Subtle elegance

James Fallows points out one of the finer points in Obama’s Wesleyan commencement speech.

Is it more efficient to leave your car idling?

Simple answer. No.

Today’s cars use electronic fuel injectors, which rigorously control the amount of gas delivered to the engine when you hit the ignition. As a result, virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

How many seconds, exactly? A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine. The one exception is when you’re stopped in street traffic—it’s illegal to kill the engine in many states, due to concerns that switched-off cars are more easily rear-ended (especially if an absent-minded driver forgets to restart once the gridlock abates).

. . . The researchers concluded that restarting a six-cylinder engine—with the air conditioner switched on—uses as much gas as idling the same car for just six seconds.

Idling is similarly wasteful in frigid temperatures. Contrary to popular belief, cold-weather drivers needn’t warm up their cars for longer than 30 seconds. The best way to raise an engine’s temperature to optimal levels is to drive it almost immediately after startup . . .

Slate Magazine

Kindergartener Voted Out

A Port St. Lucie, Fla., mother is outraged and considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.

Melissa Barton says Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo had her son’s classmates say what they didn’t like about 5-year-old Alex. She says the teacher then had the students vote, and voted Alex, who is being evaluated for Asperger’s syndrome — an autism spectrum disorder — out of the class by a 14-2 margin.

CBS News

Dick Martin

Comedian Dick Martin died Saturday at age 86. Martin’s biggest claim to fame by far was the TV show Laugh-In that ran 1968-1973. Martin is on the right with partner Dan Rowan.

Is she still Goldie Hawn, or do we just call her Kate Hudson’s mother now?

Passing in the night

Do you get the feeling that gas prices and housing prices are going to pass each other going in opposite directions sometime soon?

Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

Prices nationwide are at levels not seen since the third quarter of 2004 . . .

Las Vegas had the worst performance in March, falling 25.9 percent from a year earlier, followed by Miami and Phoenix.

Yahoo! News

Meanwhile AAA says that the nationwide average price for regular is $3.937, up 9.4% (33.8¢) in a month. Up a dime a gallon in five days! I want my 18.4¢ a gallon federal tax rebate.

How come Clinton and McCain quit talking about that rebate?

Best list of the day, so far

Cheers and Jeers thinks we should name this year’s hurricanes after the Bushies. You know —

Ashcroft
Brownie
Condi
Dick
Enron
Feith
Gonzales

etc. He’s got all 26.

Best line of the day, so far

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Rachel Carson, born on May 27, 1907

Another reason to make May 27th into a holiday

Hubert Humphrey was born in Wallace, South Dakota, on this date in 1911. Humphrey was first elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 and U.S. Senator in 1948. Senator Humphrey introduced his first bill in 1949; it became law in 1965 and we know it as Medicare.

Humphrey became Vice President with the election of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. After Johnson withdrew from the 1968 campaign, and after Robert Kennedy was killed, Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President. He lost to Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in history. Some commented that with the vote trending as it did, had the election been one or two days later Humphrey would have won.

But then we wouldn’t have had Watergate and Nixon to kick around.

May 27th ought to be a holiday

Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925.  The Shape Shifter is the 18th book in the series centered on Navajo Tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.  Hillerman had an interesting website with excerpts from all the books, but it has disappeared.  There he told us that:

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t. 
. . . 

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.

Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894.  Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism.  He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.  

Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective.  He turned to writing.  He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929.  His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels. 

By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous.  He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing.  Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48.  His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature.  Hammett died in 1961.

John Cheever was born on this date in 1912.

He wrote for more than 50 years and published more than 200 short stories. He’s known for writing about the world of American suburbia. Even though he was one of the most popular short-story writers of the 20th century, he once said that he only earned “enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year.”

In 1935 he was published in The New Yorker for the first time, and he would continue to write for the magazine for the rest of his life. His stories were collected in books including The Way Some People Live (1943) and The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the few collections of short stories ever to make the New York Times best-seller list.

The Writer’s Almanac

Cheever died in 1982.

The Golden Gate Bridge

. . . opened on this date in 1937. Vehicular traffic began the next day. Jumping off began three months later.

Read about the world’s leading location for suicide from a 2003 article in The New Yorker.

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Ken Baldwin, one of 26 known survivors

The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension span in the world (4,200 feet) until 1964. It’s now ninth.