26 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

  1. That’s lively and perky. Great start to a six below Sunday. I need to run out and pick a few things up … maybe I’ll wait a while. And glad I didn’t spend my powerball winnings before I checked the results. I did match 1 number. Whoopee!

  2. renee?

    nbc news;

    A single jackpot-winning ticket in Saturday’s estimated $570 million Powerball jackpot was sold in New Hampshire, the lottery game said on its website.

    The big win comes a day after someone who bought a ticket in Florida won a $450 million Mega Millions jackpot.

    The numbers in Saturday’s Powerball drawing are 12-29-30-33-61 with a Powerball of 26. The $570 million estimated Powerball jackpot was the fifth-largest in the game’s history, lottery officials have said.

  3. jace, candide always reminds me of dick cavett….talk about how craig and ko never dumbed down, cavett sometimes soared us to genius level.  still does now and thenwith little call-ins.  there were other times tho’ as in this reported by mentalfloss last year on one unforgettable cavett show [sorry for the length but too good not to post]:

    During his first few years on the air, talk show host Dick Cavett might have imagined his worst moment as a broadcaster would remain the night when actors Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and John Cassavetes showed up for a taping drunk and incoherent. Things got so bad that at one point Cavett walked off his own show.

    That was September 18, 1970. Less than a year later, Cavett would outdo himself. Interviewing New York Post columnist Pete Hamill, Cavett and his guest stopped momentarily to regard the odd behavior of the man sitting a few feet away. Jerome Rodale, who had just spent 30 minutes talking to Cavett about the organic food lifestyle he promoted, was snoring loudly.

    That was funny only during the brief time it took for Cavett to realize Rodale’s color was pallid and that his head was slumped listlessly against his shoulder. Moments after the 72-year-old had declared he “never felt better in my life,” Rodale was dead, having expired in full view of ABC’s cameras.

     The name Jerome Rodale doesn’t have the same resonance today that it once did. At one time, the man media dubbed “Mr. Organic” was one of the most famous health advocates in the country, urging consumers to ignore the store aisles of increasingly processed food and to eat as many natural, whole foods as possible.

    [….]

    By 1971, Rodale was firmly in control of a publishing empire and even made the cover of The New York Times Magazine for his status as a leading organic food advocate—at the time, a novel idea. The resulting publicity caught the attention of Cavett, who was preparing to tape a program in New York on June 7 of that year and had one spot open for a guest. His producers booked Rodale with the expectation that some of his more eccentric advice would make for good television.

    They weren’t wrong. After Cavett opened his show with an act involving trained monkeys and comedian Marshall Efron, Rodale strolled out to the set bearing gifts. One was a goose egg that he declared harbored numerous health benefits; another was some asparagus that he claimed had been boiled in urine. The audience, perhaps drawing a line at consuming their own waste to benefit their health, responded with concerned murmuring.

    Cavett, however, was happy. Rodale was as advertised, and the two spent 30 minutes of Cavett’s 90-minute running time exploring Rodale’s plans to live to be 100.

    When Hamill came out, Rodale made room and shifted to another seat. After a few minutes, he appeared to lose consciousness. Though Cavett doesn’t recall it, he’s been told some people remember him asking Rodale if they were boring him.

    Once Cavett realized what was happening, he began to shout for a doctor in the audience. Two medical interns rushed the stage, attending to a now-prostrate Rodale. “Two stewardesses in the front row who’d been winking and joking with me during the commercial breaks were now crying,” Cavett recalled. “I guess from their training and having seen emergencies, they knew the score.”

    As police and EMTs began to fill the stage, it was obvious that Rodale would not be leaving under his own power. His inert body was taken away on a stretcher, leaving Cavett and his astonished audience to process what had just happened. Rodale had suffered a fatal heart attack.

     

    Rodale’s death didn’t go on the air that night—or any night, for that matter. Both ABC and Cavett had the good sense to never exploit the incident in any way out of respect for Rodale and his family. Cavett aired a rerun, then went on the following night to explain what happened to viewers who had read of the incident in the papers. (Hamill had been taking notes during the entire fiasco.)

    Cavett did watch the tape several weeks later with some of his production staff, and it’s likely someone in the network’s pipeline made copies of the morbid footage to give to their wives or friends as a scare. Aside from those incidences, Rodale’s death has never been seen by anyone.

    Despite that embargo, Cavett once estimated that he is confronted 20 or so times a year by people who want to discuss “the guy who died on your show” and how shocked they were to see it. Cavett had painted such a detailed picture of the segment on his show that it created a kind of false memory in his viewers, some of whom could not be convinced the show didn’t actually air. A 2007 New York Times editorial by Cavett recalling the episode even featured a comment by one reader who swore that “I DID see this.” If they did, you’d think they’d remember the urine-soaked asparagus, too.

     

     

  4. So, if Donny is a stable genius, I guess that makes Tillerson an amiable environmentalist, Yertle a strong-chinned liberal and Paul Ryan a kind-hearted human being.

    rr – I hope last night’s powerball drawing made you a generous multi-millionaire, for realz. 😉

    Yes, COUNTDOWN was the best thing MSNBC ever had going for it.

  5. But above all was the ever golden “One more cow”.
    does everyone who does some good somehow, somewhere, have to be an entirely savory character?  I see that Wolfe appears a bit wobbly himself and others preface their remarks on his book by noting that……but…..
    It’s the song, not the singer.

  7. A beautiful morning glory to the trail…our low temp last night was 51 degrees.   Thank you for the music, Jace and it is good to see so many on the trail.  Patd, thank you for the Rodale story…the family business started in Emmaus, PA and I have been a fan of Prevention for years.  Sturge, ran, ran-off years ago.  BTW, my tenth year anniversary begins on the trail this month….I started the trail in 2008 when it was part of Roll Call.  I may design an aluminum outfit.

    With regards to KO?  His worst person in the world  segment was genius…something only a stable genius could achieve.  The name of the show Countdown, genius…reminding us of the number of days bush was in office.

     

  8. patd…  bid….   oh crap!…  yet another lottery ticket I forgot to buy…  🙂

    by the end of the week, we are going into a January thaw…  the weather person says in the 50s by Friday.  I need to get out my bathing suit!

  10. Holy Collective Unconscious!   I had a gut feeling that our gut feelings are interconnected.  Gut feelings decoded.  From the Economic Times —

    This explains how people often have a “gut feeling” or intuition about a person or situation even if they cannot logically determine why. People can pick up on subliminal information, Digby Tantum, Clinical Professor of Psychotherapy at the University of Sheffield, was quoted as telling the Telegraph late on Saturday.Tantum describes it as “The Interbrain” the phenomenon. “We can know directly about other people’s emotions and what they are paying attention to. “It is based on the direct connection between our brains and other people’s and between their brain and ours. I call this the interbrain,” Tantum explained, while writing in his book The Interbrain.It is this interbrain that is the reason why people are drawn to religions gatherings or feel the need to come together in huge crowds at football matches or concerts. 

  11. Remember when Leonard was a left wing cultural icon?  He never would have voted for SFB

  14. Where is Ernestine?  Verizon sold our landline service to Frontier – the worst phone company on the planet (although Verizon was just about as bad)

  15. critterville, please listen up.

    bandy lee op ed in the guardian: Trump is now dangerous – that makes his mental health a matter of public interest

    Eight months ago, a group of us put our concerns into a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. It became an instant bestseller, depleting bookstores within days. We thus discovered that our endeavours resonated with the public.

    While we keep within the letter of the Goldwater rule – which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without a personal examination and without consent – there is still a lot that mental health professionals can tell before the public reaches awareness. These come from observations of a person’s patterns of responses, of media appearances over time, and from reports of those close to him. Indeed, we know far more about Trump in this regard than many, if not most, of our patients. Nevertheless, the personal health of a public figure is her private affair – until, that is, it becomes a threat to public health.

    To make a diagnosis one needs all the relevant information – including, I believe, a personal interview. But to assess dangerousness, one only needs enough information to raise alarms. It is about the situation rather than the person. The same person may not be a danger in a different situation, while a diagnosis stays with the person.

    It is Trump in the office of the presidency that poses a danger. Why? Past violence is the best predictor of future violence, and he has shown: verbal aggressiveness, boasting about sexual assaults, inciting violence in others, an attraction to violence and powerful weapons and the continual taunting of a hostile nation with nuclear power. Specific traits that are highly associated with violence include: impulsivity, recklessness, paranoia, a loose grip on reality with a poor understanding of consequences, rage reactions, a lack of empathy, belligerence towards others and a constant need to demonstrate power.

    There is another pattern by which he is dangerous. His cognitive function, or his ability to process knowledge and thoughts, has begun to be widely questioned. Many have noted a distinct decline in his outward ability to form complete sentences, to stay with a thought, to use complex words and not to make loose associations. This is dangerous because of the critical importance of decision-making capacity in the office that he holds. Cognitive decline can result from any number of causes – psychiatric, neurological, medical, or medication-induced – and therefore needs to be investigated. Likewise, we do not know whether psychiatric symptoms are due to a mental disorder, medication, or a physical condition, which only a thorough examination can reveal.

    A diagnosis in itself, as much as it helps define the course, prognosis, and treatment, is Trump’s private business, but what is our affair is whether the president and commander-in-chief has the capacity to function in his office. Mental illness, or even physical disability, does not necessarily impair a president from performing his function. Rather, questions about this capacity mobilised us to speak out about our concerns, with the intent to warn and to educate the public, so that we can help protect its own safety and wellbeing.

    Indeed, at no other time in US history has a group of mental health professionals been so collectively concerned about a sitting president’s dangerousness. This is not because he is an unusual person – many of his symptoms are very common – but it is highly unusual to find a person with such signs of danger in the office of presidency. For the US, it may be unprecedented; for parts of the world where this has happened before, the outcome has been uniformly devastating.

    [….]

    The progress of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations was worrisome to us for the effects it would have on the president’s stability. We predicted that Trump, who has shown marked signs of psychological fragility under ordinary circumstances, barely able to cope with basic criticism or unflattering news, would begin to unravel with the encroaching indictments. And if his mental stability suffered, then so would public safety and international security.

    [….]

    It does not take a mental health professional to see that a person of Trump’s impairments, in the office of the presidency, is a danger to us all.

    [….continues….]

  16. front page sunday ny times;

    President Trump, whose sometimes erratic behavior in office has generated an unprecedented debate about his mental health, declared on Saturday that he was perfectly sane and accused his critics of raising questions to score political points.
    In a series of Twitter posts that were extraordinary even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency, Mr. Trump insisted that his opponents and the news media were attacking his capacity because they had failed to prove his campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
    “Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence,” he wrote on Twitter even as a special counsel continues to investigate the Russia matter.
    “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he added. He said he was a “VERY successful businessman” and television star who won the presidency on his first try. “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”
    Elaborating during a meeting with reporters at Camp David later in the day, Mr. Trump again ticked off what he called a high-achieving academic and career record. He raised the matter “only because I went to the best colleges, or college,” he said. Referring to a new book citing concerns about his fitness, he said, “I consider it a work of fiction and I consider it a disgrace.”
    The president’s engagement on the issue is likely to fuel the long-simmering argument about his state of mind that has roiled the political and psychiatric worlds and thrust the country into uncharted territory. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to force the president to submit to psychological evaluation. Mental health professionals have signed a petition calling for his removal from office. Others call armchair diagnoses a dangerous precedent or even a cover for partisan attacks.
    In the past week alone, a new book resurfaced previously reported concerns among the president’s own advisers about his fitness for office, the question of his mental state came up at two White House briefings and the secretary of state was asked if Mr. Trump was mentally fit. After the president boasted that his “nuclear button” was bigger than Kim Jong-un’s in North Korea, Richard W. Painter, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, described the claim as proof that Mr. Trump is “psychologically unfit” and should have his powers transferred to Vice President Mike Pence under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment.
    [….continues…]

  21. Watch Pence as he stands behind Trump as he speaks. He tries to keep a neutral face, but never quite succeeds.  Watch as Donny says he went to all of the best colleges.  Pence shakes his head in a very slight no.

  22. Michael Wolff needed a designated hitter to stand in for him in interviews.   Can the man finish a sentence?

  23. carl Hiaasen: Geez, did I say ‘brick?’ No, no, Donnie, I meant Ivanka’s dumb as a stick

    Rejected first draft of Steve Bannon’s apology letter to Donald Trump:

    Dear Mr. President,

    I understand why you’re so angry about the new Michael Wolff book, especially some of the quotes attributed to me. I was as shocked as you were to see them in print.

    For the record, I take full responsibility for letting Mr. Wolff hang out with me in the White House for so long. Apparently the dude was writing down everything I said, word for word.

    Who does that? Nobody here at Breitbart News, that’s for sure!

    Please allow me to provide some context and clarification for my seemingly nasty comments about your family.

    First, you know Ivanka and I have had our differences. It’s no secret that she actually hates my guts, which is fine. Lots of people do. Almost anybody who’s spent time with me, to be honest.

    However, Wolff’s book says I describe your daughter as “dumb as a brick,” a phrase I’ve never used in my life.

    Now, it’s somewhat possible that — in an unguarded moment — I said she was “dumb as a box of rocks,” a phrase I use many times a day.

    In fact, I say it so often that nobody who knows me takes it seriously anymore, or gets their itty-bitty feelings hurt.

    I know you were also infuriated by remarks made by me suggesting that Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner were “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with those Russian bozos who promised to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton.

    (By the way, remember who came up with the whole “Crooked Hillary” riff? You’re welcome. And, BTW, I won’t tell a soul that it wasn’t your idea.)

    Am I seriously alleging that your son and son-in-law knowingly committed treason on that notorious day at Trump Tower in Manhattan?

    No, sir, because I’m confident Don Jr. and Jared had no clue what they were doing when they sat down with Putin’s operatives. Junior and J-Kush are nice young men, but who are we kidding? It gets back to that “box of rocks” thing again.

    There are other parts of the Wolff book that I feel compelled to address. For instance, I’m not the one who snitched about your fear of having your food poisoned and your preference for eating McDonald’s because the burgers are pre-cooked and therefore safe from your enemies.

    Between you and me, the source of that leak was probably one of your Secret Service agents. I’ve heard them gripe about having to wait in line at the drive-through for your lunch delivery, and how they can’t get the smell of the fries out of their upholstery.

    The Wolff manuscript also quotes several White House advisers, some by name, disparaging you as stupid, crazy, and “a dope.” Even your pal Rupert Murdoch apparently said you’re a “f—— idiot.”

    In my own defense, Mr. President, I never stooped quite that low. If you ever read the whole book from cover to cover — and I know that would be a first — you’ll see I was much tougher on your staff than I was on you.

    Still, feel free to rant and call me names. It helps clean out the old arteries.

    In your official response to the published book excerpts, you said I’ve “lost” my mind, which is kind of funny because that’s exactly what people told me when I went to work for your campaign.

    Admit it, bro — you knew I was a vicious, self-serving opportunist when you hired me. Everybody in Washington knew.

    Then, once the shock of winning the election wore off, you put me on the White House payroll and gave me a seat on the freaking National Security Council! Good times, right?

    Someday you and I will sit down have a laugh about how we hijacked the whole country. I’ll buy you a sack of Quarter Pounders, you’ll buy me a steak.

    In the meantime, your lawyer is threatening to sue me for defamation. If I may offer one final piece of advice, the last thing in the world you need right now is me sitting in a court of law, under oath, talking about everything we said and did, and planned to do.

    With all due respect, Mr. President, you’d have to be dumb as a brick to let them put me on the witness stand.

    Sorry. Make that a box of rocks.

  24. ny times: Major Donor Reconsiders Support for Democrats Who Urged Al Franken to Quit
    A prominent donor to the Democratic Party says she is considering withdrawing support for senators who urged their colleague Al Franken to resign after he was accused of sexual misconduct.
    The donor, Susie Tompkins Buell, has been one of the Democratic Party’s most generous supporters for decades. In particular, she has been a champion of female politicians, including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Maria Cantwell of Washington.
    [….]
    “In my gut they moved too fast,” she wrote, adding that Mr. Franken “was never given his chance to tell his side of the story.”
    “For me this is dangerous and wrong,” she added. “I am a big believer in helping more women into the political system but this has given me an opportunity to rethink of how I can best help my party.”
    [….continues….]

  25. Susie has her facts wrong…not unusual. Oh and her husband marries for $$$$$$$$ formerly married to Serana Mondavi

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