At Rox Populi there has been a series of photos (now 182) with instructions to Write Your Own Caption.
The best caption NewMexiKen saw for this photo was:
“I’m a really good driver…yeeaah…definitely a good driver….UH OH! 33 minutes to judge Wopner.”
What exactly is “my” side? In previous eras there were more clear-cut definitions of what “left” and “right were. Today there are dozens of variations. On economic issues I’m a typical liberal. Having run my own business and having worked for big corporations, I have a basic belief in capitalism, but I think that government, representing the collective will of the citizens, has a special obligation to balance out the excesses of the marketplace. I wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes to have national health care, better paid school teachers, smaller class sizes in public schools, and more jobs programs to help get people out of poverty and help average-income people deal with their lives more easily. It seems to me that many Western European countries have been better at supporting people on the low end of economic spectrum than Americans have, and the extent of poverty in America seems immoral to me given our country’s wealth. Although I’ve never been a member of a labor union, I believe they should be stronger. Corporations have so much power that it seems healthier to me for there to be a strong counterweight on behalf of workers. I also think our country should be more generous with foreign aid given the immense poverty around the world.
Conservative rhetoric that implies that private charities can replace government doesn’t ring true to me. I know that governments tend to be inefficient, but there are some things that only governments can do, such as build highways, protect the environment, and provide police protection, and so on. The environment is an area where it’s particularly important for government to enforce the public interest when it clashes with the economic interest of businesses.
Danny Goldberg, from his book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, quoted at Altercation.
The Huffington Post — word is it got 8-million hits its first day.
This could be photoshopped but it seems real — expressionless girl.
Advisory: Loud (but otherwise OK for work).
Paula Roemer knows most people don’t understand her passion for animals.
Some of her North Seattle neighbors aren’t thrilled about the crows she attracts to her back yard with bird seed, she says. When she rescued a scraggly kitten abandoned on a pathway while she was vacationing in Israel 13 years ago, people reacted with disdain.
So when a neighbor’s dog mauled and killed that same beloved cat, Yofi, last year, Roemer barely mentioned it to people she knew. But now she feels that she found one person who understood: a judge.
Last week, Seattle District Court Judge Barbara Linde ordered the dog’s owner to pay $45,480.12 to Roemer for the cat’s death.
Read more from The Seattle Times.
NewMexiKen thinks they should have given the dog an award — one less damn cat.
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page… .
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children… .
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you… . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.
Steven Johnson in Everything Bad Is Good For You speculating on the reaction if books were the “new” thing; as quoted in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, as always, is excellent in his review of Johnson’s book. Highly recommended. Click the link!
It poured again on Sunday in the Yosemite Valley, but people were smiling in their ponchos and galoshes. It has been that kind of spring here: dreadful weather and delighted visitors.
With extraordinarily heavy snowfall in the higher elevations, and lots of rain elsewhere, the rivers and waterfalls in the Sierra Nevada are gushing. Hikers must hopscotch around muddy puddles, and much of the park remains closed because of impassible roads, but the Yosemite water show is at its best in years.
“There are places we’ve stood, where you can look around and see six waterfalls at once,” said David Cosio of Watsonville, Calif., getting soaked from head to toe near Yosemite Falls with his wife, Linda, and three young sons. “We’ve been here before in May, but nothing like this.”
Yosemite Drapes Itself in Its Splendid Liquid Veils, and Preens from The New York Times
You saw it here ten days ago. It was stupendous — though NewMexiKen did get a sunny morning.
“Recently confined with a case of bulmedia (reading and watching so much of it you start throwing up)…”
Larry Gelbart writing at The Huffington Post
Functional Ambivalent has a great take on The Huffington Post: Pilots Always Suck.
Ten years ago today NewMexiKen made the round trip from Northern Virginia to Blacksburg to bring Jason, official youngest son, home from Virginia Tech for the summer. It was about a 550 mile drive, so not long after I got home from dropping Jason and his stuff off, I had collapsed in my Arlington townhouse’s second floor bedroom; exhausted, but not really asleep.
As I lay there dozing on-and-off a thunderstorm blew in. I began listening to it, the lightning closer and the thunder right behind and increasingly loud. I was counting the seconds to see how far away the strikes were, when, BAM, the lightning and thunder came in the same instant.
“Wow! That was close.” I got up to look out the back and front windows to see which large tree it had hit. Not the one in the back open space. Not the even bigger and older one across the street. Odd I thought. It had to be that close.
I went down the two stories to the basement to reset the circuit breakers that had popped. Coming back through, I began the inventory of damaged electronic gear. No phones worked. The TV was screwy and the VCR was blasted. Sitting in the living room I heard a loud static-like sound upstairs and concluded the clock radio had come on, but didn’t work, or maybe the station was off the air. I headed back up, but the noise wasn’t coming from the radio. I started back down again, confused.
Above the stairway landing was a pull-down stepladder to the attic. As I passed—for the third time since the lightning—I looked up. Through the seam around the molding I could see what was making the crinkly sound. Flames!
As it was a townhouse with a common attic I immediately alerted neighbors on both sides and had one of them call the fire department (remember, my phones didn’t work). Foolishly perhaps, I went back in (there was no smoke) to get my wallet and car keys from the top of the bureau in the bedroom. I also grabbed a couple of envelopes with utility payments but not my work ID (which I later thought was an interesting psychology).
The fire station was only a few blocks down the street but they were already out on a call. It was ten minutes before the next nearest engine company arrived. You think waiting for a computer to load a program or waiting for a red light to change is long? Try standing in the pouring rain waiting for the fire trucks when your house is on fire.
The firemen arrived, vented the attic, went out of their way to protect some of my furniture, and stopped the fire just before the slate roof crashed through the burned-out attic and destroyed the place top down. Even so there was water and smoke damage all the way down to the basement (water gets into walls and runs across ceilings that way). It took $50,000 and several months to rebuild the place (I was a renter, but I did return after it was rebuilt). State Farm handled my personal claim with courtesy and generosity. I got a lot of new stuff.
The fire inspector the next morning told me that lightning strikes are about 2000° F. It hit about 20 feet from my bed.
President Bush said today that he will appoint nine new federal judges and possibly one new “American Idol” judge.
Have you heard the latest? Another scandal at “American Idol”. Apparently Simon was caught having an affair with himself.
If you’ve been following that “American Idol” scandal, you know that Corey Clark, that little sleazeball, said Paula Abdul who was 18 years his senior, gave him money, bought him clothes, and had sex with him. To which Cher said, “Yeah so?”
Leno
“I tell you, I went to the dullest Cinco de Mayo party last night. It was given by The Minutemen.”
Leno
(The Minutemen is the name of the border surveillance vigilante group.)
But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn’t a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers - and fathers?
This is, in fact, what some leading brain scientists, like Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, now believe. Becoming a parent, they say, can power up the mind with uniquely motivated learning. Having a baby is “a revolution for the brain,” Dr. Merzenich says.
The human brain, we now know, creates cells throughout life, cells more likely to survive if they’re used. Emotional, challenging and novel experiences provide particularly helpful use of these new neurons, and what adjectives better describe raising a child? Children constantly drag their parents into challenging, novel situations, be it talking a 4-year-old out of a backseat meltdown on the Interstate or figuring out a third-grade homework assignment to make a model of a black hole in space.
Excerpted from This Is Your Brain on Motherhood by Katherine Ellison in Sunday’s New York Times.
A friend tells me American Airlines has moved their seats back closer together. She couldn’t fit her water bottle in the seatback pocket because it took up too much of her knee room.
Just wait until the person in front of her reclines!
The Los Angeles Times has a redesign on their website today (four columns!). The change includes free access to their cultural section “CalenderLive,” including movie reviews.
The last spike was driven to complete the American transcontinental railroad on this date in 1869.
Last year on May 10, NewMexiKen posted two entries on the subject:
And the Continent was spanned with iron and Promontory Summit.
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