Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Garrison Keillor: Just looking out a window, thinking
That was the week when Uncle Joe referred to Individual #1 as a clown. It was at a campaign stop in South Carolina and it was just a little fundraiser, not a big show in an arena with thousands in their blue MAIA caps (Make America Intelligent Again), and Uncle Joe was careful to say he didn't intend to get into a mud wrestling match, but nonetheless there it was - Clown - and it opened up a window. So let's look through that window.
Paul Waldman: "We're finally inching toward a smarter understanding of 'electability'" (Washington Post)
The point isn't that boosting African American turnout offers the only path to success, but that it's one of many factors to consider, instead of talking as though the only voter who matters to an electability discussion is a 60-year-old white guy sitting in a diner in Sheboygan. The other big question in this debate is gender.
Steve Rose: "Toy story: why Hollywood can't stop kidulting" (The Guardian)
From Detective Pikachu to Sonic the Hedgehog, when did audiences OK the big brand movie?
Steve Rose: Pokémon Detective Pikachu review - Ryan Reynolds grabs film by scruff of the neck (The Guardian)
The inspired casting of the Deadpool actor transforms this from an average Pokémon movie into fun family fare.
Interview by Phil Hoad: "Kevin Smith: how we made Clerks" (The Guardian)
'We shot it after hours in the store where I worked, filming from 11pm to 6am with the shutters closed. Everyone assumed we were making a porno.'
Hadley Freeman: "'She was our Michelle Obama': how Gilda Radner changed comedy for ever" (The Guardian)
The death of the SNL star 30 years ago robbed the industry of one its finest voices - but not before she had blazed a trail for women such as Tina Fey to follow.
Zoe Williams: We're a nation of scrollers, not readers - but it's tech billionaires' fault (The Guardian)
Stop feeling guilty about not reading books! Netflix and Twitter really are to blame, so stick it to the man by chomping a chapter a day.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
wrote:
took the day off.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
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Brand Colours
David
Thanks, Dave!
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Entertainers in show business can be big, and then, later, they can be not so big. Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were big: They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show44 times. In the 1990s, Penn Jillette and Teller of Penn and Teller fame were headlining at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Being headliners, they were in the big room - the room with the theater where the audience plays attention to the performers. Penn and Teller would open the next night, and this night Penn got a call from Mr. Rossi inviting him and Teller to see Allen and Rossi perform their act in a lounge. Lounges are places in the open. They don't have walls, and unless the entertainers are in a band that makes a lot of sound, it can be difficult to get people to pay attention to you. In addition, the noise that can be heard coming from the casino can be a big distraction. Allen and Rossi were funny; they were committed to putting on a good show; they were great. But this was not the high point of their careers, and few people were present to pay attention to them, although Penn and Teller and a few others were enjoying the act. In a break between bits, Teller, who had been intently watching and laughing at the comedy, looked around the room and noticed the few people who were present and the noise that was coming from the casino. Penn leaned over to him and said, quietly, "You know, this is us in a very few years." Teller looked around again, smiled, and replied, "I am so OK with that." Penn, happy with the reply, cried a little.
• Singer/songwriter Jack White used to make a living as an upholsterer. As you may expect, he was an unusual upholsterer. Everything in his business - clothing, tools, even his van - had to be yellow or white or black. Why? He explains that it was "an aesthetic presentation." When he made out his bills, he says that he used crayon. When he restored furniture, he hid in the upholstery poems for the next upholsterer who would restore the furniture. Mr. White says, "I thought, we're the only ones to see inside this furniture, we should be talking to each other, like the Egyptian masons might leave a message on the stone they were putting in the pyramid." He even formed a band with another upholsterer. The band, obviously, was called the Upholsterers. They recorded a single, made 100 copies, and hid them inside the furniture they restored. Mr. White says, "Not one's been found yet. They were on clear vinyl with transparency covers, so even if you x-rayed the furniture you wouldn't be able to find them. I know where a couple of them might be, but it's very funny in that sense."
• M.F.K. Fisher began writing because a man was reading an old book about Elizabethan recipes in a public library. When he left the book on a table, she looked at it because she liked its smell and began reading it. She said, "Later I wrote about those recipes simply to amuse my husband and our friends, just as to this day I write books for myself." She did write well. She wrote that "a well-made dry Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature." Her feminism sometimes shows in her writing. She and her first husband "sweated out the Depression" by doing such things as cleaning other people's houses. She remembers, "It annoyed the hell out of me because he got 50 cents an hour and I only got 35 cents because I was a woman." Selling her first piece of writing was a joy. She got $10 for the essay and $15 for an illustration that she created to go with the essay. She remembers, "I thought - am I a writer or am I going to be a sort of mediocre illustrator for the rest of my life?"
• Like many writers, Carl Sandburg had a great wealth of experience from his childhood and his many jobs to draw upon for inspiration. As a young boy, he was arrested for skinny-dipping in a neighborhood pond. His parents thought that the arrest was silly; they had seen Carl naked when he was born, and they saw him naked whenever he took a bath in a laundry tub. Young Carl once got a summer job washing bottles from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. in a bottling works. (This was before modern child-labor laws.) He was allowed to drink as much soda pop as he wanted, and he drank so much that he got diarrhea and lost his job. For a while, he rode the rails as a hobo. One night he and four other hoboes tried to sleep in an empty boxcar, but it was so cold that they gave up and walked to a jail where a kind sheriff let them sleep on the floor of a cell. When Carl attended college, he had a job as a firefighter. His professors knew that whenever the town's fire whistle blew, Carl had to leave class and fight a fire.
• Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis became a musician not because of a love of music, but because he watched musicians and he noticed that they drank, they smoked, they got women, and they slept late. He watched to see which musicians were most noticed, and he noticed that the drummers and the tenor saxophonists were widely noticed. To him, playing the drums looked like it took more work and so he learned to play the tenor saxophone. When he told this story, he always said, "That's the truth." He probably made a good decision not to play the drums. Lester Young played drums, but he switched to the saxophone because he would want to spend time with a woman, but while he was busy putting away his drums after a gig her mother would call her and she would leave and go home. Putting away a saxophone was a whole lot quicker.
• "When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'" - Don Marquise
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Selected Readings
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still cloudy and cool.
Siamese Cat Song Scrapped From Remake
Lady and the Tramp
Disney will scrap the twin Siamese cat characters from its forthcoming remake of Lady and the Tramp, and has commissioned Janelle Monae to produce two brand new songs for the film.
According to Variety, Monae was asked to reinvent the "Siamese Cat Song", which is notorious for its racist depiction of the Siamese cats.
In a 2013 analysis of the song on culture blog Flavorwire, one author found the depiction of Si and Am to be a result of a post Second World War anxiety that America had about the foreign "other".
"They have no individuality; their innocent blue eyes bend into a sinister glare as they cave at the slant," author Marcus Hunter wrote. "They are jaundiced and sly; sick and feral; domesticated, though nevertheless propelled by their mischievous, impish nature to deceive and intimidate."
In the original 1955 film, the song was performed by Peggy Lee in the voices of cats Si and Am, who are responsible for tricking their owner Aunt Sarah into thinking Lady is dangerous.
Lady and the Tramp
First Hosting Gig Since
Billy Bush
It's been two-and-a-half years since a leaked tape (filmed in 2005) nearly derailed his career, but now Billy Bush is back on television with a new hosting gig - and opening up about how he's changed.
"We all have to be able to evolve as we grow," Bush, 47, tells PEOPLE. "The guy that left the scene in 2016 was already a changed person [since 2005], but I had the opportunity to grow up a little bit. Facing adversity in some way is good. And I feel I'll be better at my job than I ever was. This is my next step."
This fall, the veteran TV personality will host Extra Extra, a new iteration of the current syndicated entertainment show, featuring a modernized set and in-depth look at topics including pop culture, sports and politics. (The current version of Extra, hosted by Mario Lopez, will continue its run through the season.)
In 2016, he was in his first year as co-host on the Today show when the tape, which featured Bush laughing as a then-Apprentice star Donald Trump (R-Deplorable) bragged about groping women, surfaced. Bush was promptly fired, left unsure about what to do next.
Subsequently, Bush used the forced hiatus as a chance to self-reflect.
Billy Bush
Argentina
100 "Evitas"
One hundred people have dressed up as Evita Perón and paraded in the streets of Argentina's capital a day before the 100th anniversary of the birth of the charismatic first lady.
Eva María Duarte was born on May 7, 1919, and died in 1952 from cancer at age 33. She was an actress who married Juan Perón, an army general who served as Argentine president for two different spans.
Best known as "Evita," she was idolized as a "champion of the poor" and helped women obtain the right to vote.
The performers marched through the streets of Buenos Aires on Monday to a building decorated with a large cast-iron portrait of Evita. Some wore her trademark top-knot hairstyle, while others donned ballroom dresses in homage to the combative first lady.
100 "Evitas"
Told To Register As Russian Agent
Radio Station
The owner of a Washington, D.C., area radio station that broadcasts Sputnik International 24/7 has been ordered to register his Florida-based broadcasting company as a Russian federal agent.
WTOP-FM reports Judge Robin Rosenburg ruled Tuesday that RM Broadcasting must register with the U.S. government. RM and a Russian government-owned news agency agreed in 2017 that the station would broadcast the agency's communications continuously without edit until 2021.
Federal agents told RM in 2018 that the station was acting as a "publicity agent" for the Russian agency. It said RM would need to register as a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, originally adopted to fight Nazi propaganda. RM asked the court to rule on the matter, arguing that it only buys and resells airtime.
Radio Station
Denver Decriminalizes
Psilocybin
Denver will become the first city in the United States to decriminalize magic mushrooms, based on final unofficial results on Wednesday of a ballot initiative about the hallucinogenic drug.
The initiative called for Colorado's capital to end the imposition of criminal penalties for individuals at least 21 years of age for using or possessing psilocybin, widely known as magic mushrooms.
The Denver Elections Divisions will certify results on May 16, but the final count on its website on Wednesday was 50.56 percent of voters in favor and 49.44 percent against.
If the initiative is approved, psilocybin would still remain illegal under both Colorado and federal law. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies the drug as a Schedule 1 substance, meaning the agency has deemed that it has a high potential for abuse with no accepted medical application.
Decriminalize Denver, the group behind Tuesday's ballot question, said psilocybin had a wide range of medical benefits. It has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety and to help in treating tobacco, alcohol and opioid addictions, and with alleviating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the organization.
Psilocybin
SMARTER Than Bees
Wasps
It has always been presumed that wasps sting people deliberately and now science has proved that they have quite the brain on them.
While a bee sting may be put down to an accident or as a defence mechanism, people stung by wasps usually say the insects had more of a menacing brain on them.
Tests have now shown that wasps do in fact use a form of reasoning known as transitive inference - a trait once thought to only be seen in humans.
Scientists believe wasps are able to use known relationships to infer unknown relationships - and used a simple colour test to prove the theory.
Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, tested whether two common species of paper wasp, Polistes dominula and Polistes metricus, could solve a transitive inference problem.
Wasps
Used To Study Nuclear Fusion
Mayonnaise
One promising aspect of US nuclear fusion research may depend on a common kitchen condiment.
To recreate the conditions necessary for fusion reactions, physicists sometimes use something called inertial confinement studies. In this case, that means using gas, frozen inside pea-sized metal pellets, which are placed in a centrifugal chamber and bombarded with high-powered lasers that compress the gas and heat it up to a few million Kelvin - a staggering 400 million degrees Fahrenheit.
This all happens in a matter of nanoseconds and, according to Phys.org, tends to have an unwanted side effect - the pellets often explode before reaching fusion conditions. In order to take the concept further, scientists need to better understand the physics at play.
Arindam Banerjee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University, studies the dynamics of materials in extreme environments. He and his team have built several devices to measure forces in inertial confinement studies.
To understand how molten metal and gasses interact, Banerjee and collaborators looked to mimic the metal. They determined that the material properties and dynamics of the metal at a high temperature are much like those of - drum roll, please - mayonnaise at a low temperature.
Mayonnaise
Gold And Platinum
Ancient Cosmic Event
A violent collision between two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago showered the as-yet-unformed Solar System with heavy elements, new research has found.
As much as 0.3 percent of Earth's gold, platinum and uranium (along with other heavy elements) could have been forged in the fire of a merger 1,000 light-years away, when the Solar System was little more than a cloud of gas and dust.
"This means that in each of us we would find an eyelash worth of these elements," said astrophysicist Imre Bartos of the University of Florida, "mostly in the form of iodine, which is essential to life."
The famous neutron star collision detected in 2017 taught us many things - not least of which is that such collisions produce heavy elements. In the electromagnetic data produced by GW 170817, scientists detected, for the first time, the production of heavy elements including gold, platinum and uranium.
This is because a powerful explosion, such as a supernova or stellar merger, can trigger the rapid neutron-capture process, or r-process - a series of nuclear reactions in which atomic nuclei collide with neutrons to synthesise elements heavier than iron.
Ancient Cosmic Event
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