from Bruce
Anecdotes
Grandparents
• When Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, became valedictorian of his high school in 1922, the principal attempted to compliment him to his grandmother by saying that he never thought of Ralph as a Negro. Ralph’s grandmother firmly stated, “He is a Negro — and proud of it.”
• Frank DeCaro, the author of A Boy Named Phyllis, had a grandmother who liked to read trashy novels such as Valley of the Dolls and Airport while sitting under a hairdryer. Just to keep her family guessing, however, she occasionally varied her reading matter with a book such as Saints to Know and Love.
• Jayree, one of Jerry Clower’s grandsons, came to visit his grandparents for a while, and Homerline, his grandmother, told him a couple of times to pick up his toys. Jayree ignored her for a while, then he put his hands on his hips and asked Mr. Clower, “Grandaddy, how have you lived with her all these years?”
• Famed conductor Arturo Toscanini asked his granddaughter Sonia Horowitz, whose father was the famed pianist Vladimir Horowitz, whether she would prefer to be a conductor like her grandfather or a pianist like her father. She answered, “A conductor — because it’s a lot easier.”
• When television talk-show host David Letterman was a small child, his grandfather used to take him out to hunt for watermelons. They were always careful to sneak up on the watermelons, because if a watermelon knows you are coming, it will run away.
Halloween
• When ballerina Darci Kistler was five years old, a neighbor gave her a Halloween costume — a pink tutu. Because she knew that she wanted to learn to dance (even at age three, she was cutting photographs of ballerinas out of magazines), she wore the tutu around the house after Halloween as a hint for her mother to sign her up for dance lessons. The hint worked.
Husbands and Wives
• Just after the end of World War II, while country comedian Archie Campbell was still an enlisted man in the United States Navy, he hadn’t seen his wife for a long time, so he asked Lieutenant Sam Bailey if a way could be arranged for him to see her. Therefore, Lieutenant Bailey asked Mr. Campbell to take an apparatus to Florida to have it repaired — of course, Mr. Campbell had his wife meet him in Florida. At the repair shop, Mr. Campbell asked how long it would take to have the apparatus repaired, and the technician assured him that it would be repaired by the very next day. This was bad news for Mr. Campbell and his wife, so he explained the situation to the technician, saying, “I haven’t seen my wife in over a year. Take longer than that.” The technician replied, “In that case, it will take at least a week.”
• As a world-class track athlete, Thelma Wright competed away from home, meaning long separations from her husband, Lee. And even when her husband was nearby, practices, competitions, and media interviews sometimes kept her from seeing him. At the 1972 Olympic Games, many fans asked for her autograph and gave her pieces of papers to sign. While she was surrounded by autograph-seeking fans one day, someone gave her a crumpled piece of paper. She looked up to see who had given her the paper — it was her husband, who said, “Hi, I just wanted to say hello.”
• Hugh Downs and his wife were in Washington, D.C. While Mr. Downs’ wife was in the shower, he received a telephone call saying that their flight to New York had been cancelled because of bad weather. However, after making a telephone call, he discovered that a train would be leaving soon for New York. So he quickly packed all of his and his wife’s clothing and had it sent to the train station. Just then, his wife came into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. “Dear,” she said, “would you please hand me my green dress?”
• A housewife once bought some guest towels for a party. She hung them up in the bathroom, but being afraid that her husband would use the towels before the party started, she hung a sign on them: “If you use these towels, I’ll kill you.” Then she went around the house, making other preparations. The party seemed to go well, but when it was over, she noticed that none of the guests had used the guest towels — she had forgotten to take down the sign.
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Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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Track: "Bumblebee Twist"
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All tracks by The Screaming Seagulls except "Bumblebee Twist" by The Ventures.
Price: £1 (GBP) for track; £3 (GBP) for five-track album
Genre: Surf
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Sells Nobel Prize For Ukrainian Children
Dmitry Muratov
What’s the price of peace?
That question could be partially answered Monday night when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctions off his Nobel Peace Prize medal. The proceeds will go directly to UNICEF in its efforts to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine.
Muratov, awarded the gold medal in October 2021, helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was Muratov’s idea to auction off his prize, having already announced he was donating the accompanying $500,000 cash award to charity. The idea of the donation, he said, “is to give the children refugees a chance for a future.”
Dmitry Muratov
80th Birthday
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is raking in the 80th birthday wishes from an array of friends and musical peers, including Bob Dylan, Carole King, Elton John, and Questlove.
The aforementioned artists — and many others — all sent in short video messages celebrating the musician, who entered his eighth decade today, June 20. The clip also includes Smokey Robinson, Barry Gibb, Chuck D, Fleet Foxes, Graham Nash, David Crosby, John Fogerty, Micky Dolenz, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and She and Him. Wilson’s longtime collaborator and former Beach Boys bandmate Al Jardine also chimed in — and tossed in a requisite dig at Mike Love for good measure: “Hi Brian, I’m the guy who sings on your left, Al Jardine. Just remember, we’ll always be younger than your cousin, Mike.”
Several non-musicians popped up in the video as well, including Cameron Crowe, John Cusack, and Jeff Bridges, who delivered the most Dude-possible message to Wilson, “Thank you for all the gifts you’ve given us over all these years, it’s so wonderful being alive with you, man!”
Considering the occasion, and the personnel involved, the video did feature some lovely musical touches. Fleet Foxes had a small horn section play part of “God Only Knows” in their clip, while Smokey Robinson sang a bit of “Happy Birthday To You” and Dylan delivered a full-on acoustic rendition of the song at the end of the video. The award, however, for the best performance goes to the one and only Joe Walsh, who peeled off a bunch of tasty riffs as he created his own characteristically bonkers birthday tune for Wilson on the spot.
Brian Wilson
Wins Van Cliburn Competition
Yunchan Lim
An 18-year-old from South Korea has won the 16th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the top showcases for the world's best pianists.
The competition held in Fort Worth, Texas, ended Saturday night with Yunchan Lim becoming the competition's youngest winner of the gold medal. His winnings include a cash award of $100,000 and three years of career management.
The silver medalist was Anna Geniushene, a 31-year-old from Russia, and the bronze medalist is Dmytro Choni, a 28-year-old from Ukraine.
The competition was founded in 1962 in honor of the celebrated pianist Van Cliburn, who lived in Fort Worth. Cliburn, who died in 2013 at age 78, played for U.S. presidents, royalty and heads of state around the world. He is best remembered for winning the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, at the height of the Cold War.
Yunchan Lim
Less Gay-Friendly Than You Think
Hollywood
When the Elton John biopic Rocketman opened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019, expectations were sky-high. Just months earlier, Bohemian Rhapsody, another rock-music biopic, this one centered on Queen’s Freddie Mercury, had pulled off a surprise box-office coup, raking in $911 million worldwide. Paramount Pictures had taken a big gamble with Rocketman, spending $41 million on the production and entrusting the lead role to an actor who wasn’t quite a household name (Taron Egerton), but the success of Bohemian — for which Rami Malek had won a Best Actor Oscar in March — augured good things.
There was one notable difference between the films when it came to telling their subjects’ stories, however: While Bohemian glossed over the topic of Mercury’s queerness, Rocketman met John’s love life head-on, becoming the first major studio film to depict gay male sex onscreen. And sadly, that historic moment of progress may have hurt the film’s chances at the kind of global domination Bohemian enjoyed.
Rocketman never received a release in China, where homosexuality is not legally recognized and gay-themed films are routinely barred from distribution. (By comparison, Bohemian’s scant references to Mercury’s sexuality were simply cut for its China release.) The film was also denied release in the Middle East. After a triumphant bow in Cannes, complete with John and Egerton dueting on the beach, Rocketman‘s worldwide haul totaled just $195 million. The underwhelming performance seemingly did not go unnoticed: This September, Bros, Universal’s gay rom-com starring Billy Eichner, will mark the first major studio release to show gay male sex onscreen in more than three years.
While Hollywood outwardly signals blanket support for LGBTQ+ rights, its track record often tells a different story. By some measures, the entertainment industry even appears to be moving backward. In the spring, Disney drew widespread criticism for opting not to release a statement condemning Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, and for donating funds to politicians who supported the legislation, which bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. The streaming giant Netflix recently came under fire for releasing comedy specials from both Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais which featured jokes targeting the transgender community. And on the big screen, gay characters continue to be largely relegated to the sidelines — and edited out of movies altogether when they are deemed too high a financial risk.
Hollywood
Seriously, WTF
Uvalde
Parents and reporters were asked to leave Uvalde City Hall this afternoon before a Texas House of Representatives committee held a hearing to gather testimony from officers involved in the response to a school shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers and wounded 17 others there last month.
Video posted by CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz shows a fire marshal telling Prokupecz that they are being asked to leave the meeting because “someone is intimidated.”
As the conversation continues a chaplain walks by saying he’s “come down to protect our children.”
Another man, whose nephew reportedly was among those killed in the shooting, asks the fire marshal, “What people are intimidated, the officers?”
The fire marshal responds by asking the man — who is wearing a pin with a child’s picture on it and a “Uvalde Strong” T-shirt — to leave the building.
Uvalde
Same-Sex Marriage Ban
Japan
A Japanese court ruled on Monday that a ban on same-sex marriage was not unconstitutional, dealing a setback to LGBTQ rights activists in the only Group of Seven nation that does not allow people of the same gender to marry.
The ruling dashes activists' hopes of raising pressure on the central government to address the issue after a court in the city of Sapporo in March 2021 decided in favour of a claim that not allowing same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.
Three same-sex couples - two male, one female - had filed the case in a district court in Osaka, only the second to be heard on the issue in Japan.
In addition to rejecting their claim that being unable to marry was unconstitutional, the court threw out their demand for 1 million yen ($7,400) in damages for each couple.
Japan's constitution defines marriage as being based on "the mutual consent of both sexes". But the introduction of partnership rights for same-sex couples in Tokyo last week, along with rising support in opinion polls, had raised the hopes of activists and lawyers for the Osaka case.
Japan
Returns Lumumba's Tooth
Belgium
Belgian authorities on Monday returned a gold-capped tooth belonging to the slain Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, as the former colonial power continues to confront its bloody past and look toward reconciliation.
The restitution of the relic took place after Belgium’s King Philippe earlier this month expressed his “deepest regrets” for his nation’s abuses in its African former colony, Congo, which is 75 times the size of Belgium.
Following a private ceremony in the presence of relatives of Lumumba during which the federal prosecutor handed over a case containing the tooth, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander De Croo told Congolese officials and Lumumba’s family that the restitution came way too late.
“It is not normal that Belgium held onto the remains of one of the founding fathers of the Congolese nation for six decades,” said De Croo, who also offered apologies for the role played by his country in the assassination.
After his assassination in 1961, Lumumba’s body was dismembered and dissolved with acid in an apparent effort to keep any grave from becoming a pilgrimage site. The tooth was seized by Belgian officials in 2016 from the daughter of the Belgian police commissioner who said he took it after overseeing the destruction of Lumumba’s body.
Belgium
Humans Can Learn In Just 10 Weeks
'Echolocate'
With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds and interpreting the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment.
In as few as 10 weeks, researchers have been able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of objects using the rebounding calls of their clicks.
The experiment, the results of which were published in 2021, involved 12 participants who'd been diagnosed as legally blind during their childhood, and 14 sighted people.
Echolocation is a skill we usually associate with animals such as bats and whales, but some blind humans also use the echoes of their own sounds to detect obstacles and their outlines. Some use the tapping of a cane or the snapping of their fingers to make the necessary noise, while others use their mouths to make a clicking sound.
Despite how useful this skill can be, very few blind people are currently taught how to do it. Expert echolocators have been trying to spread the word for years, and this study suggests a simple training schedule is all that's needed.
'Echolocate'
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