Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Alexandra Petri: Goodbye, America! Tanks for everything! (Washington Post)
A farewell to a beloved friend.
Jonathan Chait: Democratic Presidential Candidates Need to Stop Taking Unpopular Stances (NY Mag)
The Democratic presidential primary has worked to the party's disadvantage by maneuvering its candidates into unpopular positions. This is not quite a crisis, but it is a serious danger that, if not redressed, could blow up in the party's face.
Matthew Yglesias: Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump (Vox)
He ran as a moderate - and it worked.
Alissa Wilkinson: Midsommar's twisted ending, explained (Vox)
[SPOILERS] What on earth just happened?
Andrew Doyle: The joys of being horrified (Spiked)
Too many horror films give us mere jump scares when what we want is real terror.
Xan Brooks: "Jim Jarmusch: 'I'm for the survival of beauty. I'm for the mystery of life'" (The Guardian)
The acclaimed director talks about his new climate-crisis zombie film, his unique look and why he's taken to hanging out in the woods.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce's Blog #1
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David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
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David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Oh Rats
David
Thanks, Dave!
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• As coach of the Boston Celtics, Red Auerbach used to pull out a cigar and smoke it whenever the Celtics held a commanding lead in the final seconds of a game. This was done not so much to insult other teams as to insult the "higher-ups" of the NBA. Mr. Auerbach once said that when the higher-ups of the NBA were picking on him, he tried to find something he could do to aggravate them. However, he didn't have any luck until he smoked a cigar one day while coaching a game. After the game, the higher-ups sent him a note saying that smoking cigars while sitting on the bench didn't look good. Mr. Auerbach said that since reading the note, he has never been without a cigar.
• Soccer superstar Julie Foudy did a lot of work for an anti-smoking campaign, and in April of 1996 she visited the White House, where Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave her a tour. Ms. Shalala stopped outside the Oval Office, where she asked a Secret Service agent if the President was in it. The agent said the President was, so Ms. Shalala said, "We can't show you the room if he's in there. Come on, let's go down to the Cabinet Room." The Secret Service agent was wrong, as Ms. Shalala and Ms. Foudy bumped into President Bill Clinton as he turned the corner. Ms. Foudy said, "We were just looking for you," and they chatted for a while.
• Professional golfer Bryon Nelson once was offered $500 to endorse the cigarettes of a certain tobacco company. This was big money at the time, and Mr. Nelson accepted it. However, he had second thoughts when Sunday School teachers started writing him to ask, "How could you?" These letters upset Mr. Nelson, and he contacted the tobacco company and tried to give the money back. Unfortunately, the tobacco company refused to let him out of his contract and so the advertisements stayed in circulation.
• Ice skater Peggy Fleming's father knew how to handle teenage smoking. When she was a young teenager, Peggy got hold of a pack of cigarettes and lit one up in the garage. Her father walked into the garage, saw her smoking, and said, "Hmm, you're smoking? Great. I feel like smoking too. Why don't we smoke together?" They ended up smoking the whole pack of cigarettes together. Young Peggy got sick, and she never smoked again.
• Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, started to smoke while her father was President. He would not allow her to smoke in the White House, so she used to climb up to the roof and smoke there. About his daughter, Mr. Roosevelt said, "I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."
• Rod Serling found becoming a published author difficult. Early in his career, the magazines he submitted his work to sent him forty rejection slips in a row. However, once he began to become successful, his workload on such projects as The Twilight Zone became enormous, and he smoked as much as four packs of cigarettes a day to help stimulate him enough to keep up with it.
• Rev. Gustave Weigel, S.J., once lit a cigar and began puffing on it contentedly following an interfaith dinner. A fundamentalist Protestant looked on, disgusted, and asked, "Don't you Catholics believe that the body is a temple?" After the priest replied, "Yes," the fundamentalist asked why he was putting smoke in it. Father Weigel replied, "You put sausage in it."
• Famous pianist Adolphe Henselt suffered so badly from stage fright that he used to stay offstage until the very last minute, then rush onstage to play his solo before running offstage again. Once, he had to rush so quickly to the piano that he wasn't able to put out his cigar first, so he had to smoke throughout his solo.
• Nelson Mandela's father, Mphakanyiswa, probably died because of a heavy smoking habit. During the last days of his life, he coughed heavily, looked ill, and lost weight. Just before he died, he asked for his tobacco and pipe. Smoking stopped the heavy coughing, and he was peaceful as he smoked. He died an hour later with his pipe still lit.
• In the late 19th century, Francis Hodgson Burnett, author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, smoked, although smoking by women was considered scandalous at the time. Often, she took a puff from a cigarette in one hand, then took a bite of a cream peppermint in her other hand.
• A man who had fathered 16 children once appeared on You Bet Your Life. Groucho Marx asked, "Why do you have so many children?" The man answered, "Because I like my wife." Groucho took a drag on his cigar, then said, "I like my cigar, too, but I take it out sometime."
• TV commercials for the European jeans manufactured by Diesel sometimes addressed contemporary issues. One commercial was headlined, "How to smoke 145 cigarettes a day." In it, a talking skull asks the viewers, "Man, who needs two lungs anyway?"
• Early cigarette advertising slogans were misleading, if not outright lies. The slogans "More doctors smoke Camels" and "Your mouth feels cleaner, your throat refreshed" seem to imply that smoking is healthy and does not make the smoker's breath reek.
• Want to keep teenagers from starting to smoke? Columnist Sandy McIntosh suggests giving tobacco products new brand names. Instead of calling them Camel, Marlboro, and Virginia Slims, let's call them Immature, Loser, and Pimples.
• George Burns smoked cigars on stage, but he was always careful not to blow smoke into his wife and partner's face. He always walked out on stage to find out which way the smoke would blow before his and Gracie Allen's act.
• After Dorothy Hamill won the gold medal in women's figure skating at the 1976 Winter Olympic Games, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do now, Dorothy?" She joked, "I'm going to smoke a cigar."
• Many Native Americans regard tobacco as a sacred plant. Often, they give tobacco to the Creator.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
4 letter obscene words!
Not even the F word is obscene enough for my reaction to this:
Trump Says He's Planning Repeat of July 4 Event
It wasn't a one-time deal.
President Donald Trump says he's planning a repeat of the "Salute to America'' Fourth of July festivities that included a speech by him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump says it was "a wonderful day for all Americans'' and that, "based on its tremendous successes,'' his administration has "made the decision to do it again next year and maybe we can say for the foreseeable future.''
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Residual fireworks still going off, so there's still a cat velcro-ed to my lap.
Women's World Cup
Ratings
American television viewers turned out in large numbers to see if the U.S. women's national soccer team, led by Megan Rapinoe, could bring home the title of world champion.
The 2019 Women's World Cup final Sunday, in which the United States beat the Netherlands 2-0, drew more than 14 million viewers, making it the most-watched soccer event in the U.S. since the 2015 women's final, according to a statement from Fox Sports, which cited data from media measurement company Nielsen.
Fox's TV broadcast drew just under 14 million viewers, with another 289,000 viewers streaming the game, according to Fox Sports. The match drew 22 percent more viewers than the Men's World Cup final played between France and Croatia last year, according to Nielsen data.
The final was also a hit on social media, with the network touting 17.8 million views across various platforms, outpacing the 2018 men's final by 18 percent, Fox said in a press release.
Sunday's match did, however, break a record for Telemundo, the NBCUniversal-owned Spanish-language channel. The company said it notched 1.6 million viewers, making the final the most watched women's World Cup match in Spanish-language history. The U.S. team also won on that occasion, though the game was broadcast in prime time.
Ratings
UK Phone Hacking Apology, Payout
Heather Mills
Heather Mills, the former wife of Paul McCartney, and her sister have received an apology and a settlement from Britain's defunct News of the World tabloid over the hacking of their phones.
Heather Mills and her sister Fiona Mills both received a formal apology in Britain's High Court on Monday. In a statement read outside the court, she said she felt "joy and vindication" at the settlement.
"My motivation to win this decade-long fight stemmed from a desire to obtain justice, not only for my family, my charities and myself, but for the thousands of innocent members of the public who, like me, have suffered similar ignominious, criminal treatment at the hands of one of the world's most powerful media groups," she said.
Mills is one of a number of celebrities who have received settlements in the prolonged phone hacking scandal, which closed the Rupert Murdoch (R-Evil Incarnate)-owned News of the World in 2011. The paper was found to have hacked into the voicemail of many prominent Britons in a gross violation of privacy.
The size of what was called a "substantial settlement" hasn't been revealed.
Heather Mills
Samuel L Jackson Joins Cast
Saw
Samuel L Jackson has become the first and suitably unexpected cast member for the forthcoming reboot of horror franchise Saw, which has already inspired puzzlement in that it is being brought to the screen by comedian Chris Rock.
Horror site Bloody Disgusting has confirmed the truth in a Reddit rumour that Jackson had been spotted on set, while adding that Rock himself is also due to star in the movie along with crafting the story for it.
Earlier today a Reddit user posted photos from the set along with the message: "Set pics I got while doing a cleaning job in Toronto, pretty cool I talked to a guy that was there and he said the new one is gonna have Samuel L Jackson in it, can't wait to find out."
The set photographs have since been deleted.
It was confirmed in May that the long running franchise, which has grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide since it debuted in 2004, was being revived under Rock and director Darren Lynn Bousman, who previously directed Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV.
Saw
Library Owner Detaine
Stan Lee
Camsing International, the Chinese firm that has owned the late Stan Lee's Pow! Entertainment since 2017, has revealed that its founder and chairwoman Lo Ching has been detained by mainland Chinese authorities. The company's shares crashed by more than 85% on Monday morning.
Camsing revealed Lo's detention in a filing to the stock exchange in Hong Kong, where it is listed. It said that it became aware of her situation on Friday (July 5), and that she is being held "in criminal custody" by the Yangpu branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau.
"As at the date of this announcement, the directors are unable to ascertain the reasons of, or incidents leading to, the criminal custody of Ms. Lo. Nevertheless, as at the date of this announcement, the normal business operations of the Group and the functions of the Board both remained stable and have not been materially and adversely affected by the aforesaid event," Camsing said in its filing.
Lo is also chair of another mainland-listed company Jiangsu Boxin Investing. In a regulatory filing to Chinese stock regulators, made after the close of trading on Friday evening, Boxin said that Lo and another executive, CFO Jiang Shaoyang had been detained Shanghai Public Security Bureau. While Boxin had received a certificate of their detention earlier that day, the company said that Lo had been detained on June 20, and Jiang taken in on June 25.
Camsing shares plunged by 86% on Monday, falling from HK$4.59 at their Friday close, to just HK$0.62 at the lunchtime trading break. Boxin shares initially fell from RMB12.28 on Friday to RMB11.00 in the morning trading session o the Shanghai stock exchange. But in the afternoon rebounded to RMB13.51.
Stan Lee
'Appalled' At U.S. Treatment
Michelle Bachelet
U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet is "appalled" at the conditions in which the United States is keeping detained migrants and refugees, including children, her office said in a statement on Monday.
"As a pediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of state, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate healthcare or food, and with poor sanitation conditions," the statement quoted Bachelet as saying.
U.S. President Don-Old Trump (R-Grifter) has made a hardline immigration stance a key issue of his presidency and 2020 re-election bid.
"In most of these cases, the migrants and refugees have embarked on perilous journeys with their children in search of protection and dignity and away from violence and hunger," Bachelet said.
"When they finally believe they have arrived in safety, they may find themselves separated from their loved ones and locked in undignified conditions. This should never happen anywhere."
Michelle Bachelet
Invited To White House Social Media Summit
Cartoonist
While Facebook and Twitter are reportedly still waiting for their invites, President Don-Old Trump (R-Churl) has invited a cartoonist accused of creating "a blatantly anti-Semitic" illustration to a Social Media Summit at the White House.
Artist Ben Garrison, whose work often display alt-right themes and is a favorite of the popular pro-Trump Reddit community The_Donald, tweeted a picture Friday of his invitation to the White House for the summit the following week.
"Honored to be invited to the White House!" wrote the Garrison on Friday. "Thank you, Mr. President!"
Garrison, known for conspiracy-minded alt-right cartoons, created an illustration in 2017 that was slammed by the Anti-Defamation League for anti-Semitic imagery. It was apparently commissioned for a website created by radio host Mike Cernovich. Cernovich promoted the bizarre "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, which eventually led to a North Carolina man firing an assault rifle in a D.C. area pizza parlor.
Garrison's 2017 cartoon depicted then-U.S. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and retired General David Petraeus being controlled by strings held by philanthropist George Soros. Soros, himself Jewish, is suspended from strings held by a hand labeled "Rothschilds," an American banking family long subject to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
Cartoonist
Proves Rock Transcends Species
Cockatoo
Birds of a feather flock together, but this cockatoo rocks alone. A new study reveals that the internet-famous cockatoo named Snowball can do more than just bust moves - whether headbanging, wildly tapping its foot or gyrating its mohawked head - in sync with the beat of the music. The parrot creates his own steps as well.
This entertaining finding has profound implications for our understanding of animal intelligence. In effect, the discovery indicates that spontaneous dance isn't a human invention, but rather something that occurs when certain cognitive and neural capacities align in animal brains, the researchers said.
The inspiration for the study began with the pet bird Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora) whose hilarious dance moves went viral on YouTube a decade ago, as he shimmied to the Backstreet Boys.
Intrigued, researchers studied Snowball to gain insight into how animals process music, which in turn could shed light on the evolution of human musicality, said Aniruddh Patel, a professor of psychology at Tufts University in Massachusetts. In 2009, Patel and his colleagues published a study on Snowball in the journal Current Biology, "showing he spontaneously synchronized his movements to the beat of music, something seen in every human culture but which had never been observed in a nonhuman animal," Patel told Live Science in an email.
Then, Snowball surprised the researchers again. "After that study, we noticed him doing new movements to music that we hadn't seen before," Patel said. These new moves were Snowball's own creations; they weren't modeled after any cavorting from his owner, Irena Schulz, nor was he trained (for instance, no food rewards were involved) as he came up with this new repertoire, Patel said.
Cockatoo
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