Servant down, the lawsuit wants widespread but unspecified damages as well. Interestingly, amidst the claims that "both works use magical realism to create an otherworldly mood" and more detailed allegations, one difference between Servant and Emanuel that the paperwork notes is the shift in gender. Emanuel was made by women and Servant is made by men, and that brings an "an added layer of sexism" to the AppleTV+ series.
Asians cringe at in
A social media campaign backed by a Japanese seasonings company is targeting the persistent idea that Chinese food is packed with MSG and can make you sick.
So entrenched is the notion in American culture, it shows up in the dictionary: Merriam-Webster.com lists " Chinese restaurant syndrome " as a real illness that has been around since 1968. But much of the mythology around the idea has been debunked: monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, shows up in many foods from tomatoes to breast milk, and there's no evidence to link it to illness.
"For me, it's another thing to point to other people and say 'Look, if you think racism toward Asians doesn't exist in this country, like here it is,'" said restaurateur Eddie Huang. "I know how white people see us. 'They're cool, they're acceptable, they're non-threatening. But they're weird, their food.'"
Huang, a New York City-based chef and author (his memoir inspired the ABC sitcom "Fresh Off the Boat"), and TV's "The Real" co-host Jeannie Mai are launching a social media effort Tuesday with Ajinomoto, the longtime Japanese producer of MSG seasonings. They plan to use the hashtag #RedefineCRS to challenge Merriam-Webster to rewrite the definition.
Tardigrades are microscopic organisms with a reputation for being practically indestructible. The tiny animals, colloquially known as water bears or moss piglets, can survive extreme temperatures and pressures, years without food, and direct exposure to the vacuum of space. It's even possible that tardigrades lived on the Moon for a while, after an Israeli spacecraft spilled thousands of them on the lunar surface when it crash-landed last year.
But even these death-defying creatures might be pushed to their limits by human-driven climate change, according to a recent paper in Scientific Reports. A team led by Ricardo Cardoso Neves, a cell biologist at the University of Copenhagen, found that the tardigrade species Ramazzottius varieornatus was vulnerable to temperatures that will become more common in the coming decades.
"Before our study, tardigrades were regarded as the only organism on Earth to survive a cataclysmic event," such as "the impact of an asteroid that could cause the boiling of all water in the oceans," Neves said in an email.
"But now we know this is not true," he added. "Albeit being among the most resilient organisms that inhabit our planet, it is now clear that tardigrades are vulnerable to high temperatures."
Common murres look like skinny penguins but fly like F-15 fighter jets. The North Pacific seabirds can quickly cover hundreds of miles searching for schools of small forage fish. Their powerful wings let them dive more than 150 feet (46 meters) under water to gorge on capelin, sand lance, herring, sardine and juvenile pollock.
So biologists were stunned four winters ago when carcasses of emaciated common murres showed up on beaches in what they say was the largest seabird die-off recorded in the world's oceans. The die-off eventually killed an estimated 500,000 to 1 million murres from California to Alaska, eliminating 10-20% of the northeast Pacific population of the species. Seabird experts now believe they know why.
Common murres were ambushed by effects of the northeast Pacific marine heatwave dubbed "The Blob," according to a paper published Wednesday by 23 federal, university and private researchers in the science journal PLOS ONE. The heatwave lasted more than 700 days from 2014 to 2016, increasing water temperature and interrupting patterns in the food web from the smallest creatures to top predators.
Forage fish - the main prey of murres- feed on zooplankton, the floating small animals that feed on plant plankton. Cold water produces the biggest, fattiest varieties of zooplankton. But the marine heatwave reduced the nutritional value of zooplankton, researchers concluded, and the lower-grade food stunted the growth of forage fish.
In turn, warmer water increased the metabolism of large fish such as Pacific cod, walleye pollock and arrowtooth flounder, requiring them to eat more forage fish.
Israel's defence minister Wednesday announced the creation of seven nature reserves in the occupied West Bank as part of efforts to maintain Israeli control, weeks before a general election.
The sites are all located in what is know as Area C of the West Bank that includes the strategic Jordan Valley, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September he planned to annex.
Defence Minister Naftali Bennett, whose rightwing New Right party draws much of its support from Jewish settlers, said last week that the territory belonged to Israel and his goal was to annex it "within a short time".
According to Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now, the designated reserves total about 13,000 acres (5,300 hectares), some 40 percent of it under private Palestinian ownership.
Under Israel laws regulating nature reserves, Palestinians would be forbidden to cultivate their own land, the NGO's Hagit Ofran said.
What happens when you take cells from frog embryos and grow them into new organisms that were "evolved" by algorithms? You get something that researchers are calling the world's first "living machine."
Though the original stem cells came from frogs - the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis - these so-called xenobots don't resemble any known amphibians. The tiny blobs measure only 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) wide and are made of living tissue that biologists assembled into bodies designed by computer models, according to a new study.
These mobile organisms can move independently and collectively, can self-heal wounds and survive for weeks at a time, and could potentially be used to transport medicines inside a patient's body, scientists recently reported.
"They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal," study co-author Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, said in a statement. "It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."
Algorithms shaped the evolution of the xenobots. They grew from skin and heart stem cells into tissue clumps of several hundred cells that moved in pulses generated by heart muscle tissue, said lead study author Sam Kriegman, a doctoral candidate studying evolutionary robotics in the University of Vermont's Department of Computer Science, in Burlington.
Like most large galaxies, the Milky Way is glued together by a supermassive black hole at its center, buried deep in the constellation Sagittarius. Our galaxy's supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*), constantly pulls stars, dust and other matter inward, forming a stellar megalopolis 1 billion times denser than our corner of the galaxy.
Sometimes, stars closest to the black hole have to compete for space - and sometimes, a new study suggests, this competition becomes a strange and violent marriage.
In the new study, published today (Jan. 15) in the journal Nature, astronomers describe six mysterious objects swirling around our galaxy's central black hole. According to the authors, these anomalous objects (dubbed G1 through G6) look like oblong blobs of gas several times more massive than Earth. However, they behave like small stars capable of passing perilously close to the black hole's edge without being ripped to shreds.
Are these peculiar space burps just gas, or are they stars? According to the study authors, the blobs may be a strange hybrid of both. Based on the six objects' shapes, orbits and interactions with Sgr A*, the researchers suggest that each G object is a pair of binary stars (two stars that revolve around each other) that got smashed together by the black hole's gravity millions of years ago and is still spilling out clouds of gas and dust in the messy aftermath of the collision.
"Black holes may be driving binary stars to merge," study co-author Andrea Ghez, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "It's possible that many of the stars we've been watching and not understanding may be the end product of [these] mergers."
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