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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Great Britain's Madge Syers struck a blow for women's liberation when she applied to skate in the world figure skating championship of 1902. Because the rules did not state that a woman couldn't enter the competition, in which only men had to that date competed, the judges allowed her to skate. She finished second to Sweden's Ulrich Salchow, and defeated the male skaters from Germany and Great Britain. Because of Ms. Syers, the first women's figure skating championship was held in 1906.
• Competitive figure skating can be expensive. In 1995, Rudy Galindo retired from competitive figure skating because he didn't have enough money to pay for training. However, the 1996 United States Championships were being held in his hometown of San Jose, California, so he entered. Smart move. Despite being an underdog, he won the gold medal and became THE story of the championships. His victory led to a career as a professional figure skater and lots of money for training.
• When Amy Grossman and Robert Davenport first started working together as a pairs team in figure skating, it took time for them to get used to working together as a team. For a while, Robert's chest was black and blue from frequent accidental contact with Amy's blades. After a particularly bruising practice session, Robert told Amy, "I think I just lost my appendix or maybe it was a kidney."
• Competitive figure skating can be nerve-racking. Often the skaters don't wish to hear the competition's scores. Canadian skater Brian Orser used to turn on the shower in the men's dressing room so he couldn't hear the competition's scores being announced over the loudspeaker. American skater Elaine Zayak used to flush toilets whenever her competition's scores were announced.
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"THE POST OFFICE IS NOT GOING BROKE. IT IS A SCAM!"
"FASTER HORSES, YOUNGER WOMEN, OLDER WHISKEY, MORE MONEY!"
THE DICTATOR.
THE 'KISS ASS' PRESIDENT.
WITCHES ATTACK REPUGS!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bit of a marine layer.
Rhetoric 'Has Been Repugnant'
Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle, the comedian who once urged the American public to give Donald Trump "a chance," minced no words in excoriating the president during an interview with CNN's Van Jones that aired Saturday night.
"I think the rhetoric of his presidency is repugnant. I just don't like the way he talks," Chappelle said of Trump. "We're living in a time where there's got to be more cultural sensitivity."
Chappelle was responding to a question from Jones about the comedian's controversial "Saturday Night Live" monologue delivered shortly after the 2016 election.
Chappelle has previously expressed regret for those remarks, saying last year that he'd "fucked up."
He reiterated that sentiment in his chat with Jones, saying that while "I don't ever apologize for jokes … I shouldn't have said that shit."
Dave Chappelle
'Light a Woman's Torch'
Natalie Portman
While being honored at Variety's Power of Women event earlier this week, Natalie Portman offered a list of guidelines for listeners to abide by in order to bring about gender parity - or at least move closer to it. In addition to pointing out the dispiriting statistic that "only 11% of the top 250 films last year were directed by women," the Academy Award winner touched on everything from donating to Time's Up and not depicting violence against women to hiring more women in influential roles.
Portman - back in the Oscar race this year for her performance in Brady Corbet's "Vox Lux" - also discussed the legal cases of both Brett Ratner and Harvey Weinstein, whom she said have tried to silence their alleged victims. Ratner recently dropped a defamation case against his accuser Melanie Kohler after she received financial assistance from Time's Up, prompting Portman to note that the filmmaker "saw that she could not be bullied legally just because he has hundreds of millions of dollars and she does not.
"Many men are behaving like we live in a zero-sum game. That if women get the respect, access and value we deserve, they will lose," Portman said. "But we know the message of the mammaries: The more milk you give, the more milk you make. The more love you give, the more love you have. And the same can be said of fire. When you light someone else's torch with your own, you don't lose your fire, you just make more light and more heat."
"Light a woman's torch," Portman added. "The light will multiply and the heat will intensify for all of us."
Natalie Portman
Record Number Running In Midterms
Native American Women
No native American woman has ever served in the US House of Representatives. But a trio of female candidates running in New Mexico and Kansas are looking to erase that statistic.
Two are Democrats. The third is a staunch supporter of President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked). But all three hope to make a difference on Capitol Hill -- and do their tribes proud.
"I'm a woman, a woman of color. That seems to be who we need in office right now to really push the issues that we care about," Deb Haaland, who is running in New Mexico, told AFP in an interview.
The 57-year-old single mother also says she wants to be a "strong voice" for native Americans, other minorities and the poor.
Native American Women
10-Year-Old Fan
Foo Fighters
Foo Fighters gave fans at their Kansas City, Missouri show on Friday a night to remember by covering Metallica's "Enter Sandman" with a twist after Dave Grohl invited a young fan onstage to play guitar for the performance.
In fan-filmed footage, Grohl is seen asking the 10-year-old fan named Collier Cash Rule if he knew how to play guitar, to which he replied "yes."
"What do you know?" Grohl asked, to which Collier responded, "I know a lot of Metallica songs." The kid then proceeded to launch into the opening riff of "Enter Sandman" alongside the Foo Fighters.
Grohl interrupted the band mid-song to ask Collier if he knew any other songs; Collier responded with the riff to Metallica's "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)." Grohl, impressed by the young fan's talent, also made a joke about Ed Sheeran's concert in the same city that evening, saying Sheeran "ain't got nothing on Collier."
Collier, a native of nearby Shawnee, Kansas, was later given the ultimate gift by Grohl, one of the frontman's own guitars. "If I see that shit on eBay next week, I'm gonna find you, Collier," Grohl warned.
Foo Fighters
LIVE!!!! Foo Fighter VS KID's Playing METALLICA "Enter Sandman" FULL VIDEO - YouTube
Every President Since Ford
'SNL'
Gerald Ford had been in office just more than a year when the words "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" were first broadcast across the land. And almost immediately, Ford became the first president to face a question every president - including the current occupant of the Oval Office - has had to answer since: how to respond to "Saturday Night Live's" parody at the real president's expense.
The show's Ford was Chevy Chase, a lanky slapstick comedian who portrayed the commander in chief as President Pratfall, a genial spaz stumbling across the world stage with a complacent grin.
"He was probably our most athletic president," said Ford's press secretary Ron Nessen, now 84 and living in suburban Maryland. "It really bothered him to be portrayed as a klutz."
But in public, Ford's reaction to the "Saturday Night" send-ups was very different: He laughed. The president invited the entertainer who skewered him to the White House. When Chase was the featured comedian at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 1976, Ford embraced the shtick, scattering papers and silverware across the dais, mostly on Chase's lap.
It was a strategy that most media-age image consultants would hail as a no-brainer: hide your pique, show you can take a joke, don't let your bruised feelings become the next story. And it was more or less the way every subsequent president has handled his NBC doppelganger. Until now. President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Grifter) doesn't laugh.
'SNL'
'He's sort of a Democrat'
Jim Mattis
Donald Trump (R-Untethered) has sparked fresh speculation that defence secretary Jim Mattis could be poised to leave his administration by saying that "he's sort of a Democrat".
A week after UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced she was standing down, the president suggested the 68-year-old former general could be the next to go.
During an interview with CBS, the president was asked if Mr Mattis - with whom he has at times reportedly had a strained relationship - was going to leave.
"I don't know. He hasn't told me that," he said. "I have a very good relationship with him. I had lunch with him two days ago. I have a very good relationship with him. It could be that he is. I think he's sort of a Democrat, if you want to know the truth."
He added: "General Mattis is a good guy. We get along very well. He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves. Everybody. People leave. That's Washington."
Jim Mattis
Queen Of Barely Coded Messages
'Being Melania'
"Media can be very tricky sometimes," Melania Trump said back in 1999, in an interview with ABC News. "You need to be very careful."
That wariness has, not surprisingly, stuck with her, which is why much of the new ABC special, Being Melania, consisted of her offering up vague bromides and an innocuous set of talking points: her independence, her own priorities, the Be Best initiative she launched earlier this year and the work of "staying true to myself".
But, strikingly, there were also many moments when Melania seemed uninterested in being careful. And in that unwillingness to stick to her own talking points, we got a tiny glimpse of her spiky recalcitrance - her refusal to be what either the left or right want her to be.
In general, being Melania meant not being entirely on script. She pronounced herself to be "the most bullied person on the world". She freely noted that there are people in the White House she does not trust. (After ABC released an advance clip of Melania's comments on the White House, Trump himself called the producers to say that this was not his version of things.) She told Tom Llamas, her interviewer, she was "blindsided" by the policy of separating children from their parents at the border, and found it "unacceptable". In this, she didn't play the usual role of the political wife, cannily couching disagreement and controlling the narrative to hide administrative chaos. She just seemed indifferent to such strategies.
Perhaps it's not so crazy to read meaning into tiny choices Melania makes; she seems to want us to. In fact, if Being Melania showed anything, it's that she is quite skilled at sending messages in a barely coded way, and very willing to bait those around her. It's the power of the powerless person in powerful situations, a mode of communication perhaps learned from years working as a model who had lots of glamorous visibility but no real authority.
'Being Melania'
Red Flag Warnings
PG&E
PG&E says it may turn off power within portions of a dozen counties in California amid red flag warnings this weekend.
The power could be turned off as early as Sunday and into Monday morning. The move is an attempt to reduce wildfire danger and may impact several northern California cities.
The counties that could be impacted include Lake, Napa, Yuba, Sonoma, Butte, Sierra, Placer, Nevada, El Dorado, Amador, Plumas, and Calaveras.
PG&E says that it will provide early warning notifications as well as updates, if and when possible.
PG&E
Weekend Box Office
'Venom'
The Neil Armstrong film "First Man" settled for a third-place landing at the North American box office in its opening weekend in theaters. The Ryan Gosling-starrer and a host of newcomers, like the family-friendly "Goosebumps" sequel and the neo-noir mystery "Bad Times at the El Royale," couldn't unseat last week's top two films, "Venom" and "A Star Is Born," which again took first and second place.
Studios estimated Sunday that "First Man" earned $16.5 million in ticket sales from 3,640 North American theaters, and $25 million worldwide. That was on par with expectations, but not exactly an eye-popping number for a space epic that cost nearly $60 million to produce.
The comic book film "Venom," meanwhile, continues to belie poor reviews in its second weekend in theaters. Sony Pictures estimated the film added $35.7 million in ticket sales, down 56 percent from its first weekend, to repeat at No. 1. The film has earned $142.8 million to date from North American theaters.
On the other end of the critical spectrum, Bradley Cooper's "A Star Is Born" continued to ride a wave of goodwill and awards buzz into its second weekend adding $28 million. With total domestic grosses at $94.2 million, the Warner Bros. pic starring Cooper and Lady Gaga will sail past $100 million in no time.
Fourth place went to "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween" which took in $16.2 million (down from the first film's $23.6 million launch in 2015) while "Bad Times At The El Royale" debuted in seventh place with only $7.2 million.
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. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. "Venom," $35.7 million ($69.7 million international).
2. "A Star Is Born," $28 million ($20.2 million international).
3. "First Man," $16.5 million ($8.6 million international).
4. "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween," $16.2 million ($3.7 million international).
5. "Smallfoot," $9.3 million ($14.5 million international).
6. "Night School," $8 million ($2.2 million international).
7. "Bad Times at the El Royale," $7.2 million ($4 million international).
8. "The House with a Clock in its Walls," $4 million ($5.6 million international).
9. "The Hate U Give," $1.8 million.
10. "A Simple Favor," $1.4 million ($1.9 million international).
'Venom'
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