Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Simon Tisdall: The Democrats should win but, as in 2016, what should happen may well not (The Guardian)
It remains to be seen if the president's worst excesses still appeal to voters' primal instinct - fear.
Andrew Tobias: What You Get If You Vote
… if you vote Republican, Trump has told us over and over you'll be voting for him. And, as I've said over and over, he's right. So this is what you'll get: […] A pathological liar (says Ted Cruz). A dangerous con man (says Marco Rubio). A national disgrace (says Colin Powell). The world's number one bully (says Republican ex-governor Christine Todd Whitman). A Putin admirer.
Alexandra Petri: These racist appeals do not work on me, because I am not racist (Satire Alert! Washington Post)
I am not voting Republican this year because I am racist. It is just that racist appeals resonated with me and motivated me to come to the polls. Totally different.
Joe Bob Briggs: Leave Harvard Alone (Taki's Magazine)
It's not just a college, it's a club, and they have a "Members Only" sign on the gate, and you're not Harvard material. Be glad you're not Harvard material. Join me and the 99 percent-white, black, Latino, Asian, and, hell, we even let French people in-who represent the truly inclusive America, not the one that traffics in symbolism while maintaining the same entitled clubs that have manipulated us into this political hell that we currently live in. Believe me, that rejection letter is the best thing that ever happened to you. You won't get that guaranteed six-figure starter job at Goldman Sachs, but someday your soul will be glad you missed out.
Jude Rogers: "Chrissie Hynde: 'It's hard work being alone. Paintings are an outlet'" (The Guardian)
The Pretenders frontwoman has been defying musical expectations for 40 years. Here she talks about feminism, censorship and the power of putting brush to canvas.
Phil Mongredien: "Marianne Faithfull: Negative Capability review - up there with Cohen and Cash" (The Guardian)
Comparisons with such late-career highlights as Johnny Cash's American Recordings albums and Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker are inevitable, but Negative Capability really does belong in such exalted company.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Critter
Frog & Plant
Cuban Frog resting in my Dracaena plant. The frog patiently waited for me in position so I could get my camera and take this picture.
BSmasher
Thanks, Brain!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Today's anecdotes are serious rather than funny.
• The Catholic family of Maria "Marysia" Andzelm hid Jews during the Holocaust, saving two lives. They did this even though Maria, at age 13, realized about the Nazis, "If they're willing to kill Jews, they're willing to kill people who hide Jews." For a while after Germany invaded Poland, Jews who were hiding in the woods knocked on the door of the Andzelms' home in Poland, begging for food. Although food was sometimes insufficient in their own home, the Andzelms gave away some of what they had. The Andzelms then began to hide two Jewish men in a hideout they built in their barn, although they had seen people's corpses hanging in the street; on their corpses were signs saying, "FOR HIDING A JEW." The hideout was hardly comfortable: farm animals' urine and manure leaked into the hideout, and fleas infested the straw. Maria was able to get books for the two men in the hideout to help them forget the uncomfortable conditions for a while. To convince the person from whom she had borrowed the books that she had read them, Maria memorized something about each book. After the Holocaust ended, one of the hidden Jews, Moses Kershenbaum, married Maria. (The other hidden Jew was Srulik Schwarzfort.) Maria and her family had some frightening times with the Nazis. Once some Nazis came to take Maria away to help in the war effort, but Maria had jumped in bed and she pretended to be ill with a contagious disease, so the Nazis left her alone. Asked why Maria and her family had risked their lives to hide him and another Jew, Moses replied, "They are angels. You seldom find people like that." Maria and her parents are Righteous Among the Nations, and their names are inscribed on the Wall of Honor.
• During the Holocaust, Ruth Jacobsen was a hidden Jewish child in Holland. She spoke Dutch well and had blue eyes, and in some of the families she lived with she was allowed to go outside. Her parents, however, from whom she was separated, but very occasionally could visit, were not so fortunate. They had to stay indoors, and often knowledge of their existence was hidden from the children of the families they lived with so that the children would not accidentally reveal that Jews were hiding in their house. In one house, the attic her parents were hiding in was located above the room where the young children, who did not know of their existence, slept. Once, the young children heard noises coming from the attic, and so their mother invented the boogieman. When the children were naughty, she would tell them that the boogieman would come to get them unless they were good. She would then use the handle of a broom to hit the ceiling, and Ruth's parents would stamp their feet on the floor. Following the end of the war, Ruth was reunited with her parents, but none of them had much clothing. Ruth attended a Catholic school, and the nuns wanted her to wear socks, but she had no socks. Therefore, the nuns had each student bring a ball of cotton yarn-in any color whatsoever-to school, and the nuns knitted multi-colored socks for young Ruth, who wrote as an adult, "The socks really stood out, and I loved them. After hiding for so long, standing out made me feel good. I was visible again."
• In Lvov, Ukraine, Luncia Gamzer hid in the home of a Gentile woman named Mrs. Szczygiel and her parents hid in the home of a Gentile man named Mr. Ojak during the Holocaust, but hiding Jews was dangerous. A Gentile who was found to be hiding Jews could end dead. This led to much tension among many of the Gentiles who were hiding Jews. Sometimes, the Gentiles had their own children whom they worried about. What would happen to the children if the parents were killed by the Nazis? Mrs. Szczygiel and her family worried about this because she was hiding Luncia. Even after her family decided-after narrowly being caught-that hiding Luncia was too dangerous, Mrs. Szczygiel kept on hiding her from the Nazis-and this time, from her husband and children. Unfortunately, one of her daughters discovered that Luncia was still being hidden in their home. Therefore, Mrs. Szczygiel took Luncia to the man who was hiding her parents and told him, "We can't keep her any longer. You have to take her." Mr. Ojak was completely surprised-he had no idea that he would be asked to hide another Jew. He hesitated a long time, and then he said, "She can stay. If I'm caught, it's the same death for me whether I'm hiding two Jews or three." Luncia had a joyous reunion with her parents. After surviving the Holocaust, the Gamzers came to live in the United States, where Luncia changed her name to Ruth and married a Holocaust survivor named Jack Gruener.
• Markus Reich and his friend Stefan Schreiber escaped from a Nazi forced-labor camp that was under construction outside Tarnow, Poland, simply by picking up a heavy board when no guards were around and carrying it on their shoulders out of the camp. They kept on carrying the heavy board for more than 36 miles in bitter winter weather to their hometown: Bochnia. When they came to bridges, they found them guarded by Nazi soldiers, but the Nazis assumed that they were Polish workers and let them pass. In Bochnia, they parted and went to their own homes. Markus' family had thought that he was dead, and they celebrated his return by making potato pancakes-a true celebration because food was so scarce.
• Leo Baeck engaged in resistance during the Holocaust. The Nazis in Germany ordered the Jews to hand over all their silver, including religious objects made of silver. Unwilling to do this, Mr. Baeck took all his family silver, went to Hamburg, rowed to the middle of the Elbe River and dumped all of the silver overboard. One day, the Gestapo ordered him to appear at their headquarters on the Sabbath. He told them, "I'm not in the habit of showing up in an office on Saturday. On the Sabbath, I go to services." He ended up in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, but survived the Holocaust.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE LIARS CONTINUE.
A REPUBLICAN MURDERS TWO WOMEN.
PRESIDENT TRUMP MURDERS THE PUFFINS.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The city is tearing up the street and there's some heavy equipment parked out front.
There's even a porta-crapper.
Finally, that 2nd bathroom of my dreams!
On Fellow Steve King
Stephen King
Famed horror writer Stephen King issued a last-minute plea to his Iowa-based fans to vote a fellow Steve King, a Republican representative in the state, out of public office during Tuesday's midterm elections.
"Iowans, for personal reasons I hope you'll vote Steve King out," the writer King wrote to his five million Twitter followers. "I'm tired of being confused with this racist dumbbell."
The political King, an eight-term congressman, routinely spouts white nationalist views and recently endorsed a far-right white nationalist in Toronto's mayoral race. He also frequently retweets other white supremacists on Twitter and has warned about "mixing cultures."
The author King has regularly wielded his social media account to criticize politicians, most notably President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Grabby Grifter). Last month, he challenged Trump's political assertions about asylum seekers, firing back that the so-called caravan of migrants fleeing violence in Central America were simply "scared and hungry people," not an existential threat to American values.
He simply followed up with a note of disappointment, telling the president: "Jesus, man."
Stephen King
Comes Out Of Retirement
Carole King
Carole King has released new music for the first time in seven years, re-working her 1977 song "One" in a bid to "empower people" ahead of the US mid-term elections.
The 76-year-old is a lifelong Democrat, and described the song to the Guardian as "a call to action".
The song's new verse muses: "What will we do?/We're gonna run/reach for the sun/come together as one/show 'em how it's done/at the end of the day, we'll be able to say/love won."
"I see it as empowering people who feel hopeless to do whatever they can as one person," King said of the track. :If nothing else, they can vote for Democrats and change the climate of our country."
King's return comes shortly after a similar one from Barbra Streisand. "Don't Lie to Me" was her first new song since 2005, and also took aim at Trump.
Carole King
'Amazing Grace'
Aretha Franklin
More than 46 years after it was shot, the Aretha Franklin concert film "Amazing Grace" will finally be released, ending one of the most tortured and long-running sagas in documentary film.
The late gospel singer's estate and film producers said Monday that "Amazing Grace" will premiere Nov. 12 at the DOC NYC film festival with the full support of Franklin's estate. The film, largely shot by Sydney Pollack, captures Franklin's performance at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood in January 1972.
The music from the two performances was released as a landmark double live album in 1972. But Pollack's footage proved virtually impossible to edit because the filmmaker failed to sync the sound. After acquiring the film's rights from Pollack in 2007, producer Alan Elliott brought in a team to construct the film, which Elliott calls "a labor of love."
Franklin first sued Elliott in 2011 for planning to release the film without her permission. "Amazing Grace" nearly saw the light of day in 2015, but it was yanked at the last minute from the Telluride and Toronto film festivals after Franklin's attorneys obtained an injunction against its release. They argued the film was "the functional equivalent of replaying an entire Aretha Franklin concert," and couldn't be screened without her consent.
An Oscar-qualifying release of "Amazing Grace" is planned for this fall, with a larger rollout in theaters likely coming next year. The film doesn't yet have distribution.
Aretha Franklin
Estate Sets Weekly Music Videos Series
Prince
The Prince estate has announced plans to upload weekly batches of music videos, some rarely seen, from the late icon's 1995 to 2010 outputto video streaming sites.
The first batch of videos - 1995's The Gold Experience and 1996's Chaos And Disorder - includes the music videos for "Gold," "Eye Hate U," "Dinner With Delores" and "The Same December" plus three videos that only diehard Prince fans have been privy to: "Endorphinmachine" was previously only available on a 1994 CD-ROM game, while "Dolphin" marked the first ever video to air on VH1 Europe in September 1994.
The video for the b-side "Rock And Roll Is Alive! (And It Lives In Minneapolis)," which initially aired on the January 1997 VH1 special Love 4 One Another and was a response to Lenny Kravitz's "Rock And Roll Is Dead," has also been unearthed, one of the videos that "had either been impossible to find or only available in substandard fan uploads taped off of television," the Prince estate said.
The seven-week series will span Prince's albums from 1995's The Gold Experience through 2010's LOtUSFLOW3R and MPLSoUND and follows a recent compilation highlighting notable tracks from that era.
Prince
Harvard Scientists Suggest
Oumuamua
The mysterious rock that flew past Earth could actually have been an alien spacecraft sailing past us using light, according to a new paper.
When Oumuamua flew past Earth, scientists rushed to learn about it: it was the first known object ever to have made it into our solar system from another. But as they scrambled to research it, the rock made its way out of the other side of our solar system, giving researchers only a glimpse to make the most of.
In that short time, astronomers established that the object was moving strangely. It was spinning very quickly as it flew through the solar system, and seemed to speed up rather than slow down as it goes.
Now a new paper suggests that could be because the object is acting as a "light sail", gliding through space and using the sun as its energy source. If so, that might have happened by accident - or the object might in fact be a spacecraft made by an alien race, they said.
The object might be "a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilisation", the researchers write.
Oumuamua
California Mansion For Sale
'Star Trek: The Next Generation'
If you're shopping for the Star Trek fan who has everything, here's one way to boldly go where few trekkers have gone before: real estate. A home that played a crucial role in a Season 3 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is up for sale at a cool $5.7 million.
Designed by California architect Ellis Gelman for his own use, the house is featured in the Next Generation episode "The Survivors." In it, the crew of the U.S.S Enterprise tries to understand what has happened to Kevin and Rishon Uxbridge, botanists from Earth who appear to be the sole survivors of some kind of plant-wide devastation.
At the risk of spoiling a 29-year-old piece of television, let's just say that all is not as it seems with the Uxbridges.
During the episode, Chief Engineer Geordi LaFordge calls the house "a typical settlement structure." In reality, the real estate listing for the Malibu, California home describes something much different. The property has "4 eclectic bedrooms, 3.5 baths, media/family room with kitchenette, loft, 440+ sq ft ocean view terrace with glass railing ideal for indoor/outdoor entertaining, lavender and rose garden, all on over 2 acres."
The most distinctive aspect of the home is its triangular shape. On his website, Gelman describes a philosophical approach based in believing that "architects can provide environments which responsibly provide for physical needs and at the same time increase the awareness and wonder of being."
'Star Trek: The Next Generation'
The Monkees and Jack Nicholson
'Head'
Fifty years ago, Columbia Pictures and Raybert Productions released a fascinating '60s celluloid artifact promised to be "the most extraordinary adventure western comedy love story mystery drama musical documentary satire ever filmed." That film, Head, effectively (if temporarily) detonated the careers of reluctant TV teen idols the Monkees - but it simultaneously ushered in the New Hollywood and kickstarted the career of a certain future Oscar-winning actor.
"That was a very strange experience," chuckled the Monkees' Micky Dolenz, visiting Yahoo Entertainment in 2016 to discuss the Monkees' comeback album Good Times!, when asked about the notorious cult classic. "[The Monkees series co-creator and Raybert co-founder] Bob Rafelson brought this guy in one day. He was a B-movie actor, and he said, 'It's a friend of mine, and he wants to do some writing. And his name is Jack Nicholson. … Jack's going to hang around the set and go to your homes and hang out with you at home and you're going to just see what kind of movie we put together.'"
The strategy came at a point in the made-for-TV band's career where they were feeling stifled onscreen (NBC forbade them from making overt political statements or even saying the word "hell" on the "Devil and Peter Tork" episode). The Monkees had also seized creative control of their musical output with their third album, Headquarters, the year before. So, while Dolenz and his bandmates Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones (credited as "David Jones" in Head) didn't quite know what to expect when they joined Rafelson and Nicholson for a weekend brainstorming trip to Ojai, Calif., they did all agree that Head would not be a typical pop-music matinee.
Nicholson used tape recordings of the Ojai sessions to write the screenplay for Head, reportedly - and not surprisingly, given the bizarre result - while dropping acid. (Nicholson had written the script for Roger Corman's countercultural LSD film The Trip the year before.) Suffice to say, the super-meta movie - filmed around Southern California one month after the cancelation of the band's Emmy-winning TV series, directed by Rafelson and produced by Rafelson and his Raybert partner and Monkees co-creator Bert Schneider - definitely would not have made it past those NBC censors.
Head plays out like a lysergic dream sequence - beginning with Dolenz leaping off Long Beach's Gerald Desmond Bridge, then frolicking with a school of hippie mermaids in the kaleidoscopic waters below to Carole King and Gerry Goffin's woozy, psychedelic epic "Porpoise Song" (which is now widely regarded as one of the all-time greatest Monkees tunes).
'Head'
In Memory
Kitty O'Neil
Kitty O'Neil, Lynda Carter's stunt double on the 1970s "Wonder Woman" TV series, died on Friday of pneumonia at the age of 72.
O'Neil broke ground for women in the stunt industry, becoming the first woman to join the Hollywood stunt agency Stunts Unlimited. O'Neil performed all her stunts despite losing her hearing after contracting multiple diseases shortly after birth, leading to a fever that destroyed her hearing and nearly killed her had her mother not placed her in an ice bath.
Despite this, O'Neil became a proficient cello and piano player and might have become an Olympic diver. Her career was cut short by a case of spinal meningitis incurred shortly before the Tokyo Olympic trials. Yet she recovered and became a stuntwoman, performing multiple stunts for "Wonder Woman" over the show's three-season run. Her most famous stunt came during the final season in 1979 when she dressed up as the famed superhero and jumped nearly 13 stories out of a San Fernando Valley hotel and onto an airbag.
O'Neil also did stunts for films like "The Blues Brothers" and "Smokey and the Bandit II," where she drove cars and became the first woman to perform a cannon-fired car roll, in which an explosive wired under the car lifts it off its wheels and causes it to roll. She also piloted rocket-powered cars and boats, setting land speeds for women in both categories.
Her fastest speed was recorded in Oregon in December 1976, recording a land speed of 618 mph. That was just slightly short of the then men's record of 630 mph, which O'Neil said she was confident she could break but was not allowed to because her mentor and famed stuntman Hal Needham was attempting the record as well. He failed to break it.
O'Neil retired from stunt work in 1982, leaving Hollywood and settling down in Eureka, South Dakota, where she lived for the remainder of her life. Her women's land speed records still stand today.
Kitty O'Neil
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