“Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.”
What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now?
Link via dangerousmeta!
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Bonus question: Quick, without looking, are there more red stripes or white stripes in the American flag?
Answers in comments. No peeking.
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Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on this date in 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration; Adams, with Benjamin Franklin, was also key to its evolution.
Image of first page of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence with edits.
Adams and Jefferson were colleagues during the Revolution, but fell apart over political differences during their terms as president (Adams 1797-1801, Jefferson 1801-1809). After Jefferson left office they resumed a remarkable correspondence that lasted until their deaths.
Also, on that same day in 1826, Stephen Foster, the first great American songwriter, was born. “His melodies are so much a part of American history and culture that most people think they’re folk tunes. All in all he composed some 200 songs, including ‘Oh! Susanna’ ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,’ and ‘Camptown Races.’” [American Experience]
And “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Beautiful Dreamer.”
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An excellent piece written in 2004 for The New York Times by Walter Isaacson. Here is an excerpt but take the time to go read it all — it is our nation’s birthday after all.
Where did these axioms come from? At first, the founders foundered a bit in figuring that out. “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Jefferson wrote in his initial rough draft. Franklin crossed this out with his heavy printer’s pen and changed it to “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Drawing on the concepts of his friend David Hume, Franklin believed that the truths were grounded in rationality and reason, not in the dictates or dogma of any particular religion.
Similarly, Jefferson originally noted that “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” John Adams, a product of Puritan Massachusetts, appears to be the one who suggested that this be amended to, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” But whatever the provenance of these basic premises, it was clear what this meant for the role and the legitimacy of governments: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” A nice concept.
It was the Declaration of Independence that was approved by the Second Continental Congress on this date in 1776.
Independence itself was voted two days earlier. We celebrate the anniversary of the birth certificate, not the birth.
Although the section of the Lee Resolution dealing with independence was not adopted until July 2, Congress appointed on June 10 a committee of five to draft a statement of independence for the colonies. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with the actual writing delegated to Jefferson.
Jefferson drafted the statement between June 11 and 28, submitted drafts to Adams and Franklin who made some changes, and then presented the draft to the Congress following the July 2nd adoption of the independence section of the Lee Resolution. The congressional revision process took all of July 3rd and most of July 4th. Finally, in the afternoon of July 4th, the Declaration was adopted.
The signing of the embossed copy we recognize as THE Declaration of Independence began on August 2nd.
Information and quote from The National Archives.
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A federal judge has ordered the invasion of your privacy. This is from washingtonpost.com:
That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). [Judge] Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”
Speculative. It’s terabytes of data about us.
Andrew Tobias has a nice posting about Clay Felker, who died earlier this week.
Walt Mossberg provides Some General Tips For Switch to Mac From Windows. I would have found this handy during the first few weeks; not so much later.
Obama leads McCain by 5 points in — wait for it — Montana.
[Not having to blog because I'm taking a break makes it a lot easier to blog. Does that make any sense — other than as a description of insanity I mean?]
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Ever take a business call while on vacation? Me, too.
So just consider the three items that follow some stuff I phoned in.
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Senator Barack Obama and his famous fist bumps have been drawing a lot of attention in recent weeks. So in Ohio on Tuesday, when it was reported that he refused to oblige a boy’s request for one, it created something of a stir.
An instant replay, however, shows that it didn’t happen the way it was reported.
The Caucus has the details.
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“But as far as sitting down and watching a sporting event, that’s just not part of my day, it’s not part of my night, and, ahh, I’ll be honest with you, watching The Bachelorette is.”
Joe Buck, Fox Sports’ lead announcer for Major League Baseball and the NFL, on ESPN Radio’s The Herd via Awful Announcing.
NewMexiKen wrote this about Buck six months ago (January 6, 2008):
I’m thinking that Joe Buck doesn’t actually like sports. He likes the life — he learned that from his dad, and he can recite from his notes with the best of them (and then some), but I don’t think he actually likes sports (the game on the field). He got into this because it was the family business.
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“Animal welfare groups must be panting: Leona Helmsley reportedly directed that her fortune — up to $8 billion — be used for the care and welfare of dogs.”
A bitch, even in death.
I think I’ll shut NewMexiKen down for a while.
Knowing my record you may find me back in a few days or a week.
Or maybe not. We’ll see.
Hey, thanks everybody.
1. I’m fine — or at least I’m as fine as ever.
2. I just really needed a break from the day-to-day pressure obsession, which I feel even when I skip a day or two. So maybe I’ll take three or four days or more off this time.
3. I’m sick of the election and reading about the election and the media coverage of the election. I needed a break particularly from that, but just doing the birthdays and a few best lines doesn’t keep me going.
4. I need to do some re-coding, hence the drop back to the default style temporarily. The site may look the same as it did when I come back (or not), but the code (CSS) has to be cleaned up.
5. I’ve done this blog an estimated 330+ days a year for almost five years. I really should quit.
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“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
Mark Twain as quoted by Barack Obama
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“[W]hen it comes to energy policy, the U.S. toggles between complacency and panic.”
Attributed to the first U.S. energy secretary, James Schlesinger.
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A classic from Functional Ambivalent.
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While greatly respecting and admiring John McCain’s patriotism and honor, NewMexiKen has never thought being a prisoner of war was a qualification for high office, as so much of the mainstream media seems to think. General Clark seems to doubt it too.
I thought about just making this a best line of the day, but out of respect to McCain — and out of respect to Clark who was after all responding to Bob Schieffer directly — I thought the context was important.
Gen. CLARK: Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, `I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk?
What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’SCHIEFFER: Well…
Gen. CLARK: He hasn’t made those calls, Bob. So…
SCHIEFFER: Well, General, maybe–could I just interrupt you?
Gen. CLARK: Sure.
SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…
Gen. CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.
SCHIEFFER: Really?
Gen. CLARK: But Barack is not–he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements, he’s running on his other strengths. He’s running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment, and those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership.
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An article on the Hubble Space Telescope with a handful of cool photos. You’ve probably seen them all before, but still . . .
Some descriptive narrative accompanies each image.
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I asked Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” to update his list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. Here’s his advice.
Among them, cinnamon, prunes and turmeric.
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Today we honor two venerable American institutions.
On this date in 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed the land grant preserving Yosemite Valley.
According to the Library of Congress:
The legislation provided California with 39,000 acres of the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”
The newly-appointed Yosemite Board of Park Commissioners confronted the dual task of preserving the magnificent landscape while providing for public recreation. With amazing foresight, board member and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted noted these goals could conflict. In his August 9, 1865 Draft of Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove, Olmsted warns “the slight harm which the few hundred visitors of this year might do, if no care were taken to prevent it, would not be slight, if it should be repeated by millions.”
And Lena Horne is 91 today.
Even in her eighties, the legendary Lena Horne has a quality of timelessness about her. Elegant and wise, she personifies both the glamour of Hollywood and the reality of a lifetime spent battling racial and social injustice. Pushed by an ambitious mother into the chorus line of the Cotton Club when she was sixteen, and maneuvered into a film career by the N.A.A.C.P., she was the first African American signed to a long-term studio contract. In her rise beyond Hollywood’s racial stereotypes of maids, butlers, and African natives, she achieved true stardom on the silver screen, and became a catalyst for change even beyond the glittery fringes of studio life.
Elsewhere —
Vincent D’Onofrio is 49.
Deirdre Lovejoy — Rhonda Pearlman of The Wire — is 46.
Mike Tyson is 42.
37 years ago today the 26th amendment was ratified by Ohio, the required 38th state. The amendment lowered the voting age to 18.
100 years ago today, a small chunk of rock or possibly ice was lazily making its way across the inner solar system when a large, blue-green planet got in its way. Traveling roughly westward, it entered the Earth’s atmosphere moving at tens of thousands kilometers per hour. Compressed and battered by tremendous forces, the object got about 5 - 10 kilometers from the ground before it succumbed, exploding like a gigantic multi-megaton bomb.
The air blast flattened trees for hundreds of square kilometers. The ground shook, witnesses felt the hellish heat from kilometers away, and the shock wave circled the world. It happened over the remote Podkammenaya Tungus river, a swampy region in Russia; had it happened over Moscow a million people might have died within minutes.
Now known as the Tunguska Event, it stands today as a shocking reminder that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the Earth sits in the crosshairs of many objects.
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NewMexiKen received an email this morning from a company offering Barack Obama Bumper Stickers! Normally this would be no big deal — in fact I delete email messages like that fairly often.
But I liked their idea of 50 different bumper stickers for 50 different states.
According to the email I received: “22 percent of the proceeds from each sale benefits the Obama Campaign, and we’re offering both full-size ‘bumper-stickers’ and six-packs of mini ‘laptop stickers’.”
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The wild part starts Tuesday, when Mars, Saturn and the star Regulus– part of the constellation Leo– loiter together, with Mars and Regulus tightly grouped. On subsequent nights, sky gazers will observe that Mars moves toward Saturn. A new moon joins the trio on the evenings of July 5 and 6.
The following week, look west. Saturn (zero magnitude, bright enough to see in urban skies) and Mars conjunct July 10 above the western horizon. You can spot them after dusk. The ringed planet is the brighter of the two, and Mars (first magnitude) has the rusty, red tint.
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If you have a brain, and I believe most readers of this blog do, you may want to read an article in this week’s New Yorker by Atul Gawande.
The article begins by describing the symptoms of a patient, M, who had a phantom itch. Ultimately her scratching became so severe that, “She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.”
There are nerves specifically that convey itch, but after describing them Gawande goes on to discuss the larger phenomenon of phantom itches and phantom pain — the reader who starts to scratch while reading The New Yorker article about itching, the amputee who still feels his arm. Possibly these are, the medical professor suggests, perceptions of the brain and not, as has been long thought, neurological misfires. The brain is far more a part of our perception than we generally think.
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with the engine. Maybe sometimes it’s just the dashboard sensor that’s broken.
[P]erhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.
So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem. …
Fascinating.
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Two Angels pitchers held the Dodgers hitless for eight innings last night, but it’s not a no hitter because the Dodgers didn’t bat in the ninth inning. They didn’t have to. They were the home team and they were ahead. The Dodgers won without a hit.
It’s only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league baseball team has won without getting a hit.
Angels, no runs, five hits, two errors.
Dodgers, one run, no hits, two errors.
The Los Angeles Times has the story on the Dodgers no hit 1-0 win.
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Today is the birthday
… of Harmon Killebrew, 72. Not only is Killebrew in the Hall of Fame, but his is the profile on the Major League Baseball logo.
… of best actor Oscar nominee Gary Busey. He’s 64. The nomination was for The Buddy Holly Story.
… of Football Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf, 59.
… of Maria Conchita Alonso, 51.
Actress Jayne Mansfield, just 34, was killed 41 years ago today when her car struck a trailer truck near Slidell, Louisiana. The driver and Ms. Mansfield’s companion, Sam Brody, were also killed. Three of her children asleep in the backseat survived.
Those who have seen Field of Dreams or read the book on which it was based, Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, will remember the character “Moonlight” Graham, played by Burt Lancaster in the film.
Archibald Wright Graham (1876-1965) was an actual player, and a doctor. Graham played in one game for the New York Giants on June 29, 1905 (in the movie it was the last game of the season in 1929). Graham played two innings in the field but never batted in the major leagues; he was on deck when his one game ended.
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