from Bruce
Anecdotes
Food
• As an author who writes frequently about survival in the wilderness, Gary Paulsen has eaten some strange meals. In a village along the Bering Sea, he came across a six-year-old boy who was sucking blood from a hole in the carcass of a seal. The boy asked Mr. Paulsen, “Want some?” As an inquisitive author, Mr. Paulsen did — and he says that the taste was “not unpleasant.” Later, he saw the boy eating Crisco straight from the can, dipping his fingers into the fat, then sucking the fat from his fingers. This time, when the boy offered him some, Mr. Paulsen declined.
• Think carefully about where to do your writing. For a while, Judy Blume wrote in an office located above a bakery. However, at noon she was unable to resist buying and eating two glazed doughnuts, and at 3 p.m. she was unable to resist buying and eating two more glazed doughnuts. After a few months — and after gaining a few pounds — she started writing at home again.
• When Sylvia Plath was a student in England, she did not make many female friends. One morning, she was cutting up her fried eggs, and another student asked her, “Must you cut up your eggs like that?” Ms. Plath replied, “Yes, I’m afraid I really must. What do you do with your eggs? SWALLOW THEM WHOLE?”
• George Bernard Shaw was as thin as Lord Northcliffe was fat. Once Lord Northcliffe said to him, “The trouble with you, Shaw, is that you look as though there were a famine in the land.” Mr. Shaw replied, “The trouble with you, Northcliffe, is that you look as if you were the cause of it.”
• When William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mississippi resident John Cullen wrote to the King of Norway suggesting that the award presenters serve Mr. Faulkner some opossum meat and collard greens. The king sent back a very nice reply.
• Famous philosopher George Santayana knew what he liked. Sometimes, he would pour wine over cake and then eat it. A friend once saw him do this. The friend was shocked, but he tried it, liked it, and continued to do it.
• Mahatma Gandhi and the great Nobel-Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore once met, and Gandhi told him, “The suffering millions need only one poem — food.”
Free Speech
• Quite often people challenge books by Judy Blume; this means that people request that Judy’s books be removed from libraries so that people cannot read them. Sometimes, these challenges result in her books being banned. At one school where her books were banned, students protested by wearing at school buttons that said, “Judy Blume for Principal” and “Judy Blume for President.” By the way, when Judy’s son and daughter were in elementary school, their mother’s book Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was banned from the school library.
• During high school, writer Nancy Garden discovered that she was a lesbian. She and her lover looked for books on homosexuality in the library, but those books were always checked out. Today, she realizes that those books had been censored — the books were always said to be checked out so that no one could read them. Ms. Garden is the author of Annie on My Mind, a young-people’s novel about lesbians in love.
• Distinguished Bible scholar Henry Cadbury, a Quaker, assisted in preparing the Revised Standard version of the New Testament. Unfortunately, many people disliked this book, and some of them even burned it. Mr. Cadbury merely said, “They used to burn the translators. If now they only want to burn the translation, I guess we have made some progress.”
Friends
• Wisdom comes from many places. Pammy is the best friend of novelist Anne Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds. When Pammy was dying and in a wheelchair, Ms. Lamott asked her if she — Ms. Lamott — looked fat while wearing a certain dress. Pammy replied, “Annie, you really don’t have that kind of time.” Ms. Lamott says now, “I live by that.” Ms. Lamott got something else from another friend, who lent her some “simple but fabulous gold hoops [earrings] from Guatemala.” Ms. Lamott wore them, she liked them, and she told her friend, “You know, I won’t be giving them back.” Her friend said — sadly — that she realized that. Ms. Lamott wears the hoops often, and she says, “I still see her every few years, and I’ve always got the earrings, and we still laugh. You can see them in every author’s photo of mine since my second book, Rosie.”
***
© 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: "El Regreso de los Muertos Vivos" [“The Return of the Living Dead”]
EP: EL REGRESO DE LOS MUERTOS VIVOS
Artist: Los Acetones
Artist Location: Ciudad Autónoma De Buenos Aires, Argentina
Info:
The Acetones also have a full-length album on Scatter Records
Price: $2 (USD) for track; $5 (USD) for four-track EP
Genre: Surf. Garage.
Links:
EL REGRESO DE LOS MUERTOS VIVOS
Los Acetones on Bandcamp
Los Acetones YouTube
Scatter Records
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
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Gingrich has always been clueless scum
Casablanca is the story of an embittered but ultimately noble anti-fascist who's inspired to resume the good fight against Nazis. Who better to commemorate the film’s upcoming 80th anniversary than that crawling piece of slime Newt Gingrich?
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast and on the cool side.
Plans MSNBC Hiatus
Rachel Maddow
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow plans to take a hiatus lasting “several weeks” in order to focus on other projects she is working on as part of a broader content deal with NBCUniversal, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The anchor, who is the linchpin of the cable news outlet’s primetime schedule, is expected to tell viewers about her planned absence, which is slated to start Friday, during this evening’s broadcast. Ali Velshi is among the anchors who have filled in for MSNBC’s primetime anchors in the past, and Mehdi Hasan and Ayman Mohyeldin have both taken up 9 p.m. duties on Fridays, when Maddow is often off. Maddow struck a deal with NBCUniversal last year that calls for her to put more of her attention on to a mix of new media projects and other content.
During her hiatus, Maddow is expected to work on a new podcast for NBCUniversal, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Among the other projects she has in the mix are a movie based on her book “Bag Man,” which analyzes the scandal around former U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew. Ben Stiller has been named as a director for that project, which is set to be distributed by NBCU’s Focus Features.
Her immediate absence won’t be a sustained one. MSNBC executives expect Maddow to return to schedule during the hiatus for big news events, such as President Biden’s coming State of the Union address.
Rachel Maddow
Hits Bestseller List
Maus
The Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has become a bestseller on Amazon, after a Tennessee school board banned it.
Last week, according to meeting minutes, 10 school board members in McMinn county agreed to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing “rough, objectionable language” and sketches of naked women they deemed unsuitable for 13-year-old students.
As news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. In history, it ranked first. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.
Efforts have also emerged to make Maus more accessible to students. One professor at a North Carolina college offered eighth-grade and high-school students in McMinn county a free online class.
Richard Davis, owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, offered to loan The Complete Maus to any student. Davis also set up a GoFundMe campaign to buy additional copies. Created with a target of $20,000, it had raised more than $80,000 by Monday.
Maus
New York Times Buys
Wordle
The New York Times said on Monday that it has bought Wordle, the free online word game that has exploded in popularity and, for some, become a daily obsession.
It listed the purchase price as being in the “low-seven figures,” but did not disclose specifics.
The Times, which has popular word games like Spelling Bee and its crossword puzzle, said “at the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay.”
Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn software engineer. He originally made it for his partner, but released it to the public in October. On Nov. 1, only 90 people had played it. Within two months, that number had grown to 300,000 after people began sharing their scores on social media.
Wordle
Billboard Hot 100
‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’
“We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the surprise hit off the “Encanto” soundtrack, has gone where even “Let It Go” couldn’t: It’s become the first song from a Disney movie to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart since “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin” did it in 1993.
It joins the “Encanto” album itself as a chart-topper, as the animated film’s soundtrack remains atop the Billboard 200 chart for the third time in the last four weeks.
Some other stats Billboard points out: “Bruno,” solely penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda, becomes the first Hot 100 chart-topper to have been written by a solo writer in more than four years, Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” having been the last. It’s the first time a Miranda tune has topped the chart. And it’s only the second time a Disney song has reached the top, since “A Whole New World” was the only one to ever do it previously.
And it did this with close to no radio play, which is highly unusual for a chart in which spins play a considerable factor.
(If you’re wondering how high “Let It Go” got, the answer is: a mere No. 5, despite its seeming cultural ubiquity in 2014.)
‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’
Had Been Ripped Up
Records
Some Trump White House documents that have been handed over to the House select committee investigating January 6 had to be taped back together by National Archives staff because they had been ripped up, the agency said in a statement.
The agency did not explain how officials know the former President Donald Trump himself ripped up the records, but the Archives pointed to previous reporting that White House records management staff had to tape together torn-up documents during the Trump-era.
“These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House,” the Archives said in the statement. “The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.”
The Archives pointed to media reports dating back to 2018. That’s when Politico reported that the White House employed staff whose jobs partly entailed reconstructing White House communications and documents that crossed Trump’s desk that he would tear up.
Records
Asked To Not Release Report
Amnesty International
Israel on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish an upcoming report accusing it of apartheid, saying the conclusions of the London-based international human rights group are “false, biased and antisemitic.”
Amnesty is expected to join the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B'Tselem in accusing Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state and because of its treatment of its own Arab minority.
Israel dismissed the other reports as biased, but is adopting a much more adversarial stance this time around. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has said Israel expects intensified efforts this year to brand it as an apartheid state in international bodies and hopes to head them off.
Neither Human Rights Watch nor B’Tselem compared Israel to South Africa, where an apartheid system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until the early 1990s. Instead, they evaluate Israel’s policies based on international conventions like the Rome Statute, which defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”
They argue that Israel’s various policies in the territories under its control are aimed at preserving a Jewish majority in as much of the land as possible by systematically denying basic rights to Palestinians. Israel says its policies are aimed at ensuring the survival and security of the world’s only Jewish state.
Amnesty International
4.5-Magnitude Earthquake
Oklahoma
A 4.5-magnitude earthquake has been registered around five miles from the small city of Medford, Oklahoma.
The United States Geological Survey reported the “notable” quake at around 11.10am local time.
Since 2009, Oklahoma has seen a spike in earthquake activity, USGS said.
Some of the earthquakes have been caused by hydraulic fracturing for fossil fuels - so-called “fracking”. The largest earthquake induced by fracking in the state was a M3.6 earthquake in 2019.
However the majority of earthquakes in Oklahoma are caused by the oil and gas industry’s wastewater disposal - where the liquid byproducts are injected underground, below ground water or drinking water aquifers.
Oklahoma
Longest Bolt
Lightning
A bolt of lightning that stretched nearly 500 miles across three U.S, states is the new world record holder for longest flash.
The single flash extended 477.2 miles (768 kilometers) across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in April 2020, the World Meteorological Organization said Monday. That beat the old record set in 2018 in Brazil of 440.6 miles (709 kilometers).
Also in 2020, a single lightning flash over Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted 17.1 seconds, nipping the old time record of 16.7 seconds.
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 10 miles and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological organization.
Both were cloud-to-cloud, several thousand feet above the ground, so no one was in danger, he said.
Lightning
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