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Weekend Butler: Stanley Tucci’s glasses, Christopher Walken reads Maurice Sendak, Bill Bryson teaches you almost everything… and condom sales are up
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Published: May 06, 2021
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Weekend
I’ve been in Portland, Oregon all week, packing my daughter up. A few days before I arrived, the city ended indoor dining for at least two weeks. A minor inconvenience. A major heartache: the tents that are home to the homeless. They line the drive from the airport. They’re on city streets. They’re by the river. They’re not just for the moment: surrounding many are piles of debris. For reasons that no one can explain to me, the city doesn’t consider this stuff junk. It’s “personal property.” Thus immune from any city action. As, it seems, are the homeless. Let me be clear: I’m not condemning the people who live this way. This isn’t “Nomadland.” Most, I’m sure, didn’t choose this. But the city that can’t solve its homeless problem even as construction cranes dot the landscape? Shame. Shame.
CAN YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED?
The 2004 Rock Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison has been viewed 100 million times on YouTube. With reason: it’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” performed by Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, other luminaries… and Prince. Near the end, Prince plays a solo. He hadn’t come to the rehearsal, no one knew what he was going to do. Well, he torched the place — the other musicians were grinning as he played himself into legend. He topped his three-minute solo by doing something never seen before. There’s now a Director’s Cut, which shows more of Prince’s solo. Watch starting at 3:30. And take the quiz. 1) What did Prince do with his guitar? 2) What happened to the guitar? 3) What did Prince do next?
MEET THE SERUM KING OF INDIA
COVID is killing 120 people an hour in India. A bitter irony in that — India makes a third of the world’s vaccines. It gets worse: The Serum Institute is run by playboy billionaire Adar Poonawalla, who inherited it from his polo-playing father. According to Indian news reports, he was recently given ‘Y category’ security, which means he’s entitled to 11 security personnel – one or two of them commandos and the rest policemen.
MEET THE #1 NFL DRAFT CHOICE
The Jacksonville Jaguars had the first draft choice, and they used it to select Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence (photo). His signing bonus: $22,630,055. If you were his advisor, what would you tell him to do with that fortune? I bet you wouldn’t vote for bitcoin. But that’s exactly what Lawrence did — he partnered with Blockfolio, a crypto investment app, to invest in bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: CONDOM SALES ARE SURGING
COVID killed sex for many men. Condom sales fell 4.4% in 2020. They’re up again. In the 4 weeks ending in mid-April, condom sales rose 23.4% compared with the same stretch a year ago. The CNN headline: People are ready to have sex again. Good to know.
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN READS “WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE”
Maurice Sendak’s book is mostly illustrations. Walken’s forced to improvise: “There’s a Bear strung up… I assume, Murdered, maybe a Suicide, I don’t know…” Like that. Click here.
EYEGLASSES: PORTLAND
Sign in a store window: POLARIZED PLANT-BASED SUNGLASSES.
EYEGLASSES: STANLEY TUCCI
You can buy frames “in almost exactly the same design as worn by Stanley Tucci in ‘Searching for Italy’” for $188. Click here.
AFTER YOU READ “THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE,” WHY NOT LEARN… ALMOST EVERYTHING?
Bill Bryson created A Really Short History of Nearly Everything for every curious kid burdened by a dull textbook or a brain-dead science teacher… and you. Among the cool contents:
— The Big Bang was so massive that, in just three minutes, “98 percent of everything there is, or will ever be in the universe, has been produced.”
— A baby weighing 4 kilograms has about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in its body.
— “The average distance between stars is just over 30 million million [no, that’s not a typo] kilometres. Of course it is possible that alien beings travel billions of kilometres to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in the English countryside or frightening some poor guy in a truck on a lonely road in Arizona. But it does seem unlikely.”
— “Fly from London to New York and you will step from the plane a quinzillionth of a second younger than the friends you left behind.”
Weather, geology, space, energy, the atom — it’s all here, and all stunningly interesting. What’s not here? Creationism. Bryson not only doesn’t deal with it, he doesn’t acknowledge it; for him, the world is 4,550 million years old. And evolution isn’t a “theory,” it’s a fact: “The first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably like modern woodlice.” (In Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and certain heartland states, a kid who brought this book into school could possibly be in trouble.)
Get the idea? Life is exciting, mysterious and glorious. And learning stuff is fun.
