from Bruce
Anecdotes
Practical Jokes
• Knowing that yawns are infectious, a group of Quaker girls once played a joke at meetings while at school. Whenever a person of authority — a teacher, an elder, a minister, an overseer — looked at them, one or more of them would yawn. Then they watched with delight as the yawn passed from one person of authority to another. The girls felt that there was nothing wrong with this game, as they played it only when a meeting went past its normal closing time.
• Thomas Aquinas was a huge man, both physically and mentally. Once a brother monk decided to play a joke on him. The monk looked out a window and said, “Come quickly — look at the cow flying.” Aquinas jumped up and looked out the window — and saw nothing, of course. The monk began to laugh, but Aquinas told him, “I thought it more likely that a cow should fly than that a monk would lie.”
• Some gurus are also rascals. One rascal guru got great amusement from his more gullible students — if any of them asked how he had become so wise, he used to tell them that he was thousands of years old. One especially gullible student believed this and said, “It’s amazing how human you are.” The rascal guru replied, “After a thousand years or so, you go native.”
Prayer
• Rabbi Eliezer understood the proper length of a prayer. A man once prayed for a long time, and some people complained, “What a prayer elaborator this man is!” But Rabbi Eliezer replied, “Has he really prayed longer than Master Moses, of whom Deuteronomy 9:25 reports that he once prayed for 40 days and 40 nights?” Then another person prayed for a very short time. This time, some people complained, “What a prayer abbreviator this man is!” But Rabbi Eliezer replied, “Has he really offered a shorter prayer than our Master Moses, of whom Numbers 12:13 reports that he once offered a prayer of only five words, ‘O God, pray heal her’?”
• Christian author Judy Esway was feeling very discouraged, and she prayed, saying that she wished Jesus would walk into her living room, sit down in the striped chair, and say to her, “Judy, why don’t you come over here and sit on my lap and tell me all your problems?” Just then, her husband walked into the living room, sat down in the striped chair, and said to her, “Judy, why don’t you come over here and sit on my lap and tell me all your problems?” Ms. Esway writes, “Thank you for answering my prayer, God. And thank you for my husband, who follows the prompting of your Holy Spirit.”
• During family prayers, some friends of country comedian Jerry Clower took turns praying. When it was the four-year-old’s turn to pray, he started praying for Mr. Clower’s family. He said, “Dear Lord, God bless Mr. Clower, God bless Ray, God bless Amy, God bless Sue, and God bless ….” Here he couldn’t think of the name of Mr. Clower’s wife, so he started all over again — and still couldn’t remember her name. He tried to say the prayer a third time, but even then he couldn’t remember her name, so he finished the prayer with, “Lord, please bless that woman what lives with Mr. Clower.”
• Just before performing on the balance beam during the individual apparatus competition at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, gymnast Shannon Miller said this prayer: “God, I’m in your hands. I’m going to do the very best I can. I know I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t supposed to be — if I wasn’t capable of doing this.” She did her very best on the balance beam — and she won her second gold medal of the games.
• In Eastern Europe, many Jewish prayers showed a familiarity with God: 1) “Dear God, you help complete strangers — so why not us?” 2) “Lord in Heaven, blessed be Thy Name, we know You love the poor — so why do You help the rich?” 3) “Dear God, all we ask of You is a bit of bread to stave off our hunger and some rags to keep out the cold — the whiskey we’ll buy ourselves.”
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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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: "Hotwired"
Album: THE ROUTES — INSTRUMENTALS
Artist: The Routes
Record Company: Groovie Records
Record Company Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Info:
“That is one of those bands I would love to release myself on VOODOO RHYTHM RECORDS, just to make that clear. I met CHRIS JACK back in Japan when I was touring with my band, THE MONSTERS. The gig in general was amazing and wild. We had naked men and almost naked girls at the show, and a rock’n’roll scene that I dream to have in Switzerland, with lots of girls’ bands.
“I was super impressed, then Chris told me he had a band. He gave me his recordings and I heard that like 20 times a day. It was something like 10 years after I met The Sonics. FUCKING KILLER. Anyway, time went by, and we kept contact all these years. Now THE ROUTES released an album on the fantastic GROOVIE RECORDS, from Portugal. A full INSTRUMENTAL album, a super fox on bass and an animal on drums, with the new Jeff Beck on guitars.
“That is RAW WILD and OUT OF CONTROL guitar instrumentals with sometimes an EXOTIC touch as in “Bossa Hossa Nova,’ in ‘Shove-it’ or in the beautiful ‘Yeti Spaghetti” and SURF instrumentals like ‘Luck Of The Devil’ or the SMASHER ‘Hang Eleven.’
“This album is a super INSTRO KILLER! If you like The Shadows only, it may not be your cup of tea, but if you live in the gutter and drink booze instead of water, this album will be the HOLY GRAIL FOR ALL YOU SURF PUNKS OUT THERE!
“Reverend Beat-Man (Master Of Disaster)”
Groovie Records: “Record label, distributor and music producer, been based in Lisbon since 2005. Since its founding, we have been dedicated to musical research, through compilations and re-releases of rare records, and the production of unpublished records of Portuguese and foreign bands.”
Price: €1 (EURO) for track; €7 (EURO) for 10-track album
Genre: Surf.
Links:
The Routes - Instrumentals
Groovie Records
Groovie Records on YouTube
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
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
Voter Suppression Tactic
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
Laundromat-of-the-darned was extra busy so used the back-up, laundromat-of-the-sad.
Fueled CRT Panic
Rightwing Media
Viral videos of impassioned parents denouncing critical race theory at school board hearings have become a cornerstone of the movement to ban its teaching.
In one such video, a mother declares critical race theory (CRT) to be “a tactic used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slavery very many years ago to dumb down my ancestors so we could not think for ourselves”. In another, a woman calls CRT “the American version of the Chinese cultural revolution”. A third mother says she has proof that her local school board is “teaching our children to go out and murder police officers”.
The videos, and their spread online, are emblematic of the way the campaign to ban CRT has combined genuine grassroots anger, institutional backing, and a highly effective rightwing propaganda machine to propel critical race theory from academic obscurity to center stage in the US political debate.
That movement has gained tremendous ground at great speed. Legislation seeking to limit the teaching of CRT has been introduced in at least 22 states this year, and enacted in six: Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. Statewide resolutions against CRT have also been passed in Florida, Georgia and Utah.
“This was a massive campaign that has borne fruit in very dramatic fashion,” said Emerson Sykes, a first amendment lawyer with the ACLU, which is exploring litigation to combat these bills. “It’s going to take a massive campaign to try to push back against that.”
Rightwing Media
Honored By Library of Congress
Joy Williams
The Library of Congress awarded a lifetime achievement prize to Joy Williams, a fiction writer known for her spare prose and dark and incisive worldview.
Williams is this year’s recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, an honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo among others.
“Her work reveals the strange and unsettling grace just beneath the surface of our lives. In a story, a moment, a single sentence, it can force us to reimagine how we see ourselves, how we understand each other — and how we relate to the natural world,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement Wednesday.
Williams, 77, has written such novels as “State of Grace” and “The Changeling” and story collections such as “The Visiting Privilege.” Her previous awards include the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Joy Williams
Spain Honors Chef
José Andrés
The chef José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen were awarded a prestigious Spanish prize Wednesday for their international relief work promoting healthy food.
The jury that decides the Princess of Asturias Awards awarded the 51-year-old Andrés and the non-profit group he founded the Award of Concord for “offering extraordinarily fast and efficient on-the-ground response to social and nutritional emergencies.”
Born in northern Spain in 1969, Andrés moved to the U.S. in 1991 and was later naturalized as an American citizen. He helped popularize Spanish cuisine, especially the tapa, in the U.S. before he also became heavily involved in humanitarian work.
Andrés founded the World Central Kitchen in 2010 following a trip to Haiti to do aid work. Since then, it has been active in deploying field kitchens to respond to food crises both in the United States and abroad. The organization served over 3.6 million meals in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Last year, Andrés dedicated some of his own restaurants in the U.S. to help feed people in need during the coronavirus pandemic.
A recipient of many honors, Andrés was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2015.
José Andrés
Circulation Revenue Surpasses Advertising
Newspapers
For the first time in 2020, the newspaper industry earned more money from circulation than advertising.
Yet like many of the other benchmarks noted this week by the Pew Research Center in the first of a series of reports on the state of the news media, that’s not necessarily good news.
Circulation revenue, from people buying digital or print subscriptions, reached $11.1 billion in 2020, Pew said. The newspaper industry reported $8.8 billion in ad revenue last year.
Newspaper newsroom employment stood at 74,410 in 2006, the last year that figure grew over the previous year. In 2020, there were 30,820 people in newsrooms.
The median wage for editors last year was $50,010, or $2,104 less than it was in 2012, Pew said.
Newspapers
Secret Recordings
Exxon Lobbyists
Two lobbyists for Exxon have been caught on tape admitting how the company manipulates politicians and the public. Among the damning admissions are that the company views its advocacy for a carbon tax as little more than “an advocacy tool” and that it once funded “shadow groups” to fight climate science.
When it comes to oil and gas majors, getting a peek at the internal workings of a company past its PR-heavy facade is rare. But the new investigation conducted by Unearthed, the investigative arm of Greenpeace UK, provides a revealing peek behind the curtain of secrecy to show how Big Oil operates to game the system.
To set up the sting, representatives from Unearthed posed as recruitment consultants looking to hire a DC lobbyist for a major client. They then had Zoom calls with two senior Exxon staffers: Keith McCoy, Exxon’s senior director of federal relations, and Dan Easley, who formerly worked as an executive branch and regulatory team lead for federal relations. The Unearthed team asked both men about their time at Exxon and the company’s lobbying on environmental issues, while secretly recording both calls, which took place in April and May. Footage of the interviews was released to the UK’s Channel 4, which aired it on Wednesday.
A chief talking point of the two interviews was the recent work Exxon did lobbying against President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan which, in its original form, proposed a slew of groundbreaking climate initiatives. The plan also called for cranking up the corporate tax rate to pay for those initiatives, sending major businesses and corporate lobbying groups into a panic. Exxon, it seems, is no exception.
“We’re playing defense” on the bill, McCoy told the Unearthed interviewers in his May conversation, according to a transcript provided by Greenpeace, before rattling off the lawmakers from both parties he’d been talking to about the bill. He boasted about his relationships with certain lawmakers as well. Among those mentioned are fossil fuel heavy-hitters like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sens. John Cornyn and John Barrasso.
Exxon Lobbyists
Swallows Neutron Star
Black Hole
Talk about a heavy snack. For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a black hole swallowing a neutron star, the most dense object in the universe — all in a split-second gulp.
Ten days later they saw the same thing, on the other side of the universe. In both cases, a neutron star — a teaspoon of which would weigh a billion tons — orbits ever closer to that ultimate point of no return, a black hole, until they finally crash together and the neutron star is gone in a gobble.
Astronomers witnessed the last 500 orbits before the neutron stars were swallowed, a process that took far less than a minute and briefly generated as much energy as all the visible light in the observable universe.
“It was just a big quick (gulp), gone,” said study co-author Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The black hole “gets a nice dinner of a neutron star and makes itself just a little bit more massive.”
While astronomers had seen gravitational waves from two black holes colliding with each other and two neutron stars colliding with each other, this is the first time they saw one of each crashing together.
Black Hole
Who'd Win
Scorpion or Tarantula
Scorpions and tarantulas are two ancient arachnids that have been walking the Earth for hundreds of millions of years - even before the time of the dinosaurs.
And the question of which would win in a fight has been the subject of numerous YouTube videos, online forums and even research papers.
Well, with more than 900 species of tarantulas and 2,500 species of scorpions found worldwide, the winner depends on who's facing off in the ring. The question comes down to three things: size, speed, and venom.
On Team Scorpion, we have tough armor in the form of a hardened exoskeleton made of overlapping layers of chitin, a protein that's similar to the keratin in our nails.
Spiders on Team Tarantula also have the advantage of size. The goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi) in South America, for example, has an impressive body length of 12 centimeters, with legs spanning nearly 30 centimeters (the size of an A4 page).
Scorpion or Tarantula
Inexplicably Found
Allabogdanite
A very rare mineral that's previously been found only in extraterrestrial meteorites has been discovered in Earth's own rocks for the first time, lying in a sedimentary formation not far from the shores of the Dead Sea.
Allabogdanite, a phosphide mineral, was unknown to science until just a couple of decades ago, after fragments of a small iron meteorite were recovered from the Bolshoi Dolguchan River in Eastern Yakutia, Russia.
A sample of the fragments later revealed the presence of a new mineral structure occurring as thin layers of crystals spread throughout the meteorite's plessite mixture. The discoverers named it after Russian geologist Alla Bogdanova.
Subsequently, allabogdanite has been found in other meteorites too, suggesting that the rare mineral might not be quite as exclusive as had been believed.
Even so, only being found in rocks falling out of the sky is still a pretty special status all told – and yet now it seems allabogdanite also has Earthly origins we never knew about.
Allabogdanite
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