Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Alexandra Petri: 2018 was a year that happened (Washington Post)
There was a midterm election that could be described as a blue wave only in the narrow and limited sense that it was the biggest Democratic gain in the House since the post-Watergate election. Still, some people were discouraged from voting, and that must be counted in the nature of a red win.
Joe Bob Briggs: Closed? No Hurry. I'll Come Back. (Taki's Magazine)
What am I missing? Well, I know what I'm missing. These are mere employees we're dealing with here. Kitchen help. Janitors. Park rangers. Clerks. People who took government jobs so they could have security instead of making a lot of money. People who were told, "You're a patriot for doing this repetitive work and so we'll make sure you never have to wonder where your next paycheck is coming from." Whoops.
Matthew Yglesias: The shutdown is intractable because Trump's wall is ridiculous and Republicans know it (Vox)
Conservatives won't trade the wall for anything good because they know it's a bad idea.
Amy Russo: Millions To See Pay Hikes In 2019 As Minimum Wage Increases In 20 States (Huffington Post)
Thirteen counties and cities will notice the difference immediately on January 1, reaching or exceeding $15 an hour.
Daniel Politi: Women's March in California Canceled Over Fear it Would Be "Overwhelmingly White" (Slate)
A Women's March that was due to take place in early 2019 in Northern California has been canceled because organizers feared it would not be diverse enough. The march was scheduled to take place in the town of Eureka, in Humboldt County on January 19. "Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community," according to a statement posted on Facebook. "Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach."
Matthew Dessem: "Stan & Ollie Is a Double Act: a Delightful Character Study and a Dutiful by-the-Numbers Biopic" (Slate)
Stan & Ollie, the new film from director Jon S. Baird about the greatest double act in comedy history, is sort of a double act itself. Half of it is a sensitive character study of two artists on the downslope, an actor's showcase anchored by brilliant performances from Steve Coogan (Stan Laurel) and John C. Reilly (Oliver Hardy) …. The other half is a by-the-numbers biopic that dutifully shuffles from struggle to success to catastrophe to redemption-slash-artistic-immortality. Fortunately for audiences, the character study is the fat one.
Matthew Dessem: Audio of a New Louis C.K. Set Has Leaked, and It's Sickening (Slate)
For one clue, here's a joke C.K. told at the expense of the Parkland teens, of all people, children who responded to an unthinkable tragedy by dedicating their lives to making the world a better place: "You're not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? Why does that make you interesting? You didn't get shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I gotta listen to you talking?"
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Noah Webster is famous for his spelling book and for his dictionary. Because during and for a while after the American Revolutionary War, the British were the bad guys, he changed some English spellings to create American spellings. For example, colour became color, and musick became music. He also invented the word demoralize. He had great accomplishments, and he had great pride. When he visited Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush, a famous physician, said to him, "I congratulate you on your arrival in Philadelphia." Mr. Webster replied, "You may, if you please, sir, congratulate Philadelphia upon the occasion!"
• Film director Robert Altman had an old Iranian-born friend named Reza Badiyi, who became a television director. They once went on a cross-country trip and ended up in Las Vegas without any money. Mr. Altman convinced a Las Vegas hotel that Mr. Badiyi was actually a famous Middle Eastern prince who lived large and whose name was currently in many gossip columns. The hotel gave them free room and board. However, the real Middle Eastern prince showed up at the hotel. Fortunately, he thought that what the two friends had done was funny, and he and Mr. Badiyi partied together in Las Vegas.
• In 1939, the Three Stooges were invited to perform in London at the Palladium. They did not pay for first-class passage on the ship that took them to England, but the captain of the ship was a fan, so he upgraded them to first class at no cost to them. Moe Howard, the leader of the Stooges, remembered with amusement a newspaper headline that he saw when they arrived: "STOOGES ARRIVE IN LONDON-QUEEN LEAVES FOR AMERICA."
• As a boy, ballet dancer André Eglevsky suffered from a cough that caused his family to travel to a healthier locale for him. However, young André learned that a cough does have its advantages. While traveling in a crowded train compartment, young André had a bad fit of coughing. As he coughed and coughed, the other passengers left the train compartment, finally leaving André alone with his mother, his nurse, and his sister.
• Cellist Pablo Casals was born and grew up in Catalonia. While on tour in the United States, he visited the territory of New Mexico. While walking in the desert, Mr. Casals and pianist Léon Moreau came across a cabin. The cabin's owner, who was dressed like a cowboy, greeted them. Mr. Casals noticed his accent, and he asked the man where he was from. "It's a country you never heard of," the man said. "Catalonia."
• Robert M. Brinkerhoff, the cartoonist of the long-ago comic strip Little Mary Mixup, had a yen for travel and a strong work ethic. The two worked well together. Before he traveled to the Orient, he turned in 100 cartoons to the United Feature Syndicate. For two years previously, he had created one extra cartoon each week.
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Selected Readings
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Fairly quiet evening, except for some intermittent fireworks in the hood that caused the kitties to velcro themselves to my legs.
After A 20 Year Delay
Public Domain
After a twenty year hiatus, tomorrow will finally see the 95 year long copyrights of works released in 1923 expire. These 1923 films, books and songs will effectively be the first to enter the public domain in the US since 1998, and Duke University notes that it will include such classics as Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim, Jacob's Room by Viginia Woolf, and the song Charleston (based on the popular dance of the same name).
Welcoming classic works to the public domain was an annual New Year's Day tradition. Charlie Chaplin's 1921 directorial debut, The Kid, became public on January 1st, 1997, and was joined by the 1922 German horror classic Nosferatu a year later. But in 1998, Congress extended the length of copyright from 75 years to 95, or from 50 to 70 years after the author's death. The result of the legislation was to effectively prevent any new works from entering the public domain.
Lawmakers argued the legislation was necessary to protect the revenues of US entertainment industry, and bring US law into line with European law - but it was really about protecting Mickey Mouse. The first Mickey Mouse cartoons were released in 1928, and the new rules extended Disney's control of the copyright until at least 2023.
However, on January 1st 2019, the first works protected by the CTEA's new 95 year limit will expire. These books, films and songs will now be free for anyone to copy, reproduce, present, or perform, without having to gain permission or pay royalty fees to their original rights holders. Google will be able to make full books available to read through its Google Books service, anyone will be able to upload the films to YouTube, and amateur theaters will be able to produce plays without needing to seek permission.
If you're looking to explore some of the works that will shortly become freely available, then Duke University and The Public Domain Review have compiled lists, while the latter also has a collection of online resources that publish public domain works.
Public Domain
Volunteers Stave Off Shutdown Chaos
US Parks
Sabra Purdy is just back from Joshua Tree National Park in southern California, which was crammed with tourists. It is high season, and to prevent chaos from the partial shutdown of the US federal government, she put on her gloves, cleaned toilets and picked up trash.
The 40-year-old businesswoman joined other members of the business community who benefit from park-related tourism, and together they performed some serious maintenance in the 790,737-acre (320,000-hectare) park while waiting for politicians in faraway Washington to end their budget impasse.
The shutdown began on December 22, with Congress at loggerheads over whether to include the $5 billion sought by Donald Trump (R-Flaccid) to fund a wall on the border with Mexico, a central pillar of his election campaign and of his presidency.
Since the shutdown began, dozens of volunteers have been traveling to the park to clean overused bathrooms, remove mounting piles of garbage and carry out other, equally unfragrant work.
Purdy, who eight years ago opened a tour company for climbing trips with her husband Seth Zaharias, said that when she arrived at Joshua Tree on Friday she found disorder but "no chaos."
US Parks
Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA)
Lake Mercer
While you were baking cookies and binging Netflix shows over Christmas, a team of about 50 scientists, drillers, and support staff was attempting to punch through nearly 4,000 feet of ice to access an Antarctic subglacial lake for just the second time in human history. And folks, they did it.
On Friday, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) team announced they'd reached Lake Mercer after melting their way through an enormous frozen river with a high-pressure, hot-water drill. The multi-year effort to tap into the subglacial lake-one of approximately 400 scientists have detected across Antarctica-offers a rare opportunity to study the biology and chemistry of the most isolated ecosystems on Earth.
The only other subglacial lake humans have drilled into-nearby Lake Whillans, sampled in 2013-demonstrated that these extreme environments can play host to diverse microbial life. Naturally, scientists are stoked to see what they'll find lurking in Lake Mercer's icy waters.
"We don't know what we'll find," John Priscu, a biogeochemist at Montana State University and chief scientist for SALSA, told Earther via satellite phone from the SALSA drill camp on the Whillans Ice Plain. "We're just learning, it's only the second time that this has been done."
According to the latest SALSA blog post, the team began drilling its main borehole on the evening of December 23. (A secondary borehole that acts as a well, its water back-pumped into the main hole after being filtered and sterilized, was started a night earlier, Priscu told Earther.) Things apparently proceeded smoothly, with the team reaching the 54-square-mile lake on the evening of December 26 after drilling to a depth of 3,556 feet (1,084 meters).
Lake Mercer
Lake Superior State University
Words
Wordsmiths at Lake Superior State University in Michigan are certainly sticklers for the lexicon, considering they're releasing their 44th annual Banished Words List. Buzz60's Mercer Morrison has the story. Buzz60
If the wordsmiths at Lake Superior State University have their way, the vocabulary of President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Inadequate) is going to shrink dramatically in 2019.
"Collusion" is among the list of 18 words the university in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, suggested should be banished from our collective vocabularies for overuse, misuse or general uselessness.
It's a word that Trump frequently uses, including in a Tweet posted Saturday, that went, in part: "The Russian Collusion fabrication is the greatest Hoax in the history of American politics. The only Russian Collusion was with Hillary and the Democrats!"
The list, which started in 1976 and included the word "Macho," was the brainchild of the late W.T. Rabe, a public relations director at Lake Superior State University. It's been published every year since, with thousands of nominations coming in from across the country, as a way to vent about verbal crutches, pet peeves and phrases that translate like nails on a chalkboard.
Words
Leaked Audio
Louis CK
A leaked set from one of Louis CK's controversial appearances at the Comedy Cellar has caused uproar after he mocked young people who wish to be referred to with gender neutral pronouns, along with the survivors of the Parkland school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
"I'm a little disappointed in the younger generation, honestly, because I'm 51 years old, and when I was like, 18 to my twenties, we were idiots. We are out getting high, doing mushrooms and s**t, and then older people were like 'you've got to get your s**t together' and we were like, 'f*** you'.
He continued: "They're just boring. Telling you, 'you shouldn't say that'... what are you, an old lady? 'That's not appropriate' - f*** you, you're a child. They're like royalty, they tell you what to call them. 'You should address me as they/them because I identify as gender neutral.' OK. You should address me as 'there' because I identify as a location, and the location is your mother's c***."
He then said: "I don't know. They testified in front of Congress, these kids. Like, what the f***? What are you doing? You're young. You should be going crazy. You should be unhinged, not in a suit saying: 'I'm here to tell...' f*** you. You're not interesting 'cause you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? How does that make you interesting? You didn't get shot. You pushed some fat kid in the way and now I got to listen to you talk?"
In a statement issued after the news emerged, he said: "These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was OK because I never showed a woman my d**k without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your d**k isn't a question. It's a predicament for them."
Louis CK
Woman Develops Donor's Peanut Allergy
Lung Transplant
Sometimes, you just really want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And, as long as you're not allergic to the ingredients, that's totally fine. At least, that's what one woman thought.
The 68-year-old woman, who had never had a peanut allergy, had a severe allergic reaction to the sandwich, according to a recent report of her case, which was published in August in the journal Transplantation Proceedings. But someone else did have a peanut allergy, it turned out: the donor who supplied the woman with a transplant lung.
It's a very rare occurrence for lung transplant recipients to acquire a food allergy from a donor organ, said lead case report author Dr. Mazen Odish, a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of California - San Diego Medical Center, who treated the woman.
Although it's rare for food allergies to be transferred from organ donors to transplant recipients, it does occur: cases of food allergies being acquired from organ donors have been reported after liver, kidney, lung, bone marrow, heart and kidney transplants, the authors wrote.
But not every transplant recipient who obtains an organ from a donor with food allergies picks up the sensitivity, which may turn up anywhere from days to months after the transplant. Studies have suggested, for example, that children and people who receive liver transplants may be more likely to develop food allergies from organ donors who have them.
Lung Transplant
Deletes New Year's Eve Joke
U.S. Strategic Command
U.S. Strategic Command made an unexpected joke in a now-deleted Twitter post about American military might on Monday in its New Year's Eve message.
Noting the "big" Times Square ball drop celebration at midnight, the unified command's account tweeted, "if ever needed, we are #ready to drop something much, much bigger."
The joke was followed by a slickly produced video of stealth jets with the words "stealth, ready, and lethal" flashing across the screen. The tweet encouraged followers to "watch to the end!" If you do, you'll see two bombs released from a plane, followed by several massive explosions.
The tweet was later deleted, and a subsequent tweet from the unified command's account said the first was "in poor taste & does not reflect our values. We apologize."
"This post, which has since been deleted, was part of our Year in Review series meant to feature our command priorities: strategic deterrence, decisive response and combat-ready force. It was a repost from earlier in the year, dropping a pair of conventional Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOP) at a test range in the United States," a spokesman told NBC News this evening.
U.S. Strategic Command
In Memory
Don Lusk
Don Lusk, the last link to Disney Animation's golden age of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, has died at the age of 105. His passing was confirmed in an Instagram post by the Disney Animation Research Library.
Lusk joined The Walt Disney Company in 1933 and went on to work as a character animator for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," and "Bambi." His best-known achievement is single-handedly animating the "danse arabe," or "dance of the seven veils," featuring a sultry goldfish during the Nutcracker sequence of "Fantasia."
The legend goes that the stacked sketches of the fish doing her entire dance would stretch from floor to ceiling, it was that monumental and exhaustive a feat. But a feat of real delicacy and subtlety too. Lusk had previously worked with Eric Larson to animate the goldfish Cleo in "Pinocchio" along with the cat Figaro, whose movements are incredibly lifelike - just look at the moment when the toymaker Geppetto holds Figaro up by the scruff of his neck to get a look at his new boy made of pine and Figaro winds up his paw to take a jealous swing at Pinocchio. When his slug misses the marionette, Figaro continues to twist, his fur animated to look like it's really just hanging on his bones. It's an incredibly dynamic moment that shows the sharpest eye for movement.
Following a break for military service, Lusk returned to Disney to work on such classics as "Cinderella," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (he animated the sequence where Alice falls through the rabbit hole and her cat Dinah waves goodbye), "Peter Pan," "Lady and the Tramp," "One Hundred and One Dalmations," and the early live action meets animation mixed-media film "So Dear to My Heart." Plus, he worked on several of the less heralded but equally impressive anthology animated films Disney produced in the late 1940s including "The Wind in the Willows" from "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" and several shorts from one of the most gob-smackingly gorgeous of all Disney animated films, "Melody Time," in which he contributed to sequences in "Once Upon a Wintertime," "Trees," and "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed."
After leaving Disney in 1960, Lusk went on to work on many of the Charlie Brown animated TV programs including "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," and the Hanna-Barbera studio. Working deep into his 70s he even directed the crossover special "The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones."
Don Lusk
In Memory
Ray Sawyer
Ray Sawyer, the Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show member who sang the 1973 Shel Silverstein-penned hit "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone,'" has died at the age of 81.
Page Six first reported Friday that Sawyer died in Daytona Beach, Florida following a brief illness; a representative for the band confirmed the singer's death to Rolling Stone.
The Alabama-born Sawyer - who founded the group with Dennis Locorriere, Billy Francis and George Cummings - was a member of Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show from 1969 to 1981. A few years before the band's formation, Sawyer lost his right eye in a car accident; Sawyer wore an eyepatch that made him resemble the Peter Pan villain Captain Hook, which served as the inspiration for the Dr. Hook moniker.
In 1970, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show's demo tapes wound up in the hands of author and songwriter Shel Silverstein, who recruited the band to become a vessel for his music: The group would turn Silverstein-written tracks like "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of 'Rolling Stone'" into hits and released two albums of Silverstein-penned songs, 1971's Dr. Hook and 1972's Sloppy Seconds.
The latter single, a tongue-in-cheek paean to the magazine and rock stardom with Sawyer on vocals, became a Top 10 single on the Billboard Hot 100 and resulted in Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, in caricature form, receiving a Rolling Stone cover in March 1973 as well as a profile of the New Jersey-via-Alabama act. "From unknown bar band to the cover of 'Rolling Stone,'" the profile noted of the band's sudden ascension.
Following their Silverstein partnership, the band shortened their name to Dr. Hook and enjoyed a string of hit singles in the mid to late-Seventies, including "Only Sixteen," "A Little Bit More," "Sexy Eyes" and "When You're in Love With a Beautiful Woman," which became a Number One hit in the United Kingdom. Bruce Springsteen also notably served as Dr. Hook's opening act in 1973.
After nine albums with Dr. Hook, Sawyer left in 1983 to pursue a solo career; he previously released a self-titled solo LP in 1977. While Locorriere maintained ownership of the official Dr. Hook moniker, Sawyer toured as Dr. Hook featuring Ray Sawyer over the past few decades. However, health issues forced Sawyer to stop performing live in 2015.
Ray Sawyer
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