Month: February 2005

The Top 100 Gadgets

A fascinating list of The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time with photos.

Whether they’re strapped to our belts, sitting on our desks, or jammed in an overstuffed closet, we absolutely love our gadgets.

So it wasn’t exactly easy coming up with the definitive list of the 100 best gadgets ever unleashed. In the weeks we spent debating the entries, tempers were flared, fingers were pointed, chairs were smashed over heads, and feelings were hurt. But we emerged, like Moses from the mountain, with the world’s most authoritative ranking of the best gadgets of all time.

Peace

Bad week for …

Differences of opinion, after four men attacked the home of an Oregon family that had hung up a rainbow-colored flag bearing the word “pace”—”peace’ in Italian. Lisa Wells, who is married, said the men threw things and called her a lesbian. “He told me I should die. He told me I should read the Bible.”

From The Week Newsletter.

Best line of the day, so far

“‘The debate over whether or not there is a global warming signal is now over, at least for rational people,’ [Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography] said.”

Report from CNN.

Studies looking at the oceans and melting Arctic ice leave no room for doubt that it is getting warmer, people are to blame, and the weather is going to suffer, climate experts have said.

Link via dangerousmeta!

Let them play!

A great essay from Broken Cowboy on the Hokies win over Duke and the quality effort by ESPN.

And so as another Ewing three-point attempt clanked off the rim and the good folks of Blacksburg, VA, showed their inexperience at celebrating as they tentatively wandered down onto the court, looking like hesitant swimmers dipping their toes in the water, I wondered why all basketball games couldn’t be like this.

Welcome to the ACC Virginia Tech. Football champions and a very respectable 6-6 in their first season on the hard court.

A little bit (too much) of heaven

Another report from Jill:

In the car on the way to the chocolate festival, Erinn could not contain her enthusiasm.

“Tommy, you’re going to have such a fun day,” she enthused to her four-year old son.

Tommy smiled excitedly,

Erinn continued, “There’s going to be a fountain made of different kinds of chocolate. And you can buy some candy to take home with you. And you can taste some of Mommy’s ice cream. Then, afterwards we’re going to have pizza for lunch. Your perfect day! You are going to be in heaven!”

She looked in the rear-view mirror. Tommy’s face was ashen. His lip quivered.

“I’m going to heaven?” he asked.

Oh, to be 4 again, when love was easy and problems were, too

Jill, official daughter of NewMexiKen, reports on the four-year-old world:

Today was Purple Day at school. Mack wore a purple shirt and his purple Mack hat.

When I dropped him off, Mrs. Corish said, “Oh, Mack, you look great!”

At which point, a mother who was standing nearby, taking off her daughter’s coat, turned and said, “Oh, is this Mack? Amanda is in looooooove with Mack.”

Amanda, by the way…..long blond hair and incredibly cute. But famous as the girl who picked her nose, right in front row center, during the class’s singing presentation at church.

It’s the birthday

… of “Dragline.” George Kennedy is 80.

… of the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 72 today. In 2003 Time Asia published an informative profile of the complex artist Yoko Ono.

… of Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 51 today. So are Vincent Vega, Chili Palmer, Michael, Buford ‘Bud’ Uan Davis, Tod Lubitch, Danny Zuko and Tony Manero. And so is John Travolta.

… of the letter lady. Vanna White is 48 today.

… of Jack Palance (86), Cybill Shepherd (55), Matt Dillon (41), and Molly Ringwald (37).

Wallace Stegner

In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists previously, but repeats them here — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

First in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

Jim Brown …

was born on this date in 1936.

Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN.

Brown played only nine seasons for the Cleveland Browns — and led the NFL in rushing eight times. He averaged 104 yards a game, a record 5.2 yards a pop. He ran for at least 100 yards in 58 of his 118 regular-season games (he never missed a game). He ran for 237 yards in a game twice, scored five touchdowns in another game and four times scored four touchdowns. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards in seven seasons, scorching opponents for 1,527 yards in one 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

Best line of the day, so far

“The [Honduran] abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he [John Negroponte] either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.”

From the web site Think Progress, commenting on the nomination of Ambassador John Negroponte as National Director of Intelligence.

Link via Altercation.

Brit Hume is a classless ass

From Liz Smith at the New York Post Online:

I felt I had nothing to say on the Charles/ Camilla en gagement. But then I heard newsman Brit Hume “covering” the story, and saying, “Well, if you look at a photograph of Diana, you can understand, but this one . . . why? Why her?”

Good grief! Camilla is a normal-looking, middle-aged English lady. By no means is she a candidate for the bell tower at Notre Dame. In fact, she has grown more gracefully into her maturity than many “great beauties.”

Beauty does not automatically translate into stability, kindness, intelligence, compassion, wit, sexual prowess or happiness — not for the owner of the beauty, or for those in its axis. All it means is that nature has been both kind and cruel, because as surely as you are beautiful now, the day will come when you cherish candlelight. And Botox.

Link via Altercation.

NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars

From Space.com:

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Must be part of that intelligent design thing.

Good one

“A Nebraska man has been arrested for stealing a greyhound bus, getting drunk, and trying to crash into his ex-wife’s trailer home because he thought she was cheating on him. This could be the first time ever that a crime gets nominated for a country music award.”

Jay Leno

Tribal Casino Revenues Surpass Nevada’s

From The Washington Post:

Indian gambling pulled in $18.5 billion in 2004, nearly double the take for Nevada’s gambling industry, as tribal casinos boomed ahead.

The 10 percent increase extended more than a decade of double-digit growth for the nation’s Indian casinos, which have mushroomed since Congress passed a law creating the legal framework in 1988.

There now are 411 Indian casinos in the United States, operated by 223 tribes in 28 states. More than half the 341 federally recognized Indian tribes in the continental United States operate casinos.

Take me for a ride

From the Casper Star Tribune:

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — Interior Secretary Gale Norton cruised the powdery soft roads on a snowmobile, then took in the scenery near Old Faithful from a warm snowcoach.

She experienced for herself on Tuesday the plan that has made room for both activities in Yellowstone National Park for at least the next two winters.

As she got off the yellow snowcoach — a roomy passenger van on tracks — she declared the experience “not as special as snowmobiling.” Both are good options for seeing the park, Norton said, but “this is a much more ordinary way to see things.”

Righteous Anger

From a review of God’s Politics in The Washington Post:

The problem with religious conservatives is not that they invoke religion too much, but that they practice “bad theology,” he argues. He notes that although religious conservatives focus on homosexuality and abstinence, Jesus and Isaiah and Micah had much more to say about poverty and economic justice than sexual impropriety. Therefore, he writes, the Bush administration’s tax policies reflect a “religious failure.” And also: “An enormous public misrepresentation of Christianity has taken place. . . . [M]any people around the world now think Christian faith stands for political commitments that are almost the opposite of its true meaning. How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?”