The two old guys in the box

One can only imagine what Statler & Waldorf would say about their acquisition, along with the rest of the Muppets, by Disney.

Flying by

Channel 4 News in Albuquerque has been running a series on speeding where they actually go out on the streets and clock cars with a radar gun. Tonight they showed a car doing 67 in a 20 mph school zone. Another was doing 46 in a 25 mph school zone and smiled for the news crew without so much as tapping the brake.

My favorites though were last week when they clocked two Albuquerque police vehicles at more than 15 over the limit.

‘Rare for an incumbent to be trailing any named opponent at this early stage’ - Gallup

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll taken Feb. 16-17 indicates that if the election were held today, Kerry would be chosen by 55% of likely voters over 43% for Bush. Edwards beats Bush 54%-44%.

Of course, it’s February not November and the Democrats have been getting most of the attention. But, as NewMexiKen posted last week:

Gallup has a long history of asking presidential trial-heat questions in election years. There are comparable data from as far back as 1948 for elections in which an incumbent president was pitted against his eventual challenger in January or February of the election year. While it is not clear at this point who the Democratic nominee will be, Gallup’s historical polling shows it is rare for an incumbent to be trailing any named opponent at this early stage in the election year.

Doonesbury on Kerry from 1971

Click here.

Humor me

Opinions You Should Have is The Onion of blogs. Among recent stories:

White House Budget Contains Gatefold, 12-page “Emperor’s Clothes” Pictorial of Bush

Intern Says Kerry And Matt Drudge Having Affair

White House Concerned Obsession With Lying About National Guard Could Distract Nation From Current Lies

Ex-American Airlines Pilot Hired To Fly Airforce One

Senate Offices Closed Due To Botox Scare

Capture Of Bin Laden In Preproduction; Slated For October Release

Norah #2

Reported by Blogcritics.org:

Norah Jones’ “Feels Like Home,” the follow-up to her multiplatinum, Grammy-winning debut album, has sold over 1 million copies in its first week, the highest sales debut for an album since 2001.

NewMexiKen’s copy among them.

It seems from NewMexiKen’s reading that the critics aren’t sure about “Feels Like Home.” The songs aren’t as good is one consistent complaint.

Hey, it’s the voice. She could sing the phone book and sell a million CDs.

If not the best line of the day, possibly best metaphor

Dave Pell at Electablog*: “[Dean] may not be the guy to carry the torch, but he was certainly one of the few hitting two rocks together to light it in the first place.”

Nominee for best line of the day

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus is so overwrought about Kerry that Jesse Taylor at pandagon.net predicts that by tommorow Kaus will be telling “How John Kerry Kidnapped The Lindbergh Baby…And Aborted It.”

Sports flicks

San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Betting Fool liked the movie Miracle:

I saw the movie “Miracle” over the weekend and it immediately jumps into my top sports movies of all time. Great stuff. Also on the Fool’s list are: “Hoosiers,” “Rocky,” “Bull Durham,” “Slapshot” and, of course, “Kansas City Bomber.”

Wallace Stegner

In 1999 San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen mentioned this in one of the earliest posts last August, but repeats it here — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

First in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

More on Toni Morrison

The Writer’s Almanac, as they often do, has some insight about Toni Morrison:

She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, “It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own. …

Morrison said, “[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It’s like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I’m certain I’m going to come up.”

Toni Morrison…

winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 is 73 today. The following is the press release announcing her selection:

“who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world”. These are the words of this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, the American writer Toni Morrison, in her book of essays “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992). And she adds, “My project rises from delight, not disappointment…”

Toni Morrison is 62 years old, and was born in Lorain, Ohio, in the United States. Her works comprise novels and essays. In her academic career she is a professor in the humanities at the University of Princeton, New Jersey.

She has written six novels, each of them of great interest. Her oeuvre is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation. One can delight in her unique narrative technique, varying from book to book and developed independently, even though its roots stem from Faulkner and American writers from further south. The lasting impression is nevertheless sympathy, humanity, of the kind which is always based on profound humour.

“Song of Solomon” (1978) with its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.

“Beloved” (1987) continues to widen the themes and to weave together the places and times in the network of motifs. The combination of realistic notation and folklore paradoxically intensifies the credibility. There is enormous power in the depiction of Sethe’s action to liberate her child from the life she envisages for it, and the consequences of this action for Sethe’s own life.

In her latest novel “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison uses a device which is akin to the way jazz itself is played. The book’s first lines provide a synopsis, and in reading the novel one becomes aware of a narrator who varies, embellishes and intensifies. The result is a richly complex, sensuously conveyed image of the events, the characters and moods.

As the motivation for the award implies, Toni Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the lustre of poetry.

Bacon, Lettuce and WiFi, please

From Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things:

Schlotzky’s is a deli chain that gives away free WiFi…The company has released new market research showing that free connectivity is a selection-factor for 40 percent of its customers.

Not bad sandwiches either.

Great photos, tiny camera

Looking for a slim, lightweight digital camera tiny enough to carry around in a pocket but that still delivers great photos? Walt Mossberg says to look at the $299 Konica Minolta Dimage Xg.

Not only did the Dimage photos have the sharpest details, but they were also the most color-accurate, indoors and outdoors, in a variety of lighting conditions.

Vrooming Into Yellowstone

Nicholas Kristof thinks “humans trump the bison and moose.” Two excerpts from his op-ed piece in The New York Times:

Yellowstone National Park, a wonderland at any time of year, is particularly dazzling in winter, when the geysers shoot out of snowfields and the elk wear mantles of frost. I took one of my sons to visit last year and learned two things that I don’t believe most environmentalists realize.

First, in winter Yellowstone is virtually inaccessible except by snowmobile. Cars are banned (except for one small part of the park), and Yellowstone is so big that snowshoeing and cross-country skiing offer access only to the hardiest backpackers, who can camp in snow and brutal cold for days at a time.

Second, a new generation of snowmobiles is available with four-stroke engines, not two-stroke. These machines cut hydrocarbon emissions by 90 percent — and noise by 50 percent. …

As an avid backpacker who loves the outdoors, I think the environmental movement should be trying to get more people out into the wild. That’s why I’d like to see the Bush administration’s compromise upheld, so Americans can continue to enjoy Yellowstone in winter. Cross-country skiers and snowshoers would, of course, still have all of backcountry Yellowstone for themselves, with no machines for many miles around.

Granted, snowmobiles are an intrusion. But so are cars. In the summer, we accept a trade-off: we admitted about 965,000 people last July to Yellowstone, with all the noise, garbage, public toilets and disruption that entailed, knowing that the park would be less pristine but that more people would get a chance to enjoy it. That seems a fair trade.

The philosophical question is the purpose of conservation: Do we preserve nature for its sake, or ours?

My bias is to put our interests on top. Thus I’m willing to encroach on wilderness to give Americans more of a chance to get into the wild. That’s why we build trails, for example — or why we build roads into Yellowstone.

Happy Birthday!

… to the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 71 today. In 2003 Time Asia published an informative profile of the complex artist Yoko Ono.

… to Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 50 today. So are Vincent Vega, Chili Palmer, Michael, Buford ‘Bud’ Uan Davis, Tod Lubitch, Danny Zuko and Tony Manero. And so is John Travolta.

… to the letter turner. Vanna White is 47 today.

… to Jack Palance (83 or 84 or 85), Cybill Shepherd (54), and Matt Dillon (40).