from Bruce
Anecdotes
Animals
• In the early 20th-century play Palmy Days is a scene in which a dog recognizes a character named “Kaintuck” in a saloon. The scene worked very well on stage. The playwright trained his dog to find his hat. He told his dog, “Where’s that hat?” and the dog would search for the hat, howling until he found it. On opening night, the playwright gave the hat to the actor playing Kaintuck, and for the recognition scene, he told his dog, “Where’s that hat?” The audience heard howling offstage, then saw the dog come on stage and go directly to Kaintuck, who was wearing the hat.
• Downhill mountain bike racer Missy Glover loves pets. While racing, she carries her dead dog’s ashes, and around her neck she wears the taxidermist-preserved remains of another deceased pet — a piranha. She also believes in meditation, and for that purpose, she built a Mongolian yurt in her backyard.
• Animals cause their share of mishaps on stage. Fred Terry once wore a false nose while playing the role of King Charles, who kept a number of spaniels. During a performance, one of the spaniels jumped up, bit off the end of the false nose, then ran away. The audience was delighted.
• In a Central Village cemetery in Connecticut is a tombstone bearing the inscription, “ROSA. My first Jersey Cow. Record 2 lbs. 15 ozs. Butter. From 18 qts 1 day milk.”
Art and Artists
• The Taliban is against much art. In 1996, the Taliban rose to power in Afghanistan and immediately forbade paintings that depicted animals or humans. An Afghan physician named Muhammad Yousef Asefi, who was also an artist, wished to preserve this kind of art. Therefore, he used watercolor to paint over animals and humans, thereby disguising them. Dr. Asefi said about the Taliban, “They were determined to destroy the culture of Afghanistan. Gradually, step by step, they would have come around to destroying my paintings.” After the Taliban fell from power in Afghanistan in 2001, Dr. Asefi used a wet sponge to remove the watercolor and restore the paintings to their original condition. Dr. Asefi said about the removal of the watercolor, “Taking it off is easy.” However, he added, “Putting it on was very difficult.” Dr. Asefi preserved much art for future generations to see.
• Pablo Picasso created his mural Guernica to protest the 26 April 1937 bombing of the Basque village Guernica by Fascists using German airplanes. The planes killed 1,654 and wounded 889 of the village’s population of 7,000. During World War II, when the Nazis occupied France, Picasso stayed in Paris. Frequently, the police came to his studio, but he simply smiled and gave them postcards picturing his Guernica. Once, a German officer asked him about Guernica, “Did you do this?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.”
• While living and painting at Zaandam, which is near Amsterdam, Impressionist painter Claude Monet bought some groceries and carried them home, where he discovered that they had been wrapped in paper that was actually a work of art — a brilliantly colored Japanese wood-block print. Mr. Monet went back to the grocery store and bought the rest of the prints, thus starting a collection that greatly influenced his own art.
• Artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler was once asked why he was so rude to so many people. He replied, “Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming, and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death.”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Miss Russian"
Album: SHELTER FROM THE SUN
Artist: The Bonnie Situations
Artist Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Info: All songs by The Bonnie Situations
Audrey Croisier on Vocals, Backing Vocals, Guitars
Julien Berlioz on Guitars, Vocals, Backing Vocals
Alexis Baudin on Bass
Sébastien Moritz on Drums
Lute FP, a fan, wrote, “If I had to use one word only, it would be ‘pleasant.’
Fortunately, I can use quite a few more. The band takes a variety of influences and splices them into a very complete sound. I hear Americana, northern soul, a little garagy surf rock, some pop. The songwriting is excellent, the vocals sublime. Overall, an excellent album.”
Price: 7 CHF (Swiss Franc) for eight-track album; approximately $7.60 USD
Genre: Rock. Garage.
Links:
SHELTER FROM THE SUN
The Bonnie Situations on Bandcamp
The Bonnie Situations on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
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
Reader Contribution
man cave/shop
What do you do with an old bulldozer and lots of spare time on your hands?
My Brother-in-law's man cave/shop,,,, (his wife refused to allow it in the family room)
(Click on image for larger version)
Gary in PA
Thanks, Gary - that's pretty cool!
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
The machines at the laundromat-of-the-darned are slowly falling apart - there are no replacement parts available.
Sells Publishing Catalog to Sony
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen has sold his publishing catalog to Sony for a reported $500 million, as Billboard reports.
The musician has sold his masters to Sony Music and his publishing to Sony Music Publishing in a combined deal, according Billboard sources. A rep for Sony declined to comment on the deal. Springsteen has remained with Sony’s Columbia Records since he launched his career, and was given ownership of his earlier albums. According the the RIAA, his album catalog has sold 65.5 million in the U.S., which includes his 15-times platinum Born in the U.S.A. and five-times platinum The River. A rep for Springsteen did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
Springsteen is the latest in a long line of veteran artists that have parted ways with their publishing rights in the past couple of years. That list includes Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Shakira, Jimmy Iovine, and David Crosby.
And while Springsteen is in a far better financial situation than Crosby, he still has many incentives to part ways with his catalog. Interest rates are at historical lows, and many artists want to personally oversee the deals before the task falls to their heirs. There’s also a flood of new companies investing huge money in song catalogs, including Merck Mercuriadis’ Hipgnosis and Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group.
Bruce Springsteen
Gets Official Music Video
"My Sweet Lord"
We don’t know if you noticed, but there’s been a lot of Beatles remembrances as of late. The most recent, however, isn’t a deep dive into lore, unanswered questions, or lingering regrets. It’s just an appropriately celebratory good time.
Although released over half a century ago, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” has a new, official music video to celebrate both the song’s recent certified Platinum status, as well as the “50th Anniversary Uber Deluxe Edition” of All Things Must Pass receiving a Grammy nomination for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package.
Directed by Lance Bangs and produced by Harrison’s son, Dhani, and David Zonshine, the clip centers on Fred Armisen and Vanessa Bayer as a pair of “metaphysical special agents” tasked by their boss (Mark Hamill) to “search for that which can’t be seen”—something that sounds pretty on brand for a George Harrison-inspired conceit. What follows is a very endearing journey about town that features cameos by:
Moshe Kasher, Natasha Legerro, Jeff Lynne, Reggie Watts, Darren Criss, Patton Oswalt, “Weird” Al Yankovic, David Gborie, Sam Richardson, Atsuko Okatsuka, Rosanna Arquette, Brandon Wardell, Ringo Starr, Joe Walsh...
Jon Hamm, Brett Metter, Anders Holm, Dhani Harrison, Rupert Friend, Angus Sampson, Taika Waititi, Eric Wareheim, Tim Heidecker, Kate Micucci, Riki Lindhome, Alyssa Stonoha, Mitra Jouhari, Sandy Honig, Olivia Harrison, Aimee Mullins, Courtney Pauroso, Natalie Palamides, Shepard Fairey, Claudia O’Doherty, Tom Scharpling, Paul Scheer, and Sarah Baker.
"My Sweet Lord"
Kennedy & Kwan
Ambassadors
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday he’s nominating Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy who served as ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration, to serve as ambassador to Australia and Michelle Kwan, the renowned U.S. Olympic figure skater, to serve as his chief envoy to Belize.
Kennedy in a statement offered gratitude to Solomon Islanders and Australian coast watchers in the Pacific who rescued her father during World War II after his crew’s motor torpedo boat was sunk by the Japanese in August 1943.
Biden appointed another member of the Kennedy clan, Victoria Kennedy, an attorney and the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy, to serve as his ambassador to Austria. The Senate confirmed her nomination in October.
Kwan was named the State Department’s first public diplomacy envoy in 2006. Kwan currently serves as the treasurer and a board member of Special Olympics International.
Ambassadors
Happy 100th
Bloody Mary
Harry’s Bar in Paris is celebrating the 100th birthday of the bloody mary, the vodka-tomato juice cocktail believed to have been invented at the iconic watering hole in 1921.
The centenary events this week bring a welcome respite from winter gloom and worries about the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The bar is carefully checking COVID-19 health passes as foreign visitors gather to sample the drink closely associated with Harry’s Bar, whose patrons over the past century have included writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
According to the history of Harry’s, bartender Fernand Petiot invented the cocktail, and the recipe was first published in a book called “Harry’s ABC of Cocktails” in 1921. The bar serves an estimated 12,000 bloody marys a year.
Franz-Arthur MacElhone, a great-grandson of bar founder Harry MacElhone, said the celebration would take place in line with government regulations: the health passes of patrons from around the world will be checked, hand sanitizers will be distributed, and bar staff will wear masks.
Bloody Mary
Supports More Justices
Elizabeth Warren
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday fiercely condemned the Supreme Court's current 6-3 conservative majority and came out in support for expanding the number of justices on the bench.
"I believe it's time for Congress to yet again use its constitutional authority to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court," the Massachusetts Democrat she wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed. "I don't come to this conclusion lightly or because I disagree with a particular decision; I come to this conclusion because I believe the current court threatens the democratic foundations of our nation."
Warren said that adding more justices would help "rebalance" the court, which she claims in recent years has undermined its legitimacy and independence because of a slew of "radical right-wing" decisions, particularly concerning voting rights, labor unions, and corporate power.
"This radical court has reversed century-old campaign-finance restrictions, opening the floodgates for corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to buy our elections. It has reversed well-settled law that once required employers to permit union organizers to meet with workers," Warren wrote. "And it has gutted one of the most important civil rights laws of our time, the Voting Rights Act, not once but twice."
The progressive lawmaker also called out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the highest-ranking Republican senator, for refusing to consider former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, nine months before the presidential election, but then four years later, swiftly confirming former President Donald Trump's pick, Amy Coney Barrett, eight days before the 2020 election.
Elizabeth Warren
Holding Up About as Well as You’d Expect
Abbott’s Promise
There are currently 73 people on the waiting list to speak with a rape counselor at the Sexual Assault Resource Center in Bryan, Texas — the highest number in the organization’s history. The vast majority of the names on that list have been added since September, says Lindsey LeBlanc, the center’s executive director.
September was the same month Gov. Greg Abbott boldly declared he was putting an end to rape in the state. “Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets,” Abbott declared.
In the first three months after Texas enacted its abortion ban, 3,079 rapes were reported across the state, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. A total of 615 those rapes — 22 percent, or a little more than one fifth of the total reported — were “cleared” by authorities, meaning prosecutors brought charges. That clearance rate is a slight improvement over the same period in 2020, when a less than 18 percent of 3,642 reported rapes resulted in charges, but still far from the full eradication of rape Texans were promised in September.
From small-town Texas to the state’s most sprawling metropolises the picture is the same: rapes are being reported at similar rates, and rapists evading prosecution at roughly the same rate. The difference is that, since September, rape victims in Texas have been largely stripped of the ability to end a pregnancy that may have occurred as a result of their attack.
The same is true for victims of incest. (Like rape, S.B. 8 makes no exceptions for their circumstances.) Of 15,989 sexual assaults reported in Texas so far this year, 5,703 — more than one-third — were committed by a family member, roughly the same volume and rate of sexual assaults reportedly perpetrated by family members in 2020. Unlike last year, the children and adults who become pregnant as a result of those assaults will only be able to avoid carrying those pregnancies to term if they are able to find a provider and book an appointment within two weeks of discovering their pregnancy.
Abbott’s Promise
KFC Christmas Custom
Japan
A long queue of patrons running out the door of nearly every KFC has been a perennial Christmas sight in Japan but COVID-19 social distancing rules that discourage lines and place strict conditions for dining-in are threatening the custom.
This year, KFC Holdings Japan, the domestic licensor of the Yum! Brands Inc franchise, is nudging customers to order online and then pick up their chicken at a certain time, rather than forming up in the traditional queues.
The run-up to Christmas is the company's biggest sales week and it hopes the move will help maintain those revenues, which fell last year from a record, and let customers keep a tradition that stretches back to the 1970s.
While only around 1% of Japan's population is Christian, the holiday's commercial aspects have been embraced.
Company lore says the Christmas campaign was inspired by foreign customers in Japan who lamented that they could not find turkey during the holidays. The first "Kentucky for Christmas" promotion started in 1974, marketed towards couples and including a bucket of chicken along with a bottle of wine.
Japan
Gold-Foil 'Tongue'
Mummy
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of three ancient Egyptian inhabitants — a man, woman and child — outfitted with tongues of gold foil, a treasure likely intended to help them speak with gods in the afterlife, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
The burials were found in two neighboring tombs. One of the tombs, which had been plundered by grave robbers, held the remains of the woman and a 3-year-old child, and it had a limestone sarcophagus with a lid shaped like a woman, according to Ahram Online. But the man's grave, from the 26th dynasty (664 B.C. to 525 B.C.), also known as the Saite period, was untouched.
Researchers with the Archaeological Mission of Oxyrhynchus, co-run by Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Barcelona, made the finding at the archaeological site of Oxyrhynchus, near the modern-day town of El Bahnasa, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Cairo. Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, or province, of Upper Egypt, according to the mission's website. It's known for the Oxyrhynchus papyri, or ancient Greek, Latin and other languages written on hundreds of thousands of papyri that date from the third century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.
The two newfound tombs add to the ancient capital's history. The man's tomb contained a mummy interred within a limestone sarcophagus with a man-shaped lid, as well as four canopic jars designed to hold the deceased's organs, amulets including a scarab, green beads and about 400 funerary figurines, known as ushabti, crafted out of faience, or glazed ceramic, The National reported.
This is the second time this year that archaeologists have found gold tongues in ancient Egyptian burials. In January, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of a 2,000-year-old mummy with a gold tongue at Taposiris Magna, an archaeological site on Egypt's Mediterranean coast. Perhaps that individual received a gold tongue to help him speak in the afterlife, especially to a deity like Osiris, the god of the underworld, Live Science previously reported.
Mummy
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