The Los Angeles Times reports that California’s statewide ban on hand-held cell phone use (it goes into effect July 1) may mean more than a fine. If you’re in an accident while using a phone, the fact that you were breaking the law greatly increases the chances you will be held responsible. It might even be enough to bring a felony charge if the accident has a fatality.
“Violations of a safety law would be powerful evidence of liability.”
It has come to my attention that kids love Fred.
Who is Fred?
If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of Fred. And if you’re like me — or hell, even if you’re not like me — you will not understand why Fred is getting 3 million to 4 million hits every time he posts a video on YouTube.
Follow this link to Web Scout to learn more about Fred and see a sample video — a video already seen by 4,813,549 viewers.
The solstice is today, Friday, June 20th, at 5:59 PM Mountain daylight time (23:59 UTC).
“I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?”
Ronnie Shakes
Remember this?
Ten days later, same Chevron station in Orange County, California:
Bet customers wish they were getting their 18.4¢ tax rebate.
SAN DIEGO—A man who used several different bent sticks to hit a ball to an area comprised of very short grass surrounding a hole in the ground was praised for his courage Monday after he used a somewhat smaller stick to gently roll the ball into the aforementioned hole in fewer attempts than his competitors.
The Onion – America’s Finest News Source. There’s more.
Thanks to Jill for the pointer.
Thinking about the seasons of life, a mom seeks reassurance from her child:
I put my arm around seven-year-old Charlie, seated next to me, and squeezed him tight.
“Will you promise,” I whispered in his ear, “to stay little forever and never leave me?”
“Mom,” he said looking up at me, “I’ve got plans.”
“Britney Spears’ sister gives birth to baby girl”
NewMexiKen was looking on the shelf for something else just now and Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter caught my eye. I didn’t particularly like this book when I read it — too sketchy and slapped together I thought — but I did find this interesting:
The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven’t really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson’s name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.
The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. …
Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.
At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Billy the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.
NewMexiKen would add Wyatt Earp, but otherwise thinks McMurtry is correct. Anyone feel differently?
That’s NGC 5907, about 40 million light-years away. Photo taken from New Mexico.
Click the image for a larger version and to learn more.
Leaving aside the merits of more off-shore drilling — and the government’s own experts say the impact wouldn’t be for 20 or more years1 — which means that $4 gasoline is just being used to leverage the issue.
But leaving that aside, is there no real appreciation or understanding that burning carbon is threatening the health of the planet?
Even if there is unlimited oil, natural gas and coal, don’t we have to begin to cutback on its use?
1 “The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017.” (Energy Information Administration)
“In a recent interview, President Bush said that he might not be the last President Bush if his brother Jeb decides to run. Yeah, when he heard this, Jeb said, ‘Please stop reminding everyone we’re related.’”
Conan O’Brien
Today is the birthday
… of Gena Rowlands. She’s 78. Miss Rowlands has been nominated for the best actress Oscar twice — A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980).
… of Salman Rushdie. He’s 61.
When Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, most Western critics didn’t notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. In the book, Rushdie makes a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion, he names the whores in a Mecca brothel after the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and he suggests that the Koran is not the direct word of God. The book was banned in India the month after publication and then subsequently in other countries. It was also publicly burned. There were bomb threats called in to the publishing house. Translators of the work suffered assassination attempts; the Italian translator was wounded, the Japanese translator killed, and the fire set by Islamic extremists to the Turkish translator’s hotel left 40 people dead.
The above excerpted from The Writer’s Almanac, which has much more.
… of Phylicia Rashad. Clair Hanks Huxtable is 60. (Bill Cosby, Dr. Huxtable, is 11 years older.)
… of Kathleen Turner. She’s 54. Miss Turner was nominated for the best actress Oscar for Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).
… of Paula Abdul. She’s 46. A former Lakers cheerleader, Miss Abdul had six number one records 1988-1991. She topped the charts for 15 weeks altogether.
Lou Gehrig was born on June 19 in 1903.
Lou Gehrig teamed with Babe Ruth to form baseball’s most devastating hitting tandem ever. “The Iron Horse” had 13 consecutive seasons with both 100 runs scored and 100 RBI, averaging 139 runs and 148 RBI; set an American League mark with 184 RBI in 1931; hit a record 23 grand slams; and won the 1934 Triple Crown. His .361 batting average in seven World Series led the Yankees to six titles. A true gentleman and a tragic figure, Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak ended at 2,130 when he was felled by a disease that later carried his own name.
Gehrig died in 1941. As Christopher Moltisanti of The Sopranos puts it, “You ever think what a coincidence it is that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
Moses Horwitz was born on June 19th 110 years ago. That’s the boss stooge, Moe Howard. “I’ll squeeze the cider out of your Adam’s apple.”
The Statue of Liberty arrived at Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor on June 19, 1885.
The statue is constructed of hand-shaped copper sheets, assembled on a framework of steel supports designed by engineers Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. For transit to America, the figure was broken down into 350 separate pieces and packed in 214 crates. The Statue of Liberty sits within the star-shaped walls of the former Fort Wood, rising to a height of 305 feet on a pedestal designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt.
BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
In looking at the vice-presidential selections of the past five decades or so since television has expanded the regionality of presidential elections, it’s clear that, in reality, both major parties rarely have nominated VP candidates as a strategic electoral vote collector, and to the extent they have set about deliberately trying to add a state with a VP pick it has almost never worked.
FiveThirtyEight.com has the specifics.
This is excerpted from an essay on today’s New York Times Op-Ed page. I recommend you read the entire article.
This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.
By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.
“This is ugliest stretch of road I know. And I am from New Mexico. I know from ugly roads.
Karen Fayeth from I-5 in central California.
NewMexiKen learned over the weekend that grandson Mack is planning to compete in a triathlon August 9th. The event includes running, swimming and biking. You have to admire a 7-year-old with moxie to try such a grueling event.
And it becomes particularly special because Mack can’t ride a bike. He’s having to learn. His mom reported Monday evening: “Today we moved to the sidewalk and he got the hang of balancing and started to go longer and longer distances before crashing. Eventually (after about 100 crashes) I got him to use the brakes and put his foot down when he felt unsteady, rather than just crashing. But it is still a 50/50 proposition that he will end a ride on the ground.”
When a neighbor girl asked if she could help, Mack replied, “No, I’m in training.”
NewMexiKen’s friend Don has an equally impressive athletic ambition. Don is 45 and also prepping for a triathlon. Except Don doesn’t know how to swim.
Good luck learning Don. It’ll be hard to compete if you have to wear floaties.
The MotherJones Blog has this, extracted from a Wall Street Journal article:
(1) Dr. Rex Rammell is a conservative independent who is running in the Idaho senate race to replace Sen. Larry Craig. He is only running because the Republican in the race, a man named Jim Risch, once had Fish and Game Department officers kill 43 members of Rammell’s private elk herd. Risch was serving as interim governor at the time. Rammell, who staged a sit-in on a fresh elk carcass that game officers were trying to remove, vowed at the time “to see Jim Risch never gets elected in this state again.”
(2) Rammell’s daughter is Miss Idaho USA. After winning her crown, she refused to have her photograph taken with Risch, due to the aforementioned dispute between Risch and her father. She called Risch a “weasel.”
(3) One of the fringe candidates in the race (okay, one of the other fringe candidates in the race) is named Pro-Life. That’s his whole name. He is an organic-strawberry farmer who, apparently, cares passionately and exclusively about the rights of the unborn.
Keep in mind the senate seat they’re after is that of Larry “Tap Tap” Craig.
Dana Goldstein restarts the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings controversy.
Be sure to read the first comment.
Jefferson often seems to NewMexiKen to represent that great Linus Van Pelt line: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.”
Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, filed this report on Aidan, who will be five in September:
This morning, Aidan came into my bed at about 6:00am and woke me up by saying, “Aidan, reporting for duty.” Snuggle duty.
We took coloring books to the pool, to watch Mack’s swim team practice, and didn’t wear our bathing suits because it was so cold today. Since we didn’t get suited up, we forgot a hat for Aidan. He was so concerned, and although we sat in the shade at the pool, whenever he got up to go to the bathroom or go say hello to someone he held a coloring book across his face as a sun shield.
A few days ago our electricity went out in a storm. We played and watched the storm for about half an hour and then Aidan announced he was going to watch TV. I laughed, “Aidan, the TV won’t work. It uses power.” He replied, “The TV has powers?!”
Yes, magical, magical powers.
Firefox 3 is out for all platforms. According to reports there have been more than 7 million downloads in 24 hours.
I’ve been using the Mac version of Firefox 3 for a couple of weeks — rather than Safari. I like it.
This Mental_Floss quiz is too easy, but fun. Altered States
Barack Obama has the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE tattooed on his stomach. It’s upside-down, so he can read it while doing sit-ups.
There’s only one artist on Barack Obama’s iPod: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY.
Barack Obama is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. His favorite book is the BIBLE, which he has memorized. His name means HE WHO LOVES JESUS in the ancient language of Aramaic. He is PROUD that Jesus was an American.
There’s more by Christopher Beam.
