Not all the great architecture is in Italy

This particular masterpiece is located near Groom, Texas, also home to the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. The reason the water tower says Britten is because that was the name of the truck stop once on the spot. The water tower was brought in to be an attraction. The truck stop is long gone but the leaning tower of Groom remains alongside I-40 east of Amarillo. Yes, that left leg is completely off the ground.

NewMexiKen

There were 38,167 visits from 21,197 unique IP addresses viewing 150,906 pages at NewMexiKen in January.

Good night, and good luck

There’s a very good essay on the career and impact of Edward R. Murrow by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker. An excerpt:

Clooney’s film takes great pains to be accurate about all the specifics. It isn’t just the way people dressed and carried themselves; every word Strathairn says on the air, Murrow said on the air. Those Murrow shortcomings (by today’s lights) that pertain to the McCarthy story, such as his having voluntarily signed the CBS loyalty oath, are duly inserted somewhere or other in the screenplay. Still, without ever misstating anything, “Good Night, and Good Luck” leaves you with the impression that Murrow was an early, and the dispositive, attacker of McCarthy, and that isn’t exactly the case. Murrow was genuinely courageous, and not just in this instance, but the real story is more complicated.

Carpetbagger – Marginalia, Sidebars, Addenda, Etc.

Carpetbagger is an Oscars blog by New York Times critic David Carr. It has included both informative and amusing writing in the lead-up to today’s nominations. You might want to bookmark it. In the meantime, I liked this little summary:

This is the year that serious films about real stuff captured a city built on selling fantasy. And while the pert little movie stars are in the race — let’s retool that speech Reese and Kiera; insouciance has its upside, no? — grown-ups who have been annealed by countless roles and time’s winged feet are in there too. Anything that gets Felicity Huffman near a microphone is a good vote, and Judi Dench’s elegant durability is something to behold. Schlubs are having a big year, which is heartening for the Bagger to see. Both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are guys who know their way around hitching up pants being forced toward earth by ample midsections. The Academy knows a good ambassador when they see one, which may be part of the reason that Terrence Howard made it into the Best Actor category. He may not be a big movie star yet, but his willingness to engage in the awards season absent archness and with a clear enthusiasm for the craft has made everyone’s job easier, including the Bagger’s. And he can rap, too, if “Hustle and Flow” is to be believed. Russell Crowe is nowhere to be seen, which is too bad for the business and not such a good thing for audiences. Tantrums aside, he combines real curb appeal and the kind of acting muscle that rarely comes along. But you can’t really doubt the process. This is the first time since 1981 that the best director and best picture categories contain the same five pictures. The Academy is of a single mind, including the fact that studios might want to try something new, like making better movies.

Call me Ishmael

100 Best First Lines from Novels

Best line of the day, so far

“President Bush goes before a disaffected nation tonight to reassert his leadership — quite possibly by insisting repeatedly that he’s a leader with an obligation to lead at a time that requires leadership.”

Dan Froomkin

Hullabaloo

All the liberal and left bloggers are linking to Digby for post-mortems on yesterday’s cloture vote, so NewMexiKen will too. It’s a good, positive statement at the end of a pretty discouraging process.

Alito was confirmed today 58-42. He will appear tonight at the State of the Union in the robe of a Supreme Court Justice.

NewMexiKen has decided to watch the DVD of The Aristocrats instead.

Creativity

From an article in today’s New York Times, The Romance of Business Travel and Other Myths:

Bobbie Wyatt’s husband packed the bags and checked out of their Manhattan hotel before she did, leaving her with only her top. “I had nothing to wear from the waist down,” said Ms. Wyatt, a public relations professional from Greenville, S.C. There were no housekeepers in the hallway to lend her a uniform, and she was too embarrassed to call the concierge and say she had no pants.

“As I sank down on the bed, my arm brushed against the fabric of an airline blanket,” she said. A light bulb went off. With the sewing kit from the bathroom, she rigged up a wrap skirt and headed outside for the nearest clothing store. “I glanced up to see a half-naked cowboy playing a guitar,” she recalled. “I just relaxed, realizing I fit right in.” To reward herself for her ingenuity, Ms. Wyatt emerged from the shop with three outfits.

Academy Awards

The major nominees:

BEST PICTURE
“Brokeback Mountain,” Diana Ossana and James Schamus, producers
“Capote,” Caroline Baron, William Vince and Michael Ohoven, producers
“Crash,” Paul Haggis and Cathy Schulman, producers
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” Grant Heslov, producer
“Munich,” Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg and Barry Mendel, producers

BEST DIRECTOR
Ang Lee, “Brokeback Mountain”
Bennett Miller, “Capote”
Paul Haggis, “Crash”
George Clooney, “Good Night, and Good Luck”
Steven Spielberg, “Munich”

BEST ACTRESS
Judi Dench, “Mrs. Henderson Presents”
Felicity Huffman, “Transamerica”
Keira Knightley, “Pride & Prejudice”
Charlize Theron, “North Country”
Reese Witherspoon, “Walk the Line”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams, “Junebug”
Catherine Keener, “Capote”
Frances McDormand, “North Country”
Rachel Weisz, “The Constant Gardener”
Michelle Williams, “Brokeback Mountain”

BEST ACTOR
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “Capote”
Terrence Howard, “Hustle & Flow”
Heath Ledger, “Brokeback Mountain”
Joaquin Phoenix, “Walk the Line”
David Strathairn, “Good Night, and Good Luck”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
George Clooney, “Syriana”
Matt Dillon, “Crash”
Paul Giamatti, “Cinderella Man”
Jake Gyllenhaal, “Brokeback Mountain”
William Hurt, “A History of Violence”

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco, “Crash”
George Clooney and Grant Heslov, “Good Night, and Good Luck”
Woody Allen, “Match Point”
Noah Baumbach, “The Squid and the Whale”
Steven Gaghan, “Syriana”

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, “Brokeback Mountain”
Dan Futterman, “Capote”
Jeffrey Caine, “The Constant Gardener”
Josh Olson, “A History of Violence”
Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, “Munich”

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
“Don’t Tell” (Italy)
“Joyeux Noël” (France)
“Paradise Now” (Palestine)
“Sophie Scholl – The Final Days” (Germany)
“Tsotsi” (South Africa)

It’s the birthday

… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 85.

… of Norman Mailer. He’s 83. Here’s what NewMexiKen posted before on Mailer’s birthday.

… of Jean Simmons. The actress (The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry) is 77. Miss Simmons was twice nominated for an Oscar; Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).

… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 74. Let’s play two.

… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 69.

As is, Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds.

… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 58.

Minnie Driver is 35. Justin Timberlake is 25.

Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous entry for Merton.

And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous entry on Grey.

More On What Google (and Probably A Lot of Others) Know

From John Battelle’s Searchblog:

1) “Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?”

2) “Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?”

I put these to Google. To its credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is “yes.”

How do we know when we’ve made the right generalization?

The always worth reading Malcolm Gladwell on “What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.” A short excerpt from an article more about decision-making than dogs:

Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don’t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world’s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us (even though many young men are perfectly good drivers), and doctors use generalizations when they tell overweight middle-aged men to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight middle-aged men won’t experience heart trouble). Because we don’t know which dog will bite someone or who will have a heart attack or which drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by generalizing. As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, “painting with a broad brush” is “an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.”