Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Alexandra Petri: "Pundits talk about other events the way they have talked about the 'blue wave'" (Washington Post)
• In Disappointment to Female Voters, 19th Amendment Passes Only Once
• Truman Only Defeats Dewey For President
• Disappointing Night for Rebels Who Only Manage to Destroy Death Star, Dashing Hopes They Might Also Have Engaged and Defeated Entire Imperial Navy
• Faulkner Wins Nobel Prize for Literature, Comes Up Empty in Chemistry and Biology
Joe Bob Briggs: Be Kind to Your Stripper (Taki's Magazine)
But here's the other thing about the saleswoman who was "just one of the guys." (And by the way, the same type could be found at newspapers in the form of beautiful reporters who always managed to land interviews with powerful men.) She had enormous respect for the strippers. She always had ongoing deals with the ones she trusted. She knew which ones were the savvy "deal closer" types and she cultivated friendships with them and made sure they saw her when she walked into the club so they would come over to her table and then, after the men tipped them poorly, she would tip them well. She considered them soul sisters-women who were smarter than men.
Andrew Tobias: "Done with Politics"
We won by a wide margin in the popular vote, flipped the House, flipped at least 7 governorships, flipped 7 state legislative chambers, 4 state attorneys general, and more - but yes, largely because of gerrymandering (but also because Trump has betrayed the country and his obligation to tell the truth), we didn't do even better.
Matthew Yglesias: House Democrats must resist Trump's infrastructure trap (Vox)
Congressional Democrats could, in theory, vote for a big grab bag of random projects that lets each of them deliver some picayune benefit to their local constituents while allowing Trump to spend the next two years on an endless national tour of ribbon-cutting ceremonies. At each stop, Trump would lie relentlessly about the merits of the project, lie relentlessly about the degree of personal credit he deserves for it, slander his political enemies, stoke the fires of racial resentment, and obtain large amounts of largely uncritical local media coverage.
Will Oremus: A Vox Co-Founder Got Doxed on Twitter by a Hate-Spewing Incel, and Twitter Allowed It (Slate)
If verified users with huge followings can't get Twitter to enforce its safety rules, what hope does everyone else have?
Julia Belluz: Nutrition research is deeply biased by food companies. A new book explains why. (Vox)
The best advice is to eat as wide a variety of unprocessed foods as possible and to stay active. That's all it takes to get the nutrients you need and do what you can to stay healthy.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• British journalist Henry Porter wrote a weekly column in the Sunday Times. In May of 1986, he announced in a column that he had deliberately made five grammatical mistakes, and he offered a bottle of champagne to anyone who could point out those mistakes. The following Sunday, Mr. Porter wrote in his column that no one had identified the five errors that he had made intentionally, but that the numerous letters he had received had identified 23 errors that he had made unintentionally!
• At the age of twenty-four, Michelangelo Buonarroti sculpted the masterpiece known as the Pietà, which depicts the dead body of Jesus held in his mother Mary's arms. People did not believe that a twenty-four-old man could have carved such a masterpiece, so Michelangelo carved into Mary's sash these words: "Michel Angelus Bonarotus Florent Faciebat." The Latin means, "Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence made it." This is the only artwork signed by Michelangelo.
• Conductor Arturo Toscanini was having difficulty - musically and linguistically - with a star tenor in a Swedish opera house, and finally he asked a friend who spoke Swedish, "Ask that man if he knows who I am, and tell him to get the hell off the stage." The tenor listened to the two requests, then replied, "Yes and no." After hearing the translation of the tenor's reply, Mr. Toscanini laughed and went on with the rehearsal.
• Eddie Cantor and Georgie Jessel performed an act together in vaudeville. In one town, Mr. Jessel noticed that the billing read, "Eddie Cantor with Georgie Jessel." This upset him, and he complained to their manager, Irving Mansfield, "What kind of conjunction is that? Eddie Cantor with Georgie Jessel?" Mr. Irving promised to fix the wording, and the next day the billing read, "Eddie Cantor but Georgie Jessel."
• Opera singer Grace Moore often answered her own telephone; however, being a celebrity, she disguised her voice with a French accent until she learned who the caller was. Sometimes, she was unable to identify important callers and so would not speak to them. Discovering the truth later, they were not amused at the precaution she had taken to preserve her privacy.
• Early in his career, E.B. White wrote a short story about a man seeing his wife's body in a morgue, then submitted it to the newspaper where he worked: the Seattle Times. The editor's response made him quit his job - the editor wanted him to change "My God! It's her!" to the grammatically correct but unrealistic "My God! It is she!"
• As a cartoonist, Matt Groening, creator of Life in Hell, The Simpsons, and Futurama, is subversive. He says that his work has an underlying message: "The authorities don't always have your best interests in mind. No matter what they say."
• "People will be rewarded for what they say; they will be rewarded by how they speak. What you say can mean life or death. Those who speak with care will be rewarded." - Proverbs 18:20-21.
• Learning phonics has its advantages. An elementary schoolchild in Springfield, Oregon, once told his teacher: "There's a dirty word on the bathroom wall. I know. I sounded it out."
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Giggles re Barbara Trumpstock
I'm so happy that my vote for Jennifer Wexton is helping send Barbara Comstock packing. But you have to realize two things beyond this being an instance of flipping a seat in Congress blue:
As Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out tonight, the flip was by a higher percentage than any other seat that went from red to blue.
AND This district is where the damnable NRA has their headquarters! I see the building with those big red letters on the side every time I've been east of Chantilly and head home via I-66.
Makes it sweet than Babs lost so many Republican voters; lord knows my vote for her opponent wasn't enough to keep her from being elected in 2014 or 2016. That Brett Kavanope is her buddy makes me even happier to see her go!
French army trolls Trump with picture of them training in rain
Not France, not here
Guess Big Pussy really is afraid he'll melt in rain:
White House confirms Trump will not visit Arlington cemetery on Veteran's Day | Alternet
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
'DESPICABLE' REPUBLICAN LIES…'
REPUBLICAN FASCIST CONSPIRACY THEORIES.
RAIN CAUSES FASCISTS TO MELT!
ALL HELL IS GOING TO BREAK LOOSE!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Have it on good authority that Johnny Carson's koi survived the Malibu fire.
Next 'Game of Thrones' Book
George R.R. Martin
"Game of Thrones" book fans have been waiting over seven years for the release of "The Winds of Winter," the sixth novel in George R.R. Martin's beloved fantasy franchise, and it doesn't appear the book will be ready any time soon. Martin recently spoke to The Guardian about the pressure he's facing to finish "The Winds of Winter," and admitted the blockbuster HBO series is at least partially to blame for the novel's delay.
"The show has achieved such popularity around the world, the books have been so popular and so well reviewed, that every time I sit down I'm very conscious I have to do something great, and trying to do something great is a considerable weight to bear," Martin said. "On the other hand, once I really get rolling, I get into the world. The rest of the world vanishes, and I don't care what I'm having for dinner, what movies are on, what my email says or who's mad at me this week because [the book] isn't out."
Martin admitted the challenge over the last couple years has been getting into that "almost trance state" where he can write. While the HBO series has added significant pressure, cracking "The Winds of Winter" is also difficult because of how complicated Martin's story has become.
"I've been struggling with it for a few years," Martin said. "'The Winds of Winter' is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist, each having a different cast of supporting players, antagonists, allies and lovers around them, and all of these weaving together against the march of time in an extremely complex fashion. So it's very, very challenging."
Martin's last "Game of Thrones" novel, "A Dance With Dragons," was released July 12, 2011. The HBO series finished covering elements of "A Dance With Dragons" at the end of its fifth season and famously started going beyond what Martin had already published in the sixth and seventh seasons. Martin gave "Thrones" showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the plot structure of the entire series, including the ending, and therefore the delay of "The Winds of Winter" has not prevented the show from continuing.
George R.R. Martin
California Wildfires
Neil Young
By Sunday, the devastating wildfires across California were only 25 percent contained as the death toll rose to 31 across the state. An estimated 200 people still remain missing, and in response to the disaster, President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Grabby Grifter) took the opportunity to blameCalifornia's "gross mismanagement of the forests" for the mass destruction.
Hundreds of structures have been destroyed in the fires; among them is Neil Young's home. On his website, Young called out Trump for his refusal to believe in climate change.
"California is vulnerable - not because of poor forest management as DT (our so-called president) would have us think. We are vulnerable because of climate change; the extreme weather events and our extended drought is part of it," Young wrote. "Imagine a leader who defies science, saying these solutions shouldn't be part of his decision-making on our behalf. Imagine a leader who cares more for his own, convenient option than he does for the people he leads. Imagine an unfit leader. Now imagine a fit one."
Even firefighters are blaming the blaze on climate change. In a press conference, Los Angeles Fire Chief Daryl Osby said, "The fact of the matter is if you look at the state of California, climate challenge is happening statewide ... it is going to be here for the foreseeable future."
Young continued in his post: "It really is time for a reckoning with this unfit leader. Maybe our new Congress can help. I sure hope so."
Neil Young
Blue Eyes Special
Sinatra Auction
More than 200 items belonging to Frank and Barbara Sinatra ranging from movie scripts to jewelry are going up for auction.
Sotheby's on Monday unveiled the contents of Lady Blue Eyes: Property of Barbara and Frank Sinatra, which will go on the block in a series of auctions in New York in December. Sotheby's says the items were gathered over the couple's 22-year marriage and portray their public and private lives.
Barbara Sinatra's 20-plus-carat diamond engagement ring, which Frank Sinatra presented to her in a glass of champagne, is among the jewelry up for bid.
Copies of scripts include "From Here to Eternity," for which Sinatra won an Academy Award, and "Ocean's 11."
Paintings, signed letters and personal accessories also are available.
Sinatra Auction
'Shark Nursery'
Ireland
An enormous shark "nursery" swarming with the predatory fish and strewn with their eggs has been found in the waters 200 miles off the western Irish coast.
The rare discovery was made by a remotely operated vehicle exploring the region's cold-water coral reefs at depths of around 750m.
Scientists observed a large school of blackmouth catsharks, a relatively small species found throughout the northeast Atlantic, alongside the more unusual and solitary sailfin roughshark.
The site's egg cases, or mermaids purses, are seldom seen in such vast numbers, and are thought to belong to the catsharks.
While there were no shark pups swimming around the site, the researchers behind the SeaRover survey that captured the footage want to keep an eye on events there and potentially watch them hatch in the future.
Ireland
Antibiotics Consumption
WHO
Antibiotics are used far more in some countries than in others, a survey by the World Health Organization showed on Monday, suggesting that urgent action was needed to slash unnecessary consumption of the medicines.
The "WHO Report on Surveillance of Antibiotic Consumption" looked at antibiotic use in 65 countries and found the Netherlands used 9.78 defined daily doses (DDD) per 1,000 people, while Britain used twice as much and Turkey almost twice as much again, at 38.18 DDD per 1,000 inhabitants.
Iran's consumption was similar to Turkey's, while Mongolia's was the highest of all among the countries surveyed, at 64.41 DDD per 1,000 people.
Collecting the data is vital for tackling antimicrobial resistance, the extremely worrying trend of bacterial infections becoming immune to antibiotics, the report said.
The United States, China and India, were not among the countries in the survey.
WHO
Science Redefines
Kilogramme
Sealed in a vault beneath a duke's former pleasure palace among the sycamore-streaked forests west of Paris sits an object the size of an apple that determines the weight of the world.
Forged against a backdrop of scientific and political upheaval following the French Revolution, a single, small cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy has laid largely undisturbed for nearly 130 years as the world's benchmark for what, precisely, is a kilogramme.
The international prototype of the kilogramme, or "Le Grand K" as it is tenderly known, is one of science's most hallowed relics, an analogue against which all other weights are compared and a totem of the metric system that accompanied the epoch of liberty, equality and fraternity.
It's so revered, in fact, that it's only been weighed four times since 1889 and the room housing it in the Pavillion de Breteuil may only be opened when the three living key holders -- who for security reasons must be of different nationalities -- turn the lock simultaneously.
Hundreds of scientists from around the world will gather this week in the opulence of Versailles Palace for the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures. There, in an act belatedly fulfilling the metric system's founding promise of "For all ages, for all people", they will replace the Grand K with a universal formula that defines the kilogramme using the quantum laws of Nature.
Kilogramme
Physicists Wrangled Electrons
Quantum Fractal
Physicists have created an oddity known as a quantum fractal, a structure that could reveal new and strange types of electron behaviors.
Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves on different length scales: Zoom in and the structure looks the same as it does from afar. They're common in the natural world. For instance, a cauliflower stalk looks like a miniature version of the full head. A lightning stroke splits into many branches, each of which has the same forked structure as the whole bolt.
But in the tiny quantum realm, fractals aren't so easy to come by. Now scientists have artificially created a quantum fractal by placing carbon monoxide molecules on a copper surface. Confined between the molecules, electrons in the copper form a fractal shape of triangles within triangles called a Sierpinski triangle (SN Online: 12/30/02), the researchers report November 12 in Nature Physics. A full-fledged Sierpinski triangle would contain an infinite number of triangles, so the researchers created an approximation to that shape, with enough triangles for its repeating structure to be evident.
Electrons inhabiting a fractal don't live in 3-D like the rest of us. Nor do they exist in a flat 2-D world or a one-dimensional line. Instead they occupy an in-between, fractional number of dimensions. In this case, the scientists found that the electrons lived in approximately the number of dimensions expected for a Sierpinski triangle, 1.58.
Quantum particles tend to act in unusual ways when confined to one or two dimensions (SN: 10/20/16, p.6). Scientists don't yet know how electrons will behave in fractional dimensions, says physicist Cristiane Morais Smith of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "What can come out of our work is completely uncharted territory."
Quantum Fractal
In Memory
Stan Lee
Stan Lee, the legendary comic book writer and editor who helped redefine the medium when he co-created much of Marvel Comics' vast library of characters and concepts, died Monday, according to a statement released by Disney. He was 95.
Working alongside fellow comics titans like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby during the 1960s, Lee was instrumental in sparking what became known as "the Marvel revolution," a shift in superhero comics that emphasized flawed protagonists expressing humanistic values. Concepts and plots remained as colorful and weird as ever. But Marvel characters, written with complex, realistic personalities and mundane private lives, often had to resolve family, dating and even financial challenges while protecting the public from an increasingly packed roster of supervillains.
This new approach to superhero comics debuted in "The Fantastic Four," a team of superheroes presented as a dysfunctional but loving family unit that Lee co-created with Kirby in 1961. Lee credited his wife, Joan, for inspiration - he had been working for Marvel since the early 1940s, when it was known as Timely Comics, and frustrated with the creative restrictions of the medium, he was planning to quit his job and pursue a career as a novelist. It was Joan who told him to "write one comic you are proud of" before quitting, leading to "Fantastic Four."
Lee later said in 1974 that he resolved "for just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading… And the characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to: they'd be flesh and blood, they'd have their faults and foibles, they'd be fallible and feisty, and - most important of all - inside their colorful, costumed booties they'd still have feet of clay."
"The Fantastic Four" was a huge success, and the series was quickly followed by other soon-to-be iconic characters. In 1962, Lee co-created Ant-Man, the Incredible Hulk and Thor with Jack Kirby, and with Ditko he co-created "Spider-Man."
Spider-Man proved another cosmic leap for Marvel, introducing the idea of a hero who didn't just have personal issues, but problems - unpopularity at school, constant worries about money, a struggle to balance his role as a hero with his interpersonal relationships, and as he grew older, realistic concerns about his career and educational future - that were positively modern. Spider-Man would eventually become a Marvel flagship and alongside DC's Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, one of the defining heroes of the comic book superhero genre.
Lee's prolific output continued through the 1960s. In 1963 alone, he created Iron Man with Don Heck, Doctor Strange with Ditko, and again with Kirby he created The Howling Commandos, Wasp, the X-Men andthe Avengers. Lee would go on to share credit for almost all of the characters Marvel debuted during the 1960s, including Black Panther, The Inhumans, Daredevil, Black Widow, S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell).
Born in 1922 in New York City, Lee grew up in the Bronx and began his career right out of high school as part of the WPA Federal Theatre Project in 1939. That same year he was hired as an assistant at newly-established Timely Comics, where by 1941 he rose to writer and then interim editor-in-chief. After the outbreak of World War II, Lee served in the Army from 1942 to 1945, after which he returned to Timely as editor-in-chief, a position he held through Timely's change to Marvel Comics and into the early 1970s.
As pivotal as he was, Lee's legacy and his reputation in the comics world are complicated. A gifted self-promoter, Lee turned himself into the rare comics industry celebrity known even to non-readers, and served as a sort of ambassador for Comics to the mainstream. But he was often accused of claiming oversized credit for the characters and concepts that made Marvel famous, and of dealing dishonestly with the artists he worked with.
His most notable critic was Jack Kirby, who died in 1994. Kirby believed Lee had robbed him of his rightful share of profits from their characters, and went on record repeatedly calling Lee a fraud. "Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything," Kirby told an interviewer in 1989. "It wasn't possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things - or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn't a guy that read or that told stories."
Kirby's estate spent years litigating with Marvel over credits and money for characters Kirby co-created. That fight would not be resolved until 20 years after his death, when Marvel settled with Kirby's heirs for an undisclosed sum. The terms of the settlement are not public, and the true extent of Lee and Kirby's actual collaboration may never be known.
Lee, for his part, maintained that his partnership with Kirby was equitable, and that the two had largely reconciled by the end of Kirby's life. "I saw him at a comic book convention, and I walked up to him, and he said 'Stan, you have nothing to reproach yourself for,' which I thought was kind of an odd thing," Lee said in a 2016 radio interview. "I liked hearing it, but it was odd for him to say it."
Even after his output slowed, Lee continued to serve as a public face for Marvel as the brand became a global powerhouse thanks to the success of Fox's "X-Men" franchise, Sony's "Spider-Man" films, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Disney. To younger audiences he is best known for his cameo appearances in Marvel films, which have continued even into 2018 with a cameo in "Black Panther" and a particularly poignant scene in the Playstation 4 video game "Spider-Man."
Lee was married to Joan Lee for 69 years, until her death in 2017 at age 93. He's survived by his daughter J.C.
Stan Lee
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