That’s sunset tonight from Casa NewMexiKen after an awesome thunderstorm.
Day: June 26, 2006
Transamerica
It seems somehow incomplete for a blogger to view a film, enjoy it, marvel at the star’s performance, and then not mention it. Yet, I feel at a loss for what to say.
Transamerica, starring Felicity Huffman (Oscar nomination) as Stanley/Sabrina/Bree, is a movie that grows on you while you watch, perhaps because Bree grows on you — as a person, not a type. Days before a final sex change operation, Bree discovers she fathered a now 17-year-old son in New York. The road trip back to Los Angeles follows (of course, on two-lane back country roads — no one in road movies ever takes the interstates) with the boy (Kevin Zegers) assuming, implausibly, that Bree is a do-gooder church lady, and not, of course, his parent, least of all his father. Ultimately, according to the formula, the secret comes out, but by then the movie has us. We realize the film is about people and families and life and not about sexuality at all.
One-time supporting-actor Oscar nominees Graham Greene and Burt Young both succeed in small roles and Fionnula Flanagan is terrific.
With Bill Gates’ plans to retire from Microsoft
… and the announcement of Warren Buffet’s $30 billion contribution to the Gates Foundation, it occurs to NewMexiKen that Bill Gates now sees Microsoft as a means rather than an ends, and that his life’s great work is yet to come.
Shortcut
… to some of the videos Bill Simmons mentions (see my previous post).
Michael Jackson’s moonwalk during Motown 25. Hard to remember what an incredibly big star Michael was 20 years ago.
The We Are the World video.
A scene from the Miami Vice pilot. So cool it was hot.
Joe Namath makes a pass — to Suzy Kolber.
And the Best of Bo Jackson. The opening Nike ad alone is awesome.
The YouTube Hall of Fame
After a decade of watching the Internet change everyone’s lives (including mine), it never ceases to amaze me. The Internet gave me a job and a career. I pay my bills online, follow stocks, buy DVDs and books, argue about the Celtics with complete strangers on a message board, send streaming video of my kid back home to my parents, get almost all my sports information, keep in touch with dozens and dozens of family members, friends, acquaintances and co-workers every week. There’s always some new way to kill time. But YouTube ranks among the greatest Internet developments ever, right up there with iTunes, Napster, free porn and e-mails with “Vegas?” in the subject heading.
With that as part of the introduction, Bill Simmons describes and links to dozens of his favorite videos on YouTube.
Go waste enjoy a couple of hours.
Dropping the F-Bomb
Joel Achenbach discusses that most special word. The essay includes this:
Liberating the word became a dubious triumph of the 1960s counterculture. At Woodstock, Country Joe and the Fish led a rousing cheer that began with “Give me an F!” and continued on through “K,” finally asking, “What’s that spell?” Now it sounds silly. Wow. They said a bad word out loud! What revolutionaries!
At death’s window
The essay by Anne Lamott begins “The man I killed did not want to die….”
Interested? Click here.
Greenland’s Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away
Excerpt from a report in the Los Angeles Times:
The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world’s weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.
It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.
In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze.
The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands.
Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.
Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.
Key quote: “The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.”
A rather unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day
Click image to enlarge and learn more.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial (Washington, DC)
A national memorial to Thomas Jefferson was authorized on this date in 1934. It was dedicated in 1943.
Thomas Jefferson-political philosopher, architect, musician, book collector, scientist, horticulturist, diplomat, inventor, and third President of the United States-looms large in any discussion of what Americans are as a people. Jefferson left to the future not only ideas but also a great body of practical achievements. President John F. Kennedy recognized Jefferson’s accomplishments when he told a gathering of American Nobel Prize winners that they were the greatest assemblage of talent in the White House since Jefferson had dinner there alone. With his strong beliefs in the rights of man and a government derived from the people, in freedom of religion and the separation between church and state, and in education available to all. Thomas Jefferson struck a chord for human liberty 200 years ago that resounds through the decades. But in the end, Jefferson’s own appraisal of his life, and the one that he wrote for use on his own tombstone, suffices: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”
Some fortunate wedding parties are able to have photos taken at the Jefferson Memorial among architect John Russell Pope’s beautiful columns and curves.
President Kennedy
… uttered his famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) on this date in 1963. As The New York Times put it at the time:
President Kennedy, inspired by a tumultuous welcome from more than a million of the inhabitants of this isolated and divided city, declared today he was proud to be “a Berliner.”
He said his claim to being a Berliner was based on the fact that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”