Everything you ever wanted to know about books

An encyclopedia of book and publshing statistics compiled by Para Publishing.

I found this fascinating:

81% of the population feels they have a book inside them.

BUT

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.

42% of college graduates never read another book.

80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.

70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. (Or this one: Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.)

Wrong place, right time

(By the way, I’ve been watching the World Cup for four weeks trying to decide which NBA players could have been dominant soccer players, eventually coming to three conclusions. First, Allen Iverson would have been the greatest soccer player ever — better than Pele, better than Ronaldo, better than everyone. I think this is indisputable, actually. Second, it’s a shame that someone like Chris Andersen couldn’t have been pushed toward soccer, because he would have been absolutely unstoppable soaring above the middle of the pack on corner kicks. And third, can you imagine anyone being a better goalie than Shawn Marion? It would be like having a 6-foot-9 human octopus in the net. How could anyone score on him? He’d have every inch of the goal covered. Just as a sports experiment, couldn’t we have someone teach Marion the rudimentary aspects of playing goal, then throw him in a couple of MLS games? Like you would turn the channel if this happened?)

Bill Simmons, ESPN

NewMexiKen also wonders how a few NFL running-backs or safeties might do on the pitch.

Soccer clinic

Cristiano Ronaldo Skills Workshop 2003

Thanks to The Sport Economist.

Best line of the day about a pirate movie, so far

“Mr. [Orlando] Bloom, as is his custom, leaps about, trying to overcome his incurable blandness, and is upstaged by special effects, musical cues, octopus tentacles and pieces of wood.”

A.O. Scott in a a generally positive, more-or-less, kind of, but qualified, review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Deadwood

Deadwood fans — alas, currently not NewMexiKen as I continue without HBO — may appreciate this post from Give Me the Booger. I know they will appreciate the photos of the stars, in and out of character, especially W. Earl Brown/Dan Dority, who may always be in character.

Best line of the day, so far

“[A]n industry that miscasts “normal” as some kind of brave statement, and rewards the size-0 waifs whose only solids are taken in via the nostril in powder form.”

Go Fug Yourself; the “industry” being movies-television-celebritihood.

Satan’s Shoes

The always delightful Dan Neil visits Prada. His essay, well worth your click, includes this:

Ah yes, the fashion world. The gist of Lauren Weisberger’s book—which I read while waiting at a red light last week—is that the world of high fashion is full of toxic egomaniacs and money-grubbing, drunk-with-power neurotics raving at their underlings with impossible demands, crushing their spirits and feeding like vampires on their idealistic ambition. No, wait, that’s the newspaper business. Anyway, the book is based on Weisberger’s adventures as the sniveling thrall to real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The book is a roman à clef—that’s French for “bitch fest”—in which Weisberger’s alter ego is named Andy Sachs and the infamous “Nuclear” Wintour is renamed Miranda Priestly.

Best line of the day, so far

“It wasn’t live, but it was classic Larry King: a warm bath, not a hot seat.”

Alessandra Stanley reviewing President and Mrs. Bush’s appearance on Larry King.

Photo of Mozart’s widow found

From BBC News:

A print of the only photograph of Mozart’s widow, Constanze Weber, has been found in Germany.

The photograph was taken in 1840 in the Bavarian town of Altoetting when she was 78. She died two years later.

Click here to see the print. Constanze is on the front left.

She was 29 when Mozart died.

Wildfire Increase Linked to Climate

All those warnings from Smokey Bear and it wasn’t really even our fault.

Rising temperatures throughout the West have stoked an increase in large wildfires over the past 34 years as spring comes earlier, mountain snows melt sooner and forests dry to tinder, scientists reported Thursday.

More than land-use changes or forest management practices, the changing climate was the most important factor driving a four-fold increase in the average number of large wildfires in the Western United States since 1970, the researchers concluded.
…

“I think this is the equivalent for the West of what hurricanes are for the Gulf Coast,” said fire ecologist Steven Running at the University of Montana in Missoula, who was not connected with the research. “This is an illustration of a natural disaster that is accelerating in intensity as a result, I feel, of global warming.”

All told, the average fire season has grown more than two months longer, while fires have become more frequent, longer-burning and harder to extinguish. They destroy 6.5 times more land than in the 1970s, the researchers found.

Los Angeles Times

Good to know for Scrabble

Google is officially a verb.

Google Inc.’s eponymous search engine became a sanctioned part of the English language Thursday, when “google” — with a small “g” — earned an entry among the 165,000 or so terms in the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

Los Angeles Times

Great tournament, shame about the football

Sean Ingle, writing for Guardian Unlimited, loves the tournament but laments the lack of scoring in this year’s World Cup. He proposes some changes:

Such intervention needs to happen again. Because ever since the wondrous magic of Euro 2000, football’s delicate balance between attack and defence has spun increasingly out of kilter. Here are a few ideas:

- Stop the clock every time someone gets injured. Too often players feign distress, especially in the last 10 minutes, wasting two or three minutes of play and destroying their opponents’ momentum. They’re rarely seriously injured. Another option: if the injury is in the middle of the pitch, allow the physio on but keep playing. Either way, more playing time may lead to more goals.

- Investigate the use of sin bins. At the moment it’s rational for defenders to body-check, scythe and take out opponents in promising positions, picking up a professional yellow, because conceding a goal is far worse. The possibility of 20 minutes in the sin bin - with a yellow card chucked in - for cynical fouls might change a player’s incentives and, ergo, behaviour.

- Increase the size of the goals by a few centimetres. Yes, you hate the idea. Every football fan does, but surely it’s worth experimenting with in a semi-professional league? After all, keepers are at least a foot taller now then in the 19th century when goalpost sizes were laid down in law.

Think American TV likes that idea about time outs (known here as commercial time outs)?

Pointer via The Sports Economist.

David McCullough

Historian and author David McCullough is 73 today. His works include some of the best—and best-selling—biographies ever, Truman and John Adams, and the more recent miliary history 1776.

NewMexiKen thought this excerpt from an interview McCullough did with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole was interesting:

McCullough: There are certain books that I like very much. Reveille in Washington. I love Barbara Tuchman’s work, particularly The Proud Tower. Paul Horgan’s biography of Archbishop Lamy is a masterpiece. Wallace Stegner’s book on John Wesley Powell I’m fond of.

I like some of the present-day people: Robert Caro’s first volume on Lyndon Johnson was brilliant. I care for some of the best of the Civil War writing: Shelby Foote, for example, and Bruce Catton’s The Stillness at Appomattox. It was Catton’s Stillness at Appomattox that started me reading about the Civil War, and then on to people like Tuchman and others. There is a wonderful book called The Reason Why, about the Charge of the Light Brigade–and biographies–Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, for example.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber. I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down. To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

When I did Truman, I had no idea what woods I was venturing into. Had I known it was going to take me ten years, I never would have done it. In retrospect, I’m delighted now that I didn’t know.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. There have been times when a book was taking year after year—not with this one so much, but with The Path Between the Seas—when I’d come down to Washington to do research in the National Archives, hoping I wouldn’t find anything new because it could set me back another year or two.

By the same token, to open up a box of the death certificates kept by the French at the hospital in Ancon, at Panama City and to read the personal details of those who died—their names, their age, where they came from, height, color of eyes—was a connection with the reality of them, the mortal tale of that undertaking, that one can never find by doing the conventional kind of research with microfilm or Xeroxed copies.

McCullough also says this: “You stand in front of one of those great paintings or you pick up Samuel Johnson’s essays or Francis Parkman’s works on the French and Indian War, and it’s humbling. But it also is affirming in the sense that you realize that you’re working in a great tradition.”

Manifest Destiny

This date, July 7, is significant in American imperial growth. On July 7, 1846, Commodore John D. Sloat captured Monterey and officially raised the American flag over California. On July 7, 1898, President William McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution which annexed the Hawaiian Islands to the United States.

Marc Chagall

 
 
 
The artist Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia, on this date in 1887. Click on his Paris through the Window to learn more and see other images of his work.
 
 
 
 

Roosevelt Campobello International Park

… was established on this date in 1964.

The Roosevelt Campobello International Park is not a unit of the United States National Park Service or Parks Canada. It is administered by a joint U.S./Canadian Commission, funded equally by the two countries.

The Roosevelt Campobello International Park is a unique example of international cooperation. This 2800 acre park is a joint memorial by Canada and the United States and a symbol of the close relationship between the two countries. Here are the cottage and the grounds where President Roosevelt vacationed, the waters where he sailed, and the woods, bogs, and beaches where he tramped and relaxed.

Roosevelt Campobello International Park

Leroy Robert Paige

Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was born 100 years ago today. A huge star in the Negro Leagues, Paige began pitching in 1926 and was the oldest major league rookie ever when he joined the Cleveland Indians at age 42. Paige pitched in his last major league game in 1965 (at age 59).

In the barnstorming days, he pitched perhaps 2,500 games, completed 55 no-hitters and performed before crowds estimated at 10 million persons in the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. He once started 29 games in one month in Bismarck, N.D., and he said later that he won 104 of the 105 games he pitched in 1934.

By the time Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first black player in the majors, Mr. Paige was past 40. But Bill Veeck, the impresario of the Cleveland club, signed him to a contract the following summer, and he promptly drew crowds of 72,000 in his first game and 78,000 in his third game. (The New York Times)

Paige first published his Rules for Staying Young in 1953. This version is from his autobiography published in 1962, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.

1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society — the social ramble ain’t restful.
5. Avoid running at all times.
6. And don’t look back — something might be gaining on you.