Debby, official younger sister of NewMexiKen, has graced these pages from the earliest days with her comments and from time-to-time her stories. You may remember not long ago reading about her day on horseback rounding up cattle.
Anyway for family reasons — among others, she just became a grandma — Debby has moved back to Arizona. And she loves being out in the country. How far out in the country you ask. Would you believe she just moved into a town and got P.O. Box 5?
Wholesale — that’s wholesale — gasoline hit $4.85 today, up from $3 Tuesday because the refineries in southeast Texas are closed and aren’t making any gasoline for now.
That’s wholesale — four-eighty-five a gallon.
But the price of crude oil is down to near $100 you say. How can that be?
Because the southeast Texas refineries are closed. They aren’t buying any crude oil because they aren’t using what they have because they aren’t making any gasoline.
… but it is amusing.
Well, it’s really only amusing because of who they are. Get Warren Buffet and they’d really have something.
I sense a new NewMexiKen poll coming on. Who’s the worst actor, Seinfeld or Gates?
I have had a strong and a long relationship on national security, I’ve been involved in every national crisis that this nation has faced since Beirut, I understand the issues, I understand and appreciate the enormity of the challenge we face from radical Islamic extremism.
I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training.
I wasn’t a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn’t a governor for a short period of time.
— John McCain, Republican debate, October 21, 2007
… was authorized on this date 44 years ago. From the National Park Service:
Canyonlands National Park preserves a colorful landscape of sedimentary sandstones eroded into countless canyons, mesas and buttes by the Colorado River and its tributaries. The Colorado and Green rivers divide the park into four districts: the Island in the Sky, the Needles, the Maze and the rivers themselves. While the districts share a primitive desert atmosphere, each retains its own character and offers different opportunities for exploration and learning.
George Jones is 77.
In many ways Jones is one of country music’s last vital links to its own rural past—a relic from a long-gone time and place before cable TV and FM rock radio and shopping malls, an era when life still revolved around the Primitive Baptist Church, the honky-tonk down the road, and Saturday nights listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. The fact that Jones himself has changed little over the years, and at times seems to be genuinely bewildered by the immensity of his own talent and the acclaim it has brought him, have merely enhanced his credibility.
Like Hank Williams before him, Jones has emerged—quite unintentionally—as an archetype of an era that most likely will never come around again. He is a singer who has earned his stature the hard way: by living his songs. His humble origins, his painful divorces, his legendary drinking and drugging, and his myriad financial, legal, and emotional problems have, over the years, merely confirmed his sincerity and enhanced his mystique, earning him a cachet that, in country music circles, approaches canonization.
Maria Muldaur is 65. Muldaur, famous for “Midnight at the Oasis,” has an album of Shirley Temple songs (2004).
Joe Pantoliano is 57.
Ruben Studdard is 30.
Yao Ming is 28.
Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson is 27 today.
Jesse Owens was born on September 12th in 1913. ESPN.com ranked Owens the sixth best athlete of the 20th century:
On May 25 [1935] in Ann Arbor, Mich., Owens couldn’t even bend over to touch his knees. But as the sophomore settled in for his first race, he said the pain “miraculously disappeared.”
3:15 — The “Buckeye Bullet” ran the 100-yard dash in 9.4 seconds to tie the world record.
3:25 — In his only long jump, he leaped 26-8 1/4, a world record that would last 25 years.
3:34 — His 20.3 seconds bettered the world record in the 220-yard dash.
4:00 — With his 22.6 seconds in the 220-yard low hurdles, he became the first person to break 23 seconds in the event.
For most athletes, Jesse Owens’ performance one spring afternoon in 1935 would be the accomplishment of a lifetime. In 45 minutes, he established three world records and tied another.
But that was merely an appetizer for Owens. In one week in the summer of 1936, on the sacred soil of the Fatherland, the master athlete humiliated the master race.
NewMexiKen posts this every September 12, so no need to be different this — the sixth — year. Here’s what I wrote two years ago:
View 28 of the 100 Photographs that Changed the World, originally from Life magazine. NewMexiKen has posted this link each year on this date and I hesitated this morning. I mean, why repeat it for the fourth time?
I then went and looked at the 28 photos and said to myself, “Oh, that’s why.”
… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:
Live along the Texas coast and don’t want to evacuate? Consider this.
Instead of relying on a “Good Samaritan” policy – the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors – the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave, Mr. Judkins told The Daily Press in Newport News, rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.
“It’s cold, but it’s effective,” Mr. Judkins explained.
Reported by John Tierney in 2005.
Palin doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the Bush Doctrine is. Literally, not a clue about the guiding U.S. foreign policy principle of the last seven years. When she tried to fudge it, her ignorance on the issue was even more glaring.
Second, she really didn’t want to answer an important question about U.S. strikes in Pakistan. It’s not like this was a curveball — the issue was in yesterday’s New York Times. Eventually, after trying to wiggle out of the question, Palin eventually seemed to support unilateral strikes, which contradicts the stated McCain policy.
Third, Palin believes Russia was “unprovoked” in its military incursion against Georgia. That’s just wrong.
Fourth, instead of waving off hypothetical questions about wars with massive nuclear powers, Palin openly suggested it “perhaps” would be necessary to go to war with Russia.
James Fallows explains what Sarah Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine (in her interview with Charles Gibson) reveals. This is an excerpt from a longer piece worth reading in full.
Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don’t. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we’re able to talk and think about it in a “rounded” way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I’d really like to hear answered is A.
Here’s the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.
Mention a name or theme — Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong’s comeback, Venus and Serena — and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.. . .
What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.
ALL NEIGHBORHOODS…AND POSSIBLY ENTIRE COASTAL COMMUNITIES…
WILL BE INUNDATED DURING THE PERIOD OF PEAK STORM TIDE. PERSONS
NOT HEEDING EVACUATION ORDERS IN SINGLE FAMILY ONE OR TWO STORY
HOMES MAY FACE CERTAIN DEATH.
