from Bruce
Anecdotes
Comedians and Humorists
• As a five-year-old child, Sid Caesar learned several words in foreign languages while helping out in his father’s restaurant. Many people of different ethnic groups came in, and they took great delight in teasing young Sid. The Italians would teach him a dirty word in Russian and send him over to the Russians’ table to say it, and then the Russians would teach him a dirty word in Italian and send him over to the Italians’ table to say it. This training in languages was of enormous help when Mr. Caesar began to speak foreign-sounding gibberish on his TV shows.
• Frank Aloysius Robert Tinney became a comedian in the early 20th century and stumbled upon his act almost by accident. One day, he was called upon to perform without his partner, so he was forced to use a badly rehearsed orchestra leader as his partner, and of course the orchestra leader muffed his lines. This made Mr. Tinney angry, so on stage he began to berate the orchestra leader: “Say, you’re crabbing my act. You hadn’t ought to of said that. You ought to of said ….” The audience felt that this was hilarious.
• Helen Traubel, who was a somewhat large woman and a very fine singer, and Groucho Marx once appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado together. One day, Ms. Traubel arrived late for rehearsal and Groucho told her, “Hello, Helen, pull up a couple of chairs and sit down.”
Comic Strips
• In 1974, Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, was the Grand Marshall of the Rose Parade. His Peanuts comic strip of that time contains an in-joke: Linus walks into a room in which Lucy is watching the Rose Parade and asks, “Has the Grand Marshall gone by yet?” Lucy replies, “Yeah, you missed him … but he wasn’t anyone you ever heard of.” In one early cartoon, Charlie Brown worries that no one cares about him, and then he says, “I’ll bet that Doctor Spock cares about me.” Shortly afterward, Mr. Schulz received a letter from Doctor Benjamin Spock, author of a famous child-care book. The letter stated, “You can tell Charlie Brown that I care about him very much.” By the way, Mr. Schulz once said, “Cartooning is a fairly sort of proposition. You have to be fairly intelligent—if you were really intelligent, you’d be doing something else. You have to draw fairly well—if you drew really well, you’d be a painter. You have to write fairly well—if you wrote really well, you’d be writing books. It’s great for a fairly person like me.”
Conductors
• Oscar Levant told these stories about conductors: 1) Leopold Stokowski was acting as a guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic when he was annoyed by a musician who talked during a rehearsal. Maestro Stokowski ordered the musician to leave the rehearsal, but instead of being contrite, the musician said, “Thank you—I haven’t had a Thursday evening off all winter.” 2) Conductor Modest Altschuler of the Russian Symphony Orchestra once tried to get a more emotional performance from an oboist during a rehearsal of Scheherazade by pointing to the concertmaster and saying, “Here is the princess and you are making love to her.” Maestro Altschuler then stopped and looked at the poor complexion of the concertmaster, and added, “I’m sorry I can’t do better.” 3) Walter Damrosch was known for conducting with a slow beat. Once, a member of his orchestra threatened him, “If you bawl me out again, I’ll follow your beat.” 4) A musician who continually tuned his violin during each pause in a rehearsal annoyed Arturo Toscanini, who told the violinist, “It’s not the A that counts, but the B.”
• Arturo Toscanini made his debut as a conductor when he was 19 years old. He was a cellist in an orchestra traveling in South America, and in Rio de Janeiro the regular music conductor got into an argument with the manager. Because a conductor was needed for Aida, and because Toscanini was already known for his musical ability, he took over and conducted despite not having time for even one rehearsal—he even conducted from memory. The performance was electrifying, and a new star was recognized. By the way, Maestro Toscanini’s ears were very sensitive. Once, he listened to a broadcast by another conductor and was so upset that he knelt and begged, “Please, please! No more ritenuti!” Also by the way, while on tour in Rio de Janeiro, one of Maestro Toscanini’s violinists was killed by an autobus. Toscanini wept, created a fund for the violinist’s widow, and made a big contribution.
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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: "Zomb Zomb"
Single: This is a one-sided single.
Artist: The Delstroyers
Artist Location: Seattle, Washington
Record Company: Hell Hop Records
Record Company Location: Seattle, Washington
Info:
“The Delstroyers emerged from the mists of Seattle, WA in 2016, awash in reverb and cloaked in black. Their dark, instrumental surf melodies pay homage to both the founders of the genre and the revivalists of the 1990s, all wrapped in an undying love for things that go bump in the night.”
“The Delstroyers are an instrumental surf band from murky Seattle, WA USA that worships things like Fender Reverb units and creatures that go bump in the night. In 2017, the band teamed up with producer Johnny Sangster (Mudhoney, The Posies, The Supersuckers) on their first full-length album, DIABOLICAL! In 2019, the 7" RESURRECTED was released, and a new full-length record is coming in May 2022.”
“Though we have long lurked away from prying eyes, our hands have not been idle. Clawing and scraping from beneath the ground, a single is unearthed. But this is only the first of many monsters to come; it has awakened, and she is … Zomb Zomb!”
“Hell Hop Records is proud to present this single, the first track on the The Delstroyers’ electrifying instrumental surf album 10,000 WAYS TO DIE, releasing Friday the 13th of May, 2022.”
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE)
Genre: Instrumental Horror Surf
Links:
“Zomb Zomb”
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Reader Suggestion
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Sugar
New Venture
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
Recommended
Recommended Reading
Bethan McKernan: “Rape as a weapon: huge scale of sexual violence endured in Ukraine emerges” (Guardian)
Particularly difficult for many to comprehend is the scale of the sexual violence. As Russian troops have withdrawn from towns and suburbs around the capital in order to refocus the war effort on Ukraine’s east, women and girls have come forward to tell the police, media and human rights organisations of atrocities they have suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers. Gang-rapes, assaults taking place at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children are among the grim testimonies collected by investigators. … Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes and a breach of international humanitarian law, and both Ukraine’s prosecutor general and the international Criminal Court have said they will open investigations into reported sexual violence. But what currently seems like a far-off possibility of justice has done little to assuage Ukrainian women’s fears of what may yet happen in a war that is far from over.
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Mostly overcast.
Soared In 2021
‘Challenged’ Books
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, has never been so busy.
“A year ago, we might have been receiving one, maybe two reports a day about a book being challenged at a library. And usually those calls would be for guidance on how to handle a challenge or for materials that support the value of the work being challenged,” Caldwell-Stone told The Associated Press. “Now, we’re getting three, four, five reports a day, many in need of support and some in need of a great deal of support.”
Accounts of book bannings and attempted book bannings, along with threats against librarians, have soared over the past year and the ALA has included some numbers in its annual State of America’s Libraries Report, released Monday. The association found 729 challenges — affecting nearly 1,600 books — at public schools and libraries in 2021, more than double 2020's figures and the highest since the ALA began compiling challenges more than 20 years ago.
The actual total for last year is likely much higher — the ALA collects data through media accounts and through cases it learns about from librarians and educators and other community members. Books preemptively pulled by librarians — out of fear of community protest or concern for their jobs — and challenges never reported by libraries are not included.
The two most challenged books on the ALA’s top 10 list have been in the news often: Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir about sexual identity, “Gender Queer,” and Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” a coming-of-age novel narrated by a young gay man. Both have been singled out by Republican officials.
‘Challenged’ Books
Local TV Station Unearths Interview Footage
Prince
WCCO Minneapolis recently struck gold when an employee went to pull archival footage for a story about local teachers’ strike.
Production Manager Matt Liddy was looking at features of local landmarks in a 52-year-old film reel when he saw what he believed was a familiar face. Without revealing his guess, he showed the image of a young boy to his co-workers and asked them who it looked like. They all had the same answer: “Prince.”
Reporter Jeff Wagner tracked down one of the Purple Rain legend’s childhood friends, Terrance Jackson, a neighbor who went to kindergarten with the superstar and was in his first band, Grand Central.
“Oh my God, that’s Kitchen,” Jackson said as the video began, recognizing their friend Ronnie Kitchen as a teenager. Then, as the boy in question came into frame he exclaimed, “That is Prince! Standing right there with the hat on, right? That’s Skipper! Oh my God!”
Skipper, it turns out, was the 11-year-old Prince’s nickname.
Prince
Secretly Married
Jon Batiste
Jon Batiste had a lot more to celebrate on Sunday night at the 2022 Grammy Awards than met the eye. Hours before The Late Show With Stephen Colbert band leader took home the coveted album of the year hardware for his album We Are, he revealed in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that he and longtime partner Suleika Jaouad secretly got hitched last month.
“We got married the day before I was admitted to the hospital to undergo my bone marrow transplant,” Jaouad told the show about wanting to get married after the author of the best-selling cancer memoir Between Two Kingdoms was diagnosed with leukemia a second time.
“We have known that we wanted to get married, I think, from the first week that we started dating. That’s when Jon first brought up the topic of marriage to me. So, we’ve had 8 years,” Jaouad laughed about their long, slow walk to the altar. “This is not, you know, a hasty decision!”
She said because of the haste involved in the “tiny, beautiful little ceremony,” they had to push through without official rings, opting for ceremonial “bread ties” instead of precious metals. Batiste told correspondent Jim Axelrod that getting married was an affirmation that the couple have a future together.
“Yes. It’s an act of defiance,” Batiste said. “The darkness will try to overtake you, but just turn on the light. Focus on the light. Hold onto the light.” In fact, Jaouad said that after she was diagnosed, Batiste admitted that he’d been working on a proposal for months. “He said to me, ‘I just want to be very clear, I’m not proposing to you because of this diagnosis. It’s taken me a year to design your ring. So, just know this timing has nothing to do with it. But what I do want you to know is that this diagnosis doesn’t change anything. It just makes it all the clearer to me that I want to commit to this and for us to be together,'” she said. “But once we realized we had this tiny window before the bone marrow transplant, we decided to go for it.”
Jon Batiste
NBCUniversal Buys 30% Stake
Grand Ole Opry
NBCUniversal and investment partner Atairos have paid $293 million for a 30% stake in fabled country music brand the Grand Ole Opry and a cluster of related Nashville-based live entertainment and assets.
The Opry’s home, Ryman Auditorium, is known for hosting the Country Music Awards. It is a cornerstone of Opry Entertainment Group, the division of Ryman Hospitality Properties receiving the investment from NBCU. Along with the Ryman and the Opry itself, a nearly century-old country music showcase, properties include a smaller collection of music venues called Ole Red, radio station WSM-AM and a 50% interest in country lifestyle media network Circle. The network is a joint venture with Gray Television, a major station group owner. The weekly “Grand Ole Opry” stage show streams on Circle.
Atairos is shouldering almost the entire cost of acquiring the stake, putting in $278 million, compared with a direct investment of $15 million by NBCU. The transaction, which is expected to close during the current quarter, values Opry Entertainment at $1.415 billion. That amount will rise to $1.515 billion, according to the deal terms, once an additional $30 million is kicked in by Atairos, contingent on certain performance targets being hit. OEG will also be recapitalized via a $300 million term loan, on top of the 30% stake sale.
Grand Ole Opry
Red States v. Blue States
Murder Rates
Republican politicians routinely claim that cities run by Democrats have been experiencing crime waves caused by failed governance, but a new study shows murder rates are actually higher in states and cities controlled by Republicans.
In February, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., blamed Democrats for a 2018 law that reduced some federal prison sentences — even though it was signed by Trump a known grifter after passing a GOP-controlled Congress. “It’s your party who voted in lockstep for the First Step Act that let thousands of violent felons on the street who have now committed innumerable violent crimes,” Cotton said during a speech in the Senate.
But a comparison of violent crime rates in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats and Republicans tells a very different story. In fact, a new study from the center-left think tank Third Way shows that states won by Trump the loser in the 2020 election have higher murder rates than those carried by Joe Biden. The highest murder rates, the study found, are often in conservative, rural states.
The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump the treason weasel carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump.
Although murder rates tend to be highest in the South, the biggest increases in 2020 were found in the Great Plains and Midwest, according to Third Way. The largest jumps were in Wyoming (91.7% higher than in 2019), South Dakota (69%), Wisconsin (63.2%), Nebraska (59.1%) and Minnesota (58.1%). Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska all voted for Trump the conman and have Republican governors. Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Biden and are led by Democrats.
Murder Rates
Paid Viewers
Researchers
A new study published Sunday found that American viewers are likely to change their political views based on the media outlets from which they get their information.
David E. Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale spent five years researching the effect of partisan media on people’s political views. They tested their theory by gathering a sample of Fox News viewers, some of whom were paid to watch CNN for about seven hours a per week during the month of September 2020. The control group, comprised of the rest of the participants, continued to watch Fox News.
At the end of the testing period, the groups took three rounds of news surveys. Two significant findings emerged from the results: Fox and CNN covered different topics during the survey period, and the Fox-to-CNN group changed their attitudes about several issues.
For instance, those in the switcher group emerged 5 percent more likely to believe in the existence of long COVID. They were also 6 percentage points more likely to think that other countries handled the virus better than the U.S. did.
The most notable differences revolved around race and President Biden. Participants were 10 points less likely to think that supporters of Biden were glad when police officers got shot, and 13 points less likely to think the number of police who get shot by Black Lives Matter protesters would increase if he were to be elected. They were also 11 points less inclined to say Biden should focus on controlling violent protesters than COVID.
Researchers
What Climate Change
French Vineyards
French vintners are lighting candles to thaw their grapevines to save them from a late frost following a winter warm spell, a temperature swing that is threatening fruit crops in multiple countries.
Ice-coated vines stretched across hillsides around Chablis as the Burgundy region woke Monday to temperatures of minus 5 C (23 F). Fruit growers are worried that the frost will kill off large numbers of early buds, which appeared in March as temperatures rose above 20 C (68 F), and disrupt the whole growing season.
The frost is particularly frustrating after a similar phenomenon hit French vineyards last year, leading to some 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in losses. Scientists later found that the damaging 2021 frost was made more likely by climate change.
In neighboring Switzerland, fruit growers scrambled Sunday to protect their crops, rolling out heaters and pellet stoves at night and around dawn, or turning on overhead irrigation systems, said Beatrice Ruettimann, a spokeswoman for Swiss Fruit, a union of fruit producers. Some unfurled plastic sheeting to shield their trees.
Last year’s April frost led to what French government officials described as “probably the greatest agricultural catastrophe of the beginning of the 21st century.” The pattern was similar: an intense April 6-8 frost after a lengthy warm period in March.
Most Distant Exoplanet
K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb
An exoplanet a whopping 17,000 light-years from Earth has been found hiding in data collected by the now-retired Kepler Space Telescope.
It's the most distant world ever picked up by the planet-hunting observatory, twice the distance of its previous record. Fascinatingly, the exoplanet is almost an exact twin of Jupiter – of similar mass, and orbiting at almost the same distance as Jupiter's distance from the Sun.
Named K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, it represents the first exoplanet confirmed from a 2016 data run that detected 27 possible objects using a technique called gravitational microlensing rather than Kepler's primary detection method. The discovery has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and is available on preprint server arXiv.
The Kepler spacecraft was instrumental in blowing the field of exoplanet astronomy wide open. It launched in 2009, and spent nearly 10 years hunting for planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets. During that time, its observations revealed over 3,000 confirmed exoplanets, and another 3,000 candidates.
K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb
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