… but isn’t it intolerably condescending of the political commentariat to keep talking and writing about whether Hillary Clinton’s supporters will switch to McCain because he selected a woman as his running mate? The two women, Clinton and Palin, agree on almost nothing.
I am not aware that women make political choices based solely on gender without regard to the issues.
Update: No, it’s not just me.
As an American, you have an obligation to support your presidential candidate (Obama or McCain). So, every day until Election Day, when you drive, show who you will vote for:
If you support the policies and character of Barack Obama, please drive with your headlights on during the day.
If you support John S. McCain, please drive with your headlights off at night.
Spread the word.
… was authorized on this date in 1964. According to the National Park Service:
Fort Bowie commemorates in its 1000 acres, the story of the bitter conflict between the Chiricahua Apaches and the United States military. For more than 30 years Fort Bowie and Apache Pass were the focal point of military operations eventually culminating in the surrender of Geronimo in 1886 and the banishment of the Chiricahuas to Florida and Alabama. It was the site of the Bascom Affair, a wagon train massacre, and the battle of Apache Pass, where a large force of Chiricahua Apaches under Mangus Colorados and Cochise fought the California Volunteers. The remains of Fort Bowie today are carefully preserved, the adobe walls of various post buildings and the ruins of a Butterfield Stage Station.
Visiting Fort Bowie requires a three mile round trip hike — unless you use the handicap entrance, which they keep a secret until you show up after walking a mile-and-a-half on a July afternoon with a daughter eight months pregnant and a two-year-old grandson.
Here in Albuquerque we have two minutes less daylight each day now in our headlong rush for the equinox in three weeks (September 22). There’s more than three minutes less light in Portland, Oregon, today than yesterday; two-and-a-half minutes less in Washington; about two minutes, 20 seconds, less each day in Louisville; and three minutes less daylight each day in Leland, Michigan.
Oh, and in Fairbanks, there’s six minutes, 44 seconds, less daylight today than yesterday.
Oh, and there’s no 90s in the forecast. Fall IS here. (Officially Albuquerque reached 97º four times during the summer, last on August 1st. In the past five years we’ve gotten to 100ºF just one time officially.)
… was established as a national battlefield site on this date in 1890. It was redesignated a national battlefield in 1978.
23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862. The Battle of Antietam ended the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s first invasion into the North and led to Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
It was the bloodiest day in American history. Among the battlefields I’ve visited, Antietam is my favorite, perhaps because it less congested and monumented-up than Gettysburg. It retains, it seems, more of its 1862 feel.
According to an item at The Writer’s Almanac in 2005:
It was on this day in 30 BC that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt killed herself with a snake she had smuggled into her chamber where she was held captive by Octavian, formerly the political rival of her lover Mark Antony. Octavian had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at the Battle of Actium and had taken Cleopatra prisoner. When Cleopatra learned that Octavian planned to parade her as part of his triumphant return to Rome, she planned her own suicide. For centuries, it was assumed that the snake she used was an asp, but it is now thought that the snake was an Egyptian cobra.
Other sources say it was August 12, not August 30, so I guess those Writer’s Almanac folks got 30 BC and August 30 mixed up. Whatever.
Cleopatra was Greek, the last queen of Ptolemaic Egypt. When she was 17-18, Cleopatra and her 12-year-old brother/husband inherited the throne from their father. They fought over who was really the ruler, with Ptolemy XIII emerging as victor until Julius Caesar showed up. And the rest, as they say, was history.
Cleo was the mother of four children, one with Julius Gaius Caesar (31 years her senior) and three with Mark Antony (14 years her senior). Cleopatra was 39 when she died.
Of course, Titus Pullo really fathered her oldest child, right viewers of Rome?
Ted Williams is 90 today. Again as he has in recent years, Williams is planning to spend the day hanging out and just chillin’.
It’s also the birthday —
… of Ellen Muriel Deason, known to us as Kitty Wells, and famous for “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
It wasn’t God who made Honky Tonk angels
As you said in the words of your song
Too many times married men think they’re still single
That has caused many a good girl to go wrong
… of Bill Daily. He was the goofy other guy on I Dream of Jeannie, and the neighbor on The Bob Newhart Show. Daily is 81 today.
… of the other Buffet, Warren. The one who’s not wasting away again in Margaritaville. The billionaire is 78.
In February 2008, he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world, worth about $62 billion. Despite his massive wealth, he lives relatively frugally, still residing in the home he bought in 1958 for $31,500, driving his own car, and allotting himself an annual salary from his investment company of about $100,000.
… of Peggy Lipton. The Mod Squad member is 61.
… of Lewis Black. The comedian, and regular on The Daily Show, is 60.
… of basketball hall-of-famer Robert Parish. He’s 55. Parish played in 1,611 NBA games, the record.
… of Cameron Diaz. Princess Fiona is 36.
… of Andy Roddick. He’s 26.
Fred MacMurray was born on this date in 1908. MacMurray required that all his scenes for My Three Sons be filmed at one time. After MacMurray was done, the rest of the cast started filming the shows in the normal sequence. IMDb has MacMurray saying: “The two films I did with Billy Wilder, ‘Double Indemnity’ and the ‘The Apartment’ are the only two parts I did in my entire career that required any acting.” It showed Fred, it showed.
Oscar-nominee Raymond Massey was born on this date in 1896. Massey received the nomination for Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Massey, related to the Masseys of Massey-Ferguson (tractors and such), was in a lot of westerns and did a lot of TV.
Best actress Oscar-winner Shirley Booth was born on this date in 1898. Booth won the award for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sadly, she’s probably better known for playing the maid Hazel on the sitcom.
Barack Obama’s audience for his acceptance speech likely topped 40 million people, and the Democratic gathering that nominated him was a more popular television event than any other political convention in history.
More people watched Obama speak from a packed stadium in Denver on Thursday than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year, Nielsen Media Research said Friday. …
…
Through four days, the Democratic convention was seen in an average of 22.5 million households. No other convention — Republican or Democratic — had been seen in as many homes since Nielsen began keeping these records for the Kennedy-Nixon campaign in 1960. There weren’t enough television sets in American homes to have possibly beaten this record in years before that.
Yahoo! News
I woke up this morning after the strangest dream. The whole thing was like a made for TV movie; a comedy. Some totally unqualified small state governor — amiable, attractive, intelligent, but just not prepared — gets selected to be vice president in a crazy effort to win the election. The governor has a household full of kids, eats mooseburgers, and her husband is — get this — a professional snowmobile racer she calls “First Dude.” The whole thing was just wacky.
I woke up before the dream turned from comedy into nightmare.
“In England, an elderly Swedish tourist lay down on the luggage conveyor belt, after her suitcase, believing that was how she was told to board her plane. Confused? Or prophetic?”
