Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Alison Flood: Mueller report to be 'instantly' printed as a book, if made public (The Guardian)
Publishers prepare to race 'the most anticipated investigative document of this century' into print.
Jonathan Jones: Painted into a corner
British art responds to the folly of Brexit (The Guardian)
A shrinking map of the UK, xenophobic graffiti, a white flag
here is the depressing, defeated art of a country on the precipice of a historic mistake.
Hadley Freeman: I used to pretend my epilepsy didn't exist. Like a no-deal Brexit, it's a dangerous game (The Guardian)
I try to avoid writing about Brexit for the same reason I avoid eating my hair: you just end up choking on the pointlessness of it all. But one question has become too pressing to ignore: just how self-centred do you have to be to think the risk of making it harder for people to get necessary medications is an irrelevant niggle while you achieve your masturbatory fantasy of "sovereignty"?
Lucy Mangan discovers how the world was literally designed with men in mind (Stylist)
"We need to tear down as much as possible
redesign is revolution," says Lucy Mangan.
Suzanne Moore: "Enough is enough: Michael Jackson's music is dead to me now" (The Guardian)
How sad is it that I might not listen to Jackson any more, that this investment in my own past is so morally rotten? In the scheme of things, not so sad. There is so much magnificent music in the world; I won't go without. He is properly dead to me now.
Suzanne Moore: George Osborne's policies took a wrecking ball to our public spaces - and our society (The Guardian)
Shared civic spaces, such as libraries, make us all stakeholders in our community. But, since 2014/15, more than 12,000 public spaces have been sold, at what cost to our social fabric?
Peter Bradshaw: Alien review - Ridley Scott's masterpiece is lethally contemporary (The Guardian)
After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary. With screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare parody of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry.
Bruce Dalzell: The Last Time I Saw You (YouTube)
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Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Writer Ben Hecht hated pomposity. When he was writing for his own newspaper, the Chicago Literary Times, the Moscow Art Players came to Chicago and performed, entirely in Russian, The Brothers Karamazov. Approximately 3,800 people in the audience listened to Russian actors speak Russian for four hours, and then they gave the actors a tremendous ovation. Now, of the 3,800 people in the audience, Mr. Hecht figured that no more than 20 people could understand enough Russian to follow the play, and so the tremendous ovation they gave the play annoyed him. Because the Chicago Literary Times was his own newspaper, Mr. Hecht could do with it what he wanted, so he decided to have the review of the play translated into Russian and to print it that way. However, after the review was all set in Russian type, the printer dropped the type and it scattered all over the floor. Unfortunately, no one there knew how to read Russian and since the paper had to go to press right away, they picked up the type and put it back anyway they could, knowing that the review no longer made sense. As it turned out, the mistake didn't matter. After the paper was published, approximately 60 letters arrived, all praising the review written in Russian and saying that it was the best thing that the Chicago Literary Times had ever published.
The Teatro la Fenice in Venice, Italy, is the only opera house in the world that has an entrance for gondolas. (The theater is built oddly because the site it is on is shaped irregularly, partly due to the presence of canals.) It was built in 1836 to replace another theater that had burned down. Gianantonio Selva, who designed the building, had the word "Societas" written on the building's facade. Witty Venetians made an acrostic of the word: "Sine Ordine Cum Irregularitate Erexit Theatrum Antonius Selva." Translated, the phrase means: "Without Order, With Irregularity, This Theater was Built by Antonio Selva."
When speaking with someone from another country, be sure to pronounce all words clearly. After a charity performance of Broadway at the Albert Hall in London, the stars of the play met the host of the charity event. First he met Tallulah Bankhead, whose voice was renowned for its huskiness, and then he met Olive Blakeney, whose voice was as husky as Tallulah's. Amused, the host turned to Ms. Blakeney's husband and asked, "Are all American women hoarse?" Ms. Blakeney's husband punched the host on the jaw, and the host woke up in a hospital.
Sometimes it hurts not to know local slang. When H. Allen Smith was working as a young reporter in Huntington, Indiana, he interviewed a hotel owner. The hotel owner's wife was blonde, and because Mr. Smith had forgotten to get her name, he referred to her in his article as "Blondie." After the article was published, he discovered that "Blondie" in that particular town meant the proprietor of a brothel. Fortunately, the hotel owner accepted Mr. Smith's sincere apology and did not stomp him to death.
Conductor Arturo Toscanini once swore in Italian at the Metropolitan orchestra, saying that it played like a pig. After the rehearsal, the remark was translated and disseminated, and members of the orchestra demanded an apology; otherwise, they would not play for him. Toscanini refused on the grounds that his remark was true. However, he did say "Good morning" at the next rehearsal, and the members of the orchestra decided to play once more for him.
Andrew Tobias knows a couple of gay men who are raising a daughter who is trilingual. The gay men speak English and French around the house, and the babysitter speaks nothing but Spanish. Not allowing their daughter to watch TV, the gay men bought her instead a bunch of Disney videotapes - all in Spanish. For a long time, their daughter thought the TV set spoke only Spanish.
After Bob Denver graduated from college, the draft board called him because his deferment was over. At a meeting, Mr. Denver told the draft board that he was his mother's sole support, but they didn't believe him. This made Mr. Denver angry, so he called the head of the draft board a pragmatist. The head of the draft board didn't know what the word meant, so he thought he had been called a dirty name.
Humorist Ellen Orleans writes about code words that lesbians use to identify other lesbians. For example, there's "She goes to the same church we do" and "She's family." Some lesbians even use the code words "She's a member of the committee" and "She's advanced." Others use "gay-dar" and say "Beep, beep" when they pass a lesbian.
Alicia Markova, born Alicia Marks, was an English ballerina who was given her name by Russian ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev because at that time, ballet was not prominent in England. The name - and her reluctance to make speeches - fooled some journalists, who reported that Ms. Markova could not speak English!
Ballet shoes are handmade, and the people who make them are called makers. Once, before going to London to dance with the New York City Ballet, Patricia McBride remarked, "I hope so much to meet my maker while I'm there."
Ring Lardner once read through a newspaper column about the 10 most beautiful words in the English language - words such as "moonlight," "melody," and "tranquil." Setting the newspaper down, he mused, "What's wrong with 'gangrene'?"
Long ago, Church of Christ preacher J.D. Tant got in trouble for using the word "bull" in a sermon. The congregation thought that the word was indelicate for a woman's ears and preferred the use of "Mr. Cow."
In America in the 19th century, citizens loved Italian opera. William Henry Fry wrote his opera Leonore in English, but when it was performed in 1858 in New York, it was sung in Italian.
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Joins The AOC Fan Club
Bill Nye
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has a new fan: Bill Nye the Science Guy.
The TV scientist offered his support for the freshman congresswoman Saturday on Twitter from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where talks are held by leaders in a variety of industries including media, tech, politics and the arts.
"AOC gets it," Nye wrote, praising her for recognizing that "fear is dividing us" and calling for attention to economic inequality and climate change:
Nye, who has long been an environmental advocate warning against climate change, made a surprise appearance at Ocasio-Cortez's talk where he participated in the Q&A portion.
In a video obtained by CNN, Nye argued that "people are just afraid of what will happen if we try to make these big changes" regarding environmental issues, asking about the congresswoman's plan to handle fear among her fellow lawmakers.
Bill Nye
'SNL' Hosting Debut
Sandra Oh
Killing Eve star Sandra Oh will make her first appearance as host of Saturday Night Live on March 30, the weekend before her BBC America series' Season 2 premiere. Tame Impala will be the musical guest.
The SNL gig will mark Oh's return to NBC, after she and Andy Samberg co-hosted the Golden Globes back in January.
Oh has been having a big year, winning a Globe and nominated for an Emmy for starring in Killing Eve, which revolves around Eve (Oh), an MI6 operative, and psychopath assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Season 2 picks up about half a minute after the first-season's finale.
Season 2 of Killing Eve will bow April 7 at 8 PM.
Sandra Oh
Nearly 3M Subscribers Cut Service
Pay-TV
The pace of cord-cutting accelerated in 2018, with the largest pay-TV providers shedding about 2.9 million video subscribers, nearly double the 1.5 million subscriber losses in 2017, according to the latest study by Leichtman Research Group.
The research firm, which tracks providers covering about 95% of the market, found that gains from virtual MVPD services (aka "skinny bundles") are not making up for the conventional subscriber losses. That indicates that a growing number of viewers are doing without pay-TV altogether, presumably in favor of lower-cost subscription services like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Video.
Satellite distributors DirecTV and Dish Network suffered the bulk of the losses, a collective 2.36 million in 2018, up from 1.55 million in 2017.
Pay-TV
Hundreds Fold
Newspapers
Five minutes late, Darrell Todd Maurina sweeps into a meeting room and plugs in his laptop computer. He places a Wi-Fi hotspot on the table and turns on a digital recorder. The earplug in his left ear is attached to a police scanner in his pants pocket.
He wears a tie; Maurina insists upon professionalism. He is the press - in its entirety.
Maurina, who posts his work to Facebook, is the only person who has come to the Pulaski County courthouse to tell residents what their commissioners are up to, the only one who will report on their deliberations - specifically, their discussions about how to satisfy the Federal Emergency Management Agency so it will pay to repair a road inundated during a 2013 flood.
Last September, Waynesville became a statistic. With the shutdown of its newspaper, the Daily Guide, this town of 5,200 people in central Missouri's Ozark hills joined more than 1,400 other cities and towns across the U.S. to lose a newspaper over the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by the University of North Carolina.
Blame revenue siphoned by online competition, cost-cutting ownership, a death spiral in quality, sheer disinterest among readers or reasons peculiar to given locales for that development. While national outlets worry about a president who calls the press an enemy of the people, many Americans no longer have someone watching the city council for them, chronicling the soccer exploits of their children or reporting on the kindly neighbor who died of cancer.
Newspapers
There's A Reason
Katie Hill
California Congresswoman Katie Hill says there's a reason the Democratic National Committee decided to block Fox News from hosting any 2020 presidential primary debates - Democratic viewers have no interest in watching the channel.
"I think we know that there are basically no Democrats who watch Fox News, so to me that's pretty fair," Hill told host Chris Wallace this weekend on Fox News Sunday.
"That's not true. There are a lot of Democrats who watch Fox News and a lot of independents who watch Fox News," Wallace said.
Hill told him that was only partly correct about the right-leaning channel, adding that she believes the channel's Democratic viewers are few and far between.
"Certainly independents yes, but mostly it's become more and more partisan and that's unfortunate" she said about the network. "I'm here because I do represent a purple district
but I think that there is not a feeling right now that there's a lack of bias and I'm hoping we can change that."
Katie Hill
60 Years
Tibet
Huge crowds gathered at the Dalai Lama's temple in India Sunday to commemorate 60 years since the failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule that drove the spiritual leader into exile.
Supporters of the 83-year-old peace icon chanted and prayed at the Buddhist shrine in mountainous Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama established a government-in-exile after fleeing a deadly Chinese crackdown in Tibet in 1959.
Devotees in the Indian hill station the Dalai Lama has called home for six decades waved Tibet's colourful "snow lion" flag, which China has outlawed as a symbol of separatism.
The Dalai Lama himself was not present at the anniversary ceremony, but chief representatives of the exiled Tibetan administration and foreign dignitaries gathered for the solemn occasion.
A minute's silence was held at the outset to remember those killed when China brutally crushed the fledgling Tibetan revolt, a crackdown the government-in-exile claimed killed tens of thousands.
Tibet
Nurse Facing 'Misconduct' Charge
Stephen Hawking
A former nurse of Stephen Hawking has been suspended amid allegations of "serious misconduct" relating to his care.
Patricia Dowdy is being investigated after a complaint was lodged by the late scientist's family, reports suggest.
But the exact nature of the accusations remains unknown because the Nursing and Midwifery Council has taken the highly unusual step of banning the public and media from attending its hearing into them.
Ms Dowdy, 61, helped look after Professor Hawking for 15 years, although it is now understood she was suspended in 2016, two years before his death last March, aged 76.
She told the Mail on Sunday she could not talk about the hearing, which started last month and is due to last six weeks.
Stephen Hawking
Skeletons Found
Peru
A mass sacrifice site containing the remains of more than 100 children has been unearthed in Peru.
Dating back to the 15th century, archaeologists have identified the remains as part of the largest mass sacrifice of its kind ever seen in the Americas.
The bodies, which belonged to children as young as five, bore evidence of having their hearts ritualistically removed.
Alongside the bones of 140 children were those belonging to more than 200 young llamas, all spread across an area spanning around 700 square metres.
The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas site was part of the Chimu state, which was the dominant society along the coast of Peru during the 15th century.
Peru
Weekend Box Office
'Captain Marvel'
"Captain Marvel," Marvel Studios' first female-fronted superhero movie, launched with $153 million domestically and $455 million globally, according to studio estimates Sunday, making it one of the biggest blockbusters ever led by a woman.
Brie Larson's Carol Danvers, a character who first debuted in Marvel Comics in 1968, had never before made it into the movies and was previously lesser known than many Marvel heroes. But "Captain Marvel," which came in at the high end of the Walt Disney Co.'s DIS, -0.18% expectations, ranks as one of Marvel's most successful character debuts.
Last week's top film, "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World," from Comcast Corp.'s CMCSA, -0.50% Universal Pictures, slid to a distant second place in its third weekend of release with $14.7 million. In its second weekend, Tyler Perry's "A Madea Family Funeral" dropped 55% with $12 million. The Lionsgate LGF.A, -4.27% film has made $45.9 million in 10 days.
"Apollo 11," the acclaimed moon landing documentary featuring newly discovered and restored footage, continued to pack theaters. It made $1.3 million from 285 locations, including many IMAX screens.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included.
1. "Captain Marvel," $153 million ($302 million international).
2. "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World," $14.7 million ($21.7 million international).
3. "A Madea Family Funeral," $12.1 million.
4. "Lego Movie 2: The Second Part," $3.8 million ($3.9 million international).
5. "Alita: Battle Angel," $3.2 million ($11.6 million international).
6. "Green Book," $2.5 million ($28.3 million international).
7. "Isn't it Romantic," $2.4 million.
8. "Fighting With My Family," $2.2 million ($1.5 million international).
9. "Greta," $2.2 million.
10. "Apollo 11," $1.3 million.
'Captain Marvel'
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