M Is FOR MASHUP - September 16th, 2021
IamJstncrdble - MASHania Is All Shania Twain! Woot!
By DJ Useo
The highly-talented bootlegger IamJstncrdble
( sowndhaus.audio/explore/filter/justincredible )
has released a super-fine collection of Shania Twain mixes called “MASHania”
( drive.google.com/file/d/1ZDWiPM63z-4QGt6lcS24AwLz2dLSG3P8/view )
.
The new 18-track album provides a deep look into genre clash, with tracks that team country music with other styles you love. On this collection expect pairings like Shania Twain vs The Chainsmokers, Shania Twain vs James Brown, Shania Twain and Billy Currington vs Britney Spears, & Shania Twain vs SpongeBob SquarePants, plus 14 more.
As things go with very good mashups, these are totally enjoyable, yet compell re-listening of the source artists. There’s lots of good music by Shania. She strikes me as a wonderful late afternoon artist. After you consume this tribute release, you’ll no doubt seek other IamJstncrdble audio creations, which can be easily had here
( sowndhaus.audio/explore/filter/justincredible )
As this column is a bit short today, here’s some useful algebra to kick in your neurons. Solve the equation
5(- 3x - 2) - (x - 3) = -4(4x + 5) + 13, Simplify the expression 2(a -3) + 4b - 2(a -b -3) + 5, & simplify If x 2 to |x - 2| - 4|-6|.
Plus, here’s my 2 “Sunday Novelty
Mixes”
( hearthis.at/vxmfxz7w/dj-useo-sunday-novelty-mix/ )
( hearthis.at/vxmfxz7w/dj-useo-sunday-novelty-mix-2/ )
Each is about a half hour of complete music madness. To ease your audio passage through such material, I edited each track down to well under a minute. After hearing these, you’ll be happy to return to more “normal” fare. ( Like Shania Twain )
More mashups next week. Ta.
Have the day of good.
DJ Konrad Useo
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Animals
• William Butler Yeats wrote some plays in the Japanese Noh style, including The Hawk’s Wells, which created a problem. The stage direction “The Girl gives the cry of the hawk” appears twice, but Yeats, choreographer/dancer Michio Ito, and costume/mask designer Edmund Dulac did not know what the cry of the hawk sounded like. They made a few trips to a zoo, but they were unsuccessful in hearing the cry of a hawk, even though Mr. Dulac prodded a hawk with his umbrella. Finally, they decided that the Japanese word for hawk, taka, was onomatopoeic, and so when the Girl gave the cry of the hawk, she cried taka.
• Before he became a success, Jack Benny was desperate for work. Hearing that an animal act was needed at a vaudeville theater, he borrowed two Pekinese dogs and showed up to work. However, Mr. Benny simply tied the dogs to some scenery on stage, and then performed his regular act of telling jokes. While paying Mr. Benny his $25 fee, the theater manager remarked that the animal act was very peculiar and asked, “Don’t your dogs do any tricks?” Mr. Benny pocketed the money, then replied, “Not at these prices, they don’t.”
• The part of Nana, the nanny-dog in James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, was based on Luath, Mr. Barrie’s Newfoundland dog. To create the costume for Nana, costumers copied Luath’s black-and-white coat. For one performance, Luath made an appearance on stage during a curtain call — the audience was delighted. Afterward, Luath was famous and took liberties during his walks at Kensington Gardens. Sometimes, he would even eat buns that he had taken from babies.
• Jack Benny once performed in USO shows in Europe. After a performance one night, he and some other performers were riding back to their quarters on base when an MP ordered them to stop. The jeep didn’t stop fast enough for the MP, so he fired some shots into the air. After the jeep had stopped and the MP was inspecting the entertainers’ papers, a black cat crossed in front of the jeep. Mr. Benny watched the black cat, then said, “Now he tells us.”
• Mrs. Patrick Campbell certainly loved her dog. When a taxi driver accused her dog of making a puddle in the back of his taxi, Mrs. Campbell rose to the defense of her pet by claiming, “I did it!”
Audiences
• Marga Gomez, the lesbian author of Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty, and Gay, ran into problems the first time she performed this one-person theatrical piece. Because the piece was new, she placed cheat sheets on the set, out of the sight of the audience. Unfortunately, she accidentally kicked the sheets, mixing them up, and she had to wing the rest of the performance. However, this was not her most terrifying performance. That occurred when she thought Cher was in the audience. All during the performance, she was afraid she would forget her lines. After the performance, she discovered that Cher hadn’t been there — just a man who looked like Cher.
• When Eli Wallach was studying to be an actor, he often attended plays (with cheap tickets) in New York. He once watched a play titled Waiting for Lefty, which was about a taxi-driver strike. Mr. Wallach sat by a man who looked as if he was a taxi driver and who became very interested in the acting on stage. Eventually, an actor on stage started shouting, “Strike! Strike!” The man next to Mr. Wallach jumped to his feet and started shouting, “Strike! Strike!” Carried away by the emotion beside and in front of him, Mr. Wallach also jumped to his feet and started shouting, “Strike! Strike!” Other members of the audience felt the same way and did the same thing.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
The Funniest People in Theater: 250 Anecdotes — Buy
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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: "Ave, Lucifer"
Album: LIVE AT THE BARBICAN THEATRE
Artist: Os Mutantes
Artist Location: Brazil
Record Company: Luaka Bob
Record Company Location: New York, New York
Info: “The late 60's in Brasil produced an explosion of creativity that is still reverberating throughout the worid … and Os Mutantes (The Mutants) were the most outrageous band of that period. Their creative cannibalism produced psychedelic gems unlike anything else, and they sound as relevant today as anything happening anywhere. They were exactly what their name implies — a mutant genetic recombination of John Cage, The Beatles, and bossa nova. A creature that was too strange and beautiful to live for very long, but too strong to ever fade away. It lives again. Be prepared.” — David Byrne
“Luaka Bop is a record label established by David Byrne in 1989.”
“How did 60s Brazil produce the wildest, most psychedelic rock'n'roll group of them all? And why, three decades on, has the rest of the world gone crazy over them? As the DAILY TELEGRAPH put it 'people talk about cult bands, but there should be a separate category for Os Mutantes, who have had a fanatical following among music lovers for years.' Against all odds, in May 2006 the band reunited for the first time in over 30 years for a euphoric show at the Barbican's Tropicalia Festival. This is the recording of this historic concert, with special guests Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson.”
“Os Mutantes are an influential Brazilian rock band that were linked with the Tropicália movement, a dissident musical movement during the Brazilian dictatorship of the late 1960s. They released their acclaimed self-titled debut album in 1968. Although the original line-up made the most notable breakthrough for the group, it has gone through numerous personnel changes throughout its existence. After a hiatus from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, the band reunited in 2006, touring and recording new material.”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $10 (USD) for 21-track album
Genre: Rock.
Links:
LIVE AT THE BARBICAN THEATRE
Os Mutantes on Bandcamp
Os Mutantes – Topic
OsMutantesVEVO
Luaka Bop
Other Links:
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
New Venture
Michael Egan
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
Smells like something really pissed off a skunk out back.
Not Attending Emmys
Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston revealed on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” that she will not be attending the 2021 Emmys on Sunday, citing her personal safety as the pandemic continues.
As part of HBO Max’s “Friends” reunion, she’s nominated in the variety special (pre-recorded) category alongside Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer and other producers.
“No, I will not be going,” she told Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night, adding that producer and director Ben Winston will attend and accept on her behalf, if the “Friends” reunion wins. “This is a big step for me to just be here. Just baby steps.”
She told Kimmel that she’s been staying home a lot, while also safely filming Season 2 of Apple TV Plus’ “The Morning Show,” doing press and visiting her friends Courteney Cox and Jason Bateman. “We had this little bubble of friends — thank God, I love all of you so much — but yeah, it was hard. Weird times,” she said.
Jennifer Aniston
Nielsen Ratings
NFL Football
The ageless Tom Brady is due a thank you note from NBC. The Tampa Bay Bucs quarterback helped the network to a smashing audience of 24.8 million viewers for the NFL kickoff game, where he took on and defeated the Dallas Cowboys. That’s up from last year’s season opener, which reached 19.3 million.
Fox News Channel led the cable networks in prime time, averaging 2.23 million viewers. ESPN had 1.89 million, HGTV had 1.07 million, MSNBC had 1.06 million and TLC had 910,000.
ABC’s “World News Tonight” won the evening news ratings race, averaging 7.8 million viewers. NBC’s “Nightly News” had 6.4 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 4.6 million.
For the week of Sept. 6-12, the 20 most popular programs in prime time, their networks and viewerships:
1. NFL Football: Dallas at Tampa Bay, NBC, 24.81 million.
2. NFL Football: Chicago at L.A. Rams,” NBC, 17.64 million.
3. “NFL Pregame” (Thursday), NBC, 16.21 million.
4. “NFL Pregame” (Sunday), NBC, 12.81 million.
5. “NFL Kickoff,” NBC, 10.42 million.
6. “60 Minutes,” CBS, 9.98 million.
7. “Football Night in America, Part 3,” NBC, 9.97 million.
8. “America’s Got Talent” (Tuesday), NBC, 6.9 million.
9. “Football Night in America, Part 2,” NBC, 6.5 million.
10. “America’s Got Talent” (Wednesday), NBC, 5.95 million.
11. “The O.T.,” Fox, 5.78 million.
12. College Football: Washington at Michigan, ABC, 4.75 million.
13. “Big Brother” (Sunday), CBS, 4.223 million.
14. “Celebrity Family Feud,” ABC, 4.218 million.
15. “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” ABC, 4.07 million.
16. “Big Brother” (Wednesday), CBS, 3.89 million.
17. “Big Brother” (Thursday), CBS, 3.86 million.
18. “FBI” (Thursday, 8 p.m.), CBS, 3.42 million.
19. “FBI” (Thursday, 9 p.m.), CBS, 3.37 million.
20. “20/20” (Friday, 9 p.m.), ABC, 3.34 million.
NFL Football
Sequel ‘Triplets’
‘Twins’
It only took 33 years, but director/producer Ivan Reitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito have found a way to sequelize Twins.. They’ve enlisted Tracy Morgan to play a third and long lost sibling. Triplets will shoot January in Boston, as the two unlikely brothers Julian (Schwarzenegger) and Vincent (DeVito) find they are part of a trio. This immediately becomes a hot project in the Toronto Film Festival market, which like last year is mostly playing out in virtual fashion. Script is by Dylan Dawson & Lucas Kavner. CAA Media Finance will rep North America and Rocket Science is handling international sales. They are about to send out a sizzle reel with the trio to potential buyers.
“Twins was quite successful, and some years after, this whole thing started with Arnold meeting Eddie Murphy, and the suggestion came from one of them,” Reitman told Deadline. “It was, ‘I should be a triplet, that could be a very funny comedy.’ We started a script with Eddie, and after the success he had with Amazon Prime on Coming 2 America, he got himself booked up heavily. And we knew we were going to make it at the beginning of next year. I’d been good friends with Tracy Morgan for a long time and always thought he was one of the funniest men in the world. I thought he would make a terrific triplet, and we rewrote the whole script for him. Now, we’ll go out and try and put the money together and get it made.”
The original was a big hit for Universal — $216 million global gross — but Reitman said that the terms called for a reversion of rights if the sequel wasn’t made in a certain amount of time.
‘Twins’
Rare, Early Version Translated
The “Bristol Merlin”
A team of researchers has published a full English translation of an 800-year-old passage from the story of King Arthur. They also analyzed the handwriting and linguistic style of the manuscript, nicknamed the “Bristol Merlin,” to glean information on its origin and history, using an imaging technique called Raman spectroscopy to better make out faded parts of the text.
Tucked away in the bindings of four books from the turn of the 15th century, the Bristol Merlin is made up of seven parchment fragments that comprise a passage from the Arthur legend. Dated to between 1250 and 1275, the manuscript was likely penned in northern France, the researchers said, based on the writing style and its language (Old French). Though about an English king, the Arthur myth was told and retold in different ways throughout France. The manuscript is not the first document to contain its particular story, which is called the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. Researchers believe the text was initially written around 1225, which means the Bristol Merlin was a fairly contemporary retelling of the story.
The fragments of the Bristol Merlin were evidently written by two people, based on differences in the handwriting—perhaps an apprentice and a more learned colleague, Campbell explained in an email. But the team was also able to see previously invisible details in the tale itself by using a spectroscopic technique called Raman scattering to enhance the ink that had faded away with time. Such methods are helping historians and other experts recover knowledge previously inaccessible in degraded documents.
The Bristol Merlin manuscript has some narrative differences from later versions of the Arthur myth, revealing what one of the earliest renditions of the tale was like. The Holy Grail, for example, a staple of the Arthur myth you might know, wasn’t introduced until the version of the myth written by Chrétien de Troyes, a French poet.
The “Bristol Merlin”
Gangs
L.A.
At least four “secret cliques or gangs” of sheriff’s deputies — with names like the Banditos and the Executioners — continue to operate and recruit within the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, despite recent reforms intended to ban them. The persistence of illicit factions is described in a new report commissioned by L.A. County that rebukes a department that “either can’t or won’t” manage a problem that is undermining the legitimacy of the law enforcement agency, and has cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of recklessness, violence, and harassment.
Conducted by the RAND Corporation on behalf of the county government, the report draws on an unprecedented survey of the department’s roughly 10,000 sworn personnel, and reveals that nearly one-in-six deputies have been invited to join a “subgroup” — a quarter of those within the past five years. (The report opts for the neutral language of “subgroups” and “cliques,” but recognizes that critics have long decried these factions as “gangs,” pointing to pervasive initiation rituals, tattoos, hand signs, and the groups’ often-violent behavior.)
The report identifies four subgroups by name as “currently active,” each operating within a different geographic station within LASD: the Banditos of East Los Angeles station, the Reapers of South Los Angeles station, the Spartans of Century station, and the Executioners of Compton station.
Underscoring how ingrained such cliques are within the culture of the department, the report also names eight other subgroups (including the Cavemen, the Jumpout Boys, and the Regulators) that no longer actively recruit new deputies, but whose aging members remain on LASD payroll. “I can’t say whether the Regulators or Vikings or Banditos are a criminal street gang, but they’re close to it,” said one survey respondent who identified obliquely as a “county stakeholder representative.” This person continued: “The reason you can’t answer that is that it’s never been investigated…. The culture is so pervasive within the department. There are many people who are in places of management that may have been part of the same cliques, or precursors of them.”
L.A.
Traditions
Dolphins
The slaughter of 1,428 white-sided dolphins over the weekend, part of a four-century-old traditional drive of sea mammals into shallow water where they are killed for their meat and blubber, has reignited a debate on the small Faeroe Islands.
The hunt in the North Atlantic islands is not commercial and is authorized, but environmental activists claim it is cruel. Even people in the Faeroes who defend the traditional practice worry that this year's hunt will draw unwanted attention because it was far larger than previous ones and seemingly took place without the usual organization.
Heri Petersen, the foreman of a group that drives pilot whales toward shore on the central Faeroese island of Eysturoy, where the killings took place Sunday, said he was not told about the dolphin drive and “strongly dissociated” himself from it.
Islanders usually kill up to 1,000 sea mammals annually, according to data kept by the Faeroe Islands. Last year, that included only 35 white-sided dolphins.
Dolphins
Egypt Opens Tomb
King Djoser
Egypt on Tuesday showcased an ancient tomb structure belonging to the cemetery complex of King Djoser, a pharaoh who lived more than 4,500 years ago, following extensive restorations of the site.
The structure — known as the Southern Tomb — is largely underground and includes a labyrinth of corridors, decorated with hieroglyphic carvings and tiles. A central funeral shaft houses a massive granite-clad sarcophagus from Egypt’s Third Dynasty.
However, the pharaoh was not actually buried there but in the famed Step Pyramid nearby. The two structures make up part of the Saqqara complex near Cairo — one of the country’s richest archeological sites. The Step Pyramid is the oldest known pyramid and one of the first examples of monumental architecture from the ancient world, according to UNESCO. It is believed to have been the inspiration for the Pyramids at Giza.
Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism said the opening this week of the tomb structure marked the completion of restoration work that started in 2006 and included reinforcing of the underground corridors, refurbishing the carvings and the tiled walls, and installing lighting. As of Tuesday, the tomb opened to the public.
King Djoser
Discovery At Kentucky National Park
Mammoth Cave
The longest cave in the world just got even longer — at least officially speaking.
Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky said researchers found another 8 miles of passages while mapping the immense underground geological marvel. The new discovery by the Cave Research Foundation brings the total length to 420 miles, officials said.
According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the park estimates up to 600 miles of cave remain undiscovered. Plus, more than 200 miles of disconnected parts of the main cave system exist in the park.
Steven Bishop, an enslaved Black man, was a guide and among the first in modern history to map the cave in the 1840s, discovering new passageways in the “dark labyrinth,” according to the park.
Mammoth Cave
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