Month: February 2006

Blogging to iTunes

iTunes started at the top of the alphabet (unintentionally on my part) this morning.

‘Ama’ama, Israel Kamakawiwo’le
‘S Wonderful, Ella Fitzgerald
‘Til, The Angels
‘Til I Gain Control Again, Rodney Crowell
‘Til Tomorrow, Marvin Gaye
“40,” U2
“Heroes,” David Bowie
“Minute” Waltz, Chopin
“Moonlight Sonata,” Beethoven
“Pathétique Sonata,” Beethoven
(‘Til) I Kissed You, The Everly Brothers
(Da Le) Yalleo, Santana

(Punctuation marks come first, then numbers and then A-B etc. in the computer alphabet.)

Brrr

Joel Achenbach got his winter heating bill and turned his thermostat down. Part of his amusing take:

The average American burns roughly 47 jillion “British thermal units” of energy daily, plus an uncounted number of French and German thermal units. The general standard, in the past, was that you would turn down the thermostat only if there was evidence that your house was melting the under-lying planetary crust. People took pride in having a house so hot that, in the depths of winter, everyone sat around in undergarments, fanning themselves and holding iced beverages to their foreheads.

But that’s changing. Now we recognize that household warmth, far from a necessity, is a fetish, an indulgence. It’s a recent invention of a society grown so soft that its members have forgotten how to kill, gut and don the hide of a wild furry animal. Other than the socialites.

The good news is, there are many very practical steps that ordinary people can take to keep their heating bills reasonable. In my house we keep the thermostat at 48 degrees and then turn it down at night. It’s hard to enter my house because of the towels and spare curtains and stuffed animals crammed by the front door to keep the heat inside. When you do manage to fight your way in, the first thing you see are strange mounds of blankets and clothes in the living room. Laundry? No, my children.

The thermostat stays at 72° during the winter here at Casa NewMexiKen; automatically lowered to 60° overnight. Still, even with our mild winter, nearly $200 for natural gas last month.

iShirt

These days putting a lowercase I in front of any product is tantamount to printing your own money. Following shirt er, suit is something for all the hipsters in the house, the iShirt from PodShirt. It s a standard black t-shirt with the word iShirt printed on the front in block white letters. Cool? Yes, yes it is. Even more cool is that the I is actually an iPod shuffle attached to a magnet. (Shuffle not included, obviously.) $29 buys you instant popularity. (Gizmodo)

Click to see photo.

R.I.P. STOP

From a fine tribute to the telegram by Dan Neil, who has more:

For all their worldwide, instantaneous bandwidth, the one thing modern electronic communications systems don’t offer is a sense of occasion, of consequence. One hundred e-mails per day does not equal better information. It’s just a snowdrift of words to be shoveled off the walk. Telegrams were sparingly used and sparingly written, but every word counted.

And, in the hands of experts, telegrams could be used like a scalpel. One of the most famous telegram exchanges pitted George Bernard Shaw against Winston Churchill. Shaw to Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend if you have any.” Churchill to Shaw: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second if there is one.”

A Hollywood favorite: Cary Grant, evasive about his age, intercepted a telegram to his agent from a reporter: “How old Cary Grant?” it read. Grant responded himself: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

Dorothy Parker, on her honeymoon, to an editor nagging her for late work: “Too [expletive] busy, and vice versa.”

At $42 Billion, Largest Contract of its Kind, Company Says

HALLIBURTON WINS CONTRACT TO RECONSTRUCT CHENEY’S REPUTATION

The Halliburton Company announced today that it had won a $42 billion no-bid contract from the U.S. government to reconstruct the reputation of Vice President Dick Cheney.

While Halliburton has been known for massive reconstruction projects in such war-torn nations as Iraq, the $42 billion contract represents the first time that the company has been employed to put its reconstruction expertise to work on one embattled human being.

The Borowitz Report, which has more.

Toni Morrison

The Writer’s Almanac has a good essay on Toni Morrison today, her 75th birthday.

It’s the birthday of novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties, working as an editor for Random House and raising two children. She wasn’t happy with her marriage and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She joined a small writing group and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969).
…

Morrison’s first big success was the 1977 novel Song of Solomon, about a rich black businessman who tries to hide his working-class background. It was the first novel by a black author to be chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.

But Morrison is probably best known for her novel Beloved (1987), about a former slave named Sethe, living just after the Civil War, who is haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter she killed in order to save the girl from a life of slavery….

Toni Morrison wrote, “They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places … but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. … All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

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 once again — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

Stegner is 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

It’s the birthday

… of Jack Palance. He’s 87.

… of George Kennedy. Dragline is 81.

… of the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 73 today. That’s Yoko Ono.

… of Cybill Shepherd. She’s 56.

… of Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 52 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 turner. Vanna White is 49 today.

… of Matt Dillon. The Oscar nominee is 42.

… of Molly Ringwald. She’s 38.

Hunting for laughs

I have to admit that I turned away from the Olympics yesterday. Fox had a more exciting sporting event on. Softball with Dick Cheney and Britt Hume.

Yesterday Dick Cheney gave an interview with Fox News. I don’t want to say that Fox News was lenient but their first question was, “Who do you like on ‘American Idol’?”

Actually the interview did get off to a bad start when Brit Hume said, “Mr. Vice President, I have some questions.” And Cheney said, “Okay, shoot.?”

Over the weekend while on a hunting trip down in Texas, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a member of his hunting party. He apologized. In fact, he told Brit Hume that he was actually trying to hit Cindy Sheehan.

Jay Leno

Jim Brown

… was born on this date in 1936. That would make him 70 today.

Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date. It’s Michael Jordan’s birthday, too.)

“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.

Richard Ford

… was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on this date in 1944. The Writer’s Almanac had a particularly good essay on Ford two years ago. It begins:

[Ford is] best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.

This year The Writer’s Almanac has this:

Ford has spent most of his adult life moving from city to city with his wife. He’s lived in fourteen states, as well as France and Mexico. At one point he divided his time between a townhouse on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a house in Montana, and a plantation house in Mississippi. He said, “The really central thing is that, no matter where I move, I always write and I’m married to the same girl. All that other stuff is just filigree.”

Ford’s novels are particular favorites of NewMexiKen.

Follow Me

NewMexiKen only today read an article about Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in The New York Times Sports Magazine (published February 5th).

The article, “Follow Me,” by Michael Sokolove, is excellent. It discusses Coach K’s abilities and techniques (he gets up to $100,000 for a lecture) in a context of basketball, but it is not an article about basketball. It is about leadership and management skills.

Highly recommended.

Key quote: “So what is the secret to Krzyzewski’s success? For starters, he coaches the way a woman would. Really.”

The killer who was ‘hunted like a dog’

John Wilkes Booth, meet Jack Bauer. That’s the recipe of “Manhunt,” an engrossing blend of history and thriller that pulls off the heady feat of creating edge-of-your-seat narrative even as its conclusion is inevitable. And the ride? Like Bauer’s TV show, “24,” James L. Swanson’s tale of the search for President Abraham Lincoln’s killer rivets because of its pacing – and because its shifting scenes and characters are juggled with sure hands.

Lincoln is gone within the first quarter of the book, leaving center stage for his assassin, the celebrity-actor Booth. All but the most avid Lincoln followers will be surprised by the numerous twists and turns surrounding the president’s death, as well as Booth’s motley crew of co-conspirators, many of whom escaped severe punishment.

From a review in the Christian Science Monitor