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Ruth Bryant just turned 100 years old. And in all that time, she never went to jail, which bothered her. Sheriff's deputies in Person County, N.C., helped out. WRAL reports they showed up at her nursing home. They arrested her on a charge of indecent exposure, handcuffed her to her walker and threw her in the slammer. Bryant was in on all of this. She had a mug shot taken. And she even made it home in time for cake.

You are always auditioning

If you only think you're auditioning when you're in the room with the casting director, you're missing half of it. You're auditioning when you're checking in with the receptionist, when you're sitting in the waiting area, when you're grabbing a cup of coffee.

In fact, whenever you're in any public space, you're auditioning. You never know who's watching your performance. At the gym? You're being auditioned by your instructor. He knows that the guy sweating away on the next bike has a flat share with an up-and-coming script writer. Walking your dog? That woman with the out-of-control Border Collie is checking you out. She's an associate producer for a major production company. Trying to decide whether to intervene in a worrying altercation on the top deck of the bus? The frightened young bus driver, whose career is about to take a sharp turn upwards, will always remember that day.

This may all sound far-fetched but I can assure you it's not.

My friend Sean Connery had never acted a day in his life until he got discovered lifting weights in a gym by a casting director looking for some slightly more convincing sailors than the usual chorus line for South Pacific. When I was shooting the comedy-heist Gambit with Shirley MacLaine, Universal had just started its famous studio tours, and in those days the tourists were allowed onto the actual sets. Every day a tour bus would pull up, tourists would pile out and the driver would try to convince any actors who hadn't scurried out of sight, like gazelles on a safari, to sign autographs.

One driver was particularly clever at timing his stops. It was annoying, but I also admired his initiative. I knew he had a job to do and my better nature prevailed. I decided to make him look good and, instead of trying to avoid his tour party, I signed every autograph and posed for every picture, and got to know him a little. And who did the bus driver turn out to be? Mike Ovitz, then a student but later the founder, then chairman, of CAA, the world's leading talent agency and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And when, working as a doorman at a dodgy hotel in Victoria, I rescued a frightened prostitute from the attentions of a drunk and violent punter (I knocked him out but forgot about his five friends, who proceeded to return the favor), who could have known that the hotel owner's son, Barry Krost, would become a Hollywood agent and a great friend, who would, years later, put together the deal to make Get Carter?

Not an actor? Doesn't matter. Whatever your role is, perform it as though the girl on the checkout, the young woman making your coffee, or, yes, even the guy at the other end of the line trying to fix your computer, is your dream boss, dream date, dream client. It will make you a better person. And sometimes, just sometimes, they really are.

Michael Caine "Blowing The Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Ships that pass in the night
(From a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Ships that pass in the night. I'd like to talk to you about this whole business of taking one's clothes off in public in front of an audience.

The first thing I'd like to make clear is that I am not against nudity. Well, not as often as I'd like to be.

What does get me a bit irritated is the way people flock to see nude actors and actresses these days.

If I seem to be a bit incensed, if not to say incoherent on this subject it's because of that quotation "Ships that pass in the night" because it brought back to my mind a very painful occasion when Frank and I faced the possibility of having to appear in the nude.

And although it was many years ago the memory is still painful because it was a time when our joint career was at its lowest financial ebb.

We were now in a period when we chewed out pencils, it wasn't for inspiration, it was for sheer nourishment. We were starving.

And the first priority obviously was to earn some kind of money somehow, even if it meant taking a part-time job.

So, we spent our last penny on a copy of the local paper and we went down the list of part-time vacancies on offer.

And then I saw it. It was an advert for the art courses being run at the local evening institute. And underneath the bit about enrolling Thursday it said, "Model required for life class."

I said to Frank, "That would suit you to a tee. All you have to do is just sit there. That's why it's in the column. It's called 'Sits vacant'."

And Frank said, "Hang on. I'd have to sit there naked. Wouldn't I? I'd have to take all my clothes off."

I said, "Now just a minute. There is nothing to be ashamed of in the human body."

He said, "It's not my body I'm thinking about, it's my vest."

He did take quite a bit of persuading but when I finally rang up the institute and described Frank to them in detail, the chap at the other end sounded quite keen.

So the following Thursday off Frank went and I tiddled about at the typewriter putting the final touches on the opera libretto we were currently engaged on writing and which we called Amahl and the Health Visitors.

Much sooner than I expected there was a key in the door and then in strode Frank.

I said, "Hello. You're back early. What is it? They ran out of rose matter."

He'd never hit me before. When I picked myself up he was holding the local paper in front of my swelling eye.

"Read it," he said, "Read it. There. The day."

I looked down at it and said, "What's wrong with it. It says, 'Enrollment Thursday. Today is Thursday.' "

He said, "Enrollment is done in the front office. The class itself is on a Tuesday."

I said, "Oh."

He said, "I went in the back door and I got undressed And I strolled into the classroom, climbed on top of the desk, and, totally nude, took up the position of Rodin's The Thinker. Do you know which class was in session there?"

I shook my head. His finger stabbed at the paper again. I read it. "Every Thursday night: Flower Arrangement."

Now perhaps you can see why I am not all that happy about the current trends toward nudity. It's not the public I worry about, it's the people who take their clothes off in front of them.

As Longsfellow very delicately described them, the shapes that pose in the nought.

Denis Norden 571a

"Most and probably all of the distinctive infectious diseases of civilization have been transferred to human populations from animal herds." -William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples'"

Humanity's biblical "dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of heaven; and every living thing that moved upon the earth" has unleashed a veritable Pandora's ark full of humankind's greatest killers." Some diseases such as herpes and shingles seem to have always been with us, passed down the evolutionary chain. But most modern human infectious diseases were unknown to our hunter and gatherer ancestors. Early humans may have suffered sporadic cases of animal-borne diseases such as anthrax from wild sheep or tularemia ("rabbit skinner's disease") from wild rabbits," but the domestication of animals triggered what the director of Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment called the mass "spillover" of animal disease into human populations.

Archeological evidence suggests that small, nomadic groups hardly suffered from contagious disease. With the advent of agriculture, though, communities settled and grew in relatively fixed locations, increasing their close exposure to their own waste and reservoirs of disease. Populations that domesticated only plants became more exposed to the few diseases they already harbored, but it was the domestication of animals that brought people in contact with a whole new array of pathogenic germs.

Epidemic diseases tend to be harbored only by those animal species that herd or flock together in large numbers. This concentration allows for the evolution and maintenance of contagious pathogens capable of rapidly spreading through entire populations. Unfortunately, this same quality - the herd instinct - is what makes these animals particularly desirable for domestication. Domestication brought these animals once appreciated mainly from afar (along with their diseases) into close proximity and density with human settlements. As a zoonoses research team concluded, "The spread of microbes from animals to humans was then inevitable.

Tuberculosis, "the captain of all these men of death," is thought to have been acquired through the domestication of goats. In the 20th century, tuberculosis (TB) killed approximately 100 million people." Today, tuberculosis kills more people than ever before-millions every year. The World Health Organization declared tuberculosis a global health emergency in 1993 and estimates that between 2000 and 2020, nearly one billion people may be newly infected. What started out in goats now infects one-third of humanity.

Domesticated goats seemed to have beaten domesticated cattle to the punch. Between 1850 and 1950, bovine tuberculosis, acquired mostly by children drinking unpasteurized milk, was responsible for more than 800,000 human deaths in Great Britain alone. Interestingly, it can go both ways. The British Journal of Biomedical Science recounts that dozens of cases of bovine TB were traced back to a "curious farmworker practice of urinating on the hay, perhaps on the folklore premise that the salts in urine are beneficial to the cattle. Of course when it turns out the workers have genitourinary tuberculosis infections, it's not so beneficial.

Bovine tuberculosis continues to infect milk-drinking children to this day. In a study published in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal in 2000, doctors tested children with tuberculosis in San Diego and found that one-third of the tuberculosis wasn't human. One in three of the children was actually suffering from tuberculosis caught not from someone coughing on them, but, the researchers suspect, from drinking inadequately pasteurized milk from an infected cow. The investigators conclude, "These data demonstrate the dramatic impact of this underappreciated cause of zoonotic TB on U.S. chlldren."

Measles is thought to have come from domesticated cows, a mutant of the bovine rinderpest virus. The measles virus has so successfully adapted to humans that cattle can't get measles and we can't get rinderpest. Only with the prolonged intimate contact of domestication was the rinderpest virus able to mutate enough to make the jump. Though now considered a relatively benign disease, in roughly the last 150 years measles has been estimated to have killed about 200 million people worldwlde. These deaths can be traced to the taming of the first cattle a few hundred generations ago.

Smallpox also may have been caused by a mutant cattle virus. We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, domesticated chickens and got typhoid fever, and domesticated ducks and got influenza. The list goes on. Leprosy came from water buffalo, the cold virus from cattle or horses. How often did wild horses have opportunity to sneeze into humanity's face until they were broken and bridled? Before then. the common cold was presumably common only to them.

New zoonotic infections from domesticated farm animals continue to be discovered. The 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the scientists who discovered in 1982 that bacteria living in the human stomach, which they called Helicobacter pylori, caused stomach cancer and the vast majority of peptic ulcers worldwide. Roughly half of the world's population is now infected. This ulcer-causing bacterium is thought to have originated in sheep's milk, but is now spread person to person via oral secretions -saliva or vomit - or perhaps, like cholera, the fecal-oral route due to poor hand-washing following defecation. What has become probably the most common chronic infection afflicting humanity, according to the CDC, came about because humanity started to drink the milk of another species thousands of years ago.

A recent addition to the list of infectious farm animal bacteria is a cousin of H pylori, known as Heliobacter pullorum (from the Latin pullus for "chicken")," infecting a large proportion of chicken meat. H pullorum is thought to cause a diarrheal illness in people who contract it through the consumption of improperly cooked chicken fecal matter.

Yet another newly described fecal pathogen, hepatitis E, is one of the latest additions to the family of hepatitis viruses. It can cause fulminating liver infection in pregnant women, especially during the third trimester, with a mortality rate of up to 20%. Scientists began to suspect that this virus was zoonotic when they found it rampant in North America commercial pork operations. Direct evidence of cross-species transmission was obtained in 2003. Unlike a disease like trichinosis, which humans only get by eating improperly cooked pork, once a disease like hepatitis E crosses the species line, it can then be spread person to person. Between 1 and 2% of blood donors in the United States have been found to have been exposed to this virus.

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal." - Charles Darwin, 183677

UCLA professor Jared Diamond explored how pivotal the domestication of farm animals was in the course of human history and medicine in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock," he argues convincingly that the diseases we contracted through the domestication of animals may have been critical for the European conquest of the Americas in which as many as 95% of the natives were decimated by plagues the Europeans brought with them. Natives had no prior exposure or immunity to diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles. Parallels were seen throughout the world with single missionaries unintentionally exterminating the entire target of their religious zeal with one of livestock's "lethal gifts."

Why didn't the reverse happen? Why didn't Native American diseases wipe out the landing Europeans? Because there essentially weren't any epidemic diseases. Medical historians have long conjectured that the reason there were so many plagues in Eurasia was that "crowd" diseases required large, densely-populated cities, unlike the presumed small tribal bands of the Americas. But that presumption turned out to be wrong. "New world" cities like Tenochtitlan were among the most populous in the world.

The reason the plagues never touched the Americas is that there were far fewer domesticated herd animals. There were buffalo, but no domesticated buffalo, so there was presumably no opportunity for measles to arise. No pigs, so no pertussis; no chickens, so no Typhoid Marys. While people died by the millions of killer scourges like tuberculosis in Europe, none were dying in the "new world" because no animals like goats existed to domesticate. The last ice age killed off most of the easily domesticated species in the western hemisphere, such as American camels and horses, leaving the indigenous population only animals like llamas and guinea pigs to raise for slaughter, neither of whom seem to carry much potential for epidemic human dlsease.

Once an animal is infected, the stress of transport can lead to increased shedding of the pathogen. In one study at Texas Tech University, for example, the average prevalence of Salmonella within feces and on the hides of cattle was 18% and 6%, respectively, before transport. But cram animals onto a vehicle and truck them just 30 to 40 minutes, and the levels of Salmonella found in feces jumped from 18% to 46%; the number of animals covered with Salmonella jumped from 6% to 89% upon arrival at the slaughter plant, where fecal contamination on the hide or within the intestines can end up in the meat. Similar results were found in pigs. The physiological stress of transport thus increases a healthy animal's susceptibility to disease. while at the same time enhancing a sick animal's ability to spread contagion.

No surprise, then, that the FAO blames "[t]ransport of animals over long distances as one cause of the growing threat of livestock epidemics ...." Dozens of outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, for example, have been tied to livestock movements or contaminated transport vehicles.

The FAO describes live animal transport as "ideally suited for spreading disease" given that animals may originate from different herds or flocks and are "confined together for long periods in a poorly ventilated stressful environment." Given the associated "serious animal and public health problems, the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe has called for the replacement of the long-distance transportation of animals for slaughter as much as possible by a "carcass-only trade.


Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Belgians were even more upset when it became clear that their king was spending much of his newfound wealth abroad. He was soon one of the largest landowners on the French Riviera, where he built a dock for his fifteen-hundred-ton yacht, the Alberta, and had architects from Nice design and build a series of splendid villas. His property included most of the land at the end of the scenic fingertip of Cap Ferrat, then, as now, among the most expensive seaside real estate in the world.

On his young mistress Leopold showered castles and mansions. When she became pregnant, he and the French government split the cost of building a new road near her villa at Cap Ferrat, in order to give her carriage a smoother ride. When her son was born, he was given the title of Duke of Tervuren, and she became the Baroness de Vaughan. The king took her around the Mediterranean on his yacht, but the Belgian public loathed her, and her carriage was once stoned in the streets of Brussels. In the minds of Europeans, the king's public and private lives by now were wholly entwined. When Caroline's second son was born, he had a deformed hand. A cartoon in Punch showed Leopold holding the newborn child, surrounded by Congolese corpses with their hands cut off. The caption read: VENGEANCE FROM ON HIGH.

How did Leopold feel about being the target of such wrath? Clearly, it exasperated him; he once wrote to an aide, "I will not let myself be soiled with blood or mud." But the tone he sounded was always of annoyance or self-pity, never of shame or guilt. Once, when he saw a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper slicing off hands with his sword, he snorted, according to a military aide, and said, "Cut off hands - that's idiotic! I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo!" Small wonder that when the king jokingly introduced Prime Minister Auguste Beernaert to a gathering as "the greatest cynic in the kingdom," Beernaert replied, deadpan, that he would not dare take precedence over His Majesty.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Richard Pryor was picked to cohost The Mike Douglas Show for a week. A few months before he had appeared on the show as part of a panel that included Martha Mitchell, the free-talking wife of Nixon's attorney general, and the wives of three leading U.S. senators. Mike Douglas worried that the mix of guests was "like nitro and glycerin," but Richard and Martha surprised everyone with their rapport. One of the senators' wives said, "We live, eat, sleep, and breathe politics," and Martha chimed in naughtily, "Together?" That was Richard's cue:

RICHARD [trying to help]: She thought you were talking about an" orgy.
MARTHA: Thank you, Richard.
RICHARD: Sure You know, we've met before, on the first Amtrak train to Chicago.
MARTHA. I remember that. I christened that train. You were on that train?
RICHARD: Yaz, ma'am. I was the porter.
MARTHA. How nice. Did you carry my bags?
RICHARD: Oh yes'm.
MIKE DOUGLAS: Did she give you a tip?
RICHARD: Uh-huh. Blue Boy in the fifth.


Tickled by such repartee and aware that "That Nigger's Crazy" had raised Richard's profile considerably, Mike Douglas asked him to come back as a cohost, and gave him the latitude to choose a number of his guests. He drew from his family in Peoria (his grandmother Marie, his uncle Dickie), his teenage idols (Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte) younger, hip performers (Ben Vereen, Sly Stone, Freddie Prinze), and some fellow partisans in the battle for free speech (gadfly Gore Vidal and actor George C. Scott, fresh from a tussle with the Motion Picture Association of America Ratings Board over his latest film). And so, in the last week of November 1974, The Mike Douglas Show became considerably blacker and more unpredictable than usual. Effectively, Richard had been given the chance to curate his life, his world, on national TV.


Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)

Kevin Martin was picking up dinner last weekend when he heard a loud sound under his car. He had driven over some potholes, which left him with four flat tires and a $600 repair bill. Frustrated, he found a fix. He went back to the road and filled the potholes with soil and these little Christmas trees. Seems the authorities took notice. The trees were removed, and the potholes were filled by Monday afternoon

If you danced at the Ad Lib club just behind the Empire Cinema on Leicester Square, as I did, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles might be grooving around next to you. David Bailey would be in the corner, romancing Jean Shrimpton. In another corner Roman Polanski was with Sharon Tate.

My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. My tailor was Douglas Hayward, the tailor to the 1960s and such a star in his field that he ended up making Ralph Lauren's suits. When I played a bit part in Dixon of Dock Green I was paired with an unknown actor called Donald Sutherland. When I understudied another unknown actor making his West End debut in one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers, Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall it was Peter O'Toole. The play made him a star and I took it on tour while he went off to become T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the start of a towering theatrical and movie-making career.

Even the failed actors became household names. When the rest of us were still out of work and broke, we used to pass the time in the basement cafe of the Arts Theatre, just off Leicester Square. They would let you sit there all day over one cup of tea. One afternoon I was sitting in this warm haven for the destitute with two other broke actor friends. One of them, John, was particularly down. He had just been fired from a very low- standard repertory theatre and was humiliated and unhappy. He announced that he was going to give it all up and had already written a play instead. "What's it called?" I asked.

"Look Back in Anger," he replied.

"I'm writing a play as well," said our other friend, an actor called David Baron. "And you can be in it, Michael. Only I'm not going to write it under my acting name. I'm going to use my real name."

"What's that, David?"

"Harold Pinter."

"Well, good luck to both of you," I said. I didn't hold out much hope for either of them.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

There's no fire without some smoke
(Old Shropshire life by Catherine Milnes Gaskell)

I have a sad story to tell. I feel I owe it to the world to explain why there is no annual Christmas bazaar in Thorpe village hall this Christmas.

I think a word of explanation, a description, of this Christmas Fair is called for here

It's always the same every Christmas. As you go in there is table marked jumble. And on that are the following: There is one slightly rusty golf club with a string curling off the handle. There is a pair of bookends, one missing. About a useful as one sock. There is a biscuit barrel in pottery with the knob missing from the lid and the brass showing through the chromium. There was a paper knife in the shape of a Toledo sword, which could best be described as "an old rolled gold with the gold rolled off". There is an unused desk diary from 1947. And there are a number of books. There is always The Gorilla Hunters by R M Ballentine. And in the front was a bookplate from Strewed School saying "1924 presented to R. Thwaites for effort". There was a book called Rambles in New Zealand. There was a book called Hiawatha Rendered into Latin. And the last one was Hindustani self-taught by the Natural Method.

Now you may wonder why I know exactly what things were going to be on the jumble stall. They were there every year.

When I first went to the village twenty years ago, about the second year I bought the biscuit barrel and kept it, because I thought I'd keep tobacco in it. And Mrs. Rumbold came round to collect for the next jumble sale and explained to me the system.

She said, "Those things are for buying and passing on. They're not for using."

You're probably thinking, well, why do you go to the Thorpe Annual Christmas Fair.

We go because of one item which I haven't mentioned. Because the vicar always makes a speech to start with and makes his annual joke about none but the brave deserve the fair. And then he introduces the official opener, who is a donkey, Philomel the donkey.

And then comes in this absolutely marvelous thing. It's two chaps inside a donkey, Sam Baxter and his brother Ted. And they lollop in pretending to be the official opener. And they've been doing it for thirty-two years. And people have grown up and their sons have grown up with Philomel the Donkey.

It doesn't diverge its pattern by an inch. Year after year it lollops in to the door of the village hall and does a neigh at its front end. Then it waggles its tail. And then it does a tap dance to Mrs. Baxter on the piano.

And this is why the village fete continues.

And it can't. The tragedy this year was old Sam Baxter came in and see me and said, "Could I have a word wi' ye?"

He's about seventy. He said, "Philomel is no more. She's gone, the old . . . "

"SHE'S WHAT? WHAT'S WRONG? WHAT'S HAPPENED? WHAT WENT WRONG"

He said, "Well, I was rehearsing with young Ted." (His younger brother. He's sixty-four.) "We got started. I heard a very funny noise. And I got a premonition something was wrong. Ted. What are you doing now? He said, 'I was just lighting a fag.' And at that moment there was this blinding agony behind me. A terrible pain. I leapt forward and there was a tearing sound and the skin had come apart. The old Philomel had come in two. The conflagration was all right. I just sat in a basement and walked around and put that. The old skin is no more. The donkey is no more. I couldn't get rid of her myself. I took her along to the road sweeper. He was clearing the autumn leaves out of the drain. Just opposite the red line. I got him to put her down."

So there's no more Philomel world. And there will be no more Thorpe Christmas Fair. Because as sure as eggs are eggs, as the proverb said four hundred years ago, "There is no fair without Sam's moke."

Frank Muir 572b

A decade ago, the World Health Organization called for the exclusion of the riskiest bovine tissues - cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord, and intestine - from the human food supply and from all animal feed. Unfortunately, the United States still feeds some of these potentially risky tissues to people, pigs, pets, poultry, and fish. Then pig remains can be fed back to cattle. Cattle remains are still fed to chickens, and poultry litter (the mixture of excrement, spilled feed, dirt, feathers, and other debris that is scooped from the floors of broiler sheds) is fed back to cows. In these ways, prions may continue to be cycled back into cattle feed and complete the cow "cannibalism" circuit.

Ecologists assert that animal fecal wastes pose public health risks "similar to those of human wastes and should be treated accordingly," yet in animal agriculture today, fecal wastes are fed to other animals. Although excrement from other species is fed to livestock in the United States, chicken droppings are considered more nutritious for cows than pig feces or cattle dung. Because poultry litter can be as much as eight times cheaper than foodstuffs like alfalfa, the U.S. cattle industry feeds poultry litter to cattle. A thousand chickens can make enough waste to feed a growing calf year round.

A single cow can eat as much as three tons of poultry waste a year, yet the manure does not seem to affect the taste of the subsequent milk or meat. Taste panels have found little difference in the tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of beef from steers fed up to 50% poultry litter. Beef from animals fed bird droppings may in fact even be more juicy and tender. Cows are typically not given feed containing more than 80% poultry litter, though, since it's not as palatable" and may not fully meet protein and energy needs.

The industry realizes that the practice of feeding poultry manure to cattle might not stand up to public scrutiny. They understand that the custom carries "certain stigmas," "presents special consumer issues," and poses "potential public relations problems." They seem puzzled as to why the public so "readily accepts organically grown vegetables" grown with composted manure, while there is "apparent reluctance on the part of the public" to accept the feeding of poultry litter to cattle. "We hope," says one industry executive, "common sense will prevail."

The editor of Beef magazine commented, "The public sees it as 'manure.' We can call it what we want and argue its safety, feed value, environmental attributes, etc., but outsiders still see it simply as 'chicken manure.' And, the most valid and convincing scientific argument isn't going to counteract a gag reflex." The industry's reaction, then, has been to silence the issue. According to Beef, public relations experts within the National Cattlemen's Beef Association warned beef producers that discussing the issue publicly would only "bring out more adverse publicity." When the Kansas Livestock Association dared to shine the spotlight on the issue by passing a resolution urging the discontinuation of the practice, irate producers in neighboring states threatened a boycott of Kansas feed-yards.

In compliance with World Health Organization guidelines, Europe has forbidden the feeding of all slaughterhouse and animal waste to livestock. The American Feed Industry Association called such a ban "a radical propositton." The American Meat Institute agreed, stating, "[N]o good is accomplished by ... prejudicing segments of society against the meat industry" As far back as 1993, Gary Weber, director of Beef Safety and Cattle Health for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, admitted that the industry could find economically feasible alternatives to feeding rendered animal protein to other animals, but that the Cattlemen's Association did not want to set a precedent of being ruled by "activists."


Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

One of the more forgettable of American presidents, Chester A. Arthur was an amiable man whose highest job, only a few years earlier, had been as collector of customs revenue for the port of New York - a position he had been forced to leave amid charges of corruption and mismanagement. Soon after this, Arthur's ties to the powerful New York State Republican machine won him nomination as candidate for vice president. To near-universal dismay, he had entered the White House when President James A. Garfield died from an assassin's bullet. A good storyteller and man about town, fond of whiskey, cigars, and expensive clothes, the dapper, side-burned Arthur is perhaps best remembered for saying, "I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business." On this trip to Florida, however, his private life fitted very nicely into someone else's business. The owner of the Belair orange plantation was General Henry Shelton Sanford, the man who had helped Leopold recruit Stanley.

Sanford did not bother to leave his home in Belgium to be in Florida for the president's visit. With the self-assurance of the very rich, he played host in absentia. He made sure that the president and his party were greeted by his personal agent, and that they got the best rooms at the Sanford House hotel, which stood on a lakeshore fringed with palm trees in the town of Sanford. When the president and his guests were not out catching bass, trout, and catfish, or shooting alligators, or exploring the area by steamboat, the Sanford House was where they stayed for the better part of a week. There is no record of who paid the hotel bill, but most likely, as with the rail journey south, it was not the president.

Ironically, the huge Sanford orange plantation the Washington visitors admired was proving as disastrous a venture as Sanford's other investments. Some Swedish contract laborers found the working conditions too harsh and tried to leave as stowaways on a steamboat. A slaughterhouse Sanford invested in had a capacity fifty times larger than what the local market could consume and went bankrupt. A 54o-foot wharf with a warehouse at the end of it that he ordered built was washed away by a flood. The manager of one of the hotels in Sanford absconded while owing him money. Foremen failed to put up fences, and wandering cattle nibbled at the orange trees. But if everything Sanford touched as a businessman turned to dust, as an accomplice of Leopold he was a grand success.

Sanford was a long-time supporter of President Arthur's Republican Party. For two years, he had been corresponding with Arthur and other high United States officials about Leopold's plans for the Congo. Now, after the president's trip to Florida, confident that Arthur would pay attention, he pressed his case with more letters. Seven months later, Leopold sent Sanford across the Atlantic to make use of his convenient connection to the White House. The man who had once been American minister to Belgium was now the Belgian king's personal envoy to Washington.

Sanford carried with him to Washington a special code for telegraphing news to Brussels: Constance meant "negotiations proceeding satisfactorily; success expected"; Achille referred to Stanley, Eugenie to France, Alice to the United States, Joseph to "sovereign rights," and Emile to the key target, the president. Bonheur (happiness) meant "agreement signed today." The agreement Leopold wanted was one that gave full American diplomatic recognition of his claim to the Congo.

Sanford also carried a letter to the president from the king, which he himself had carefully edited and translated. "Entire territories ceded by Sovereign Chiefs have been constituted by us into independent States," Leopold declared, a claim that would have startled Stanley, then finishing up his work on the Congo River. From Arthur, Leopold asked only "the official announcement that the Government of the United States [will] treat as a friendly flag the blue standard with the golden star which now floats over 17 stations, many territories, 7 steamers engaged in the civilizing work of the Association and over a population of several millions."

On November 29, 1883, only two days after his ship arrived in New York and he had boarded the overnight train for Washington, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. Leopold's great work of civilization, he told the president and everyone else he met in Washington, was much like the generous work the United States itself had done in Liberia, where, starting in 1820, freed American slaves had moved to what soon became an independent African country. This was a shrewdly chosen example, since it had not been the United States government that had resettled ex-slaves in Liberia, but a private society like Leopold's International Association of the Congo.

Like all the actors in Leopold's highly professional cast, Sanford relied on just the right props. He claimed, for example, that Leopold's treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s - and Sanford just happened to have copies of those treaties with him. Furthermore, in his letter to President Arthur, Leopold promised that American citizens would be free to buy land in the Congo and that American goods would be free of customs duties there. In support of these promises, Sanford had with him a sample copy of one of Leopold's treaties with a Congo chief. The copy, however, had been altered in Brussels to omit all mention of the monopoly on trade ceded to Leopold, an alteration that deceived not only Arthur but also Sanford, an ardent free-trader who wanted the Congo open to American businessmen like himself.

In Washington, Sanford claimed that Leopold's civilizing influence would counter the practices of the dreadful "Arab" slave-traders. And weren't these "independent States" under the association's generous protection really a sort of United States of the Congo? Not to mention that, as Sanford wrote to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (Stanley was still vigorously passing himself off as born and bred in the United States), the Congo "was discovered by an American." Only a week after Sanford arrived in Washington, the president cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress, only slightly rewritten, text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold's high-minded work in the Congo:

The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.


Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Late Tuesday afternoon, the NSC's security officers arrived to seal up North's office. As they came in the door, Fawn Hall suddenly remembered, to her horror, that she had failed to finish the job of replacing North's altered contra documents in her files. Both the incriminating originals and the new versions were still sitting on the desk next to her word processor.

As the security officers did their work in North's office, Hall coolly scooped up a stack of documents and took them upstairs. Standing outside Earl's office, she folded two bundles and stuffed them into her boots. The security officers were finishing up downstairs.

Hall dashed into Earl's office, a sheaf of PROFS notes in her hand. The marine grabbed the notes, folded them, and began putting them in the inside pocket of his jacket, but Hall stopped him. "No," she said. "You shouldn't have to do this."

She asked him to watch the door. As he turned around, she stuffed the notes into the back of her blouse. Then the former model did a hasty pirouette. "Can you see anything?" she asked. He couldn't.

They walked downstairs. North and Tom Green had just walked in.

"Can you see anything in my back?" she whispered to North nervously.

The security officers inspected their briefcases as they left the office, but was all. Halfway down the marble corridor, Hall reached for the back of her blouse.

"No." North muttered. "Wait until we get outside." On the sidewalk on Seventeenth Street, she reached for the papers again, but Tom Green, the lawyer, said, "Wait until we get inside the car"

Once she was in Green's car, Hall extracted the documents from her blouse and boots. Then her face fell. "I left the originals in the office," she confessed. In her haste, she had smuggled out the wrong documents. The ones she left behind would show clearly that North had tried to alter the records.

Green asked what she would say if the investigators asked her about shredding.

Hall thought for a moment. "We shred every day," she said.

"Good," said Green.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

The next morning, bride and groom were joined in holy matrimony, and in total intoxication. Richard showed up drunk; Deboragh arrived an hour late and, according to Richard, "had to be revived after taking too many Quaaludes." One of Richard's daughters wore black to convey her thoughts on the union. The ceremony took place at his home, with little effort made to disguise the fact that it was a construction site. Richard and Deboragh recited their vows surrounded by unfaced cabinets, torn-up floors, and stacks of lumber. "Thank God you were drunk when I got there," Richard remembered Deboragh saying afterward, "because if you'd seen what I looked like."

For their wedding reception, Richard and Deboragh traveled to NBC studios in Burbank, where Richard was responsible for wrapping up the third episode of his TV show. Earlier, producer Rocco Urbisci had made preparations for a party with confetti and a cake; he'd assumed Pam Grier was the bride, so the cake carried the frosted message "Congratulations Richard and Pam." Apparently Grier, too, had thought she was in contention to be the bride: Urbisci recalled fielding, on the morning of the wedding, a phone call from an incensed Grier, in which she explained that she was going to visit a certain "motherfucker" and "shoot his ass." Urbisci notified security; Grier was kept at bay. But he forgot about the infelicitous inscription on the cake. When the bride and groom arrived at the studio and the cake was brought out, Urbisci had to grab some roses from a prop table and hurriedly scatter them over the cake to cover the name "Pam."

Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)

People in "Schitt's Creek" are stuck with an embarrassing town name. But it's TV. It's fictional. In Austria, though, there is a real village named [expletive] - rhymes with ducking. It's been the name for centuries. But they've had enough of the ridicule and having the village sign stolen. In 2021, they are renaming the village F-U-G-G-I-N-G. They will ring in the new year as Fuggingers. Are we still on the air

At two hours long, The Other Man was ITV's longest ever TV play. There was a cast of two hundred, sixty of whom had speaking parts, a twenty-minute stop for the news and several commercial breaks. And, yes, again, to top it all off, the play was broadcast live.

The exposure was high-stakes and the circumstances could hardly have been tougher but my co-star Sian Phillips was a wonderful actress, which helped, and I swear I didn't forget one line. (A couple of people did, but fortunately for them we had a high-tech solution in the form of a lady with a button on a wire and a script, who followed whoever was speaking around the set. If someone dried up, she would push the button, sound transmission would be cut and she would read the actor the line. I imagined people all over Britain banging their silent TVs and cursing in unison.)

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

April in Paris
(Vernon Duke and E Y Harburg, 1932 song)

I'm not likely to forget it. I'd like to use the opportunity afforded by this quotation to make an urgent recommendation to the authorities responsible for running the London Zoo in Regents Park.

Gentlemen, did you happen to see a program that was on television called Animal Courtship?

There was one scene showing a couple of black cat yowls perpetuating their species. And the reason why that stuck in my mind, I never realized that they did while actually up in the air in flight.

It made me revise my whole opinion about a certain story that an Alitalia pilot I know tells about one of his air hostesses.

Anyway, Gentlemen of the London Zoo. Let me tell you the reason why I'm drawing this program to your attention. What happened was instead of the program being put out at its scheduled time of Sunday afternoon, its transmission was switched to 9:25 at night. Why? So that children wouldn't see all the goings-on among the animals.

Now , gentlemen of the London Zoo, does that give you food for thought. Because I can tell you this. It certainly should. And I speak as one who recently, fool that I am, thought I'd give my two twelve-year-old nephews an educational afternoon by taking them round your zoo on a warm spring day.

And I very quickly learned something. You know how films have to be labeled in categories ranging from suitable for all the family to no children allowed to see it under any circumstances? Well, so should those pages of yours and your animals.

If the giraffes and the penguins can be described as Mary Poppins, I'll tell you this. That monkey house is Last Tango in Paris.

I'm particularly thinking, or trying not to think, about those apes of yours. If apes ARE the species that Tarzan grew up with, it's no wonder he turned out to be a swinger.

I don't know what the spectacle did to those two twelve-year-old nephews of mine, but if their wisdom teeth aren't through now, they never will be.

So, gentlemen of the London Zoo, my recommendation is that at your entry gate, you henceforth issue a small booklet to any adult going in with children, a book that would categorize each group of your inhabitants according to their embarrassment quotient.

From my own experiences of the various species, I can make just three suggestions to start you off: giraffe will delight, penguin will enchant, and here I draw on Mr. Vernon's Duke's melody, ape will embarrass.

Dennis norden159a

Stanislas Lefranc, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Early one Sunday morning in Leopoldville, he heard the sound of many children screaming desperately.

On tracing the howls to their source, Lefranc found "some thirty urchins, of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged. Most of the urchins, in a paroxysm of grief ... kicked so frightfully that the soldiers ordered to hold them by the hands and feet had to lift them off the ground ... 25 times the whip slashed down on each of the children." The evening before, Lefranc learned, several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold's Congo, which in the minds of the territory's people, soon became as closely identified with white rule as the steamboat or the rifle. It was the chicotte - a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim's bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more - not an uncommon punishment - were often fatal.

Lefranc was to see many more chicotte beatings, although his descriptions of them, in pamphlets and newspaper articles he published in Belgium, provoked little reaction.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

He could forget whether the U.S nuclear advantage was on land or sea, but he remembered to take care of the White House squirrels, filling his pockets", with acorns collected for them at Camp David. He didn't like to impose. And he worried about the inconvenience his every move became for the staff. He once refused to go along with a stunt that called for him to dump confetti on a visiting athlete's head because he didn't want anyone to have to pick It up. (Aides settled on popcorn for the outdoor event, so that the birds could do the cleanup.)

The danger was that left to his own good intentions, the president would confuse the human interest with the national interest, mistaking gestures for policies, romantic themes for strategy, and immediate emotional gratification for long-term strategic gains. There was no clearer example of this danger than in his approach to the hostages. But those around him should have seen plenty of warnings in the unique way in which Reagan turned the presidency into a case-by-case philanthropic pursuit - seemingly disconnected from his own broad policies.

Reagan's view of himself as First Caseworker of the Land was institutionalized in the White House Correspondence Office, a little-known but extraordinary shop in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, a few hundred yards from the West Wing. It was a sprawling empire managed by an energtic blonde named Anne Higgins, who liked to turn up the volume on the office tape to the Simon and Garfunkel song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" which expressed how she saw her mission. As anyone who worked closely with the president must have realized, it was Reagan's sentimental view of his own role too.

In a rare lapse from good Samaritanism, Higgins once described the office as the Schlock Capital of the World, buried as it was in needlepoint inspirational sayings, stained-glass doodads, and other offerings Americans felt compelled to share with their commander in chief. During Reagan's tenure, it employed a staff of 130 people and 500 part-time volunteers to handle as many as twenty thousand letters and packages a day - much more mail than any other president had ever received. While most presidents had dismissed the public mail as a nuisance, Higgins said of Reagan, "It's hard to believe When you get that much mail, but he actually likes it."

Every week Higgins selected thirty representative letters for the president to read, many of them appeals for help or tales of heartache, and just about every Friday afternoon he took the time to answer them in longhand on sheets of yellow legal paper. It was a habit he had picked up in Hollywood, where he had often answered his own fan mail. Some aides snickered privately at the amount of time and energy Reagan gave to this epistolary pursuit. George Shultz had had to fight strenuously to get two half-hour meetings a week with the president, but if Reagan spent only five minutes on each letter, he was still devoting more than twice as much time to strangers' letters as to his secretary of state. When a program to adopt a school-aged pen pal was introduced, Reagan was the only senior official who took it seriously, corresponding through much of his tenure with Rudy Hines, a young black boy from Washington's Southeast slums. But Higgins observed, "I think it's one of the keys to his success as a man in public life: he doesn't take the average person lightly."

Frequently, though, this empathy seemed to place Reagan at odds with his own policies in the White House, just as it had in Sacramento. This conflict between the particular and the abstract was endemic to the correspondence unit, which was, after all, a central switching point between the presidential cocoon and the real world outside. Thus, while Reagan was moved by one letter to make a televised appeal for a liver donor for an eleven-month-old girl in Texas, his administration pushed to eliminate spending for a new national computer network designed to match organ donors with patients in need of transplants. In another such case found by Higgins's office, Reagan ensured that a young girl in Hawaii get a waiver from his administration's own toughened eligibility requirements for welfare benefits because she had won a new automobile, which put her family over the new $1,700 limit for possessions. (The White House helped the girl's family sell the car and place her prize money in a trust - thus resorting to the kind of dodge Reagan had accused "welfare cheats" of doing for so many years.) One member of the correspondence unit, Sally Kelley, said, "He loves having that stuff done, especially when it's a deserving youngster against the huge bureaucracy" - no matter that the bureaucracy was now his own.

Aides who knew Reagan well recognized that his episodic sentimentality left him open to manipulation. Some realized that if they could harness it, they could alter whole policies. In the summer of 1982, when Israel's air force was bombing residential neighborhoods in Beirut, killing hundreds of civilians, Reagan's deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, took action. Deaver had no experience or responsibility in the area of foreign affairs, but he didn't like the civilian casualties, and he knew that the Israeli attacks using U.S. weapons were potentially harmful to Reagan's image at home. Reagan, in contrast, hadn't reacted much to the air strikes, but he generally supported Menachem Begin's government.

In the middle of August, after an especially bloody raid, Deaver reached his limit. He stormed into the Oval Office by himself and declared emotionally, "I can't stay here any longer."

"What are you talking about?" the president asked.

"I don't want to be part of this," replied Deaver. "You sit here and listen to these guys, and you don't know what they're talking about. And you let Begin bomb Beirut every day, and they're your bombs. And the result of that is children without arms." Deaver was referring to a horrifying news photograph showing a Lebanese baby bound in gauze from the shoulders down, the caption explaining that both arms had been severed by an Israeli bomb.

"For what?" stormed Deaver. "Just to make the Israelis happy? It hasn't got anything to do with anything else. And you are sitting here, the only man on the face of the earth that can stop it, and you won't do it. I can't stay any longer and be part of it."

The president looked at his distraught aide for a moment and then asked bewilderedly, "How do I stop this?"

"You pick up the phone and call Menachem Begin," Deaver replied.

"And," Deaver said later, "he did." Within twenty minutes, Begin called back to say that a cease-fire had been imposed. Reagan then put down the phone and said, "It's over with." Two and a half years into his presidency, he then looked at his longtime aide and said, "Gosh! I didn't realize I had that kind of power."

It later turned out that the caption under the UPI photograph had been mistaken. Israeli authorities went to the trouble of finding the injured child, who had indeed been hurt, but not by Israeli bombs, and who under the bandages still had the use of both arms. Yet, as was so often true with Reagan, the facts didn't matter as much as the emotional impact.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Players could get a Trump Card, become an Island Ambassador at the Sands, or join the Officer's Club at the Showboat.

These frequent-gambler cards carried a magnetic strip on the back, like those used to withdraw cash from bank teller machines. Inserted into a device on a slot machine, the card tracked play. It also triggered an electronic greeting welcoming the player by name. Often this would be followed by congratulations on a wedding anniversary or the arrival of a grandchild or recommending a new kind of slot machine that had been installed since the player last visited.

Simultaneously, a screen would light up just off the casino floor, announcing to the crew of casino hosts, as floor sales agents are called, the player's name, nickname, tidbits like a recent birthday or wedding anniversary, and the player's favorite beverage. A cocktail waitress could be sent to the player's machine with a drink even before the player asked. A casino host could also stroll by and strike up a conversation using her personal knowledge of the player or the information gleaned from the computer. New tidbits collected from these chats would then be added to the computer database so the casino would have fresh material to strengthen its bond with the player on future visits.

Frequent-gambler cards allowed Harrah's to keep a perfect record of how much each player bet, on what kinds of machines, how fast he or she played, the total amount wagered and how much the player had won or lost. In this way Harrah's could grade its players into profitability categories without the uncertainty and errors formerly made when casino hosts rated players by recording their guesstimates on slips of paper. These precise records allowed Harrah's to calculate exactly how much to reward each player with comps, which is gamblerese for complimentary meals, drinks and rooms and, for really big players, gifts of jewelry, cars, even trips around the world.

Comping was a huge factor in the Atlantic City casino business, unlike Las Vegas, where only the biggest players received comps. In 1991, Atlantic City gamblers collected $488.6 million in comps. The casinos gave away another $247.7 million in coins and coupons to bus riders, in all enough to pave the entire New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway with quarters.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994