from Bruce
Anecdotes
Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Other People’s Houses"
Album: COLOR
Artist: Rachel Mousie
Artist Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Info:
Daniel Klein wrote, “I first saw Rachel tear it up at the Front Room at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and am glad to see her still doing her thing. The perfect combo of stripped-down melodies and effortlessly soulful vocals lend to a hauntingly beautiful listening experience. Favorite track: ‘Sharp.’”
“I like to sing and write songs. I play the keys and use a looping station to create live harmonies and hand percussion rhythms. Sometimes when I’m practicing, my cat sits on my lap and gives me feedback in the form of cat sounds. Once I find a way to incorporate that, I'll have it all figured out. — Rachel
“I aim to make you feel something, whatever that may be. I hope I am successful.” — Rachel
“Recorded by Bruce Dalzell at The Dalzell Country Club.”
“Additional recordings by us in our apartment.”
“Broomstick metronome provided by our upstairs neighbor.”
Price: $5 (USD) for eight-track album; tracks cannot be purchased separately
Genre: Alternative
Links:
COLOR
Rachel Mousie on Bandcamp
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
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!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on his honeymoon.
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
No pineapple upside-down cake, yet.
Film Nominations
Critics Choice Awards
Continuing its recent nominations rout at the Golden Globes and SAG nominations last week, Netflix starts this week in the same mode scoring 46 noms in the Critics Choice Awards, with David Fincher’s Mank landing in an impressive 12 categories to lead the field. A24’s tender drama of a Korean American family seeking a new beginning on an Arkansas farm, Minari was just behind with 10 nominations. Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Universal’s Tom Hanks western, News Of The World followed with respectively 8 and 7 nominations each.
The CCA list for Best Picture, often a good barometer on the way the Oscar winds may be blowing, includes 10 entries including the above aforementioned quartet and two more Netflix contenders which grabbed 6 nominations each: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, which had been completely ignored by the Globes, and another of the season’s strongest performers, Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7. The rest of the Best Picture possibilities are Searchlight’s critical fave Nomadland, Focus Features’ Promising Young Woman, and Amazon Studio’s One Night In Miami, each also nabbing six nominations apiece. Bringing up the rear is another Amazon hopeful, Sound Of Metal with 5 nominations.
Of the ten Best Picture nominees, six of them – Minari, Promising Young Woman, Mank, One Night In Miami, The Trial Of The Chicago 7, and Nomadland – showed particular strength as the contest goes forward by also landing key Directing, Screenwriting, and Acting mentions as well. Proving a recent Variety headline regarding its awards fate as “tanking” quite premature, Mank’s recent surge at the Globes, where it also led the pack, and now Critics Choice means Fincher’s gorgeous black and white look at Hollywood and the creation of Citizen Kane which hadn’t gained a lot of traction from earlier regional critics group voting now seems locked and loaded to score nicely when Oscar nominations are announced on March 15. If Academy Award history has told us anything it is that Oscar voters love stories about themselves and it likely will have widespread appeal across the various AMPAS branches. As for A24’s Minari with its hugely impressive SAG, and now robust Critics Choice showing, it also looks to be gaining momentum as well with a month left before those Oscar ballots will be filled out, the kind of underdog story Oscar voters also love.
The Critics Choice Awards will be broadcast on The CW on Sunday March 7, 2021, and like every other awards ceremony in the era of COVID will not be in front of its usual live audience of members and nominees but rather in more of a virtual/live hybrid, although full details of what it will look like have not yet been announced. The ceremony will include both Motion Pictures and Television achievements. Nominees for the TV awards were previously announced on January 18. In the studio/network tally, Netflix leads both film and television nominations with a total of 72 possible wins. HBO/HBO Max carries over their 24 series nominations, and Amazon Studios expands its total to 18 with today’s film additions. You can see the full list of today’s Film nominations, as well as a recap of the TV nominations below.
Critics Choice Awards
“Mea Culpa”
Stormy and Michael
When he was Donald Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen was hellbent on silencing Stormy Daniels, even arranging a hush-money payment to the porn actress that landed him in federal prison.
Now, as one of many of the former president’s insiders-turned-critics, Cohen is literally broadcasting Daniels’ story — including intimate new details of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump — in a discussion ranging from shame and scandal to a haunted house in New Orleans.
Seeking to bury the hatchet, Cohen interviews Daniels in the latest episode of his podcast, “Mea Culpa,” in which the two commiserate over life-altering experiences with Trump and his recent departure from office.
“My battle is just now starting,” Daniels tells Cohen in their first ever conversation, referring to litigation she said had been in a holding pattern before Trump left office. “People are really upset, and they’re just going to get more pissed off at me.”
Cohen, in keeping with the title of his program, apologizes for “the needless pain” he put Daniels through when he arranged a $130,000 payment during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an alleged dalliance with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair.
Stormy and Michael
TikTok and Universal Music
‘Expanded Global Alliance’
Just days after Triller and Universal Music Group essentially declared war on each other, UMG has unveiled a global agreement with TikTok “that delivers equitable compensation for recording artists and songwriters and significantly expands and enhances the companies’ existing relationship, promoting the development of new innovative experiences,” the announcement reads.
Via the agreement, which covers recorded music from artists at UMG’s labels and songwriters with Universal Music Publishing Group, “TikTok users will be more empowered than ever to express themselves through music, soundtrack their video creations with songs about which they are passionate and build communities around artists and music-centered culture.” The companies have additionally pledged to experiment with new features: TikTok users will now be able to incorporate clips from UMG’s full catalog of music, spanning the company’s iconic labels, songwriters and global territories.
“We are excited to enter this new era with UMG and UMPG to continue supporting artists and songwriters, by working together to help reach music fans on TikTok. Our platform has been a driver in creating chart hits and licensing the world’s biggest catalog of tracks will continue to inspire our community. In turn, we are proud to partner with UMG and UMPG to be a source to help new talent emerge and to re-introduce legacy acts to a new audience,” said Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music for TikTok.
“UMG and TikTok will now work more closely than ever to promote ambitious experimentation, innovation and collaboration — with the shared objective of developing new music experiences and features. Driving new and deeper connections with fans, this agreement delivers equitable compensation to our recording artists and songwriters, as well as a commitment to develop industry-leading tools, A&R insights and models necessary to advance their careers,” said Michael Nash, Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy at UMG.
‘Expanded Global Alliance’
Album Sales Spike
Morgan Wallen
Despite being actively shunned by his industry after video of him shouting a racial slur was published, country music singer Morgan Wallen has seen a spike in album sales and streams.
The video, published last Tuesday by TMZ, has spurred a flurry of consequences for the singer: He was pulled from airplay by several major radio groups, suspended by his label, reportedly dropped by his booking agency and denied eligibility for a major awards competition. Yet Wallen saw a 1,220 percent increase in digital album sales and a 327 percent increase in song sales between Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Rolling Stone.
The country music phenom also saw a 6 percent increase in on-demand audio streams and 16 percent increase in programmed streams, the magazine reported.
However, the artist saw a 79 percent drop in radio play compared with the previous two days, Rolling Stone reported. The drop came after radio chains — including Cumulus, iHeartMedia and SiriusXM — announced that they were pulling his songs.
Morgan Wallen
New Emails
Covid-19
A new trove of emails from congressional investigators shows how Trump appointees pressured scientists tackling the coronavirus to back unproven treatments and limit testing guidelines, as the House of Representatives presses on with its oversight investigation.
The House has been conducting an oversight investigation of the Trump administration's pandemic response since last April, and its latest round of disclosures suggest a “persistent pattern of political interference in the nation’s public health response,” chairman James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, wrote in a statement.
Taken together, material from the investigation “shows that political appointees were involved in the decision to change CDC’s guidance, and that the Trump Administration changed the guidance for the explicit purpose of reducing testing and allowing the virus to spread while quickly reopening the economy," Mr Clyburn added.
The emails include messages from Paul Alexander, a Trump-appointed scientific adviser, who had controversially pushed for deliberately infecting young people with coronavirus to achieve herd immunity, before he was fired in September.
In one exchange, Mr Alexander, who could not be reached for comment, defends a decision from the CDC in August to change its testing guidance to say those in close contact with infected people “do not necessarily need a test,” a decision it later reversed in September after pressure from public health experts.
Covid-19
Unprecedented Enrollment Drop
Catholic Schools
Enrollment in Roman Catholic schools in the United States dropped 6.4% from the previous academic year amid the pandemic and economic stresses — the largest single-year decline in at least five decades, Catholic education officials reported Monday.
Among the factors were the closure or consolidation of more than 200 schools and the difficulty for many parents of paying tuition fees that average more than $5,000 for grades K-8 and more than $10,000 for secondary schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.
Between the 2019-2020 school year and the current year, nationwide enrollment dropped by 110,000 to about 1.6 million students. Back in the 1960s, enrollment was more than 5 million.
With the recent wave of closures, there are now 5,981 Catholic schools in the United States, compared with more than 11,000 in 1970.
Catholic Schools
Nightmare for Allergy Sufferers
Climate Change
A new study out Monday is the latest to suggest that climate change is already making people’s lives worse, this time for those allergic to pollen. The findings indicate show pollen season in North America has gotten measurably longer and that pollen has become more plentiful over the past three decades, due in part to a warmer climate.
There are different types of pollen from plants and trees that become prevalent at different times of the year. But typically, the pollen season starts in early spring and runs through the summer and early fall. These months are associated with an uptick in seasonal allergies, which is also known as hay fever or allergic rhinitis. Sufferers experience cold-like symptoms like a stuffy or runny nose, watery eyes, along with itching around their nose and roof of the mouth.
The study’s researchers looked at data from pollen count stations across the U.S. and Canada, stretching between 1990 to 2018. During those years, they found that the pollen season has significantly changed. Compared to 1990, the average pollen season in an area now starts about 20 days earlier, runs 10 days longer, and pumps out 21% more pollen. While this change was seen everywhere, areas like Texas and the the midwestern U.S. saw the largest increases in total pollen over those years.
Some studies have found evidence in the lab that warmer temperatures should lead to worse pollen seasons. Others have predicted that certain allergy-causing plants like ragweed will become more widespread over the next few decades. But the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is some of the first research to explicitly tie climate change to worse pollen seasons, and to suggest that it’s making things worse here and now.
Climate change isn’t the only factor that’s making the pollen season more of a nightmare for allergy sufferers in recent years, they noted. But according to their model, it’s likely that climate change is primarily responsible for about half of the added days seen over this time, along with 8% of the heavier pollen counts. They also found that climate change has had a larger contribution on the pollen season as the years have gone on, which doesn’t exactly bode well for what’s ahead.
Climate Change
Oldest DNA
Neanderthals
Biologist Marco Candela and his colleagues recently sequenced ancient microbial DNA from 50,000-year-old Neanderthal feces found at the El Salt archaeological site in Spain. The sequences included DNA from several of the microbes that still call our intestines home, as well as a few that have nearly vanished from today’s urban dwellers. According to Candela and his colleagues, their results suggest that the microscopic population of our guts may have been with us since at least 500,000 years ago, in the era of our species’ last common ancestor with Neanderthals.
Mixed in with the layer of sediment that once formed the floor of a Neanderthal rock shelter in eastern Spain, archaeologists found millimeter-sized coprolites (fossil poop) and chemical signatures of human feces. An earlier study, published in 2014, sifted through the tiny coprolites to look for traces of Neanderthal diets. “These samples therefore represent, to our knowledge, the oldest known positive identification of human fecal matter,” wrote Candela and his colleagues.
They recently returned to El Salt for new samples, which they scoured for fragments of ancient DNA from the bacteria and other microbes that once lived in the intestines of Neanderthals. To weed out possible contamination, Candela and his colleagues sorted out the old, obviously degraded ancient DNA from the more pristine modern sequences. Most of the ancient DNA in the sediments came from bacteria that lived in the soil and water—tiny relics of the Pleistocene environment. But the rest included some familiar companions.
In the 50,000-year-old feces-laden sediments from El Salt, Candela and his colleagues identified several key members of the human gut microbiome, like the aptly named Faecalibacterium and the somewhat ironically named Roseburia, both of which help break down dietary fiber into shorter chemicals that your body can metabolize. The team also found the genus Bifidobacterium, which helps digest sugars in milk and also plays a key role in the early childhood immune system. It’s “one of the human commensal bacteria of greatest current interest, due to its very promising potential as a biomarker of a healthy gut microbiome,” they wrote.
Neanderthals
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