Month: December 2004

OK, now how about the Coors twins

From the Albuquerque Tribune:

Don’t mess with these New Mexicans.

The teens in Rhonda Stanfield’s communication skills class at Robert F. Kennedy Charter School unsettled a bottling company, a distribution company and a marketing plan – all in six weeks.

Billboards put up in the spring as an advertising campaign for Tecate beer featured a bottle at a 45-degree angle surrounded by the words “Finally, a cold Latina.”

The class wanted the billboards removed from their community in the heart of Five Points in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

“I didn’t think we were going to change anything because we are so young,” Lauren Hermosillo, 18, said.

But their success has led them to take on all alcohol advertising in their community.

“We want to do more,” she said.

They’ve already completed research that they say shows there are five times more alcohol advertisements in Hispanic communities than in white communities in New Mexico.
…

Surely, they thought, anyone who worked for the distributor would understand their frustration at stereotypes. But, Hermosillo said, a woman who answered the phone at Labatt USA in Miami – which distributes Tecate – asked him “What’s a Latina?”

Cold Mountain

NewMexiKen watched Cold Mountain twice last evening, first as a movie and secondly with the commentary of director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella and film editor Walter Murch.

Somehow, Renée Zellweger’s Oscar-winning performance had escaped my radar. I remembered she’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actress (and that Nicole Kidman famously had not been nominated for an Oscar), but I did not remember that Zellweger won. And I knew nothing of her performance or the character.

She was superb, saving the film from its own earnestness. Most intriguing talent from UT Austin since Janis Joplin.

And who would think a Civil War film, famous for its love story and its battle scene, would come across as a tale of female bonding?

Alas, the commentary on this film, while not without some interest, is remarkably tedious. These two creative talents believe that a picture requires 1,000 words. Or at least every explanation and elaboration does.

All information is not created equal

From CNN.com:

NEW YORK (AP) — Go to Google, search and scroll results, click and copy.

When students do research online these days, many educators worry, those are often about the only steps they take. If they can avoid a trip to the library at all, many students gladly will.

Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn’t mean it’s reliable, yet their perceptions of what’s trustworthy frequently differ from their elders’ — sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.

She wasn’t prepared for the response: “Someone raised their hand and asked, ‘Excuse me, where would I get a book?'”

Link via dangerousmeta!

Hey Brokaw, the Greatest Generation may get another shot

From The Marion Star:

Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he’s 70 years old and had already retired – twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private practice two years ago.

“My first reaction was disbelief,” Caulfield said. “It never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old.”

In fact, he was so sure it was an error that he ignored the postcards and telephone messages asking if he would be willing to volunteer for active duty to “backfill” somewhere on the East Coast, Europe or Hawaii. That would be OK, he thought. It would release active duty oral surgeons from those areas to go to combat zones in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But then the orders came for him to go to Afghanistan.

Today, Caulfield, a colonel from Satellite Beach, Fla., is an example of how the continuing demands of keeping ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are forcing the military to go to extraordinary measures to keep its ranks filled. He’s attending to patients – U.S. troops, Afghan soldiers and civilians – at the Army’s 325th Field Hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan.

He is one of about 100 over the age of 60 known to be serving. The Department of Defense couldn’t provide exact figures.

Link via TPM.

Lord of the Flies

The oldest of the Sweeties, Mack, turns four Monday, so his parents decided to host a birthday party. To their horror, nearly everyone invited accepted — and all who accepted came. That meant that Saturday afternoon 24 three- and four-year-old boys (and one two-year-old girl cousin and one little brother) took over the island that is Mack’s playroom.

Jill, official mother of Mack, reports that the swarm was amazingly well behaved, but that it did require a periodic “Freeze!” so that a census could be taken to make certain no one had escaped to some other part of the house, or worse, outside. (“Christopher? Are you sure you dropped him off? We don’t remember seeing him.”) There were moments, Jill also reported, when the boys seemed to realize that they had the adults grossly outnumbered, but she says they were easily held at bay with the cake knife.

The ice cream and cake was delayed until the last minute so that the children could be released to the custody of their parents before the sugar fully kicked in.

NewMexiKen is sad to live so far from his grandchildren; hence the prominent display of their photos on this blog. Even so, 1900 miles seemed about right while this party was on.

Buying in Bulk

Kevin Doughten in The New York Times:

I had always hoped you’d never have to hear this, but the newspapers have it now, so it’s only a matter of time. I prefer that you get the story from me, so here goes: for the past three Christmas shopping seasons, I have been taking performance-enhancing drugs to give myself a competitive advantage at the mall.

I’d like to apologize first to those my actions hurt the most: my family, my friends, and the management and staff of the stores at the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, N.J. But I also want to apologize to my fellow shoppers. You deserve a level playing field out there in the aisles, but when I can easily rip the last U2 iPod Special Edition from your hands and then toss you aside like used gift wrap – well, no one would call that a fair contest. To those that I have body-checked or pancaked on my way to a display rack of progressive-scan DVD players, I am truly sorry.

It gets even better.

Renaming ‘Squaw’ Sites Proves Touchy in Oregon

From The New York Times:

“Squaw” originated in a branch of the Algonquin language, where it meant simply “woman,” but it turned into a slur on the tongues of white settlers, who used it to refer derisively to Indian women in general or a part of their anatomy in particular. The settlers liked the word so much that there are now more than 170 springs, gulches, bluffs, valleys, and gaps in this state called “squaw.” All must be renamed under a 2001 law that was enacted after two members of the confederated tribes persuaded the Legislature that the word was offensive to many American Indians and should be erased from maps. But only 13 places have been renamed so far. It is a problem familiar to Indians and government officials in several states where attempts to outlaw “squaw” have been caught in a thicket of bureaucratic, historical and linguistic snares.

In Maine, one frustrated county changed all “squaw” names to “moose” in one fell swoop to save on hassle, while in Minnesota, disgruntled residents suggested new names like Politically Correct Creek and Politically Correct Bay. But often the stumbling block has been questions over what Indians themselves would prefer instead of “squaw.”

Tea time (update)

From CNN.com:

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with a New Mexico church that wants to use hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas services, despite government objections that the tea is illegal and potentially dangerous.

The high court lifted a temporary stay issued last week against using the hoasca tea while it decides whether the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal is permitted to make it a permanent part of its services.

The legal battle began after federal agents seized 30 gallons of the tea in a 1999 raid on the Santa Fe home of the church’s U.S. president, Jeffrey Bronfman.

Bronfman sued the government for the right to use the tea and the church won a preliminary injunction, which was upheld by 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The Bush administration then took the case to the Supreme Court.

Link via dangerousmeta! who’s staying on top of this tea story.

Not really a problem for me either

From Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog:

And then there was the sign I saw on a door in the twisty maze of little passages all alike scores of feet below the classrooms of Berkeley’s College of Chemistry:

     PLEASE HELP US TO BETTER SERVE YOU BY
     PROVIDING AT LEAST 24 HOURS’ NOTICE (48
     IF POSSIBLE) OF YOUR LIQUID HELIUM
     REQUIREMENTS.

I don’t know about you, but I am generally able to anticipate my liquid helium requirements more than 72 hours in advance…

It’s the birthday

… of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Prize winner (for Literature in 1970) is 86.

… of Rita Moreno. Anita is 73.

… of Tom Hayden. Jane’s one-time husband and co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society is 65.

… of John Kerry. The man who received the second most votes for president ever cast in one election is 61.

… of Brenda Lee. Little Miss Dynamite is (gasp!) 60.

The 10 Best Books of 2004

From The New York Times:

The books we’ve chosen as the year’s 10 best — five novels, a short-story collection, a memoir, two biographies and a historical study — present a broad range of voices and subjects. What do they have in common? Each is a triumph of storytelling, and each explores the past, whether through research, recollection, invention or some combination of the three.

Gilead by By Marilynne Robinson

The Master by Colm Toibin

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Runaway by Alice Munro

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

War Trash by Ha Jin

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

Don’t tread on me

From The New York Times:

New Mexico may not have any major league teams, but members of the New Mexico Game Birds Association, the state’s largest cockfighting advocacy group, say it is proud of the sports it does have. One is cockfighting, a practice, particularly popular among Hispanics, that is believed to have originated in ancient Greece and Persia, pitting gamecocks against each other with metal spurs attached to their legs. The birds often fight to the death.

Massachusetts was the first state to ban cockfighting, in 1836, and has been followed by 47 others. But New Mexico’s “galleros,” as cockfighting practitioners here call themselves in Spanish, are determined that their state will not be next, even as they face their strongest challenge yet from animal rights activists and some celebrity friends.
…

Purses in New Mexico can reach more than $10,000, making the loss of a prized gamecock, bred through generations of pedigree to fight to the death, a risk that most galleros are prepared to take.

Nor is cockfighting the only practice involving roosters that some outsiders would find shocking. Another, common in some Hispanic villages or Indian pueblos until a couple of decades ago, was “correr el gallo,” the rooster pull, in which the bird was buried up to its neck in a dirt mound and men on horseback competed to uproot it. The rooster was usually killed in the process.

Usually.

Pot calling the kettle black

From New Mexico Politics with Joe Monahan:

A member of the powerful state Public Regulation Commission who advocated zero tolerance on drugs and alcohol in the PRC workplace has been arrested on drug charges. E. Shirley Baca, 53, of Las Cruces, was taken into custody shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday at Albuquerque’s international airport. She was booked into the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center on charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

John Roberts, deputy chief of Albuquerque Aviation Police, told The Associated Press that the controlled substance was marijuana. Baca’s bond was set at $1,000, and she bonded out by early afternoon, jail officials said. Fellow Commissioner David King said he was stunned when told by the AP that Baca had been arrested. “I know that she was one of the advocates to have zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol” at the PRC, King said. She advocated immediate dismissal of any PRC employee when it comes to drugs or alcohol, he said.

Link via Pika.

Big game

James Madison vs. William & Mary

ESPN2 5PM MT Today

Winner advances to Division I-AA Championship next Friday against the winner of the Sam Houston State @ Montana game (tomorrow at noon MT on ESPN2).

Championship? Playoffs? Unlike the Division I-A presidents, the presidents of these schools must want to be football factories. All four teams have already played 13 games (all four are 11-2).

Simple facts

If no change is made to Social Security it can continue to pay full benefits for another 48 years, or until the youngest baby boomer is 88. After that it could continue to pay 80%.