Lindsay Morgan Lohan! What are you wearing?

See for yourself at Go Fug Yourself.

Extra! Extra!

Michael Kinsley has an entirely readable, if nothing new, essay about the future of newspapers. A couple of quotes:

As we live through the second industrial revolution, your daily newspaper remains a tribute to the wonders of the first one.

And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn’t within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

How dry is it?

According to this National Weather Service report, frighteningly dry.

November was the 9th driest of the past 111 years in New Mexico, and preliminary numbers suggest December will also go into the record books as one of the 10 driest December months of the past 111 years. When considered together, the November-December period was one of the driest 5 such periods of the past 111 years. Precipitation for this time period has averaged a mere 11 percent of normal for the state.
…

Fire Danger Impacts: The wet period in 2004 and early 2005 allowed abundant grass growth over eastern New Mexico. With the recent exceptionally-dry weather, these “fine fuels” are presenting high fire danger, much higher than normal for this time of year. Unless unforeseen significant precipitation develops, the fire season in 2006 is likely to be extended and severe in New Mexico, beginning in the lower elevations this month and progressing to higher elevations in the spring to early summer.
…

The most likely scenario is for continued drier than normal, and warmer than normal weather in New Mexico through the spring.

Link via John Fleck.

Upside: We can not only play winter golf, we can play it in shorts.

Downside to the upside: Greens are very, very fast.

It’s the birthday

… of Katherine Anne Couric. University of Virigina grad Katie Couric is 49.

… of Nicholas Kim Coppola. The Oscar-winner, known better as Nicolas Cage, is 42.

Jay talking

“What was Reggie Bush thinking trying to lateral that ball in the red zone? A guy named Bush making a bonehead move. What are the odds? Has that ever happened?”

“A 40 year old woman in Israel who friends call an eccentric millionaire married a dolphin. President Bush said he has no problem with it, as long as the dolphin’s not gay.”

Jay Leno

Growth industry

In NewMexiKen’s recent drive through California I noticed a number of California penitentiaries I hadn’t remembered hearing about during my 12 years living in the state (but not since 1985). It occured to me that prisons were a growth industry. In her 2003 book, Where I Was From, Joan Didion confirms this impression and explains. Two excerpts:

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. … Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.

Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipatria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.

It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. … It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.

Painter of Light or Painter-Lite

In Where I Was From, Joan Didion gives us this wonderful takedown of pop artist Thomas Kinkade:

The passion with which buyers approached these Kinkade images was hard to define. The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip, to buyers who already owned ten or twenty, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought to the viewing of the images “a sizeable emotional weight.” A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire. The cottages had thatched roofs, and resembled gingerbread houses. The houses were Victorian, and resembled idealized bed-and-breakfasts, at least two of which in Placerville, the Chichester-McKee House and the Combellack-Blair House, claimed to have been the models for Kinkade “Christmas” paintings. “There’s a lot of beauty here that I present in a way that’s whimsical and charming,” Kinkade allowed to the Placerville Mountain Democrat. He branded himself the “Painter of Light,” and the postcards Media Arts provided to his galleries each for a while bore this legend: “Thomas Kinkade is recognized as the foremost living painter of light. His masterful use of soft edges and luminous colors give his highly detailed oil paintings a glow all their own. This extraordinary ‘Kinkade Glow’ has created an overwhelming demand for Thomas Kinkade paintings and lithographs worldwide.”

This “Kinkade Glow” could be seen as derived in spirit from the “lustrous, pearly mist” that Mark Twain had derided in the Bierstadt paintings, and, the level of execution to one side, there are certain unsettling similarities between the two painters. “After completing my recent plein air study of Yosemite Valley, the mountains’ majesty refused to leave me,” Kinkade wrote in June 2000 on his web site. “When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fantasy-a recreation of a Miwok Indian Village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”

Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Center’s recreation of a Miwok Indian Village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels (not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush….

Not to mention that the Kinkade paintings available are all mass-produced reproductions.

Five books in five days (2)

NewMexiKen completed Joan Didion’s Where I Was From last evening, the second book in two days in an effort to read five books in five days. This really superb book incorporates history, memoir, journalism, literary and art criticism to examine California, then and now, real and imagined. The result is a rare combination of insightful analysis and personal feeling. Outstanding.

I’ll include two passages in separate entries.

NewMexiKen began book three last night, The Jefferson Bible, but after 50 or so pages realized that, though interesting, the book really doesn’t fit into the scheme of five books in five days. I will substitute something else for day three.

We’ve seen the future and it’s already here

This is hilarious. It’s the audio of Bill Gates this week explaining all the exciting new features in Windows Vista (to be available this fall). With it, someone added video to show us all those very same features already here on Mac OS X Tiger.

Link via David Pogue.