from Bruce
Anecdotes
Husbands and Wives
• In the 1970s, James Garner and Mariette Hartley made a series of TV commercials for Polaroid in which they appeared to be a feisty, but happily married, couple. The actors were so good that many viewers thought they were actually married. Ms. Hartley even started wearing a T-shirt that said, “I am not Mrs. James Garner.” Meanwhile, the real Mrs. James Garner started wearing a T-shirt that said, “I am Mrs. James Garner.”
• Bea Wain and Andre Baruch were the husband-and-wife stars of a radio show. Mr. Wain once said on the air, “The hen that laid double-yolk eggs will be exhibited at the New York State Fair. However, due to the excessive heat, the hen hasn’t laid since last Monday.” His wife added, “That could happen to any of us.”
• After Trigger, the horse of TV and movie star Roy Rogers, died, Mr. Rogers had him stuffed. His wife, Dale Evans, told him, “Roy, don’t you go getting any ideas about me.”
Language
• While living in Italy, actress Eve Arden rented a villa from a Marchese. While living in the villa, she kept track of all the drinking glasses her family had broken so that she could pay for them at the end of her lease. However, because of her poor Italian, the Marchese got a shock because he thought that the glass she was reporting on was window glass (“vietro”) instead of drinking glasses (“bicchieri”). “My God,” he said (in Italian) after hearing her report on the telephone, “there can’t be a windowpane left in the place!”
• In the TV series Hogan’s Heroes, extras frequently had to speak a little German because the series was set in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp (not in a concentration camp). Chris Anders once played a German guard who had to tell some trucks to take off, so he said, “Fahrt Los.” However, because the German word “fahrt” sounds like the English word “fart,” the director stopped the scene, saying, “We can’t use that!”
• Robin Williams’ humor could be crude. Before a Comic Relief show, members of the production staff created a pool in which they guessed how long it would take for Mr. Williams to make a penis joke in the show, which started at 6 p.m. The winner guessed 6:07 p.m. (Mr. Williams might have made the joke even sooner, but the opening number of Comic Relief took five minutes.)
• After Honor Blackman, who played Cathy Gale, left the 1960s tongue-in-cheek TV spy series The Avengers, her partner in the series, John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee, said in an episode, “I’ve no doubt that she is pussy-footing around on some island.” (Ms. Blackman left The Avengers to play the character Pussy Galore in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.)
• In the early days of radio, Jan Savitt was the leader of a house orchestra. One day, he decided to fire George, his Polish secretary, who was in charge of all the orchestra’s files and records. Very quickly, however, Mr. Savitt had to rehire George. George had kept all of the orchestra’s files and records in Polish.
• The star of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, collects first editions of children’s books, including Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. She is especially fond of the author Dr. Seuss because in his book There’s a Wocket in My Pocket, he wrote the line “There’s a Gellar in the cellar.”
• Jeff Stone, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, once played for a while in Latin America, and when he returned to the United States, he left his TV behind. Why? He explained, “All the programs were in Spanish.”
• To break the ice with her normal-hearing co-stars on the TV series Reasonable Doubts, deaf actress Marlee Matlin taught them how to say dirty words in sign language.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. responded:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Ghost Riders in the Sky"
Album: EN VIVO!
Artist: Los Fuckin Surfer Smokers
Artist Location: Bogota, Colombia
Info:
Checho - Guitarra.
Reve - Bajo.
Efra - Bateria.
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE)
Genre: Surf Instrumentals.
Links:
EN VIVO!
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Los Fuckin Surfer Smokers on YouTube
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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.
Beach Surprise
Tom Hanks
Diciembre and Tashia Farries celebrated their wedding day with their family, close friends and Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks.
The brides tied the knot on Oct. 22 and went to the beach by Santa Monica Pier to take photos when Hanks stopped by to say congratulations.
"We were so in our own moment so for him to walk up, it was shocking and took a second for us to realize. It was the cherry on top for our big day," Diciembre Farries told TODAY.
In a video of the encounter, members of the wedding party can be heard shouting, "That's Woody!" referring to the character Hanks voiced in the "Toy Story" series.
The newlyweds said Hanks spent at least five minutes chatting with them and even asked them for a photo. They posed with Hanks and their 1-year-old son, August.
Tom Hanks
“I Was Wrong, Bro”
Snoop Dogg
One of the juiciest rap beefs in recent memory came to a very quiet end a few months back, when Snoop Dogg picked up his phone and made a private apology to fellow Dr. Dre protege Eminem, as Snoop explains on an upcoming episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “I know how to call Marshall and say, man, I apologize,” Snoop says in the episode, which airs October 29th on SiriusXM’s Volume channel (106) and will be available as a podcast on November 3rd. “‘I was wrong, bro. Do you forgive me?'” The two veteran rappers then teamed up to record a new song set for release on next January’s album from Snoop’s Mt. Westmore supergroup, which also includes Ice Cube, Too $hort and E-40.
In an interview on the Breakfast Club radio show last July, Snoop suggested he wouldn’t rank Eminem among the Top 10 rappers of all time, and Eminem shot back in his song “Zeus”: “I’m used to people knocking me/But just not in my camp… Last thing I need is Snoop dogging me.”
Late last year, Eminem explained why he was upset: “Everything he said was fine, up to a point,” Eminem said in a New Year’s Eve interview on Shade 45. “Him saying Dre made the best version of me, absolutely, why would I have a problem with that?…. it was the last statement where he said, ‘Far as music I can live without, I can live without that shit.’ Now you’re being disrespectful. It just caught me off-guard.”
“You got to understand we really love each other,” Snoop says. “So we don’t want the public to put a spin on something that’s not even that serious…. And we truly respect each other. So we wanted to get an understanding behind closed doors… We’re brothers, man. You know, my [real] brother hurt my feelings a lot of times — I wanted to join a gang and he wouldn’t let me!… You learn to understand and respect each other as brothers, as family members, and you respect each other’s opinions. And as long there was no disrespect directly or ill will, then it can all be forgiven and it can all be moving on.”
Snoop and Eminem recorded their upcoming new song “about two months ago,” Snoop says. “And that motherfucker slap. It was very challenging for me, I’ll say that. Eminem really fucking shot at me, he shot his shot. And as a rapper, that’s what you want when you get a feature, to have to fucking work your ass off. You want somebody to come to the playing field, putting up points, to where you got to rethink your shit and say, ‘Well, damn, this is what he thinks of me. That’s why he’s going so hard, because he knows that I’m going to match him on the same level.’ And that’s what it is when you make records with people that you love and family. It’s competitive, but it’s competitive for the right reasons to bring the best out of each other.”
Snoop Dogg
DNA Confirms Great-Grandson's Ancestry
Sitting Bull
A sample of Sitting Bull's hair has helped scientists confirm that a South Dakota man is the famed 19th century Native American leader's great-grandson using a new method to analyze family lineages with DNA fragments from long-dead people.
Researchers said on Wednesday that DNA extracted from the hair, which had been stored at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, confirmed the familial relationship between Sitting Bull, who died in 1890, and Ernie LaPointe, 73, of Lead, South Dakota.
"I feel this DNA research is another way of identifying my lineal relationship to my great-grandfather," said LaPointe, who has three sisters. "People have been questioning our relationship to our ancestor as long as I can remember. These people are just a pain in the place you sit - and will probably doubt these findings, also."
The study represented the first time that DNA from a long-dead person was used to demonstrate a familial relationship between a living individual and a historical figure - and offers the potential for doing so with others whose DNA can be extracted from remains such as hair, teeth or bones.
Sitting Bull, whose Lakota name was Tatanka-Iyotanka, helped bring together the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains against white settlers taking tribal land and U.S. military forces trying to expel Native Americans from their territory. He led Native American warriors who wiped out federal troops led by George Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn in what is now the U.S. state of Montana.
Sitting Bull
Humanity's Downward Slope
Edward O. Wilson
The Harvard University scientist who has called for setting aside half the planet as a nature preserve says the slope of human history will always be downward unless there is global cooperation to save existing species.
Edward O. Wilson, a 92-year old naturalist hailed as the Darwin of the 21st century, said humankind is not too polarized to save the planet, even as some of the world's biggest polluters drag their feet on cutting carbon emissions and arresting global warming.
He sees preventing catastrophic climate change -- the aim of U.N. climate talks starting in Scotland on Sunday -- and saving biodiversity, or the variety of plant and animal species in the world, as two initiatives that must happen together.
"This is the most communal endeavor with a clear definable goal that humanity has ever had and we need to get the kind of cooperation and ethical harmony and planning in order to make it work," Wilson told Reuters in an interview outside Boston on Oct. 21.
"Otherwise, the slope of human history will always be downward."
Edward O. Wilson
Rupert Fluffs Lumpy
Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a letter to the editor from former President Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up), which contained a multitude of falsehoods that have been fact checked by the newspaper and other publications.
Trump's letter was in response to a Monday editorial about Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court, which referred to the 2020 presidential election and mail-in ballots. The editorial stated, factually, that President Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 ballots, which set Trump off. "Well, actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven't figured out," Trump wrote.
He went on to make several false claims about the vote in Pennsylvania, including, "120,000 excess voters are not yet accounted for by the Pennsylvania Department of State — far more votes than voters!" This was debunked by The Philadelphia Inquirer's Jonathan Lai in January, who wrote that state GOP lawmakers came up with this number after looking at incomplete data, calculating that nearly 7 million votes were cast but not quite 6.8 million voters participated in the election. Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler, and Cambria counties had not uploaded all their voter history data, the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement, adding, "We are unclear as to exactly what data and what the legislators actually did to offer this so-called 'analysis.'"
There was swift pushback to Trump's letter being published, with Jonathan Tamari, the Inquirer's national political writer, tweeting, "This is full of absolute lies — from the first bullet point down." The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler asked, "Why would they publish, without analysis, a bunch of stuff that['s] already been fact checked as false?"
Amanda Carpenter, director of Republicans for Voting Rights and a columnist at The Bulwark, called Trump's missive "garbage." By allowing Trump to spew "election lies" as a letter to the editor, the Journal was able to "avoid taking responsibility," Carpenter said, adding, "Trump couldn't post this to Facebook but the editors at the WSJ collectively decided to put it on their platform. Think about that."
Wall Street Journal
South America's Second-Largest River
The Parana
Gustavo Alcides Diaz, an Argentine fisherman and hunter from a river island community, is at home on the water. The Parana River once lapped the banks near his wooden stilt home that he could reach by boat. Fish gave him food and income. He purified river water to drink.
Now the 40-year-old looks out on a trickle of muddy water.
The Parana, South America's second-largest river behind only the Amazon, has retreated this year to its lowest level since its record low in 1944, hit by cyclical droughts and dwindling rainfall upriver in Brazil. Climate change only worsens those trends.
The decline of the waterway, which knits together a huge swathe of the continent, has hurt river communities like Diaz's, snarled grains transport in Argentina and Paraguay and contributed to a rise in wildfires, damaging wetland ecosystems.
The Parana's crisis is among the multitude of woes arising worldwide associated with global climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. World leaders are set to meet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, starting on Oct. 31 in Glasgow, Scotland amid warnings from a U.N. panel about climate-related disruptions for decades, if not centuries, to come.
The Parana
Inner Core
Earth
For over half a century, the scientific community thought that Earth's inner core was a solid ball of compressed iron alloy surrounded by a liquid outer core. But new research, published Sept. 20 in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, suggests that the firmness of the planetary ball ranges from hard to semisoft to liquid metal.
"The more that we look at it, the more we realize it's not one boring blob of iron," Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "We're finding a whole new hidden world."
In some ways, Earth's inner core remains as mysterious as it was when Jules Verne published his fanciful "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864. Though scientists have known since the 1950s that our planet isn't hollow as Verne predicted, the planet's interior is still unexplored; the immense heat and pressure are simply too great for any human or human-made probe to travel there. "Unless something awful happens to our planet, we will never have a direct observation of Earth's core," Irving said.
Instead, geophysicists rely on seismic waves generated by earthquakes. By measuring these massive vibrations, scientists can reconstruct a picture of the planet's inner workings in a way that's "akin to a CT scan of a person," Irving said. These waves come in two main flavors: straight-line compressional waves and undulating shear waves. Each wave can speed up, slow down or bounce off of different mediums as it travels through the ground.
For Rhett Butler, a geophysicist at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, the new study started as a question of mismatched numbers. Butler was looking at how the seismic waves created by large earthquakes in five different locations travel through Earth's core to the exact opposite side of the globe. But something was off — the quakes' shear waves, which should have passed through a solid ball of metal, were instead being deflected in certain areas.
Earth
Bronze Age Culture
Tarim Mummies
The mysterious Tarim mummies of China's western Xinjiang region are relics of a unique Bronze Age culture descended from Indigenous people, and not a remote branch of early Indo-Europeans, according to new genetic research.
The new study upends more than a century of assumptions about the origins of the prehistoric people of the Tarim Basin whose naturally preserved human remains, desiccated by the desert, suggested to many archaeologists that they were descended from Indo-Europeans who had migrated to the region from somewhere farther west before about 2000 B.C.
But the latest research shows that instead, they were a genetically isolated group seemingly unrelated to any neighboring peoples.
European explorers found the first Tarim mummies in the deserts of what's now western China in the early 20th century. Recent research has focused on the mummies from the Xiaohe tomb complex on the eastern edge of the Taklamakan Desert.
The naturally mummified remains, desiccated by the desert, were thought by some anthropologists to have non-Asian facial features, and some seemed to have red or fair hair. They were also dressed in clothes of wool, felt and leather that were unusual for the region.
Tarim Mummies
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