Hey, guess what?

It’s raining at Casa NewMexiKen.

Posted at 4:35 PM. Temperature dropped 16 degrees in a few minutes.

Update: The rain lasted about long enough to write the above; it did leave the street damp and settled the dust.

Alas, we are a pathetic people, us desert rats, when it hasn’t rained in forever.

Update update: It rained again around 10 PM, longer and harder. Not enough, but we’re getting there!

This is a test

NewMexiKen, every day more a confirmed Mac user, has installed a widget on my desktop that permits me to blog without even opening the blog software. No big deal; just kind of cool.

I’ve also installed a desktop widget that searches for album cover art when I add music to iTunes. I just type in a word or two, the artist’s name for example, and voila, album covers.

This is all in addition to the usual desktop widgets — calendar, weather for me and The Sweeties, stocks, time, sunset, moon phases, a calculator, a dictionary, World Cup schedule, whatever.

All a keystroke away.

Like father, like son

A Little League father from Kent, N.Y., has been charged with misdemeanor assault, The Associated Press reported, after he allegedly punched the coach of 9- and 10-year-olds who suspended his kid for uppity behavior.

“A word of warning to youth baseball coaches,” wrote Bob Reno of BadJocks.com. “If you kick a kid off the team for insubordination, you can probably assume the little acorn hasn’t fallen far from the big nut tree.”

The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter

A whale of a song

Ocean Alliance has some worthwhile information you can use, but the best thing it has at the moment is a free download (10 MB mp3) of “the sweetest, serenest, loveliest sounds one might hear.”

I’m adding it to iTunes, but not sure what genre. Update: New Age.

Link via Andrew Tobias.

I wish it would rain

Please, some rain. And not the six-inch rain we had yesterday and then again last night in parts of town — a drop every six inches.

So far in 2006 there has been measurable precipitation in Albuquerque just 11 times (including yesterday’s two occurences) for a grand total of 44/100ths of one inch. Seven of the eleven times the moisture was just two-hundredths of an inch or less. That’s not enough to do more than put rainspots on your car.

The humidity is in the thirties this morning. The dewpoint above 50. The monsoons are coming.

Where’d you come from?

Five billion searchable names — that’s billion, as in “gabillion” — are now online, thanks to Salt Lake City’s Ancestry.com. For three days, you can search the whole magilla without paying a cent. After that, it’s $155 a year.

It’s a huge opportunity, especially since Ancestry just finished adding complete census records from 1790 to 1930, and it’s the only place you can search those records in detail online. Mercy! Think of it — from 1790. That’s just after the Revolutionary War.

Ancestry says it took workers a combined 6.6 million hours of labor to pull off this staggering feat. They had to scan images of census documents, figure out the handwriting, then catalog each record — by hand. On a keyboard. 540 million names. Oy.

Read more at New West Network.

Or check it out at Ancestry.com.

It’s the birthday

… of Justice Clarence Thomas. He’s 58.

… of American Idol’s Randy Jackson. He’s 50.

… of Oscar-winner Frances McDormand. She’s 49. Miss McDormand has had three Oscar nominations for best supporting actress in addition to her winning best actress performance in Fargo.

Choreographer Bob Fosse was born on this date in 1927.

According to many sources, Killer Angels author Michael Shaara was born on this date in 1929. According to his biography at son Jeff Shaara’s web site, the father was born in 1928. The Killer Angels, which won the Pulitzer Prize and is regarded by many as the best Civil War novel, “was rejected by the first fifteen publishers who saw the manuscript.”

Ford’s Theatre (Washington, DC)

… was designated a national historic site on this date in 1970.

America’s transfer from civil war to peace was made more difficult on April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed, just five days after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. A well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, desperate to aid the dying Confederacy, stepped into the president’s box. Booth’s decision to pull the trigger altered the nation’s power to reconstruct after the war. Booth escaped into the night as Abraham Lincoln was carried to the Petersen boarding house across the street. It was there that President Lincoln died early the next morning, and became the first American president to be assassinated.

Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site

Best line of the day, so far

“The poor Mavericks — they had home court advantage, they were up two games to none, and still blew it. Even Phil Mickelson said they choked.”

Jay Leno