Day: January 2, 2009

Making the Bad Worse

Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:

Remember how the Smithsonian’s American History Museum always felt like a museum that was fun and interesting in spite of itself? Like, the museum itself was so antiquated and the exhibits were so boring and old-fashioned…yet you still enjoyed visiting simply because the items they had to display were so great?

Well, they closed the museum for more than two years, spent more than $85 million and managed to make it…even worse.

Oh my gosh, we went there today and we were so disappointed. They’ve renovated the building, but they have the same old exhibits, except even smaller and more cramped, with fewer items on display. All the exhibits are like cramped in corners and there is very little to see, and lines everywhere to even get into these tiny rooms.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Reid was SO UPSET because we’d promised him he could see Indiana Jones’ hat. Nope. The entire entertainment/music/sports exhibit is now one room about the size of my living room with about three interesting things in it (Kermit, Oscar the Grouch, and the Ruby Slippers).

Yuck. At least the Museum of Natural History never disappoints.

The Best Sportswriting of 2008

The Daily Fix is a blog at The Wall Street Journal that takes a “daily look at the best sportswriting on the Web.”

The average Daily Fix contains a dozen links to sportswriting from around the Web, which over a year adds up to some 3,000 sports stories we thought were worthy of a look. Some pieces stuck with us weeks and even months later. For the fifth straight year, we’re picking the 10 columns or features we found most memorable.

Here they are.

Random stuff

I read somewhere that a survey sent to economists asking when they thought the recession would end did not even include any dates in 2009.

We saw Slumdog Millionaire Wednesday evening and it lived up to its hype. Definitely one you should see and a likely prospect to take the best picture Oscar. The audience stayed longer into the titles than any in my recent memory and I’m thinking they didn’t want the experience to be over. (It’s a story of a young man who succeeds remarkably on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” He is accused of cheating and explains how he knew the answers with flashbacks to his growing up. The child actors are phenomenal; the whole film fascinating and poignant.)

You know how sometimes after you’ve been driving too long, even after you get out of the car it still feels like you are moving? Yesterday when I finally turned off the TV after the Orange Bowl (way to go Virginia Tech!), I could still hear football announcers in the house. Three games back-to-back is really too much for me.

But I must confess I switched back and forth a lot during the Orange Bowl to the movie Waitress on HBO. The film had all the signs of a Lifetime channel movie, but was entertaining nonetheless, perhaps because Keri Russell is about the cutest person on the planet.

The guy that invented the button on the remote that jumps back-and-forth between two channels ought to be given a damn Nobel Prize.

When do you take down your Christmas decorations (including the tree)?

What’s With the Home Underdogs in the N.F.L.?

Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt looks at this weekend’s NFL games and concludes:

Home underdogs are of particular interest right now because, remarkably, in all four playoff games this weekend, the home team is the underdog. If I were a betting man (or more accurately, if I had an account I could bet on), I would be hammering the home underdogs this weekend.

Click the link to read Levitt’s reasoning.

January 2 is the hottie birthdate

Tia Carrere, 42.

Cuba Gooding Jr., 41.

Christy Turlington, 40.

Taye Diggs, 38.

Paz Vega, 33.

Kate Bosworth, 26.

Sally Rand was born on this date in 1904. Ms. Rand was a burlesque dancer, famed for her feather fan and bubble dances. She was portrayed in the movie The Right Stuff, shown performing for the Mercury Astronauts in 1962 when she was 58. Ms. Rand died in 1979.

Issac Asimov

… was born in Petrovichi, Russia, on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac profile today includes this:

His family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old, and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. He spent most of his time working in the family store, and he was fascinated by the shop’s newspaper stand, which sold the latest issues of popular magazines. When his father finally relented and let him read pulp fiction, Asimov started reading science fiction obsessively.

He started writing science fiction as well. He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which includes the passage, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov went home and wrote the story “Nightfall” (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. It’s been anthologized over and over, and many people still consider it the best science fiction short story ever written.

Asimov died in 1992.

Best line from a mother any day

“Byron surprised Jill with a short birthday trip to New York, where they saw a show and actually had dinner in a restaurant where crayons were not given out with the menus.”

Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen and the mother of three sons, in Jill and Byron’s holiday newsletter, 2005.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

… was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac in 2003:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

And, as noted in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer, where Cherry-Garrard’s tale is listed second:

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”