from Bruce
Anecdotes
Alcohol
• In Austria, operatic tenor Leo Slezak sometimes heard musical societies play at dances for summer visitors. Often, as the night wore on and the band members became drunker and drunker, the music declined in quality. Once, he saw a band member stuff a sausage into the mouth of a tuba, thus preventing the tuba player from getting any sound at all from his instrument.
• John Steed, the sartorially perfect spy on the TV series The Avengers, does a lot of drinking—especially champagne—so of course he has a hangover cure, which we learn in the episode “A Touch of Brimstone.” The cure is to play the National Anthem because it “gets you to your feet.”
Animals
• Arturo Toscanini once conducted the New York Philharmonic in a Sunday radio broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A flock of canaries was loose in an apartment while the occupant listened to the broadcast. The canaries were silent for the symphony’s first three movements, but when the Choral Finale began they flew to the radio, settled on it, and sang with the music. Maestro Toscanini was greatly pleased with this story.
• George White was a producer of revues during the Roaring Twenties. Often, he sat in the ticket office and sold tickets for his revue and was amused whenever someone he had never met demanded good seats because of being “a personal friend of George White’s.” By the way, Mr. White thought it was a good day when he lost $100,000 at a horse race because he immediately stopped betting on the horses.
• When Tallulah Bankhead appeared with a monkey in Conchita at the Queen’s Theatre, it did not go well. When the monkey first appeared on stage, it grabbed Tallulah’s black wig, then ran away, revealing Tallulah’s blond hair. The audience laughed, and Tallulah turned a cartwheel on stage.
Art and Artists
• Joe Greene of Stillwater, Oklahoma, does not like good things to go to waste. In the summer of 2012, he looked in a trashcan outside a church in Stillwater and saw the corner of an old wooden frame. He took it out and looked at it. The glass pane in front was smeared with ketchup and barbeque sauce. He said, “It had been buried in somebody’s picnic.” He took it and left. For about six weeks, he ignored it, and then he looked at it again. On the back was a photocopied newspaper article about Doel Reed and some contest-entry forms for an arts festival in Taos, New Mexico. From 1924 to 1959, Mr. Reed had worked in the art department at Oklahoma A&M College, which is now Oklahoma State University. In 1967, he created the drawing in the frame. Mr. Greene called a friend who is an artist, and the friend advised him to take the drawing to the art department of Oklahoma State University. Chris Ramsey, the head of the art department, advised him to have the drawing reframed. He did, and the drawing looked brand-new. Mr. Greene then donated the drawing to Oklahoma State University in honor of his wife, Dixie Mosier-Greene, who is part of the university’s philosophy department faculty. The drawing is titled “Near Ledoux,” and now it hangs in the Oklahoma State University Bartlett Center for the Visual Arts. Oklahoma State University art historian Louise Siddons said about the drawing and its artist, “It’s just really direct and clearly drawn. He just communicates how it felt to be in that place in that light.” Mr. Greene is proud to have rescued the work of art. He said, “My life is weird. And it gets weirder all the time.”
• Rembrandt van Rijn didn’t have to worry about models. The people depicted in his Night Watch are all people who paid him to be in the painting. Those who paid more got a better position in the painting. By the way, Vincent van Gogh painted 22 portraits of himself. This does not mean that he had a big ego; rather, he was always so broke that he could not afford to hire models to sit for him.
• Landscape artist Joseph Turner (1775-1851) painted his Peace: Burial at Sea of the Body of Sir David Wilkie, using some very dark colors for the sails. Clarkson Stanfield objected to the “funereal and unnatural blackness of the sails,” but Mr. Turner replied, “I only wish I had any color to make them blacker.”
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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: "I Want Out"
3-Track EP: FROM GALAXIES BEYOND
Artist: Lookit, Martians!
Artist Location: Mannheim, Germany
Info:
“Lookit, Martians! is a four-piece pop punk band hailing from Olympus Mons [Mountain] on planet Mars, but currently residing in Mannheim, Germany, Earth.
“Founded by members of pop-punk veterans The Barbecuties in response to the very unpunk pandemic and the resulting boredom on the planet, Lookit, Martians! made first contact with earthlings in 2020. While encountering incredible tristesse and social-distancing, these four extraterrestrials decided to stay and spread some groovy interstellar vibes next to secretly taking-over world dominance.
“Stylistically, Lookit, Martians! is heavily influenced by old school pop punk (Nah! Not that modern cute boy suck-up stuff!) in the vein of bands like The Ramones, Green Day, Teen Idols or Teenage Bottlerocket. So if you’re into sugar-sweet girl meets boy vocals and hip-shaking harmonies, these Martians and Martianettes might exactly be your thing!”
Lookit, Martians! is:
Fee - Vocals, Guitar
Sid - Vocals, Bass
Coli - Guitar, Vocals
Sven - Drums
Music and lyrics by Lookit, Martians!
Price: €1 (EURO) for 3-track EP
Genre: Pop Punk.
Links:
FROM GALAXIES BEYOND
Lookit, Martians!
Lookit, Martians! on YouTube
Lookit, Martians! Official Website
Other Links:
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Dogs
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
Marine layer rolled in.
Plays Mozart In Portugal
Yo-Yo Ma
Celebrated U.S. cellist Yo-Yo Ma joined refugees from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in the Portuguese capital Lisbon on Tuesday for a performance of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Ma joined young Afghan and Portuguese musicians on a small stage at the National Conservatory, where the refugees who arrived last December are studying.
“They risked their lives for something they believed in and you, in Lisbon, opened your hearts and risked ... all kinds of things in order to do what is human,” he said.
Portugal granted asylum to a 273-person group, including some 150 students, from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music as they fled Afghanistan in the wake of a Taliban takeover last August. Ma had a hand in helping them get out of Afghanistan.
Yo-Yo Ma
Hula Teacher To Appear On Quarter
Edith Kanaka’ole
The late Native Hawaiian hula teacher Edith Kanaka’ole is among five women who will be individually featured on a U.S. quarter next year as part of a program that depicts notable women on the flip side of the coin.
The U.S. Mint said Wednesday the other side of each quarter will show George Washington.
It described Kanaka’ole, who died in 1978, as a composer, chanter, dancer, teacher and entertainer.
The U.S. Mint said the other four women to appear on the coin next year were: Bessie Coleman, the first African American and first Native American woman pilot; Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady and author; Jovita Idár, the Mexican American journalist and activist; and Maria Tallchief, who was America’s first prima ballerina.
Edith Kanaka’ole
Villain In Blue Beetle
Sharon Stone
Back in December, Warner Bros. announced that its Blue Beetle movie—based on one of the DC Comics heroes of the same name, specifically the younger, more recent one—was shifting its release strategy from HBO Max to theaters, a fun reversal of every movie the studio put out in 2021. With that level up, the movie has also apparently earned the ability to attract big-name actors, no offense to Xolo Maridueña (who is starring as the eponymous Blue Beetle), with Deadline reporting that Sharon Stone has joined the cast as the film’s villain.
But it’s that apparent villain’s name that is the most interesting part of this, provided you know your Blue Beetle lore: Deadline says she’ll be a woman named Victoria Kord… as in Ted Kord, as in the old Blue Beetle. This character is apparently being created for this film and doesn’t have a history in the comics, but Deadline thinks she’s the wife of Ted Kord. If she’s a villain, then, what does that mean for Ted Kord? Is he a villain? Did he die and his wife turned into a bad guy?
The fact that the Kord family is involved at all is somewhat surprising, since you don’t really need Ted Kord’s Blue Beetle to tell a story about the new Blue Beetle, whose secret identity is a teenage named Jaime Reyes. Unlike the old Beetle, who was basically Batman but without the dour disposition and with a different theme (beetles instead of bats, you see), the newer Blue Beetle gets his powers from an alien artifact that looks like a beetle and latches onto his back, allowing him to activate a somewhat beetle-like suit of armor with various transforming weapons attached.
Blue Beetle, directed by Angle Manuel Soto, will be in theaters (not HBO Max!) on August 18, 2023. (Also, yes, Sharon Stone was in the Catwoman movie, which was technically based on a DC comic. We couldn’t find a place to naturally bring that up.)
Sharon Stone
Thanks God
Lara Logan
Lara Logan — the former 60 Minutes star reporter, turned Fox Nation host, turned far-right screedster — has spoken out in the most explicit terms yet about her break up with Rupert Murdoch (R-Evil Incarnate)’s company in the wake of her comments comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to a genocidal Nazi psysician.
“I was dumped by Fox,” Logan said in a Monday video interview on a right-wing streaming show, “That’s what happened to me.”
In earlier interviews, Logan had voiced some optimism of a return to Fox’s good graces, hoping for a possible return to Fox Nation. “I don’t know at this point how that’s going to turn out,” she said in January, adding of the controversy she’d stirred, “They might not care!”
But in an appearance Monday on the “The Stand Up America US Show” [sic], Logan described her separation from Fox as a definitive breakup, describing the network’s apparent decision to “dump” her as a gift from the heavens. “God has intervened in my life in very significant ways to spare me from being tainted,” Logan said. “I was taken off the air at Fox just before they went into a whole marathon of war porn in Ukraine.”
While most Americans have sympathized with the victims of Putin’s deadly blitz, Logan has consistently echoed Russian talking points, decrying (as Putin has propagandized) a plague of “Nazis” in Ukraine, while also touting the Russian dictator as a geopolitical hero — “the man standing between us and this New World Order.”
Lara Logan
Smear Tactics Against TikTok
Facebook
Eleven years ago, Facebook was caught red-handed after it hired a prominent public relations firm to try to plant stories harshly criticizing Google’s privacy practices in leading news outlets.
In 2018, it hired the PR firm Definers to do opposition research on the company’s critics, including billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The company’s longtime head of communications, Elliot Schrage, took the blame for approving the hiring of Definers and similar firms and left Facebook.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is using similar tactics to go after another rival TikTok. Meta, the Post reported, hired a Republican consulting firm called Targeted Victory to “orchestrate a nationwide campaign” against TikTok.
Targeted Victory, according to the Post, contracted with dozens of public relations firms across the U.S. to help “sway public opinion against TikTok” by planting local news stories and helping place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, the story says.
The Post obtained internal emails from Targeted Victory that outlined a campaign to undermine TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The firm used a mix of “genuine concerns and unfounded anxieties” about TikTok in order to try to turn public and political sentiment against it.
Facebook
Crossed Picket Line
Chateau Marmont
Protestors picketing Jay-Z’s Gold Party on Sunday evening, March 27, warmed up by having a party of their own. They erected a step-and-repeat at the end of the Chateau Marmont’s driveway, projected a logo reading “Boycott” in massive blade lettering across the hotel’s exterior, strung lights along Marmont Lane, donned glow sticks, led raucous chants and played disco hits from a DJ rig.
They’d shown up after the billionaire musician had declined to move his event from the grounds of the legendary Sunset Strip property, which has been embroiled in controversy since 2020, when Chateau Marmont owner André Balazs laid off nearly all of his employees at the onset of the pandemic without providing severance packages or extended health insurance. Months later, more than 30 staffers told The Hollywood Reporter about long-simmering workplace issues, including allegations of systemic racial discrimination and sexual misconduct. The UNITE HERE Local 11 hospitality union has led a boycott of the hotel since 2021 and made public appeals for Jay-Z to respect the boycott after the Gold Party’s location was revealed.
But by the 11 p.m. start time, activity was clustering along Sunset Boulevard, where the Gold Party’s main entrance funneled guests inside a lounge space formerly known as Bar Marmont. Private security personnel and nearly two-dozen LAPD officers cordoned protestors behind barricades to a corner of sidewalk abutting Selma Avenue. There, they aimed to catch the attention of the fleet of black Cadillac Escalades and GMC Yukon Denalis slowly pulling up, then idling, in the lengthy valet line.
The party went on despite the protest. Janelle Monáe and Saweetie soon arrived. They were joined by, among others, Emily Ratajkowski, Daniel Kaluuya, Kim Kardashian, Timothée Chalamet, Rosario Dawson, Michael B. Jordan, Mindy Kaling, Tiffany Haddish, Tyler Perry, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Zoe Kravitz. Questlove was inside spinning “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” as his best documentary Oscar — which he’d won earlier in the night for Summer of Soul — stood sentinel at his DJ rig, as seen on his Instagram account.
Chateau Marmont
Seems to Be Leaking
Primordial Helium
Ancient, primordial helium that was forged in the wake of the Big Bang is leaking from Earth's core, scientists report in a new study.
There's no cause for alarm. Earth isn't deflating like a sad balloon. What it does mean is that Earth formed inside a solar nebula – the molecular cloud that gave birth to the Sun, a detail about our planet's birth that has long been unresolved.
Helium on Earth comes in two stable isotopes. By far the most common is helium-4, with a nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons. Helium-4 accounts for arund 99.99986 percent of all the helium on our planet.
The other stable isotope, accounting for just about 0.000137 percent of Earth's helium, is helium-3, with two protons and one neutron.
It's the Helium-3 isotope that has been detected leaking out of Earth's interior, mostly along the mid-ocean volcanic ridge system, giving us a pretty good indication of the rate at which it escapes the crust.
Primordial Helium
Stranded In Hawai'i
Ukrainians
A Ukrainian family who came to Hawaii for a long-awaited vacation ended up watching from the islands in shock as bombs started dropping on their country. Now, more than a month later, they remain stranded on Oahu without access to their house, money, family or friends.
They’ve found support through the local canoe paddling community, which set them up with a place to stay and raised money online to help get them settled. They do not know if they will ever be able return to their home.
Vasyl and Marina Prishchak and their three daughters, ages 5, 10 and 16, arrived in Hawaii in the middle of February and had an idyllic, three-week beach vacation planned before Russia invaded Ukraine.
“This vacation changed our life,” said Vasyl Prishchak, who along with his wife owns a cosmetics company with stores in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. ”We don’t know how we return to Ukraine and what we will do, we will begin from zero, from scratch.”
Ukrainians
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