Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Garrison Keillor: Life is so interesting, it's hard to stop
But three years ago, a choice was made. The electorate turned away the favorite, a woman who read scientific studies, finding her unlikable. She had serious Methodist virtues but it wasn't what the middle of the country wanted that year. I saw her clearly once, working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She was encountering the crowd and making it look personal, with the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited three hours to see you so treat them right and make them feel special and forget that your back hurts and you need a toilet. She didn't do bombast, didn't do playground insults, and she paid a price for it.
Paul Waldman: Why aren't Trump and Republicans pilloried for failing to 'reach out'? (Washington Post)
… When was the last time you heard some chin-scratching pundit say that President Trump will never be able to reach liberals if he doesn't go on MSNBC?
The fact that you've never heard anyone say that isn't just because of how we think about the media choices politicians make. It's because of something even more fundamental. Nobody asks whether going on MSNBC is the best way for Trump to talk to liberals because nobody even suggests that Trump should talk to liberals in the first place.
Nicholas Kristof: She May Have Saved a Life. Then She Was Arrested. (NY Times)
I thanked Todd for her humanity, and for helping save a life. She said her assistance had been instinctive. "I'm simply a mom who saw a child in need and pulled over to try to help," she said. "The whole time I was by the side of the road, I was thinking: What country am I in? This is not the United States."
Isaac Butler: Game of Thrones Was an Epic Tale of Incremental Change (Slate)
Eight years, a billion dollars, and several dragons to go from one kind of monarchy to another.
Steve Rose: "Aladdin review - live-action remake really takes flight" (The Guardian)
Guy Ritchie's adaptation is lively, colourful and genuinely funny - making only judicious tweaks to the original, it's thankfully not a whole new world.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury: What will music be like in 20 years? (BBC)
Can't get enough technical death metal? Good news for fans of this high-precision, high-velocity musical subgenre: the indefatigable Dadabots have been thrashing it out live on YouTube 24 hours a day, seven days a week since March - without ever repeating themselves. Quite the feat. Or it would be if Dadabots was a human band; but as you've probably already guessed, it's actually a neural network generating 'new' music on the fly.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson once played a practical joke on singer Ella Fitzgerald. She owned a fur coat that her manager, Norman Grantz, had given her that she was very proud of. In the days before ballpoint pens, Mr. Peterson bought a trick ink bottle that came with a fake inkblot. He then visited Ms. Fitzgerald in her dressing room and made sure that she saw him writing with his pen. She warned him to be careful with the pen and ink because her fur coat was in the dressing room, and he said that she had nothing to be worried about. But when she left, he put the fake inkblot on her fur coat and upended the trick ink bottle. He was pretending to cry when Ms. Fitzgerald returned to her dressing room. She was a kind person; instead of displaying attitude, she comforted him. Mr. Peterson said, "She was more concerned about me than the coat." He called her "such a sweet person." Of course, people respected her singing. After she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, in 1956, a spectator commented, "Ella Fitzgerald could sing the Van Nuys [California] telephone directory with a broken jaw and make it sound good - and that's a particularly dull telephone directory." Occasionally, however, a member of an audience would start acting up while Ms. Fitzgerald was singing - and she would add new lyrics to the song and give that audience member a warning. And if a technical problem occurred on stage, she would sing about it and let the technicians know what the problem was. How good was Ella? She won 13 Grammies (and a 14th for lifetime achievement), and for 18 years in a row Down Beat magazine named her "Top Female Vocal Jazz Singer."
• Rapper Kanye Omari West's mother, Donda, looked through books of African names to find the perfect name for him. Omariz is Swahili and means "wise one." Kanyeis Ethiopian and means "the only one." Of course, "K.O." is a boxing term and means knockout. Donda said, "I knew he would be our only child, set apart, and special." Kanye showed originality as a child, painting objects the colors he wanted to paint them. For example, he painted bananas purple. His mother let him paint the way he pleased. She said, "Kanye always had a distinct perspective. He always had his own spin on things." She did punish him when he needed to be punished. When Kanye was a teenager, she caught him watching an X-rated video. She made him research the effect that watching such videos has on teenagers, and she made him a write a paper on his research. Kanye is known for his self-confidence, of course, and his self-confidence kept him from getting a record contract early in his career. Columbia Records executive Michael Mauldin was interested in signing Kanye to a record contract, but Kanye bragged during the meeting with him that he was more talented than rapper Jermaine Dupri. Kanye did not know that Jermaine Dupri was Mr. Mauldin's son; Mr. Mauldin decided not to sign Kanye to a record contract. Kanye has the ability to grow as a person. Early in his career, he discriminated against gays, but when he learned that one of his cousins was gay, he changed his attitude. Kanye said, "It was kind of a turning point when I was like, 'Yo, this is my cousin. I love him and I've been discriminating against gays.'"
• Almost everyone is familiar with This is Spinal Tap, a 1984 mockumentary directed by Rob Reiner, but not everyone knows that sometimes a version of something that occurs in the movie happened in real life to real bands. For example, the fictional band Spinal Tap had an on-stage disaster with a prop that was designed to look like Stonehenge. The prop was supposed to be 18 feet high, but due to a mishap was actually only 18 inches high. In real life, the real band Black Sabbath had trouble with a Stonehenge prop. Black Sabbath ordered a 15-foot-high model of Stonehenge, but the company that built it made it 15 meters high. Band member Michael "Geezer" Butler said, "It was 45 feet high and it wouldn't fit on any stage anywhere, so we just had to leave it in the storage area. It cost a fortune to make, but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into." By the way, in American slang "Geezer" means old man, but Mr. Butler is British, and when he was growing up, in British slang "geezer" meant a good man or a cool dude.
• Taylor Swift learned how to play a 12-string guitar in part because of a bad deed and a good deed - and because of her own desire and determination. Here she explains the bad deed: "I actually learned [to play guitar] on a 12-string because some guy told me that I would never be able to play it, that my fingers were too small. Anytime somebody tells me that I can't do something, I want to do it more." A good deed helped her learn how to play. She explains that a computer repairman at her house helped her get started: "In this magical twist of fate, the guy who my parents had hired to come fix my computer [taught me]. I'm doing my homework and he looks round and sees the guitar in the corner and he looks [at me] and says, 'Do you know how to play guitar?' I was like, 'Ah, no.' He said, 'Do you want me to teach you a few chords?' After that, I was relentless. I wanted to play all the time."
• In 1958, Esquire magazine commissioned Art Kane to take a group photograph of many jazz musicians. He took it at 10 a.m. on the front steps of a house in Harlem. Jazz musicians almost always work at night, and some of the jazz musicians who were in the photograph stated that they had not realized that a single day contained two 10 o'clocks.
• "I take music pretty seriously. This scar on my wrist, do you know what's from? I heard the Bee Gees were getting back together again." - Denis Leary.
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Predator's public temper tantrum
Comment on Wonkette re Predator's "press conferemce" AKA temper tantrum today:
ok, so wait, he stormed out of meeting in the White House and just happened to storm into the Rose Garden? I guess that part is plausible, given his dementia-linked propensity to wander off. But then there just happened to be a podium complete with sound-checked mics standing in the Rose Garden and assembled press to boot? And that podium just happened to have been randomly hung with a sign detailing his reasons for storming out of said meeting that just ended early due to the aforementioned storming out? And atop the pre-positioned podium just happened to be some kind of pre-printed handbills also laying out said meeting related grievances?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Rainy afternoon.
Scores First Ratings Win Over 'Tonight Show'
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert has brought the TV ratings crown back to CBS after more than two decades. "The Late Show" host scored the first season-long win among adults 18-49 in 24 years, just barely edging Jimmy Fallon's "Tonight Show" on NBC.
In terms of total viewers, Colbert separated himself by Fallon by a pretty wide margin, claiming his third-straight victory there. Below are the Nielsen averages through May 19, 2019.
All three of broadcast's main late-night shows saw their ratings decline double digits from the previous season. Fallon's drop was the harshest at 22%, while Jimmy Kimmel fell by 18%. Colbert's key-demo average slipped just 12% year over year.
The last time "The Late Show" won the traditional Nielsen season in the key demo was the 1994-1995 season, which was early into David Letterman's run.
On the positive side for NBC, Seth Meyers is still beating CBS' James Corden (and ABC's "Nightline") later into the evening.
Stephen Colbert
New $20 Bill Won't Happen
Harriet Tubman
Don't bet on seeing a Harriet Tubman $20 bill anytime soon. The redesigned bill bearing Tubman's face, which was supposed to debut next year, will not be coming out for nearly a decade, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (R-Sock Puppet) said.
Planning started years ago to have Tubman replace former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Tubman, who was born into slavery and became a noted abolitionist and political activist, would be the first black woman to have her face on U.S. currency. The new bill was scheduled to be released in 2020 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
But Mnuchin said Wednesday that it won't be happening under the Trump administration.
"It's not a decision that is likely to come until way past my term, even if I serve the second term for the president," Mnuchin told the House Financial Services Committee. "So I'm not focused on that for the moment."
Mnuchin said a redesign of the bill's security features will still come out in 2020. But the issue of changing how the bill looks "most likely" won't come up again until 2026, he said, and the new $20 bill won't be printed until 2028.
Harriet Tubman
'So Long, Marianne' Love Letters
Leonard Cohen
A collection of love letters written by Canadian musician Leonard Cohen to the woman who inspired his song, "So Long, Marianne" is going up for auction next month, two years after both of them died.
The archive of 50 letters from Cohen to Marianne Ihlen chronicles their 1960s love affair and the blossoming of Cohen's career from struggling poet to famous singer-songwriter, Christie's New York auction house said on Wednesday.
The letters are being sold by Ihlen's family.
Cohen and Norwegian-born Ihlen met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 and she became the inspiration for several of his best-known songs, including "Bird on a Wire," "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," and the 1967 track, "So Long, Marianne."
The letters will be sold as individual lots, at $300-$12,000 each. The auction will take place online from June 5-13.
Leonard Cohen
DA Calls for New Trial
Meek Mill
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner waded into rapper Meek Mill's legal quagmire on Wednesday, filing an appeal with the Pennsylvania Superior Court that asked for a new trial with a new judge.
Previously, Krasner said he supported a new trial for the rapper, whose legal name is Robert Mihmeek Williams, but had not pursued any legal action to that effect.
That all changed Wednesday with the appeal, which outlines why Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Genece Brinkley should recuse herself from the case.
In the document, Krasner highlights the "public perception of unfairness and bias" throughout Williams' highly public trial, and instances where Brinkley overstepped her duties as a judge. This included checking up on Williams while he was performing community service at a homeless shelter.
For a complete timeline of the decade-plus court drama in and out of the courtroom involving Mill and Brinkley, click here.
Meek Mill
Sues U.S. Air Force
SpaceX
Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX accused the U.S. Air Force of breaking contracting rules when it awarded money to three rocket makers but passed on Musk's rival bid, and said the tender should be reopened, according to a court filing unsealed on Wednesday.
In the complaint, Space Exploration Technologies Corp said contracts were awarded for three "unbuilt, unflown" rocket systems that would not be ready to fly under the government's timeline, "defeating the very objectives" outlined by the Air Force's program.
SpaceX asked the court to force the Air Force to reopen the $2.3 billion Launch Service Agreements competition and reconsider the Hawthorne, California-based company's proposal.
The agreement is part of a Department of Defense initiative to assure constant military access to space and curb reliance on Russian-made RD-180 engines.
In the watershed race for dominance in the space industry, new entrants including SpaceX and billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, compete for lucrative contracts for military launch services. The arena has been long dominated by incumbents like Boeing Co-Lockheed Martin Corp's United Launch Alliance (ULA).
SpaceX
Authoritarian & Paranoid
Ice-T
Ice-T says he came close to shooting an Amazon delivery driver after mistaking him for an intruder.
Following the incident, the rapper, 61, suggested on Twitter that the tech company should make their employees wear uniforms to help identify them.
"Message to Amazon: Now that you have regular people making your home deliveries… Maybe they should wear a Vest with AMAZON DELIVERY on it… I almost shot a MF creeping up to my crib last night… Just saying," the Law & Order star wrote.
"Was he not wearing a delivery man uniform?" one fan wrote in response.
"No. They don't wear ANY uniform. Just regular people workin… I ain't mad at them. Just saying. That s- ain't safe," Ice-T wrote back.
Ice-T
Last American Slave Ship Discovered
Clotilda
The schooner Clotilda-the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to America's shores-has been discovered in a remote arm of Alabama's Mobile River following an intensive yearlong search by marine archaeologists.
"Descendants of the Clotilda survivors have dreamed of this discovery for generations," says Lisa Demetropoulos Jones, executive director of the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC) and the State Historic Preservation Officer. "We're thrilled to announce that their dream has finally come true."
The captives who arrived aboard Clotilda were the last of an estimated 389,000 Africans delivered into bondage in mainland America from the early 1600s to 1860. Thousands of vessels were involved in the transatlantic trade, but very few slave wrecks have ever been found.
Rare firsthand accounts left by the slaveholders as well as their victims offer a one-of-a-kind window into the Atlantic slave trade, says Sylviane Diouf, a noted historian of the African diaspora.
"It's the best documented story of a slave voyage in the Western Hemisphere," says Diouf, whose 2007 book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama, chronicles the Clotilda's saga. "The captives were sketched, interviewed, even filmed," she says, referring to some who lived into the 20th century. "The person who organized the trip talked about it. The captain of the ship wrote about it. So we have the story from several perspectives. I haven't seen anything of that sort anywhere else."
Clotilda
Early Fungus?
Billion-Year-Old Fossils
When did the first complex multicellular life arise? Most people, being a bit self-centered, would point to the Ediacaran and Cambrian, when the first animal life appeared and then diversified. Yet studies of DNA suggest that fungi may have originated far earlier than animals.
When it comes to a fossil record, however, things are rather sparse. No unambiguous evidence of a fungus appears in fossils until after the Cambrian was over. A few things from earlier may have looked fungus-like, but the evidence was limited to their appearance. It could be that fungi branched off at the time suggested by the DNA but didn't evolve complex, multicellular structures until later. Alternatively, the fossils could be right, and there's something off about the DNA data. Or, finally, it could be that we simply haven't found old enough fossils yet.
A new paper out in today's Nature argues strongly for the last option. In it, a small team of researchers describe fossils of what appear to be fungi that could be up to a billion years old. And the researchers back up the appearance with a chemical analysis.
The fossils come from an area on Canada's northern, Arctic coast. The fossils themselves were discovered by dissolving the minerals that contained them with acid. With the rocks gone, a large collection of small fossils floated free.
Visually, these microfossils look like a partially deflated balloon with a stalk at its base. Those stalks are connected to a long tube that can link up multiple balloon-like structures. This looks a lot like some modern fungi, where the balloon-like structure is a source of spores while the tubes are how the organism grows and spreads within a surface. One critical feature that's shared with fungi is the fact that the stalk that attaches the sphere to the rest of the organism branches off at a right angle. The structure provided the new genus' name, Ourasphaira, for tail and sphere; the full species name is Ourasphaira giraldae.
Billion-Year-Old Fossils
Totally Unexpected
Shark Vomit Study
Sharks are pretty eclectic eaters. They'll go for prey ranging from fish and invertebrates to sea mammals and turtles. A shark may even have a chomp on the odd surfer. If they can catch it, or scavenge it, and it's made of meat, sharks will generally eat it.
A new study identifying the contents of the bellies of baby tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) using DNA analysis has found a dietary component no one expected, though: land-based songbirds.
Yes, like the ones you see in your backyard, such as doves, sparrows and meadowlarks.
"None of them were seagulls, pelicans, cormorants, or any kind of marine bird," said marine fisheries ecologist Marcus Drymon of Mississippi State University. "They were all terrestrial birds."
Not. One. Marine. Bird.
Shark Vomit Study
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