Day: December 21, 2008

Momma’s girl

Saturday, six-year-old Kiley, the second oldest of The Sweeties, was decidedly unhappy about being separated from her mother even for three hours to attend a play with her grandma.

Her grandma asked, “Kiley, I’ve been thinking about going to Denver and that you could go along and visit Sofie.” (Sofie is Kiley’s five-year-old cousin.) “If you’re six and can’t leave your mom long enough to go to a play, how old would you have to be to go to Denver and leave your mom for five days?”

Kiley thought about it for a moment and replied, “Thirty-six.”

Best sports line of the day

On the first play of the second half, the Lions broke the huddle with 12 men. The first play of the second half. Now, it’s important to keep two things in mind:

1. The Lions had known for nearly two hours that they would have the ball at the start of the second half.

2. Only 11 men are allowed on the field at a time. That is a new rule for the 2008 season. Oh, wait, my bad: That’s actually been the rule for, like, 100 years.

Michael Rosenberg writing about the futility of the 0-15 Detroit Lions.

2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid: 52 mpg and the darkness before dawn

Dan Neil informs us that all is not bad in Motown. Go read it all (because Neil is the best), but here’s the teaser:

The 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid, and its twin, the Mercury Milan Hybrid, are mid-to-full-size sedans that seat five in surprising comfort and offer a full-size trunk measuring around 12 cubic feet. They measure 190.6 inches long and weigh a goodly 3,720 pounds. The gas-electric output is 191 horsepower and zero to 60 mph acceleration is under 9 seconds.

The retail price of a nicely equipped Fusion Hybrid — with blandishments such as rearview camera, blind-spot alert and 17-inch alloy wheels — is $27,270. With the applicable federal tax credit, the car should cost consumers about $25,000, I estimate (final numbers have not been announced).

On a test drive of a Fusion Hybrid last week in West L.A. traffic, I managed, without much trouble, to get 52 mpg in mixed city-highway driving.

Knucklehead

I’ve told Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen and the mother of three boys, that I intend to get the book Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka by Jon Scieszka so I can read it aloud to her boys my next visit.

From the review:

Scieszka gets children, and he gets their humor. Especially boy humor. He tells the truth about what really goes on when parents aren’t looking. (Chapter 34, “Fire”: “There is something about boys and fire that is like fish and water, birds and air, cats and hairballs. They just go together.” Good thing Scieszka’s mom was a nurse.

The book’s design is also inviting. There are 38 chapters of two to three pages each, with titles like “Who Did It?” With the timing of a stand-up comedian, Scieszka writes in “Watch Your Brothers”: “That’s what my mom used to tell me and Jim — ‘Watch your brothers.’ So we did. We watched Jeff roll off the couch. We watched Brian dig in the plants and eat the dirt. We watched Gregg lift up the lid on the toilet and splash around in the water.”

As someone who grew up with three brothers, I am familiar with boy knuckleheadedness. Scieszka makes the case for certain truths of boyhood, like why nothing beats a good game of “slaughter ball.” “One guy would throw the football up in the air. The rest of us would try to catch it. Then once you caught it, you had to run around and try not to get ‘slaughtered’ by everyone else. It was a great game because you got to smash into a lot of people and then end up in a giant pile.” Did you know it takes only seven pounds of pressure to break a collarbone?

December 21st ought to be a national holiday

The Solstice was at 5:04 this morning Mountain Time.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

The Writer’s Almanac (2005)

Today is the birthday

… of Joe Paterno. The football coach at Penn State is 82.

… of Phil Donahue. The talk show host is 73.

… of Jane Fonda. The two-time Oscar-winning actress is 71. Miss Fonda has been nominated for the best actress Oscar six times, winning for Klute and Coming Home. She was also nominated for best supporting actress for On Golden Pond.

… of Carla Thomas. Gee Whiz, she’s 66.

… of Michael Tilson Thomas, he’s 64.

His grandparents, the Thomashefskys, were famous Yiddish theatrical stars. He graduated from the school of music at the University of Southern California and then got a fellowship conducting at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires. At 23, he was the youngest assistant conductor ever hired by the Boston Symphony.

He was the protégé of Leonard Bernstein, and is frequently compared to him. Like Bernstein, he stepped in at a major performance when the principal conductor got sick, and so made his reputation at age 24. He was founder of the New World Symphony in Miami, and in 1995 he went to direct the San Francisco Symphony, and he’s been there ever since. He hosts a classical music series on PBS called Keeping Score.

He said, “I believe that music is the most important when the music stops. When a piece ends, that’s when I really measure what effect it had on me or those who heard it.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Samuel L. Jackson. Mace Windu is 60. Jackson was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.

… of Chris Evert. The tennis hall-of-famer is 54.

… of Jane Kaczmarek. Malcolm’s mom is 53.

… of Ray Romano. Raymond is 51.

… of Kiefer Sutherland. He’s 42.

… of Julie Delpy. The actress, who was nominated for a writing Oscar for Before Sunset, is 39.

Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. He died in 1993.

The singer, songwriter, and composer was born in Baltimore, Maryland (1940). Zappa’s father was a meteorologist in the Army who studied the effects of weather on explosions and poisonous gases. The gas masks and chemical paraphernalia his dad brought home were some of young Zappa’s first toys. When Frank Zappa started playing atonal classical music on his electric guitar, he said that his goal was to make sounds that would cause people to run from the room the moment they heard it. He was also a political activist, and he once proposed that the United States form a fourth branch of government devoted entirely to creativity.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Joseph Stalin was born on this date in 1879. This from his obituary in 1953:

Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.

During the second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.

The New York Times