Marc Dion: Values By the Pound (Creators Syndicate)
In the grocery store, they got the cheap hamburger, the good hamburger and the ground sirloin. I come from a ground sirloin family. If we were eating the good hamburger, or (shame of all shame) the cheap hamburger, it meant my father was out of work. By the time I was 11, my father had traded the nightlife thrills and uncertain income of the side street bartender for a suit-and-tie corporate job, and ground sirloin was all we ate.
Ted Rall: First Thing, Let's Fire All the Cops (Creators Syndicate)
Police have shot and killed 717 people so far this year. Blacks are 2 1/2 times more likely to be shot to death by police officers than whites are. Many victims were unarmed. Is it any surprise that only half of the public has confidence in Officer Not-So-Friendly? Public perception is worse among minorities and young people.
Mark Shields: Why the Nationals in the World Series Is Good for America (Creators Syndicate)
Neither a seven-figure "soft money" donation to a powerful leader's PAC nor the best-connected "K Street" lobbyist who's "wired" to the White House can get you four outs instead of three in one inning. If you can't hit the curveball, having been Jared's roommate or the Senate leader's fraternity brother won't get you to first base. Baseball is relentlessly democratic and egalitarian.
Susan Estrich: Gloria Allred, Superlawyer (Creators Syndicate)
She is almost as famous as the women she represented and the men she has held responsible. She has been standing up for women's rights - decades before anyone uttered the words "Me Too." So why is she out there defending herself? If there is anyone who doesn't need to apologize, it's her.
Susan Estrich: The New Moderate Alternative (Creators Syndicate)
Who'd a thunk it? In the post-mortem of the Democrats' Tuesday night debate, the consensus among the chattering class was that Pete Buttigieg not only had a strong night but also, in challenging Elizabeth Warren's "Medicare for All" plan, emerged as a moderate alternative (along with Joe Biden) to socialist Bernie Sanders and the like-minded Warren. And, of course, as the moderate alternative to Biden himself. Let me say that again: Mayor Pete emerged as the moderate alternative to the other three candidates in the top tier.
Froma Harrop: Sanders Still Sees Democrats As the Problem (Creators Syndicate)
The Vermont senator's fan base takes great offense at the notion that Sanders was a spoiler in the 2016 election who helped elect Donald Trump. But many Democrats believe that and remain bitter over his burnt-earth campaign against Hillary Clinton. This explains Sanders' frequent shoutouts these days about how he avidly supported Clinton's candidacy.
The world's first submersible vessel with a documented record of use in combat was built in 1775 by American David Bushnell. What was the name of this vessel?
Born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski, this American singer has four Grammy Awards, five platinum albums, three gold albums, and 15 Billboard Top 40 singles. By what name is she better known?
Patricia Mae Giraldo (née Andrzejewski; born January 10, 1953), who goes by the stage name Pat Benatar, is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and four-time Grammy Award winner. She has two RIAA-certified multi-platinum albums, five platinum albums, three gold albums, and 15 Billboard Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "Hit Me with Your Best Shot", "Love Is a Battlefield", "We Belong", and "Invincible".
Pat Benatar was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski on January 10, 1953, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City. Her family moved to North Hamilton Avenue in Lindenhurst, New York, a village in the Long Island town of Babylon.
Pat Benatar married her high school sweetheart Dennis Benatar at the age of 19 in 1972. The couple divorced in 1979. She has been married to her second husband, guitarist Neil Giraldo, since 1982. They have two daughters and live in Los Angeles, California.
Source
Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Pat Benatar.
Alan J answered:
Pat Benatar.
Randall wrote:
Pat Benatar
Kevin K. in Washington, DC, said:
Pat Rent-a-car, I mean Pat Benatar. How disrespectful to a great rock n' roll singer!
Micki responded:
Pat Benatar.
Cal in Vermont replied:
Pat Benatar. She was born in Greenpernt, a Polish-American community in Brooklyn, NY. Benatar is much easier to spell than the mouthfull of Polish consonants she was born with. There is a community in NY State an hour or so from here called Schaghticoke (pronounced scat-ih-coke). I would hate to have been a Polish kid in the first grade there and had to spell my name and home town.
Dave wrote:
Pat Benatar. She started singing professionally under her first husband's last name, although they divorced 40 years ago, she still goes professionally by Pat Benatar. Since 1982 she has been married to musician, songwriter and record producer Neil Giraldo, who teamed with Pat in writing some of her successful songs. Other of her biggest selling singles were written by other composers, and elitist snobbery toward performers who don't write their own songs may be the reason Pat Benatar has, so far, not been inducted into the RRHOF, although I see she has finally been nominated this year. From 1979-1990 Pat Benatar charted a string of 9 LP's that earned Gold and/or Platinum status. Since then Pat Benatar's record sales gradually fell off and her last LP with new material was released in 2003. However, Pat Benatar still tours, and has toured almost ever year since 1979. In 2018 Pat and Neil Giraldo (her only musical accompaniment on guitar) held a concert at our local Michigan casino (I didn't attend). She and her band used to fill large stadiums back in the day.
Deborah replied:
My WAG is Pat Benatar. Even if that's not right, she's still badass.
Rosemary in Columbus responded:
Pat Benatar
Joe S wrote:
OMG. it's Pat Benatar! I didn't know Patricia Mae Andrezejewski is Pat Benatar. I love Pat Benatar, not as much as Joan Jett, but I love her.
Mac Mac said:
Pat Benatar
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BttbBob has returned to semi-retired status.
~~~~~
I was just wondering if you ever get any "Monkey Mail?" If you do, what's it like?
Always a Fan,
BSmasher
Thanks, Brain!
Haven't had any Monkey Mail in a long time - maybe 5 years - not that I'm complaining.
Mostly I get requests to link to profit-generating sites that are posing as information, from people who are mail-bombing sites with a form letter.
In other words, they want free advertising.
Sometimes, if their pitch is interesting, I'll drop them a note with an offer to link - 99 out of 100 never respond.
It's not that I'm against advertising, but I'm tired of something for nothing.
• On 12 December 1952, a very young Allegra Kent made her debut with other young dancers on the New York stage. Unfortunately, she didn't know how to use make-up, so in the dressing room she watched what the dancer on her right did with her make-up and imitated her, then she watched what the dancer on her left did with her make-up and imitated her. The unpleasant result was that the two sides of her face were made-up in two different ways, making her look like a Picasso cubist painting.
• Choreographer Bella Lewitzky is her own person. When Rose Eichenbaum was ready to take Ms. Lewitzky's photograph for her book Masters of Movement: Portraits of America's Great Choreographers, she asked her if she needed to fix her hair or put on lipstick. Ms. Lewitzky replied, "No, I'm fine as I am." And when Ms. Eichenbaum told her to be herself for the photograph, she replied, "I don't know how to be anyone else."
Death
• Claude Monet worked hard, painting outdoors in very bad weather and sometimes-dangerous locations. Art critic Léon Billot wrote about him in the Journal de Havre on 9 October 1868, "It was during winter, after several snowy days … [and the] desire to see the countryside beneath its white shroud had led us across the fields. It was cold enough to split rocks. We glimpsed a little heater, then an easel, then a gentleman, swathed in three overcoats, with gloved hands, his face half-frozen. It was [Monsieur] Monet, studying an aspect of the snow. We must confess that this pleased us. Art has some courageous soldiers." Monet painted on the Normandy Coast, including the Manneporte arch at Etretat. Some people had been trapped under the arch at high tide and then washed out to sea and drowned. In November 1885 Monet himself almost died there. While he was painting, a large wave struck and slammed him and his canvas and his paints against a cliff and then swept them into the sea. Monet wrote Alice, his wife, "My immediate thought was that I was done for, as the water dragged me down, but in the end I managed to clamber out on all fours."
• Near the end of his life, the heart of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco grew weaker, and his cardiologist, Dr. Ignacio Chávez, recommended that he stop the strenuous work of painting huge murals and instead concentrate on the less strenuous work of creating easel paintings. However, Mr. Orozco refused to take this advice. Instead, he remarked to his wife, "I'm not going to do as the doctor says and abandon mural painting. I prefer physical death to the moral death that would be the equivalent of giving up mural painting."
• Claude Monet used brilliant colors and flowers in his paintings. When Monet lay dying, a telegram was sent to friend Dr. Georges Clemenceau, who travelled 700 kilometers (approximately 435 miles) to see him. He arrived too late to see him alive; the undertakers were putting Monet's body in the coffin. Seeing that the undertakers were about to put a black cloth over Monet's face, Dr. Clemenceau pushed them aside. He tore from a window a flowered curtain and placed it over Monet's face, crying, "No black for Claude Monet!" Art critic Jean-Paul Crespelle writes, "There could have been no better epitaph."
• A couple of women - tenor Leo Slezak, whose story this is, calls them Fräulein Meier and Fräulein Schulze - hated each other. One day, Fräulein Meier was lunching with wealthy artist Bela Haas, and she asked what would happen to his money when he died. Because Mr. Haas disliked any mention of death, he replied, "I've made my will, and I'm leaving all my money to Fräulein Schulze."
With the Twin Peaks weekend binge on Decades, don't have to think too hard about what to watch next.
Tonight, Sunday:
CBS starts the night with a '60 Minutes', followed by a FRESH'God Friended Me', then a FRESH'NCIS: The Expendable One', followed by a FRESH'Madam Secretary'.
NBC fills the night with LIVE'Sunday Night Football', followed by a FRESH'Jimmy Fallon', and as usual, local crap padding on the left coast.
ABC begins the night with a FRESH'America's So-Called Funniest Home Videos', followed by a FRESH'Kids Say The Darndest Things', then a FRESH'Shark Tank', followed by a FRESH'The Rookie'.
The CW offers a FRESH'Batwoman', followed by a FRESH'Supergirl'.
Faux has an old 'Modern Family', followed by another old 'Modern Family', then a FRESH'The Simpsons' ('Treehouse of Horror XXX'), followed by a FRESH'Bless The Harts', then a FRESH'Bob's Burgers', followed by a FRESH'Family Guy'.
MY recycles an old 'How I Met Your Mother', followed by another old 'How I Met Your Mother', then an old 'Big Bang Theory', followed by another old 'Big Bang Theory', then still another old 'Big Bang Theory', followed by yet another old 'Big Bang Theory'.
A&E has the movie 'Salt', followed by the movie 'Hacksaw Ridge'.
AMC offers 'The Walking Dead', another 'The Walking Dead', followed by a FRESH'The Walking Dead', then a FRESH'Talking Dead'.
BBC -
[2:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS - SEASON 2 - EPISODE 5
[3:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS - SEASON 2 - EPISODE 6
[4:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS - SEASON 2 - EPISODE 7
[5:00AM] WEIRD WONDERS - SEASON 2 - EPISODE 8
[6:00AM] HIDDEN HABITATS - SEASON 1 - EPISODE 15-Making Worlds
[6:30AM] THE KARATE KID (1984) -
[9:30AM] THE KARATE KID PART II (1986) -
[12:00PM] REVENGE OF THE NERDS (1984) -
[2:00PM] NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION (1985)
[4:00PM] REVENGE OF THE NERDS (1984)
[6:00PM] PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987)
[8:00PM] THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)
[10:00PM] THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)
[12:00AM] NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION (1985)
[2:00AM] PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987)
[4:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - SEASON 5 - EPISODE 15-Power Play
[5:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - SEASON 5 - EPISODE 16-Ethics (ALL TIMES EDT)
Bravo has 'Married To Medicine', another 'Married To Medicine', followed by a FRESH'Married To Medicine', then a FRESH'Watch What Happens Live'.
Comedy Central has the movie '50 First Dates', followed by the movie 'The Waterboy'.
FX has the movie 'Transformers: Age Of Extinction', followed by a FRESH'The Weekly', and another 'The Weekly'.
History has 'American Pickers', followed by a FRESH'American Pickers: Bonus Buys'.
IFC -
[6:00A] Night Flight-Rock on the Road
[6:15A] Night Flight - Fame!
[6:30A] Night Flight-Art Pop and Rock Muses
[6:45A] From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter
[8:45A] Halloween -
[10:45A] Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
[12:45P] Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
[3:00P] Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers
[5:00P] Halloween -
[7:00P] Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
[9:00P] Halloween: Resurrection -
[11:00P] Halloween
[1:30A] Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
[3:30A] Halloween: Resurrection
[5:30A] Night Flight - Fame!
[5:45A] Night Flight - Art Pop and Rock Muses (ALL TIMES EDT)
Sundance -
[6:15am] Law & Order
[7:15am] Law & Order
[8:15am] Law & Order
[9:15am] Law & Order
[10:15am] Law & Order
[11:15am] Mission: Impossible
[1:45pm] Sin City
[4:15pm] Walking Tall
[6:00pm] U.S. Marshals
[9:00pm] The Green Mile
[1:00am] The Sum of All Fears
[3:30am] Mission: Impossible (ALL TIMES EDT)
SyFy has the movie 'Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix', followed by the movie 'Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince'.
Prince's eponymous second album turns 40 this month, and in honor of the anniversary, the Prince estate has released a previously unheard, acoustic demo version of "I Feel For You." The full version of the song was one of the album's original tracks, and later became a hit single for Chaka Khan and the title track of her 1984 album.
The demo is available now on streaming services, as well as on a limited-run single CD, with the original album version of "I Feel For You" as its B-side. The single will be on sale at Prince's website for the next week.
According to a statement from Prince's estate, the cassette demo was recorded sometime in 1978-1979 as the 20-year-old musician was preparing for his debut solo performance at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis.
"I was blown away," said Prince vault archivist Michael Howe on discovering the tape. "Here is 20-year-old Prince thinking aloud, feeling his way through the song. You hear his incredible talent shining through on acoustic guitar, which is not something he typically showcased, and his guide vocal is astonishingly great."
When Chaka Khan re-recorded "I Feel For You" in 1984, it became a Top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned the singer two Grammys, including Best R&B Song, which recognized Prince for his songwriting contribution.
President Trump (R-Grifter) tweeted a rebuke directly at a guest of Real Time with Bill Maher after apparently tuning-in to the HBO show on Friday during an especially savage anti-Trump episode. The Commander-in-Chief's social media sniping was aimed not at the firebrand host but at Susan Rice, the former National Security Advisor under President Obama.
On air, Rice had methodically flayed the GOP incumbent for the ineptitude of his foreign policy moves and the long-range consequences of Trump's most recent geo-political misadventures. Rice, plugging her new book, also said that Trump's polarizing presence in the American political arena has made the country more vulnerable to foreign influence.
"What Putin's genius is, is he understands that we are so divided internally," said Rice, who was also U.N. Ambassador. "And I argue in my book, Tough Love, that our domestic political divisions are, in fact, our greatest national security vulnerability."
The leader of the Free World responded in the show's final minute via Twitter by trashing Rice (he dismissed her as "a disaster" twice in one tweet) and tossed blame for "millions killed" at the feet of his White House predecessor, President Obama.
Rice fired back with a question that implied Trump was being hypocritical with his snarky rejoinder. The former ambassador wasn't exactly diplomatic in her reply, which describes a fleeting 2015 encounter with Trump as "totally gross" due to an undesired embrace.
< Bill Maher
The systems used to control the United States arsenal of nuclear weapons rely on outdated computers. But the Department of Defense is updating at least one part of the archaic technology-the floppy disk storage systems.
A 60 Minutes segment in 2014 presented a tour of a nuclear control center, revealing to the public that the computers that would take a nuclear launch order from the President rely on 8-inch disks invented nearly half a century ago.
Defense tech news site C4isrnet reports that the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS)-the communication infrastructure that transmits emergency action messages for nuclear command centers-is ditching the floppy disks. Lieutenant Colonel Jason Rossi, 595th Strategic Communications Squadron commander, told C4isrnet the SACCS is upgrading to a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
As C4isrnet points out, the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2016 that the SACCS operates on an IBM Series/1 computer from the 1970s, and the Pentagon planned "to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017."
The system's use of outdated technology helps keep it secure. "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address," Rossi told C4isrnet. "It's the age that provides that security."
Production on Netflix's upcoming series Cowboy Bebop has been halted after the show's leading actor John Cho was injured on set.
Cho, 47, was filming a scene in New Zealand recently when he suffered a serious knee injury that required him to immediately fly back to Los Angeles and undergo surgery, according to Deadline.
Because Cho will also need extensive rehabilitation after his surgery, production on the series has been shut down for seven to nine months, the outlet reports.
Sources on the set told Deadline that Cho's injury was quite surprising, calling it a "freak accident", as the scene was well-rehearsed and the actor was filming the last take.
Cowboy Bebop is a 10-episode live-action adaptation of the original anime series that also stars Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda and Alex Hassell.
Unknown actors may have made billions from the turmoil Don-Old Trump (R-Crooked) has created in the markets through erratic tweets, shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy, and the trade war with China, according to a new report.
A Vanity Fair deep-dive into stock market activity has uncovered several instances where advantageous trades were made suspiciously close to market-moving events.
One trade, made just before Iranian drones attacked Saudi Arabian oil production facilities, netted $180m. Another trade, made shortly before Mr Trump announced a delay in tariffs on Chinese goods, made $190m. The biggest trade of all came on June 28, while Mr Trump was at the G20 meeting. There, he met with President Xi and announced trade negotiations were "back on track."
Those trades ended up being worth $1.8bn thanks to an 84 point boost in the S&P 500 index following Trump's announcement.
There's no suggestion in the article that Mr Trump or anyone in his circle is involved in insider trading.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources found the virus while searching for the cause of Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome, an enigmatic disease endemic to bald eagles near the Lower Wisconsin River. The newly identified bald eagle hepacivirus, or BeHV, may contribute to the fatal disease, which causes eagles to stumble and have seizures.
But BeHV was also found in eagles without symptoms of the syndrome, making a direct link between virus and disease difficult to confirm. The virus is related to human hepatitis C virus, which causes liver damage in people, and some birds with BeHV show similar effects. BeHV infects eagles from Washington to Florida but is most common in Wisconsin's eagles.
The researchers published their findings on October 18, 2019, in the journal Scientific Reports. Tony Goldberg, a UW-Madison professor of pathobiological sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine, led the study. He collaborated with LeAnn White at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Sean Strom at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome (WRES) was first described in the 1990s. The river attracts eagles year-round because its open waters allow the birds to fish through the winter. Observers near the river spotted eagles vomiting or staggering, and all of these birds either succumbed to the disease or were euthanized.
Officials at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center conducted necropsies to determine the cause of death and found liver damage in most of the birds. Damage to brain tissue was also common. Searches for environmental toxins underlying the disease came up empty.
Egypt on Saturday unveiled the details of 30 ancient wooden coffins with mummies inside discovered in the southern city of Luxor in the biggest find of its kind in more than a century.
A team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered a "distinctive group of 30 colored wooden coffins for men, women and children" in a cache at Al-Asasif cemetery on Luxor's west bank, the Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement on Saturday.
"It is the first large human coffin cache ever discovered since the end of the 19th century," the Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany was quoted as saying during a ceremony in Luxor.
The intricately carved and painted coffins, three thousand years old, were closed with mummies inside and were in "a good condition of preservation, colors and complete inscriptions," the statement added.
They were for male and female priests and children, said Mostafa Waziri, the excavation team leader, dating back to the 10th century BC under the rule of the 22nd Pharaonic dynasty.
A comprehensive analysis of DNA from modern Melanesian people suggests an assortment of mutated genes inherited from extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans provided evolutionary advantages, such as the ability to consume new foods and avoid infections, among other important benefits.
Neanderthals and Denisovans went extinct some 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, but not before these closely related hominins interbred with modern humans. To this very day, the legacy of these interbreeding episodes live on in our DNA - at least among humans of European and Asian descent. As to why some of these archaic genes have stuck around over the eons is not fully understood, nor is their potential role in human functioning and health, whether good or bad.
"Our study demonstrates that previously unknown large genomic structural changes that originated in our now-extinct close relatives - and were subsequently introgressed or introduced back to our genome - play important roles in human evolution," explained PingHsun Hsieh, a geneticist from the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and the lead researcher of the new paper, in an email to Gizmodo. "We also identify new genes encompassed within these large genomic variants that might be beneficial to Melanesians and help them adapt to their local island environments."
By "previously unknown large genomic structural changes," Hsieh is referring to copy number variants (CNVs), as opposed to simpler single-nucleotide variants (SNVs). Simply put, CNVs are changes to large batches of genetic bases, or nucleotide letters (typically 50 or more), whereas SNVs describe a single base mutation within the genome. These types of mutations can arise either due to the gain or loss of genomic material, and both can influence the way certain genes function.
A particularly notable and fortuitous SNV mutation, for example, allowed some European populations to drink milk (i.e. the ability to produce lactase throughout adulthood). CNVs, due to their size and complexity, tend to have a negative influence on human health.
Hurricanes are one thing. Earthquakes are another. But these hazardous events aren't mutually exclusive, and sometimes one can even feed the other.
In a new study, scientists have identified what they say is a new geophysical phenomenon entirely unknown to science - a hybrid entity where powerful storms such as hurricanes trigger seismic episodes that can rumble for hours or even days.
"We're calling them 'stormquakes'," says geophysicist Wenyuan Fan from Florida State University.
"During a storm season, hurricanes or nor'easters transfer energy into the ocean as strong ocean waves, and the waves interact with the solid earth producing intense seismic source activity."
When Fan and his team combed through over 12 years of seismic and oceanographic data recorded from 2006 to 2019, they uncovered more than 14,000 stormquakes being spawned in waters offshore both the US coasts, plus Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico.
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wrote:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
