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.