M Is FOR MASHUP - RERUN - December 18th, 2019
Audioboots Christmas 2019 Brings The Holiday Joy!
By DJ Useo
Last years "Audioboots Christmas 2018"
( www.suprmchaos.com/bcEnt-Wed-121918.index.html ) really got a fine response, with many wanting a sequel. So, we proceeded along those lines towards completion.
Now, we offer you "Audioboots Christmas 2019"
( audioboots.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/2046 )
Chocomang approved the theme, then Me, & Petrushka collated the results, & everybody mixed to levels that exceeded my hopes. I mastered the project, & after hosting it, you all get the benefit.
Personally, I like much Christmas music. ( The "Little Drummer Boy" being my favorite ) It's been a thrill to mix for this comp, & I really enjoy listening to it repeatedly. There's tracks by established, skilled mixers like Rudec, SMASH, rappy, DJ Spider, & more. Artists used include Mariah Carey, Depeche Mode, Eric Clapton, Book Of Love, & plenty more, all combined in appealing arrangements.
The best part for me, ( along with the mp3's ) is interacting with the contributors. A finer group of individuals I can't imagine. Rappy, a long time pal, & accomplished bootlegger, brought with him a superb new mixer named Al Colle. You can hear his Christmas contribution "I Like Christmas" ( Mariah Caey vs Cardi B ), plus he sent along two swell bonus tracks you will enjoy much.
Here's a preview link for his mix
( youtube.com/watch?v=t1CPGgeyCM8 )
And here's a preview link for one of my Christmas tracks "Merry Christmas Praise You" ( Nina Hagen vs Fatboy Slim vs Maribou State )
( sowndhaus.audio/track/14701/dj-useo-merry-christmas-praise-you-nina-hagen-vs-fatboy-slim-vs-maribou-state- )
The next holiday coming up is National Pinwheel Day, so I expect we won't make a mashup album for that. Lol.
Happy Holidays to y'all - DJ Konrad Useo & the Gang at Audioboots.
( audioboots.com/ )
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Theater
• Eve Arden was getting ready to go on stage in Los Angeles, California, in the title role of Auntie Mame when she realized she couldn’t remember the name of the Connecticut town where Mame’s nephew’s snooty fiancé lived. She turned to a cast member who played one of the Connecticut group and asked, “Quick, Frank, where do you live?” Misunderstanding her, he told her the name of his Los Angeles hotel. Fortunately, Ms. Arden remembered the name of the Connecticut town once she was onstage.
• Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker got to know playwright Robert E. Sherwood (later to become twice a Pulitzer Prize-winner for Idiot’s Delight and Abe Lincoln in Illinois) because he asked to go to lunch with them — and to walk between them. They soon found out why. Mr. Sherwood was six-feet-seven, and some little people near where he worked used to lie in wait for him and walk him to his restaurant while shouting things like “How’s the weather up there?”
• Dame Edith Evans consistently made the same mistake during rehearsals for Hay Fever, saying, “On a very clear day you can see Marlow.” Mr. Coward told her, “Dear Edith, you spoil the rhythm by putting in a ‘very.’ The line is ‘On a clear morning you can see Marlow.’ On a very clear morning you can also see both Beaumont and Fletcher.”
• Shakespeare was very popular in Yiddish translations in Yiddish theaters. Once, a Yiddish-speaking taxi driver asked Walter Matthau what he was doing. Mr. Matthau replied that he was performing in a Broadway production of King Lear. The taxi driver replied, “Really? Do you think it would go in English?”
• While performing in a Marx Brothers play on Broadway, Groucho went to the footlights and asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?” When a doctor stood up, Groucho asked him, “If you’re a doctor, why aren’t you at the hospital making your patients miserable, instead of wasting your time here with that blonde?”
Travel
• Balletomanes sometimes think that the life of ballet dancers and choreographers is glamorous, but it often isn’t. Early in ballerina Maria Tallchief’s career, she and other lowly paid ballet dancers often played “Ghosting,” aka “That Old Army Game.” One dancer would rent a room, then two other dancers would sneak in and stay there, too. One dancer would sleep on the bed, another on the box springs, and a third on the floor. Because of wartime conditions, however, rooms were not always available, and Ms. Tallchief once saw famed choreographer Agnes de Mille sleeping on a table in a hotel hallway.
• Estimating travel times accurately used to be very difficult, as naturalist Charles Darwin found out when he set sail on the Beagle. Robert FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, thought that the voyage would take two years. The actual time it took for the Beagle to return home again was five years! By the way, when Mr. Darwin wished to learn how to stuff birds, his teacher was a black man named John Edmonstone, who had been a slave in South America but was freed.
• When Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States for his 1882 lecture tour, he went through customs, where he stated, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” By the way, during his American lecture tour, Oscar Wilde was asked whether he had in fact walked with a lily in his hand down Piccadilly — as legend had it. Mr. Wilde replied, “To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph.”
• Melissa Hayden, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet, used to travel with a special circular bag which held a flattened tutu. Stewardesses often wondered what was in it, and Billy Weslow, a funny but sometimes crude NYCB dancer, often yelled, “It’s her diaphragm!”
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Boredom is Anti-Life: 250 Anecdotes and Stories — Buy
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "The Bat People"
Album: ESCAPE FROM THE BAT PEOPLE
Artist: Jay Poisön and the Bat People
“The Bat People have risen and Jay Poisön is trying to contain them!”
Eleven tracks of sloppy and raw surf punk from the caves.
Artist Location: Lyon, France
Info: “Sloppy surf punk from the caves!”
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for 11-track album
Genre: Horror Surf.
Links:
TERROR OF THE BAT PEOPLE
Jay Poisön and the Bat People on Bandcamp
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
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
Stephen Suggests
2nd Amendment
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
Little bit of rain this morning.
Estate Listed
Kirk Douglas
The Beverly Hills home owned by iconic actor Kirk Douglas and his wife Ann — who passed away within months of each other in 2020 and 2021, each in their 100s — has hit the market. Listed with Rochelle Atlas Maize of Nourmand & Associates for $7.495 million, the four-bedroom, 4,648-square-foot residence includes a one-of-a-kind feature: a sort of personal Hollywood Walk of Fame in the garden which is made up of stepping stones that were personally autographed by a cavalcade of legendary movie stars.
The stones — dubbed the “Stars of Beverly Hills” — will be included in the sale of the one-story traditional-style residence, built in 1921 and located at 805 N. Rexford Drive in a central location in the flats of Beverly Hills. The 15,503-square-foot lot also includes a two-story detached guesthouse, pool and spa, and mature trees offering full privacy in the garden. Each of the four bedrooms is en suite and there are five baths.
In total, there are 22 stones and they include autographs by the following: Milton Berle, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Lucille Ball, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Charlton Heston, Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand, Polly Bergen, Henry Fonda, Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis, Robert Taylor, Janet Leigh, Ricardo Montalban, Eric Douglas, Barbara Rush, Edward G. Robinson, Roger Moore, Rosalind Russell, Robert Stack, James Mason, Cyd Charisse, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Hugh O’Brian, Jack Lemmon, Joanna and Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Montgomery, Burt Lancaster, Edie Adams. There are also autographs by Kirk’s sons, Michael Douglas, Eric Douglas, Joel Douglas and Peter Douglas.
Kirk Douglas, the star of Spartacus who was nominated for three Oscars in his career (for Lust for Life, The Bad and the Beautiful and Champion), died in 2020 at age 103. His wife Ann, to whom he was married for more than 60 years, died in April of this year at age 102.
Kirk Douglas
Major Outage
Amazon
A major outage in Amazon's cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for more than five hours, the latest sign of just how concentrated the business of keeping the internet running has become.
The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon's own massive e-commerce operation. That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day, greatly limiting its ability to publish its news report..
Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong. In fact, the company limited its communications Tuesday to terse technical explanations on an AWS dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon's own warehouse and delivery operation but said the company was “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage, which it did not describe. It took some affected companies hours more to thoroughly check their systems and restart their own services.
Amazon Web Services was formerly run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July. The cloud-service operation is a huge profit center for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research — a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined.
Amazon
Most Mispronounced Words
2021
“Cheugy” is apparently a lot to chew on. Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce have something in common — broadcasters butcher their names.
And virtually everyone is having trouble with “omicron.”
All four made it onto this year’s list of most mispronounced words as compiled by the U.S. Captioning Company, which captions and subtitles real-time events on TV and in courtrooms.
The list released Tuesday identifies the words that proved most challenging for newsreaders and people on television to pronounce this year.
The caption company said it surveyed its members to generate the list, which is now in its sixth year and was commissioned by Babbel, a language-learning platform with headquarters in Berlin and New York.
2021
Exhibit
Andy Warhol
At Andy Warhol's memorial service on April 1, 1987, many mourners learned a lesser-known aspect of his life: Warhol was raised as a Byzantine Catholic and remained so throughout his life, the art historian John Richardson said in his eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Indeed, religious iconography — including crosses and depictions of Jesus and Mary — recur throughout Warhol’s body of work. And in his diaries, Warhol documented details of his trips to church and his trip to the Vatican in 1980, where he met Pope John Paul II.
But exhibitions on Warhol’s work have not examined the role that his faith played in both his life and art — until now. A new exhibit on view at the Brooklyn Museum, “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” aims to correct this historical oversight, by featuring more than 100 objects that show how Warhol’s relationship to religion served as both a muse and a methodology for his art, and a guiding force in his personal life.
Warhol, who was gay, adapted — and, oftentimes, subverted — religious themes in his artwork, the exhibit argues, in part by questioning traditional depictions of women and mothers and by using male bodies as a way to explore queer desire. And through his portraits of celebrities and paintings of objects that shaped American consumerist culture in the 1960s — including Campbell’s soup cans and Coke bottles — Warhol “very presciently tapped into kind of an undercurrent of society that you could call worship,” said Carmen Hermo, associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, who organized the exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum with José Carlos Diaz, chief curator at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Andy Warhol
Outrageous Behavior
Loyalty Tests
Republicans are headed for a knock-down drag-out primary May 24 in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp – who last year resisted President Donald Trump’s pressure to overturn his state’s win for Democrat Joe Biden – has just learned he’ll be facing off against Trump ally David Perdue, who lost his Senate seat this year in part because Trump's lawyers said the election was rigged and urged Republicans not to vote. So it’s time for another round of “Democrats in disarray,” right?
The double standard is absolutely maddening. “Imploding Republicans” isn’t nearly as catchy as “Democrats in disarray,” but by rights it should be dominating the news every day. Because that’s pretty much how often GOP implosions happen.
Republicans are bitterly split over whether Trump is a force for good or evil in their party, whether he should have been impeached once, twice or never, whether his role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack should be investigated in full or glossed over as a nothingburger, whether he should run in 2024 and even whether he won the last election, as he still falsely insists he did.
And with Trump setting the tone, Republican disarray is like World Wrestling Entertainment, except meaner, with less alliteration and more potential for real-life harm.
It's Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert joking about a Muslim colleague being a “jihad squad” terrorist, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace criticizing Boebert, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling Mace “trash” and saying she and Trump think Mace should be primaried, and Mace responding: "All I can say about Marjorie Taylor Greene is bless her f------ heart."
Loyalty Tests
Replaces Striking Employees
Kellogg
Kellogg Co said on Tuesday a majority of its U.S. cereal plant workers have voted against a new five-year contract, forcing it to hire permanent replacements as employees extend a strike that started more than two months ago.
Temporary replacements have already been working at the company's cereal plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee where 1,400 union members went on strike on Oct. 5 as their contracts expired and talks over payment and benefits stalled.
Kellogg also said there was no further bargaining scheduled and it had no plans to meet with the union.
Union members have said the proposed two-tier system, in which transitional employees get lesser pay and benefits compared to longer-tenured workers, would take power away from the union by removing the cap on the number of lower-tier employees.
Several politicians including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have backed the union, while many customers have said they are boycotting Kellogg's products.
Kellogg
Scientists Observe
Quantum Spin Liquids
An exotic and totally new state of matter called a quantum spin liquid has been hypothesized for decades, and now scientists have been able to observe it in a laboratory for the first time.
The 'liquid' part refers to electrons that are constantly changing and fluctuating inside a magnetic material at low temperatures. Unlike regular magnets, in this case the electrons don't stabilize or settle into the structured lattice of a solid as they are cooled.
The 'quantum spin' refers to orientation of angular momentum (up or down) carried by particles, which are entangled in pairs with opposing spins. Now that the state has been observed for the first time, it's hoped that the discovery can advance progress in the development of quantum computers.
Normal magnets feature electrons whose spin is orientated in the same direction either up or down, which is what generates magnetism.
In quantum spin liquids, a third electron is introduced, so while two opposing spins will stabilize each other, the spin from the third electron throws out the balance. It creates a 'frustrated' magnet where the spins can't all stabilize in one direction.
Quantum Spin Liquids
Florida To Feed
Starving Manatees
Starving manatees will soon be fed by hand in Florida, a rare wildfire intervention to save the marine mammals whose natural food is vanishing from the effects of pollution, state officials told Reuters.
“Unified Command does have approval to move forward on a limited feeding trial,” said Carly Jones of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, in an email to Reuters ahead of a formal announcement later this week. “Details are still being worked out.”
The move, authorized by the federal government, is highly unusual in conservation, which tends to favor leaving wild animals to their own foraging and hunting lest they become dependent on human handouts.
But manatees have suffered badly in 2021, with 1,017 animals found dead so far this year. The gentle herbivores, also known as "sea cows," are considered threatened, with fewer than 8,000 left in Florida waters.
It remains illegal for the public to feed manatees.
Starving Manatees
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