Meaningless coincidence

The Washington Redskins have played home games before 17 presidential elections (beginning with 1936). When the ‘Skins have won, the incumbent party has stayed in the White House. When the ‘Skins have lost, the incumbent party has been beaten by the challenger.

Today the Redskins lost 28-14 to the Green Bay Packers.

Kerry’s victory Tuesday will keep this strange little statistical anomaly alive for four more years.

(By the way, the Redskins scored to tie the game late in the fourth quarter and could have kicked an extra point to go ahead. The touchdown was called back on an illegal procedure play. How’s that for an omen?)

Wednesday

Functional Ambivalent has some fine thoughts about what should happen Wednesday.

I hope and pray that we can go back to work with the celebratory feeling we should all have after watching another democratic miracle. We have, in the most vociferous and occaisionally acrimonious way, held our political leadership accountable, tested their mettle, and made our statement. And now it’s time to feel pride and wave the flag and take a break from calling each other names. On Wednesday it’s time, once again, to become simply “Americans.”

That’s the measure of patriotism, to me: Can you lose the election and then go along with what your countrymen chose, even though you disagreed with it?

Nevada …

became the 36th state on this date in 1864, just in time to cast two electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln.

It’s the birthday

… of Dan Rather. His frequency is 73.

… of Jane Pauley. She’s 54.

… of David Ogden Stiers. Major Winchester is 62.

It’s also the birthday of Michael (Bonanza/Little House on the Prairie) Landon, who was born in 1936 and died in 1991, and John Candy, born in 1950. Candy died in 1994.

It’s the birthday

… of Grace Slick. The Jefferson Airplane singer is 65.

… of Henry Winkler. The Fonz is 59.

… of Charles Martin Smith. Terry “The Toad” (American Graffiti) is 51.

Best line of the day, so far

“They are going after me in the most personal and vindictive way. It’s gutter politics.”
— Tom DeLay

“That’s kinda like Attila the Hun complaining because somebody hunned him.”
— Juanita

Three hurricanes, three losses

God just doesn’t like Florida.

Miami #3, Florida State #5 and Florida all lost Saturday. All three hadn’t lost on the same day since 1978.

2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes

Take a look.

Bless us all Chester

Albloggerque posted this Wednesday (sorry I missed it before now):

DOWNTOWN–Chester Nez rests on a plaza bench after the Kerry rally. Many in Boston credit Mr. Nez for breaking the Curse of the Bambino with a Navajo blessing. The WWII Code Talker and Congressional Gold Medal winner blessed the Kerry campaign in Albuquerque Tuesday night.

Apparently the Boston Red Sox called on Chester Nez to come to Boston and give a Navajo blessing to the Red Sox last April. After the team lost its 3 games to the Yankees in the ALCS they called him again. The local story goes that he walked out of his Albuquerque home, faced Fenway Park, and gave a blessing.

Now the Kerry campaign has him on stage with JK. And last night in Albuquerque’s Civic Plaza there he was extracting corn pollen from a little leather bag and letting it sift into the air in all 4 directions. The thousands of people at the rally were hushed during the brief ceremony…

Albloggerque has a couple of photos.

Strange

NewMexiKen is away from home in a part of the country where they don’t have presidential campaign advertising because the states are not in contention like New Mexico.

How calm it all seems.

Voters are as voters do

From CNN October 27, 2000:

Gallup: Bush 52% Gore 39%
CNN/Time: Bush 49% Gore 43%
ABC/Washington Post: Bush 48% Gore 45%
Zogby: Gore 45% Bush 43%

Actual vote: Gore 48.4% Bush 47.9%

Fans of ‘The Princess Bride’ take note

NewMexiKen, having decided and voted, had also decided to lay off – as one blogger called it – “the liberal political crap” and stick to birthdays and history, [YAWN] etc.

Except Wonkette deserves recognition:

Ooops: He’s alive. And he’s condemning Bush. Which of course means that he wants Kerry to win. Unless he really wants Bush to win and is just by default endorsing Kerry in order to get people to vote for Bush out of spite. But then again, if we’re smart enough to figure that out, then maybe Osama knows that, too and he really wants Kerry to win, and is endorsing Kerry so that people will at first learn toward voting for Bush but then think that’s what Osama wants. . . So confusing. Clearly, we’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”; but only slightly less well known is this: “Do not read about goats when death is on the line.”

Toying with the terrorists

After her first contact with a Department of Homeland Security agent, an Oregon toy store owner thought she might be the victim of a prank caller. But a second cryptic call left Stephanie Cox shaky. When the feds descended on Pufferbelly Toys, they showed their badges and made their mission clear: They were investigating a report that she was selling a toy called the Magic Cube, which they said was an illegal knockoff of Rubik’s Cube. Cox removed the offending item from the shelf, then contacted the manufacturer, who assured her there was no patent violation. Now, with the Magic Cube back on the shelf, Cox still puzzles over her Homeland Security experience. “Aren’t there any terrorists out there?” she asked.

Wired News Furthermore

Wait ‘Til This Year

Charles Pierce has a nice, not to be missed piece on the Red Sox victory.

It’s the birthday

… of Bill Gates. The former resident of Albuquerque is 49 today.

… of Julia Roberts. The Oscar-winning (Erin Brockovich) actress is 37. Ms. Roberts was also nominated for Best Actress for Pretty Woman and Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias.

It’s also the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. He was born in 1914 and died in 1995. The following is from The Writer’s Almanac:

In the 1950s, Salk turned his attention to the polio virus. The disease affected children and many of those infected became paralyzed or died. There had been larger and larger outbreaks of polio in the United States since the late 19th century. By 1952, more than 58,000 cases were reported and more than 3,000 children had died of the disease.

It was the height of the baby boom, there were more children in the United States than ever before, and parents were terrified. The outbreaks occurred in the summer, and parents kept their children home from swimming pools out of fear they would be infected.

Salk’s groundbreaking discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus. Scientists were skeptical at the time, but Salk believed so strongly that it would work that he first tested the vaccine on himself, his family and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe.

When the vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, polio infection rates were reduced to less than 100 cases a year, and Salk was declared a national hero.

It’s over

Michael Bérubé sums it up pretty well:

And surely some of you must regard victory itself as a prize of dubious worth. Until tonight, your team was legendary, and their legend shaped and defined your self-identification as fans. If you win the World Series, you win the World Series– and you become kin to the 2002 Angels and the 1980 Phillies. You will be elated (and drunk!) for a couple of days, sure. But then the championship will begin to sink in, and while some of you will say, as did a New York Rangers fan in 1994, “now I can die in peace,” others among you will be plunged into existential crisis.

This was written before last night’s game.

One of our 50 is missing

At a restaurant just off Interstate 40 in Tucumcari, N.M., four women from Arkansas, en route to a fat farm in Arizona, appeared flush with excitement, New Mexico magazine reports.

The excitement, it turned out, was due to the fact that they were able to cross over into New Mexico without showing their passports — which all deemed necessary for the trip.

From Porter’s People in the Akron Beacon Journal

Thanks to Dwight Perry for the link.

Elmore Leonard

Sorry for the lack of blogging today. NewMexiKen was busy reading two of Elmore Leonard’s westerns, Hombre and Valdez Is Coming. If you like westerns, or like Leonard’s mysteries, you’ll love these and his other western novels written early in his career. They’re all available in inexpensive paperbacks.

And yes, Hombre was made into a movie with Paul Newman, Richard Boone and Martin Balsam.

NewMexiKen

Almost 1,200 visits to NewMexiKen yesterday. Amazing what a little story about a post turtle can do.

Holy moley!

iPod Photo — All your music and all your photos on an iPod.

A delight for the ears. A feast for the eyes. Though it’s no bigger than a pack of playing cards and weighs in at just over 6 ounces, iPod Photo delivers a one-two sensory punch. Letting you carry an entire library of your favorite music — up to 15,000 songs — or enough photos — as many as 25,000 — to fill nearly 200 slide trays or cover nearly 5,000 square feet of wall space.

Connect iPod Photo to a projector or TV and give slideshows — complete with music.

Update: iTunes 4.7 (now available) includes a very useful duplicate track feature.

NewMexiKen voted this afternoon

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been somewhat undecided about the presidential race, but I went ahead and cast my vote this afternoon. It was the tenth time I’ve voted for President of the United States (well actually, for an elector to cast his or her vote for President of the United States).

It went well. The line was about 75 minutes long, punctuated as we stood along a major thoroughfare by a couple of drive-by campaignings. (Technically a felony, as those shouting from their vehicles were well within the 100 foot no electioneering limit.) It was a sunny day, and people seemed reasonably content with the wait given the seriousness of the responsibility.

I had no trouble with the electronic voting machine and it gave me a screen readout of all my selections at the end before I pushed the “I really mean it” button (the machine even warned me I had missed a couple choices).

One of the choices I missed (made no selection) was for Bernalillo County Clerk. As noted here Sunday, I did not think it was appropriate for the incumbent to imply people were having trouble voting because they were stupid. However true that might be, NewMexiKen found that a very unattractive response from a public servant. Furthermore, we’ve been voting in this country for well over 200 years. Isn’t it the job of county clerks to make it a simple, efficient, fool-proof process?

New Mexico (important in the election, but not that important)

Senator Kerry is appearing in Albuquerque this afternoon, but not The Boss (Bruce Springsteen) and not The Big Dog (Bill Clinton).

Why’d the old man cross the road?

One sunny day in 2005 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Ave, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the US Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”

The old man said, “Okay” and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”

The man thanked him and, again just walked away

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same US Marine, saying “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?”

The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.”

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir.”

[From Julia, commenting at Making Light]

We are what we list

Veronica, official daughter-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me a link to this intriguing article about Bill Keaggy and his fascination with other people’s grocery lists. The article appeared in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

The collection, which now numbers more than 500 lists, is strangely addictive.

The lists elicit twofold curiosity — about the kind of meal the person was planning and the kind of person who would make such a meal. What was the shopper with vodka, lighters, milk and ice cream on his list planning to do with them? In what order would they be consumed? Was it a he or a she? Who had written ”Tootie food, kitten chow, bird food stick, toaster scrambles, coffee drinks”? Some shoppers organize their lists by aisle; others start with dairy, go to cleaning supplies and then back to dairy before veering off to Home Depot. A few meticulous ones note the price of every item. One shopper had written in large letters on an envelope, simply, ”Milk.”

See the actual lists here.

”You can see their lives from these lists even if you haven’t been in their houses,” Keaggy says.

Which bodes poorly for the the individual who wrote: ”Shell corn, bind holder, belt, knife, coolers, map, cellphone, hunting license, say goodbye to wife, kill deer, Mt. View Motel, kill deer.”

We should both cherish it

As noted below, today is author Pat Conroy’s birthday. He’s 59.

Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me this story about Conroy, in part because the tale it tells concerns Byron’s own high school alma mater.

Mr. Conroy’s latest book, “My Losing Season,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is ostensibly a memoir of his senior year playing basketball at the Citadel.

But the book’s most gripping moment, for those readers interested in education, may be the three and a half pages set inside Room 2A, the classroom of Joseph A. Monte at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Monte was Mr. Conroy’s sophomore-year English instructor, and in describing how Mr. Monte taught him to read Faulkner that year, Mr. Conroy has provided a bonus for all those devoted teachers in his audience: he has captured that elusive moment when a teacher succeeds in firing the imagination of a student.

Mr. Monte’s mantra was: “Read the great books, gentlemen, just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.” To that end, in November 1960, Mr. Conroy received a personal assignment to read “The Sound and the Fury.”

After studying the first 90 pages, Mr. Conroy said he felt as if he was “reading the book underwater.” Even after rereading those 90 pages, he did not understand a word.

When Mr. Conroy approached his teacher in the cafeteria to tell him of his despair, Mr. Monte sent him scurrying in a different direction: the scene in “Macbeth” when Macbeth learns of the death of his queen.

“There you will find the key to your dilemma,” the future novelist was told, “if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”

The critical passage, Mr. Conroy discovered, was when Macbeth says, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mr. Conroy realized that “The Sound and the Fury” was also told by an “idiot,” Benjy.

“That’s why I was confused,” Mr. Conroy writes in his new book. “It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”

The lesson, according to Mr. Monte: “Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward. Sometimes it makes you work.”

For his trouble, Mr. Conroy received an “A+, double credit” in Mr. Monte’s ever-present grade book.

“This is a good moment in the life of your mind,” Mr. Conroy recalls his teacher saying. “It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”

The longer article by Jacques Steinberg originally appeared in The New York Times in 2002, but can be found several places on the Internet including here.

I believe. It’s silly, but I believe

At The Gadflyer, Thomas Schaller believes in Bush. Some precepts of his faith:

I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited.
…

Domestically, I believe income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are the solution to budget surpluses or deficits, high or low inflation, stable or unstable interest rates, expanding or shrinking trade deficits, widening or narrowing wealth gaps, increasing or decreasing poverty rates, rising or falling unemployment, prosperity or recession, wartime or peace. I believe record-setting budget deficits, record-setting trade deficits, and a burgeoning national debt are examples of the president’s fiscally-conservative economic leadership.
…

Finally, I believe a white man of privilege who was accepted to Yale University despite a middling performance in prep school; was accepted to Harvard Business School despite a middling performance at Yale; was admitted to the Texas Air National Guard despite no flight background and an entrance exam score in the bottom quartile; was given funds by Osama bin Laden’s father to start a failed oil company; and was chosen to serve as Texas governor and 43rd President of the United States despite a lifelong record of mediocrity, is a man with the moral authority to criticize affirmative action as a policy that gives opportunities to the undeserving.

Wisdom from Maxine

Egad!

“One is too polished; the other one, I think to be honest, I don’t know how he ever got to be president,” Ms. Parmer said. “I am really surprised he has gotten as far as he has in life. I do think he’s honest.”

Even so, Ms. Parmer said, she thought she might vote for Mr. Bush. “If you actually look at him, and he stands up next to Kerry, you just kind of feel sorry for him,” she said. “I feel he’s more of an underdog, he’s had a hard go of it in the last four years.”

The New York Times

The World Series resumes tonight

… with Game 3. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Red Sox win tonight to go up three games to none and then the Cardinals become the second team in history to come back from three games to none to win a series?

The campaign for president is grueling

And I’m just talking about the blogging. God only knows what it’s like for the candidates (and He’s only sharing what he knows with one of them).

It’s the birthday

… of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton is 57 today.

… of Pat Sajak. His wheel has spun for 58 years today.

… of Pat Conroy. The author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini is 59 today.

And it’s the birthday of Mahalia Jackson, born on this date in 1911 (she died in 1972). As The New York Times noted in Ms. Jackson’s obituary:

“I been ‘buked and I been scorned/ I’m gonna tell my Lord/ When I get home/ Just how long you’ve been treating me wrong,” she sang in a full, rich contralto to the throng of 200,000 people as a preface to Dr. King’s “I’ve got a dream” speech.

The song, which Dr. King had requested, came as much from Miss Jackson’s heart as from her vocal cords. The granddaughter of a slave, she had struggled for years for fulfillment and for unprejudiced recognition of her talent.

Electronic voting — Trick or Treat

Visit uggabugga and try out the latest electronic voting ballot from Diebold.

Be sure to move your cursor as if to choose.

Best line of the day, so far

“I’m a sunny guy, so I don’t feel burdened at all,” Bush replied.

— President Bush on Good Morning America this morning responding to Charlie Gibson’s asking if he feels his job is burdensome.

I don’t get it

NewMexiKen understands why some people, especially Republicans, don’t care for John Kerry. I think they’re wrong, but I understand.

What I don’t understand is how any American could vote to give George Bush four more years to put American soldiers in harm’s way. Bush and his national security people lied about why we needed to go to war. They have incompetently managed the war. And now they are lying about their incompetence.

To me, this alone, rises above all other interests and issues. You simply cannot reward this behavior and say you support the troops.

Roswell is really in Texas anyway

On the north end of town, where the Anglos live, people lined up in large numbers Saturday at the Roswell Mall to take advantage of the early voting site there. But down on the south side, in the Hispanic neighborhood, the designated early voting venue was locked up tight — closed for the weekend.

From The Washington Post

Link via Ralph

A few people turned out …

in Philadelphia to see John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve’s last work was a made-for-TV movie, The Brooke Ellison Story, to be shown tonight on A&E. Miss Ellison was hit by a car and left paralyzed from the neck down at the age of 11. Even so, she graduated from Harvard College in 2000. As reviewer Alessandra Stanley states,

The film…manages to be moving, not maudlin, truthful but still well told. It makes Mr. Reeves’s point better than all the mournful eulogies: with help, severely handicapped people can continue to live, love and work as well as or better than their more fortunate peers.

From the review, it sounds like better than most TV fare, and a tribute from (and to) Christopher Reeve.

Best line of the day, so far

“The president wants to determine what went wrong [with the missing explosives].

This reminds me of when I wanted to know why my Palm Pilot stopped working after I dropped it in the bath tub.”

— Josh Marshall, who goes on to say, “The thing happened more than a year ago, his administration has taken active steps to cover it up and now that the truth finally comes out, he ‘wants to determine what went wrong.’”

Yup!

While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 70-year-old Texas Rancher (whose hand had been caught in a gate while working cattle), a doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the White House.

Then the old Texan said, “Well, ya know, G. W. Bush is a ‘post turtle.’”

Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old man said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain.

“You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor, stupid bastard get down.”

What he said

Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of various government gumshoes — and, worse, into the heads of some important journalism types — that popping a big story before the election is somehow “unfair,” and might “unduly influence” the outcome.

Hello?

— Charles Pierce at Altercation