Remembering the Metropolitan Blues All Stars

YouTube link.

When I lived in Kentucky in the 1980s,  I had several opportunities to hear the Metropolitan Blues All Stars perform.  The group members were from Eastern Kentucky; they came to Lexington for concert performances (or to Louisville for Lonesome Pine Specials as in the 1987 one embedded above).

I particularly remember Rodney Hatfield's prolonged harmonica riffs, and I have an old VCR tape with Caroline Dahl really rocking the keyboard; I understand she later moved on to San Francisco for a successful career there.  Here's her Boogie Woogie Piano with the Metropolitan Blues All Stars, recorded in 2007 (here's another boogie woogie performance, with Tom Rigney and Flambeau in 2007).  Is boogie woogie still popular? (I don't know - don't get out much)

I wonder if any other readers here remember the group.  Miss C?

After some internet searching, I discovered Rodney Hatfield playing with a group called Tin Can Buddha (profiled in this KET recording).

Addendum:  adding "Caledonia" to the text here.  The YouTube video is labeled "Caldonia" which is obviously a misspelling of the word for northern Scotland.  Now this will show up better on searches.

Reposted from 2017 to embed the harmonica riff linked above:

Fears of "needle spiking" in Europe

 LONDON — She had eagerly looked forward to going home for the holidays and reuniting with friends over dinner and drinks. Instead, Eva Keeling, 19, says, she wound up injected by a stranger with a needle, leaving her unable to speak or function while at a bar in her hometown of Stafford, in northern England.

“We went outside [the bar] for some fresh air … then I ended up losing all control of my body, the ability to walk, hold my head up, I couldn’t talk — I was projectile vomiting everywhere,” Keeling told The Washington Post. 

Days after her April night out, she still felt ill and, while getting dressed, noticed her arm was swollen. Feeling “petrified,” she rushed to a hospital for blood tests and was screened for diseases such as HIV. Doctors informed her she’d been injected with a “dirty needle,” causing the infection and swelling.

Keeling is one of hundreds of people across Britain and Europe who have been victims of suspected “needle spiking” — an injection administered without consent or knowledge, often in a bar or nightclub setting, in an attack similar to the more common crime of contaminating alcoholic drinks...

French police have received more than 300 complaints of injections in various regions since the end of March but have not made arrests, according to local media reports...

“It’s a really difficult crime,” she said. Possible motives could include assault, rape, human trafficking or even personal vendettas, she added.

Continued at The Washington Post.

Addendum:  See the informed commentary by reader Benjamin in the Comments section, and the links at this Wikipedia entry.

Circumhorizontal arc

Colloquially known as a "fire rainbow."  This one hovered over Madison, Wisconsin yesterday.  It had more vivid coloration a minute before I was able to take the photo, and it faded from view a couple minutes later.

A truly Python-esque idea

Related: Graham Chapman's memorial service

"Plastic recycling will never work"

Excerpts from an Atlantic article written by a former EPA administrator and a chemical engineer:

"Although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work...

The first problem is that there are thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics. They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing...

Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together. This is one of several reasons why plastic fast-food service items cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S...

Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers...

Yet another problem is that plastic recycling is simply not economical...

Despite this stark failure, the plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes...

If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling. Although we may not be able to stop them from trying to fool us, we can pass effective laws to make real progress. Single-use-plastic bans reduce waste, save taxpayer money spent on disposal and cleanup, and reduce plastic pollution in the environment.

Consumers can put pressure on companies to stop filling store shelves with single-use plastics by not buying them and instead choosing reusables and products in better packaging. And we should all keep recycling our paper, boxes, cans, and glass, because that actually works.

Most expensive car in the world

On May 5, a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe sold for $142 million during an auction at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. It was the highest price ever paid for a car at auction, soundly beating the eight-figure Ferrari sales that had long topped the blue-chip billing.

Interesting that the exhaust pipes are right next to the passenger door.

Some additional details at Bloomberg, where the discussion is mostly about how (and whether) to insure a car like this.

Posted for Jesse to consider adding to the 50,000 posts at Just A Car Guy.

Good book to take on a picnic

E. O. Wilson was arguably the world's leading authority on ants.  He authored thirty books (with two Pulitzer prizes), so when I saw this most recent one on our library's new acquisitions list, I immediately clicked to be put on the waiting list.  

This book was written for the general public, assembling a couple dozen stories to describe his personal and professional life.  Lots of interesting factoids:

"In the Brazilian rain forests [ants] make up an astonishing three-quarters of the insect biomass and more than one-quarter of the entire animal biomass."

"In 1955, early in my career as a field biologist, I had managed to identify about 175 ant species in a square kilometer of lowland rain forest in Papua New Gjuinea.  This I believed likely to last as a world record.  Not so.  In later years, twice that number, 355, were collected by Stefan Cover and John Tobin at a single locality in the Amazon."

"The mother queen, when inseminated by several males during the nuptial flights, receives 200 to 300 million sperm cells.  These she stores in her spermatheca.  She pays out sperm cells one by one from the spermatheca during her lifetime of ten to fifteen years.  In this time, she gives birth to as many as 150 million to 200 million workers - half the size of the human population of the United States."

Lots more.  And an easy, pleasant read, sitting on your blanket by the lake. 

It's called "docking"

I can remember watching my mom do this to a pie crust, but I never knew there was a specific word for it.  I can't quite suss out how this is related to the other definitions of "dock" (listed but not explained at Etymology 6 of the verb form of dock).

This story has a happy ending

Cassandra Ridder was crushed when her 12-year-old son Brody came home from school last week with only a few signatures in his yearbook — including his own.

“Hope you make some more friends. — Brody Ridder,” the rising seventh-grader wrote in his own yearbook, which was signed by only two classmates, two teachers and himself...

The story at the link will make your day a little brighter.

Caption contest

 Photo credit Danny Lawson/PA.  Backstory at The Guardian.

Modern-day tree foliage

Unutterably sad, IMHO.  Photo credit Rodrigo Abd/AP, via.

Omarolluk

I remember finding stones similar to this on the shores of Leech Lake in northern Minnesota when I was a child.  It took 70 years for me to now discover that this is an omarolluk.

Omarolluks, sometimes shortened to omars, are a distinctive type of glacial erratic that consists of dark siliceous greywacke and exhibits prominent rounded, often deep, hemispherical voids and pits. The hemispherical voids and pits result from the selective dissolution of carbonate concretions within the greywacke... 

Their rounded shape, whether found in glacial tills or glacial-fluvial (outwash) gravels, indicate that they were eroded from pre-existing littoral or fluvial deposits. Omars are typically found associated with granules and pebbles of oolitic jasper that were transported from the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, Canada...

... named after Omarolluk, an Inuit man who accompanied and guided R. J. Flaherty on numerous geological surveys of the Belcher Islands and elsewhere in the Canadian north.

With a tip of the hat to the readers of the whatsthisrock subreddit. 

Remember when the U.S. cracked down on mass shootings?

I had forgotten.  An article in the Washington Post reminded me -

They were the mass shooters of their day, and all of America knew their names: John “the Killer” Dillinger, Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

In the 1930s, the violence by the notorious gangsters was fueled by Thompson submachine guns, or Tommy guns, that fired up to 600 rounds in a minute. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pressing Congress to act on his “New Deal for Crime,” specifically a bill officially called the National Firearms Act of 1934. Informally, it was known as the “Anti-Machine Gun Bill.”..

By 1934, more than two dozen states passed gun-control laws. West Virginia required gun owners to be bonded and licensed. Michigan mandated that the police approve gun buyers. Texas banned machine guns...

“A machine gun, of course, ought never to be in the hands of any private individual,” Attorney General Homer Cummings said at a House hearing. “There is not the slightest excuse for it, not the least in the world, and we must, if we are going to be successful in this effort to suppress crime in America, take these machine guns out of the hands of the criminal class.”..

The NRA gave qualified support to the proposed law...

The NRA and groups representing hunters opposed extending the tax to pistols and revolvers. “It is a fact which cannot be refuted that a pistol or revolver in the hands of a man or woman who knows how to use it is one thing which makes the smallest man or the weakest woman the equal of the burliest thug,” argued Milton Reckord, the NRA’s executive vice president. But as for a bill limited to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, he said, “We will go along with such a bill as that.”

The embedded image is a screencap from an anguished video at this tweet (with a hat tip to reader Lyle).

BTW, there have been at least fifteen more mass shootings since the one at Uvalde last week.   Over the Memorial Day weekend, basically.  How fucked up is it that Americans take guns to holiday gatherings?

Note:

Around 19.8 million AR-15 style rifles are in circulation in the US, a nationwide tally that's surged from around 8.5 million since a federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004.

The more recent estimate comes from a November 2020 statement by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In the statement, its President and CEO Joseph Bartozzi called the AR-15 the "most popular rifle sold in America" and a "commonly-owned firearm."

"Zombie corporations" explained

"They are creations of easy credit, beneficiaries of central bank largesse. And now that the era of unconventional monetary policy is over, they’re facing a challenge like never before. 

They are America’s corporate zombies, companies that aren’t earning enough to cover their interest expenses, let alone turn a profit. From meme-stock favorite AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. to household names such as American Airlines Group Inc. and Carnival Corp., their ranks have swelled in recent years, comprising roughly a fifth of the country’s 3,000 largest publicly-traded companies and accounting for about $900 billion of debt.

Now, some say, their time may be running short.

Firms that could once count on virtually unfettered access to the bond and loan markets to stay afloat are being turned away as investors girding for a recession close the spigot to all but the most creditworthy issuers. The fortunate few that can still find willing lenders face significantly higher borrowing costs as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to tame inflation of more than 8%. With surging input costs poised to eat away at earnings, it’s left a broad swath of corporate America with little margin for error.

The end result could be a prolonged stretch of bankruptcies unlike any in recent memory."

Pasties are now... outerwear?

It has been 21 years since Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones uttered the words “nipples are huge right now” – yet here we are again. This time, though, nipples are so huge as to be worthy of adornment. “Pasties” – self-adhesive nipple covers usually worn under clothes in lieu of a bra – are being worn proudly, in metallics rather than muted tones, as part of an outfit rather than behind-the-scenes staging.

They have, in fashion circles, gone the way of lingerie: underwear as outerwear, the externalisation of something that was once meant to be concealed. Pasties are no longer sharing space with hidden necessities, such as boob tape or bunion insoles; instead, they are the stars of the show...

“The fashion for pasties on the red carpet is not entirely unprecedented,” says Sarah Thornton, the author of Uplifting Sagas: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation. “The pasty arose with burlesque as a commercial form of bare-breasted entertainment. There was no widespread need for them before that. Also, the availability of easy, cheap, gentle adhesives was a necessary precursor – hence their name, which derives from the word ‘paste’.“The burlesque cliche is that they are ‘boob jewellery’. They draw attention to nipples as much as they mask them. When I think of the history of pasties, I see red satin, sequins, rhinestones, diamantes, silk tassels.” In this way, their latest incarnation is more in line with their burlesque backstory than their more recent deployment to hide nipples.

Continued at The Guardian.