Tuesday 10/19/21
Celebrate National Kentucky (our 15th State), Seafood Bisque, Pharmacy Technician, Dress Like a Dork, Evaluate Your Life, Information Overload Awareness, International Gin and Tonic, New Friends, and Rainforest Day.
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A strike of Hollywood production workers that was to start today has been avoided after the union agreed to a tentative deal with the studios. Assuming the contract is ratified, IATSE members will get retroactive pay increases and more rest between shoots.
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Elon Musk is so rich that he’s now worth more than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Musk’s net worth recently crossed $230 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, thanks to the strength of Tesla stock and a stock sale at his other company, SpaceX. Musk has been trolling former world’s-richest Jeff Bezos, tweeting a silver-medal emoji at the Amazon founder.
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Halloween Kills shocked at the domestic box office, bringing in more than $50 million -- the biggest open of the pandemic for a horror or R-rated film. The Halloween installment was even available to stream on Peacock and still overperformed in theaters, a very good sign for the movie-theater industry as a whole.
No Time to Die $24.3M
Venom: Let There Be Carnage $16.5M
The Addams Family 2 $7.2M
Ridley Scott's The Last Duel with Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck made $4.8M
Watch for the biggie opening this weekend, Dune.
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A Spanish author of popular crime thrillers, thought for years to be a woman, turns out to be three middle-aged men writing under a pseudonym. Spain’s literary world was shocked when three male TV writers, Agustín Martínez, Jorge Díaz and Antonio Mercero, accepted a coveted book award that had been given to “Carmen Mola,” an acclaimed author who was thought to be female university professor and mother of three living in Madrid. The men acknowledged Mola didn’t actually exist, and said they had hid behind the pseudonym for fun.
This happens all the time. Popular series are continued under the original author's name, and for instance, Romance author Nora Roberts writes romantic suspense novels under the name J.D.Robb.
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Colin Powell, the first Black US secretary of state whose leadership in several Republican administrations helped shape American foreign policy in the last years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, has died at 84.
Powell was a distinguished and trailblazing professional soldier whose career took him from combat duty in Vietnam to becoming the first Black national security adviser during the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the youngest and first African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. His national popularity soared in the aftermath of the US-led coalition victory during the Gulf War, and for a time in the mid-90s, he was considered a leading contender to become the first Black President of the United States. But his reputation would be forever stained when, as George W. Bush's first secretary of state, he pushed faulty intelligence before the United Nations to advocate for the Iraq War, which he would later call a "blot" on his record.
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