from Bruce
Anecdotes
Horse Racing
• In 1936 in Cuba, American track star Jesse Owens was supposed to run an exhibition race against Conrado Rodrigues, but the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which was angry at Mr. Owens because he had skipped some money-raising exhibitions after the 1936 Olympics (although Mr. Owens would not have been paid for running in the exhibitions), threatened to revoke Mr. Rodrigues’ amateur status. Therefore, instead of racing against Mr. Rodrigues, Mr. Owens raced against a horse! Because he was given a big lead, Mr. Owens won.
• The owner of a horse once gave famed jockey Eddie Arcaro detailed instructions on how to win a race. Mr. Arcaro followed the instructions exactly, but he finished last instead of first. The horse’s owner was angry and said to him, “I told you exactly what to do! You were supposed to stay in fourth position until the last turn and then take the lead as you came into the stretch.” Mr. Arcaro replied, “What? And leave the horse?”
Injuries
• After gymnast Kurt Thomas won a gold medal in floor exercise at the 1978 World Championships — thus winning the United States its first gold medal ever at this level — he became an instant celebrity and even appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. During his appearance, Johnny asked him, “Kurt, have you ever had any injuries in gymnastics?” Mr. Thomas replied, “Nothing serious, although I did fracture my neck once.”
• Dana X. Bible was a football coach at the University of Texas. He cared about his players, and he once had a center who would play hurt, hiding his injury so he wouldn’t be taken out of the game. Therefore, Mr. Bible asked another player to keep an eye on the center, and if the player noticed that the center was hurt to tell him so that he could take the center out of the game.
• Rodeo clown Benjie Prudom once found herself in a tight spot with a bull in an arena. She put her hand out in front of her, and the 1,900-pound bull ran into it. Of course, people were concerned about her, and when she had gotten out of the arena, someone asked if her hand was broken. She replied, “No, but my fingernail is.”
Language
• World-class women’s gymnastics coaches Bela Karolyi and his wife, Marta, used to speak in their native Romanian when discussing the faults their gymnasts had made during practice. However, they noticed something odd after the young gymnast Betty Okino began training with them. When they used Romanian to criticize an error in a gymnast’s routine, the next time the gymnast did that routine, the error had been corrected. One day, Bela mentioned, in Romanian, an error that young Betty had made and Betty’s eyes grew round. Bela noticed, and he asked her, “You speak Romanian, don’t you?” Betty whispered, “Yes,” everyone laughed, and thereafter Bela and Marta communicated in Hungarian.
• When world-class gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi defected from Romania to the United States, he didn’t know English. He started work cleaning in a restaurant for a man who called him a son of a bitch. Since Mr. Karolyi didn’t know what the words meant, he looked them up in a Romanian-English dictionary. “Son” meant “child of,” and “bitch” meant “female dog,” so Mr. Karolyi put the meanings together, and since everybody loves little puppy dogs, he figured the restaurant owner liked him and was calling him something good. It wasn’t until later, when Mr. Karolyi called one of his gymnastics students a son of a bitch, that he learned that the phrase was not complimentary.
• Maury Maverick, Jr. was raised to be polite and not use bad language in letters. While he was a student at the school that became the Texas Military Institute, he felt that he should have received a letter in football. When he wrote home that he did not receive it, he wrote that he had been “sexually intercoursed” concerning the letter in football.
• Dominique Moceanu won a gold medal as a member of the United States women’s gymnastics team in 1996 at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother, Camelia, was born in Romania and came to the U.S. as an adult. Camelia learned English by watching television and looking up words she didn’t know in her Romanian-English dictionary.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Music to Watch Girls By"
Album: CHICAGO SURF RALLY
Artist: Roger and the Wraybands
Artist Location: Chicago, Illinois
Info:
Any time Roger and the Wraybands play, it’s 1964 again.
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $10 (USD) for 27-track album
Genre: Surf Instrumentals.
Links:
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Wagner Festival
Bayreuth
The annual Bayreuth opera festival has returned after a one-year break forced by the coronavirus pandemic, with a woman conducting for the first time in the 145-year history of the event.
Oksana Lyniv won enthusiastic applause after conducting Richard Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus on Sunday, news agency dpa reported.
Lyniv, a 43-year-old native of Ukraine, is the former principal conductor of Austria’s Graz Opera and a former assistant to current Berlin Philharmonic chief conductor Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera.
The opening performance was attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband, who have been regular guests at the annual celebration of Wagner’s work over the years. Asked at a reception later Sunday about the first woman conducting, Merkel replied: “Finally!”
Festival director Katharina Wagner said that there weren’t that many female conductors in the past, and that it takes courage to learn to conduct. A generation has now grown up “that is courageous enough,” she said.
Bayreuth
Granddaughter Getting Married
Anita Bryant
Sarah Green said she came out to her grandmother, anti-gay rights crusader Anita Bryant, on her 21st birthday.
After Bryant, a famed singer and devout Christian, sang Green "Happy Birthday," she told her a husband would be in her future.
"And I just snapped and was like, 'I hope that he doesn't come along because I'm gay, and I don't want a man to come along,'" Green said on an episode of Slate's podcast "One Year."
That's when Green said her grandmother told her homosexuality doesn't exist.
"It's very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion," Green said. "She wants a relationship with a person who doesn't exist because I'm not the person she wants me to be."
Anita Bryant
Quit ‘Howard the Duck’ After One Week
Robin Williams
It’s been widely known that Robin Williams was courted for and auditioned for Willard Huyck’s 1986 misfire “Howard the Duck,” but it turns out the iconic comedian booked the role and quit after only a week. Voice actor Chip Zien revealed as much in a new interview for The Hollywood Reporter to mark the movie’s 35th anniversary. Zien voiced the eponymous anthropomorphic duck and was originally offended when his agent first brought him the role.
“She asked me if I considered auditioning because I sound a little bit like a duck,” Zien said. “I was miffed. And I told my agent. He said, ‘Oh, my God! Someone came to you about ‘Howard the Duck?’ Chip, it’s huge! This is a great thing! I am going to call right away.’ And then I became aware that everyone in the world was auditioning for it, from big names to people like me.”
Robin Williams was cast over Zien, but according to The Hollywood Reporter’s interview: “Zien [revealed Williams] left the project within the first week out of frustration over syncing his voice to the duck’s animatronic bill. An actor to voice Howard had not been cast during production, so all of Howard’s lines were read on set by the puppeteers, and the bill moved to fit their bland delivery, rendering Williams’ wild improvisational style moot in post production.”
“What I was told was by the third day, Robin said, ‘I can’t do this. It is insane. I can’t get the rhythm of this. I am being confined. I am being handcuffed in order to match the flapping duck’s bill.’” Zien said. “So, on Memorial Day 1985, I got a call from my agent who said, ‘You have to get right to the airport! Robin Williams just quit and you’re now Howard the Duck. You need to get there tonight. There is a ticket waiting for you at the counter.’ I was incredibly excited.”
“Howard the Duck” was an infamous critical and commercial bomb when it opened in theaters, although it has earned a cult following in the decades since release. Head over to The Hollywood Reporter’s website to read more from Zien on the film’s 35th anniversary.
Robin Williams
‘Exorcist’ Trilogy
Ellen Burstyn
Universal Pictures and NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, in partnership with Blumhouse and Morgan Creek, have closed a reported $400 million-plus deal to purchase worldwide rights for a new Exorcist franchise that will see Ellen Burstyn reprise her role as the mother of a demon-possessed child.
To be directed by David Gordon Green (Halloween), the franchise will star Hamilton‘s Leslie Odom Jr. as the father of a possessed child who seeks out the aid of Burstyn’s Exorcist character Chris MacNeil, mother of the possessed Regan MacNeil (played in the original 1973 film by Linda Blair).
According to Universal, the franchise will encompass three films in total and is described as a “continuation,” rather than a remake, of the 1973 original, which was directed by William Friedkin and adapted by William Peter Blatty based on his novel.
Burstyn did not participate in any of the previous – and mostly panned – Exorcist sequels or prequels, which included Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), The Exorcist III (1990), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005).
The first film in the new trilogy will be released theatrically on October 13, 2023. Subsequent installments could premiere on Peacock, according to a report in the New York Times, which also set the deal amount at more than $400 million. That is reminiscent of Netflix’s Knives Out two-sequel deal in March also struck for north of $400M, making it one of the biggest streamer movie pacts in history.
Ellen Burstyn
‘Inexcusable Ambush’
Rupert
Fox News has been ridiculed online after they said footage of a man in Montana “ambushing” one of its most controversial hosts, Tucker Carlson (R-Effette Heiress), was “totally inexcusable”.
Shopper Dan Bailey was seen on video in a fishing equipment store telling the outspoken right-wing presenter that he was the “worst human being known to mankind”.
A Fox News spokesperson told NBC News that “ambushing” Mr Carlson while he was at the shop in Livingston with his family was “totally inexcusable”.
However, critics of the broadcaster were quick to hit out on Twitter at their condemnation of the man’s confrontational nature.
One user commented: “Really? Calling out @TuckerCarlson was ‘inexcusable’? But him calling for Fauci to be prosecuted, Biden to be impeached and Democrats arrested for being vaccinated is, how you say, ‘patriotic?’”
Rupert
Blames America’s Woes
JD Vance
The author turned Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance (R-Vulture Capitalist) has blamed America’s woes on “the childless left”, singling out Vice-President Kamala Harris, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Senator Cory Booker and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their own share of the blame.
Speaking to a conservative thinktank, the Republican also praised the far-right president of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, for encouraging married couples to have children.
Vance is a venture capitalist and former US marine who wrote the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy about his upbringing in Appalachia and experience studying law at Yale.
Running for a Senate seat which will be vacated next year by Rob Portman, a relative centrist in a party dominated by Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up), Vance has attracted backing from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel (R-Vulture). He has also apologised for tweets criticising Trump, for whom he has said he did not vote in 2016.
On Friday night, Vance spoke to a conference organised by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
JD Vance
Harvard-Led Team
The Galileo Project
Are there intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations capable of building technologies that can travel between the stars? An international research project is poised to find out.
The Galileo Project, helmed by a multi-institutional team of scientists led by Avi Loeb, a professor of science in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, will seek and investigate evidence that could represent defunct or still-active "extraterrestrial technological civilizations," or ETCs, project representatives said in a statement released on Monday (July 26).
The project will analyze data from astronomical surveys and telescope observations, and design new algorithms using artificial intelligence (AI), in order to identify potential interstellar travelers, alien-built satellites and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), according to the statement.
"Science should not reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences that are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry," Loeb said in the statement. "We now must 'dare to look through new telescopes,' both literally and figuratively."
Loeb, who is also director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has previously suggested that the oddball cosmic object 'Oumuamua — which passed by Earth in 2017 and was widely identified as a comet or asteroid — was an example of alien tech. 'Oumuamua was visible only briefly before it continued on its journey to distant stars, and its flattened, cigarlike shape and erratic motion stymied many astrophysicists; Loeb was one of several scientists who proposed that the object could be a type of spacefaring equipment made by extraterrestrials, Live Science previously reported.
The Galileo Project
Stained Glass Among World's Oldest
Canterbury Cathedral
New research indicates that some stained glass windows from Canterbury Cathedral may be among the oldest in the world.
The panels, depicting the Ancestors of Christ, have been re-dated using a new, non-destructive technique.
The analysis indicates that some of them may date back to the mid-1100s.
The windows would therefore have been in place when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, was killed at the cathedral in 1170.
The re-dated panels are part of the Ancestors of Christ series depicted over one of the cathedral's entrances. It was thought for centuries that they were made by master craftsmen in the 13th century.
Canterbury Cathedral
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