from Bruce
Anecdotes
Problem-Solving
• While working on her play The Autumn Garden, Lillian Hellman had trouble writing one particular speech. She wrote, rewrote, and rewrote it again, but she couldn’t make the speech say what she wanted it to say in the way she wanted it said. Finally, late at night, she went to bed. The next morning, she got up and discovered that her partner, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, had written the speech for her. It was perfect.
• Unfortunately, people sometimes take their cellular telephones with them to Broadway plays — which are interrupted when the telephones begin ringing. Actor Nathan Lane, while performing on stage in the comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, used to run off stage when a telephone began ringing in the audience, answer it, and say, “I’m sorry. He’s at a Broadway show right now. He can’t come to the phone.”
Props
• Ralph Richardson had an uncanny eye for detail when it came to props on stage — unfortunately, in one case. Judy Campbell performed with him in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell. In one scene, she had to pour tea, and the handle of the teapot was facing the wrong direction, away from her, making it difficult for her to pour the tea. She spoke to the prop man and for the next performance, the teapot was placed correctly on the tray. However, when Sir Ralph put the tray down before her, he said, “Oh, dear. Someone has moved the teapot,” then he put the teapot back in its original, incorrect position. Because of Ms. Campbell’s respect for Sir Ralph, she didn’t say anything about the teapot for the rest of the play’s run.
• Famous vaudeville comedian Bobby Clark was seldom recognized unless he was wearing his trademark spectacles — which weren’t real, but were merely drawn onto his face. He married a French-speaking woman, and decided to take French at Hollywood High School in order to communicate better with her mother, who didn’t speak English. The high school students were putting on a play, and they asked Mr. Clark to take part — as a prop man. Mr. Clark agreed.
Public Speaking
• In 1957, character actor A.E. “Matty” Matthews was nearly 90 when he was invited to a party at Pinewood Studios to celebrate British filmmaking. The party went well until one after-dinner speaker droned on and on, boring everyone. Matty stood it as long as he could, then muttered, “Good God, doesn’t he know I haven’t got long to live?”
• Each night, after the end of her hit play Catherine Was Great, Mae West made this famous curtain speech: “I’m glad you like my Catherine. I like her, too. She ruled 30 million people and had 3,000 lovers. I do the best I can in two hours.”
Puns
• Director Tyrone Guthrie was busy casting The First Gentleman in New York. A friend mentioned an English actress whose actor husband was performing in a hit play in New York and who was carrying on an affair with another woman. The friend said that the actress would probably be delighted “to go to New York because her husband has a hit there.” Mr. Guthrie replied, “She’ll be delighted to go to New York because her husband has a Miss there.”
• In England, to “give someone the bird” means to boo them. On the New York opening night of Bitter Sweet, Noël Coward walked into Evelyn Laye’s dressing room and presented her with a silver box. When she opened the box, a mechanical bird emerged, flapped its wings, and sang. Mr. Coward said, “I wanted to be the first to give you the bird.”
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy The Paperback
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy Kindle
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy Apple
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy Barnes and Noble
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy Kobo
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF
Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Afrodite’s Friends"
Album: SUMMER LICKS
Artist: The Telestons
Artist Location: Athens, Greece
Info:
“The Telestons are a surf n' more band. The name is inspired by the greek mythology creature Telesto, an oceanid, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. Their studio is at the port of Pireaus that is the gateway to the islands and the birthplace of rembetiko music. The influences of The Telestons are surf, rock and roll, psychedelic rock, jazz, thrash, hardcore punk, traditional Greek and African music.”
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for 15-track album
Genre: Surf. Instrumentals. Various Influences.
Links:
SUMMER LICKS
The Telestons on Bandcamp
The Telestons on YouTube
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
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
Brady Suggests
Gun Safety
Hi Marty
I write for a blog called Gun Made where I put
together detailed guides for those interested in firearms and anything shooting related.
Here's a sample:
New Venture
Michael Egan
Reader Question
Internet Issues
Hey Marty -
I've had tons of net problems the last many months.
The net fails a lot, is very slow, & my mac freezes a lot,
but only when I'm online.
Nowadays, I'm regularly getting page fail notices, & warnings that sites
like yours, mine, twitter, youtube, Facebook, & most others
aren't safe to go to.
Coincidentally, the problems are worse whenever
there's bad new for G O P.
Have you, or your associates noticed similar problems?
I'm trying to form an opinion.
Just wondering.
DJ Useo
Thanks, Konrad!
I'm always having problems, but then my computer is nearly 20 years old...
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
So, it turned out that the water heater wasn't the problem this time - the line into it, at the very top of the unit, sprang a leak.
Later in the afternoon we had some real weather - thunder & lightning & rain.
The shittens are quite miffed about the weather, but it turned out to be a much better day than anticipated.
Lifted
Referral Ban
The Biden administration on Monday reversed a ban on abortion referrals by family planning clinics, lifting a Trump-era restriction as political and legal battles over abortion grow sharper from Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Department of Health and Human Services said its new regulation will restore the federal family planning program to the way it ran under the Obama administration, when clinics were able to refer women seeking abortions to a provider. The goal is to “strengthen and restore” services, said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Groups representing the clinics said they hope the Biden administration action will lead some 1,300 local facilities that left in protest over Trump’s policies to return, helping to stabilize a longstanding program shaken by the coronavirus pandemic on top of ideological battles.
Planned Parenthood, the biggest service provider, said on Twitter its health centers look forward to returning. But the group criticized part of the Biden administration rule that allows individual clinicians who object to abortion not to provide referrals. The administration said that’s “in accordance with applicable federal law.”
Known as Title X, the taxpayer-funded program makes available more than $250 million a year to clinics to provide birth control and basic health care services mainly to low-income women, many of them from minority communities. Under former President Donald Trump, clinics were barred from referring patients for abortions, prompting a mass exit by service providers affiliated with Planned Parenthood, as well as several states and other independent organizations.
Referral Ban
Posthumous Honor
Aretha
Aretha Franklin was given a bit of posthumous R-E-S-P-E-C-T on Monday when a post office in her hometown of Detroit was named after the late singer.
Members of Franklin’s family as well as postal and elected officials visited the former Fox Creek post office to celebrate the name change honoring the Queen of Soul.
“Her legacy lives on in her music, in her family. But we have added to that list of her legacy: A post office with her name on it,” said U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a Michigan Democrat and longtime postal service worker.
Lawrence also was a friend of Franklin’s and introduced the bill in Congress that resulted in the name change.
The post office is located about five miles east of downtown and not far from a concert amphitheater on the Detroit River that also is named for Franklin. It now will be known as the “Aretha Franklin Post Office Building.”
Aretha
Blue Origin
Shatner
Captain Kirk is rocketing into space next week — boldly going where no other sci-fi stars have gone.
Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin, announced Monday that “Star Trek” actor William Shatner will blast off from West Texas on Oct. 12.
“Yes, it’s true; I’m going to be a ‘rocket man!’” the 90-year-old tweeted. He added: “It’s never too late to experience new things.”
Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is a huge fan of the sci-fi series and even had a cameo as a high-ranking alien in the 2016 film “Star Trek Beyond.” His rocket company invited Shatner to fly as its guest.
Shatner will become the oldest person to go to space. He’ll join three others — two of them paying customers — aboard a Blue Origin capsule. He’ll wind up being the second actor to reach space this month: Russia is launching an actress and a film director to the International Space Station on Tuesday for almost two weeks of moviemaking.
Shatner
1st Movie In Space
Russia
In a historic first, Russia is set to launch an actor and a film director into space to make a feature film in orbit — a project the nation’s space chief has hailed as a chance to raise the prestige of Russia’s space program.
Actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko are set to blast off Tuesday for the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three space missions. After 12 days on the space outpost, Peresild and Shipenko will return to Earth with another Russian cosmonaut.
The crew plans to film segments of a new movie titled “Challenge” about a surgeon summoned to rush to the space station to save a crew member who suffers a heart condition.
Speaking at a news conference at the Russian launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Peresild acknowledged that the training for the mission was grueling but described it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Shipenko, 38, has made several commercially successful movies, including “Kholop” (“Serf”), a 2019 movie that set a Russian box office record. He also described the training as tough.
Russia
Rejects Government’s Recommendation
Judge
A judge on Monday ordered Capitol rioter Matthew Mazzocco to spend 45 days in prison, rejecting not only the defense’s argument for probation but also the prosecution’s recommendation that he be sentenced to home confinement instead of time behind bars.
The sentencing before US District Judge Tanya Chutkan marked the first time that any judge presiding over the hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions in Washington, DC, handed down a sentence that was harsher than what the government asked for. Chutkan noted that Mazzocco had already been allowed to go home and be with his family in the months since his arrest in mid-January and said his punishment had to be more severe.
“There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said.
Mazzocco is the 12th person sentenced in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection. He pleaded guilty to one count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in the Capitol, a misdemeanor crime that carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison. The government had asked for a sentence of three months home confinement followed by a period of probation. Assistant US Attorney Kimberly Nielsen had argued that probation alone wasn’t enough, but also that Mazzocco should get credit for pleading guilty early — he was one of the first 10 people to come forward to accept responsibility and take a plea deal, she said.
Chutkan gave less weight to Mazzocco’s early guilty plea, saying that he only decided to show remorse after it was clear he could face prison time. His sentence not only needed to deter him from participating in similar incidents in the future, she said, but also deter other people. She said the evidence showed Mazzocco didn’t go to the Capitol out of love for his country, but rather “to support one man … in total disregard of a lawfully conducted election.” She also chastised him for taking photos to document the “chaos” around him as if it were “entertainment.”
Judge
Family Sues
Henrietta Lacks
On the 70th anniversary of the death of Henrietta Lacks, her estate has filed a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotechnology company who the family claims has been profiting off the sale of “stolen” cancerous cells that were harvested from Lacks’ cervix before she died in 1951 as part of “a racially unjust medical system.”
A descendant of Black Americans enslaved in Virginia, Lacks died in Baltimore, Maryland of cervical cancer on October 4th, 1951. Before that, however, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed some of her cancerous tissue, a procedure that changed the course of medical research history. But Lacks didn’t even know the tissue was being removed, the lawsuit says, placing Lacks’ plight within a larger context the racist history of medical research. “The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by black people throughout U.S.,” the suit says.
In 1951, shortly after Lacks passed away, her cells became the first human “immortal cell line” to grow and reproduce successfully in a lab. They have been multiplying by the billions in labs around the world ever since. Known as the HeLa line (using the first two letters of Lacks’ first and last name), Lacks’ cell line was used in the development of the polio vaccine, as well as innovations like gene mapping and in vitro fertilization and, more recently, in researching the Covid-19 vaccine. Lacks’ story and her cell line were the subject of a 2017 HBO movie starring Oprah as Lacks’ youngest daughter, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on a best-selling book by the same title.
Lacks’ estate argues the cells were taken from Lacks’ body without her knowing about it or giving permission. The cells weren’t removed to help with Lacks’ own medical treatment, but rather for medical research, the suit says. Doctors were striving to get human cells to live outside the body in laboratories where researchers could experiment with the causes and cures for cancer. The suit quotes one doctor who worked at the hospital at the time saying, “Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.” Lacks was just one woman whose tissue was taken without her consent — but her cells were the first to survive in the lab.
Henrietta Lacks
Makes History
'Playboy'
Bretman Rock is making history with his appearance on the cover of Playboy magazine's October 2021 digital issue, as the 23-year-old becomes the first openly gay male to secure the coveted spot.
The Hawaii-based Filipino influencer isn't new to the spotlight after making a name for himself on YouTube and the short-form video app Vine, where Rock displayed both his humor and his skill with makeup. And while videos of him applying contour and trying out drag makeup came long before there were other men in makeup gaining notoriety online, Rock continues to break boundaries with his latest cover shoot.
"I'm a @playboy bunny," Rock wrote on Twitter alongside photos of the digital cover where he's wearing the famous bunny suit.
According to Playboy, Rock isn't the first man to rock different parts of the iconic outfit. However, he is only the third to appear on the cover of the men's lifestyle and entertainment magazine, behind the magazine's late founder Hugh Hefner and, in July 2020, Latin pop star Bad Bunny; Rock is the first openly gay man.
"For Playboy to have a male on the cover is a huge deal for the LGBT community, for my brown people community and it’s all so surreal," Rock told the publication. A total 'is this even f***ing happening right now?' type of vibe."
'Playboy'
Cool Things About Slime
Hagfish
Meet the humble hagfish, an ugly, gray, eel-like creature affectionately known as a "snot snake" because of its unique defense mechanism. The hagfish can unleash a full liter of sticky slime from pores located all over its body in less than one second. That's sufficient to, say, clog the gills of a predatory shark, suffocating the would-be predator. A new paper published in the journal Current Biology reports that the slime produced by larger hagfish contains much larger cells than slime produced by smaller hagfish—an unusual example of cell size scaling with body size in nature.
As we've reported previously, scientists have been studying hagfish slime for years because it's such an unusual material. It's not like mucus, which dries out and hardens over time. Hagfish slime stays slimy, giving it the consistency of half-solidified gelatin. That's due to long, thread-like fibers in the slime, in addition to the proteins and sugars that make up mucin, the other major component. Those fibers coil up into "skeins" that resemble balls of yarn. When the hagfish lets loose with a shot of slime, the skeins uncoil and combine with the salt water, blowing up more than 10,000 times its original size.
From a materials standpoint, hagfish slime is fascinating stuff. In 2016, a group of Swiss researchers studied the unusual fluid properties of hagfish slime, specifically focusing on how those properties provided two distinct advantages: helping the animal defend itself from predators and tying itself in knots to escape from its own slime. They found that different types of fluid flow affect the overall viscosity of the slime. A flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is, and the slower the sliding, the less resistance there is. As I wrote for Gizmodo at the time:
Hagfish slime is an example of a non-Newtonian fluid, in which the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force. ... Applying a strain or shearing force will increase viscosity—in the case of ketchup, pudding, gravy, or that classic mix of water and corn starch called “oobleck”—or decrease it, like non-drip paint that brushes on easily but becomes more viscous once it’s on the wall.
Hagfish slime can be both. It turns out that the suction feeding employed by many of the hagfish’s predators creates a unidirectional flow. The elongated stress of that sucking flow increases the goo’s viscosity, the better to suffocate said predators by clogging of the gills. But when the hagfish is trying to escape from its own slime, its motion creates a shear-thinning flow that actually reduces the viscosity of the slime, making it easier to escape. In fact, the slimy network quickly collapses in the face of a shear-thinning flow.
Hagfish
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
