from Bruce
Anecdotes
Work
• Being an ice dancer is tougher than you think, although it looks effortless on TV. Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean once performed in an old circus tent in Tasmania. The weather was rough, the tent was leaky, and the audience was forced to use umbrellas while watching the performance. Meanwhile, a half-inch of water collected on the surface of the ice, and Ms. Torvill and Mr. Dean wondered what would happen if the wind blew a live electrical wire down onto the ice.
• When world-class gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi defected from Romania to the United States, he worked like a dog to earn whatever money — usually very little — he could. Often, he and his wife, Marta, ate a pretzel as their food for the entire day. By the way, they did have a dog. The dog ate better than they did, as Mr. Karolyi would feed him table scraps he had gotten from the restaurant where he worked as a cleaner.
• As President, John F. Kennedy appointed his younger brother Robert Kennedy as Attorney General of the United States — a decision for which he was much criticized, in part because Bobby Kennedy was so young and inexperienced. President Kennedy explained his decision in this way: “Bobby wants to practice law, and I thought he ought to get a little experience first.”
• In 1997, because President Bill Clinton had injured his foot and couldn’t walk to the Orioles’ pitcher’s mound, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was given the privilege of throwing the first baseball of Baltimore’s season. However, the baseball traveled only 15 feet, and she joked later that she had better not give up her day job.
• Like everyone else, early in his life world-renowned women’s gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi had to decide which career to pursue. Once, his mother gave him an appliance to repair. He did his best, but the appliance blew up in his face. Therefore, he decided not to be an engineer, but instead to pursue his interest in gymnastics.
• In the early 20th century, Mr. Fyfe, the Caddie Superintendent at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews in Scotland, had an interesting way of dealing with disputes between caddies. He simply told them, “Go to the bandstand and fight as long as you can stand, then come back and I’ll find you work.”
• World-class gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi believes in working his gymnasts hard. When Mary Lou Retton was training with him, she quickly realized that when Mr. Karolyi said, “Just one more,” they were really in the middle, not at the end, of the workout.
• Gymnastics coach Steve Nunno can be demanding. When he thinks a gymnast is not working as hard as she should, he kicks her out of practice for a while. Mr. Nunno has been known to kick as many as 10 of 11 total gymnasts out at one practice.
• Pitcher Lefty Gomez retired from major league baseball, then sought employment elsewhere. A job application form asked for the reason why he had left his previous job, so Lefty wrote, “I couldn’t get the side out.”
Alcohol
• At one time, newspaper reporters used to drink — a lot. During one drinking session, Paul Galloway, reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, became perturbed — make that very perturbed — about something that editor Jim Hoge had perpetrated. Mr. Galloway became so perturbed that he decided to do something about his perturbation, so he went back to the Sun-Times offices, picked up a chair, and threw it as hard as he could at the window of Mr. Hoge’s office. Big mistake. Mr. Galloway recounted later, “Something I had not foreseen was that the window was made of Plexiglas. The chair bounced back and almost hit me.” Mr. Hoge was not present at the time, and he need not ever have become aware of the event, but Mr. Galloway was still perturbed, so he insisted that the City Desk log the event, although the City Desk assistant advised him, “Forget it, Paul.” The next morning, Mr. Hoge was at his desk, and he perused the log, as was his custom. He also called Mr. Galloway, who now regretted having insisted that his action of the previous night be logged, into his office. Mr. Hoge said to Mr. Galloway, “So, Paul, I understand you have a problem with our interior decoration.” Mr. Galloway replied, “No, sir! I find it excellent! Nothing whatsoever wrong with it! Enviable, in fact!” Mr. Galloway was a very good writer, and Mr. Hoge was a very good editor, and very good editors realize that very good writers can occasionally disagree with very good editors, and so Mr. Hoge said, “I’m relieved. Now get back to work.”
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
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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: "Monkey Grip"
Album: AUTUMN 2017
Artist: Jordan Oakley
Artist Location: Melbourne, Australia
Info:
Jordan Oakley: “The Unsettling Views Lurking Beneath Australia’s Most Cherished Cartoonist” (Medium)
The usual tone of Michael Leunig is a sentimentality that addresses the world in a whimsical, fantastical way. But when it comes to a topic such as vaccines this innocence belies an adamant voice that disregards science.
Price: FREE Download
Genre: Alternative. Acoustic Guitar.
Links:
AUTUMN 2017
Jordan Oakley on Bandcamp
Jordan Oakley on YouTube
Jordan Oakley on Spotify
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce's Blog #1
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David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Twofer
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
Looked like rain, weatherman said it was gonna rain - no rain.
Sad Little Snowflakes
Texass
Texas state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt has been cleared by a special court of review after being rebuked by the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct for a pair of incidents when she was Travis County judge.
In 2017, Eckhardt, 57, donned a pink knitted cat-eared "pussyhat" during a commissioners court meeting, the Texas Tribune reports. The hats were worn at that time and since in protest of Donald Trump's presidency and his lewd comments about grabbing women "by the p----" in a leaked Access Hollywood tape that jolted the 2016 presidential campaign.
And then in 2019 Eckhardt made a joke about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair because he was paralyzed from the waist down after being struck by an oak tree while jogging in 1984, during an appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival.
While discussing Abbott's support of a law restricting local governments from regulating tree removal on private property, Eckhardt said the governor "hates trees because one fell on him," the Texas Tribune reported at the time.
Both incidents were cited in a complaint considered by the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, which publicly admonished Eckhardt for "for engaging in willful conduct that cast public discredit upon the judiciary."
Texass
Cold Case Team Shines New Light
Anne Frank
A cold case team that combed through evidence for five years in a bid to unravel one of World War II’s enduring mysteries has reached what it calls the “most likely scenario” of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.
Their answer, outlined in a new book called “The Betrayal of Anne Frank A Cold Case Investigation,” by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, is that it could have been a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, who disclosed the secret annex hiding place of the Frank family to German occupiers to save his own family from deportation and murder in Nazi concentration camps.
“We have investigated over 30 suspects in 20 different scenarios, leaving one scenario we like to refer to as the most likely scenario,” said film maker Thijs Bayens, who had the idea to put together the cold case team, that was led by retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke, to forensically examine the evidence.
“There is no smoking gun because betrayal is circumstantial,” Bayens told The Associated Press on Monday.
How did facism bring people “to the desperate point of betraying each other, which is an awful, really awful situation?” he said.
Anne Frank
How Rights Work
Jodorowsky's Dune Book
Late last year, a rare copy of one of the pitch books legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky made to pitch his vision for an adaptation of Dune went to auction. Expected to sell for around $30-40,000, it went for around a baffling three million dollars, thanks to an ether-backed collective known as TheSpiceDAO. Now, they want to use manuscript to... make their own Dune.
SpiceDAO’s overwhelming bid for the book—one of a handful of copies still in existence, some of which has already been partially made available online before and highlighted in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune —was part of a number of headline-making landmark auctions for collectors items last year. Rare copies of Mario and Zelda games, comics like Spider-Man’s debut in Amazing Fantasy, and more all generated wildly-overestimated record breaking bids, in part driven by people with more money than sense placing speculatory bids into rare collectibles as the next big thing. The Christie’s sale of Jodorowsky’s Dune was no exception to this trend, albeit that it was one brushing up with another speculatory trend: cryptocurrency-backed DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, pooling together millions of dollars from supporting crypto owners in an attempt to buy something and web3-ify it in some nebulous capacity. There was a failed attempt to purchase the US constitution, and plans to transform Blockbuster into a future streaming service by similar DAOs, and now, there is SpiceDAO. The difference with SpiceDAO’s plans to these, however, is that they suddenly think spending three million dollars just means they own Dune.
SpiceDAO attracted a bevy of attention—mostly scorn—over the weekend by reiterating their plans for Jorowsky’s Dune after its purchase. The first, to make the book public with a new digitized copy while the purchased physical book is stored in a “fine art quality storage with a professional, insured service,” is admirable, if not, as previously mentioned, something that’s never happened with other copies of the book before. The problem is the other two plans, which involve turning the Moebius-illustrated storyboards into an animated series to sell to a streaming service, and then also having done that, encourage derivative projects based on the manuscript from the crypto enthusiasts who backed the bid in the first place.
Except, of course, Jodorowsky’s Dune is still Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel. Purchasing a book of storyboards—one of several in existence, even if that number is low—and expecting that to transfer the rights to those storyboards, or the story itself, would’ve been like whoever purchased that copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 last year expecting they could go to Sony and direct Spider-Man: Are We Still Doing Home Puns?. Or, perhaps, you walking into a book store, picking up one of those re-released copies of Dune with the cast from Denis Villeneuve’s movie on the cover, and thinking you could walk up to Timothée Chalamet and tell him how Chapter Two is yours now.
Jodorowsky's Dune Book
Secret Daughter
Gabriel García Márquez
For decades renowned Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez kept the public from knowing about an intimate aspect of his life: He had a daughter with a Mexican writer, with whom he had an extramarital affair in the early 1990s.
The closely guarded secret was published by Colombian newspaper El Universal on Sunday and confirmed to the Associated Press by two relatives of the Nobel Prize-winning author, who is famous for novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Márquez died in Mexico City in 2014, where thousands of his readers lined up to see his casket in a concert hall. He was married for more than five decades to Mercedes Barcha and the couple had two children named Rodrigo and Gonzalo. They lived in Mexico City for much of their lives.
El Universal said that in the early 1990s Márquez had a daughter with Susana Cato, a writer and journalist who worked with Márquez on two movie scripts and who also interviewed him for a 1996 magazine story. Cato and Marquez named their daughter Indira: She is now in her early 30s and uses her mother’s surname.
Other members of García Márquez’s family, cited by El Universal, said they had not spoken about the writer’s daughter previously out of “respect” for Mercedes Barcha who died in August 2020. Torres García said that Indira Cato’s mother, Susana, had also been discrete about her daughter’s lineage, to keep her away from the media spotlight.
Gabriel García Márquez
Birth Rate Drops
China
Mainland China's birth rate dropped to a record low in 2021, data showed on Monday, extending a downward trend that led Beijing last year to begin allowing couples to have up to three children.
China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly aging population, but the high cost of urban living has deterred couples from having more children.
The 2021 rate of 7.52 births per 1,000 people was the lowest since 1949, when the National Statistics Bureau began collating the data, adding further pressure on officials to encourage more births.
The natural growth rate of China's population, which excludes migration, was only 0.034% for 2021, the lowest since 1960, according to the data.
In addition to allowing couples to have three children, China has been adopting policies aimed at reducing the financial burden of raising children, including banning for-profit after-school tuition, a massive industry, last year.
China
Insides Are Cooling Faster
Earth
Earth formed 4.5 billion years or so ago. Ever since then, it's been slowly cooling on the inside.
While the surface and atmosphere temperatures fluctuate over the eons (and yes, those external temperatures are currently warming), the molten interior – the beating heart of our planet – has been cooling this entire time.
That's not a glib metaphor. The rotating, convecting dynamo deep inside Earth is what generates its vast magnetic field, an invisible structure that scientists believe protects our world and allows life to thrive. In addition, mantle convection, tectonic activity and volcanism are thought to help sustain life through the stabilization of global temperatures and the carbon cycle.
Because Earth's interior is still cooling, and will continue to do so, this means that eventually the interior will solidify, and the geological activity will cease, possibly turning Earth into a barren rock, akin to Mars or Mercury. New research has revealed that may happen sooner than previously thought.
The key could be a mineral at the boundary between Earth's outer iron-nickel core and the molten fluid lower mantle above it. This boundary mineral is called bridgmanite, and how quickly it conducts heat will influence how quickly heat seeps through the core and out into the mantle.
Earth
One Of England's Earliest Gold Coins
"Henry III Gold Penny"
An amateur metal detectorist who discovered what is thought to be one of England's first gold coins could soon see a payday of nearly half a million dollars.
The "Henry III gold penny," which was unearthed on farmland in Devon, in the country's southwest, was minted in about 1257 and depicts the former English king sitting on an ornate throne, holding an orb and scepter. It is one of only eight such coins known to exist, many of which are in museums.
The finder, who wishes to remain anonymous, didn't realize how valuable the coin was until he posted a photograph of the penny on Facebook. That's where Gregory Edmund, a numismatist with auctioneer Spink & Son, spotted it.
Under the United Kingdom's Treasure Act of 1996, the hobbyist who found the coin is able to keep and sell it, as it's not considered to be part of a wider discovery.
The discoverer said that the coin could have quite easily never been found, and that its value came second to the information it had offered about England's first gold coinage.
"Henry III Gold Penny"
555.55-Carat Black Diamond
“The Enigma”
Auction house Sotheby’s Dubai has unveiled a diamond that’s literally from out of this world.
Sotheby’s calls the 555.55-carat black diamond — believed to have come from outer space — “The Enigma.” The rare gem was shown off on Monday to journalists as part of a tour in Dubai and Los Angeles before it is due to be auctioned off in February in London.
Sotheby’s expects the diamond to be sold for at least 5 million British pounds ($6.8 million). The auction house plans to accept cryptocurrency as a possible payment as well.
Sophie Stevens, a jewelry specialist at Sotheby’s Dubai, told The Associated Press that the number five bears an importance significance to the diamond, which has 55 facets as well.
Black diamonds, also known as carbonado, are extremely rare, and are found naturally only in Brazil and Central Africa. The cosmic origin theory is based on their carbon isotopes and high hydrogen content.
“The Enigma”
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