Subversive cross stitch

Exactly what it says — subversive cross stitch.

World Wide Web

NewMexiKen has had visitors from 10 11 different time zones today.

Best blogs

Among the sites nominated for Best American Weblog is dooce. Some highlights:

If the baby in my womb has its legs crossed during tomorrow’s ultrasound, I am totally going to put him/her into a time-out.

I can safely blame iTunes for Windows when my child asks why I can’t help her pay for her college education.

The scariest thing about this whole baby thing is knowing that I won’t be able to say to her, “You’re poopy? Your mom will change your diaper when she gets home.” I WILL BE THE MOTHER.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to give birth to an 8-lb Nacho Cheese Dorito.

Feeling guility: For hoping that this baby doesn’t decide to make her entrance into the world during the season premiere of “Survivor.” She needs to get her priorities straight early.

And:

Things in the Past Week That Have Brought Me to Uncontrollable, Blubbering Tears

The finely orchestrated piece of crap otherwise known as the finale to “Joe Millionaire.”

The look on my dog’s face when I took away his bone last night.

The delicate beauty of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

The moment we realized that the bed sheet we bought at Target was too small to fit the mattress for the baby’s crib, and the thought of my baby having to sleep on a bed sheetless mattress for the rest of her life.

The amount of money the plumber told us he is going to charge us to move our kitchen sink 24 inches to the right.

The realization that Paris Hilton is someone’s daughter.

The Internet never ceases to amaze

The Joy of Soup

Killer whales in the Gulf of Mexico

Orcas off Port Aransas including photos and a video.

Best-designed weblogs

Nominated as best-designed weblogs for 2004 are:

• Brookelyn.org
• Sixfruit6: Daily Servings
• Kitta.Net
• What Do I Know
• SimpleBits

NewMexiKen would be interested in comments on these designs.

The Bloggies

2004 marks the Fourth Annual Weblog Awards and the nominees were announced yesterday. If you don’t have time to visit the site, don’t worry. NewMexiKen will glean all the highlights for you starting with the nominees for best weblog tagline:

• Mighty Girl: “Famous among dozens”
• The Art of Rhysisms: “Stealing traffic cones from the Information Superhighway since 2002″
• C:\PIRILLO.EXE: “Getting screwed while everybody else is getting laid”
• Sabrina Faire: “All the fun of a saucy wench, none of the overpriced beer”
• Tenth-Muse.com: “Fabulous since 1973, blogging since 2003, drinking since noon”

NewMexiKen is thinking “Half Wisdom, Half Whimsy, Half Wit” wasn’t half bad.

Snow update

Unfortunately NewMexiKen’s snowfall didn’t last much longer than the time it took to blog about it. By early afternoon the snow had stopped and the little that did fall was gone. Rats!

It’s all the way up to 3° today

From the Fairbanks News-Miner

A cold air mass that settled over the Tanana Valley late last week from the Yukon Territory resulted in bitter cold temperatures throughout much of the central Interior. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero on Friday and stayed there for most of the next four days, though it did climb up to 38 below on Saturday at one point.

The coldest temperature recorded in the Interior was 57 below at Dry Creek, on the Alaska Highway between Delta Junction and Tok, and sub-50 below temperatures were reported from several other Interior communities. A low of 55 below was recorded at Circle Hot Springs and Manley Hot Springs. It was 52 below in Central, Eagle, Nenana and Tok.

The lowest temperature recorded at the Fairbanks International Airport, the official recording site for the weather service, was 46 below on Sunday, but a low of 52 below was recorded in North Pole. Two Rivers reported 51 below.

Too cold

From the Anchorage Daily News

Mid-January temperatures in Bethel, ALaska, normally hover around zero, according to the National Weather Service. Last week, a chill set in that bottomed out at minus 30 Sunday morning, though winds were light all weekend.

Monday was a different story. With the temperature at 29 below, northeast winds gusted to nearly 40 mph, driving the wind chill below minus 60….

Jan. 19 is also the day Epiphany is celebrated in the Russian Orthodox Church, a holiday that celebrates the baptism of Christ. At St. Sophia church in Bethel, parishioners usually chop a hole in the Kuskokwim River ice and dip out water for the Rev. George Berezkin to bless.

Not this year. Too cold, said subdeacon Nick. In a typical year, parishioners must remove their hats during the service, he said, and the priest dips a cross into the river three times during the ceremony, then holds the dripping cross while reciting long prayers.

“Without hats and gloves, their hands would freeze right on the cross,” Nick said. He’s seen that happen, though the power of the Holy Spirit prevented the people from suffering frostbite, he said.

This year, George blessed water inside. He gave it to parishioners Monday, after getting a ride to church. His car wouldn’t start, he said.

Sonja Olofsson was ready for the restorative powers of running after waking Monday morning to frozen pipes. The taps worked all weekend but slowed down, then stopped.

A veteran of a dozen Bethel winters, Olofsson said she’s used to cold snaps. “This is about normal around here,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

2003 National Book Critics Award Nominees

National Book Critics Circle chooses award nominees:

Fiction
Monica Ali, Brick Lane
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore
Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing
Tobias Wolff, Old School

General Nonfiction
Carolyn Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Anne Applebaum, Gulag
Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down

Biography/Autobiography
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards
Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

Poetry
Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means To Me
Venus Khoury-Ghata, She Says
Susan Stewart, Columbarium
Mary Szybist, Granted

Criticism
Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos
Nick Hornby, Songbook
Ross King, Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Wacky Warning Labels

The Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch Seventh Annual Wacky Warning Label Contest:

A five-inch fishing lure which sports three steel hooks and cautions users that it is, “Harmful if swallowed,” has been identified as one of the nation’s wackiest warning labels in an annual contest sponsored by a consumer watchdog group….

The $500 grand prize for the wackiest label was awarded to Robert Brocone of Euclid, Ohio for a warning he found on a bottle of drain cleaner which says: “If you do not understand, or cannot read, all directions, cautions and warnings, do not use this product.”

Phenoms

Tony Kornhiser on LeBron, Freddy and Michelle.

And in that vein let me digress to speak of the trio of sports prodigies who stand in front of us: Michelle Wie, Freddy Adu and LeBron James. The three of them may have unprecedented talent. As a sportswriter for nearly 35 years I can only think of a few phenoms I’d put in their class: Tiger Woods, Chris Evert, Wayne Gretzky, Jim Ryun, maybe Dwight Gooden, who was electrifying at 19; if we look worldwide I’d include Pele, Boris Becker, Nadia Comaneci.

Part of the fun of sports is ranking people arbitrarily, so here goes: LeBron James is even better than advertised. Of all the high school kids who’ve come into the league since Kevin Garnett, James is the only one who actually looks to make his teammates better. At 19, James might be one of the NBA’s 10 best players already. But at 19 James isn’t that much younger than Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson were when you’d have said the same about them. At 14, Freddy Adu appears to be the Mozart of American soccer (by way of Ghana, of course). But Adu has yet to compete against men. Adu’s big “Wow Factor” came in under-17 competition. For him to do what Michelle Wie did, he’d have to score goals in the World Cup in 2006, when he’s 16.

What Wie did is astonishing, going to the tips and shooting 68 in a PGA tournament against an array of the best golfers in the world. It would be astonishing if a 14-year-old boy had gone to the tips and shot two-under in a PGA tournament. It’s more astonishing that a girl did it. Wie was even-par after two rounds, same as Jim Furyk and Ben Curtis, who last year won a couple of little things I like to call the U.S. Open and British Open. This is like a Little Leaguer getting Nomar and Manny to ground out. Well, no, it’s not like that. I don’t know what it’s like.

Golf is not football, basketball or tennis. It doesn’t reward strength and speed in the same ways. Women can play golf with men, though they usually have to hit longer irons into greens — shots that are harder to stop. But look how impressed folks were when Annika Sorenstam shot 71 in the first round at Colonial last May (she shot 74 in the second round). And Sorenstam is a 33-year-old adult in her golfing prime, with 48 career tournament wins; she’s probably the best woman golfer of all time. Michelle Wie is in ninth grade! I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like this. This doesn’t mean Michelle Wie will win the Masters next year, or ever. But it’s not hard to imagine Wie, say at 18, leaping over the LPGA tour and saying, “Howdy, fellas, here I am.”

Double jeopardy

TMQ writes:

In Double Jeopardy the Ashley Judd character is framed for the murder of her husband, convicted and sent to jail. Years later, paroled, she realizes her husband is alive and set her up — then decides to hunt him down and kill him. She can do this, the movie announces, because, having already been convicted of his murder, she can’t be tried for it again under the “double jeopardy” clause of the Constitution. As reader Robert Boardman, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, points out, this is nonsense. “The safeguard against double jeopardy states that a person cannot be tried for the same offense twice,” Boardman notes. But an offense is a specific act on a specific day in a specific place. Convicted of one crime on the a specific day at the a specific place, Ashley Judd could not be placed on trial for that crime again. But if her evil husband’s alive and she kills him, that would occur at a different specific time and place — and be a different crime, for which she could be tried. Crimes must be defined as specific events at specific times and places. Otherwise if someone robbed a bank, served time and got out, he could rob any bank he wanted, arguing, “Since I’ve already been convicted of robbing a bank, double jeopardy means I can’t be tried for robbing another bank.”

NewMexiKen was wondering about the Tommy Lee Jones character. He’s apparently Ashley Judd’s parole officer but he chases her from state to state. I thought that’s what U.S. Marshals did. Or am I just confusing Double Jeopardy with The Fugitive?

Snow falling on chamisas

Light snow is falling at NewMexiKen’s this Tuesday mid-morning; 1-3 inches expected below 7,500 feet, more at higher elevations.

A Minnesotan on the Iowa vote

The Bleat “can imagine a nice Iowa lady of a certain age, sitting in a coffee shop, enjoying her pie, watching the TV crew pack up after Doctor Dean had blown in and out of Bev’s Chatterbox Cafe. ‘Well, he certainly does think well of himself,’ she might have thought. Translation: she wouldn’t spit on his face if his nose was on fire.”

If only he’d had a laser printer

On this date in 1961, 87-year-old Robert Frost recited his poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Although Frost had written a new poem for the occasion, titled “Dedication,” faint ink in his typewriter ribbon made the words difficult to read in the bright sunlight, so Frost recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.

Inauguration day…

is a year from today.

The 20th Amendment to the Constitution states that the “terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January”. The Amendment was ratified in 1933 — the first inauguration on the new day was January 20, 1937.

Before the 20th Amendment, the Constitution did not provide the date when the terms began and ended. The terms of the first President and Vice President were fixed by an act of the Continental Congress adopted September 13, 1788. That act called for “the first Wednesday in March next to be the time for commencing proceedings under the Constitution.” It happened that the first Wednesday in March was the 4th day of March, and hence the terms of the President and Vice President and Members of Congress began on March 4, 1789. (Washington did not take the oath of office until April 30, 1789, but technically his term began March 4th.)

The Constitution set the terms of the President and Vice President at four years. Any change from March 4th then required an Amendment because a date change would mean that the incumbents would not serve exactly four years. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Nance Garner’s first terms were 43 days less than four years — March 4, 1933 – January 20, 1937.

Inflation

From the Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times

Tickets to the first Super Bowl were priced at $6 and $12. Still, more than 30,000 went unsold.

Tickets to this year’s Super Bowl are priced at $500, and it is a sellout.