More on Willie’s reggae album

While the music on “Countryman” might raise the eyebrows of country purists, so will the cover. With green marijuana leaves on a red and yellow background, the cover art makes the CD look like an oversized pack of rolling papers.

The marijuana imagery reflects Jamaican culture, where the herb is a leading cash crop and part of religious rites, but it also reflects Nelson’s fondness for pot smoking.

Universal Music Group Nashville is substituting palm trees for the marijuana leaves on CDs sold at the retail chain Wal-Mart, a huge outlet for country music that’s also sensitive about lyrics and packaging.

“They’re covering all the bases,” Nelson joked.

Yahoo! News

Here’s a review from E! Online:

It’s one of those ideas that looks great on paper…rolling paper, that is. Willie Nelson, the classic American country singer lights up a bushel of reggae hits and gives his own tunes an island spin in tribute to his favorite recreational activity: blazing a giant doobie. What should be the ultimate stoner’s delight (or at least a laugh-a-minute musical oddity) disappointingly goes up in smoke the minute the music starts. With a drowsy mix of slide guitars and echoing Caribbean beats, Nelson sleepwalks through Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and his own “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” sounding like Jimmy Buffet with a bad hangover. It’s no wonder his former label kept this stuff locked away in the vaults for nine years. Whoever decided to put this out must have been, well, you know.

Want to be creeped out?

These Photo Contest Winners, “should be professional pictures, but should not be extremely or overly retouched.”

You decide.

Best line of the day, so far

“The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled…suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

In other words, the less you know, the more you think you know. Or, to put it yet another way, stupid is as stupid does.

Keeping it in the family

While reading Rivers of Gold (see below) NewMexiKen checked out the genealogy in the appendices. This was the most remarkable find:

King Manuel of Portugal (b. 1469, d. 1521) first married Isabel of Aragon, daughter of Queen Isabel and King Fernando. She died in childbirth in 1498.

So then King Manuel married her 16-year-old sister, Maria of Aragon. She died in 1517.

He then married Leonor, the daughter of Juana, the oldest of Fernando and Isabel’s daughters (that is, his niece by two marriages).

He had children with all three. What a guy.

It’s so nice to hear the pitter-patter …

of raindrops. It could be a six-inch rain — a drop every six inches.

You need to realize that there’s been just two-tenths of an inch of rain in Albuquerque during the past 10 weeks to understand. It becomes a craving about now.

Oops. The drops stopped in the time it took for me to write this.

Amerigo

NewMexiKen remembers learning that Amerigo Vespucci was just a mapmaker who got America named after him by mistake. Not entirely true.

Vespucci, a native of Florence, settled in Seville in 1492, after a career as a private secretary for various diplomats. He was nearing 40. In 1499, he sailed with one of the first non-Columbian expeditions and explored the north coast of South America, Trinidad, Curaçao and Aruba. Initially, Vespucci agreed with Columbus that these lands were extensions of Asia. By the time he returned to Europe in 1500 though, he thought they were a new continent. Vespucci wrote most enthusiastically about the women he had encountered, which no doubt helped make his reports widely read.

In 1501-1502, Vespucci sailed along the Brazilian coast as far south as the Rio Plata on a commission from the King of Portugal. This was too far south to be Asia. Vespucci wrote, “We arrived at a new land which, for many reasons…we observed to be a continent.” In 1502, the Portugese published a new map showing the new continent with another ocean between it and Asia. In contrast, Columbus continued to believe, until his death in 1506, that he had discovered an extension of Asia.

By this time, because Vespucci had become so well known, two additional letters of his appeared. These have since proven to be forgeries, probably written for fun and profit. They were accepted at the time however, and, ironically, it was one of these that was widely circulated and relied upon by geographer Martin Waldseemüller in his new edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia. In his introduction Waldseemüller wrote: “And since Europe and Asia have received the names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other place Amerige, that is the land of Amerigo, or America, after the wise man who discovered it.” It was in this publication in 1507 where the new hemisphere was named “America” for the first time. Needless to say, the name stuck.

Meanwhile Vespucci was appointed piloto mayor by Spain, the chief geographer and cartographer for all expeditions to the new world. He died in 1512.

Source: Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold, a book that, while interesting, is burdened with so many trivial details about each and every participant, and so many reversals of chronology, that the story is made tedious.

Happy Birthday

• Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

• You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who’ve never had any.

• Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.

• I want to die before my wife, and the reason is this: If it is true that when you die, your soul goes up to judgment, I don’t want my wife up there ahead of me to tell them things.

• Is the glass half full, or half empty?
It depends on whether you’re pouring or drinking.

• Old is always fifteen years from now.

• Nothing I’ve ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Bill Cosby, who turns 68 today.

Late night with Jay Leno

• How ’bout the price of gas? Oh my God! Oil is now over $62 a barrel. In fact, it is so high, today I saw the Sierra Club drilling in Alaska.

• A judge in Mobile, Alabama has put a 90 year old woman in jail for selling drugs. Here’s my question — where are the parents?

• Willie Nelson did an album with reggae musicians. Did you hear about this? How much smoke poured out of that studio? It must have looked like they were electing a new pope.

• Happy Birthday to Jessica Simpson who turned 25 years old on Sunday. Jessica threw a surprise party for herself — and it worked. She had no idea!

• “ESPN” magazine said that Lance Armstrong is considering running for governor of Texas. Well finally Texas would have a governor who knows how to ride a bicycle.

• The White House announced today that next month Vice President Dick Cheney will get a colonoscopy. It’s important that you get these on a regular basis. You know, the last time he had one, they found one polyp and three oil company executives up there.

Show me

If you’re on the job, and you’re reading this story, you should probably get back to work. The average worker wastes more than two hours a day, and that’s not including lunch, according to a new survey by America Online and Salary.com. That means companies spend as much as $759 billion on salaries annually for which they receive no apparent benefit, the research found. The No. 1 state for wasting time was Missouri, where workers who responded to the survey reported slacking off 3 hours and 12 minutes a day. The survey didn’t specifically look at why Missouri is the worst in the nation, but if Missouri workers think the perception is unfair, “We would encourage people to visit the home page and weigh in further on that,” said Richard Cellini, Salary.com’s head of research.

Associated Press via Wired News

Best line of the day, so far

“When Was The Last Time Liberals Were This Giddy?”

“Answer — The Last Time Liberals Were This Giddy Was Election Day ‘04 About 3pm”

The Hotline’s Blogometer

Best line of the day, so far

“In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow [airline] passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.”

John Tierney in The New York Times in a column arguing that Internet hackers deserve a punishment worse than death. Mr. Reid, of course, is the would-be shoe bomber that brought about the removal of shoes in airport security lines.

Best line of the day, so far

“[F]or Bush to get rid of Rove, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.”

Marshall Wittmann

Under cover

A CIA manager once told me about life under cover. He went by his regular name, lived in a regular neighborhood, etc., but as far as anyone knew he worked for the Navy. In fact, he told me, one time his car broke down and his neighbor insisted on giving him a ride to work at the Washington Navy Yard (in southeast Washington, D.C.). The neighbor kept insisting and he finally had to accept.

After being left off at the Navy Yard the CIA employee had to figure how to get back across the Potomac to Virginia to his “real” office. He was further away than when he started.

In other instances we were often amused when we held a meeting that included CIA or other “under cover” agency personnel. The sign-in sheet consisted of names like Cindy D., Bob L., Frank C., etc.

Lastly, my particular favorite under cover story. After visiting a “secret” location for business and being well treated, I composed a short thank you note to the man in charge. I addressed it to him by name. I ran the draft past my staff member who was liaison with that agency. The staff member came back, saying the note was great except that the man’s name was classified because he worked undercover. So we sent the thank you without the name.

His name was John Smith.

Satellite Radio Is Music to Fans’ Ears

An article in today’s New York Times describes the appeal of Major League Baseball broadcasts on XM radio.

“Because of the length of the season, the pace of the games and the soap-opera quality of baseball, listeners get to know announcers very well and become very close to them,” Gary Cohen, the radio voice of the Mets, said. “But what I like best about XM is that you can also listen to other broadcasters. You can get a point of comparison.”

Harry Kalas has been calling Philadelphia Phillies games in his unique baritone for 34 years, but only now can he be heard all the way to California. Jerry Coleman has been tripping over his words in San Diego for 34 years and can finally be laughed about in the far Northeast. But the main attraction seems to be Scully, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame announcer who is generating better reviews on XM than Beyoncé. Fifty years after Scully narrated Brooklyn’s only World Series championship, New Yorkers can again listen to his lyrical broadcasts of Dodgers home games.

Best line of the day, so far

“Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.”

The Writer’s Almanac, quoting Julius Caesar, who was born on this date around 100 B.C.

Stocking up

Following up on the Cuban cigar item below, here’s what Pierre Salinger wrote about the Cuban cigar embargo:

Shortly after I entered the White House in 1961, a series of dramatic events occurred. In April 1961, the United States went through the disastrous error of the Bay of Pigs, in which Cuban exiles with the help of the U. S. government tried to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Several months later, the president called me into his office in the early evening.

“Pierre, I need some help,” he said solemnly.

“I’ll be glad to do anything I can, Mr. President,” I replied.

“I need a lot of cigars.”

“How many, Mr. President?”

“About 1,000 Petit Upmanns.”

I shuddered a bit, although I kept my reaction to myself. “And, when do you need them, Mr. President?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

I walked out of the office wondering if I would succeed. But since I was now a solid Cuban cigar smoker, I knew a lot of stores, and I worked on the problem late into the evening.

The next morning, I walked into my White House office at about 8 a.m., and the direct line from the president’s office was already ringing. He asked me to come in immediately.

“How did you do, Pierre?” he asked, as I walked through the door.

“Very well,” I answered. In fact, I’d gotten 1,200 cigars. Kennedy smiled, and opened up his desk. He took out a long paper which he immediately signed. It was the decree banning all Cuban products from the United States. Cuban cigars were now illegal in our country.