Day: January 24, 2006
Absurd fact of the day, so far
TicketsNow.com, which connects ticket buyers and sellers, advertised Monday a 40-person luxury suite on the [Super Bowl] 40-yard-line for — are you sitting? — $261,000. Another Web site priced a box at $315,000. The median home price in the Detroit area last year was about $169,000.
How to Get Great Sleep
A good, informative, useful report on How to Get Great Sleep from Psychology Today. Some key points:
Experts generally apply the “30-30 rule”: It’s insomnia if it takes you 30 minutes or more to fall asleep or if you’re awake for 30 or more minutes during the night — at least three times a week. No matter how little you sleep, it isn’t insomnia unless your nighttime habits drag you down during the day.
Believe it or not, “You don’t want to sleep like a baby,” says Michael L. Perlis, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at New York’s University of Rochester and director of the behavioral sleep medicine service there. “You want to sleep like an adolescent.” Babies wake often; they are not yet able to consolidate sleep into one stretch. Adolescents sleep like there’s no tomorrow.
Now you’re even more tired and worried about the consequences of not sleeping than you were the day before — while you’re at your greatest vulnerability to irrational thought. Is this, you worry, the beginning of decrepitude?
Pretty soon, this self-defeating cycle takes on a life of its own. Under the influence of anxiety, your brain learns very quickly, without your knowledge or consent, to associate the bedroom with wakefulness. You lie down to rest and your brain goes on high alert. “It has been shown that people who have difficulty falling asleep are supersensitive to bedroom-related stimuli,” explains Perlis. “They become physiologically aroused in the bedroom environment” — their nervous system switches on just when they want it to calm down.
It’s the psychophysiologic equivalent of the perfect storm….
Where Albertson’s Failed
Interesting commentary on food shopping from Emily Esterson at New West Network. Albertson’s, one of just three “regular” grocery chains in Albuquerque, was sold yesterday to SuperValu (which I’d never even heard of).
Key quote from Esterson: “Wal-Mart was just as crowded and slow. The prices only marginally better on certain items, and the food, well, sort of franken-foodish in its cheerful coats of wax and cellophane.”
Second key quote: “Drive 30 miles to Whole Paycheck. Deal with the prices at Wild Oats (and make a second stop for toilet paper, paper towels and dog food?). We don’t have the income to spend $5 on organic carrots, or $9.99 for a pound of ranch-raised organic beef.”
It’s like ‘Teen Wolf’ sprung to life
From ESPN’s Bill Simmons, an excerpt:
Like many NBA junkies, I monitor Laker games since Kobe reached “you always need to make sure Kobe isn’t feeling it” status about two months ago, when it became apparent that his team stunk and Phil Jackson was fine with Kobe gunning 35 to 40 times a game. I don’t like the Lakers, and I definitely don’t like Kobe that much (except for the “Black Mamba” gimmick, which delights me to no end). But I enjoy the nightly potential of an ESPN Classic-caliber scoring explosion. It’s a form of basketball that’s never been seen at this level — as I wrote two weeks ago, it’s like “Teen Wolf” sprung to life. Not only is Mamba hogging the ball to a historic degree, just about everyone else on the Lakers seems OK with it. It’s their only chance to win.
(One player seems to be resisting: Poor Lamar Odom, who’s going to bludgeon himself to death with Phil Jackson’s blank clipboard soon. When they’re running the offense in which Odom sets up Kobe from the top of the key and then stands in place like a third base coach, I keep waiting for Odom to rear back and fire line drive baseball passes at Kobe to try to knock him unconscious. Frankly, there’s still time.)
So this has evolved into a unique situation: A Hall of Fame scorer in his absolute prime, stuck with teammates best described as deferential, playing with a chip on his shoulder after his last two seasons were marred by fallout from the Shaq trade and ongoing legal troubles, working with a permanently green light to hoist an ungodly amount of shots (nearly 28 a game). Again, everyone’s OK with it. Which means it’s impossible to determine a ceiling for Kobe Games right now. After the 62-point game against Dallas, when I bemoaned Kobe’s lost chance to make history, hundreds of Lakers fans disagreed. The common theme of the e-mails: “Dude, are you crazy? He’s shooting the ball 40 times a game! There will be plenty of chances for him to go for 80!”
You know what? Good point.
Mozart
In an essay that goes on to discuss nuances in some of Mozart’s music, Terry Teachout has this succinct description of the composer’s life and work:
One might easily put together an anthology of heartfelt tributes to Mozart’s music, were it not that the result would be so repetitious. Suffice it to quote Aaron Copland, writing in 1956 on the occasion of the Mozart bicentenary:
[W]e can pore over him, dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in the end there remains something that will not be seized. That is why, each time a Mozart work begins . . . we composers listen with a certain awe and wonder, not unmixed with despair. The wonder we share with everyone; the despair comes from the realization that only this one man at this one moment in musical history could have created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.Some part of Copland’s wonder, of course, must have stemmed from the fact that its object was a child prodigy without formal education who wrote his first symphony at the age of nine and his last one a mere 23 years later, not long before his early death. All prodigies are by definition interesting, but in Mozart’s case the interest is heightened by the fact that he not only died young but left behind an oeuvre so extensive and all-encompassing that it might as well have been the work of a fully mature composer who died at sixty, or even eighty.
In addition, though, there is the still greater puzzle of the apparent incongruity between Mozart’s music and his personality. Forget the foul-mouthed idiot savant of Peter Shaffer’s movie Amadeus (1984); the real Mozart is elusive enough without benefit of caricature. “It is impossible,” wrote the great English musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “to exaggerate the depth and power of Mozart’s thought.” Yet Karoline Pichler, who knew him socially, described a man “in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests.” His surviving letters paint a similarly inexplicable portrait of a likable, lively-minded lightweight.
The gap between man and artist is so vast, in fact, that one half-wonders why some ragtag band of ardent pseudo-scholars has not come along to claim that the music of “the man from Salzburg” was really written by a more cultivated and better situated contemporary.
The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is Friday, January 27.
Preserving a Grand Landscape in New Mexico
NewMexiKen first posted this item two years ago today. The link to the Times still works, and I’ve posted about Valles Caldera twice recently, so I thought I’d include it again today.
The most sublime place described in this Sunday’s New York Times Travel Section is, of course, in New Mexico.
Less than four years ago, Congress paid $101 million to buy an 89,000-acre ranch in northern New Mexico of such grandeur and scientific richness it’s been called the Yellowstone of the Southwest. The nation’s backpacking cognoscenti laced up their hiking boots in anticipation. Here, finally, was the chance to tramp across a landscape so iconic of the American West that it appeared for years in Marlboro Man ads and on Stetson hatboxes.
Then the government promptly locked the gates. Managers of the newly renamed Valles Caldera National Preserve needed time to create a plan to safeguard the place from the surge of interest that was sure to come.
(When a few “sneak peek” hikes were announced in September 2000, 50,000 people telephoned in one day to snare the 1,500 spots.) But the managers also needed time to digest the mandate Congress had handed them. The preserve is “an experiment in land management” that is run neither by the Forest Service nor the National Park Service but by a trust that is governed by presidential appointees. Valles Caldera is to remain a working ranch while also protecting the environment and accommodating hikers, hunters and other users. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, Congress asked the preserve to try to become financially self-sufficient by 2015, whether by charging fees for cattle grazing and recreation or perhaps even permitting some logging. It is a complex, at times contradictory charge and one that makes Valles Caldera a good symbol of the many issues the nation’s public lands grapple with today….
Some of the West’s great vistas thrust themselves on you with a beauty that is almost oppressive. Valles Caldera is not one of these places. Beyond the windshield, steamship clouds dragged their shadows across Valle Grande, a treeless, harvest-colored valley that ran to a horizon of ponderosa and green peaks. A bull elk lounged in the valley with his harem, his chandelier of a rack rising above the grama grass. This is not the awe-demanding West of Albert Bierstadt but the welcoming West of an Aaron Copland score – a big-hearted landscape, heroic, promising, completely American. Seeing it, you realize that you know Valles Caldera from billboards and ads and untold westerns. You feel at home.
Aztec Ruins National Monument (New Mexico)
… was established on this date in 1923.
Around 1100 A.D. ancient peoples embarked on an ambitious building project along the Animas River in northwestern New Mexico. Work gangs excavated, filled, and leveled more than two and a half acres of land. Masons laid out sandstone blocks in intricate patterns to form massive stone walls. Wood-workers cut and carried heavy log beams from mountain forests tens of miles away. In less than three decades they built a monumental “great house” three-stories high, longer than a football field, with perhaps 500-rooms including a ceremonial “great kiva” over 41-feet in diameter.
A short trail winds through this massive site offering a surprisingly intimate experience. Along the way visitors discover roofs built 880 years ago, original plaster walls, a reed mat left by the inhabitants, intriguing “T” shaped doorways, provocative north-facing corner doors, and more. The trail culminates with the reconstructed great kiva, a building that inherently inspires contemplation, wonder, and an ancient sense of sacredness.
Blast off
It took the spacecraft just nine hours to pass the moon. That baby was moving (75,000 kmh).
Click image to enlarge and learn more.