Tonight, tonight
Won’t be just any night

From Space.com:

A fine display of shooting stars is underway and peaks overnight Wednesday into early Thursday morning. Astronomers expect the 2004 Perseid meteor shower to be one of the best versions of the annual event in several years.

Watching meteors requires no special gear — telescopes and binoculars are of no use. So anyone in the Northern Hemisphere with clear skies could see some “shooting stars.”

His idea of higher education is being able to read without moving your lips

Juanita got me laughing so hard about Tom DeLay, I actually had to stop and take a break from reading.

The more his poll numbers drop, the more he’ll be calling in favors. Thelma says that for the promise of some federal government pork, she’ll give him a reception over at Thelma’s Pool Hall and Family Mediation Center. However, Thelma really means pork, as in pork ribs, not the government money kind.

It’s the birthday…

of Marilyn vos Savant, born on this date in 1946. She’s the Parade magazine columnist and one-time holder of the title of world’s highest IQ. Her IQ was once measured at 228, but more modern tests now reveal it to be simply a lofty 180. She is married to Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.

The Wikipedia article on vos Savant led me to this item:

Sho Yano (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Japanese American and Korean American boy who at the age of 12 held the title of world’s highest recorded IQ with a figure so high that it was unmeasurable. He graduated from Loyola University magna cum laude at age 12, and attends the University of Chicago Medical School on a full scholarship. He scored 1500 on the SAT at the age of 8.

NewMexiKen has found errors among Wikipedia entries in the past. No guarantees here, either.

Do Me a Favor, Keep a Lid on Your Double Latte

Roxanne Roberts on nursing in public:

I admit it: I’m lactose intolerant.

The latest assault on the right to a peaceful cup of Joe comes courtesy of Lorig Charkoudian, a Silver Spring woman who not only wants to breast-feed her daughter at Starbucks whenever she likes but expects me to avert my eyes or leave if I don’t share her enthusiasm for double breast milk latte. It’s not enough that a new Maryland law supports her right to lactate in public — no, she wants Starbucks to issue a nationwide corporate policy supporting her position.

Speaking for the school of not letting it all hang out, let me say: Don’t. Please, please please. Just don’t.

Read on.

NewMexiKen was a bit startled to notice a nursing infant next to him a few weeks ago while on the hayride at the petting zoo (with three of the Sweeties). But the mother was modest and the world didn’t end. As long as it’s not the Super Bowl halftime show, who cares?

Link via Electablog.

Monitoring baby

From Gizmodo:

The Boardbug is a watch-like baby monitor that has two distinct modes. In the first “baby” mode, the devices work like a traditional baby monitor, broadcasting audio from the child’s unit to the parent’s and even sounding a warning buzzer if the baby outsmarts the latch and takes the unit off. Plus it has a built in thermometer to monitor temperature levels in the baby’s room.

The “toddler” mode takes all those features and adds on a proximity-based “safety range” and a panic button, which sounds a startling klaxon so you can easily determine which freeway your child is playing in, but sadly does nothing for the periodic anxiety attacks that come from realizing you’ve got 16 more years of this shit.

Coming soon to a traffic lane near you

From CNN:

A man was acquitted Tuesday of charges he caused a fatal crash by taking his eyes off the road while watching a movie on a DVD player mounted on his truck dashboard.

Jurors acquitted Erwin Petterson Jr., 29, of two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of manslaughter. No law in Alaska prohibits operating a DVD player in view of a driver.

*****

Petterson testified he was not watching a movie and that his truck strayed into oncoming traffic when he reached for a soda.

Maybe they thought it was highbiscus

From the Houston Chronicle —

Landscape contractor Blair Davis was in his northwest Harris County home around 2 p.m. Tuesday when there was a knock at his door.

Davis said he hadn’t even gotten his hand on the doorknob when it flew open and he was looking at the barrel of a pistol.

Behind the gun were about 10 members of the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force, who burst into the home, guns drawn, and began shouting at him to get down on the floor.

There on the floor, Davis said, it took a while to figure out that what had caused the swarm of lawmen to descend upon him was the hibiscus in his front yard.

That’s right, hibiscus.

The foliage of the Texas Star hibiscus, a native plant that’s growing in popularity, vaguely resembles that of marijuana.

But: “It’s got white buds on it,” Davis said. “Hello.”

Davis had several of the plants in his yard, where he grows stock for his business.

“They were in containers,” he said. “I don’t want to say potted plants.”

Evidently, some well-meaning but horticulturally challenged citizen turned Davis in. Davis said the team of narcotics officers combed his house for about an hour, at one point discussing whether red and gold bamboo growing in his window might be marijuana. They also asked what he did with the watermelons and cantaloupes growing in his back yard.

“What would I do with them?” Davis said.

Link via Stupid Words.

The Rock

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary accepted its first prisoners 70 years ago today.

Alcatraz is a 22-acre rock island in San Francisco Bay, 1½ miles from shore. For 29 years the federal prison system kept its highest security prisoners there, including Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the famous Birdman, Robert Stroud (played by Burt Lancaster in the film Birdman of Alcatraz). Reportedly, no one was ever known to have successfully escaped from Alcatraz.

From 1868 to 1934, Alcatraz was a military prison. In 1969, American Indian activists occupied and claimed the island. Their occupation lasted 19 months.

Alcatraz Island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area of the National Park Service in 1972.

Alcatraz, for the original Spanish Alcatraces, is usually defined as meaning “pelican” or “strange bird.”

Click photo to enlarge.

Tired of regular postage stamps?

Well now you can make your own. That’s right, real postage stamps with your own photos/art. New baby, put their photo on the stamps for the announcements. Take a trip, put your own photo on the stamps for the postcards. Costs about $21 for twenty 37-cent stamps. Still, pretty cool.

PhotoStamps.com

Update: Actually, I guess you’d have to send the postcards when you got home and received your order.

Wal-Mart = Bush. Costco = Kerry. Costco’s Winning.

Daniel Gross writing at Slate tells us —

Now we’ve also got red-state, blue-state discount retailers.

On the left: Costco Wholesale Corp. Last week, Jeffrey Brotman and James Sinegal, chairman and chief executive office of Costco, respectively, joined the list of executives who endorsed John Kerry for president. The company is based in Washington (a blue state in the past four elections, and one that Kerry leads, by a 53-45 margin according to the Aug. 2 Zogby poll), and a list of its locations bears some resemblance to the Kerry-Edwards campaign: strong on the affluent coasts and virtually nonexistent in the comparatively poor Great Plains and in the Old Confederacy….

Like today’s Democratic Party, Costco favors highly trafficked urban and edge-city locations—it has three stores in New York City. And it caters to a decidedly upscale crowd. As John Helyar reported in this excellent Fortune profile, the average salary of a Costco member is $95,333. The company’s merchandise mix reflects the fact that its customers shop at discounters by choice, not by necessity. They’re New Luxury suckers who like to save on staples, more Jean Chardonnay than Joe Six-Pack. As Helyar notes: “Costco is the U.S.’s biggest seller of fine wines ($600 million a year).”

The article continues.

Bush on tribal sovereignty

It seems a number of visitors to NewMexiKen are searching for the President’s answer on the American Indian tribal sovereignty issue. Here it is [mp3 file].

Update: Type “tribal sovereignty Bush wav” into Google and you get NewMexiKen as the first pick.

Kerry for President

A young woman came to NewMexiKen’s door last night — right in the middle of a Law & Order rerun (one I didn’t remember!). She knew my name and wanted to encourage me to vote for John Kerry. I told her that wouldn’t be a problem, but she persisted. (Just maybe there aren’t that many Kerry supporters in my neighborhood and she wanted someone to talk to).

What was the most important issue, she asked.

He wasn’t an idiot, I answered. (My reasons to be positive about Kerry actually do exceed my negativity about Bush, but it was an easy answer.)

But it still didn’t seem to satisfy her. She must have felt I was just telling her what she wanted to hear so I could get back to Briscoe and Curtis. And I just felt her time was better spent convincing someone who needed convincing.

Did I have any questions about the candidates?

No, I said. Then I gave her the response that seemed to completely satisfy her that I was indeed in Kerry’s column.

My son used to work on Senator Kerry’s staff, I said.

Traffic fatalities…

were down slightly in 2003 to 42,643; motorcycle fatalities were up 12% to 3,661.

56% of those killed in car crashes last year were not wearing seat belts.

Rollover crashes account for 3% of all accidents, but they represent one-third of all highway fatalities.

Report from the Los Angeles Times.

Not close

From the Los Angeles Times —

Almost half of Medicare recipients dislike the new prescription drug law, and nearly 3 in 10 seniors and disabled persons say the issue will influence their vote for president, according to a national survey released Tuesday.

The survey suggests that there are “maybe a half-million seniors” who might swing their votes to Democratic candidate John F. Kerry and another “1 million to 2 million whose votes might be up for grabs on this issue,” said Drew E. Altman, president and chief executive of the private, nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

Alex Haley…

was born on this date in 1921. Haley was the author of two publishing phenomena — The Autobiography of Malcolm X (6 million copies) and Roots, which was not only a best-seller, but led to one of the most successful television series ever. Nearly half the people in the country watched the last episode in January 1977. Haley won a special Pulitizer for Roots, “the story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.”

NewMexiKen co-chaired a symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, that included Haley. He was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. Along with the Archivist of the U.S. and Professor Wesley Johnson, I sat on the stage behind Haley as he spoke and could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Subsequently it bothered me to learn he plagarized sections of the book and possibly fudged some of the genealogy. Clearly, that wasn’t right. Even so, the good his work did in educating both black and white America (and I include both books) was a legacy of major proportion.

Haley, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard 1939-1959, before becoming a full-time writer, died of a heart attack in 1992. The Coast Guard has named a cutter for him.

Terry Gene Bollea …

was born on this date in 1953. Who’s that, you ask?

Does 6′8″ (2.03m) help?
How about 275 pounds (124.7kg)?
Long blonde hair, but balding? Fu Man Chu mustache?

Twenty years ago NewMexiKen saw this man in the St. Louis Airport. I had no idea who he was, but knew he had to be somebody. He was huge. His shirt was artistically slit. Twelve-year-old boys were all a twitter.

I finally asked one of the boys, “So, who is that?”

He looked at me like I had just arrived from Mars.

“Hulk Hogan, of course!”

Kerry Unveils One-Point Plan for Better America

From America’s Finest News Source, The Onion —

Delivering the central speech of his 10-day “Solution For America” bus campaign tour Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.

“If I am elected in November, no inner-city child will have to live in an America where George Bush is president,” Kerry said, addressing a packed Maize High School auditorium. “No senior citizen will lie awake at night, worrying about whether George Bush is still the chief executive of this country. And no American—regardless of gender, regardless of class, regardless of race—will be represented by George Bush in the world community.”

Hey, if it’s all the same to you…

remember to use NewMexiKen’s Amazon button if you’re planning to purchase anything from them. It costs you nothing extra, and I get a little dividend.

Subversive, hot-rod styling

Dan Neil on the prototypical Dodge Magnum RT consumer —

Killer was wearing a bowling shirt and baggy shorts, several earrings and a couple of ounces of high-quality tattoo ink swirling around his calves, forearms and neck — flaming dice, crossed pistols, hearts and death’s heads, Bettie Page in fishnets. You know, the illustrated psychobilly.

Killer explained that he and his wife — huh? — had been trying to find a Dodge Magnum RT in Los Angeles because they had a 2-year-old daughter — wha?! — and they needed a family car. None of the local dealers had the RT edition — with the 340-horsepower Hemi V8 — and he was thinking of driving to Las Vegas to find one.

“Aw, man,” Killer said, “that thing is just so money!”

It occurred to me as I closed the door and put down my can of “Welcome Mace” that Killer was the Magnum’s ideal demographic: a middle-finger-waving anti-establishmentarian, bad-beer connoisseur, breeder.

Sometime between being hip and breaking a hip, even kool kats need a family car.