from Bruce
Anecdotes
Fathers
• H. Allen Smith’s father had many, many children. Whenever he wanted to read his newspaper, his numerous small children tearing around the house bothered him. Therefore, he invented a game to keep them quiet. One day he pulled a penny from his pocket, told his children to watch him, then he rubbed the coin on a rug until it shone like new. After that, whenever he wanted some peace and quiet, he would give each of his children a penny and tell them, “Go shine.”
• Aretha Franklin remained unspoiled despite becoming a rhythm and blues superstar with numerous Grammy Awards. She credits her father with ensuring that she did not become spoiled. At home, everyone in her family would be working — vacuuming, washing dishes, etc. — but young Aretha would sometimes stand around, doing nothing. Whenever this happened, her father would tell her, “See if you can find yourself around in that kitchen and introduce yourself to the trash.”
• When Shaquille O’Neal was 13 years old, he stood 6 feet, 6 inches tall and was growing so fast that new clothes became too small for him after only a few weeks. However, his size by itself did not make him a good basketball player. When Shaq was a high-school senior, his father criticized him, saying that he wasn’t playing hard enough. This criticism so motivated Shaq that in the very next game he scored 52 points.
• When Casey Stengel was a young man, he smashed an inside-the-park home run, but his shoelace came untied as he ran around the bases. The loose shoe made him run awkwardly, and he ended up staggering across home base. In the stands sat his fiancée, Edna Lawson, and her father. Proud of the home run, Ms. Lawson asked her father, “What do you think of my hero now, Pa?” Unimpressed with Casey’s base running, her father replied, “I just hope he lives till the wedding.”
• When Wayne Gretzky was two years old, his father, Walter, started training him to be a hockey star. After buying the smallest hockey stick he could find, he cut it down even more so that Wayne could use it. He even built a hockey rink — complete with lights! — in the backyard so that Wayne could practice, even at night. The practice paid off. Mr. Gretzky became perhaps the greatest hockey player ever.
• Comedian Tim Conway’s father pretended that he had very sharp vision. Occasionally while driving, he would say, “Wasn’t that a dime back there?” Then he would stop the car, and he and little Tim would get out, and sure enough, they would find a dime on the street. Not until he was an adult did Tim realize that his father had planted the dime on the street earlier just so he could “see” it later.
• The artist Bela Haas was wealthy, but tight with his money. Once a well-dressed man asked him for some money, saying that he knew that Mr. Haas was rich, but Mr. Haas replied, “My dear sir, I am indeed rich, but I’m not generous and I must tell you that as my money is the only thing I have to remember my late-lamented father by, I can never part with it.”
• While Groucho Marx’s son, Arthur, was in the Navy, Groucho visited him. Arthur helped him with the luggage, and with both his hands filled with luggage, he suddenly saw an admiral, who obviously expected to be saluted. Groucho came to the rescue. He saluted the admiral, then pointed to Arthur and explained, “He pays me to do his saluting for him.”
• The father of Sid Fleischman, author of the McBroom comedy series of children’s books, owned a taxicab. One day, he discovered that if he hit a pothole, the meter would jump ahead, thus increasing the fare the passenger had to pay. After making this discovery, he learned the location of every pothole in the city.
• Jay Leno’s father didn’t understand the importance of major celebrities maintaining some form of privacy. Whenever he learned that someone was a big fan of Jay, he would give the fan Jay’s private telephone number and say, “Call him up! He’d love to hear from you!”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Big Mamma"
Album: BIG MAMMA
Artist: Los Blue Marinos
Record Company: Roctopus Tea Party Records
Record Company Location: Toledo, Spain
Info: Kahuna Cole, a fan, writes, “Surf's Up, and Big Mamma's serving it up overhead, glassy and hollow! Time to thread your figerblass rocket through the eye of greenroom!”
LOS BLUE MARINOS are:
Sebastián Marino: Fender Jaguar
Nacho: Fender JazzBass
Fletán: Ludwig Downbeat
Price: €1 (EURO) for track; €5 (EURO) for five-track EP
Genre: Surf
Links:
BIG MAMMA
Roctopus Tea Party Records
Los Blue Marinos on YouTube
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce's Blog #1
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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
Lots of leaves on the fig tree, but not much fruit.
Jon Stewart Settles It
Trevor Noah
Texas Senator Rafael "Ted" Cruz (R-Traitor) was not a fan of a Tuesday Daily Show segment and he let host Trevor Noah know it.
The bit was about Congressional reapportionment due to population shifts in the U.S. Those shifts are causing New York to lose a U.S. House seat while Texas picks up two. Noah made no mention of Cruz, but the congressman nevertheless felt the need to respond.
“Trevor Noah whines that people are fleeing high-tax blue states & moving in droves to low-tax states like Texas, where the jobs are,” wrote Cruz. “Doesn’t understand why people like freedom.”
Noah went right for Cruz’s soft parts in his rejoinder saying, “Not sure I’d be using the words ‘fleeing’ and ‘Texas’ in the same sentence, Senator Cancun.”
Unfortunately for the Senator, the world’s top authority on funny Daily Show eras weighed in, supporting Noah. In the comments, former host Jon Stewart replied to Cruz’s “I remember when” with, “Ummm…you remember last night?? Bravo.”
Trevor Noah
Former Contestants
‘Jeopardy!’
A group of 467 alleged former Jeopardy! participants issued an open letter on Medium Wednesday, demanding an apology from the show producers for not catching a “Jeopardy!” winner allegedly flashing a white power hand gesture.
“A recent contestant has caused concern among ‘Jeopardy!’ viewers for two separate occurrences, and we, as former contestants, feel the need to speak out against the messaging that these choices communicated — either intentionally or unintentionally — by the contestant Kelly Donohue and, implicitly by association, the producers of ‘Jeopardy!’” the story said.
On Tuesday, Donohue “held his thumb and forefinger together with his other three fingers extended and palm facing inward, and he tapped his chest.” Donohue claims he was indicating that he’d won three games, and had gestured with one finger and two fingers to indicate previous wins.
However, the third time was not the charm. The Medium story claimed the move was similar to a gesture used by white power groups, alt-right groups, and the anti-government Three Percenters.
“A couple of years ago, a contestant unintentionally wagered a monetary amount that used numerical values coopted by white supremacist groups and, since the total didn’t affect the outcome of the game, ‘Jeopardy!’ digitally altered the numbers in the version that aired,” the Medium letter claimed. “This should have been done in this case. Intentional or not, the burden was on the production team to catch the similarity to a hate symbol and make sure it didn’t end up on air.”
‘Jeopardy!’
Hosting MTV Movie & TV Awards
Leslie Jones
Comedian-actor Leslie Jones will take the stage as host of the MTV Movie & TV Awards next month.
The network announced Wednesday that Jones will host the awards, which will air live on May 16 from Los Angeles. The awards show celebrates the best moments in movies and television over the past year.
The Emmy-nominated Leslie is currently the host and executive producer of ABC’s “Supermarket Sweep” and appeared in “Coming 2 America,” which is streaming on Amazon Prime. She also hosted the BET Awards in 2017.
Previous Movie & TV Awards hosts include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tiffany Haddish, Kevin Hart and Adam DeVine.
Leslie Jones
Drive-Through Wagner
“Twilight: Gods”
Amid signs pointing “To Elevator” and advising drivers to “Take Parking Ticket With You,” the Rhinemaidens lament the theft of their gold, Siegfried is murdered, and Brünnhilde drives off in a red Mustang convertible to redeem the world.
Welcome to opera in an underground parking garage.
A year after Lyric Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s complete “Ring” cycle was scuttled by the pandemic, the company has brought a bit of the epic back to life. But instead of walking into the opera house and taking their seats, spectators drive down into the garage and stay in their cars.
“Twilight: Gods,” as the production is called, is the brainchild of Yuval Sharon, who premiered it last October in Detroit, where he had just been named artistic director of Michigan Opera Theater.
It’s a reimagining of “Götterdämmerung,” the final installment in Wagner’s four-part saga of gold, greed and the downfall of the gods. Using his own English translation, Sharon has distilled the four-hour-plus opera down to six episodes lasting just over an hour all together.
“Twilight: Gods”
Story Fell Apart
Hamburglar
President Joe Biden spent only a weekend as the “Hamburglar” in the conservative media world.
But while the false story lasted, it moved with a damaging speed and breadth, another example of a closed ecosystem of information affecting public opinion.
An academic study published a year before Biden became president was used to speculate that he would place limits on how much red meat Americans can consume as part of his stated goal to sharply reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
It was a potentially potent, visceral argument with punchy cable TV octane, namely that Biden was trying to limit people to eating one hamburger a month — an allegation that could seriously undermine his climate change plan before he even announced it.
There was one main problem: He’s said no such thing.
Hamburglar
Flight Of Fantasy
Mount Rushmore
A stone bust of Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) would already be chiselled into the granite pillars of Mount Rushmore if the former president were a Democrat, according to Donald Trump (F-Feeble).
At the same time, Mr Trump (R-Low Energy) has also said Democrats want to "blow up" the presidential monument.
Mr Trump also told podcast host Dan Bongino that he would be holding a rally "soon", and that he would likely announce his plans for the 2024 presidential election immediately after the 2022 midterms.
Mr Bongino, an avid supporter of Mr Trump, proposed that Hollywood loved the former president before he became a Republican, and that if he had run as a Democrat he would already be on Mount Rushmore.
“I know, I know — yeah, I would have,” Mr Trump replied.
Mount Rushmore
Melting Faster
Glaciers
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.
The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,” said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.
Half the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.
Almost all the world’s glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world.
Glaciers
Reveals True Age
'Plain of Jars'
The mysterious Plain of Jars in northern Laos — a landscape dotted with massive stone jars hewn from sandstone thousands of years ago — was likely used as a burial site for much longer than previously suspected, and perhaps for up to 2,000 years, according to new research.
The massive jars, which were likely used to expose the dead to the elements until only their bones were left to be buried, could be more than 3,000 years old, new tests suggest.
But the research also suggests that most of the human remains buried in the ground beside the ancient jars were interred there between 700 and 1,200 years ago.
"What we surmise from that is the enduring ritual significance of these sites," University of Melbourne archaeologist Louise Shewan told Live Science. "They were important for a very long time."
So far, the archaeological team has carefully studied three of the innumerable megalithic "jar sites" throughout northern Laos. For the new study they focused on the best-known of all of the sites, called Site 1, which is located just west of Phonsavan, and is one of 11 listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. It contains around 400 stone jars scattered across more than 60 acres (24 hectares).
'Plain of Jars'
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