“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. . . .”
Annie Savoy
Pitchers and catchers begin reporting in two weeks.
Today is the birthday
… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 89.
… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 79. Let’s play two.
… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 73.
The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.
… of Queen Beatrix. She’s 72. Do you know what country is she queen of?
… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 63.
… of KC. He’s 59. And his band was?
Minnie Driver is 40. Justin Timberlake is 29.
Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds, would have been 73 today. She died two years ago.
Jean Simmons would have been 81 today; she died nine days ago. The actress was in such classic films as The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry and was twice nominated for an Oscar — Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).
Norman Mailer was born 87 years ago today. He died in November 2007. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Mailer.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on this date in 1919.
As a competitor, Robinson was the Dodgers’ leader. In his 10 seasons, they won six National League pennants–1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. They lost another in the 1951 playoff with the New York Giants, and another to the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the 1950 season.
In 1949, when he batted .342 to win the league title and drove in 124 runs, he was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. In 1947, he had been voted the rookie of the year.
“The only way to beat the Dodgers,” said Warren Giles, then the president of the Cincinnati Reds, later the National League president, “is to keep Robinson off the bases.”
He had a career batting average of .311. Primarily a line drive hitter, he accumulated only 137 home runs, with a high of 19 in both 1951 and 1952.
But on a team with such famous sluggers as Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Roy Campanella, who was also black, he was the cleanup hitter, fourth in the batting order, a tribute to his ability to mover along teammates on base.
But his personality flared best as a baserunner. He had a total of 197 stolen bases. He stole home 11 times, the most by any player in the post-World War II era.
Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Merton.
John O’Hara was born on this date in 1905.
[O’Hara] went on to become one of the most popular serious writers of his lifetime, writing many best-selling novels, including Appointment in Samarra (1934) and A Rage to Live (1949). Most critics consider his best work to be his short stories, which were published as the Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984). He holds the record for the greatest number of short stories published by a single author in The New Yorker magazine.
And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Grey.
When I am at home and check some websites there are ads saying Albuquerque mom make $567 (or some such figure) a week working at home. I am on the road tonight, far from home, and on the web there’s a photo of a woman making money working at home and she looks identical to the Albuquerque woman.
Must be her twin sister.
“I am sure I will continue my unbroken streak of mindless devotion to Apple and find a way to love the iPad, no matter how expensive and unnecessary it is.”
Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker
Me too.
“Adam from Bonanza has died. And if you know who Adam from Bonanza was, you’re probably not doing too well yourself.”
“Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.
The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in “Synecdoche” (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He’s like a
novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another. Those who felt the film was disorganized or incoherent might benefit from seeing it again. It isn’t about a narrative, although it pretends to be. It’s about a method, the method by which we organize our lives and define our realities.
Jules Feiffer is 81 today.
He said of his childhood: “The only thing I wanted to be was grown up. Because I was a terrible flop as a child. You cannot be a successful boy in America if you cannot throw or catch a ball.” He decided early on that he wanted to be a comic-strip artist, and when he was a teenager, he went to work for cartoonist Will Eisner. Then, he started drawing his own cartoons in the pages of The Village Voice. His strip in The Village Voice was one of the first cartoon strips to deal with adult themes such as sex, politics, and psychiatry. For most of his career, he has drawn and written all of his work in Central Park, which he considers his office.
Bob Uecker is 75.
Scott Glenn is 69 today.
One-time Oscar nominee David Strathairn is 61.
Lucinda Williams is 57.
Eddie Van Halen is 55.
Ellen DeGeneres is 52.
Wayne Gretzky is 49.
Paul Newman was born 85 years ago today. Newman was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar eight times, winning for The Color of Money in 1986, but not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, or Nobody’s Fool. He was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor for Road to Perdition at age 78.
The most overrated — especially by himself — person in American history was born on this date in 1880. That’s Douglas MacArthur.
Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco on January 26, 1872.
Miss Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering. During her tenure at Berkeley, Morgan developed a keen interest in architecture which is thought to have been fostered by her mother’s cousin, Pierre Le Brun, who designed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in New York City. At Berkeley one of her instructors, Bernard Maybeck, encouraged her to pursue her architectural studies in Paris at the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts.
Arriving in Paris in 1896, she was initially refused admission because the Ecole had never before admitted a woman. After a two-year wait, Julia Morgan gained entrance to the prestigious program and became the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture. While in Paris, Morgan also found a mentor in her professor, Bernard Chaussemiche, for whom she worked as a drafter.
Soon after her graduation from the Ecole, Julia Morgan returned to her native San Francisco and began working for architect John Galen Howard. At the time Howard was the supervising architect of the University of California’s Master Plan, the commission of which he won by default from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Morgan worked on the Master Plan drawing the elevations and designing the decorative details for the Mining Building built in memory of George Hearst. During this time Morgan also designed the Hearst Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus.
…Over the course of the next 28 years, Morgan supervised nearly every aspect of construction at Hearst Castle including the purchase of everything from Spanish antiquities to Icelandic Moss to reindeer for the Castle’s zoo. She personally designed most of the structures, grounds, pools, animal shelters and workers’ camp down to the minutest detail. Additionally, Morgan worked closely with Hearst to integrate his vast art collection into the structures and grounds at San Simeon. She also worked on projects for Hearst’s other properties including Jolon, Wyntoon, Babicore, the “Hopi” residence at the Grand Canyon, the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Memorial Gymnasium at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Examiner Building, several of his Beverly Hills residences and Marion Davies’ beach house in Santa Monica.
… is celebrating its 95th anniversary today.
Established on January 26, 1915, Rocky Mountain National Park is a living showcase of the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. With elevations ranging from 8,000 feet in the wet, grassy valleys to 14,259 feet at the weather-ravaged top of Long’s Peak, a visitor to the park has opportunities for countless breathtaking experiences and adventures.
Elk, mule deer, moose, bighorn sheep, black bears, coyotes, cougars, eagles, hawks and scores of smaller animals delight wildlife-watchers of all ages. Wildflower-lovers are never disappointed in June and July when the meadows and hillsides are splashed with botanical color. Autumn visitors can relax among the golden aspens or enjoy the rowdier antics of the elk rut (mating season).
“The oldest person to summit Longs Peak was Rev. William Butler, who climbed it on September 2, 1926, his 85th birthday. In 1932, Clerin ‘Zumie’ Zumwalt summited Longs Peak 53 times.”
… joined the Union as the 26th state on this date in 1837.
Click image for larger version.
Addendum: The first bullet above is a quotation from michigan.gov, the “Official State of Michigan Portal.” It should be corrected. It is the equivalent of saying, “Derived from the European word …”
There are no “Indian” words. Indian is not a language.
OK, I’m cheating. I didn’t take this photo (and neither did Jill). It comes from the AP.
Number 85, Pierre Garçon is American-born of Haitian parents. Yesterday he caught more passes than any receiver in AFC championship game history; 11 for 151 yards. The record was nine.
And then there is this, from the Palm Beach Post:
Even amid the bedlam of 67,650 screaming fans Sunday, that rang true. Dwight Lowery was one of a few Jets who took a shot at containing Garcon, the two of them fighting for something only one could have, yet even then, even amid the usual trash-talk, Lowery pulled Garcon aside.
“He said he was going to help me out with Haiti,” Garcon said. “He told me during the game, man. He said to get in contact with him and a couple of guys on their team.”
Slate’s tech writer Farhad Manjoo has slurped from the Apple tablet Kool-Aid.
The reader wondered whether that would ever change. “In short, when will the computer become an appliance?”
If we’re lucky, it’ll happen this week.
Later he continues.
So why should we expect Apple’s new tablet to set us free from all this? Because as Gizmodo’s Diaz points out, Apple already makes the one computer in the world that can be described as an appliance—the iPhone.
… Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.
Click for larger version.
More broadly, the conference championships came down to Intellectual Man, in the person of Peyton, in one game, and Instinctive Man, in the person of Brett Favre, whose Vikings played the Saints in the other. For once, blessedly, Intellectual Man won the day. Instinctive Man, to be a little hard on him—though it’s my own view that you can never be too hard on Instinctive Man—cost his team a title for the second time in three years, throwing an interception (this one right across the grain of the play) that was not merely ill-timed, but dim-witted. Credit to Favre for getting them there, but let us have no doubt that he throws those things not because he thinks he should, but because he feels inside that he can, with predictable results.
Gopnik has another good line in referring to the Jets, “just when they needed the Audacity of Audacity. (Larger life-political lesson here, of course.)”
Yup, a little less audacity of hope and a little more audacity of audacity, that’s what we need.
by Maureen
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Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
I urge you to read Solnit’s entire essay, especially where she asks, “What Would You Do?”
At least one New Orleans-based Who Dat, who goes by the name of “Jimbeaux61”, has already made his plans for Super Bowl Sunday, which happens to be nine days before Mardi Gras.
Says Jimbeaux61: “Breakfast will be beignets and café au lait at the French Market. A two-block walk for Bloody Marys at Margaritaville. Catch a Mardi Gras parade on Canal Street. A shrimp po-boy at Johnny’s in the Quarter. A Hurricane at Pat O’Brien’s. Stroll over to the Superdome parking lot for tailgating. Early dinner at Galatoire’s. More Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. Watch the Saints beat the Colts at the Absinthe House. Back to Canal Street for another parade. Close out the night on Bourbon Street. Sleep till Tuesday. Get ready for the draft. Geaux Super Bowl Champions.”
Sounds like a good day.
“Wildcat Rep. Alan Grayson has introduced a new bill that would tax corporate political donations at the eye-popping rate of 500%. The bill is called the ‘Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act.’ ”
From a 1977 Johnny Carson monologue —
August 4th: President Carter has recommended that it should not be a criminal offense to be found in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.
CARSON: The trouble is that nobody in our band knows what an ounce or less means.
DOC SEVERINSEN: It means you’re about out.
First posted here five years ago today, two days after Carson’s death at age 79.
“Osama bin Laden released his first new audiotaped message in over a year. While there is some new material in the message, insiders say it’s mostly a Greatest Threats collection. A White House spokesman says they plan to check out the message in its entirety, but they’re too busy listening to your phone calls.”
— Tina Fey
From this date in 2006. Not much has changed.
Today is Etta James’ birthday. Tell Mama, Etta James is 72 today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2wuVp00-o
Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records’ legendary producer, describes Etta James as “the greatest of all modern blues singers…the undisputed Earth Mother.” Her raw, unharnessed vocals and hot-blooded eroticism has made disciples of singers ranging from Janis Joplin to Bonnie Raitt. James’ pioneering 1950s hits – “The Wallflower” and “Good Rockin’ Daddy” – assure her place in the early history of rock and roll alongside Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. In the Sixties, as a soulful singer of pop and blues diva compared with the likes of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, James truly found her musical direction and made a lasting mark.
Miss James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, same year as Creedence, Cream, the Doors, Sly and the Family Stone, Van Morrison and Dick Clark if you still need a clue.
Alicia Keys is 29.
I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee
— Bob Dylan, “Thunder on the Mountain”
Dean Jones is 79.
Virginia Woolf was born on January 25th in 1882.
Charles Curtis was born in Kansas on this date in 1860. Curtis was the 31st vice president of the United States, serving under President Herbert Hoover, 1929-1933. Curtis is the first person with non-European ancestry to ever serve as President or Vice President. His mother was part Kansa or Kaw, Osage and Potawatomi and part French. Curtis had a one-eighth Indian blood quantum.
And, Happy Birthday to Rob, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen.
The BIG tech story this week is the expected introduction Wednesday of the Apple slate, essentially an iPod about the size of a piece of paper (and not much thicker) with internet connectivity. No one knows for sure. Word is that Apple’s Steve Jobs considers this the most important thing he’s ever done.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (which, for the uninitiated, is a parody) tells us the backstory. Here’s an excerpt.
But I digress. Let’s talk about this new device.
Yes, it will transform the media business, and by “transform” I mean it will put me in charge of it, the way the iPod put me in charge of the music industry. Yes, it will destroy cable TV and utterly transform the 60-year-old television industry, and again, by “transform,” I mean I’ll be in charge, because I’ll be the guy from whom you buy your shows — I’ll be the guy with whom the consumer forms a relationship. I’ll be the guy who has your credit card on file. So the cable carriers are dead.
As for the broadcast networks? Well, um, for now we make deals with them to get their content into our store. But eventually we just hollow them out from the inside, until everyone figures out that there’s no reason for them to exist anymore. Because really, what purpose does NBC serve, except to be, in and of itself, a form of entertainment — a comedy of errors, like some movie where the Three Stooges get put in charge of a corporation.
Like all good satire, a lot of truth in the above. You should click the link above and go read the rest. Maybe the Apple slate will be an Edsel, but then it could be a transformational device; the iPod was, the iPhone is.
I wanted the Saints to win and I’ve never really been a Brett Favre fan, but my god the old guy sure made it dramatic in every way, didn’t he?
The Fifth Down Blog has the transcript of Favre’s postgame interview (scroll down past Coach Brad Childress).
The NFL overtime procedure is just wrong.
If it’s fair, why does the coin-flip winner ALWAYS take the ball?
(Because the coin flip winner wins two out of three times, that’s why.)
And though I wanted the Saints to win, last night’s overtime was awful.
In a finale that will be talked about for years, the New Orleans Saints won the coin flip to start overtime in the N.F.C. championship game against the Minnesota Vikings. The Saints’ offense moved the ball 39 yards, 17 of them through penalties, to get into field position for a game-winning field goal.
Above from The Fifth Down Blog, which has a discussion of overtime and some alternatives.
“Go to Google’s home page or browser toolbar and type a single letter into the search box. The search engine will then drop down a list of suggestions, based on overall search activity (you have to have ‘show suggestions’ checked for this to happen in your toolbar). There are 26 sites that have the distinction of being the first suggestion for each letter of the alphabet.”
Another incredible essay from Roger Ebert.
“Sometimes two films set up an uncanny resonance with one another. I saw two documentaries back to back. One filled me with hope and the other washed me in despair. They were both about the education of primary school children.”
Just read it.
