Veronica, one of the two official daughters-in-law of NewMexiKen, posted this photo taken from their location this weekend in Colorado. Sigh.
Click for larger image
No way to set this one from dooce up without just copying the whole thing, so you’ll just have to click.
And don’t miss Daily Chuck.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A check-cashing store employee was still recovering at an area hospital Thursday after a Comcast employee attacked and robbed her, police said.
At about 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, the man walked into the Ace Checks Cashed on Southeast 73rd Avenue and Powell Street, where he attacked and robbed a woman who works in the store, police said. Officers have identified the employee as 37-year-old Nicole Loundree, of Portland.
Workers at a nearby business said they noticed something suspicious at the check-cashing store and then saw a man in a Comcast uniform rush out and leave in a Comcast van.
He was arrested shortly thereafter.
That is WAY TOO CLOSE to SnoLepard’s house. What kind of a neighborhood do you live in Bro?
Now that Sen. Coburn (R-OK) has said he will not answer any questions about his conversations with Sen. Ensign (R-NV) because he was acting as his physician (and spiritual counselor), TPM Reader DE reminds us that Dr. Coburn is an OB/Gyn.
A deeper scandal than we’d ever imagined?
On Facebook a friend (a relative actually) noted that “work is being done now to transfer ownership of General Motors to the government. ‘Government Motors’, the new GM. scary.”
Why scary?
It’s not as if General Motors has been well managed before now.
The Federal Government will own a majority of GM, it’s true, but the Canadian Government, the United Auto Workers and current bondholders will also have shares. Those organizations may not make it seem any better, but multiple owners makes me feel better. The intent is to sell the stock once it has value.
Uncle Sam will own the majority of the stock, but it will not manage the company day-to-day. Government workers won’t be on the assembly lines or designing the cars.
If, as most of our political leaders determined, we need to sustain GM (and Chrysler) for economic and national security reasons, than it’s better, I think, that we actually get stock for our money and not just loan IOUs.
Is it also scary that the Federal Government manages air traffic control? I’ve not seen any planes falling out of the skies.
Is it also scary that the Federal Government sends checks to more than 100 million people who depend on Social Security every month? I’ve heard complaints of red tape but none that people don’t get their money timely.
Is it also scary that the the Federal Government runs prisons? I haven’t heard of federal prisoners running loose across the land?
And so on. I’m not saying that the Federal Government is perfect — I had 30 years experience within it to learn differently. I am not saying that taking over auto manufacturers is something that we should be pleased was necessary.
I am saying that taking a temporary majority ownership in General Motors isn’t cause for particular alarm.
Ed Ames, the singer and actor, is 82. Ames, whose parents were Ukrainian Jews, played the Indian Mingo on “Daniel Boone.” He was responsible for the classic incident with Johnny Carson throwing a tomahawk. Ames threw at a two-dimensional silhouette and managed to add some three-dimensional anatomy. Ed, with his brothers Joe, Gene and Vic — the Ames Brothers — had several top hits in the early 1950s. Their actual surname was Urick.
Donald Rumsfeld is 77.
Doctor and author Oliver Sacks is 76 today.
He has devoted his career to studying people with unusual neurological disorders, and writing about them so that they seem like real people and not just case studies. His first book was Migraine (1970), about migraine headaches, and it got good reviews. In the 1960s, he started working with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic that occurred between 1916 and 1927. These people had been in institutions ever since, still alive but in unresponsive bodies. Sacks noticed that many people had similar reactions as people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, so he decided to treat them with the drug levodopa. Many of them woke up and were cognizant for the first time in 40 years. But it was extremely stressful for many of them to have lost so much time like that, and most of them went back to sleep. Sacks wrote a book about it, Awakenings (1973). In 1990, it was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
He went on to write several more books in the same vein, including Seeing Voices (1989), The Island of the Colorblind (1997), and the best-selling book of essays The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about people living with a variety of neurological disorders. His most recent book is Musicophilia (2007), about the sometimes bizarre connections between music and the brain, and the ways in which music operates on everyone from people with severe neurological disorders to ordinary people who can’t get a tune out of their heads.
Brian Dennehy is 71 — guess he’ll be playing one of the old folks in any re-make of Cocoon. Dennehy won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for his portrayal of Willy Loman in the 2000 made-for-TV presentation of Death of a Salesman.
Chris Cooper is 58. Cooper has appeared in over 50 films and television productions, winning a best supporting actor Oscar for Adaptation.
Jimmy Smits is 54. Smits was nominated six times for an Emmy for supporting actor for L.A. Law. He won once. He was nominated five times for best actor for NYPD Blue. No nominations for his work as Senator Bail Organa in Star Wars. But then, he was elected President on West Wing.
Tom Hanks is 53 today. Hanks has been nominated for the Academy Award for best actor five times, winning for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). His other nominations were for Big, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Kelly McGillis is 52, Courtney Love is 45, and Fred Savage is 33.
And Orenthal James Simpson is 62 today.
Posted here originally two years ago today.
Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness
As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”
Trust me, too.
First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.
… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …
“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”
Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.
The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.
Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.
On Saturday (the 4th) the Earth (that’s us) was its furthest from the Sun for the year.
I was thinking the Sun was acting a little distant lately.
(Not distant enough. It’s 90º at 10 am.)
English and American troops under British Major General Edward Braddock were routed by French and Indian forces near Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) on this date in 1755. The leading colonial officer, George Washington, had two horses shot out from under him, his coat torn by bullets and his hat shot off, but — as you may have heard — he survived.
I read both Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yesterday.
I was thinking maybe a couple of Bugs Bunny comic books ought to do it today.
Jill says she’s in — and sent along this news story.
A woman with a long history of driving violations had a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when she plowed into the back of a pickup truck on the Capital Beltway, sending the pickup over a guardrail and hurtling down a 60-foot embankment onto its roof in Montgomery County, authorities said yesterday.
The two men in the Nissan pickup, who were driving home to Virginia from a construction job site, were killed.
31 million viewers watched on 19 networks, with 8.9 million watching on cable (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Headline News) and another 14.3 million on the broadcast networks. Better ratings than Pres. Reagan’s funeral in 2004 (some 20 million viewers) but not quite Princess Di level (over 33 million).
That would mean of course, that approximately 273 million Americans did not watch.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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