Me spell and write pretty some day

Using Microsoft Word to check your spelling and grammar? The following sample passes without a hitch:

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.

McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.

Finance good for marketing. Show me money!

4P’s are marketing mix. Four P’s is marketing mix. 4Ps is marketing mix. Manager use marketing mixes for good marketing. You Know What I Mean? Internets do good job in company name Amazon. Internets help marketing big company like Boeing. Internets make good brand best like Coca Cola.

Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft. Gates do good marketing jobs out Microsoft. Gates build the big brand in Microsoft. The Gates is leader of big company in Washington. Warren buffet do awesome job in marketing. Buffets eat buffets in city and town in country.

See the web page devoted to the inadequacies of the Microsoft Word checkers maintained by University of Washington Professor Sandeep Krishnamurthy.

At least this explains it

Like NewMexiKen, Garrett at dangerousmeta! in Santa Fe has been “flailing away restarting, repairing my internet hookup. Flipping the cable modem off and on.”

It seems the problem — last night was the third prolonged outage in a week — is with our provider Comcast: “All [outages] involved issues with the cable giant’s domain name servers, which translate and route Web page requests from users. Although Internet applications such as instant messaging could continue to operate, all Web site requests either did not respond or were sluggish.” (CNET News.com)

If other utilities are absent, you don’t have to pay (the electric meter can’t move if the power is off). Is Comcast planning to reimburse its customers?

Whoosh!

At Slate, the Explainer answers: Can We Get Sucked Out of Airplanes?

Worth knowing

“If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

Steven D. Levitt, quoted in Inside the Astonishingly Curious Mind of Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner (2003).

Freakonomics

The Freakonomics guys have a blog.

In case it’s new to you, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, was published this week by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

Slate had two excerpts earlier this week: A Roshanda by Any Other Name and Trading Up, both fascinating.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention …

the most important thing about Apollo 13. The film featured Ron Howard’s brother, Clint Howard, as a NASA flight controller.

And, over time, “Ron Howard’s brother” has brought more people to NewMexiKen than any other term.

Factoid

“With oil at $55 a barrel instead of $30, as I have pointed out before, the Saudis are making (roughly) an extra $250 million — extra! — a day.”

Andrew Tobias

Energy crisis for whom?

Pedestrian injuries apparently part of Santa Fe history

City traffic engineers say embedding flashing lights in the pavement on Grant Avenue will make a new downtown crosswalk safer for pedestrians.

But Santa Fe’s Historic Design Review Board ruled this week that the lights would detract from the downtown’s historic ambience.

The Santa Fe New Mexican

Spreading some horse manure around would really up the historic ambience.

NewMexiKen wonders how many art galleries there were on the Santa Fe Plaza in the days of historic ambience. Let’s outlaw them.

Well, even a stopped watch is correct twice a day

An historic timepiece which stopped ticking when the Titanic sank 93 years ago today is to be auctioned.

The 18-carat Gold Pocket Watch is among the rare artefacts connected to the ill-fated ocean liner to be sold by Bonhams and Butterfields in Massachusetts in the US on May 1.

The watch, which was damaged when disaster struck mid-Atlantic, belonged to Nora Keane, an Irish immigrant, living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with her brothers and sisters.

Following a four-month visit to her mother in Castle Connell, County Limerick, Miss Keane decided to return on the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic, boarding at Queenstown as a 2nd Class passenger.

She was rescued by lifeboat with the watch which got water damage when the lifeboat passed under the ship’s pump discharge.

Its gilt face has some rust staining, but it is still expected to fetch £2,600-3,600, Bonhams said.

Scotsman.com News

Unsinkable

RMS Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 PM (Titanic time) on this date in 1912. She was at 41° 46′ north latitude , 50° 14′ west longitude in the Atlantic.

She sunk at 2:20 AM on the 15th. So, more here tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, here for you history and film buffs is Titanic in 30 seconds with bunnies.

Best line of the day, so far

“I heard Tom DeLay’s blood was in the water and the sharks were circling him, but unfortunately, it turned out to be a metaphor.”

The Onion | What Do You Think?

The Onion Guide to Preparing a Living Will

Key points:

• It’s important to have a lawyer present when you draft a living will, as it makes the desire to be dead that much more tangible.
• Specify which flavor of feeding-tube nutrient you prefer. Otherwise, you may get stuck with cream of mushroom day in and day out.
• Leave at least one reasonably flattering photo for the press. This point cannot be emphasized enough.
• Research medical life-support technology and specify whether you’d prefer to be hooked up to a Danninger Continuous Passive Motion device, an Emerson suction unit, or a Slushee machine.
• Comatose people have been shown to exhibit a brainstem-level response to music, so prepare a decade’s worth of mix tapes in advance.

There’s more at The Onion

James Cash Penney …

opened his first retail store, called the Golden Rule Store, in the mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, on this date in 1902. In 1913, the chain incorporated as J.C. Penney Company, Inc.

The first store, as seen in 1904.

Black Sunday

It was on this date 70 years ago that the largest of the dust storms of the 1930s swept the western plains.

Cyclic winds rolled up two miles high, stretched out a hundred miles and moved faster than 50 miles an hour. These storms destroyed vast areas of the Great Plains farmland. The methods of fighting the dust were as many and varied as were the means of finding a way to get something to eat and wear. Every possible crack was plugged, sheets were placed over windows and blankets were hung behind doors. Often the places were so tightly plugged against the dust (which still managed to get in) that the houses became extremely hot and stuffy.

Quotation and photo from the Cimmaron Heritage Center, Boise City, Oklahoma. Boise City is in the Oklahoma panhandle near Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Texas.

Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

As Atzerodt and Paine fanned out to seek their targets, Booth, a celebrated actor, familiar to everybody who worked at Ford’s Theatre, had no trouble in slipping upstairs during the performance of Our American Cousin. Moving quietly down the aisle behind the dress circle, he stood for a few moments near the President’s box. A member of the audience, seeing him there, thought him “the handsomest man I had ever seen.” John Parker, the Metropolitan policeman assigned to protect the President, had left his post in the passageway, and the box was guarded only by Charles Forbes, a White House footman. When Booth showed Forbes his calling card, he was admitted to the presidential box. Barring the door behind him, so as not to be disturbed, he noiselessly moved behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward, with his chin in his right hand and his arm on the balustrade. At a distance of about two feet, the actor pointed his derringer at the back of the President’s head on the left side and pulled the trigger. It was about 10:13 P.M.

When Major Rathbone tried to seize the intruder, Booth lunged at him with his razor-sharp hunting knife, which had a 7¼-inch blade. “The Knife,” Clara Harris reported, “went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside, — cutting an artery, nerves and veins — he bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” Shoving his victim aside, Booth placed his hands on the balustrade and vaulted toward the stage. It was an easy leap for the gymnastic actor, but the spur on his heel caught in the flags decorating the box and he fell heavily on one foot, breaking the bone just above the ankle. Waving his dagger, he shouted in a loud, melodramatic voice: “Sic semper tyrannis” (”Thus always to tyrants” — the motto of the state of Virginia). Some in the audience thought he added, “The South is avenged.” Quickly he limped across the stage, with what one witness called “a motion…like the hopping of a bull frog,” and made his escape through the rear of the theater.

Up to this point the audience was not sure what had happened. Perhaps most thought the whole disturbance was part of the play. But as the blue-white smoke from the pistol drifted out of the presidential box, Mary Lincoln gave a heart-rending shriek and screamed, “They have shot the President! They have shot the President!”

From David Herbert Donald’s outstanding biography of Lincoln.

Nearly perfect

Highs in the 70s, lows in the 40s, a cloud from time-to-time. Best of all, not too much of the Albuquerque spring winds.

Assasin!

Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on this date in 1865. Lincoln died the next morning.

On April 26, Booth and co-conspirator David Herold were surrounded while hiding in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered to Union troops, but Booth held out and was shot while the shed burned down around him.

Click on the image to see a larger version of the poster.

Read The New York Times story from the day after the assassination, headlined Awful Event.

Loretta Lynn

The coal miner’s daughter is 70 today. She was born in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, on this date in 1935. Married at 14, Ms. Lynn had four children by the time she was 17.

Loretta Lynn’s 2004 CD Van Lear Rose won the Grammy for Best Country Album. Great songs, all 13 written by Lynn. And that great honky tonk voice.

Practicing safe computing

Walter Mossberg devotes his April column to computer security and includes a “quick guide to Windows security measures” including software (some free and some not). After listing the software he adds:

Beyond installing, monitoring and updating all this software, you need to be careful online. Don’t open e-mail attachments you don’t expect and that come from strangers. They may contain viruses or spyware. Don’t download software unless you really need it and are 100% certain of the author’s trustworthiness. It could be an infection in disguise. Never click on a link in an e-mail purporting to be from a financial institution, even if it’s your own bank and it looks official. It could be a scam to steal your identity.

Always get a second opinion

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

An increasing number of athletes - marathon runners, triathletes and even hikers in the Grand Canyon - are severely diluting their blood by drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say.

The New York Times