• Bonnie Ruberg wrote about cybersex in a column for the Village Voice. After she got a Macintosh computer with a built-in camera, she took some photographs of her naked self and showed them to a male online friend, who praised her body but wrote this rather odd comment: “I really like your breasts. They look so light and fluffy.” Ms. Ruberg writes, “Light and fluffy? Those are adjectives I use to describe scrambled eggs, not breasts. … Ever since, breakfast hasn’t been quite the same.”
• Mark Twain was a true original. He lived for years in Hartford, Connecticut, whose most learned citizen was J. Hammond Trumbull. Mr. Twain was very impressed by him because he knew how to use profanity in 27 languages. By the way, while Mr. Twain was living in Hartford, he attended a baseball game at which a boy stole his umbrella. Mr. Twain offered two rewards: $5 for the umbrella, and $200 for the boy’s corpse.
• When they were children, young people’s author William Sleator and Vicky, his sister, had a sandbox in the backyard. Unfortunately, the sandbox was very attractive to cats and dogs for a very unattractive reason. One day, a lady visited and told the children, “Oh, what a lovely sand pile you two children have to play in!” Five-year-old Vicky replied, “That’s not a sand pile. It’s a sh*t pit.”
Letters
• Many, many readers have loved Anne Shirley, the outspoken young red-haired orphan who speaks her mind and comes to live with the elderly Marilla and Mathew Cuthbert on Prince Edward Island in Canada in the novel Anne of Green Gables — and in many other novels. Of course, many, many readers have sent letters to Ms. Montgomery — and to Anne Shirley. A letter that was addressed to “Miss Anne Shirley c/o Miss Marilla Cuthbert, Avonlea, P.E.I., Canada, Ontario,” made its way to Ms. Montgomery. Another letter came from Mark Twain, author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who told her that Anne was “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice [in Wonderland].”
• As you would expect, Noel Coward was witty in real life. Lawrence of Arabia once included his full Royal Air Force number at the head of a letter to him. Mr. Coward wrote back, “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?)….” Mr. Coward also signed many letters in very friendly ways — two examples are “Love and mad mad kisses” and “Love, love, love, love, love.” By the way, in a review of On The Letters of Noël Coward, edited and with commentary by Barry Day, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that Mr. Coward’s philosophy of living “prized above all the importance of snatching happiness in a world filled with emotional confusion imposed from without and exploding from within….”
• When Dr. Benjamin Spock was asked in 1943 to write a baby- and child-care book, he agreed, believing that he had the necessary skill to write such a book. One reason he had this skill was because his mother made him and his siblings write letters to her while they were away from home attending school. Dr. Spock explained, “My mother always made us write letters from school twice a week, and she would get angry if the letters were too short. I was accustomed to writing, so I enjoyed doing the book very much.” Of course, the Dr. Spock baby book — The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care — sold millions of copies and made him famous.
• Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, was a perfect gentleman. According to one writer, “Even his letters of rejection were so complimentary that they had to be read twice to discover whether he was making a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize or expressing regret.” For example, writer Paul Gallico once received this rejection notice from Mr. Crowninshield. “My dear Paul, this is superb. A little masterpiece! What color! What life! How beautifully you have phrased it all! A veritable gem! — Why don’t you take it around to Harper’s Bazaar?”
Zills, also zils or finger cymbals, are small metallic cymbals used in belly dancing and similar performances. In western music, several pairs of zills can be set in a frame to make what instrument?
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to choose between two alternatives, heads or tails, sometimes used to resolve a dispute between two parties. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes. The party who calls the side that the coin lands on wins.
The historical origin of coin flipping is the interpretation of a chance outcome as the expression of divine will.
Coin flipping was known to the Romans as navia aut caput ("ship or head"), as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other. In England, this was referred to as cross and pile.
Source
Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Heads or tails.
Randall wrote:
heads or tails
Dave said:
“Heads or tails.” The coin toss is used to decide which football team receives the ball first, and occasionally to break ties in local elections.
The Detroit Lions have an interesting history with the coin toss. Once during the coin toss (to decide who received the ball first in sudden death overtime), a captain of the Steelers called it with the coin in the air, but a referee misheard what he said and mistakenly awarded the ball to the Lions, who of course drove into field goal range and won the game without the Steelers even getting the ball. Another time, the Lions won the toss, but the Lion’s coach decided to ‘defer’ and kicked off to start the sudden death overtime because he wanted to have the wind at his team’s back. Of course the other team drove down and won the game on the first possession in spite of the wind in their faces. The coach who “took the wind” instead of the ball was of course fired because he was an idiot.
Alan J answered:
Heads or Tails.
zorch replied:
Heads or tails.
Mac Mac responded:
HEADS OR TAILS
Cal in Vermont wrote:
Heads or tails! The surest way to decide anything!
Deborah, the Master Gardener responded:
That’s the old game of heads or tails. The Italian translates to “ship or head” and now I want to see one of those coins.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, said:
Toss a Coin
Jacqueline wrote:
Heads or Tails
Joe ( -- Vote Blue, No Matter Who -- ) answered:
I'd say "heads or tails" of the coin flip. That's what I'd say.
Rosemary in Columbus replied:
Heads or Tails for a coin toss
David of Moon Valley took the day off.
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame took the day off.
DJ Useo took the day off.
John I from Hawai`i took the day off.
mj took the day off.
Stephen F took the day off.
Dave in Tucson took the day off.
Leo in Boise took the day off.
Kevin in Washington DC, took the day off.
Michelle in AZ took the day off.
Jon L took the day off.
Roy, Lifelong member of Antifa, in Tyler, TX took the day off.
Doug in Albuquerque, New Mexico, took the day off.
-pgw took the day off.
Kenn B took the day off.
Micki took the day off.
Ed K took the day off.
Angelo D took the day off.
Harry M. took the day off.
George M. took the day off.
Gary K took the day off.
Roy the (now retired) hoghead (aka 'hoghed') ( Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid. ~Frank Zappa ) took the day off.
Saskplanner took the day off.
Gateway Mike took the day off.
Steve in Wonderful Sacramento, CA, took the day off.
MarilynofTC took the day off.
Paul of Seattle took the day off.
Brian S. took the day off.
Gene took the day off.
Tony K. took the day off.
Noel S. took the day off.
James of Alhambra took the day off.
BttbBob has returned to semi-retired status.
~~~~~
Found a copy of the movie "Cats" in the cut-out bin at the grocery store - if it's as 'bad' as the reviews claim, I'll probably like it.
Tonight, Tuesday:
CBS begins the night with a FRESH'NCIS', followed by a FRESH'FBI', then a FRESH'FBI: Most Wanted'.
Scheduled on a FRESHStephen Colbert is Barack Obama.
Scheduled on a FRESHJames Corden, OBE, are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.
NBC starts the night with a FRESH'The Voice', followed by a RERUN'Weakest Link', then a FRESH'Transplant'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Fallon are Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Paul Bettany, Internet Money featuring Gunna, Don Toliver and Nav.
Scheduled on a FRESHSeth Meyers are Amy Adams and Adam Davidson.
On a RERUNLilly Singh (from 11/11/19) is Adam Devine.
ABC opens the night with a FRESH'The Bachelorette', followed by a FRESH'Big Sky'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Kimmel are Kristen Stewart, Josh Duhamel, and James Taylor.
The CW offers 'Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life'.
Faux has a FRESH'Cosmos: Possible Worlds', followed by a FRESH'NeXt'.
MY recycles an old 'Chicago PD', followed by another old 'Chicago PD'.
AMC offers the movie 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation', followed by the movie 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation', again.
BBC -
[6:00AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - THE BUZZ ALDRIN SHOW
[6:15AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - DINSDALE!
[6:30AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - PARADISE
[7:30AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - SHADOWPLAY
[8:30AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - PLAYING GOD
[9:30AM] TAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - PROFIT AND LOSS
[10:30AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - BLOOD OATH
[11:30AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - REDEMPTION
[12:30PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - REDEMPTION II
[1:30PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - DARMOK
[2:30PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - ENSIGN RO
[3:30PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - SILICON AVATAR
[4:30PM] GLADIATOR
[8:00PM] TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
[11:00PM] THE PATRIOT
[2:30AM] TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
[5:30AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - THE ANT: AN INTRODUCTION
[5:45AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - THE NAKED ANT (ALL TIMES ET)
Bravo has 2½ hours of 'Chrisley Knows Best', followed by a FRESH'Don't Be Tardy ...'.
Comedy Central has 3 hours of old 'Tosh.0', followed by a FRESH'Tosh.0', and another 'Tosh.0'.
On a RERUNThe Daily Show (from 11/17/20) is Kevin Hart.
FX has the movie 'Girls Trip', followed by the movie 'Bad Moms'.
History has 'The Curse Of Oak Island', followed by a FRESH'The Curse Of Oak Island: Digging Deeper', then a FRESH'The Curse Of Oak Island', followed by a FRESH'Beyond Oak Island'.
IFC -
[6:00am] Parks And Recreation
[6:30am] Tremors 5: Bloodlines
[8:45am] Tremors 4: The Legend Begins
[11:15am] Tremors 3: Back To Perfection
[1:45pm] Tremors II: Aftershocks
[4:00pm] Tremors
[6:00pm] Half Baked
[8:00pm] Tommy Boy
[10:15pm] Tommy Boy
[1:15am] Tommy Boy
[3:30am] Tremors 3: Back To Perfection (ALL TIMES ET)
Sundance -
[6:00am] Parks And Recreation
[6:30am] Tremors 5: Bloodlines
[8:45am] Tremors 4: The Legend Begins
[11:15am] Tremors 3: Back To Perfection
[1:45pm] Tremors II: Aftershocks
[4:00pm] Tremors
[6:00pm] Half Baked
[8:00pm] Tommy Boy
[10:15pm] Tommy Boy
[1:15am] Tommy Boy
[3:30am] Tremors 3: Back To Perfection (ALL TIMES ET)
SyFy has 'Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince', followed by the movie 'Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows: Part 1'.
TBS:
On a RERUNConan (from 4/9/16) is Conan in Korea.
“Jeopardy!” record-holder Ken Jennings will be the first in a series of interim hosts replacing Alex Trebek when the show resumes production next Monday.
Producers announced Monday that Jennings, who won 74 games in a row and claimed the show’s “Greatest of All Time” title in a competition last year, will host episodes that air in January.
The show is in its 37th year of syndication, and Trebek was its only host. It is still airing shows that Trebek filmed before his death.
Art Fleming hosted earlier editions of the game show, including the original “Jeopardy!” that debuted in 1964 on NBC and aired for a decade.
“Jeopardy!” will air repeat episodes for the holiday weeks beginning Dec. 21 and 28, meaning Trebek’s final week of shows will air starting Monday, Jan. 4.
A mysterious monolith has been discovered in a remote part of Utah, after being spotted by state employees counting sheep from a helicopter.
The structure, estimated at between 10ft and 12ft high (about 3 metres), appeared to be planted in the ground. It was made from some sort of metal, its shine in sharp contrast to the enormous red rocks which surrounded it.
The helicopter pilot, Bret Hutchings, told local news channel KSLTV: “That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying.”
Hutchings was flying for the Utah department of public safety, which was helping wildlife resource officers count bighorn sheep in the south of the state.
Hutchings said the object looked manmade and appeared to have been firmly planted in the ground, not dropped from the sky.
In a year of rapidly unfolding events and situations, the Oxford English Dictionary has been unable to name just one word for the 2020 word of the year, as it does annually.
“It quickly became apparent that 2020 is not a year that could neatly be accommodated in one single ‘word of the year,’” an OED spokesperson said, according to a report on CNN.
What OED decided would be more in tune to 2020 and best represent it was to proceed through the year chronologically, month-by-month based on “spikes in use.” It starts with “bushfire” in January, when Australia suffered its worst fire season on record, and then goes to “acquittal” in February, when U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial ended.
March certainly came in like a lion, but the lamb never appeared, because after March came along, terms related to the coronavirus started to overshadow everything with words such as “COVID-19,” “lockdown” and “social distancing.”
The term “super-spreader” really jumped front and center in October. This is another word that has been used in the past during infectious disease outbreaks. The term super-spreader saw a spike in use after a cluster of COVID-19 cases broke out at the White House.
Other words and terms on OED’s 2020 list include “cancel culture,” “BIPOC,” “Moonshot” and “net zero.”
Bruce, the fiberglass shark made from the “Jaws” mold, is ready for his close-up. The 1,208 pound, 25-foot-long, 45-year-old shark, famous for being difficult to work with on the set of Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller, on Friday was hoisted up in the air above the main escalator of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles where he will greet guests for the foreseeable future. And this time, he cooperated.
It is the culmination of years of planning, including a seven-month restoration by special effects and makeup artist Greg Nicotero. The shark is expected to be a major draw for the museum, which plans to open its doors to the public on April 30, 2021.
Super fans know that the “Jaws” crew started calling the shark Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer Bruce Ramer. They’ll also know that the Bruce that will greet guests in the museum wasn’t technically in “Jaws.” He’s a replica and it’s the last of his kind. The three mechanical Great Whites designed by art director Joe Alves were destroyed when production wrapped. But once the film proved to be a box office phenomenon, a fourth shark was made from the original mold. For 15 years he hung at Universal Studios Hollywood as a photo opportunity for visitors until he wound up at the Sun Valley junkyard he would call home for the next 25. Nathan Adlan, who inherited his father’s junkyard business, donated him to the museum in 2016.
But Bruce wasn’t quite camera ready. A quarter century in the California sun, plus all the years of being re-painted at Universal had taken its toll on the poor creature, who badly needed care and attention. Nicotero, who has worked on “Day of the Dead” and “The Walking Dead,” said he got into the business because of “Jaws” and volunteered for the task of bringing him back to life.
Restoration was one thing, but loading Bruce into the museum proved to be another ordeal. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano made sure to account for large-scale objects in his restoration of the Saban Building, which was originally the May Company department store. But Bruce is their biggest piece to date and everyone soon realized that he wouldn’t be able to get into the building with his fins attached.
Benjamin Netanyahu secretly flew to Saudi Arabia to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to Israeli media, signalling a potential breakthrough in US efforts to broker a deal between the kingdom and Israel, its long-term foe.
If confirmed, the meeting would be the first publicly acknowledged trip by an Israeli leader to the ultra-conservative nation, whose king is the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites and whose economy is the largest in the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia has previously shunned all contact with Israel, traditionally championing the Palestinian cause instead, including spear-heading key peace initiatives over the decades-old conflict.
However, the Israeli prime minister flew to the kingdom on Sunday night with Yossi Cohen, director of the Mossad intelligence agency, who has led discreet diplomatic outreach to Gulf Arab states, Israel’s Kan public radio and Army Radio reported.
Mr Netanyahu and Mr Cohen apparently met Prince Mohammed and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in Neom on the Red Sea coast, where the crown prince plans to build a massive hi-tech city.
It's been happening for several years now, especially in the autumn, but it never ceases to unsettle meteorologists like myself: Temperatures in the Arctic are astonishingly warmer than they should be.
According to the University of Maine's Climate Reanlayzer, this weekend the Arctic Circle was an average 12 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. This is not just one location, but the average of all 7.7 million square miles. That is a huge area, nearly double the size of the entire United States, being on average 12 degrees above normal.
The Arctic is more than 12 degrees above normal. Repeat: the average for the entire Arctic is 12 degrees above what was normal in 1990. Would be even more extreme compared to pre-industrial.
While the pace of global warming is the fastest we have seen in millions of years, nowhere is it warming faster than the Arctic. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at three times the pace of the rest of the globe.
The outgoing administration of U.S. President Donald Trump (R-Thug) on Monday issued a new temporary rule that could require tourist and business travelers from two dozen countries, most in Africa, to pay a bond of as much as $15,000 to visit the United States.
The U.S. State Department said the temporary final rule, which takes effect Dec. 24 and runs through June 24, targets countries whose nationals have higher rates of overstaying B-2 visas for tourists and B-1 visas for business travelers. The Trump administration said the six-month pilot program aims to test the feasibility of collecting such bonds and will serve as a diplomatic deterrence to overstaying the visas.
The visa bond rule will allow U.S. consular officers to require tourist and business travelers from countries whose nationals had an "overstay rate" of 10% or higher in 2019 to pay a refundable bond of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000.
Twenty-four countries meet that criteria, including 15 African countries. While those nations had higher rates of overstays, they sent relatively few travelers to the United States.
Countries whose tourist and business travelers could be subject to the bond requirement include those from Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sudan, Chad, Angola, Burundi, Djibouti and Eritrea. Other countries include Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iran, Syria, Laos and Yemen.(https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-24223.pdf)
With recurring zigzags, spirals, and other simple geometric patterns, ancient rock art is sometimes surprisingly similar across the globe. One hypothesis is that the artists were all using psychoactive compounds, which nudged the brain toward certain patterns. Now, a new find from a roughly 500-year-old cave used by Native Americans suggests such compounds may indeed have been an important component of their rock art. But the art itself may not have depicted the experience of tripping.
The site of the discovery is Pinwheel Cave in Southern California, about 80 kilometers northeast of Santa Barbara. The cave gets its name for a large, red, pinwheel-shaped drawing on its ceiling; some archaeologists have hypothesized it represents a genus of the psychoactive flower Datura. The flower contains the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, which are considered an entheogen—a psychoactive compound used in a spiritual context. The Chumash people of Southern California called the experiences triggered by ingesting Datura “sacred dreams,” according to Jim Adams, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California who spent 14 years studying sacred Chumash Datura ceremonies.
When David Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire, and his colleagues began to excavate the site in 2007, they found chewed remnants of plant materials—also known as quids—pushed into cracks in the ceiling of the cave. Initial attempts to extract DNA from the quids came up short. But now, a combination of new chemical analyses and electron microscopy has positively identified the plant as Datura, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I was like, ‘Wow, we found the smoking gun of hallucinogens at a rock art site,’” Robinson says.
The excavation also uncovered a plethora or arrowheads, tools, and food scraps at the site, contradicting a once-classic model of a lone shaman hallucinating in isolation and using rock art to record his experience, as had been suggested for ancient rock art around the world.
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said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
