Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Joe Bob Briggs: 500 Years of Moonshine Might, You Know, Taste Better(Taki's Magazine)
A decade later Taketsuru built the Nikka distillery on Hokkaido, the coldest part of Japan, in an effort to perfectly reproduce the conditions in Scotland. And for the rest of the 20th century, Suntory and Nikka perfected whiskies for the Japanese-Bill Murray is filming a Suntory commercial in Lost in Translation-until somehow the word got out. It's Suntory that has won most of the international awards, but it was Nikka that started it all in 2001 when its 10-year single malt won "Best of the Best" from Whisky magazine. Then it all came full circle in 1989 when Nikka saved the legendary Ben Nevis distillery from bankruptcy. The overnight miracle of Japanese whisky required a full century of monkeying around with the malt and the still.
Matthew Yglesias: The next generation of Democratic congressional leadership is coming into view (Vox)
Ben Ray Lujan, Hakeem Jeffries, and Katherine Clark are positioned for the future.
House leadership election: Democrats' new generation - Vox
Nancy Pelosi will remain in charge of House Democrats alongside her longtime No. 2 and 3 in command, an outcome to a leadership race that isn't particularly exciting. But races further down the ...
Helaine Olen: Another conflict of interest at a Trump hotel? (Washington Post)
A more ethical society wouldn't tolerate the president receiving a dime from anyone with even a potential interest in government regulation. But that doesn't describe the United States in 2018. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) anti-corruption legislation, which demands both the president and vice president put any asset that presents a potential conflict of interest into a blind trust and sold off, doesn't have a chance of passing as long as Republicans control the Senate. If it did, Jarman could hold his event at the Chicago hotel, without so much as an eyebrow raised. But as of now, Trump can continue to flout traditional norms. That's not right.
Andrew Tobias: What Do You Do When No One Cares?
… my friend David Durst offers this by way of context: "How amazing to see Trump continue to attack Mueller as unethical, untrustworthy, conflicted and a coward. Here is a comparison of the two: Donald J Trump: Skirted military service due to a bone spur. Robert Mueller: Bronze Star with Valor, Purple Heart, Navy Commendation Medal (with Valor), Combat Action Ribbon, South Vietnam Gallantry Cross. Appointed US Attorney by Ronald Reagan; Assistant Attorney General by George H. W. Bush; FBI Director by George W. Bush. Registered Republican."
Jonathan Chait: Trump Lied About His Very Legal and Very Cool Russia Deals for No Reason (NY Mag)
During the 2016 campaign, and for years after, Donald Trump insisted that he had no dealings with Russia whatsoever. He also assured the public that we could take his word on this, and there was no need to look at his tax returns. But [the recent] confession in open court by Michael Cohen shows that Trump was attempting to do business in Russia during the campaign, with high-level officials from the same government that was interceding on Trump's behalf.
Xan Brooks: "Lars von Trier on filmmaking and fear: 'Sometimes, alcohol is the only thing that will help'" (The Guardian)
His new film, the typically shocking The House That Jack Built, is supposed to be the director's big comeback. But his demons seem to have the upper hand
Arwa Mahdawi: Forget trying to save - here's what you really need to do by the age of 30 (The Guardian)
Millennials such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needn't worry about what's in their bank accounts. These are the real milestones to aim for.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Opera singers Emma Calvé and Elena Sanz once sang a duet incognito in a courtyard, where a man shouted at them from a window, "How long is this howling going to continue? Who are these witches, destroying my peace with their hideous voices and false notes? Concierge! Concierge! Turn these women out!" Ms. Calvé and Ms. Sanz ran away. Wondering whether they had really sang badly, they went that night to a party at the Spanish Embassy, where they again sang the duet, this time to great applause. In a happy coincidence, the man who had shouted at them from his window earlier in the day was present, and he had the grace to be greatly embarrassed.
• English tenor Alfred Piccaver was greatly beloved in Vienna. After an October 1924 concert that Mr. Piccaver gave to the Viennese before departing for a season in Chicago, the audience refused to leave. Thinking to solve the problem, the hall manager turned out the lights and the hall electrician left the hall, carrying with him the keys needed to turn on the lights. Nevertheless, the audience still refused to leave. Eventually, Mr. Piccaver satisfied the audience by borrowing a flashlight, going on stage, and singing seven encores. Then, and only then, did the audience leave.
• As a very young child, soprano Geraldine Farrar started taking piano lessons, but she played only the black keys. Asked why she didn't play the white keys, she replied, "Because the white keys seem like angels and the black keys like devils, and I like devils best." In an early autobiography, she wrote, "It was the soft half-tones of the black keys which fascinated me, and to this day I prefer their sensuous harmony to that of the more brilliant 'angels.'"
• Tenor Richard Lewis and some colleagues were going to sing at a concert in Wales. The concert committee had set up the program, and when Mr. Lewis looked at it, he noticed that it was exactly the same program that they had sung there the previous year. When he inquired why they wanted the singers to perform the same songs as last year, the committee replied, "Oh, we just wanted to see if you could sing them any better!"
• At the height of his powers, tenor Mario de Candia cast a spell over the young women in his audience as he sang. While in a Paris salon, he performed a song whose last line was, "Come, love, with me into the woods." At the end of the song, a half-hypnotized young woman stood up and walked toward him, murmuring, "I am coming."
• When he was general manager of Covent Garden, Henry Higgins worried that the orchestra would drown out the voice of Irish tenor John McCormack. Mr. McCormack's reply is a classic: "Then make your damned orchestra play softer."
• Sometimes a singer-songwriter will have a long wait between albums. When a reporter for MTV asked Tom Waits why six years had passed before he recorded a new album, he replied, "I was stuck in traffic."
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE FASCIST REPUBLICANS STRIKE AGAIN.
BIGOTRY!
'FASCISM'.
STOP FASCISM!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Spent 3½ hours sitting in traffic.
One Love Malibu
Katy Perry
Katy Perry, one of the biggest acts at Sunday's all-star One Love Malibu benefit concert - held at the King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas, Calif., to raise money for those affected by last month's devastating Woolsey Fire - was determined to go above and beyond for this worthy cause. So during the live Christie's auction of a motorcycle ride with "the man I'm dating that I love and respect" and the "Malibu OG" - aka her on/off boyfriend, Orlando Bloom - Perry hopped onstage to egg on prospective bidders, even throwing in a free lunch. "I'll probably book it," she quipped.
Eventually a fan named Laura placed a bid for $20,000, to which Perry shouted, "Yay! I don't know who you are, but stan for my man!" But just a moment later, Perry said, "Laura, I'm sorry - I'm buying it for $50,000." As Perry wordlessly exited the stage, the auctioneer declared, "Sold - to the lady in the red leather skirt!" And the emcee marveled, "That was a boss move."
Other highlights of the star-studded afternoon included Natasha Bedingfield's fiery cover of the Prince power ballad "Purple Rain"; Robin Thicke (who, along with Katy Perry, was the first to sign on for the event) grooving on Michael Jackson's "Rock with You" and Al Green's "Let's Stay Together"; Alanis Morissette reuniting with her "You Oughta Know" drummer, Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters (and changing the line in "Ironic" to "It's meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful … husband"); Brandi Carlile, described by event organizer Linda Perry as her "good luck charm," evoking the holiday spirit with a cover of Joni Mitchell's "River"; and Gwen Stefani recruiting the Strokes' Nick Valensi to play guitar on No Doubt's "Underneath It All" and "Don't Speak."
Among the other performers and presenters were Joe Walsh, Rick Springfield, Macy Gray, Best Coast, Rita Ora, Rita Wilson, Dorothy, Pete Molinari, Angel Haze, Demi Moore, Dick Van Dyke, Nikki Reed, and Brandon Boyd, Mike Einziger, and Ben Kenney of Incubus.
Katy Perry
Prediction
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen thinks Donald Trump (R-Grifter) will be victorious in the 2020 election - not that he'll be voting for him.
The Boss got political in a new interview with the U.K.'s Sunday Times Magazine, saying he understands why people become Trump supporters, pointing to the decline of blue-collar jobs and boom in technology.
"I think that there are a lot of reasons people became Trump voters," said the singer-songwriter, a Democrat whose hits have long touched on the plight of working-class Americans. "You had severe blows to working people in the 1970s and 1980s as all the steel mills shut down. Then you had an explosion of information technology. These are life-changing, upsetting occurrences." He said that leads some people to find themselves "in a country that you may not feel part of, or you feel that your [concerns are] being dismissed."
Springsteen, who bashed Trump in his 2017 song "That's What Makes Us Great," said when you have that "insecurity and instability" and then "someone comes in and plays on your racial anxieties, and blames an enormous amount of this on the 'other' from the southern side of the border, and you're going to have an audience for those views. I basically think that [the problem] is the incredibly rapid pace of change that's occurred in the United States that's gone unaddressed by both administrations, Democrat and Republican."
He predicted that Trump will likely be reelected for a second term because there isn't a strong-enough Democratic challenger at this point. "I don't see anyone out there at the moment. The man who can beat Trump, or the woman who can beat Trump," he said. "You need someone who can speak some of the same language [as Trump], and the Democrats don't have an obvious, effective presidential candidate."
Bruce Springsteen
Bumped Back
Grammy Nominations
The 61st Grammy Awards nominations will now be announced on Friday, Dec. 7, instead of Wednesday, Dec. 5 as previously planned due to memorial services for former President George H.W. Bush, it was announced on Monday.
Select categories will be announced live on "CBS This Morning" and on Apple Music at 8:30 a.m. ET. Immediately following, at 8:45 a.m. ET, the Recording Academy will announce nominations across all 84 categories via press release, GRAMMY.com, and the Recording Academy's social media platforms.
"The 61st Annual Grammy Awards" airs Sunday, Feb. 10, 2019 at 8/7c on CBS.
Grammy Nominations
Original Star Wars Lightsaber To Auction
Luke Skywalker
How much would pay for a lightsaber used by a young Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film?
Major Hollywood auction house Profiles In History is expecting the Jedi weapon that Mark Hamill wielded in the 1977 Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope to fetch upwards of $150,000 at an upcoming, unprecedented auction of memorabilia from the Star Wars galaxy. Another keepsake sure to draw fans from far away: an original TIE fighter helmet, which the auction house estimates may bring in well above $200,000.
Plenty of other films in the franchise are also represented in the auction, which includes more than 25 Star Wars props. Fans of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi can try to outbid worthy opponents angling to buy an Imperial Army Scout Trooper helmet or a pair of C-3PO hands. On the auction block will also be a screen used Stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, signed by Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and other lead cast members from the film.
Fans of other Hollywood blockbusters of the same era will also find treasures at this particular sale, including from 1986's Aliens, Sigourney Weaver's "Ripley" leather jacket, pants, and custom futuristic Reebok high-top sneakers, as well as her stunt pulse rifle and flamethrower.
The Profiles in History Hollywood memorabilia auction takes place December 11 to 13 in Los Angeles.
Luke Skywalker
Suit Dropped
Rania Youssef
The three lawyers who sued actress Rania Youssef with public obscenity and incitement to debauchery for wearing a sheer dress have withdrawn their charges. The attorneys explained why they withdrew the charges in a statement published on Arabic outlet El Watan News on Monday afternoon.
The statement, signed by lawyers Amr Abdel Salam, Hamido Jameel al-Prince and Wahid al-Kilani, explained that because Youssef apologized, they decided to "waive legal measures."
PREVIOUSLY:
Egyptian actress Rania Youssef is facing up to five years in prison for wearing a sheer dress at the Cairo International Film Festival last month.
Egyptian lawyers charged Youssef, 45, with public obscenity and incitement to debauchery in a criminal lawsuit filed after the film festival concluded on Thursday, The New York Times reports. The actress wore a black floor-length sequined gown that showed most of her legs in a sheer part of the dress.
Rania Youssef
Four New Black-Hole Mergers
Gravitational Waves
At a weekend workshop in Maryland, physicists from the LIGO and Virgo collaboration reported four previously unannounced detections of gravitational waves from merging black holes, including the biggest-known black-hole collision to date, roughly 5 billion years ago. That merger resulted in a new black hole that is a whopping 80 times more massive than the Sun.
All four are part of the first official catalog of gravitational wave events (called the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog, or GWTC-1), listing all events detected to date. Their addition brings the total number to 11. Two scientific papers on the new findings have been posted to the arXiv preprint repository (here and here), pending publication.
LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. (LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016.) On September 14, 2015, at 5:51am EST, both detectors picked up signals within milliseconds of each other for the very first time-direct evidence for two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and merging in a massive collision event that sent powerful shockwaves across spacetime.
The collaboration picked up two more black-hole mergers from that first run. The second run, from November 30, 2016, to August 25, 2017, produced seven more binary black-hole mergers (including the four just announced) and a binary neutron-star merger, supported by a simultaneous gamma-ray burst and signals in the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was an unprecedented recording of a major celestial event, combining light and sound, and officially marked the dawn of so-called "multi-messenger astronomy."
If the new events are from the same second runs as events previously reported, why are we only hearing about them now? It's because the physicists wanted to make absolutely sure they were bona fide detections. "We've been sifting through the data, looking at every feature, comparing it to our astrophysical predictions, cross-checking it against monitors that tell us the health of the instruments, determining if it appears in all the detectors, and using our most robust (but slow-running) super-computer analysis codes," Shane Larsen, a Northwestern University physicist and member of the LIGO collaboration, wrote on the Write Science blog.
Gravitational Waves
Sculptor Unknowingly Poisons Herself
Art
When a sculptor in Toronto started feeling ill in 2013, she had no idea that her art was the reason why. The sculptor, Gillian Genser, had been using blue mussel shells in her sculptures for the past 15 years, and, as a result, unknowingly poisoning herself.
The culprit? Heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, found in the mussel shells. In a moving personal essay published Nov. 28 in Toronto Life, Genser described the onset of her symptoms - which began with agitation, headaches and vomiting, and later progressed to symptoms such as hearing loss in one ear and short-term memory problems. It took two-year- for doctors to nail down the diagnosis of heavy metal poisoning.
Indeed, Genser wrote, it wasn't until she visited the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and spoke with a curator of invertebrates that she put the pieces together. The curator told Genser that toxins can build up in the shells of invertebrates, leading her to research blue mussels. As Live Science has previously reported, chemicals accumulate in mussels as they filter feed, making them good barometers for water pollutants.
Genser wrote that, in her case, the mussels she had been working with likely came from water contaminated with industrial waste. After 15 years of working with the mussel shells, she had built up high levels of arsenic and lead in her blood. She will "never fully recover" and continues to live with many symptoms, she wrote. However, she went on to complete her mussel-sculpture, a depiction of the biblical Adam, in 2015. She calls him her "beautiful death."
Art
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